Review: Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Power in Design

Although scholars in the humanities and social science fields have for decades examined race, class, and gender in a broad range of contexts, and geographers and urban historians began to study the spatial implications of race even earlier, the vast majority of art and architectural historians have taken much longer to put race at the heart of their analyses. Fortunately, we are witnessing the emergence of publications that are serving as a corrective and beginning to shift the field in important ways. Kristina Wilson’s Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body contributes to this literature with a particular intervention in the critical studies of whiteness, focusing on the material culture of midcentury domesticity. Whiteness studies are typically political projects at their core; namely, they aim to dismantle white supremacy by shedding light on its structures, systems, and modes of operation. As a branch of critical race theory, studies of whiteness take...