White: Essays on Race and Culture
- ISBN-10
- 1136145249
- ISBN-13
- 9781136145247
- Series
- White
- Category
- Art
- Pages
- 284
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2013-10-18
- Publisher
- Routledge
- Author
- Richard Dyer
Description
White people are not literally or symbolically white, yet they are called white. What does this mean? In Western media, whites take up the position of ordinariness, not a particular race, just the human race. How is this achieved? White takes these questions as starting points for an examination of the representation of whiteness by whites in Western visual culture. Dyer places this representation within the contexts of Christianity, 'race' and colonialism. In a series of absorbing case studies, he shows the construction of whiteness in the technology of photography and film as part of a wider 'culture of light', discusses heroic white masculinity in muscle-man action cinema, from Tarzan and Hercules to Conan and Rambo; analyses the stifling role of white women in end-of-empire fictions like The Jewel in the Crown and traces the associations of whiteness with death in Falling Down, horror movies and cult dystopian films such as Blade Runner and the Aliens trilogy.
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