Sight Unseen: Whiteness and American Visual Culture First Edition

this book gives a detailed look for whites and others studying whiteness to examine our country and its history or white privilege. It is a must have for your library of go to book on the subject of whiteness in America.

I've found my recent acquisition of Sight Unseen, by Martin Berger, to be everything I came to expect it to be.The book arrived in exceptional condition and a very extremingly interersting read. Thanks

Martin A. Berger's Sight Unseen Whiteness and American Visual Culture examines the social construct of Whiteness using the visual texts produced in genre painting, landscape photography, museum architecture and early silent movies such as "The Great Train Robbery." His examinations of these visual texts are unique because he looks at images that have no ostensibly visible racial subjects. Berger's Sight Unseen is less concerned with what a given painting, photograph, building or film means than with how the meaning is constructed. The main premise for defending his thesis is the notion that European Americans projected their already existing ideas about race and what it means to be white on to the images that they viewed in pictures and architecture. Berger's Method is not singularly tied to visual evidence. He in fact doesn't believe that there is any inherent meaning in the images that he is explaining. Meaning is projected upon them from their contemporaneous audiences. The Book is separated into four chapters that address each artistic discipline that produces the visual texts that Berger is examining. The first chapter is titled "Genre Painting and the Foundations of Modern Race" addresses the idea of whiteness found in the 19th century paintings of William Sydney Mount. The reactions of 19th century critics to two of Mount's paintings are how Berger illustrates the way that whiteness manifests itself in the affective reactions to contemporaneous imagery. The first example is of critic Alfred Jones' commentaries in 1851 about the William Sidney Mount paintings titled "Farmers Nooning" painted in 1836 and "Boys Caught Napping in a Field" painted in 1848. Both paintings depict European American farmers taking a break or napping under the shade of a tree. However, "Farmers Nooning" has the added feature of a black farmer. Jones made mention of what he perceived to be the apparent laziness of the black farmer and the close proximity of work implements to the white farmers. Contemporaneous commentators on the painting "Boys Caught Napping in a Field" made no mention of the race of the European Americans depicted and their behavior in this image warranted no attachment of their idleness to their whiteness. Whiteness only became visible for the commentators when the image of the other was present. However, Berger illustrates how the other can be depicted with a non-racial figure such as the scarecrow in the painting by Mount titled "Fair Exchange, No Robbery." Mount's painting depicts a European American swapping hats with a scarecrow in a cornfield. This painting was understood by its 19th century audience to be about the appropriateness of the European American's ability to acquire the property of anyone not privileged with the master signifier of whiteness.The worldview of European Americans insured that Mount's paintings would be viewed through the lens of white privilege. The manner in which that worldview affected how the American landscape was interpreted is covered in the chapter titled "Landscape Photography and the White Gaze." This chapter focuses on the landscape photography and cartography that Euro-Americans used to define Yosemite national park. Carleton Watkins' photo "The Yosemite Valley from the Best General View" is used as an example of how the largest natural landmarks were used as the defining elements of the Yosemite Valley. In addition to Watkins photos, map makers and tour guides all focus on large unusual rock formations leaving much of the Yosemite valley unnamed despite the fact that there were thousands of ancient names given to these places by the indigenous first nations people who originally inhabited the place. European Americans named the Yosemite landscape with names that indicated white male power such as sentinels, brothers and captains. Even the architectural names that were used for large rock formations such as cathedrals, spires, domes or columns were indications of Euro-American chauvinism towards old world European culture. White Americans understood European architecture as the remnants of a fallen civilization. The powerful adjectives that were attached to large rock formations were viewed as de facto white male designations for natural landscape formations. Berger explains this as the presence of whiteness as a meta-label that is assumed when adjectives indicating power are used. White Americans interpreted the photographs of Watkins and the landscape that they depicted not only as representative of their history, but a sanction to subdue the land in the way that they saw fit. Their way of viewing the land was preconditioned by ingrained notions of white privilege.The notion of architecture from old world Europe being the symbol of a primitive stage of European American evolution is explored in the third chapter titled "Museum Architecture and the Imperialism of Whiteness." Berger expands upon the observation that he made in the second chapter that explained the Euro-American tendency to name features of the landscape with architectural terms and the chauvinism associated with that naming. The sarcenic style of architecture was used in early movies and displays at fairs to indicate an escape from quotidian life. The sarcenic style of architecture was read as a Moorish North African form and as such was exotic to European Americans. This style of architecture was used in the design of the Roedeph Shalom synagogue in Philadelphia to differentiate the Jewish synagogue from the gentile European American worship space. Berger explains 19th century Jews as whites, albeit whites viewed with condescension and suspicion by other European Americans. The sarcenic architectural style was also incorporated into the Philadelphia Art Academy building. However, European Americans viewed it as an incongruous addition because art institutions were viewed as a sacrosanct representation of whiteness. Berger expands his explanation of the presence of whiteness in arts institutions by recounting the story of painter Henry Ossawa Tanner's admission to the Philadelphia Art Academy. Tanner submitted a drawing anonymously as was the requirement and was accepted. However, when it became apparent that Tanner was Black he was subjected to the unprecedented second test of being reviewed by the students that were currently at the academy about how the felt about having a Black student on campus. Even if there was no official discriminatory rule against Black students there was an obvious unwritten rule because women and others were not subjected to this second approval process. The notion of whiteness in European Americans is bolstered by skepticism about the competency of Black folks. Berger's fourth and final chapter titled "Silent Cinema and the Gradations of Whiteness" explicates this process with the visual texts of two early silent films by William C. Paley, both shot in 1898 and showing U.S. soldiers disembarking from a ship. One film is titled "Colored Troops Disembarking (24th U.S. Infantry)" and the other is titled "U.S. Infantry, 2nd Battalion Leaving Cars." Both of these films show Black military troops who were involved in the Spanish American war. Both of these films were described with racialized perspectives in the contemporaneous catalogue texts that explained their content to their audiences. The text describing "Colored Troops Disembarking..." found the caution with which the Black troops walked down the gangplank to the docks laughable and humorous. However the catalogue information accompanying a film by the same filmmaker, done in the same year but depicting white soldiers, found no particular humor in the fact that it shows them struggling to keep up with an ambulance that had slid down some inclined planks and out of their control momentarily. The white soldier's response to the incident was described as hustle. Berger contrasts the response to the images of the black and white soldiers indicating that the white soldiers were automatically endowed with competence while the understanding of the black soldiers actions were preconditioned with racist condescension. In addition to these three films Berger examines the racialized space of the train in the silent film "The Great Train Robbery" and the notions of minstrelsy projected on to the images of a black mother washing her child in the film "Hard Wash (Pickaninny's Bath)" amongst others. "The Great Train Robbery" in particular underscores the unifying theme of Berger's thesis. It shows that a racialized understanding of non-racial imagery is present in a white audience's need to identify with ostensibly white, but deviant, train robbers.In his closing epilogue titled "The Triumph of Racialized Thought" Berger describes the investment of 21st century European Americans in whiteness. He explains that even though physiognomy is no longer the exclusive determinant of success in America those not possessing the master signifier of whiteness fail or succeed in terms defined by European Americans. This is the strand of consistency throughout Berger's thesis. He explains that the assumed permanence of whiteness in the American experience is a factor for predetermining success or the way images are interpreted as reality.