With other eyes: looking at race and gender in visual culture

Feminist and multiculturalist efforts to uncover the assumptions underpinning the production of art have transformed our understanding of visual culture. The field of art history, however, continues to downplay the race and gender politics informing its own interpretative practices. With Other Eyes brings together leading cultural theorists to demonstrate how feminist, postcolonial, and antiracist concerns can successfully and imaginatively be incorporated into the study of art. Rejecting strict definitions of “high art,” the contributors add photography, installation art, and film to the list of more conventional art forms to examine, for example, the construction of black femininity as influenced by Josephine Baker, Grace Jones, and the women depicted in Picasso’s Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon;the nationalist and class premises in nineteenth-century British Museum guidebooks; and the gendered visions of colonial discourse in advertisements for Ralph Lauren and the Body Shop.

Section: VIII-268 p. : illustrations ; 26 cm