Introduction: Thinking about the Problem

Abstract

It could be argued that a monograph on whiteness and leisure is irrelevant or dangerous: irrelevant because the world has changed, all our identities are liquid and all social structures have melted away; dangerous because such a monograph has the potential to essentialize racial identities and — worse — recreate hierarchies of belonging based on fixed ontological categories of ‘race’ or ethnicity. This monograph does not essentialize whiteness, nor does it simply reproduce fixed notions of identity Whiteness is always being constructed, challenged and re-defined. This book shows how whiteness and contestations of whiteness and Otherness are (re)produced in and through leisure: how ‘race’ is a problematic ontological category. However, that is not to say such categories are irrelevant. This book is timely because leisure is a form and space where inequalities of power are refracted through social structures and material and cultural power is at work making constructions of whiteness unproblematic. This book’s aim is to shine a light on this activity.