Race and Vision in the Nineteenth-Century United States

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.

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.-- "Journal of Southern History", Race and Vision in the Nineteenth-Century United States offers a probing account of the myriad ways in which the social contracts of race and of vision were forged in, and emanate from, the arts and technologies of the nineteenth century nation, including architecture, sculpture, painting, music, literature, photography, anthropology, and more. These forms of expression produced both explicit and implicit arguments of the visible to which North Americans were taught to adhere. The essays in this book brilliantly challenge us now to reexamine the virtue of those conceptions: what they produced, what they portended, and what they foreclosed.--Laura Wexler, Yale University, Fomenting an intervention into debates about literary and visual studies, Race and Vision in the Nineteenth-Century United States is the rare collection where each essay yields productive insights as much as the volume as a whole rewards. We find in this volume Shirley Samuels extending her position as an editor par excellence such that the topical theme of the collection itself constitutes an index of the ways we can imagine, if not see, the future of American literary studies. Taken together as a panorama, this collection not only offers a deep history of the processes of visualization that structured racial formation in the nineteenth-century United States but serves as a trenchant critique of how the intimate relationship between ocularity and ontology informs the very ways subjectivities, possibilities, and futurities come into focus.--Ivy Wilson, Northwestern University, Shirley Samuels' carefully curated set of essays deepens and expands our understanding of the role the visual plays in constructing ideas of race. Race and Vision in the Nineteenth-Century United States is certain to become an essential collection in the fields of both literary and visual studies.--Jennifer James, The George Washington University

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