Guest Editor's Introduction: Visual Culture and Race

Abstract

In her groundbreaking essay “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators” (1992), bell hooks discusses the stakes of looking in a racially segregated United States. She proposes that restrictions and prohibitions on the black gaze that were established during slavery and reinforced in the post-Reconstruction era in the spectacle of lynching incited black viewers to adopt a critical mode of looking, an oppositional gaze of resistance: “[A]ll attempts to repress our/black peoples’ right to gaze . . . produced in us an overwhelming longing to look, a rebellious desire, an oppositional gaze” (116). hooks emphasizes the importance of looking in US history and the urgency of refusing racism by looking back. Notably, she does not focus on the spectacle of racism or on countless racist representations but on the gaze itself and the power of resistant acts of looking. The essential questions hooks addresses activate two scholarly discourses that intersect in productive ways: visual culture studies and critical studies of race. Her questions encourage one to consider, as this special issue does, how looking has been racialized in the United States. As an interdisciplinary conversation, visual culture studies is not beholden to the histories of representation claimed by any one field, such as art history, literature, film studies, or popular culture studies. Instead, visual culture studies aims to “show seeing” (Mitchell), to focus not simply on vision but on “visuality” or “sight as a social fact” (Foster ix). In other words, instead of rehearsing a disciplinary canon of artworks, objects, events, or texts, it encourages scholars to investigate how people learn to see and come to understand themselves as viewers. Critical studies of race share this interdisciplinary impetus and focus on the social forces that shape many different practices. In the most general sense, the critical study of race examines the social construction of race or race “as a social fact.” Bringing these two conversations to bear on one another suggests that if sight is a social practice, it is also racialized in the United States, shaped and directed by the racial contours and contest of the social sphere.