by Jon Lackman | 18 September 2006 | Books
John Ott writes in CAA Reviews:
“The American Culture Association’s presentation of its 2006 Cawelti Book Award to Martin Berger’s Sight Unseen: Whiteness and American Visual Culture is an early indication of its deserved recognition and acclaim. This terse volume is doubly ambitious: as a groundbreaking investigation of a category of analysis mostly uncharted by the field of US art history, and as the delineation and defense of a provocative interpretive methodology that reads ‘artworks against the grain of their visual evidence’. First and foremost, Berger’s text represents the discipline’s overdue contribution to the relatively new but rapidly expanding field of whiteness studies. At the same time, the author deliberately selects visual texts in which questions of race are latent and in which ‘the most elemental meanings . . . have nothing to do with conscious intent’. Accordingly, Berger is more interested in how discourses of whiteness structured audiences’ responses to varied cultural phenomena than in how artworks might shape belief since, as he maintains in his introduction, ‘images do not persuade us to internalize racial values embedded within them, so much as they confirm meanings’ …
None of the issues I have raised should diminish the importance and, indeed, necessity of Sight Unseen. Questions of this sort emerge with any pioneering study, and it must fall to the next wave of scholarship, in art history and elsewhere, to surmount the challenges outlined above. I do, however, have deeper concerns about one of the author’s introductory arguments. In order to direct students of race and racism to whiteness as a legitimate interpretive category—a worthy goal I fully endorse—Berger unnecessarily and to my mind unfairly tars white scholars who make ‘a subject of racial others’. ‘My concern,’ he elaborates, ‘is that white academics who focus on representations of nonwhite peoples—no less than members of the general public who ‘love’ black athletes, comedians, and musicians—may use the mantle of ‘racial justice’ as a respectable cover for indulging in our long-standing fascination with the other’. This accusation is no more helpful or credible than recriminations that the recent growth of whiteness studies provides ‘cover’ for those invested in consolidating an eroding lily-white canon. More importantly, when many important US artists of color still lack a substantial academic literature, and when the newest survey of American art somehow includes no black artists until Fred Wilson, I question the wisdom of warning white scholars that ‘academic attraction . . . to images depicting blacks might constitute a twenty-first incarnation of the minstrel show’ in order to urge them to shift ‘their primary evidence of race from black to white representations’. Most of all, I would suggest that the investigation of race, whether black or white, does not have to be an either-or affair.”
