Race and Vision in the Nineteenth-Century United States ed. by Shirley Samuels

To a large extent, race operates as a function of visual markers. In this broadly varied collection, Shirley Samuels challenges Stephen Best’s contention that the visual archive of slavery is empty by presenting twelve ways visibility shaped the democratic and antidemocratic cultural agendas of the nineteenth-century United States (1). Serving as a provocative assemblage of entry points to access the contestation of racial identity, visible elements emerge as sites for understanding the surveillance and reinforcement of the social order. While sights and sounds of nineteenth-century American life have often been dismissed as inaccessible to scholars of the twenty-first century, Samuels’s collection models the astounding breadth and variety that cultural reconstructions of these elements of daily existence, meaning-making, and opportunity can take in architecture, literature, music, theater, and art. Valuable to scholars of American culture across a range of disciplines, this volume excels at illustrating a range of possibilities for the kinds of questions scholars can ask while studying race’s contestation and evolution.

Building on scholarship by Fred Moten, Saidiya Hartman, and Hortense Spillers that processes the sensory depictions of bodily enslavement, contributors to this volume engage the visual resonances of bodies and forms. In response to Jasmine Nichole Cobb’s call for “attention to the ‘archive of Black visuality,’ ” Race and Vision demonstrates how much physical shapes, appearances, and representations disclose about visibility’s role in citizenship (2). Exploring subjects ranging temporally from the geometric patterns within the architecture of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello to the commentary of Kara Walker’s 8 Possible Beginnings, this volume not only provides a broad assortment of examples of racial difference, categorization, and uses in the nineteenth-century US, but it also offers a generative collection of models, methodologies, and implications for further inquiry and exploration. Describing the collection’s utility as propulsive rather than accretive, the contributors demonstrate the centrality of vision to a range of questions of identity, erasure, belonging, and possibility (7).

Race and Vision showcases numerous approaches by which scholars can perceive race anew in an era characterized by limited or evolving visual technologies. Wyn Kelley, Cheryl Spinner, and Kya Mangrum explore the effects of inventions like photography and stereoscopes capable of “reproduc[ing] sight” on American culture, rendering “vision a crucial index of both modernity and subjectivity in the nineteenth-century United States” (5). Irene Cheng, Kelli Morgan, Brigitte Fielder, Martha J. Cutter, Adena Spingarn, Kirsten Pai Buck, and Janet Neary examine artistic representations: architecture, sculpture, sheet music, political cartoons, theatrical performance, and contemporary art as sites of cultural negotiations of racial possibility, distinction, anxiety, ambiguity, and power. Both Kelley and Morgan interrogate the presence of the artist in scenes of composition or creation, locating questions of access, resources, education, and ability in the appearance or concealment of the artist as a racialized subject. Xine Yao and Jennifer Greiman look at literary texts, locating spectacle and color as means of understanding authors’ interpretation of race.

The book’s cover features an arresting image—a page of sheet music titled “Amalgamation Waltz”— that depicts a social dance Fielder locates as a record of anxieties surrounding amalgamation in “Music and Military Movement: Racial Representation.” Reading mixed-race balls as “[important scenes] upon which the dynamics of race and sex could be thought in antebellum culture,” differently racialized bodies function as “a visual metaphor of sorts for racial integration” (53). In sheet music for waltzes and marches depicting Black and white figures dancing together—movement on both the minute personal scales, but more broadly “through geopolitical spaces and in militaristic endeavors” as well. Examining the artifact’s multiple registers in its blended genre of illustration and sheet music, Fielder locates the discomfort these figures evoked to nineteenth-century white viewers due to their suggestion of reproduction and national belonging (58).

Like Fielder’s essay, Morgan’s unearths another facet of nineteenth-century American culture that is frequently overlooked. Morgan presents Haitian/Ojibwe sculptor Edmonia Lewis’s work as an exploration of Black feminist visuality—“a creative imaging of Black women’s self-making, autonomy, subjectivity, and personal empowerment that allows them to transcend the distorted, mythological constructions of Black female identity concretized within Western visual culture as it reveals the functions of Western culture’s racist visuality and rejects its subjugation of Black women’s identity formation—to analyze both her cartes de visite and neoclassical sculpture Forever Free (1867)” (71). Lewis’s classical training and technical proficiency in the fine arts were rare at this time, resulting in a “pronounced fascination” in her mere existence on account of her race (73). Known as “one of the few sculptors whom no one charges with having assistance in her own work,” Lewis’s autonomy adds to her allure—her strength, talent, and remarkable skill—while simultaneously dehumanizing her by assuming the racist trope of depicting Black women as natural laborers (qtd. in 74). Forever Free depicts a freedman and woman “more than capable of securing their freedom in life,” in flagrant opposition to the figure of the tragic mulatta (83).

Much of racial understanding and identification proceeded from individual engagement with texts or spectacles. Spingarn’s study of antislavery humor within theatrical performances of Uncle Tom’s Cabin at P. T. Barnum’s American Museum argues that the ironic verbal humor within the play that may seem to undermine the text’s antislavery message instead augments it within the unique context of the museum (127). By challenging visitors to engage directly with the spectacles they beheld and ascertain their meaning and verisimilitude for themselves, theatergoers within the American Museum were primed to question whether each and every exhibit was “humbug,” an attitude suited to detect and consider the import of verbal irony. Harriet Beecher’s Stowe’s narrator frequently employs ironic commentary to convey its antislavery message, emphasizing the illogic and moral depravity of the institution (129).

Samuels reflects that “The essays in this collection resist as much as they engage subjectivity as a fixed entity” (5). By way of spatial orientation, the philosophical ramifications of technologies, interpretive contexts, and representational performances, the contributors to this volume prove the richness with which contemporary scholars of the nineteenth century can view race in its many manifestations and resonances. Concluding this volume with Neary’s essay on Kara Walker’s 8 Possible Beginnings signals that the work of visualizing and engaging images of nineteenth-century slavery persists into the present day. Walker’s 2005 short film employs conventions from silent films, animations, and shadow puppets while engaging elements of Walt Disney’s Song of the South (1946) and D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915) (200). As Neary summarizes, “The film’s narrative core is a sexual encounter between an enslaved man and his master, which produces a gleefully sinister cotton baby—an animated cotton boll that smiles and dances—which is planted in a field, watered by the enslaved man, and eventually grows into a tall tree that becomes a lynching site for multiple black men” (200). Here, “Walker revises the creation of ‘America’ as the creation of ‘African America,’ recovering the black origins of a history that has been sanitized and whitewashed” to “present racial slavery as myth” (201, 203). The implications of this powerful essay, and indeed Race and Vision as a whole, urge us to consider the “relationship between flesh and myth,” sight and sense, power and perception.