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The Moment of Racial Sight: A History
Author(s): Irene Tucker (Author)
- Publisher: University of Chicago Press
- Publication Date: January 11, 2013
- Language: English
- Print length: 274 pages
- ISBN-10: 0226922936
- ISBN-13: 9780226922935
Book Description
Tucker begins her investigation in the Enlightenment, at the moment when skin first came to be used as the primary mark of racial difference. Through Kant and his writing on the relation of philosophy and medicine, she describes how racialized skin was created as a mechanism to enable us to perceive the likeness of individuals in a moment. From there, Tucker tells the story of instantaneous racial seeing across centuries—from the fictive bodies described but not seen in Wilkie Collins’s realism to the medium of common public opinion in John Stuart Mill, from the invention of the notion of a constructed racial sign in Darwin’s late work to the institutionalizing of racial sight on display in the HBO series
The Wire. Rich with perceptive readings of unexpected texts, this ambitious book is an important intervention in the study of race.Editorial Reviews
Review
“Illuminating, lively, and convincing, The Moment of Racial Sight makes a rigorous and vigorous provocation about the misrecognitions of identity and the vicissitudes of self-evidence. It is beautifully written and searchingly intelligent. To read this book from cover to cover is quite a ride.”
— David Clark, McMaster University
“The Moment of Racial Sight is a work of complex cerebration and theoretical ambition. It seeks nothing short of a fundamental rethinking of the racial construction thesis that has come to assume the character of the very air we breathe in the humanities and interpretive social sciences. An astute, erudite, and often brilliant work.”
— Stephen Best, University of California, Berkeley
“A climactically provocative book that argues convincingly against the prejudicial instantaneity of racial seeing.” ― Modern Philology
About the Author
Irene Tucker is associate professor of English at the University of California, Irvine.
