Review: Sites Unseen: Architecture, Race, and American Literature, by William A. Gleason; Little White Houses: How the Postwar Home Constructed Race in America, by Dianne Harris; and Negro Building: Black Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums, by Mabel O. Wilson

Abstract

William A. Gleason Sites Unseen: Architecture, Race, and American Literature New York: NYU Press, 2011, 288 pp., 37 b/w illus. $23 (paper), ISBN 9780814732472 Dianne Harris Little White Houses: How the Postwar Home Constructed Race in America Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013, 366 pp., 148 b/w illus. $39.95 (paper), ISBN 9780816654567 Mabel O. Wilson Negro Building: Black Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012, 464 pp., 57 b/w illus. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 9780520268425 While scholarly interest in the critical intersections of race and architecture is by no means new within the humanities, there are hints of some new horizons in contemporary scholarship. Earlier studies in North American architectural history have primarily focused on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including the racial segregation perpetuated by urban renewal policies. Sociological studies have tended to focus on the structural and institutional causes of racism or have presented ethnographic accounts of minority groups that proved their resilience under oppression.1 More recent studies have built on these investigations with new cross-cultural and transnational analyses, as well as brought the material environments produced by such processes under greater scrutiny. For example, in the past ten years, scholarship in visual studies has isolated the hegemonic function of whiteness in visual contexts seemingly unmarked by the presence of white and nonwhite figures. Martin Berger’s Site Unseen: Whiteness and American Visual Culture is representative of such scholarship, and his work has paved the way for both William A. Gleason’s Sites Unseen: Architecture, Race, and American Literature and Dianne Harris’s Little White Houses: How the Postwar Home Constructed Race in America .2 While Gleason most closely emulates Berger’s theoretical approach (as evidenced by the similar titles and methodologies of both works), Harris takes Berger’s conceptual focus on whiteness in American visual culture and extends it through a sustained archival study of material culture taken from everyday life. Also anchored by a deep analysis of historical archives, Mabel O. Wilson’s Negro Building: Black Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums will no doubt become a fundamental reference book for future studies of black self-representation in the field of architectural history. Her work follows that of scholars who have used material culture to describe the historical transition of public debates between and …