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.

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

Part 1: Articulate Spaces

Chapter 1: The Racial Geometry of the Nation: Thomas Jeffersons Grids and Octagons

Irene Cheng

Chapter 2: Arctic Whiteness: William Bradford, Herman Melville, and the Invisible Spheres of Fright

Wyn Kelley

Chapter 3: Music and Military Movement: Racial Representation

Brigitte Fielder

Chapter 4: Black Faces Etched in White Stone: Black Feminist Visuality in Edmonia Lewiss Sculpture

Kelli Morgan

Chapter 5: Enchanted Optics: Excavating the Magical Empiricism of Holmesian Stereoscopic Sight

Cheryl Spinner

Chapter 6: Between Word and Image: The Use of Humor, Satire, and Caricature in Early Abolitionist Political Cartoons

Martha Cutter

Part 2: Democratic Visions

Chapter 7: Seeing Irony in Barnums America: Anti-Slavery Humor inUncleToms Cabin

Adena Spingarn

Chapter 8: Babos Skull, Arandas Skeleton: Visualizing the Sentimentality of Race Science inBenito Cereno

Christine Yao

Chapter 9: Melvilles Greens: Color Theory and Democracy

Jennifer Greiman

Chapter 10: Narrative Structure as Secular Judgment in Thomas CrawfordsProgress of Civilization

Kirsten Pai Buick

Chapter 11: Beheld by the Eye of God: Photography and the Promise of Democracy in Frederick DouglasssThe Heroic Slave

Kya Mangrum

Chapter 12: Cotton Babies: Mamas Maybe: Kara Walkers Marvels of Invention

Janet Neary