Research Catalog

Title

American archives : gender, race, and class in visual culture / Shawn Michelle Smith.

Author

Smith, Shawn Michelle, 1965-

Publication

Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, [1999]

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

xi, 299 pages : illustrations (some color), portraits; 25 cm

Summary

Visual texts uniquely demonstrate the contested terms of American identity. In American Archives Shawn 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 Archives contributes 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.

Alternative Title

Gender, race, and class in visual

Subject

• 1800-1899
• Portrait photography > United States > History > 19th century
• Social classes > United States > History > 19th century
• Manners and customs
• Portrait photography
• Social classes
• Geschlechterforschung
• Gesellschaft Motiv
• Kunstwissenschaft
• Porträtfotografie
• Nationale identiteit
• Sociale ongelijkheid
• Beeldcultuur
• Fotografia > Estados unidos
• Gêneros (grupos sociais)
• Classes sociais > Século 19 > Estados unidos
• Imagem
• Geschichte 1800-1900
• United States > Social life and customs > 19th century
• United States
• USA
• Estados Unidos (Vida Cotidiana; Aspectos Sociais) > Século 19

Genre/Form

History

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. [227]-290) and index.

Contents

• Prying Eyes and Middle-Class Magic in The House of the Seven Gables -- "Magnetic" Daguerreotypes and the Masculine Gaze -- Evil Eyes and Feminine Essence -- Making the House a Home -- The Public Private Sphere -- The Properties of Blood -- The Blood That Flows in Subterranean Pipes -- Blood, Character, and Race -- The Spectacle of Race -- Seeing Bloodlines -- Superficial Depths -- The Portrait and the Likeness. Photographing the Soul -- Class Acts: Real Things and True Performances -- The Criminal Body and the Portrait of a Type -- Consuming Commodities: Gender in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction -- "Baby's Picture Is Always Treasured": Eugenics and the Reproduction of Whiteness in the Family Photograph Album -- Mechanically Reproducing Baby -- Reproducing Racial Inheritance -- Sentimental Aura and the Evidence of Race -- America Coursing through Her Veins -- From the Bonds of Love to Bloodlines -- America's White Aristocracy -- In the Name of White Womanhood -- "A Heritage Unique in the Ages" -- Photographing the "American Negro": Nation, Race, and Photography at the Paris Exposition of 1900 -- Racialized Bodies, National Character, and Photographic Documentation -- Making Americans -- Conserving Race in the Nation -- Looking Back: Pauline Hopkins's Challenge to Eugenics -- Envisioning Race: Bodies on Display in Hagar's Daughter "Sons of One Father" -- Excavating the Hidden Self -- Visions beyond the Color Line -- Reconfiguring a Masculine Gaze -- Visions of Commodified Identity in Consumer Culture.
• Conspicuous Consumption under a Masculine Gaze: Rethinking Gender in Sister Carrie -- Parting Glances -- Afterimages A Brief Look at American Visual Culture in the 1990s.

ISBN

• 0691004773
• 9780691004778
• 0691004781
• 9780691004785

LCCN

99020126

OCLC

• ocm40939988
• 40939988
• SCSB-869986

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library