Race and Vision in the Nineteenth-Century United States

(Hardback)

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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.

Reviews

Through astute editorship (or dare I say curation), Shirley Samuels has assembled an excellent collection, Race and Vision in the Nineteenth-Century United States, which offers far-reaching case studies of myriad forms, such as land surveying, theatrical staging, sheet music, stereography, and literature, attending to the distinct properties of each. . . . [this book] will be of interest to any scholar, student, library, or layperson engaged in the history of the United States, the long nineteenth century, cultural and intellectual histories of race, and art history and visual culture, especially those probing questions regarding the constitutive relationship among race, technological and philosophical progress, and vision.

Author Bio

Shirley Samuels is professor of English and American studies at Cornell University.