
Sight Unseen
Whiteness and American Visual Culture
Martin A. Berger(Author)
University of California Press
1st Edition
Published on 3. November 2005
Book
Hardback
252 pages
978-0-520-24459-7 (ISBN)
Description
"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.
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.
More details
Edition
First Edition
Language
English
Place of publication
Berkerley
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Cloth over boards
Illustrations
79 b-w photographs
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 178 mm
Thickness: 0 mm
Weight
816 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-520-24459-7 (9780520244597)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
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).
Content
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