The American Culture Association’s presentation of its 2006 Cawelti Book Award to Martin Berger’s Sight Unseen: Whiteness and American Visual Culture is an early indication of its deserved recognition and acclaim. This terse volume is doubly ambitious: as a groundbreaking investigation of a category of analysis mostly uncharted by the field of US art history, and as the delineation and defense of a provocative interpretive methodology that reads “artworks against the grain of their visual evidence” (24). First and foremost, Berger’s text represents the discipline’s overdue contribution to the relatively new but rapidly expanding field of whiteness studies. At the same time, the author deliberately selects visual texts in which questions of race are latent and in which “the most elemental meanings . . . have nothing to do with conscious intent” (21). Accordingly, Berger is more interested in how discourses of whiteness structured audiences’ responses to varied cultural phenomena than in how artworks might shape belief since, as he maintains in his introduction, “images do not persuade us to internalize racial values embedded within them, so much as they confirm meanings” (1).

The author organizes each chapter around a single object of scrutiny, but makes frequent and productive forays into the larger world of visual culture. In chapter 1, Berger takes up William Sidney Mount’s 1865 genre painting Fair Exchange (No Robbery),in which a man passing through a cornfield upgrades his shabby hat with a scarecrow’s newer chapeau. Arguing that the artist’s contemporaries did not consider the work’s title ironic, as present-day commentators generally do, Berger considers reviewers’ reactions to the canvas as emblematic of a “racialized discourse of property” (26) that sanctioned white entitlement and nonwhite dispossession. Chapter 2 centers on Carleton Watkins’ 1866 albumen print The Yosemite Valley from the Best General View. Like period cartography, Watkins’ photographs effectively laid claim to the Western landscape by reconceptualizing and renaming geologic phenomena in the language of the colonizers. Here the author explicitly racializes Albert Boime’s concept of the “magisterial gaze” to suggest that these visions of a land divinely granted to whites not only naturalized (white) development but also reconfigured the natural world as a “model to guide the future growth of the nation” (64).

The unusual orientalist architectural detailing of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (1872–76) is the nucleus of chapter 3. Berger accounts for this use of ornamental elements more commonly associated with Jewish synagogues and other nonwhite cultures in numerous ways. Even though most of the US population deemed Jews “provisional whites” (96) at best, the author maintains that the omnivorous academic eclecticism of the PAFA allowed whites to appropriate a “mythic Jewish lineage” (93) as both a legitimating cultural foundation and a baseline against which to measure cultural progress. At the same time, the emulation of Jewish architectural forms provided white Christians with “cover” to exercise a certain exotic ostentation that they stereotypically associated with Jews. In the fourth and final chapter, Thomas Edison and Edwin Porter’s famous silent picture The Great Train Robbery (1903) shares the limelight with numerous early films. For Berger, early cinema teemed with performances that period audiences unconsciously understood as exemplars of “white” and “extrawhite” behavior. Disciplined and orderly comportment by Irish firemen in the 1896 Biograph film New York Fire Department effectively endowed them with whiteness, while the bandits in Porter’s film relinquished their whiteness due to a range of deviant actions.

As with many recent works on the subject, the defining characteristics of whiteness fluctuate over the course of Sight Unseen (in the fall 2001 issue of International and Working-Class History [no. 60: 3–32], labor historian Eric Arnesen presents far more substantial arguments in this vein than I can attend to in this brief review). The central challenge for Berger is to develop a working unified theory of whiteness but “without claiming that all whites see the world through an identical lens” (1). To this end, he dutifully cites convincing scholarly claims that definitions of whiteness are mercurial and historically specific, so that, for example, so-called “white ethnics” gain and lose white racial entitlement at particular moments and under specific conditions. In practice, however, the author often treats whiteness as a monolithic phenomenon and sacrifices analytic precision for breadth of coverage. Berger comes closest to a more nuanced model attuned to the subtle shades of whiteness in his chapter on cinema, in which he speculates about how working-class immigrant and middle-class audiences might have variously responded to the enactments of racial identities encoded into The Great Train Robbery.

This central paradox, that whiteness operates as a coherent discourse even as “the power of whiteness lies in its fluidity” (65), precipitates many others. Although Berger claims his text “avoids analyzing images that include nonwhites” (2), he elsewhere insists that “we cannot make sense of whiteness without considering what blackness meant to European-Americans” (133). In addition, whites’ attitudes toward nonwhites oscillate unpredictably between abjection and symbolic appropriation. In the first two chapters, claims of white entitlement emerge to assuage deep anxiety over the potential erasure of discernible racial boundaries; in chapters 3 and 4, the transgression of these boundaries—what Berger characterizes as a kind of racial slumming—serves to consolidate and stabilize white identity. I do not quarrel with the particularities of these contentions; rather, I believe that Berger could strengthen his volume by more carefully mapping the ever-shifting topographies of whiteness across time, amid other subject positions, and in varying relation to different groups of nonwhites. The episodic character of his book, moreover, makes it difficult to ascertain a central historical trajectory to his arguments; there is only an implied narrative, which would not be difficult to support, that over the course of the later nineteenth century behavior supplanted physical appearance as the determining index of racial make-up once unobservable racial definitions like the “one-drop rule” became the norm.

