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 Frederick C. Staidum Jr. Race and Vision in the Nineteenth-Century United States. Edited by Shirley Samuels. (Lanham, Md., and other cities: Lexington Books, 2019. Pp. xii, 224. $95.00, ISBN 978-1-4985-7311-5.) Visual culture, and vision itself, have long been central to the development of modern racial formations. From exotic illustrations of Indigenous peoples framing early modern maps to the famed casta paintings depicting a taxonomy of new American race mixtures, visuals of so-called corporeal and moral difference and inferiority traversed the Atlantic, presenting discernible evidence used to rationalize colonization and enslavement. As early modern definitions of race collided with the liberalism and humanism of the post-Revolutionary United States, visual culture became increasingly important in resolving philosophical hypocrisies and codifying the color line. The grotesquery of minstrel makeup and costuming and the anthropological realism of Louis Agassiz’s photography capturing nude enslaved people are great examples. Across the nineteenth century, these objects and performances, through the techniques unique to the visual (for example, composition, light, color, scale, and so on), dictated how physical human difference was perceived and what philosophical, political, and cultural meanings were attached to those differences. In recent years, scholars have offered important monographs and essay collections addressing the intersection of race and a single visual medium in the nineteenth century, such as photography, painting, or sculpture; however, there has been an infrequency of work simultaneously addressing the particular modalities of multiple media. 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. Samuels is a professor of English and American studies at Cornell University, where she also chaired the History of Art Department from 2006 to 2012. She is a prolific scholar of gender, race, and literary and visual cultures of the nineteenth century, having previously published several volumes on the subject, including Facing America: Iconography and the Civil War (New York, 2004). The individual contributors are experts and practitioners in photography, art history, literary criticism, folklore studies, and architecture. Thanks to this interdisciplinarity, the collection produces a wide-ranging, albeit episodic, [End Page 137] cultural and intellectual history of how people living in nineteenth-century United States came to see race and difference. The collection is composed of twelve essays; taken together, the essays contend that technological innovations in science, engineering, and aesthetics that emerged throughout the nineteenth century radically influenced and reoriented the perception of who were and could be U.S. citizens. These technologies changed how humans saw and what they expected to see—that is to say, vision. Throughout the book’s introduction, Samuels deploys vision and visualizing as central analytical concepts and objects of study, which encapsulate all sorts of visual sensations from physical ocular function of the human eye to the figurative language of literature and other media. In this way, Race and Vision in the Nineteenth-Century United States is much less about visual culture as a discrete product; rather, it foregrounds the ways those visibly rendered products are tethered to and constituted by the processes, instruments, and conditions—social and otherwise—by which we see. Further, the essays collectively assert that the intersection of vision and technology informed racial formations “in alternately democratic and anti-democratic” ways (p. 1). The essays are arranged into two discrete yet interrelated thematic sections—“Articulate Spaces” and “Democratic Visions.” The first section undertakes the entanglements of race, vision, and spatiality or the social construction of space and its organization by way of human interactions and behavior. For example, Irene Cheng, in the opening chapter, demonstrates how Thomas Jefferson’s strategies for both territorial and architectural design consummated “his ideal of a liberal, agrarian republic” in particularly exclusionary and oppressive ways (p. 17). Jefferson’s rational, grid-like geographical patterns validated the land tenure system and the subsequent displacement of Native Americans, while his similarly rational octagonal house plan enabled the...