White Sight: Visual Politics and Practices of Whiteness
White supremacy is not only perpetuated by laws and police but also by visual culture and distinctive ways of seeing. Nicholas Mirzoeff argues that this form of “white sight” has a history. By understanding that white sight was not always common practice, we can devise better ways to dismantle it. Spanning centuries across this wide-ranging text, Mirzoeff connects Renaissance innovations—from the invention of perspective and the erection of Apollo statues as monuments to (white) beauty and power to the rise of racial capitalism dependent on slave labor—with ever-expanding surveillance technologies to show that white sight creates an oppressively racializing world, in which subjects who do not appear as white are under constant threat of violence. Analyzing recent events like the Black Lives Matter protests following the murder of George Floyd and the Central Park birdwatching incident, Mirzoeff suggests that we are experiencing a general crisis of white supremacy that presents both opportunities for and threats to social justice. If we do not seize this moment to dismantle white sight, then white supremacy might surge back stronger than ever. To that end, he highlights activist interventions to strike the power of the white heteropatriarchal gaze.
Biography
Nicholas Mirzoeff is a professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU Steinhardt, a visual activist, working at the intersection of politics, race and global/visual culture. In 2020-21, he was an ACLS/Mellon Scholar and Society fellow in residence at the Magnum Foundation, New York. His many publications include White Sight: Visual Politics and Practices of Whiteness (MIT Press, 2023), The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (2011), How To See The World (Pelican, 2015 and Basic Books, 2016).