Author, Activist and Scholar Stephany Rose Culminates a Decade of Study on Race and Pop Culture with a Controversial Book Examining White Masculinity

Online, March 11, 2014 (Newswire.com) - Author, activist and scholar Stephany Rose culminates a decade of study on race and pop culture with a controversial book examining white masculinity Rose boldly turns public debate on race to how whites construct and understand themselves

White masculinity is in crises, asserts author, Stephany Rose in Abolishing White Masculinity from Mark Twain to Hiphop (Lexington Books; March 2014) https://rowman.com/ISBN/978-0-7391-8123-2. In her latest project, Rose, who holds a Ph. D. in American Studies from Purdue University, follows the literature of Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Adam Mansbach and demonstrates how each author's work reveals their personal and collective struggles with white masculinity.

"I find this work necessary because it fills gaps left empty in larger conversations around race," says Rose. "Historically when discussing race we are interested in how one group understands the 'other', particularly how white groups think about and interact with blacks, Hispanics, Asians and so forth. Very rarely do we examine and talk publicly about how whites construct and understand themselves. My work does just that: explores how white men think about and engage themselves as white men and their internalized struggles that emerge."

For 10 years, Rose has explored and examined the impacts that race, class, and gender have on pop culture and hip hop. Rose's authoritative work is featured in "Jay-Z: Essays on Hip Hop's Philosopher King" (McFarland Press, 2011), a collection of essays that address such topics as Jay-Z's relevance to African-American oral history, and "Understanding Blackness through Performance" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), which discusses the relationship between how the performance of blackness reframe issues of race.

In Abolishing White Masculinity, Rose says the book aims to consequently unveil the internalized failures of white masculinity and should be used to create dialogue around race from the vantage point rarely explored publicly-that whiteness has always been a contested racial identity in the U.S., one in a state of constant construction and reconstruction throughout critical cultural and historical moments.

Professor David J. Leonard (Washington State University) asserts: "Stephany Rose's Abolishing White Masculinity from Mark Twain to Hiphop: Crises in Whiteness has the potential to revolutionize discussions of whiteness and the cultural imagination."

Activist, cultural critic, and founder of Rap Sessions, Bakari Kitwana says "Stephany Rose deftly bridges the gap between popular culture critiques of post-racism and scholarly debates about critical whiteness studies."

About Dr. Stephany Rose
Stephany Rose, Ph. D. is an activist, public commentator and an assistant professor of Women's and Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. With a B.A. and M. A. in Literature from Clark Atlanta University and Purdue University, respectively, as well as a Ph. D. in American Studies from Purdue University, she specializes in critical race and gender studies, English literature, and American popular culture. An interdisciplinary scholar and a social justice activist, Dr. Rose produces transformative scholarship that reaches far beyond the walls of academia.

Stephany Rose, Ph. D. is available for interview.
www.drstephanyrose.com
sspauldi@uccs.edu