Race and Vision in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Shirley Samuels

doi:10.5771/9781498573122

Summary

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.

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Bibliographic data

Edition: 1/2019
Copyright Year: 2019
ISBN-Print: 978-1-4985-7311-5
ISBN-Online: 978-1-4985-7312-2
Publisher: Lexington, Lanham
Language: English
Pages: 224
Product Type: Edited Book

1. Contents No access
2. List of Illustrations No access
3. Acknowledgments No access
Introduction No access Pages 1 - 14
1. Ch01. The Racial Geometry of the Nation No access
2. Ch02. Arctic Whiteness No access
3. Ch03. Music and Military Movement No access
4. Ch04. Black Faces Etched in White Stone No access
5. Ch05. Enchanted Optics No access
6. Ch06. Between Word and Image No access
1. Ch07. Seeing Irony in Barnum’s America No access
2. Ch08. Babo’s Skull, Aranda’s Skeleton No access
3. Ch09. Melville’s Greens No access
4. Ch10. Narrative Structure as Secular Judgment in Thomas Crawford’s No access
5. Ch11. Beheld by the Eye of God No access
6. Ch12. Cotton Babies, Mama’s Maybe No access
Index No access Pages 213 - 222
About the Contributors No access Pages 223 - 224