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ABSTRACT
This article argues that understanding vision and visuality as associated but distinct terms has significant implications for the ways in which we engage with racial constructions of identity. Expanding the ways in which we visualize race beyond simply the visual offers us a more comprehensive approach to understanding the construction of and response to race in the twenty-first-century United States. This article moves from theoretical implications of non-visual visualizations like tactile visuality and audial visuality through photographs taken by blind photographers to ask how race and racial identity are implicated in conversations about both vision and visuality.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Robert E. Terrill, John Louis Lucaites, James N. Gilmore, Brian Lain, Kirt H. Wilson, and the anonymous reviewer for their generous readings and comments on various drafts of this paper. This project began as a portion of the author's Master's Thesis, and drafts have been presented at the National Communication Association's 101st Annual Convention in Las Vegas in November, 2015 and at the Southern States Communication Association's 82nd Annual Convention, in San Antonio, TX in April, 2012.
Notes
1 Shawn Michelle Smith, At the Edge of Sight: Photography and the Unseen (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 8.
2 Nicholas Mirzoeff, “On Visuality,” Journal of Visual Culture 5, no. 1 (2006): 56.
3 Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 2.
4 Gunther R. Kress and Theo van Leeuwen, Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2006), 163.
5 Jordynn Jack, “A Pedagogy of Sight: Microscopic Vision in Robert Hooke's Micrographia,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 95, no. 2 (2009): 198.
6 Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials, 2nd ed. (London: Sage, 2007), 143.
7 Victoria Gallagher and Kenneth S. Zagacki, “Visibility and Rhetoric: The Power of Visual Images in Norman Rockwell's Depictions of Civil Rights,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 91, no. 2 (2005): 183.
8 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto, 1986), 109.
9 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 109. For an account of the hail and constitutive rhetoric drawn from Louis Althusser, see Maurice Charland, “Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the Peuple Québécois,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 73, no. 2 (1987): 133–50.
10 I am working here with the distinction provided by W. J. T. Mitchell for the difference between a picture and an image. W. J. T. Mitchell makes the distinction that an image is different than a picture in that “a picture refers to the entire situation in which an image has made its appearance.” He elaborates further that “you can hang a picture, but you cannot hang an image.” W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), xiv, 85.
11 Osagie K. Obasogie, Blinded by Sight: Seeing Race Through the Eyes of the Blind (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014), 42.
12 Obasogie, Blinded by Sight, 62.
13 Reva B. Siegel, “Discrimination in the Eyes of the Law: How ‘Color Blindness’ Discourse Disrupts and Rationalizes Social Stratification,” California Law Review 88, no. 1 (January 2000): 87.
14 Kelly E. Happe, “The Body of Race: Toward a Rhetorical Understanding of Racial Ideology,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 99, no. 2 (2013): 132.
15 Cara A. Finnegan and Jiyeon Kang, “‘Sighting’ the Public: Iconoclasm and Public Sphere Theory,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90, no. 4 (2004): 396.
16 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 5, emphasis in original.
17 Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris created an interesting test of change blindness and perception in an online video that features two teams of players: one team wearing white shirts and one team wearing black shirts. Viewers are asked to count how many times the players wearing white shirts pass a basketball back and forth, and both teams move around as they pass the basketballs. As the viewer counts, someone dressed in a gorilla suit walks through the frame of the video shot. At the end of the clip, the video asks viewers how many times the basketball was passed. After the video gives the correct answer, the video then asks, “But did you see the gorilla?!” Many people viewing the video for the first time do not see the gorilla suit. Daniel Simons explains about his studies in change blindness that
By using different methods (e.g., saccades, flashed blank screens, mudsplashes, movie cuts, etc.) to obscure the motion transient caused by the change, these studies show that visual details, even those for naturalistic displays, are not preserved following a disruption to the local transient. …The inability to detect changes to such images suggests that detailed visual representations do not provide the basis for integration across views, even for complex, naturalistic stimuli.
18 James Elkins, The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 216, emphasis in original.
19 Elkins, The Object Stares Back, 217.
20 Michael A. Fletcher, “Whites Think Discrimination Against Whites is a Bigger Problem Than Bias Against Blacks,” Washington Post, October 8, 2014, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/10/08/white-people-think-racial-discrimination-in-america-is-basically-over/
21 Michael I. Norton and Samuel R. Sommers, “Whites See Racism as a Zero-Sum Game That They Are Now Losing,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 6, no. 3 (2011): 216.
22 Charles A. Hill, “The Psychology of Rhetorical Images,” in Defining Visual Rhetorics, ed. Charles A. Hill and Marguerite Helmers (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004), 29; Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, “The Choice of Data and Their Adaptation for Argumentative Purposes,” in The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation, trans. John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969).
