| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4 | The History Cooperative

Martin A. Berger. Sight Unseen: Whiteness and American Visual Culture. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2005. Pp. xiv, 236. $49.95.
In 1992, five years after her novel Beloved was published, Toni Morrison identified the term "American Africanism" as the range of opinions "Eurocentric learning" has formed about African peoples; she called for study of racism's impact on its perpetrators as well as its victims (Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, [1992]). Martin A. Berger seeks to carry out this suggestion, even invoking Morrison at the beginning of his book, which urges the field of whiteness studies toward his conclusions that apparently race-neutral images reflect the collective racial assumptions of European Americans.	1
As a pioneer in a new field, Berger carefully outlines the theoretical basis for his approach. According to Berger, "images contain no inherent meanings ... the meanings attributed to them are created solely by a society's shared investment in them" (p. 73). Thus he must seek both to describe the matrix of racial attitudes of the white culture that produced the nineteenth and early twentieth-century images he analyzes and to identify the similarly subjective attitudes of twenty-first-century critics, typically white, who have scrutinized these cultural artifacts.	. . .

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