National Imaginaries, American Identities

by Reynolds, Larry J.; Hutner, Gordon

• ISBN13: 9780691009957
• ISBN10: 0691009953
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-11-06
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr

Summary

From the American Revolution to the present, the United States has enjoyed a rich and persuasive visual culture. These images have constructed, sustained, and disseminated social values and identities, but this unwieldy, sometimes untidy form of cultural expression has received less systematic attention than other modes of depicting American life. Recently, scholars in the humanities have developed a new critical approach to reading images and the cultural work they perform. This practice, American cultural iconography, is generating sophisticated analyses of how images organize our public life. The contributions to this volume exhibit the extraordinary scope and interpretive power of this interdisciplinary study while illuminating the dark corners of the nation's psyche. Drawing on such varied texts and visual media as daguerreotypes, political cartoons, tourist posters, and religious artifacts, these essays explore how pictures and words combine to teach us who we are and who we are not. They examine mimesis in elegant portraits of black Freemasons, industrial-age representations of national parks, and postwar photographs of atomic destruction. They consider how visual culture has described and disclosed the politics of racialized sexuality, whether subconsciously affirming it in the shadows of film noir or deliberately contesting it through the interethnic incest of John Sayles'sLone Star. Students of literature, film, and history will find that these essays extend the frontier of American studies. The contributors are Maurice Wallace, Dennis Berthold, Alan Trachtenberg, Shirley Samuels, Jenny Franchot, Cecelia Tichi, Eric Lott, Bryan C. Taylor, and Joseacute; E. Limoacute;n.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	ix
Acknowledgments	xi
Contributors	xiii
Introduction American Cultural Iconography	3	(26)
Larry J. Reynolds
PART ONE: BETWEEN IMAGE AND NARRATIVE: FIGURING AMERICAN COLLECTIVITY	29	(110)
Seeing and Believing: Hawthorne's Reflections on the Daguerreotype in The House of the Seven Gables	31	(21)
Alan Trachtenberg
Nuclear Pictures and Metapictures	52	(31)
Bryan C. Taylor
Pittsburgh at Yellowstone: Old Faithful and the Pulse of Industrial America	83	(21)
Gecelia Tichi
Melville, Garibaldi, and the Medusa of Revolution	104	(35)
Dennis Berthold
PART TWO: REPRESENTATIONAL FRAMEWORKS AND THEIR OTHERS: THE POLITICS OF RACIALIZED GENDER AND SEXUALITY	139	(90)
Miscegenated America: The Civil War	141	(18)
Shirley Samuels
The Whiteness of Film Noir	159	(23)
Eric Lott
``Are We Men?'': Prince Hall, Martin Delany, and the Masculine Ideal in Black Freemasonry, 1775-1865	182	(29)
Maurice Wallace
Unseemly Commemoration: Religion, Fragments, and the Icon	211	(18)
Jenny Franchot
Tex-Sex-Mex: American Identities, Lone Stars, and the Politics of Racialized Sexuality	229
Jose E. Limon