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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Race and Vision in the Nineteenth-Century United States ed. by Shirley Samuels Ashley Rattner Shirley Samuels, ed.Race and Vision in the Nineteenth-Century United States. Lanham: Lexington, 2019. 236 pp. $95.00. 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. [End Page 93] 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...