The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics

The field of American studies emerged in the 1930s when literary scholars and historians began to focus on American history as distinct from European history. American studies scholars were interested in American society and cultural development, topics that were best addressed with an interdisciplinary lens. Prototypical versions of American studies emerged as early as the 19th century with figures like John Dewey and Alexis de Tocqueville. In the early 20th century, W. E. B. DuBois was a prominent influence on the development of the field. American studies created a venue for interdisciplinary work at a time when academic disciplines usually maintained rigid boundaries. Scholars worked across disciplines with the guiding assumption that American culture was too complex to be contained in the history departments of the day that focused on government and warfare without recognizing the importance of cultural and social matters.

In the first years of the Cold War, some American studies scholarship overlapped with area studies and deliberated on the unique position of the United States, particularly in terms of American exceptionalism and its implications for Cold War policy and the national security state. The American Studies Association (ASA) was founded in 1951, and scholars turned to a critique of American exceptionalism. During the 1960s, the ASA became more dedicated to social movements and the democratization of the university system. In the 1960s and 1970s, US cultural experiences had become more discernible and prominent, and American studies broadened its scope to include ethnic studies, African American studies, postcolonial studies, and gender and sexuality studies, not to mention studies in popular culture and visual culture. American studies in the 1980s was informed by a deepening engagement with cultural theory and also the influence of British cultural studies.

George Lipsitz, who is most notably a scholar of ethnic studies and Black studies, encouraged American studies scholars to look beyond their disciplines and national boundaries that he considered arbitrary limits, at best, for the analysis of culture. Lipsitz also suggested that European scholars engaged in “radical interrogations of concepts too often undertheorized within American Studies” (Quoted in: Streeby, Shelley. “Popular, Mass, and High Culture.” In A Concise Companion to American Studies, ed. John Carlos Rowe. Blackwell Publishing, 2010, 445). Although The Possessive Investment in Whiteness is aligned with Black studies, it intersects with whiteness studies, which is a discipline that emerged in the 1990s. Whiteness studies is based on the necessity to reconfigure whiteness as an anti-racist pedagogy. Lipsitz’s text is considered one of the prominent works in whiteness studies, especially in its intent to deconstruct whiteness and demonstrate that it is a fiction and an artifice. In Lipsitz’s terms, whiteness studies “developed out of necessity by Blacks” as an anti-hegemonic praxis (195)––that is, as a method of dismantling dominant power structures. Lipsitz would refer to disciplines such as whiteness studies or radical Black studies as examples of an alternate, grassroots American studies engaged in theorizing about the forces of race and power, something that needed to happen alongside the practical responses of social movements. Regardless of the titles of disciplines in his approach to interdisciplinary scholarship, Lipsitz’s primary focus is on the intersectional nature of shared struggles.