With Other Eyes
Looking at Race and Gender in Visual Culture
Challenges the politics of gender and race underlying the practice of art history.
Feminist and multiculturalist efforts to uncover the assumptions underpinning the production of art have transformed our understanding of visual culture. The field of art history, however, continues to downplay the race and gender politics informing its own interpretative practices. With Other Eyes demonstrates how feminist, postcolonial, and antiracist concerns can successfully be incorporated into the study of art.
Contributors: Jennifer A. González, Inderpal Grewal, Caren Kaplan, Zoe Leonard, Aida Mancillas, Francette Pacteau, Ann Pellegrini, Griselda Pollock, Irit Rogoff, Shawn Smith, Ruth Wallen, and Margie Waller.
With a refreshing open-endedness, the essays in this important and original collection explore wide-ranging topics-from the Hottentot Venus to the corporate advertising campaigns of the Body Shop-through incisively interdisciplinary modes of analysis. Collectively producing new ways of understanding the identity politics at work in the making and reception of visual culture, the essays begin to correct the blindness to the intersecting dynamics of race and gender in the history of art. With Other Eyes will certainly become a classic in the field.
Amelia Jones, author of Body Art/Performing the Subject
Feminist and multiculturalist efforts to uncover the assumptions underpinning the production of art have transformed our understanding of visual culture. The field of art history, however, continues to downplay the race and gender politics informing its own interpretative practices. With Other Eyes brings together leading cultural theorists to demonstrate how feminist, postcolonial, and antiracist concerns can successfully and imaginatively be incorporated into the study of art.
Rejecting strict definitions of “high art,” the contributors add photography, installation art, and film to the list of more conventional art forms to examine, for example, the construction of black femininity as influenced by Josephine Baker, Grace Jones, and the women depicted in Picasso’s Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon; the nationalist and class premises in nineteenth-century British Museum guidebooks; and the gendered visions of colonial discourse in advertisements for Ralph Lauren and the Body Shop.
Contributors: Cheryl Dunye, Jennifer Gonzalez, U of California, Santa Cruz; Inderpal Grewal, San Francisco State U; Caren Kaplan, U of California, Berkeley; Aida Mancillas; Francette Pacteau, San Francisco Art Institute; Ann Pellegrini, Harvard U; Griselda Pollock, U of Leeds; Irit Rogoff, London U; Shawn Michelle Smith, Washington State U; Ruth Wallen, U of California, San Diego; Marguerite R. Waller, U of California, Riverside.
With a refreshing open-endedness, the essays in this important and original collection explore wide-ranging topics-from the Hottentot Venus to the corporate advertising campaigns of the Body Shop-through incisively interdisciplinary modes of analysis. Collectively producing new ways of understanding the identity politics at work in the making and reception of visual culture, the essays begin to correct the blindness to the intersecting dynamics of race and gender in the history of art. With Other Eyes will certainly become a classic in the field.
Amelia Jones, author of Body Art/Performing the Subject
Poses new ways of viewing and reading artworks and art historical scholarship that foreground questions of power, difference, and sexuality...A reconceptualization of art history’s means and methods...indispensable as synthetic, comprehensive critiques of the epistemological and political bases of the discipline.
Signs
Significant. Uniquely re-politicizes feminist art and theory.
NWSA Journal
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