Between privileges and precariousness: Remaking whiteness in China's teaching English as a second language industry.

Abstract

This research examines the multiple and contradictory racialization of white identities in China's booming ESL (English as a second language) industry. China represents a new geography of whiteness studies beyond Euro‐America due to the transformation of corporeal whiteness into a minority identity as a result of international migration. This research makes distinctions between white privilege as a form of structural domination in Western societies and white‐skin privilege as a form of embodied racial capital in China, which can be easily transformed into white‐skin vulnerability. It interprets the tension between white‐skin privilege and precariousness as a concurrent and mutually constitutive process that foregrounds the open‐ended nature of white racial formation in China. By focusing on the intersections between global white supremacist ideologies and local Chinese constructions of self/Other relations, this project explores new forms of racialization beyond the Black/white, superiority/inferiority binaries in the Western context.