"Making Good Use of Our Eyes": Nineteenth-Century African Americans Write Visual Culture

Abstract

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. 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 nineteenthcentury 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