White Myth Research Articles

Gods, Goddesses, and Mortals for the 21st Century: The Reinstallation of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts Collection of Ancient Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Art

Gods, Goddesses, and Mortals for the 21st Century: The Reinstallation of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts Collection of Ancient Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Art

‘A wholly racialized world’: racial inequalities and peer review in leisure and tourism studies

ABSTRACT This paper is a critical autoethnographic exploration of the racial inequalities in leisure and tourism studies by taking the case of the peer review process and the place of scholars of colour within it. Precisely, I challenge the White logic in the peer review process in leisure and tourism studies. While furthering recent scholars’ efforts in attempting to challenge positivist epistemologies on mainstream leisure and tourism studies, I ask pertinent questions. Why does academia have to still allow/accept Euro-Amero-centric dogmas to dictate the peer review process? When will academia’s enthralment with the ‘White supremacy’ (i.e. preaching the Others about scientific orthodoxy) come to an end, if at all? I explore how despite all the glorifying talks of diversity, inclusiveness, end of inequality, and sustainable development in academia, ‘we still live in a wholly racialized world’ where ‘privileged whites are supposed to [and in reality] protect and perpetuate not only white myths but also raciology itself’. What if I were a White scholar? Would the reviewers then have made similar comments? This paper is an attempt to resist the hegemonic White logic so that the scholars of colour can theorise about their academic lives with dignity.

Adjusting the focus: looking at Patagonia and the wider Argentine state through the lens of settler colonial theory

ABSTRACT Notwithstanding predictions about the exhaustion of the so-called Myth of White Argentina, recent developments signal the continuing vitality of Argentina’s European creation myth. How can it be that, despite the victories secured by more than three decades of Indigenous and Afrodescendant activism, it may prove so hard to topple? This article borrows insights from settler colonial theory to address the endurance of the Myth of Whiteness in Argentina not only as a discursive construction of racial domination but also as a fundamental structure that obscures the shady claims of the Argentine state to the land it occupies. As well as investigating the explanatory power of the analytical framework for the particular case, the article unpicks the layers contained in the narrative of White Argentina, drawing attention to the crucial role the European creation myth has played not only in Argentine history but most importantly in the current cycle of ‘progressive neoextractivism’. Contextualising Argentina within settler colonial studies also contributes to debunking accounts of Argentinean exceptionalism by locating Argentina within global logics of settler colonial domination and providing a wider framework which may help identify illuminating commonalities in the international context.

Frank Bowling’s White Paintings

Frank Bowling’s white paintings span a period of some forty years in his practice, resulting in an eponymously titled exhibition The White Paintings (2006). As a body of work, the paintings occupy the longest period within Bowling’s career yet are largely absent from his historiography and are the least referenced, either as single works or as a series. The paradox of Bowling’s white paintings is that they are not all merely white nor are they all monochromes. A consideration of them presents an opportunity to resituate Bowling from a singular focus of formalism and to convey his deep relation to the world around him via a mode of abstraction that is layered with meanings. This investigation follows by centering upon a single painting from Bowling’s white series, Icarus (2005), produced after the death of his eldest son. Icarus explores themes of time, death, and spiritual release that are constant throughout the series. Bowling undercuts attendant ideas of purity and singleness, both in his exploration of whiteness and within the “tradition” of monochrome painting, and exposes its fallacies. Bowling’s white paintings thus mediate the way both modernity and history may be otherwise deployed, speaking inevitably to how the myth of whiteness is imbricated within the construction of modernism.

Frank Bowling’s White Paintings

Frank Bowling’s white paintings span a period of some forty years in his practice, resulting in an eponymously titled exhibition The White Paintings (2006). As a body of work, the paintings occupy the longest period within Bowling’s career yet are largely absent from his historiography and are the least referenced, either as single works or as a series. The paradox of Bowling’s white paintings is that they are not all merely white nor are they all monochromes. A consideration of them presents an opportunity to resituate Bowling from a singular focus of formalism and to convey his deep relation to the world around him via a mode of abstraction that is layered with meanings. This investigation follows by centering upon a single painting from Bowling’s white series, Icarus (2005), produced after the death of his eldest son. Icarus explores themes of time, death, and spiritual release that are constant throughout the series. Bowling undercuts attendant ideas of purity and singleness, both in his exploration of whiteness and within the “tradition” of monochrome painting, and exposes its fallacies. Bowling’s white paintings thus mediate the way both modernity and history may be otherwise deployed, speaking inevitably to how the myth of whiteness is imbricated within the construction of modernism.

