Seeing Through Race

Within the rubric of academic cultural studies, this book attempts to change the way readers think about race. It consists of three W.E.B. DuBois lectures offered at Harvard University, and four related essays on visual culture. The book is designed for readers who find metaphor and meditative modes of literature, particularly the personal essay, are helpful guides to thought, but are most comfortable with the academic impersonal voice. The author, W. J. T. Mitchell (Gaylord Donnely Distinguished Service Professor, U. of Chicago) is a scholar equally comfortable alluding to Slavoj Zizek and Willam Blake, Edward Said and Thomas Hobbes, often on the same page. His essays consider the deep resonances of Israeli Garbage Pail Kids cards, offer diagrams of Lacanian theory, and compare the landscape aesthetics of Christo's Gates in Central Park with the Gilo Wall dividing Palestinians from Israeli sections of Jerusalem. (Distance from the subject is required.) However, this is also one of the few recent books to attempt two important tasks. One is to "speak postmodernism" intelligibly, in personally relevant ways as part of a conversation among human beings. Mitchell is very much helped here by beginning with the spoken word. The other is to identify and talk about ways that race--as white, black, and Semitic (Jewish, Arab)--operates in US society and world politics right now. Mitchell, an Irish-American, usefully reframes the conversation about race away from dualistic stereotypes of black and white. On the one hand, the book's power depends on an erudite, highly educated scholar speaking honestly with an equally erudite, highly educated audience about a subject of global importance, with the goal of changing how we all think. On the other hand, this goal can only be accomplished by such deep conversation among precisely the publics excluded by the style exemplified here. In many ways, the dilemma has not changed since DuBois. Mitchell takes the approach at hand, and hopes, as great poets before him have done, that the rest does not matter as long as your work reaches the right five hundred readers. To do more would require another book, one about race and class as thoughtful as this book is about race and Semitism. Annotation c2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com) More

W.J.T. Mitchell is the Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago.