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| Apollo Belvedere statue, ca. 2nd century AD; Apollo and Daphne sculpture, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, 1622–1625. Both images screen-grabbed from White Sight: Visual Politics and Practices of Whiteness. According to Mirzoeff in “The World of Statues in the Americas,” “Apollo was first a symbol of colonial dominion through his connection to the first man, Adam, when Eden became a metaphor for the Americas […] From a colonized Garden of Eden with classical overlays, modern white supremacy converged on Apollo, seen as prefiguring Christ, in response to abolition and revolution. Apollo became whiteness’s white mask” (60). | |
Chapter 2, “The World of Statues in America,” follows chronologically from “The City, Ship, and Plantation” in that it details “how the statue became the ‘perfect’ white body, also described in the European Enlightenment as a ‘machine,’ but one that was the source and type of beauty” (23). Using the aforementioned Apollo Belvedere as case in point, Mirzoeff “describes how the statue of Apollo first became the symbol of colonization as Adam in the Garden of Eden in the Americas, even as Eden was also the location of an imagined commons” (59). For Mirzoeff, whiteness is therefore intrinsically linked to ideal body types as expressed through similar, religious iconography and above all through European colonizers’ interpretation of religious texts as conditions for their imperialist conquest.
While reading “The World of Statues in America,” I was once again impressed by the scale and scope of Mirzoeff’s discussion. Moreover, this chapter (and to be quite honest, almost all of the book) introduced me to aspects of art history that I was unfamiliar with, so the sheer educational aspect of Mirzoeff’s discussion had an impact on me. And, I also greatly appreciated the author’s consideration of gender amidst his consideration of race in the Western world. After all, gender, like race, is an arbitrary construct used to establish oppressive power dynamics. In Chapter 2, gender becomes another long arm of the colonialist regime that defines the ideal white body and also gives a type of justification for conquering land and the peoples occupying it. Apollo, Adam, the white male European body—all became the ideal “human” type, the representation of monohumanism.
Chapter 3, “The Natural History of White Supremacy” is, in my opinion, the most interesting segment of White Sight for comparing the natural history museum to imperial empire. I remember that in visiting museums in my childhood, I felt uneasy while looking at tableaux of taxidermized animals, seemingly frozen in time and looking back at the viewer with glossy, blank stares.
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| Wildlife dioramas from the American Museum of Natural History, obtained from WikiMedia Commons. In “The Natural History of White Supremacy,” Mirzoeff offers that, as the extermination of plants, animals, and other species was continuing throughout the nineteenth century, “a network of institutions, including natural history museums, wildlife refuges, and zoos, was created in the Gilded Age to sustain white dominion and its consequent exterminations as natural. Like the famous dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History (founded in 1869), this network had to be viewed from a specific place in a particular way, which was that of the state” (94-95). | |
Although Mirzoeff doesn’t articulate why I might hold such a queasy nostalgia for these exhibits, the brilliance of “The Natural History of White Sight” lies in its detailed consideration of “the history of how white dominance was made natural and in turn claimed nature as part of its domain” (94). Mirzoeff explains,
“To be divine, as Apollo, is to have dominion over nature, understand its processes, and make them valuable by extraction. Over the course of the long nineteenth century (1791–1914), a white way of seeing nature through the lens of extinction was formed in transnational exchange across the Atlantic and around the circuits of European settler colonies. In the present moment—comprising the sixth mass extinction, climate crisis, and global heating—attention should be paid as to how nature was made white” (94).
From this perspective, institutions like natural history museums extended the longstanding colonialist aim of finding terra nullius, of staking a God-given claim to a land otherwise believed to be uninhabited; the museum does so through the extermination and collection of animals. Control is key here; governing the bodies of animals, namely birds, in staged exhibits is akin to the control of bodies through slavery and surveillance. Moreover, bodily control is exerted upon the stance of the viewer, who adopts “the gaze of the white person whose perfect type was the statue” (96). Most hauntingly, natural history museums and other similar institutions that exhibit unusual animal specimens function in the same way as those public (or, sometimes, private) exhibits transforming enslaved human beings into non-human spectacles. With all of this in mind, for me Chapter 3 was eye-opening, challenging my previous relations with natural history museums in the process.
