Editor’s Note: Following author Sarah Lewis’s decision to decapitalize the word "black,” this review retains the lowercase when referring to the racial category/ethnic group. 

                                                                **********

In A Companion to American Art, published by Blackwell in 2015, I surveyed how scholars of American art had been approaching the critical study of race and visual representation since the late twentieth century. At the time, those approaches included either foregrounding or decentering race in interpretations of the work of black artists; speaking about race in relation to a broader range of (especially white-produced) artistic production; and even imagining “post-racial” art and art history. The last of these emerged in the context of the presidential campaign and election of Barack Obama in 2008, when Americans were envisioning a world where someone’s life experience would not be defined exclusively by their racial or ethnic identity. If Darby English’s How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness (2007) heralded the possibility of a postracial art history in the era of Obama, Sarah Lewis’s latest book, The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America, signals the emergence of a new approach to race and representation in the context of the anti-black racism and antiracist discourse that have defined the last decade in the US.

Rather than centering the artist or the object of representation, Lewis’s book explores what she calls racial observation, or the culture of seeing the world “through the filter of race” (8). It joins other critical studies of what it means to see (and not see) in modern Euro-American culture, from Jonathan Crary’s Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (MIT Press, 1992) to Michael Leja’s Looking Askance: Skepticism and American Art from Eakins to Duchamp (University of California Press, 2004). Among the relatively few of these studies to consider deeply the relationship between race and vision are Nicole R. Fleetwood’s Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (2010), which interrogates how blackness has come to be seen as (in)visible, and Nicholas Mirzoeff’s The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (2011), which associates chattel slavery with the visual regime of classification. As its citations attest, Lewis’s book also stands on the shoulders of scholarship in critical whiteness studies, especially the writings of David Roediger, Matthew Frye Jacobson, Toni Morrison, and Nell Irvin Painter, whose The History of White People (W. W. Norton, 2010) serves as a beacon throughout the book. For The Unseen Truth is a study of how popular ideas about racial whiteness were constructed in and through visual culture, and how those notions—however spurious they turned out to be—shaped how white Americans looked at themselves and racialized others in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

That vision, Lewis argues, was tied to the mythmaking that surrounded the Caucasus, particularly the region once known as Circassia, which ran along the northeastern edge of the Black Sea (now part of Russia). In the 1795 edition of his influential treatise On the Natural Variety of Mankind, the German physician Johann Friedrich Blumenbach equated the region with the highest ideal, indeed the very origin, of whiteness, despite having no reliable evidence to support the claim. The racial signification of the Caucasus was upheld, albeit by a humbug, in the 1860s, as the famous showman P. T. Barnum exhibited a group of light-complexioned women who performed as “Circassian Beauties.” That signification began to unwind in the 1870s, when the American George Kennan documented the entire region and widely disseminated his findings about its racial diversity. Lewis’s dogged archival research reveals that references to the Caucasus started to fall away from maps in the US by the 1890s, only to resurface in the context of Woodrow Wilson’s presidency (1913–21).

In relation to the evolving discourse surrounding the Caucasus, Lewis identifies two primary modes of vision: negative assembly and racial detailing. In chapter four, which considers mapmaking as an important form of racial observation at the turn of the twentieth century, Lewis defines negative assembly as “excisions to prevent a reckoning with the fictions of racial hierarchy,” and as “a central, structural feature for the maintenance of racial hierarchies in American life” (141). Americans have learned, in other words, how to disregard anything that might disrupt “narratives of white racial dominance” (139). While negative assembly operates through omission and a refusal to see, racial detailing involves a building up of small details to form a complete vision. As Lewis puts it in chapter five, it describes the action of “assembling seemingly small, procedural features to constitute a totalizing and inhumane regime” (202). Lewis associates this form of racial observation with the popular eugenics movement, which encouraged Americans to evaluate details of the face and physique and add them up to assess an individual’s social fitness. She further locates racial detailing in Wilson’s federal government, whose practices of racial segregation were carefully constructed, one discriminatory detail at a time.

The Unseen Truth not only examines how these ways of seeing have promoted anti-black racism and white supremacism, but also how they have been coopted by black writers and visual artists seeking to “undermine” those ideologies. Lewis argues, for example, that contemporary artist Kerry James Marshall’s remaking of a famous lynching photograph taken in 1930 in Marion, Indiana, visualized—as a form of critique—the process of “racial detailing.” Titled Heirlooms & Accessories (2002), his artwork extracts the faces of three women from the apparently all-white audience to a gruesome murder of two black men, and places each of them in a golden locket—a piece of jewelry passed down, as a keepsake, from generation to generation. A century earlier, the sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois used maps in exhibitions as forms of resistance to “negative assembly.” Unlike illustrated atlases and the “instructional scripts” designed for geography classes in American schools, Du Bois’s maps, on display in venues like the 1900 Paris Exposition, visualized for broad audiences the trajectory of “black progress” (177).

The Unseen Truth not only calls upon readers to approach “vision analytically, as a process of assembly, and to consider its blind spots” (134), but the book also encourages them to attend similarly to its own process of argument-making. To build her claims about race and vision, Lewis engages in a rigorously critical and creative process of unearthing, interrogating, juxtaposing, and layering—a method she deployed to great effect in her 2014 book The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery. Chapter two of The Unseen Truth, for example, begins by considering Frederick Douglass’s thoughts on photographs as instruments of democracy and social justice. Before reflecting on the legal adjudication of racial identity in the early twentieth century, it returns to the photographs of the so-called Circassian Beauties analyzed in chapter one, comparing them to Dion Boucicault’s tragic play The Octoroon, the famous story of Ellen and William Craft’s escape from enslavement to freedom, representations of poet Alexander Pushkin’s multiracial identity, and more. Chapter three likewise draws connections among a diverse collection of objects, practices, and ideas that shared temporal proximity, such as Frank Duveneck’s painting of a Circassian soldier from 1870, changes in the racial signification of the Caucasus in the 1870s, the emphasis on comparative looking in eugenics, court practices of visually inspecting bodies for their “whiteness,” and the commissioning of “white common soldier monuments” during and after the Civil War. In other cases, the proximity is geographic, as in the coexistence within several city blocks of The New York-Caucasian newspaper’s office, one of the largest mapmakers in the US, a photographic portrait studio where the Circassian Beauties posed, and P. T. Barnum’s American Museum, where they were exhibited publicly. Taken on their own, each of the subjects Lewis assembles has generated significant scholarship in recent decades. (Consider the number of recent books devoted to Douglass’s engagement with photography or to the art history of Civil War monuments.) Lewis nevertheless offers fresh and impactful insights by envisioning these subjects in relation to one another. Each chapter of The Unseen Truth is thus a brilliantly constructed composition that teaches us how to see as American people had once been trained to do, consciously or otherwise.

In the book’s epilogue, Lewis speaks directly about her research process, which brought her to visit Wilson’s tomb, opposite stained-glass windows by Kerry James Marshall, at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC. “I had nearly missed the memorial bay for Wilson,” she recalled. “To see it, I had to move up close, shift my vantage point, and stay aware of the full detail that surrounded me, not just what might be of interest for my current task” (261). This passage pulls back the curtain to reveal Lewis’s own engagement with racial detailing, as a form of political resistance, in the making of The Unseen Truth. Self-reflective and deeply committed to social justice, this is the book art historians working in the US urgently need now, as we learn to apply our critical tools—from close looking to socio-historical analysis—to understanding and undermining systemic racism in America.