Introduction

Culture in the nineteenth-century United States always involved images. From the engravings of presidential faces circulated in newspapers to the broadsides of recruiting posters in war times, from the circulating cartes-des-visites that carried a simulacrum of identity by means of the newly developed technology of the photograph to the portrait paintings of Mary Cassatt and Thomas Eakins, from the crowds standing in line to view the statue of “The Greek Slave” to the everyday use of coins and stamps, the relation between particular representational images and the mass commodification of portraits in common use has made some of these, still prevalent, uses of the image recognizable as a trade in visibility. The nineteenth century became accustomed to images in public display in ways that make the relation of imaging technologies and modern identifications of the subject inescapable.

To what potential crises of identity does this lead? The purpose of the cluster of essays in this forum is to expose relations of identity and race that are conveyed by the use of imaging technologies in architecture, scientific discourse, music, theater, and, finally, in the hands of a twenty-first-century visual commentary on the racial practices of the nineteenth-century United States. Throughout these essays, the juxtapositions with literary practice involve some of the nineteenth century’s most familiar writers, such as Herman Melville and Harriet Beecher Stowe, as well as the technologies of performance involving theater and music.

Emphatically, the difference made by these essays is also to bring in sound, the movement of bodies on a stage and in dance, and the acts of witness engaged in by audiences up to and including this past summer when viewers lined up in Brooklyn to see Kara Walker’s A Subtlety. The exposure of bodies to the viewing audience leads to questions about race and visibility that we have only begun to consider. That is, the relation of sight to literary culture is not static, nor, of course, limited to the nineteenth century, and these essays remind us to watch out!

In the first essay, Irene Cheng takes us to a familiar location, Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, to ask about how architectural design might invoke racial visions. The second essay, by Christine Yao, treats Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno; it investigates scientific racialism and the peculiar developments of phrenological readings of heads as it looks at Babo’s head from a new angle. In the third essay, Alex Black calls attention to musical notation in the archive of sheet music that accompanied theatrical performances of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The fourth, by Brigitte Fielder, considers how the movement of bodies might be constructed in an interpretation of how “the waltz and the march produce bodies in motion.” The “event of the integrated ball” meant that the movement of bodies might result in more than one kind of racial mixture. Finally, the fifth essay, by Janet Neary, looks at Kara Walker’s 8 Possible Beginnings to think about the legacy of nineteenth-century slavery practices in visual terms.

In foregrounding vision as a formatting of the racial contract in the nineteenth-century United States, these essays foreground both the sense of a cultural contract and of the contrast that vision makes with literary representation. The contract about vision that was slowly established in the nineteenth century’s attention to the photograph involved a concept of reality and truth telling. In these short essays, we find historical incidents and cultural events that invoke both the contracts of race and the contracts of vision.

To take an example not included in this set of essays, a novel like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Dred (1856) contains a vision both alluded to and withheld in the scene that combines the sight of near-white children with the pathos of the mother who will kill them to keep them from being sold into slavery. As a novel, Dred juxtaposes attention to the law with scenes infused with sentimental pathos, and yet the effect of the pathos is to distract from the violent cruelty of the moments where women and children are hunted down or starved. These moments...