Race Beyond Vision: A Semiotic Cultural Study of Racial Perception and Blindness

This book shows how racial perception goes beyond the limits of sight. Drawing on Semiotic Cultural Psychology, it challenges the dominant visuocentric paradigm that equates race with visually apprehended phenotypic traits. Through an in-depth case study of a congenitally blind individual, the author demonstrates that racial distinctions are not self-evident to the senses but emerge through socially mediated, symbolic, and affective processes. Integrating insights from psychology, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and disability studies, the volume explores how race operates as a dynamic, culturally constructed sign within intersubjective relations. It critically revisits Brazilian racial classification systems, affirmative action controversies, and heteroidentification procedures, exposing the contradictions between race as a social construct and the visual essentialism embedded in current practices. The book advances a theoretical framework that reconceptualizes racial identity as a dimension of body image—biopsychosocial, historically situated, and affectively charged. Combining rigorous theoretical analysis with qualitative methodology, Race Beyond Vision: A Semiotic-Cultural Study of Racial Perception and Blindness contributes to debates on race, perception, and embodiment by revealing how blind individuals participate fully in the social construction of race. It will appeal to scholars and graduate students in cultural psychology, critical race studies, semiotics, and disability studies, as well as researchers interested in epistemology and qualitative inquiry.