PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
David Bindman is Emeritus Durning-Lawrence Professor of the History of Art, University College London and Fellow of the Hutchins Center, Harvard University. He is author or editor of many books including Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the 18th Century (Reaktion, 2002).
In this wonderful book Bindman brilliantly explores the ways in which visual art has represented the very idea of racial hierarchy. Linking 'scientific' ideas with the works and lives of artists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this lucid, lavishly illustrated text ranges from high art to popular racist imagery, and highlights resisters such as Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois. --Steven Lukes, professor emeritus of sociology, New York University Bindman's 'Race Is Everything' more than fulfills the promise of its title. How we see race is determined by our ideologies of difference, which are often so habituated that we believe we see our world and its inhabitants in an unmitigated manner. By looking at the visual codes in modern Western art representing difference--from the African to the Jew and beyond--Bindman provides us with means of deciphering our visual codes while detailing how such codes evolved and persist. A brilliant (and beautiful) work of cultural criticism. --Sander Gilman, author of Stand Up Straight! A History of Posture