Racial Expulsion and a Myth of Whiteness: Why Reinhardt Normal College Abandoned the New South and Became a Mountain School

Abstract Reinhardt Normal College was founded at the edge of Southern Appalachia in 1883 by New South promoters from the area who saw the school as part of a larger vision of urban, transportation, and industrial development. By 1900, a second generation identified the school as the antidote to cultural backwardness and mountain isolation. Both groups advocated colonization of blacks or presented the school as though it existed in an all-white setting. This emphasis on the “purity” of mountain whiteness affected the structure and intellectual output of the school and contributed to an environment in which racial expulsion actually occurred.

Neo-S(k)in Trade: White Skin, Black Bodies in Bernardine Evaristo's Blonde Roots

Neo-S(k)in TradeWhite Skin, Black Bodies in Bernardine Evaristo's Blonde Roots Sika A. Dagbovie-Mullins (bio) How would they like us to make slaves of and hold them in cruel slavery, and murder them as they do us? —David Walker White myth making around the black female body is inextricably linked to the larger African diaspora, that space of rupture, dispersion, and displacement. The presence of white hegemony, the black female body as property, the pervasive phenomenon of sexual abuse, and the experience of trauma constitute significant motifs … that are indicative of the reality of black diasporic women's existential experiences. —George Yancy Responding to the question, "What sparked Blonde Roots?" Bernardine Evaristo explains, "I wracked my brains about how I could write about [the transatlantic slave trade] in a way that enabled people to see it afresh."1 The British novel combines current and historic realities; there are slave ships and minstrel shows but also subways ("Tube trains") and self-help books.2 The blending of old and new urges readers to consider how modern slavery exists and operates in a contemporary context, particularly the sociocultural hierarchies and economic infrastructures that support such oppressive systems. [End Page 1] Similar to the 1995 American film White Man's Burden, Blonde Roots interchanges the roles of blacks and whites in society, imagining a world where Europe (Europa) is the "Gray Continent" whose natives must work as slaves for the black oppressor in Aphrika, the UK of Great Ambossa, and the West Japanese Islands (i.e., Caribbean islands).3 In Evaristo's novel, the white female body occupies the position of the deviant, aberrant Other, a "role" historically held by blacks. Protagonist Doris Scagglethorpe (slave name Omorenomwara) and her fellow female slaves suffer at the hands of ruthless slave catchers, violent and abusive Ambossan slave masters, and cruel and constantly suspicious Ambossan mistresses. In Blonde Roots, everything is doubled; white is also black, the past is also the present, what is imagined is also real. The various doublings in the narrative, though primarily focused on the story of white Doris, serve to represent and underscore the complexities and contradictions of black invisibility, visibility, and hypervisibility, particularly as it relates to black women who "are likely the most socially invisible in societies where poverty, blackness, and women historically mark the depths of powerlessness." David Theo Goldberg writes, "Constitutive or reflective of strategic relations, visibility and invisibility each can serve contextually as weapons, as a defensive or offensive strategy, as a mode of self-determination or denial of it."4 Evaristo uses Doris's textual visibility or presence (in lieu of a black protagonist) as a narrative strategy to retell black women's "unspeakable" slave experiences. Her whiteness also reminds readers of the power of white oppression with regards to its strategic efforts to deny or refuse to see black subjectivity. Other doublings serve a similar purpose in the novel: they remind us of an ugly past while exposing and denouncing contemporary global problems such as sex trafficking and modern-day slavery—issues that remain concealed from or ignored by the public eye. My title signifies on Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks (1952) whose title speaks to Blonde Roots's racial inversions; Doris's supposed inferiority is due to her being a "Caucasoi," a race of people who suffer from "infantalism, aimlessness, laziness, cowardice, poor coordination, [and] moral degradation."5 In his pro-slavery pamphlet, The Flame: Reflections, Thoughts, Experiences & Sentiments Candid & Free on the True Nature of the Slave Trade Remarks on the Character & Customs of the Europanes & An Account (Modest & Truthful) of my Progression from Inauspicous Origins to the Highest Echelons of Civilized Society, Chief Kaga Konata Katamba I notes that "[b]eating the hide of a Caucasoi is more akin to beating the hide of a camel to make it go faster," a statement that equates "whyte" skin with animalistic traits historically assigned to black corporeality.6 Thus Doris's whyte skin barely masks her symbolic black body. Chela Sandoval writes that Fanon's metaphoric title "calls up, but also undoes," the very racial binary opposition that the metaphor also depends on in order...

Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music ed. by Diane Pecknold (review)

Reviewed by: Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music ed. by Diane Pecknold Barbara A. Baker Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music. Edited by Diane Pecknold. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2013. 392 pp. $27.95. ISBN 978–0–8223–5163–4. Diane Pecknold’s edited collection acknowledges an African American presence in country music that goes beyond a matter of influence or aesthetic borrowing by arguing that “African American performers and audience members . . . not only lent their blues sensibilities and chord progressions to white country musicians,” they created and perpetuated old-time and country American music over the course of the twentieth century (1). Pecknold’s title, Hidden in the Mix, is slightly misleading since the essays most often reveal the complexity of an American musical complexion and imply that African American old-time and country music is worthy of study beyond its relationship to country music generally. The essays, although not arranged chronologically and uneven in tone and substance, make up a highly readable volume that should appeal to scholars of American culture, identity, music, and history. Taken in sum, they advance the aesthetic statements of Alabama intellectual [End Page 418] Albert Murray, who articulated a similar thesis in The Omni–Americans (New York, 1970): “American culture, even in its most rigidly segregated precincts, is patently and irrevocably composite.” American country music, as illustrated by Hidden in the Mix, is a composite churned from a highly American process that amalgamates race, class, and (to a lesser extent) gender. The myth of whiteness associated with American country music is a matter of racially politicized genres and marketing. The point is best illustrated by Pecknold’s excellent piece on Ray Charles, “Making Country Modern: The Legacy of Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music.” Charles released the landmark album in 1962, when racialized genre conventions left no context in which its highly amalgamated genius could be interpreted or embraced, since record companies often intentionally reinforced commercial and vernacular divergences among consumers. The amalgamating process inherent in aural production had often been purposefully concealed. The Genius of Soul had long been re-appropriating so-called white interpretations of black styles and exercising the “shared roots and continuous exchange between musics;” he had always “understood popular music as a process of natural cross-racial exchange” (85). That aural cross-fertilization occurred frequently in country music, which is to say, southern music, has everything to do with proximity. As Michael Awkward points out in his discussion of Al Green, country constitutes a space in which “historically divided peoples, whose cultures and bloody interaction have come to define a region, can come together productively” (202). The point is underscored in Adam Gasgow’s treatment of Cowboy Troy’s “transracial aesthetics.” Cowboy Troy’s flagrant mixing of “black” rap and “white” country music demands “that we understand both musical traditions as already amalgamated” (238). Gasgow interprets “I Play Chicken with the Train” as “a creolized history” of “frontier brag-talk” and “urban rap braggadocio” owing to the influence of “African praise-song, . . . blackface minstrelsy,” and western frontier life before Emancipation calling to mind Constance Rourke’s configuration of the American national character (238). [End Page 419] Particularly interesting is Barbara Ching’s “If Only They Could Read between the Lines: Alice Randall and the Integration of Country Music,” the only essay that explores African American women in country music. Ching explicates Randall’s elision of fiction and lyric, the extensive influence she has had, and a surprising subtext that explores the relationship of country music to the black female understanding of racial ambiguity. Also interesting as a history of race and marketing is the final essay in the collection, David Sanjek’s “What’s Syd Got to Do with It?: King Records, Henry Glover, and the Complex Achievement of Crossover.” Sanjeck allows the founder of King records, Sydney Nathan, to speak for himself as a Jew who welcomed African Americans to his company. Primarily a salesman, he recognized the talents of Henry Glover in assisting him in selling the products of a musical melting pot that was stoked largely by the phenomenon of recorded music...

