White Sight

Praise

Included in The Next Big Idea Club’s February 2023 Must-Read Books

“Mirzoeff’s new book, White Sight: Visual Politics and Practices of Whiteness, explores how systems of white supremacy see, and thus order, the world in the unbroken history of colonialism, up to the present day. White sight finds articulation in a vast array of visual culture—from the monuments of colonialists and Confederates that occupy (literally) key points in cities and towns, to the deadly vision of the military drone’s-eye view, to the museum displays of species made extinct through colonial slaughter. Where the British Jamaican philosopher Charles W. Mills coined the term “white ignorance” to describe the historically entrenched epistemic block that forecloses knowledge of the brutal material realities of racial capitalism, Mirzoeff’s term takes up the question of how practices of whiteness operate in our fields of vision—and, crucially, how to rupture that white reality and see otherwise.”
—The Los Angeles Review of Books

“White Sight continues Nicholas Mirzoeff ’s bold intervention on visuality and counter-visuality in his earlier book, The Right to Look, as both seek to develop a decolonial framework for the field of visual culture studies…There is also a sense of continuation in the sheer magnitude of the project: the analysis of artworks and visual practice is combined with historical, anthropological and geopolitical knowledge, which is contextualized in the cultural and economic history of the Atlantic world. At its core, this new book is also a call to action: to strike against whiteness.“
—International Affairs

“Mirzoeff’s book attempts more than an analysis of the eponymous ‘visual politics and practices of whiteness’: it is a call to strike against the machinery of white sight and the projection of reality it manufactures. . . Mirzoeff offers a perspective that is deeply personal, stemming at once from his recent experiences as an activist based in New York and his childhood as part of the Jewish diaspora in London. His analysis focuses on Anglo-American visual and literary production. Yet White Sight is not intended solely for readers in the US and the UK. It is bound to become an essential reading for anyone wishing to understand how the mainstream, hegemonic Anglo-American culture and the white sight that buttresses it continues to maintain and rebuild racial disparities. Although the book does not offer readymade solutions for dismantling them, it certainly is a timely and determined call to action.”
—Art History