Review: Sites Unseen: Architecture, Race, and American Literature, by William A. Gleason; Little White Houses: How the Postwar Home Constructed Race in America, by Dianne Harris; and Negro Building: Black Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums, by Mabel O. Wilson

While scholarly interest in the critical intersections of race and architecture is by no means new within the humanities, there are hints of some new horizons in contemporary scholarship. Earlier studies in North American architectural history have primarily focused on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including the racial segregation perpetuated by urban renewal policies. Sociological studies have tended to focus on the structural and institutional causes of racism or have presented ethnographic accounts of minority groups that proved their resilience under oppression.¹ More recent studies have built on these investigations with new cross-cultural and transnational analyses, as well as brought the material environments produced by such processes under greater scrutiny. For example, in the past ten years, scholarship in visual studies has isolated the hegemonic function of whiteness in visual contexts seemingly unmarked by the presence of white and nonwhite figures. Martin Berger’s Site Unseen: Whiteness and American Visual...