Seeing Race in Modern America - by Matthew Pratt Guterl (Paperback)

About the Book

In this fiercely urgent book, Matthew Pratt Guterl focuses on how and why we come to see race in very particular ways. What does it mean to see someone as a color? As racially mixed or ethnically ambiguous? What history makes such things possible? Drawing creatively from advertisements, YouTube videos, and everything in between, Guterl redirects our understanding of racial sight away from the dominant categories of color--away from brown and yellow and black and white--and instead insists that we confront the visual practices that make those same categories seem so irrefutably important.

Book Synopsis

In this fiercely urgent book, Matthew Pratt Guterl focuses on how and why we come to see race in very particular ways. What does it mean to see someone as a color? As racially mixed or ethnically ambiguous? What history makes such things possible? Drawing creatively from advertisements, YouTube videos, and everything in between, Guterl redirects our understanding of racial sight away from the dominant categories of color -- away from brown and yellow and black and white -- and instead insists that we confront the visual practices that make those same categories seem so irrefutably important.
Zooming out for the bigger picture, Guterl illuminates the long history of the practice of seeing -- and believing in -- race, and reveals that our troublesome faith in the details discerned by the discriminating glance is widespread and very popular. In so doing, he upends the possibility of a postracial society by revealing how deeply race is embedded in our culture, with implications that are often matters of life and death.

Review Quotes

"Seeing Race is primarily a modern exposé of race in popular culture." -- North Carolina Historical Review

"[A] splendid treatment of racialized imagery in popular culture. . . . Highly recommended. All levels/libraries." -- CHOICE

"An engaging read. . . . A general audience would appreciate this engaging and topical book, while U.S. Historians will appreciate Guterl's take on how race is depicted in popular culture." -- Journal of Southern History

"Guterl's evidence throughout is compelling, his writing and analysis is crisp and clear, and his visual examples are powerful -- if not stunning." -- American Quarterly

"Illustrates how race continues to operate as subtext in the world of ideas, coloring our expectations and, more important, our personal and political decisions." -- Chronicle of Higher Education

"Open[s] up questions that will no doubt shape future inquiry in the field of race and visual culture studies for years to come." -- American Literary History Online Review

"The book's greatest strength: its ability to open up discussion and enliven rather than limit debate." -- Journal of American History

"This rigorous and insightful book provides a careful investigation on an often overlooked topic." -- Publishers Weekly

About the Author

Matthew Pratt Guterl is professor of Africana studies and American studies at Brown University and is author of The Color of Race in America, 1900-1940, American Mediterranean: Southern Slaveholders in the Age of Emancipation, and the co-editor, with James T. Campbell and Robert G. Lee, of Race, Nation, and Empire in American History.