Section two, “Imperial Visions, Anticolonial Ways of Seeing,” consists of three chapters that each concern “white sight and empire, centering on the British Empire in the century from First Indian War of Independence in 1857 to the onset of decolonization after the Second World War” (24). If “White Sight in the World of Atlantic Slavery” discusses the rise of white sight and the ways in which colonial-era visual culture maintained ideals related to power, dominance, and surveillance, “Imperial Visions, Anticolonial Ways of Seeing” looks at those moments when such institutions began to be called into question. Mirzoeff states,
“imperial modernity always saw itself at risk of collapse. It is not that empire is now coming to an end. Rather, empire always creates moral panics about its impending collapse” (24).
For instance, in chapter 4, “The Imperial Screen,” the author looks at how a metaphorical glass screen, a way of separating colonizer from colonized, was maintained so as to create “an emotional and cultural barrier, a form of affective border, preventing the imperial viewer from identifying with what was being looked at” (25). To do so, art historians in particular devised writings that both prescribed ways of looking to art’s audience as well as stipulated norms for artists on how to best portray the real world aesthetically through the lens of white sight. For Mirzoeff, such reading and creative protocols in effect welcomed an alternative or “strange” (128) perspective for other, outsider artists to craft their work. However, as they used “cultural, decorative, and sartorial codes that were temporarily illegible to the dominant” (128), artists pushing back against white sight were still subject to isolation and persecution. Mirzoeff gives the example of author Oscar Wilde, namely in the 1890 novel The Picture of Dorian Grey, as a practitioner of resistant, strange perspectives. “In The Picture of Dorian Grey,” writes Mirzoeff,
“Basil Hallward sent Gray a fateful yellow book and rumor incorrectly asserted that Wilde himself was carrying a yellow book at the time of his arrest in 1895. Yellow was a strange perspective refracting between the style of the aesthetic movement and mainstream imperial culture. Read one way, it indicated the strange affinities between Jewish and queer cultures in London. Or it was just a color. Or once decoded, it signaled what became known as ‘decadence,’ which needed to be purged from the imperial body politic.” (129)
“Women, queers, and Jews,” like their colonized counterparts, were pushed to the margins of white society, and in their art, had to visualize their “refracted community” (134) through alternative means.
From there, in Chapter 5, “The Anticolonial Way of Seeing,” Mirzoeff provides a case study of the poet George Lamming, detailing how Lamming “de-invisibilized white sight and registered the anticolonial contemporary” (25). Mirzoeff says that Lamming coined the phrase “ways of seeing” as a practice of resistance—“It was a way to see himself by seeing how others excluded from English whiteness were seen” (149). He adds,
“The anticolonial way of seeing was a means of detecting the networks of white violence and creating a structure of immigrant feeling in this persistently hostile environment. Yet by the time [art critic] John Berger used ‘ways of seeing’ for his television series and now-classic accompanying book in 1972, the anticolonial and decolonial affects of the phrase had subsided. It is time to revive it” (150).
Here, as in Chapter 4, I was most impressed by the depth Mirzoeff dedicates to his study of Lamming and anticolonial ways of seeing more broadly, but I was also inspired by his consideration of scholarship, politics, and art (literary and visual) in the chapter. Weaving such a web across disciplines again points to the strengths of White Sight, in that it provides a thorough, tangible, and perhaps for some readers, relatable narrative of oppositional practices, of striking back. Mirzoeff notes in this chapter that the “anticolonial way of seeing did not, then, simply arise from a specific place and time but rather from a reflection on place and time over time” (160). Mirzoeff’s chapter “The Anticolonial Way of Seeing” further reflects on place and time over time, also incorporating more nuanced discussions on aesthetics, politics, and culture within such spatio-temporal boundaries.
