Daniel J. Keyes and Luís L.M. Aguiar, eds., White Space: Race, Privilege, and Cultural Economies of the Okanagan Valley (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2021)

White Space is a timely contribution to the study of whiteness in Canada. Editors Daniel J. Keyes and Luís L.M. Aguiar have brought together twelve essays that reflect critically on what whiteness means (as an identity, mode of domination, and affect) and how it has been produced and reproduced in the Okanagan Valley on unceded Syilx territory. While whiteness and the relationship between race and place have been well-studied in Canada, White Space is distinct for its localized approach. It attends to how the unique “rural-urban” makeup of the Okanagan, a place popular for its leisure and tourism economies, informs the intersections of race, class, and colonialism. Embracing a regional framework, the collection pushes its readers to not only critique whiteness generally but also to consider how it operates in everyday life (in labour, education, housing, commemoration, journalism, and tourism) within the Okanagan specifically. By taking this place-based approach, the book offers readers an accessible, relevant, and necessary reflection on white supremacy in the region.

The book is structured in two parts with essays from sociologists, geographers, educators, literary and cultural studies scholars, and community organizers. Part 1 considers the Okanagan’s historical representations and commemorative workings of whiteness. Bill Cohen and Natalie A. Chambers describe the general “whiteout” of the region and outline the critical role of Syilx knowledge, pedagogies, and histories in disrupting this pattern. In chapters 2 and 3, Daniel Keyes examines two instances of place-naming in the Okanagan – the naming of N-toe mountain and its re-naming as Nkwala, a name concocted by a settler author – to demonstrate how settlers use toponyms to “conceal the complexity that informs this landscape of dispossession.” (86) Taking a more literary approach, Janet MacArthur’s piece analyzes “settler melancholy” within the late 19th century writings of Susan Allison to examine how settlers have or have not confronted the violence of colonialism. Part 1 ends with an autoethnographic piece by Audrey Kobayashi, who reflects on her Okanagan past and the erasure of Japanese-Canadian histories there.

Part 2, on the other hand, focuses on how neoliberalism has shaped whiteness from the 1980s and 1990s into the present. Jon Corbett and Donna M. Senese analyze a series of tourist maps from Kelowna to demonstrate how the region has become synonymous with white “play, recreation, and affluent retirement.” (130) Luís Aguiar’s piece, too, analyzes local texts to illustrate the “encore” or “smug” whiteness of neoliberalism, wherein “diversity” becomes cultural capital designed to ignore racial and economic injustices (145). Alternatively, Sheila Lewis and Lawrence D. Berg’s chapter draws on interviews to document the lived experiences of surveillance and exclusion navigated by urban Indigenous women seeking housing in the Okanagan. Carl E. James’ chapter also considers racist strategies of surveillance and management, but this time as they were deployed against Jamaican migrant workers in the 2000s. Highlighting debates surrounding the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program, James demonstrates how local news outlets, regardless of intent, cast Jamaican workers and students as “foreign racial Others.” (194) Daniel Keyes’ chapter in Part 2 also critiques the news media. Focusing on the concentration of print media ownership under neoliberalism, Keyes contemplates the stubborn inability of media to “challenge hegemonic entrepreneurial whiteness.” (239) Delacey Tedesco, on the other hand, focuses on the insecurity of neoliberal whiteness. She frames Kelowna as an “aporetic” site where the city both desires global diversity (and capital) and hegemonic whiteness, making it susceptible to destabilization. Like Part 1, Part 2 ends with an autoethnographic piece, this time by Stephen Svenson, who reflects on his upbringing of “redneck whiteness” in the Okanagan. Svenson traces how, in the context of neoliberalism, white settlers possess an even stronger desire to evade responsibility within the structures of whiteness, capitalism, and colonialism.

Collectively, these essays provide rich ground for critiquing whiteness. At the same time, like many other studies of whiteness, White Space falls into common patterns and limitations. For example, methodologically, the book is dominated by discursive analysis. While this work is vital, I found myself asking about the material workings and implications of whiteness. In this regard, Lewis and Berg’s chapter on housing stands out as particularly generative. Furthermore, the book’s focus on whiteness means that, overall, the distinct experiences of non-white groups – from Syilx people to Japanese Canadians to Jamaican migrant workers – are conflated in binary opposition to whiteness. There are certainly connections across these groups’ experiences, but their differences are just as important for understanding white supremacy’s diverse and historically contingent machinations. The book may have benefited, then, from a more robust discussion and framing of racism and colonialism. These are indeed related processes, but they are not the same, and they do not impact all non-white groups the same either. By centering whiteness without including such a discussion, White Space also, at times, de-historicizes whiteness as a category and presumes its inevitable hegemony. In this sense, the collection may have been strengthened by a further emphasis on the historical construction of whiteness in both its discursive and material dimensions (including via property, for example) within Part 1. In doing so, studies like this one could remind us that whiteness has always been, as Tedesco describes it, “aporetic” and contingent on the actions and refusals of all types of historical actors. In other words, and without undermining the very real whiteness of the Okanagan, we may see that the region is, in fact, far from a stable white space.

Perhaps the most incisive critique that could be offered comes from within the book itself. In the first chapter, Cohen and Chambers ask: “Is white studies the latest intellectual pastime for a privileged, increasingly multicultural elite that has time to reflect upon and pose critical questions about societal patterns, ideology, and hegemony? […] Or does it have the potential to contribute to the struggle to collectively free ourselves from hegemony and make a more peaceful, and culturally diverse, world with new webs of relationships?” (40) In my view, White Space constructively captures this tension. Although we must consider the stakes of whiteness studies and who these studies serve, the fact that Cohen and Chambers’ cogent questions begin the book speaks to the potential of a collection such as this one. In bringing together diverse perspectives on whiteness, the book creates room for critical conversations. Part 2 also does especially important work. By foregrounding neoliberalism’s relationship to colonialism and white supremacy, it underscores the often underexamined entanglements between race and class. Here, White Space reminds us that “whiteness subtly maintains and produces exclusions of place,” even in a period of presumed global diversity and capital. (9) Moreover, the regional specificity of the volume makes its insights applicable in ways that are not always possible in more general texts. This book is essential reading for academics, undergraduate students, and, really, anyone who resides in the Okanagan Valley.

As someone who lived for a time in the whiteness of the Okanagan, this book gave me encouraging perspectives from scholars and organizers who have done and continue to do critical work there. White Space is a valuable addition to studies of whiteness in Canada and offers inspiration to those of us seeking to unpack and challenge white supremacy in local contexts, both historically and in the neoliberal present.

Nicole Yakashiro

University of British Columbia

DOI: https://doi.org/10.52975/llt.2023v91.0017.