White: Twentieth Anniversary Edition

By Richard Dyer

Book Overview

Now twenty years since its initial release, Richard Dyer's classic text White remains a groundbreaking and insightful study of the representation of whiteness in Western visual culture.

White explores how, while racial representation is central to the organisation of the contemporary world, white people have remained a largely unexamined category in sharp contrast to the many studies of images of black and Asian peoples. Looking beyond the apparent unremarkability of whiteness, Dyer demonstrates the importance of analysing images of white people.

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 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.

This twentieth anniversary edition includes a new introductory chapter by Maxime Cervulle entitled 'Looking into the light: Whiteness, racism and regimes of representation'. This new introduction illuminates how Dyer has made a major contribution to the study of contemporary regimes of representation by unveiling the cultural mechanisms that have formed and reinforced white hegemony, mechanisms under which white people have come to represent what is ordinary, neutral, even universal.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1138683043
• ISBN13: 9781138683044
• Release Date: February 2017
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 1.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

excellent discussion of race--and simple color--in film

An often fascinating read in extremely intellgible English, Dyer shows how the idea of whiteness underpins more of Western visual culture than one might have thought. Ranging from fascinating discussions of how the actual chemical composition of film stock was engineered to maximize the representation of caucasian skin on celluloid to race in cheesy Italian sword-and-sandals films of the 1950s, this is a real triumph for academic writing--a work that's actually compelling for a non-specialist, but an important intervention in the field at the same time. The last chapter or two were a little less energetic than the predecessors, I thought, but overall, one of the best I've read of this kind.

A thorough and gripping work.

Dyer's study of whiteness is a comprehensive piece. It covers all the grounds you'd expect and a few more. His style of deceptive academia (the way he explains theory and collates data from various complex sources, making them understandable and ready to grasp is a wonderul feat of writing) that strays from the usual school of academic over-writing is a true breath of fresh air. His personal insight, and anecdotal examples, are witty and vividly illustrative of his points. After his other successes in the past ('Stars' and his brilliant BFI book on 'Se7en'), Dyer firmly sets himself out as one of the finest film academics around. 'White' is exceptional.

An important addition to modern film criticism.

Dyer is one of the most important film critics in the west. His exploration of what race and politics have to do with entertainment is absolutely crucial to understanding movies better. They are not only entertainment but a key to the way modern politics work in everyone's imagination. The only other popular culture critic as astute on this subject is the American writer Armond White and Dyer's latest work makes a welcome pair with White's The Resistance. To challenge film viewers to analyze their own relationship to the ideas and images on screen is among the most significant work a contemporary critic can undertake. Dyer's chapters on Jewel in the Crown and his analysis of western art and the influence of its ideas on popular culture will be important for as longa s there are movies.