Prof Nicholas Mirzoeff, New York University, discusses his new book: White Sight: Visual Politics and Practices of Whiteness.

White supremacy is not only perpetuated by laws and police but also by visual culture and distinctive ways of seeing. Nicholas Mirzoeff argues that this form of “white sight” has a history. By understanding that white sight was not always common practice, we can devise better ways to dismantle it. Spanning centuries across this wide-ranging text, Mirzoeff connects Renaissance innovations—from the invention of perspective and the erection of Apollo statues as monuments to (white) beauty and power to the rise of racial capitalism dependent on slave labor—with ever-expanding surveillance technologies to show that white sight creates an oppressively racializing world, in which subjects who do not appear as white are under constant threat of violence.

Analyzing recent events like the Black Lives Matter protests following the murder of George Floyd and the Central Park bird watching incident, Mirzoeff shows that we are experiencing a general crisis of white supremacy that presents both opportunities for and threats to social justice. If this moment is not taken to dismantle white sight, then white supremacy might surge back stronger than ever. To that end, he highlights activist interventions to strike the power of the white heteropatriarchal gaze. White Sight is a call to action for anyone who refuses to continue to live under white-dominated systems.

Nicholas Mirzoeff is a visual activist, working at the intersection of politics, race and global/visual culture. Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, in 2020-21 he was ACLS/Mellon Scholar and Society fellow in residence at the Magnum Foundation. His new book White Sight: Visual Politics and Practices of Whiteness is just out from MIT Press. Among his earlier publications, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (2011) won the Anne Friedberg Award for Innovative Scholarship from the Society of Cinema and Media Studies in 2013. How To See The World was published by Pelican in the UK (2015) and by Basic Books in the US (2016). It has been translated into eleven languages. A frequent blogger and writer, his work has appeared in Hyperallergic, the Nation, the New York Times, Frieze, the Guardian, Time and The New Republic.

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