Looking for America The Visual Production of Nation and People

by Cameron, Ardis

• ISBN13: 9781405114660
• ISBN10: 1405114665
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-01-14
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Summary

Looking for America: The Visual Production of Nation and People is a groundbreaking collection that explores the "visual" in defining the kaleidoscope of American experience and American identity in the 20th century. Covers enduringly important topics in American history: nationhood, class, politics of identity, and the visual mapping of "others" Includes editorial introductions, suggested readings, a primer on how to "read" an image, and a guide to visual archives and collections Well-illustrated book for those in American Studies and related fields eager to incorporate the visual into their teaching-and telling-of the American story.

Author Biography

Ardis Cameron is Professor of American and New England Studies, University of Southern Maine. She is author of Radicals of the Worst Sort: The Laboring of Lawrence, 1860–1912 (1993). She received a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship for her work in progress, Tales of Peyton Place: The Biography of a Big Book.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	viii
Introduction	1	(12)
Ardis Cameron
Suggested Readings	13	(2)
PART I: 1860-1900	15	(44)
Modern Types	17	(42)
1 Sleuthing Towards America: Visual Detection in Everyday Life	17	(25)
Ardis Cameron
2 Cartes de Visite Portrait Photographs and the Culture of Class Formation	42	(16)
Andrea L. Volpe
Suggested Readings	58	(1)
PART II: 1900-1940	59	(112)
The Embodied Nation: Race, Gender, and the Politics of the Camera	61	(57)
3 Photographing the "American Negro": Nation, Race, and Photography at the Paris Exposition of 1900	61	(33)
Shawn Michelle Smith
4 Techniques of the Imaginary Nation: Engendering Family Photography	94	(24)
Laura Wexler
"The Eye of Power": Cross-Class Looking	118	(53)
5 Private Eyes, Public Women: Images of Class and Sex in the Urban South, Atlanta, Georgia, 1913-1915	118	(31)
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall
6 Margaret Bourke-White's Red Coat; or, Slumming in the Thirties	149	(21)
Paula Rabinowitz
Suggested Readings	170	(1)
PART III: 1940-2000	171	(191)
Home and Nation: Imagining the "All-American" Family	173	(91)
7 "The Kind of People who Make Good Americans": Nationalism and Life's Family Ideal	173	(39)
Wendy Kozol
8 Visual Culture and Working-Class Community: Photography and the Organizing of the Steelworkers' Union in Chicago	212	(26)
Larry Peterson
9 Sit-corns and Suburbs: Positioning the 1950's Homemaker	238	(26)
Mary Beth Haralovich
The Eye of Difference: The Politics of Appearance	264	(47)
10 The Zoot-Suit and Style Warfare	264	(17)
Stuart Cosgrove
11 Looking Jewish, Seeing Jews	281	(30)
Matthew Frye Jacobson
Troubling Sights (Sites): Visual Maps and America's "Others"	311	(51)
12 The Photograph as an Intersection of Gazes	311	(29)
Catherine A. Lutz and Jane L. Collins
13 When Strangers Bring Cameras: The Poetics and Politics of Othered Places	340	(21)
Ardis Cameron
Suggested Readings	361	(1)
Appendix A: "Reading the Visual Record"	362	(9)
Elspeth H. Brown
Appendix B: List of Visual Archives	371	(3)
Ardis Cameron
Index	374