Race and Vision in the Nineteenth-Century United States

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

• Part 1: Articulate SpacesChapter 1: The Racial Geometry of the Nation: Thomas Jefferson’s Grids and OctagonsIrene ChengChapter 2: Arctic Whiteness: William Bradford, Herman Melville, and the Invisible Spheres of Fright Wyn KelleyChapter 3: Music and Military Movement: Racial RepresentationBrigitte FielderChapter 4: Black Faces Etched in White Stone: Black Feminist Visuality in Edmonia Lewis’s SculptureKelli MorganChapter 5: Enchanted Optics: Excavating the Magical Empiricism of Holmesian Stereoscopic SightCheryl SpinnerChapter 6: Between Word and Image: The Use of Humor, Satire, and Caricature in Early Abolitionist Political CartoonsMartha CutterPart 2: Democratic VisionsChapter 7: Seeing Irony in Barnum’s America: Anti-Slavery Humor in UncleTom’s CabinAdena SpingarnChapter 8: Babo’s Skull, Aranda’s Skeleton: Visualizing the Sentimentality of Race Science in Benito CerenoChristine YaoChapter 9: Melville’s Greens: Color Theory and DemocracyJennifer GreimanChapter 10: Narrative Structure as Secular Judgment in Thomas Crawford’s Progress of CivilizationKirsten Pai BuickChapter 11: Beheld by the Eye of God: Photography and the Promise of Democracy in Frederick Douglass’s The Heroic SlaveKya MangrumChapter 12: Cotton Babies: Mama’s Maybe: Kara Walker’s Marvels of InventionJanet Neary

Through astute editorship (or dare I say curation), Shirley Samuels has assembled an excellent collection, Race and Vision in the Nineteenth-Century United States, which offers far-reaching case studies of myriad forms, such as land surveying, theatrical staging, sheet music, stereography, and literature, attending to the distinct properties of each. . . . [this book] will be of interest to any scholar, student, library, or layperson engaged in the history of the United States, the long nineteenth century, cultural and intellectual histories of race, and art history and visual culture, especially those probing questions regarding the constitutive relationship among race, technological and philosophical progress, and vision.