Whiteness

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Edited by Ruth Adams, Kathy Battista, Chris Hight and Loren Holms

Lawrence and Wishart

Due/Published January 2001, 224 pages, paper

ISBN 085315919X

The papers in this volume explore whiteness as quality, phenomenon, symbol; in film, photography, art, music, and architecture. There are areas of convergence: race, history, modernism, hygiene, but there is also motion outwards, towards the boundaries, into dirt, danger, notoriety, deviance, and death. On one level, the use of white is arbitrary and neutral; it only carries the meanings we inscribe upon its unmarked surface. These essays claim that within certain bounds, and at certain levels of function, arbitrary choice ceases and whiteness inscribes on its own blank surface the damaged and damaging reality of the ideal of the immaculately white.