Finalist for the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award
Chicago Tribune, 10 Best Books of 2024
A Hyperallergic Best Book of the Year
The award-winning art historian and founder of Vision & Justice uncovers a pivotal era in the story of race in the United States when Americans came to ignore the truth about the false foundations of the nation's racial regime.
In a masterpiece of historical detective work, Sarah Lewis exposes one of the most damaging lies in American history. There was a time when Americans were confronted with the fictions shoring up the nation's racial regime and learned to disregard them. The true significance of this hidden history has gone unseen-until now.
The surprising catalyst occurred in the nineteenth century when the Caucasian War-the fight for independence in the Caucasus that coincided with the end of the US Civil War-revealed the instability of the entire regime of racial domination. Images of the Caucasus region and peoples captivated the American public but also showed that the place from which we derive "Caucasian" for whiteness was not white at all. Cultural and political figures ranging from P. T. Barnum to Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois to Woodrow Wilson recognized these fictions and more, exploiting, unmasking, critiquing, or burying them.
To acknowledge the falsehood at the core of racial order proved unthinkable, especially as Jim Crow and segregation took hold. Sight became a form of racial sculpture, vision a knife excising what no longer served the stability of racial hierarchy. That stability was shaped, crucially, by what was left out, what we have been conditioned not to see. Groundbreaking and profoundly resonant, The Unseen Truth shows how visual tactics have long secured our regime of racial hierarchy in spite of its false foundations-and offers a way to begin to dismantle it.
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[A] masterwork of research...the overarching evidence [Lewis] presents points to how unsettled and migratory the hierarchy, category, and formation of whiteness was and continues to be worldwide. -- Emmanuel Iduma * Art in America * [Lewis's] brilliant intervention...pries open the fissures running across popular understandings of race and sight...Through reproductions of paintings, photographs, posters, and maps, Lewis brings a woefully understudied time period to light...[this] book more than rectifies this, offering a necessary reorientation for ethnic studies scholars, art historians, and everyday readers alike to learn from. -- Lakshmi Rivera Amiin * Hyperallergic * Lewis is a disrupter, too, though she detonates her truth bombs with a quiet control. -- Brooke Hauser * Boston Globe * A bold intellectual history. -- Erin L. Thompson * The Nation * Signals the emergence of a new approach to race and representation in the context of the anti-black racism and antiracist discourse that have defined the last decade in the US...this is the book art historians working in the US urgently need now, as we learn to apply our critical tools-from close looking to socio-historical analysis-to understanding and undermining systemic racism in America. -- Tanya Sheehan * caa.reviews * A searing, important read that helps unpack the current moment and future of our country, and also a feat of detective work that uncovers historical events that profoundly changed the course of the world. * Town & Country * A single book can remap your world. Exhibit A: [this book], no less than a revelatory history of how, from the Civil War to the early 20th century, Americans crafted images of race, filtering out contradictions to arrive at something simplified. -- Christopher Borrelli * Chicago Tribune * Drawing on abundant scholarship, Lewis investigates images that contributed to Americans' conception of race from the Civil War through the Jim Crow era...A fresh, authoritative historical inquiry. * Kirkus Reviews * A work of searing perspective...exposes ongoing historical narratives about who belongs in American society, revealing the skewed perceptions behind fiction-based racial systems. -- Erika Harlitz Kern * Foreword Reviews * Absolutely brilliant. Uniquely astute. Sarah Lewis grows The Unseen Truth from her superb Vision and Justice project into a work of stunning originality. There is so much here as Lewis 'unsilences' the past in a voice both informative and seductive. Her astonishing cast of characters stars Caucasians, Circassians, and most revealingly, Woodrow Wilson. Each chapter exposes the 'racial detailing' that has constructed a repressive racial regime that, once seen, can be undone. -- Nell Irvin Painter, author of the <i>New York Times</i> bestseller <i>The History of White People</i> Sarah Lewis's The Unseen Truth isn't just a groundbreaking work of visionary scholarship. It's an earthquake. Here is the map key to seeing-or, as she shows, re-seeing-the fault lines of race and how, after the Civil War, they were buried beneath an onslaught of constructed American fictions diabolical in their details and devastating in what they taught generations to filter out, allowing them to see only in Black and white. All credit to Lewis for removing the blindfold. -- Henry Louis Gates, Jr., author of <i>The Black Box: Writing the Race</i> Race is a fiction, even as it overwhelms and shapes our history. In The Unseen Truth, born of her long study of visuality, Sarah Lewis returns innovatively to the story of race as a creation of how we see or unsee. She beautifully illuminates an American and human tragedy-that we may be much better at seeing race than we ever are at understanding it. In a sweeping history from the Civil War to the Great War era, Lewis shows historically how Americans forged a lethal racial regime with their eyes as much as their minds. -- David W. Blight, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning <i>Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom</i> In a work of great originality and scholarly imagination, Sarah Lewis opens our eyes to what we have been too blinded to see in the narratives of race that have defined our nation. Her insights are transformative and indispensable. -- Drew Gilpin Faust, author of <i>This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War</i> In The Unseen Truth, it is