White

Richard Dyer

"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 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...

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