Full Description
Race and Vision in the Nineteenth-Century United States is a collection of twelve essays by cultural critics that exposes how fraught relations of identity and race appear through imaging technologies in architecture, scientific discourse, sculpture, photography, painting, music, theater, and, finally, the twenty-first century visual commentary of Kara Walker. Throughout these essays, the racial practices of the nineteenth century are juxtaposed with literary practices involving some of the most prominent writers about race and identity, such as Herman Melville and Harriet Beecher Stowe, as well as the technologies of performance including theater and music. Recent work in critical theories of vision, technology, and the production of ideas about racial discourse has emphasized the inextricability of photography with notions of race and American identity. The collected essays provide a vivid sense of how imagery about race appears in the formative period of the nineteenth-century United States.
Contents
Part 1: Articulate Spaces
Chapter 1: The Racial Geometry of the Nation: Thomas Jefferson's Grids and Octagons
Irene Cheng
Chapter 2: Arctic Whiteness: William Bradford, Herman Melville, and the Invisible Spheres of Fright
Wyn Kelley
Chapter 3: Music and Military Movement: Racial Representation
Brigitte Fielder
Chapter 4: Black Faces Etched in White Stone: Black Feminist Visuality in Edmonia Lewis's Sculpture
Kelli Morgan
Chapter 5: Enchanted Optics: Excavating the Magical Empiricism of Holmesian Stereoscopic Sight
Cheryl Spinner
Chapter 6: Between Word and Image: The Use of Humor, Satire, and Caricature in Early Abolitionist Political Cartoons
Martha Cutter
Part 2: Democratic Visions
Chapter 7: Seeing Irony in Barnum's America: Anti-Slavery Humor in UncleTom's Cabin
Adena Spingarn
Chapter 8: Babo's Skull, Aranda's Skeleton: Visualizing the Sentimentality of Race Science in Benito Cereno
Christine Yao
Chapter 9: Melville's Greens: Color Theory and Democracy
Jennifer Greiman
Chapter 10: Narrative Structure as Secular Judgment in Thomas Crawford's Progress of Civilization
Kirsten Pai Buick
Chapter 11: Beheld by the Eye of God: Photography and the Promise of Democracy in Frederick Douglass's The Heroic Slave
Kya Mangrum
Chapter 12: Cotton Babies: Mama's Maybe: Kara Walker's Marvels of Invention
Janet Neary
