As I show throughout this book, the gaze is associated with power and privilege. Not only do those in power never have to question the existence of their gaze, they also control how they and other populations are put on display. The works studied in the previous two chapters have staked out their own ‘oppositional gaze’, both looking back at their audience and contesting the image through which they are depicted. The works self-reflexively grapple with how they might become complicit in perpetuating the same institutionalized spectacularism they seek to contest (the way racial and ethnic minorities are discussed in news media, or marketed in cultural marketplaces).

Scholars who have approached the gaze through postcolonial and racial lenses have underscored how media transmit a privileged white, male, heteronormative gaze. bell hooks says it best:

Other scholars, notably Frantz Fanon and Stuart Hall, have similarly echoed how media landscapes often betray a white gaze, which is subsequently internalized by minority populations. In fact, one of the unearned privileges that white people enjoy, according to Peggy McIntosh, is being able to ‘turn on the television or open the front page of the newspaper and see people of [one's] race widely represented’. Efforts to ‘look back’ thus demand not only an interrogation of what is seen but also of the larger institutional forces that privilege certain ways of looking.

Lé;onora Miano's 2010 novel Blues pour Élisedoes just that: it probes the relationship between minorities’ literal (in)visibility within predominantly whitewashed mediascapes (a term Arjun Appadurai defines as ‘image-centered, narrative-based accounts of strips of reality’) and their figurative recognition. Far from simply pointing out how the relative absence of racial and ethnic minorities within France's mediascape impacts its Afropean characters, however, the novel puts itself forth as its own Afropean mediascape—its own remedy to the normative, whitewashed mediascape.