White
Twentieth Anniversary Edition
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- £39.99
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- £39.99
Publisher Description
Now twenty years since its initial release, Richard Dyer’s classic text White remains a groundbreaking and insightful study of the representation of whiteness in Western visual culture.
White explores how, while racial representation is central to the organisation of the contemporary world, white people have remained a largely unexamined category in sharp contrast to the many studies of images of black and Asian peoples. Looking beyond the apparent unremarkability of whiteness, Dyer demonstrates the importance of analysing images of white people.
Dyer places this representation within the contexts of Christianity, ‘race’ and colonialism. In a series of absorbing case studies, he shows the construction of whiteness in the technology of photography and film as part of a wider ‘culture of light’; discusses heroic white masculinity in muscle-man action cinema, from Tarzan and Hercules to Conan and Rambo; analyses the stifling role of white women in end-of-empire fictions like Jewel in the Crown and traces the associations of whiteness with death in Falling Down, horror movies and cult dystopian films such as Blade Runner and the Aliens trilogy.
This twentieth anniversary edition includes a new introductory chapter by Maxime Cervulle entitled ‘Looking into the light: Whiteness, racism and regimes of representation’. This new introduction illuminates how Dyer has made a major contribution to the study of contemporary regimes of representation by unveiling the cultural mechanisms that have formed and reinforced white hegemony, mechanisms under which white people have come to represent what is ordinary, neutral, even universal.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this inevitable study of whiteness as metaphor, University of Warwick film professor Dyer (Now You See It) takes an idea from Moby Dick, applies it to visual media (photography, film, television, advertising) and expands it into six essays. Proceeding from the view that white people "remain a large unexamined category in sharp contrast to the many studies of images of black and Asian peoples," Dyer looks at how Western--primarily American--culture grants privilege to whites through positive associations, such as blessedness, purity and heroism. After a tedious confessional in which the author identifies himself as a privileged, white, British "queer" with a sensitivity to other oppressed people, Dyer uses case studies from Tarzan to The Jewel in the Crown to bleached-out depictions of Christ in order to reach many predictable conclusions: "being visible as white is a passport to privilege" or "white is no colour because it is all colours." A chapter on the development of "photography and film media of light" around the white face as subject, however, is both original and compelling. This study of "whiteness qua whiteness" may be the first of its kind at book length, but there are too many theoretical variables operating at once (historical, Christian, "queer," post-colonialist, pop cultural) for whiteness to mean anything but whatever you want it to. This may be the point--that whiteness is powerful because it can mean so many different things--but that still makes for difficult subject matter, which here is handled with only partial success.
