The white gaze is the assumption that the default reader or observer is coming from a perspective of someone who identifies as white, or that people of color sometimes feel need to take into account the white reader or observer's reaction. Various authors of color describe it as a voice in their heads that reminds them that their writing, characters, and plot choices are going to be judged by white readers, and that the reader or viewer, by default, is white.

Description

Toni Morrison Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford; February 18, 1931 – August 5, 2019), known as Toni Morrison, was an American novelist. Her first novel, ''The Bluest Eye'', was published in 1970. The critically acclaimed '' So ...

wrote and spoke influentially about rejecting the white gaze. In an analysis of whiteness in American literature, Morrison said, "What happens to the writerly imagination of a black author who is at some level ''always'' conscious of representing one's race to, or in spite of, a race of readers that understands itself to be 'universal' or race-free?" In the documentary '' Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am'', she calls it “The little white man that sits on your shoulder and checks out everything you do or say. You sort of knock him off and you’re free." Writer L J Alonge described it in terms of writing "a scene about two kids trying to dine-and-dash, something I'd done, and stop to wonder if I was playing into narratives about 'black criminality.' I'd try to write a scene about a kid getting into a fight, something else I'd done, and feel like I was fueling ideas about 'black-on-black violence.'"

Representations

The Pulitzer prize-winning play '' Fairview'', by

Jackie Sibblies Drury Jackie Sibblies Drury is an American playwright. ''The New York Times'' called Drury's 2012 play '' We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as Southwest Africa, From the German Sudwestafrika, Between the ...

, focuses on the white gaze; the play's title is a play on the phrase. Hannah Miao, reviewing it, describes the White gaze as "being watched from a lens of otherness that is sometimes violently obvious, and sometimes so subtle that you find yourself wondering whether you made it up entirely. It is fetishization and repulsion, appropriation and persecution, misrepresentation and erasure, all at once." A 2018 exhibit at California Institute of Integral Studies, White Gaze, investigated "the role of photography, and specifically the images of National Geographic, in reinforcing racist hierarchies in the cultural imaginary of the West".

In the US vs. in Africa

Dana Williams, president of the Toni Morrison Society, noted that the concept was a Western construct, and that in the mid-20th century African writers wrote stories on their own terms. In the US at the same time, according to Williams, black writers writing about black subjects "were always thinking about it in the context of race and white people reading".

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Description

Representations

In the US vs. in Africa

See also

References

Further reading