The Mystification of Technology

Imitation of Life (1954) crystallized the arguments that Dyer and Osucha made from their analyses of the relationships of technology with race, political economy, and gender. In response to their arguments, I wanted to talk about mystification in relation to the usage and aesthetic considerations of lighting in cinema, and ask how the racialization of technology normalized (new) hegemonic subjectivities, bodies, and representations. By understanding that lighting has been constructed to privilege whiteness, in creating cinema and reflecting social relations, we can come to recognize lighting as a tool for racializing phenotypic differences and creating subjectivities of unequal depth—from the glorification/normalization of white-skinned (hetero-normative female) interiority to Black-skinned stereotypic superficiality. To be productive, however, I would like to get away from attributions of white authorship in films and focus on the mystification caused by seeing things in terms of whiteness through technology, that has in turn resulted in the inability of non-whites to find their subjectivities in dominant culture.