In Chapter 6, “The Cultural Unconscious and the Dispossessed,” Mirzoeff continues his work in Chapter 5 establishing “transnational networks of seeing” (177), this time exploring how the crisis of whiteness outlined in subsequent chapters started. Earlier in the monograph, Mirzoeff notes that “The Cultural Unconscious and the Dispossessed” isolates Lamming’s meeting with theorist Frantz Fanon in 1956,
“where Fanon also used the expression ‘way of seeing’ in analyzing racism and culture […] His vision was that those entirely excluded from this culture, the urban dispossessed, would be capable of creating a new humanity no longer subject to these phantasms” (25-26).
Indeed, in this chapter, the author provides a vivid summary of this chance meeting, detailing how key theoretical terms were coined and later how Black and Jewish interactions further disrupted white sight. Here, Mirzoeff borrows heavily from Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks to draw parallels “between colonialism and fascism” (180), and as a result, he expertly communicates a watershed moment “of mutual self-recognition. It broke the Black-white binary and allowed for a comparative way of seeing each other” (181). Chapter 6 accomplishes the task of communicating Fanon and Lamming’s mission to make “the way of seeing as a means of making decolonial change” (185), a task extending into the contemporary anti-colonial movements outlined in the final section of White Sight.
Section three, “The Crisis of Whiteness,” lays out the aforesaid “decolonial wave” that has “jumped the Atlantic Ocean following the forced journey made by so many thousands of Africans to unsettle the symbolic order of the Americas” (26). In other words, this decolonial wave began during independence movements in formerly-colonized African nations and has extended into acts of protest in the African diaspora and in the United States. In Chapter 7, “The Strike Against Statues,” Mirzoeff chronicles the titular resistance movements beginning in the 1960s, in nations like Algeria, Angola and in modern day South Africa.
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| Defaced and later removed colonial-era statues in Cape Town, South Africa, during the Rhodes Must Fall campaign. Obtained from WikiMedia Commons. In “The Strike Against Statues,” Mirzoeff states plainly that the “removal of colonial statues was a revolutionary and liberatory action in the African independence struggle” (199) that still persists in the African diaspora and beyond. | |
Described as the “war of statues,” the toppling of colonial-era statues—stark reminders of white sight and its surveilling capacity—serves as a symbolic task representing power changing hands “from colonizer to formerly colonized” (197-198). Mirzoeff describes moments where liberators in African nations literally and figuratively reclaim power from European colonizers, including the recent Rhodes Must Fall movement in 2015, wherein South African students protested an on-campus statue of imperial ruler Cecil John Rhodes. Furthermore, the protests described in “The Strike Against Statues” also encompass those movements reclaiming bodily autonomy on the part of the queer and trans community, for instance, the photo series Redefining the Power III (With Miguel Prince) by Kiluanji Kia Henda, wherein the artist depicts “his ‘cultural heroes’ on top of their vacated pedestals” (201)
Redefining the Power III (with Miguel Prince), triptych by Kiluanji Kia Henda, 2011; photo of the artist. Obtained from Goodman Gallery (Cape Town, South Africa) “About the Artist” page, as well as White Sight: Visual Politics and Practices of Whiteness. “In the third of the series, Redefining the Power III (with Miguel Prince),” writes Mirzoeff, “Kia Henda created a triptych that epitomized the decolonial dynamic. […] On the left was a colonial postcard depicting the monument to Pedro Alexandrino, a nineteenth-century governor of Luanda. The monument dominates what can be seen of the low-rise colony around it, with a single gaslight adjacent as a visible sign of the so-called civilizing process. […] These postcards and stereographic views circulated around the world, depicting and sustaining the colonial imaginary” (201-202).
