White

Now 20 years since its initial release, Richard Dyer’s classic text White remains a groundbreaking and insightful study of the representation of whiteness in Western visual culture.

White explores how, while racial representation is central to the organization of the contemporary world, white people have remained a largely unexamined category in sharp contrast to the many studies of images of black and Asian peoples. Looking beyond the apparent unremarkability of whiteness, Dyer demonstrates the importance of analyzing images of white people.

Dyer places this representation within the contexts of Christianity, ‘race’ and colonialism. In a series of absorbing case studies, he shows the construction of whiteness in the technology of photography and film as part of a wider ‘culture of light’, discusses heroic white masculinity in muscle-man action cinema, from Tarzan and Hercules to Conan and Rambo; analyses the stifling role of white women in end-of-empire fictions like Jewel in the Crown and traces the associations of whiteness with death in Falling Down, horror movies and cult dystopian films such as Blade Runner and the Aliens trilogy.

This twentieth anniversary edition includes a new introductory chapter by Maxime Cervulle entitled ‘Looking into the light: whiteness, racism and regimes of representation’. This new introduction illuminates how Dyer has made a major contribution to the study of contemporary regimes of representation by unveiling the cultural mechanisms that have formed and reinforced white hegemony, mechanisms under which white people have come to represent what is ordinary, neutral, even universal.

Richard Dyer is Professor of Film Studies at King’s College London. He has written on stars, entertainment and representation, and lesbian and gay culture. He is the author of In the Space of a Song (2011), Pastiche (2007), Now You See It (1990) and Heavenly Bodies (1986).

Maxime Cervulle is Lecturer of Communication and Cultural Studies at the University of Paris 8 and at the Centre d’etudes sur les medias, les technologies et l’internationalisation (CEMTI). He is the author of Dans le blanc des yeux. Diversite, racisme et medias (2013) and the co-author of Homo exoticus. Race, classe et critique queer (2010) and Cultural Studies: theories et methodes (2015).