Whitening via Erasure: Space, Place and the Census in Costa Rica

The Costa Rican national imaginary is predicated on a notion of whiteness and homogeneity as defining of the nation. As such, no recasting or expansion of the myth of whiteness can explain an indigenous presence in the nation, for a story predicated on such a foundational myth is fundamentally at odds with the prior existence of a non-white population. This paper asks how the national imaginary of whiteness develops in such a context. I focus on the mechanisms that buttress the process of indigenous erasure, arguing that a combination of racialization of space, use of the census, and contradictory indigenous policies function as critical means of whitening.

Race and Character in Cien años de soledad

For AndyCien anos de soledad has been viewed through many prisms but in critical readings of the novel there is very little focus on the question of race. The narrative arguably presents the novel's events through a European filter, or Pseudo-European presumed whiteness.1 A reading is sensitive to race shows racial mixture most often intersects with illegitimacy in Cien anos de soledad. White women are instrumental in policing racial hierarchy; black women are relegated to the margins of the socius, most particularly to brothels. Vivir para contarla, Garcia Marquez's 2003 autobiography, provides unsettling insights into how the Nobel laureate transmuted his experience of coastal Caribbean race relations into his novel.White identity is evident throughout the first two chapters of Cien anos de soledad. In the opening chapter Macondo's founder, Jose Arcadio Buendia, expresses contempt for the past and the Spanish Conquest haunts his movements, not as an epoch of terror but as an age of heroism, irretrievably lost. According to Avery Gordon, haunting describes how that which appears not to be there is often a seething (8). Gordon's analysis examines the invisible or uncanny historical presence of ostensibly silenced or marginalized people. Victors and conquerors haunt history as well. This is apparent in Jose Arcadio Buendia's explorations in the first chapter, in which the founder of Macondo discovers the remains of a Spanish galleon and a suit of armor from a previous heroic age. These refer to a golden age of discovery, upheld by ethnic Europeans in Latin America as justification for claims of patrimony. The golden age of discovery and exploration has been lost to the villagers of Macondo. They inhabit an isolated and degraded reality, in which the monumental object of the Spanish Conquest may only be recovered piecemeal, if at all. 2The predominantly Spanish ancestry of Macondo's family of leaders is never in doubt. Ursula Iguaran's great-grandfather was Aragonese and Jose Arcadio Buendia's was criollo cultivador de tabaco (CA 103). In the United States, creole connotes racial mixture whereas its Spanish homophone criollo refers to a native-born person of European ancestry, although the term is misleading. The ancestors of Ursula and Jose Arcadio lived on land nominally shared with the original inhabitants: del mar, en una rancheria de indios pacificos (CA 102). The Buendias' Spanish forebears leave an indelible stamp on a territory which once belonged to indigenous inhabitants: antigua rancheria que los antepasados de ambos transformaron con su trabajo y sus buenas costumbres en uno de los mejores pueblos de la provincia (103). A central myth of whiteness, as Richard Dyer notes, is its claim to aspiration and enterprise (21-23). Enterprising ancestors notwithstanding, the tale of the Buendias illustrates a criollo anxiety regarding whiteness and reproduction. Inter-racial sexuality, as Dyer brilliantly argues, threatens whiteness because bodies. ..can no longer guarantee their own reproduction as (25). In Garcia Marquez's novel, the copulation of white bodies eventually leads to bestial offspring. Due perhaps to the limited availability of socially acceptable (white) partners, the descendants of the Aragonese Spaniard and the criollo tobacco planter are threatened by endogamy, incest, and monstrosity. In warnings to her great-great-grandson, Ursula states the danger clearly: mujeres de la calle, que echaban a perder la sangre; las mujeres de la casa, que parian hijos con cola de puerco (CA 503).In the prehistory of Macondo, Ursula's attempt to avoid bearing children with tails leads to violence: Jose Arcadio Buendia murders the man who mocks his childless marriage. Prudencio Aguilar's return as a ghost precipitates the Buendias' journey across a Latin American wilderness: despues de varios meses de andar perdidos por entre los pantanos, lejos ya de los ultimos indigenas que encontraron en el camino, acamparon a la orilla de un rio pedregoso cuyas aguas parecian un torrente de vidrio helado (108). …

