Abstract
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This paper suggests that the field of whiteness studies, whilst offering considerable analytic and political potential, needs to pay closer attention to historical specificity, power-relations and transnational processes of material and discursive exchange if it is to move forward. Through a wide-ranging historiographical survey, this introduction 'takes stock' of the field and offers a number of strategies through the analytic and political pitfalls that have characterised studies of whiteness in the past fifteen years. Perhaps most significantly, this paper draws on a burgeoning literature from Australia to address the largely American criticisms of whiteness studies.