almost as if Sarah Lewis has given us a new pair of glasses that allow us to see history in ways that were previously unclear. Every chapter is suffused with revelations that expand and clarify our understanding of the past. This book has changed the way I look at history. It has changed the way I observe the world. Lewis has provided us with an indispensable resource to better see ourselves. -- Clint Smith, author of <i>How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America</i>, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction An engaging, compelling read from a remarkable scholar. The Unseen Truth shines light on a long-silenced history, offering endless ways to realize the possibilities for justice. -- Deborah Willis, prizewinning photo historian and author of <i>Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers 1840 to the Present</i> Writing about race is like hunting for the origins of a lie. In this masterpiece of American history, written with verve, delicacy, and imagination, Lewis takes the color line and blows it up, capturing a moment in the late nineteenth century when the older rhythms of racial sight broke down and a new, pernicious attention to detail emerged. The supposed truth of tiny distinctions, she shows us, is a lie of enormous, heartbreaking consequence for the decades that followed. -- Matthew Pratt Guterl, author of <i>Skinfolk</i> A watershed in the study of art, social, and cultural history, The Unseen Truth is probing and brilliant, based on superb research and filled with remarkable discoveries. Sarah Lewis illuminates what it means to both 'see' and create race, deepening our ability to pursue justice. -- Imani Perry, author of <i>South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation</i>, winner of the National Book Award Exhaustively researched, deeply original, and analytically brilliant, The Unseen Truth is a landmark in the literature on race. Sarah Lewis has uncovered elements that are both literally and metaphorically hidden in plain sight and offered a new way of seeing the racial fictions that surround us. The canon of indispensable books on the volatile alchemy of race has just grown by one. -- Jelani Cobb, author of <i>The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress</i> In this richly researched and capacious text, Sarah Lewis traces the fictions of race that subtend racial domination and the ways that their maintenance demands a simultaneous seeing and unseeing. With its sustained attention to art, photography, popular culture, and performance, The Unseen Truth enacts 'a system break in the usual circuits' of 'racial sight' and representation. This is necessary reading. -- Christina Sharpe, author of <i>Ordinary Notes</i> In this extraordinary book, Sarah Lewis opens our eyes to the centuries of sedimented prejudice that continue to shape our present. Taking us on a journey from the Caucasus to America, where new racial imaginaries were being forged, she shows how the instability of the Caucasus as a signifier of race reveals the fragile, spurious nature of racialized thinking itself. -- Rebecca Ruth Gould, author of <i>Writers and Rebels: The Literature of Insurgency in the Caucasus</i> The Unseen Truth is a magnificent revelation. Lewis traces the precise historical moments when minute cultural obediences became sutured-a process she calls 'detailing'-into American habits of seeing. She illuminates how insistent little distinctions quietly moved collective perceptions of difference, imposed borders, and built walls for or against the social risks of diminished status and civil death. To this day, these creepingly astigmatic distortions undergird laws that contradict themselves in every possible way except their consistent adherence to a vision of derogated black humanity. Sarah Lewis has written a brilliant and breathtaking expose of an American tragedy: how we intentionally and repeatedly have found ways to blind our eyes and silence our souls as a way of proving what doesn't exist -- Patricia J. Williams, author of <i>The Miracle of the Black Leg: Notes on Race, Human Bodies, and the Spirit of the Law</i> In this lyrically written and deeply learned book, Sarah Lewis excavates the repressed pasts and submerged narratives of racialization that have shaped American life. The Unseen Truth not only restores this fascinating history to vision, but also enables us to reconsider the American project from her passionate, critical, and necessary perspective. -- Huey Copeland, coeditor of <i>Black Modernisms in the Transatlantic World</i> The Unseen Truth is a call to arms. -- Maurice Berger, author of <i>For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights</i>
Sarah Lewis is the founder of Vision & Justice and the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and Associate Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She is the author of The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America (Harvard University Press), the bestseller, The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery (Simon & Schuster), and the forthcoming book Vision & Justice (One World/Random House). Lewis is the editor of the award-winning volumes, "Vision & Justice" by Aperture magazine and the anthology on the work of Carrie Mae Weems (MIT Press). She is the organizer of the landmark Vision & Justice Convening at Harvard University, and co-editor of the Vision & Justice Book Series, launched in partnership with Aperture. Her awards and recognition include an honorary degree from Pratt Institute, the Infinity Award, the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, a Cullman Fellowship, the Freedom Scholar Award (ASALH), the Arthur Danto/ASA Prize from the American Philosophical Association, and the Photography Network Book Prize. Her writing has been published in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Artforum, and the New York Review of Books, and her work has been the subject of profiles from The Boston Globe to the New York Times. Lewis is a sought-after public speaker, with a mainstage TED talk that received over 3 million views. She received her BA from Harvard University, an MPhil from Oxford University, an MA from Courtauld Institute of Art, and her PhD from Yale University. She lives in New York City and Cambridge, MA.
