Sight Unseen - Whiteness and American Visual Culture

1. Auflage 2005
ISBN: 978-0-520-24459-7
Verlag: University of California Press

Buch, Englisch, 252 Seiten, Cloth Over Boards, Format (B × H): 186 mm x 232 mm, Gewicht: 588 g

Sight Unseen explores how racial identity guides the interpretation of the visual world. Through a nimble analysis of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century paintings, photographs, museums, and early motion pictures, Martin A. Berger illustrates how a shared investment in whiteness invisibly guides what Americans of European descent see, what they accept as true, and, ultimately, what legal, social, and economic policies they enact.

Carefully reconstructing the racial and philosophical contexts of selected artworks that contain no narrative links to race, the author exposes the effects of racial thinking on our interpretation of the visual world. Bucolic genre paintings of white farmers, pristine landscape photographs of the western frontier, monumental civic architecture, and early action films provide case studies for investigating how European-American sight became inextricably bound to the racial values of American society. Berger shows how artworks are more significant for confirming internalized beliefs on race, than they are for selling us on racial values we do not yet own. A significant contribution to the growing field of whiteness studies, this accessible, provocative, and compelling book exposes how something as apparently natural as sight is conditioned by the racial values of society.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Berger, Martin A.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunst, allgemein Kunsttheorie, Kunstphilosophie
• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Volkskunde
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft | Kulturwissenschaften Kulturwissenschaften
• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunst, allgemein Kunstpsychologie und -soziologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Ästhetik
• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunstgeschichte Kunstgeschichte: 20./21. Jahrhundert
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Soziologie von Migranten und Minderheiten

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction: White Like Me
1. Genre Painting and the Foundations of Modern Race
2. Landscape Photography and the White Gaze
3. Museum Architecture and the Imperialism of Whiteness
4. Silent Cinema and the Gradations of Whiteness
Epilogue: The Triumph of Racialized Thought

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Martin A. Berger is Associate Professor of History of Art and Visual Culture at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of Man Made: Thomas Eakins and the Construction of Gilded Age Manhood (California, 2000).