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  • “Making Good Use of Our Eyes”:Nineteenth-Century African Americans Write Visual Culture
  • Sarah Blackwood (bio)

In his 1854 speech “The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered,” Frederick Douglass critiques the use of illustrated portraits in scientific works of mid-nineteenth-century ethnology.1 He describes how images of the “European face” are calculated to convey “beauty, dignity, and intellect,” while “The Negro, on the other hand, appears with features distorted, lips exaggerated, forehead depressed—and the whole expression of the countenance made to harmonize with the popular idea of Negro imbecility and degradation” (510). Douglass provides a unique glimpse into his own experience of nineteenth-century visual culture when he concludes that while “[t]he importance of this criticism [of images of African Americans] may not be apparent to all;—to the black man it is very apparent. He sees the injustice, and writhes under its sting” (514).

Douglass’s address engages directly with mid-nineteenth-century visual culture and its depictions of black life and selfhood. His commentary on the experience of viewing the images of blacks that appeared in newspapers and popular books at mid-century is part of a rich and complicated tradition of African American textual engagement with visual culture. Recent scholarship has begun to attend to the intersections between African American literature, material culture, print culture, and visual technologies, usefully troubling a set of artificial critical boundaries that often led text, image, and object to be considered in isolation from one another. Marcy J. Dinius, for example, has shown the necessity of approaching nineteenth-century visual culture through the textual, emphasizing what she calls the “cycle of mediation and influence between print and daguerreotypy” (5), or how a public came to know daguerreotypy, and later photography, in large part through what was written about these technologies. Specifically addressing the mutual influence of nineteenth-century visual culture and African American imaginative traditions, important recent volumes by Michael [End Page 42] A. Chaney and by Maurice O. Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith articulate just how intertwined nineteenth-century visual culture and African American life were: Wallace and Smith note that “photography emerged not out of a social and material vacuum but out of the world slavery made,” arguing that scholars must take into account both “the early history of photography in African American cultural and political life and the dialectical bearing of photographic vision on the wider logic of nineteenth-century racial thought” (3). This recent scholarship remains in useful tension with a still-suggestive critical narrative about the absence of black perspectives and participation in nineteenth- and twentieth-century visual culture. Michele Wallace’s groundbreaking essay “‘Why Are There No Great Black Artists?’ The Problem of Visuality in African American Culture” addressed what she termed “the visual void in black discourse” (333). More recently, Stephen Best elegantly responded to an excellent collection of essays published in a 2011 special issue of Representations on “New World Slavery and the Matter of the Visual” by asserting that “slaves are not the subject of the visual imagination, they are its object” (151).

Thus, it seems the time is especially ripe to explore in detail how nineteenth-century African American writers engaged with the often-objectifying visual culture of that era. While it is true that we have comparatively little visual work produced by slaves, ex-slaves, or free people of color, we have a lot of writing through which we can piece together at least a partial sense of black visual subjectivity. In the pages that follow, I will consider what nineteenth-century visual culture looks like when viewed through texts written by African Americans. I offer as a case study a famous nineteenth-century image—a photograph of Abraham Lincoln and his son Tad taken in 1864—and the surprising and altogether changing impression that a work of African American literature has upon it. Elizabeth Keckley, a former slave and Mary Todd Lincoln’s dressmaker, wrote a scandalous memoir titled Behind the Scenes: or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House (1868) that provides the reader-viewer a completely different vantage upon the image that became so representative of fatherly instruction and care...

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