Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity

Posted in Anthologies, Arts, Books, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, United States on 2012-07-19 00:55Z by Steven

Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity

Duke University Press
2012
400 pages
71 photographs
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-5085-9
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-5067-5

Edited by:

Maurice O. Wallace, Associate Professor of English and African & African American Studies
Duke University

Shawn Michelle Smith, Associate Professor of Visual and Critical Studies
School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Pictures and Progress explores how, during the nineteenth century and the early twentieth, prominent African American intellectuals and activists understood photography’s power to shape perceptions about race and employed the new medium in their quest for social and political justice. They sought both to counter widely circulating racist imagery and to use self-representation as a means of empowerment. In this collection of essays, scholars from various disciplines consider figures including Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and W. E. B. Du Bois as important and innovative theorists and practitioners of photography. In addition, brief interpretive essays, or “snapshots,” highlight and analyze the work of four early African American photographers. Featuring more than seventy images, Pictures and Progress brings to light the wide-ranging practices of early African American photography, as well as the effects of photography on racialized thinking.

Contributors. Michael A. Chaney, Cheryl Finley, P. Gabrielle Foreman, Ginger Hill, Leigh Raiford, Augusta Rohrbach, Ray Sapirstein, Suzanne N. Schneider, Shawn Michelle Smith, Laura Wexler, Maurice O. Wallace

Table of Contents

  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction: Pictures and Progress / Maurice O. Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith
  • 1. “A More Perfect Likeness”: Frederick Douglass and the Image of the Nation / Laura Wexler
  • 2. “Rightly Viewed”: Theorizations of the Self in Frederick Douglass’s Lecture on Pictures / Ginger Hill
  • 3. Shadow and Substance: Sojourner Truth in Black and White / Augusta Rohrbach
    • Snapshot 1. Unredeemed Realities: Augustus Washington / Shawn Michelle Smith
  • 4. Mulatta Obscura: Camera Tactics and Linda Brent / Michael Chaney
  • 5. Who’s Your Mama?: “White” Mulatta Genealogies, Early Photography, and Anti-Passing Narratives of Slavery and Freedom / P. Gabrielle Foreman
  • 6. Out from Behind the Mask: Paul Laurence Dunbar, the Hampton Institute Camera Club, and Photographic Performance of Identity / Ray Sapirstein
    • Snapshot 2. Reproducing Black Masculinity: Thomas Askew / Shawn Michelle Smith
  • 7. Louis Agassiz and the American School of Ethnoeroticism: Polygenesis, Pornography, and Other “Perfidious Influences” / Suzanne Schneider
  • 8. Framing the Black Soldier: Image, Uplift, and the Duplicity of Pictures / Maurice O. Wallace
    • Snapshot 3. Unfixing the Frame(-up): A. P. Bedou / Shawn Michelle Smith
  • 9. “Looking at One’s Self through the Eyes of Others”: W. E. B. Du Bois’s Photographs for the Paris Exposition of 1900 / Shawn Michelle Smith
  • 10. Ida B. Wells and the Shadow Archive / Leigh Raiford
    • Snapshot 4. The Photographer’s Touch: J. P. Ball / Shawn Michelle Smith
  • 11. No More Auction Block for Me! / Cheryl Finley
  • Bibliography
  • Contributors
  • Index
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The Obama Issue

Posted in Articles, Arts, Barack Obama, New Media, Social Science on 2009-11-22 21:26Z by Steven

The Obama Issue

Journal of Visual Culture
August 2009
Volume 8, No. 2
Online ISSN: 1741-2994
Print ISSN: 1470-4129

The August 2009 edition of Journal of Visual Culture is focused on president Barack Obama.

Table of Contents

Marquard Smith and JVC Editorial Group
Questionnaire on Barack Obama
pp. 123-124

W.J.T. Mitchell
Obama as Icon
pp. 125-129

Shawn Michelle Smith
Obama’s Whiteness
pp. 129-133

Dora Apel
Just Joking? Chimps, Obama and Racial Stereotype
pp. 134-142  

Raimi Gbadamosi
I Believe In Miracles
pp. 142-150 

Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan
Recognizing Obama: Image and Beyond?
pp. 150-154

Toby Miller
My Green Crush
pp. 154-158

Jacqueline Bobo
Impact of Grassroots Activism
pp. 158-160

Julian Myers, Dominic Willsdon, Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough, and Lauren Berlant
What Happened in Vegas
pp. 161-167

Lauren Berlant
Dear journal of visual culture
pp. 166-167

Marita Sturken
The New Aesthetics of Patriotism
pp. 168-172

Lisa Cartwright and Stephen Mandiberg
Obama and Shepard Fairey: The Copy and Political Iconography in the Age of the Demake
pp. 172-176  

John Armitage and Joy Garnett
Radicalizing Refamiliarization
pp. 176-183

Victor Margolin
Obama Sightings
pp. 183-189  

Joanna Zylinska
You Killed Barack Obama, 2008
pp. 190

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
The Modern Prince . . . ‘to come’?
pp. 191-193  

Anna Everett
The Afrogeek-in-Chief: Obama and our New Media Ecology
pp. 193-196  

Julian Stallabrass
Obama on Flickr
pp. 196-201  

Ellis Cashmore
Perpetual Evocations
pp. 202-206  

John Carlos Rowe
Visualizing Barack Obama
pp. 207-211 

Robert Harvey
Other Obamas
pp. 211-219

Curtis Marez
Obama’s BlackBerry, or This Is Not a Technology of Destruction
pp. 219-223

Cynthia A. Young
From ‘Keep on Pushing’ to ‘Only in America’: Racial Symbolism and the Obama Campaign
pp. 223-227

Nicholas Mirzoeff
An End to the American Civil War?
pp. 228-233

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