This edition of ReCentGlobe’s Druckfrisch Book Launch features the book “Routledge Handbook of Critical Studies in Whiteness” with the editors Shona Hunter and our guest professor Christi van der Westhuizen. They were joined by the contributors Sarah Heinz and Mark Schmitt in conversation with discussant Evangelia Kindinger. ­ The Routledge Handbook of Critical Studies in Whiteness offers a unique decolonial take on the field of Critical Whiteness Studies by rehistoricising and re-spatialising the study of bodies and identities in the world system of coloniality. Providing a transdisciplinary approach and addressing debates about knowledges, black and white subjectivities and newly defensive forms of whiteness, as seen in the rise of the Radical Right, the handbook deepens our understanding of power, place, and culture in coloniality.

Christi van der Westhuizen (Nelson Mandela University, South Africa), Associate Professor and Senior Researcher, is the head of the Research Programme at Centre for the Advancement of Non-Racialism and Democracy (CANRAD). She was invited on a Visiting Professorship to Leipzig University, Germany, in 2022.

Shona Hunter (Leeds Beckett University, UK) is a Reader in the Carnegie School of Education. She is the Programme Director for Research Degrees in the School and is a member of the Centre for Race Education and Decoloniality.

Sarah Heinz (University of Vienna, Austria), has been interested in the specific role that literary and cultural texts have in shaping our sense of self and our perception of the world and others. Literatures and cultures provide us with scripts and ideals of who (and how) to be and lead our lives, but they can also question norms that we often take for granted.

Mark Schmitt (TU Dortmund, Germany), is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Languages, Literature and Culture at TU Dortmund. His transdisciplinary work is situated in contemporary British literature and culture, cultural theory and Critical Whiteness studies among others.

Evangelia Kindinger (HU Berlin, Germany), is Junior Professor for American Literature and Culture at Humboldt-Universität Berlin. She holds a PhD from Ruhr-Universität Bochum with the dissertation titled Homebound – Diaspora Selves and Spaces in Greek American Return Narratives.

In this edition of Druckfrisch Book Discussion, Austin Glatthorn (University of Southampton) discussed his book “Music Theatre and the Holy Roman Empire” with Ellinor Forster (Innsbruck), Barbara Babić (Leipzig), and Axel Körner (Leipzig).

The interdisciplinary study “Music Theatre and the Holy Roman Empire: The German Musical Stage at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century” by Austin Glatthorn was published by Cambridge University Press in July 2022. It reveals the interconnected world of music theatre during the ‘Classical era’.

The event took place as part of the ERC Study day, which is organised by the ERC Project “Opera and the Politics of Empire in Habsburg Europe, 1815–1914” in cooperation with the Centre of Competence for Theatre (CCT) and the Leipzig Research Centre Global Dynamics (ReCentGlobe).