Overview

Peter Fine's innovative study traces the development of a mass visual culture in the United States, focusing on how new visual technologies played a part in embedding racialized ideas about African Americans, and how whiteness was privileged within modernist ideals of visual form. Fine considers the visual and material manifestations of this process through the history of three important technologies of the art of mechanical reproduction – typography, lithography, and photography, and then moves on to consider how racialized representation has been configured and contested within contemporary film and television, fine art and digital design.

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9781474299572

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Reviews

This profound, arresting, and beautiful study makes us see things differently. Made for graphic designers and accessible to fascinated readers far beyond that field, it demonstrates how deeply influenced by embedded relationships of race and power that creative and commercial work in design has long been. The resulting familiarities with images of racial hierarchies become less so as we read, look, and come to view matters through the brilliant critiques provided by contemporary Black artists. -- David Roediger, Foundation Distinguished Professor of American Studies at the University of Kansas, USA To really understand how race shapes US culture past and present, we must get to grips with the ways it patterns everyday life. Peter Claver Fine demonstrates the centrality of race to US graphic design, and the ways in which the visual language of commercial culture remains a key site for the reproduction - and the contestation - of racism. The Design of Race will be of great value to students of design, fine art, and popular culture. -- Ben Pitcher, Reader in the Sociology of Race at the University of Westminster, UK Fine's book is a ground-breaking analysis of the power of graphic design and its culpability in the constructions of race in America. The Design of Race is a timely and well-researched work that eloquently unpacks the complexities of visual culture, racial identity and the affordances of race as a designed object for consumption. -- John Jennings, Critical race design scholar and Professor of Media and Cultural Studies, UC Riverside, USA

Author Information

Peter Fine is Associate Professor of Graphic Design in the Department of Visual and Literary Arts at the University of Wyoming, USA.

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