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  • Guest Editor’s Introduction:Visual Culture and Race
  • Shawn Michelle Smith (bio)

There is power in looking.

—bell hooks (“Oppositional” 115)

In her groundbreaking essay “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators” (1992), bell hooks discusses the stakes of looking in a racially segregated United States. She proposes that restrictions and prohibitions on the black gaze that were established during slavery and reinforced in the post-Reconstruction era in the spectacle of lynching incited black viewers to adopt a critical mode of looking, an oppositional gaze of resistance: “[A]ll attempts to repress our/black peoples’ right to gaze . . . produced in us an overwhelming longing to look, a rebellious desire, an oppositional gaze” (116). hooks emphasizes the importance of looking in US history and the urgency of refusing racism by looking back. Notably, she does not focus on the spectacle of racism or on countless racist representations but on the gaze itself and the power of resistant acts of looking. The essential questions hooks addresses activate two scholarly discourses that intersect in productive ways: visual culture studies and critical studies of race. Her questions encourage one to consider, as this special issue does, how looking has been racialized in the United States.

As an interdisciplinary conversation, visual culture studies is not beholden to the histories of representation claimed by any one field, such as art history, literature, film studies, or popular culture studies. Instead, visual culture studies aims to “show seeing” (Mitchell),1 to focus not simply on vision but on “visuality” or “sight as a social fact” (Foster ix). In other words, instead of rehearsing a disciplinary canon of artworks, objects, events, or texts, it encourages scholars to investigate how people learn to see and come to understand themselves as viewers. Critical studies of race share this interdisciplinary impetus and focus on the social forces that shape many different practices. In the most general sense, the critical study of race examines the social construction of race or race “as a social fact.” Bringing these two conversations to bear on one another suggests that if sight is a social practice, it is also racialized in the United States, shaped and directed by the racial contours and contest of the social sphere. [End Page 1]

The intersection of visual culture studies and critical studies of race opens up important ways to understand the cultural specificity of looking and of race as a visual cultural dynamic. Working at this crucial juncture, this special issue considers looking and seeing as racialized practices in the United States. It interrogates how subjects adopt racial positions as they learn to look and how looking itself constitutes a performance of race across almost two centuries of US history, from the early nineteenth to the early twenty-first, and in contexts ranging from slavery, colonialism, allotment, the Great Migration, the Chicano art movement, the contemporary art world, and contemporary popular culture. Most pointedly, this issue endeavors to move the discussion of race and the visual beyond an assessment of representations to consider questions about looking and the ways in which looking produces racialized viewers, not simply racialized objects of view. The essays collected here examine how subjects are produced through practices of looking, how looking is learned, and how seeing is culturally coded in terms of race. A number of the essays also “show seeing” differently, assessing how individual subjects might see the same thing from different perspectives or how they might not see the same thing at all. Together, the contributors share in a visual culture analysis that understands race as a matter of looking.

As looking is racialized, it is also gendered, as a long line of feminist theorists, drawing on Laura Mulvey’s groundbreaking work on the “male gaze,” have taught us. Race and gender intersect and inform one another in the performance and power of “the gaze.” By attending to both race and gender, one discovers that not all male gazes are equal, and whiteness can sometimes grant white women access to a gaze generally reserved for men. To take the extreme case of spectacle lynching in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century US culture, one finds severe prohibitions against the black male gaze and...

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