Describing one of the photos, Mirzoeff explains:
“The dreamlike effect in the photo evokes the continuing displacement by which the cultural unconscious might be changed. The multiframe format depicts change over time, but also evokes the gaps in between each image and the future that is yet to come. […] Queer and trans bodies claimed a redefined constituent power (potencia) to imagine the global. While the skyscraper makes it clear that the global city world continues to constrain and compartmentalize life for that majority, the triptych suggests that maybe the queer African can de-dehumanize the world. The three young Africans sitting below could be the foot soldiers of that transformation, just as the Portuguese soldiers in the first panel were for imperialism.” (203-4)
Such a thorough consideration of race and national identity alongside gender and sexual identity importantly circles back to Mirzoeff’s discussion of white sight as endorsing monohumanism along the lines of gender and racial ideals. To be wholly perfectly human is to identify as white and male, and by actively resisting such ideals activists “make visible ‘an aperture, an opening, a possibility’ in settler colonial reality through which a different future may be accessed” (203).
Earlier in Chapter 7, Mirzoeff notes that strikes against colonial statues “refuse racialized ‘common sense’ about what is contemporary and what counts as history” (197). This statement in my view carries over into Chapter 8, “The General Crisis of Whiteness,” where Mirzoeff concludes with a reflection on the United States in 2020. Specifically, the author summarizes the “general crisis of whiteness in that year from the first impact of the virus in March to white claims to immunity from the virus in April and the impact of the George Floyd Uprising starting in May” (26).
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| Images of the so-called “white spatial imaginary,” described by Mirzoeff as a “new configuration” of white sight that “connects white supremacy to those domains of the state most directly involved in the war on Black lives from immigration enforcement to border patrol and the apparatus of mass incarceration” (247). Such examples of new white supremacist configurations include, as seen here, paraphernalia endorsing “Back the Blue” campaigns (and, campaigns to reelect Donald J. Trump) and the January 6, 2021 attack on the United States capitol building. | |
Catalyzed in part by the COVID-19 pandemic, the decolonizing events discussed in “The General Crisis of Whiteness” further
“made the visual politics and practices of white sight and white reality starkly visible in the United States, expressed in a chaotic mix of police, political, and viral immunities” (227).
The last portion of that quotation—a chaotic mix of police, political, and viral immunities—is of note.
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| Images of activists protesting the murder of George Floyd in 2020; commemorative mural of murder victims (Tony McDade, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor) in Minneapolis, Minnesota; defacement of Daughters of the Confederacy monument in Seattle, Washington. Obtained from WikiMedia Commons. These and other acts of resistance move “away from the heroic individual emblematized by the memorial statue toward communities centered on care. This movement combines repair, reparations, and restitution. It is both symbolic and material at once, an always changing social formation […]” (227-228). | |
Recent activism and pushes towards resistance, such as the toppling of confederate statues and protests against the murder of George Floyd (among many other murders that soon followed), according to Mirzoeff, were met with forceful, sometimes violent push-back from white supremacists. “The city may have been empty at the street level,” writes Mirzoeff, of his own experiences in New York during the pandemic, “but it continued to function as a globalized machine of inequality” (232). Indeed, in 2020, white sight reemerged within the Blue Lives Matter movement, through the conspiracy theories against COVID-19 immunization, through the January 6 insurrection. “The single imperial screen was reconstituted as many distributed devices, streaming video and downloading images that reconstructed white reality” (249). However, towards the end of “The General Crisis of Whiteness, Mirzoeff ends with a glimmer, a sliver of hope.
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Quoting Christina Sharpe, he writes, “despite all the worsening of the ‘weather’ of antiblackness […] there is nonetheless the possibility to undo its nationalism” (255). Strikes against white sight open up that possibility.
The best academic monographs expand my horizons, exposing me to new disciplines along the way. I enjoy reading books that open my eyes, shape my point of view, and make me think. White Sight: Visual Politics and Practices of Whiteness does just that. “To look forward is to look toward future decolonizing” (16), Mirzoeff writes early in White Sight, and after reading his work, I too see this future as far off as it may seem
