American Archives : Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture

by Smith, Shawn Michelle

• ISBN13: 9780691004785
• ISBN10: 0691004781
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1999-11-29
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr

Summary

Visual texts uniquely demonstrate the contested terms of American identity. InAmerican ArchivesShawn Michelle Smith offers a bold and disturbing account of how photography and the sciences of biological racialism joined forces in the nineteenth century to offer an idea of what Americans look like--or "should" look like. Her varied sources, which include the middle-class portrait, baby picture, criminal mugshot, and eugenicist record, as well as literary, scientific, and popular texts, enable her to demonstrate how new visual paradigms posed bodily appearance as an index to interior "essence." Ultimately we see how competing preoccupations over gender, class, race, and American identity were played out in the making of a wide range of popular and institutional photographs. Smith demonstrates that as the body was variously mapped and defined as the key to essentialized identities, the image of the white middle-class woman was often held up as the most complete American ideal. She begins by studying gendered images of middle-class domesticity to expose a transformation of feminine architectures of interiority into the "essences" of "blood," "character," and "race." She reads visual documents, as well as literary texts by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Pauline Hopkins, and Theodore Dreiser, as both indices of and forms of resistance to dominant images of gender, class, race, and national identity. Through this analysis Smith shows how the white male gaze that sought to define and constrain white women and people of color was contested and transformed over the course of the nineteenth century. Smith identifies nineteenth-century visual paradigms that continue to shape debates about the terms of American belonging today.American Archivescontributes significantly to the growing field of American visual cultural studies, and it is unprecedented in explaining how practices of racialized looking and the parameters of "American looks" were established in the first place.

Author Biography

Shawn Michelle Smith is Assistant Professor of English and American Studies at Washington State University

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	ix
Acknowledgments	xiii
Introduction American Archives	3	(8)
Prying Eyes and Middle-Class Magic in The House of the Seven Gables	11	(18)
``Magnetic'' Daguerreotypes and the Masculine Gaze	12	(7)
Evil Eyes and Feminine Essence	19	(5)
Making the House a Home	24	(2)
The Public Private Sphere	26	(3)
The Properties of Blood	29	(22)
The Blood That Flows in Subterranean Pipes	31	(10)
Blood, Character, and Race	41	(4)
The Spectacle of Race	45	(2)
Seeing Bloodlines	47	(4)
Superficial Depths	51	(62)
The Portrait and the Likeness: Photographing the Soul	55	(7)
Class Acts: Real Things and True Performances	62	(6)
The Criminal Body and the Portrait of a Type	68	(25)
Consuming Commodities: Gender in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction	93	(20)
``Baby's Picture Is Always Treasured'': Eugenics and the Reproduction of Whiteness in the Family Photograph Album	113	(23)
Mechanically Reproducing Baby	115	(7)
Reproducing Racial Inheritance	122	(10)
Sentimental Aura and the Evidence of Race	132	(4)
America Coursing through Her Veins	136	(21)
From the Bonds of Love to Bloodlines	137	(4)
America's White Aristocracy	141	(3)
In the Name of White Womanhood	144	(6)
``A Heritage Unique in the Ages''	150	(7)
Photographing the ``American Negro'': Nation, Race, and Photography at the Paris Exposition of 1900	157	(30)
Racialized Bodies, National Character, and Photographic Documentation	158	(9)
Making Americans	167	(10)
Conserving Race in the Nation	177	(10)
Looking Back: Pauline Hopkins's Challenge to Eugenics	187	(19)
Envisioning Race: Bodies on Display in Hagar's Daughter	189	(5)
``Sons of One Father''	194	(4)
Excavating the Hidden Self	198	(5)
Visions beyond the Color Line	203	(3)
Reconfiguring a Masculine Gaze	206	(21)
Visions of Commodified Identity in Consumer Culture	207	(3)
Conspicuous Consumption under a Masculine Gaze: Rethinking Gender in Sister Carrie	210	(10)
Parting Glances	220	(2)
Afterimages
A Brief Look at American Visual Culture in the 1990s	222	(5)
Notes	227	(44)
Bibliography	271	(20)
Index	291