6533b858fe1ef96bd12b5be7

RESEARCH PRODUCT

The Trope of Sight in North American Whiteness Studies

subject

description

The trope of sight has been the central metaphor in North American whiteness studies sińce its very inception, that is, already before whiteness studies emerged as a separate field of study. The centrality of the trope stems not only ffom a particular applicability of the sight metaphor to render subject-object relations, but also ffom the unique presence of “sight” in the very relations between racial groups in the United States, in particular Alfican Americans, and whites. Originally, minorities were cast as objects of the gaze, while white people as subjects of the gaze, exercising the power to look, survey and pass judgment. Apart ffom exposing practices of looking employed by whites, whiteness studies scholars reverse visual power dynamics, shifting white people to the object position of the gaze. The metaphor of the gaze features as central in Toni Morrison’s seminal work Playing in the Dark published in 1992 and effectively inaugurating contemporary literary whiteness studies. Morrison reaches for the gaze metaphor to illustrate the main objective of her study: “My project is to avert the critical gaze ffom the racial object to the racial subject, ffom the described and imagined to the describers and imaginers, ffom the serving to the served” (90). Averting the gaze in Playing in the Dark, Morrison analyzes the construction of whiteness and blackness in canonical and non-canonical works of American literaturę by white authors.