Abstract
This chapter explores how racial hegemony is instrumentalized and resisted through popular and mass-mediated visual culture. Using Critical Race Theory in combination with phenomenologies of difference and film theory, the authors juxtapose the Hollywood film 12 Years a Slave and cell phone videos that helped galvanize the Black Lives Matter movement to show how the politico-aesthetic strategies and frames employed in the making of these two visual sites/sights effectively and affectively challenge dominant white visuality. The discussion considers the way images of race “teach” viewers how to look and how such practices of looking contribute to the visual production of racial knowledge, identities, and power relations. Implications are drawn for a counter-visual arts education that confronts dominant white visuality.
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Notes
- 1.
We chose to capitalize the terms Black and White throughout the chapter because, even though their meanings are fluid and depend upon context, each category references a specific social group (Haney López, 1996).
- 2.
The movie 12 Years a Slave is a film adaptation of Solomon Northup’s 1853 memoir written by John Ridley and directed by Steve McQueen (McQueen et al., 2013). In his memoir, Northup, who was born a free man in New York, tells of being bamboozled by two traveling circus musicians who offered him a business opportunity to join them for a two-week tour to Washington, D.C. Once in Washington, Northup was drugged by the two musicians and sold to slave traders who transported him and many others to a fate of slavery in the state of Louisiana. The film depicts how Northup endured a life of chattel slavery for 12 years (from 1841 to 1853) before a traveling Canadian carpenter would hear his story and aid him in regaining his freedom.
- 3.
The term whitestream is used by indigenous scholars and critical race scholars to refer to dominant cultural practices and social structures in North America that normalize the experiences of Whites. Whites and non-Whites can and do participate in whitestreaming (Ahlquist & Milner, 2008; Denis, 1997; Grande, 2004; Johnson, 2011).
- 4.
A weaving house, also known as a weaving cabin, was a structure on many plantations throughout the Southern slave states in the US. They were designated for craft and weaving work. Weaving houses often contained looms that enslaved Africans used to make clothes and other textiles, as well as items such as baskets (see Stavisky, 1949).
- 5.
On February 23, 1945, US Marines raised a flag atop Mount Suribachi as a sign of triumph during a World War II battle at Iwo Jima. Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal captured the iconic photograph (see Rosenthal, 1945). The iconic nature of the Iwo Jima photograph and its “representative form” served as a “visual metaphor” (Edwards & Winkler, 1997, p. 289) for McQueen’s cinematic direction of the hanging of Platt. Aside from the gestural similarity in both images, the context of each suggests a rite/right of conquest. The hoisting of the flag at Iwo Jima symbolizes the forceful claim to Japanese land, and the hoisting of Platt’s body is a sign of force that issues a claim of White sovereignty over Black subjectivity. “Rosenthal’s iconic photograph operates as an instance of depictive rhetoric that functions ideographically” (Edwards & Winkler, 1997, p. 289).
- 6.
“Nigger” is a derogatory racial term that was in widespread usage among White supremacists in the US before the mid-1850s and well into the twentieth century (Kennedy, 2002). More than just a label, “nigger” is deployed to assert the subordinate status of enslaved Africans, African Americans, and their descendants (Harper, 2009).
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Herman, D., Kraehe, A.M. (2018). Toward a Counter-visual Education: Cinema, Race, and the Reorientation of White Visuality. In: Kraehe, A., Gaztambide-Fernández, R., Carpenter II, B. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Race and the Arts in Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65256-6_13
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