The Design of Race: How Visual Culture Shapes America

by Peter Claver Fine

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781474299572
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	02/11/2021
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.31(h) x 0.46(d)

About the Author

Peter C. Fine is Associate Professor of Visual Communication Design in the Department of Visual and Literary Arts, Art and Art History at the University of Wyoming, USA. As a design educator he teaches studio courses in design, design history and visual culture, exploring the role of the designer past, present and future. He is the author of The Design of Race: How Visual Culture Shapes America (Bloomsbury, 2021) and Sustainable Graphic Design: Principles and Practices (Bloomsbury, 2016). In 2019 he was the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to the University of Quebec, Canada.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Preface
Introduction
1. Vestiges in Word and Image
2. Typography and Type
3. First Impressions: Lithography and the Packaging of Race
4. Photography by Design
5. Racialized Play, Caught in Real Time
Conclusion

Editorial 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

From the Publisher