White: Essays on Race and Culture - Softcover

Dyer, Richard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0415095379 ISBN 13: 9780415095372

Publisher: Routledge, 1997

Synopsis

White people are not literally or symbolically white; nor are they uniquely virtuous and pure. Racial imagery and racial representation are central to the organisation of the contemporary world but, while there are many studies of images of black and Asian people, whiteness is an invisible racial position. At the level of racial representation, whites are not of a certain race. They are just the human race, a 'colour' against which other ethnicities are always examined.
In White, Richard Dyer looks beyond the apparent unremarkability of whiteness and argues for the importance of analysing images of white people. Dyer traces the representation of whiteness by whites in Western visual culture, focusing on the mass media of photography, advertising, fine art, cinema and television.
Dyer examines the representation of whiteness and the white body in the contexts of Christianity, 'race' and colonialism. In a series of absorbing case studies, he discusses the representations of whiteness in muscle-man action cinema, from Italian 'peplum' movies to the Tarzan and Rambo series; shows the construction of whiteness in photography and cinema in the lighting of white and black faces, and analyses the representation of white women in end-of-empire fictions such as The Jewel in the Crown, and traces the disturbing association of whiteness with death, in vampire narratives and dystopian films such as Blade Runner and the Aliens trilogy.

About this title

About the Author

Richard Dyer is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Warwick. He is the author of many books, including Now You See It (1990), Only Entertainment (1992) and The Matter of Images (1993), all available from Routledge.

Review

"Written with clarity and elegance impressively and eclectically sourced with notes and bibliographies, and lavishly illustrated on exceptional stock with scores fo black-and-white plates and 18 color plates of paintings... White is a feast for both the mind and the eye. An excellent companion to bell hooks's... and an indispensable addition to undergraduate and graduate collections in cultural studies and film."
-Choice, April 1998 Vol. 35 No. 8
""White comes highly recommended as a textual site which attempts to bring greater humanity to the worls through an act of critical scholarship and honest self-deconstruction."
-Tribune, 2/99
""White [is a] terrifically intelligent examination of how the visual media, from painting to photography to film, represents whiteness as the esthetic ideal of the West."
-"The New York Times, 3/99
"Politically sensitive and culturally savvy. [A]n excellent study.."
-Shannon Steen, "Theatre Journal
"This book overflows with... perceptive and provocative arguments."
-"In These Times

Edition details

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0415095379
• ISBN 13: 9780415095372
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288