Search results for "visual exchanges"

The Trope of Sight in North American Whiteness Studies

2017

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, w…