About the Author

Veronica T. Watson, Indiana, Pennsylvania, is an associate professor of English at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. She is also the director of the Frederick Douglass Institute for Intercultural Research. Her essays have been published in Mississippi Quarterly and the Journal of Ethnic American Literature, among others.

Reviews

Veronica Watson offers a brilliant analysis of African American engagement with whiteness in U.S. literature. In this historical journey examining the works of Chesnutt, Du Bois, Yerby, Hurston, and Beals, Watson reveals whiteness to be a labyrinth of insecurity, twisted intimacies, and terror. Resisting the tendency to narrow race studies to the focus on the 'black problem, ' Watson provides a searing examination of whiteness as a traumatized identity, a reality that makes even more remarkable a black willingness to understand, and in some instances, try to save white people from their own suffocation. The Souls of White Folk is a crucial contribution to critical whiteness studies and a beacon for understanding white estrangement from its own humanity.--Becky Thompson, author of A Promise and A Way of Life: White Antiracist Activism