Sight unseen : whiteness and American visual culture / Martin A. Berger.
Material type: TextPublisher: Berkeley : University of California Press, [2005]Copyright date: ©2005Description: xiv, 236 pages : illustrations ; 24 cmContent type:- text
- unmediated
- volume
- 0520244591
- 9780520244597
- 701.03 22
- NX650.R34 B47 2005
Item type | Current library | Call number | Copy number | Status | Date due | Barcode | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Book | City Campus City Campus Main Collection | 701.03 BER (Browse shelf(Opens below)) | 1 | Available | A403346B |
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Includes bibliographical references (page 225) and index.
Introduction : white like me -- Ch. 1. Genre painting and the foundations of modern race -- Ch. 2. Landscape photography and the white gaze -- Ch. 3. Museum architecture and the imperialism of whiteness -- Ch. 4. Silent cinema and the gradations of whiteness -- Epilogue : the triumph of racialized thought.
Sight unseen explores how racial identity guides the interpretation of the visual world. Through analysis of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century paintings, photographs, museums, and early motion pictures, Berger illustrates how a shared investment in whiteness invisibly directs what European Americans see as true, and ultimately, what legal, social, and economic policies they enact. Reconstructing selected artworks, the author exposes the effects of racial thinking on our interpretation of the visual world. 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. This book exposes how something as natural as sight is conditioned by the racial values of society.
"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 directs what European Americans 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 book exposes how something as apparently natural as sight is conditioned by the racial values of society."--BOOK JACKET.
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