23 Hill, “The Psychology of Rhetorical Images,” 29.
24 Victoria J. Gallagher and Kenneth S. Zagacki, “Visibility and Rhetoric: Epiphanies and Transformations in the Life Photographs of the Selma Marches of 1965,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 37, no. 2 (2007): 115.
25 Smith, At the Edge of Sight, 6.
26 Douglas McCulloh, “Pete Eckert,” Sight Unseen: International Photography by Blind Artists (Riverside, CA: University of California, Riverside & ARTSblock, 2009), 28, http://138.23.124.165/exhibitions/sightunseen/_pdf/SIGHTUNSEEN_Catalog.pdf
27 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, rev. ed. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 37.
28 Gallagher and Zagacki, “Visibility and Rhetoric: Epiphanies and Transformations,” 116–17.
29 Debra Hawhee, “Rhetoric's Sensorium,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (2015): 2–17.
30 Edward Blum and Paul Harvey note that the accounts by Joseph Smith about the vision he claimed to have seen at the foundation of the Mormon faith changed in the 1840's from describing a “blinding light” into “pristine white.” Edward J. Blum and Paul Harvey, The Color of Christ: The Son of God & the Saga of Race in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 77.
31 Thomas K. Nakayama and Robert L. Krizek, “Whiteness: A Strategic Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 81, no. 3 (1995): 291. Nakayama and Krizek write in and characterize the late twentieth century United States, but I argue that many of the same problematics have carried over into the twenty-first-century United States.
32 “The World of Blind Photographers - Photo Gallery - LIFE,” TIME Inc.—LIFE, accessed October 28, 2011, http://content.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1897093_1883578,00.html
33 Pete Eckert, “Artists Wanted, In Focus: Pete Eckert,” Vimeo, accessed November 08, 2014, http://vimeo.com/14179548. In an email to the author, Eckert presents two challenges to see with sound: 1) “imagine a wall in another room of your home. then Close your eyes and walk to it. Put your nose two inches from the wall and stop. before opening your eyes reach out and touch it. If successful, you have just navigated by sound and memory. On top of it you have safely heard an obstruction and verified it by touch.” 2) “while walking a busy street locate a telephone pole. Walk down the sidewalk with your eyes closed as a car passes. You can easily hear the telephone pole. If successful, you have just used parallel axis in sound.” Eckert notes the first test utilizes reflected sound, while the second uses background sound wrapping around a physical obstacle.
34 Geoff Mann, “Why Does Country Music Sound White? Race and the Voice of Nostalgia,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 31, no. 1 (2008): 76.
35 Krista Ratcliffe, Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005), 17.
36 Lorna Roth, “Home on the Range: Kids, Visual Culture, and Cognitive Equity,” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 9, no. 2 (2009): 141–48.
37 The actual braille text reads “ . . . entre lo invisible / . . . llegando a la homeostasis / emocional / y lo tangible / sept #2007.”
38 Douglas McCulloh, “Gerardo Nigenda,” in Sight Unseen: International Photography by Blind Artists (Riverside, CA: University of California, Riverside & ARTSblock, 2009), 58.
39 W. J. T. Mitchell, “There Are No Visual Media,” Journal of Visual Culture 4, no. 2 (2005): 257–66.
40 Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 557.
41 Sharon Patricia Holland, The Erotic Life of Racism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 104.
42 Holland, The Erotic Life of Racism, 104.
43 Danielle S. Allen, Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 140.
44 Allen, Talking to Strangers, 171.
45 “About: Seeing With Photography Collective,” Seeing With Photography Collective, accessed November 15, 2014. http://www.seeingwithphotography.com/about/
46 John Briley, Children of the Damned, directed by Anton M. Leader (United States: Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer, 1964).
47 Adam Waytz, Kelly Marie Hoffman, and Sophie Trawalter, “A Superhumanization Bias in Whites’ Perceptions of Blacks,” Social Psychological and Personality Science 6, no. 3 (2015): 352.
48 Shawn Michelle Smith, Photography on the Color Line: W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 8.
49 United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department (Washington, D.C., 2015), 4, http://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/opa/press-releases/attachments/2015/03/04/ferguson_police_department_report.pdf
50 While I am largely thinking here of the contemporary cultural discussion of the relationship of black male bodies to white male police officers and the plethora of related shootings, there are a variety of deeply dangerous relationships constructed for codified bodies.
51 For more information on the Black Lives Matter Movement, founded by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, see http://blacklivesmatter.com/herstory/
52 Mahzarin R. Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald, Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People (New York: Delacorte, 2013), 47.
53 Banaji and Greenwald, Blindspot, 47.
54 Mirzoeff, The Right to Look.
55 Gallagher and Zagacki, “Visibility and Rhetoric: Epiphanies and Transformations,” 131.