Berger’s book also works best when it explores the complex interactions between whiteness and other discourses of entitlement, as when in chapter 2 he touches on masculinity. But in order to establish the centrality of his topic of study, the author too often discusses whiteness to the deliberate exclusion of other ranked social categories with which whiteness so often intersects, such as class, gender, religion, and nationality. By diminishing other (and often more obviously relevant) considerations, Sight Unseen begs the question why whiteness is always the sole organizing principle of symbolic power; in the end, the author does not substantiate the proposition that “race always trumped gender and class” (58), as he puts it in his essay on Watkins. More to the point, must one analytic category “trump” all others? Is it not possible to produce more polysemous interpretations of visual culture?

To demonstrate how this selective approach weakens Berger’s thesis, I will confine my few examples to questions of social class; but other readers can emplot comparable difficulties along other analytic axes. The author’s analysis of a “racialized discourse of property” (26) in Mount’s paintings, for instance, surely demands serious consideration of class and the ideologies of capital, as does the fact that far western industrial entrepreneurs regularly employed Watkins, as Berger himself notes. This elision of class is most apparent in the chapter on “Museum Architecture and the Imperialism of Whiteness.” When the author argues that “economic barriers precluded a significant percentage of people of color from even attending fine arts museums” (100), he upends much of the literature in museology with a wholesale substitution of race for class. Berger’s submersion of class, finally, is especially significant and vexing since whiteness studies originated within the field of labor history as an explanation for the failure of working-class movements in the United States.

In terms of methodology, Sight Unseen falls squarely within the purview of reader-response theory thanks to the author’s expressed emphasis on how “racial values condition how texts are read” (128). Accordingly, Berger shines when he closely scrutinizes period commentary, as when he effectively uncovers viewers’ asymmetrical readings of scenes of black and white indolence in Mount’s paintings, and of vignettes of black and white Spanish-American War soldiers in Edison film shorts. The diversity of media under the author’s consideration, however, by necessity precipitates varying degrees of success: chapters 1 and 3 boast much stronger textual evidence from contemporaries than chapter 2 and especially chapter 4, which like all studies of early cinema suffers from a frustrating archival silence from period audiences.

Berger’s interpretive focus on a visual culture of invisibility is more novel and unconventional: “As counterintuitive as it might sound, these invisible discourses are more revealing of a culture than its artworks. . . . Once we have acknowledged that powerful unseen discourses circulating in society play a significant role in determining how an artwork gets seen, it is imperative to visualize the discourses these artworks fail to depict” (22–23). To his credit, he persuasively teases out many of these tacit worldviews by nimbly combing art reviews for loose threads to unravel and weave into his larger treatise on whiteness. Indeed, one unspoken goal of the book might be to provide readers with tools for conducting visual analyses into the unseen.

But by arguing at once for the centrality and latency of whiteness, Berger presents himself with an enormously difficult task. In this project he shares the hermeneutic precept, common in the field of American art, that the most constitutive and most profound meanings of an image lie deepest below the surface, and that the greatest interpretive rewards require the most intensive and elaborate scrutiny (a similar discussion emerges in the responses to Alexander Nemerov’s essay in the March 2006 issue of The Art Bulletin [88.1: 27–61). To insist on the evident invisibility of whiteness, however, is to run the risk of analytic arbitrariness. If whiteness is at once omnipresent and unobservable, why then do some texts demand more investigation than others? How does one determine what constitutes evidence for whiteness and not for some other latent discourse? More fundamentally, how does one reckon with the numerous highly visible images from the period that explicitly deal with various concepts of whiteness and that also deserve further scholarly attention? If anything, Berger’s framework might serve more ably when dealing with contemporary visual culture, in which white racism and entitlement alike operate in more coded and less discernible ways.

None of the issues I have raised should diminish the importance and, indeed, necessity of Sight Unseen. Questions of this sort emerge with any pioneering study, and it must fall to the next wave of scholarship, in art history and elsewhere, to surmount the challenges outlined above. I do, however, have deeper concerns about one of the author’s introductory arguments. In order to direct students of race and racism to whiteness as a legitimate interpretive category—a worthy goal I fully endorse—Berger unnecessarily and to my mind unfairly tars white scholars who make “a subject of racial others” (2). “My concern,” he elaborates, “is that white academics who focus on representations of nonwhite peoples—no less than members of the general public who ‘love’ black athletes, comedians, and musicians—may use the mantle of ‘racial justice’ as a respectable cover for indulging in our long-standing fascination with the other” (3). This accusation is no more helpful or credible than recriminations that the recent growth of whiteness studies provides “cover” for those invested in consolidating an eroding lily-white canon. More importantly, when many important US artists of color still lack a substantial academic literature, and when the newest survey of American art somehow includes no black artists until Fred Wilson, I question the wisdom of warning white scholars that “academic attraction . . . to images depicting blacks might constitute a twenty-first incarnation of the minstrel show” (3) in order to urge them to shift “their primary evidence of race from black to white representations” (4). Most of all, I would suggest that the investigation of race, whether black or white, does not have to be an either-or affair.