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Introduction to Visual Cultures - Coggle Diagram

- - - - Claudia Rankine, excerpt from Citizen (2014)
        -writes about the overlooked and the overseen with regards to race
        -worries about the link between invisibility and hypervisibility
      - Ralph Ellison, excerpt from Invisible Man (1952)
        -novel about a black man struggling to stay sane in a world that does not see him
        -he lives in a state of hibernation, he steals light (thieves his ability to see)
        -wants to make a cave of light
        -the lighting of his basement is a mode of resistance against the world's constant placement of darkness
      - Le Corbussier, “A Coat of Whitewash: The Law of Ripolin,” in Color, 82-84.
        -Whitewash is extremely moral - a sign of a great people - painting world white is a virtuous act of greatness
        -Law of Ripolin: the law that comes out of sanitary paint, he writes about ways in which whiteness can manufacture health and intelligence. Promoted antibacterial properties, you can see all the first, brand name, impermeable enamel at the end.
        -Law of whitening: modernist creed, purity, and nudity (bareness of things)
        “We would perform a moral act: to love purity! We would improve our condition: to have the power of judgement! An act which leads to the joy of life: the pursuit of perfection.” (82).
        “Whitewash exists wherever peoples have preserved intact the balanced structure of a harmonious culture” (83).
      - Film: Blonde Venus (dir. Joseph von Sternberg, 1932)
        -Helen Faraday’s rise and fall is shown, in various roles, housewife, cabaret singer, and prostitute, and shows her start singing again. She is the mistress of wealthy man who puts her on house arrest
        -Shot of Jean Harlow lit in a way that emphasizes her whiteness, and stability/stasis over movement and surface beauty over interiority. Her hair shimmers like plastic, and her face also shines like her hair. Her face and hair are sculpted by light
        
        1) Blonde Venus insists we see white and whiteness. Race is a visible display.
        2) Blonde Venus links whiteness to shine, blow, and celebrity
      - Richard Dyer, “White,” Screen 29:4 (Autumn 1988): 44–64.
        “This property of whiteness, to be everything and nothing, is the source of its representational power” (458).
        
        "The colorless multi-colourness of whiteness secures white power by making it hard, especially for white people and their media, to ‘see’ whiteness. This, of course, also makes it hard to analyze. It is the way that black people are marked as black (are not just ‘people’) in representation that has made it relatively easy to analyze their representation, whereas white people - not there as a category and everywhere everything as a fact - are difficult, if not impossible, to analyze qua white” (459).
      - Hilaria Loyo, “Blinding Blondes: Whiteness, Femininity, and Stardom” in Questions of Colour in Cinema, ed. Wendy Everett (Oxford and New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 179-196.
        -Whiteness is established in a way against blackness and represents ideal purity. Mimics femininity and masculinity and also mimics the performance of race by donning both whitness and blackness.
        -Faraday’s whiteness is entirely made up, her hair is not her hair it is simply a white blonde wig sprinkled with an illuminating dust.
        -Blondness is a source of female illumination and produces the image of white femininity
        "Colour as a visible physical characteristic has a range of symbolic connotations but it has also been used to signal racial difference.These senses of colour (hue, skin, symbol) interrelate in particularly unstable ways in the case of 'white'" (179).
      - Paul LaFarge, “Colors/Black,” Cabinet Magazine 36 (2009-2010)
        "Even when we are not seeing, it is by sight that we discriminate darkness from light, though not in the same way as we distinguish one colour from another."
        "Black is the color of what might have been, not of what is: it is the color of pleasures past. Regret is black, and so is its cousin melancholy, which Robert Burton describes as “cold and dry, thick, black and sour.”
      - Franz Fanon, “The Fact of Blackness,” in Theories of Race and Racism: A Reader, eds. Les Back and John Solomos
        "The evidence was there, unalterable. My blackness was there, dark and unarguable" (261).
        -Experience of alienation in the context of colonial violence.
        -Psychiatrist, philosopher, humanist, revolutionary, supporter of de-colonialist efforts in Algerian war of independence against France.