White Outlaws, Black Stetsons: The Rhetorical Presence of the African-American “Stagolee” Trope in White Outlaw Myth and Literature

White Outlaws, Black Stetsons: The Rhetorical Presence of the African-American “Stagolee” Trope in White Outlaw Myth and Literature

Picturing Race: Early Modern Constructions of Racial Identity

Picturing Race: Early Modern Constructions of Racial Identity Peter Erickson (bio) David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds. The Image of the Black in Western Art. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010–11. Volume 3. From the “Age of Discovery” to the Age of Abolition. Part 1. David Bindman, ed. Artists of the Renaissance and Baroque. 408 + xxi pages. $95.00. Part 2. By Jean Michel Massing. Europe and the World Beyond. 496 + xxvi pages. $95.00. Part 3. David Bindman, ed. The Eighteenth Century. 365 + xxvi pages. $95.00. Elizabeth McGrath and Jean Michel Massing, eds. The Slave in European Art: From Renaissance Trophy to Abolitionist Emblem. London: The Warburg Institute; Savigliano: Nino Aragno Editore, 2012. 386 + x pages. £55.00. Agnes Lugo-Ortiz and Angela Rosenthal, eds. Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 500 pages. $99.00. In her introductory statement, “Acknowledgments and Perspectives,” in the first volume of The Image of the Black in Western Art, Dominique de Menil traces the moment of inception of this ambitious project with an admirable combination of humility and conviction: [End Page 151] The decision in 1960 to launch a systematic investigation of the iconography of blacks in Occidental art did not proceed from any clear plan. It was an impulse prompted by an intolerable situation: segregation as it still existed in spite of having been outlawed by the Supreme Court in 1954. . . . The past is heavy. To face it, to assume it, facts must be brought candidly to light. The making of a more human world requires rigorous studies. (1: 291–92)1 In a similar spirit, John de Menil records his justification for supporting the purchase of Christian van Couwenberg’s The Rape of a Negress (1632) for the Museé des Beaux-Arts, Strasbourg: “‘We are happy . . . to have been able to aid in the acquisition of an important painting which depicts us, whites, in a manner which we would prefer to ignore.’”2 Volumes 1, 2, and 4 of The Image of the Black in Western Art (consisting of five books) were completed in a thirteen-year period as follows: From Pharaohs to the Fall of the Roman Empire (1976) on classical art; From the Early Christian Era to the “Age of Discovery” (1979), part 1, From the Demonic Threat to the Incarnation of Sainthood, and part 2, Africans in the Christian Ordinance of the World, on medieval art; and From the American Revolution to World War I (1989), part 1, Slaves and Liberators, and part 2, Black Models and White Myths, on nineteenth-century art. However, the series remained incomplete because of the glaring absence of the third volume intended to cover the early modern period. Not until fifty-one years after the initial commitment in 1960, and thirty-five years after the appearance of the first volume, has the gap at last been filled by the publication in 2010–11 of the three books—volume 3, parts 1–3—focusing on the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. The arrival of this rich resource is a cause for scholarly celebration. The scope of the visual material is vast; its accumulation and coordination a massive achievement. So long awaited, it has been well worth the wait. The new addition provides a broad, solid base that begins to answer Dominique de Menil’s call for “rigorous studies.” Although the new volume 3 goes far toward definitively constituting and establishing a visual field for early modern race studies, it does not have the field to itself but rather shares this moment with the other volumes under review and hence is part of a much wider, ongoing process of growth and expansion. Nor did the field stand still during the prolonged delay in the emergence of the missing piece of The Image of the Black in the Western Art. The past two decades, beginning in the early 1990s, have witnessed concerted efforts and major critical developments in formulating the issue of race in early modern [End Page 152] culture. A pressing question has been whether, beyond its archival value, The Image of the Black in Western Art project would be fully capable of adjusting to, and engaging...

