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Chapter 15 - Picturing Race

African Americans in US Visual Culture before the Civil War

from Part V - Envisioning Race

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 May 2022

John Ernest
Affiliation:
University of Delaware
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Summary

This essay focuses on an archive of nineteenth-century visual images used to protest slavery and claim US citizenship for a group of Black individuals who previously had been denied it. One goal of picturing race in the nineteenth century in illustrated books, almanacs, print publications, paintings, pamphlets, and photography was not only to show the harms of slavery, but also to confer a type of symbolic citizenship onto African Americans, whether free or enslaved, that could be taken into the postbellum era. Yet especially before the war, illustrated works by white abolitionists often replicated binaries in which African Americans were continually in need of a white viewer’s assistance, whereas works by some African Americans undermined ideas of empathy and portrayed African Americans as exhibiting agency and self-determination. Black abolitionists such as Henry Bibb, Frederick Douglass, and Sojourner Truth used visual works to complicate flat portrayals of African American identity, and to play with the notion that such works created truth and captured their subjectivity. Their sophisticated manipulation of visual images exists as a contrast to the dominant culture’s practice of surveilling the bodies of the enslaved and configuring African Americans – whether enslaved or free – as passive and abject.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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  • Picturing Race
  • Edited by John Ernest, University of Delaware
  • Book: Race in American Literature and Culture
  • Online publication: 26 May 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108766654.021
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  • Picturing Race
  • Edited by John Ernest, University of Delaware
  • Book: Race in American Literature and Culture
  • Online publication: 26 May 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108766654.021
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Picturing Race
  • Edited by John Ernest, University of Delaware
  • Book: Race in American Literature and Culture
  • Online publication: 26 May 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108766654.021
Available formats
×