The fire next time

Rodney King's beating by Los Angeles Police Department officers, and their subsequent acquittal by an all White jury sparked the first “multicultural riot” in Los Angeles in 1992. Twenty years since the time of the uprising, the vigilante murder of teenager Trayvon Martin in a gated community in Florida brought thousands across the country into the streets to protest the disposability of Black male life. Since writing this essay, Rodney King has passed away, his death also premature. This essay discusses how the lives of these two Black males are connected through the commonsense White supremacist myth of inherent Black violence. It goes on to discuss the relations of violence that structure the vastly different cities in which they found themselves. Justice for Trayvon is broader than the criminal justice system. It will mean grappling with how urban and suburban lives in the US are violently separated by fortification and targeted policing, no less than predatory mortgage lending, decades of uneven federal investments, and a militarized economy. Making claims for a right to the city, then, rests on transforming militarized landscapes and the White supremacy that naturalizes foreclosed futures.

Happy Chinatown Tours

Number One Son approached his father with a question. Pop?Call me 'Dad,' son.Pop, I have a question for you. Where did the White myth that Chinese men hate Chinese women come from?We're Christians, son! The morning Chronicle crumpled in Dad's hands. It's no myth! Dad said heartily. He shook out the paper. Donaldina Cameron's publicity claims she was the first to reveal the Yellow man's pathological cruelty to Yellow women. That's good enough for me. Is that good enough for you? The paper restored, he folded it and began reading again.

Where Did the Black Rough Riders Go?

The Spanish-American War was a key moment in the development of U.S. imperialism and the popular western. Its iconic figure was Roosevelt's rough rider—the Anglo-Saxon gentleman cowboy par excellence—who yoked frontier heroism to overseas militarism, in the process justifying American extra-continental expansionism and extending the ideological reach of the western. The black military presence in Cuba—and, subsequently, Puerto Rico and the Philippines—threatened that process by challenging white superiority on the western frontier and the imperial battlefield. When white myth makers suppressed this story of black heroism, they drove it deep into the western's creative fabric. By following the fortunes of black soldiers, in print and in society, we can recognize how deeply the western formula is motivated and shaped by the blackness it denies and to what different ends African-American writers yoked western adventure, military action, and meanings of manhood in the United States.

Contesting the Myth of ‘A People’s War’ in Bruce Moore-King’s White Man Black War (1989)

White writing in post independence Zimbabwe has received little critical attention. Yet, there has been a steady and sometimes interrupted output from white writers; the themes in their fiction have ranged from nostalgia for a bygone Rhodesia, the horrors of the war and post independence betrayal. The aim of this article is to explore the idea of the myth of ‘a people’s war’ in White Man, Black War (1989), a novel written by a former Rhodesian white soldier. Bruce Moore-King’s novel engages the myth of ‘a people’s war’ that was used by Ian Douglas Smith to persuade and ‘call-up’ white people to fight the black liberation forces in Rhodesia. White Man Black War questions the myth of whiteness as equal to civilization that was propagated by white Rhodesian leaders, especially between 1965 until 1980. The novel contests the myth of white invincibility and reveals how mytho-poetic discourses of ‘civilization’, ‘standards’ and ‘anti-communism’ were popularised by the Rhodesian government. The third myth that Moore-King’s novel exposes for critical scrutiny is also the one based on the policy of national reconciliation introduced by the then prime minister of a new Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe. When White Man Black War is re-read today in the aftermath of the economic war of the Third Chimurenga (2000–2008) the novel comes across as a satire whose object of laughter are both blacks and whites. This observation is in-spite of the fact that White Man Black War does not totally succeed in dismantling all the political scaffolds of the myth of ‘a people’s war’ as constructed and believed by a significant portion of whites and some blacks in Rhodesia.

Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism, and American Culture (review)

Thomas Doherty. Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism, and American Culture. Columbia University Press, 2OO3. 3O5 pages; $27.95. Exchange of Ideas The premise for Thomas Doherty's thoughtful and nuanced study, Cold War, Cool Medium, is that there is a simple, black and white myth about television's role in 1950's anti-Communism. According to legend, television facilitated Senator Joseph R. McCarthy's rise to prominence, nourished the blacklisting of writers and actors, and contributed to the abortion of free speech. Only after the 188-hour spectacle of the Army-McCarthy hearings and the senator's losing confrontation with army counsel, Joseph N. Welch, did TV turn against the Communist-hunter. According to Doherty, who teaches American and Film Studies at Brandeis University and has authored several books on the visual media, the actuality of 195Os television was far more complex than the myth. he makes a convincing case. To begin with, TV was not a flattering format for McCarthy. he tended to come over as harsh and sharp, when, as Marshall McLuhan noted, television, the cool medium, favored more mellow personalities. The model politician as TV performer was Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose laid-back approach fit perfectly. Before the Nixon-Kennedy debates, Ike had a successful television style. Further, we wrongly envisage early television programming as one-dimensional. The box allowed McCarthy and his ilk to make their points, but gave a proportionate amount of time to their opponents, who used the live talk shows characteristic of the era to hit at Red-bating excesses. Before the Army-McCarthy hearings, the senator had been weakened severely by such journalists as Edward R. MUITOW, who attacked McCarthy on his show, see It Now. McCarthy's filmed rejoinder was inferior to Mu rrow's technically and intellectually. Television was not friendly to bullies. When Reed Harris, a state department official being badgered by McCarthy responded that he resented the senator's attempt to publicly wring his neck, the brutal image stuck in the popular mind. More successful on television were figures whose anti-Communism took a subtler form. Thus, urbane Catholic Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, on, Life Is Worth Living (1952-1957), made a modulated case against Communism. Doherty's point, in short, is that early television was more multifaceted than supposed and that, rather than hurting the quality of public debate, it encouraged the exchange of ideas. It helped the burgeoning civil rights movement, partly by unmasking in justices, and by exposing to the camera lens racial stereotypes that could not stand visual scrutiny. …

Colonial Cinema and Imperial France, 1919-1939: White Blind Spots, Male Fantasies, and Settler Myths (review)

Colonial Cinema and Imperial France, 1919-1939: White Blind Spots, Male Fantasies, and Settler Myths (review)

White Myths, Black Omissions: the Historical Origins of Racism in Britain

White Myths, Black Omissions: the Historical Origins of Racism in Britain

Whiteness and “The Canon”

It is a great tragedy that all things in this society, including history, pedagogy, and the pursuit of knowledge, must struggle under the asphyxiating sludge of race, which is the legacy of the myth of whiteness. I grew up in a different society where color has no meaning outside the painter's palette, and my early training was such that I developed a healthy admiration for the work of artists as varied as Francisco de Goya, Gustave Courbet, Kathe Kollwitz, Charles White, Jacob Lawrence, and Ben Shahn, without consciousness of their color.3 I also had considerable exposure to a history of world art without prejudice toward the contributions ofmy own culture to that heritage. I knew one language of art history; a race coding of that language would have appeared ludicrous.However, having since taught in the academy on three continents, I must testify to the cogency of the issues that you raise. A cursory look at the curricula of art history programs across the United States quickly reveals a methodical blindness to all that is not rooted in Western civilization, which is as troubling as it is enduring. This predilection is as evident in course plans and program leanings as it is in faculty hiring practices and student recruitment. My experience was not entirely different in Britain. There is truth, therefore, to the notion of a race-specific pedagogical system and environment so suffused with “absences of vital presences” as to alienate those who may not find themselves or their backgrounds reflected.4