A01=Britt Rusert
abolition
antebellum
Author_Britt Rusert
Black aesthetics
Black Forest fairy tale
bohemianism
Brooklyn
Category=AGA
Category=JBSL
Category=NHK
Crispus Attucks
ekphrasis
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
fantasy
forthcoming
Frederick Douglass
James McCune Smith
New Negro Renaissance
New York City
Obour Tanner
Phillis Wheatley
poetry
print culture
queer aesthetics
queerness
racial capitalism
Reconstruction
Scipio Moorhead
slave trade
slavery
speculative fiction
The Arcades Project
visual art
Visual culture
visual theory
Product details
- ISBN 9781478039075
- Weight: 445g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 29 Sep 2026
- Publisher: Duke University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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In The Afric-American Picture Gallery, Britt Rusert examines a work of periodical fiction by educator and activist William J. Wilson, an episodic series of experimental prose and biting satire that was published in 1859. It tells the tale of a flaneur character who takes readers on a virtual tour through an imagined gallery of Black art, long before any such museum existed in the United States. Rusert uses Wilson’s series as groundwork to formulate a theory and practice of Black aesthetics and politics, considering the construction of autonomous zones of Black expression and vanguardism within the context of the late Antebellum period. Connecting Wilson’s writings to later emergences of the avant-garde and counter-cultural and analyzing ekphrastic methods of vividly describing visual art, Rusert brings a little-circulated piece of writing to the fore as an inflection point in the history of Black publics and imagination.
Britt Rusert is Professor of Afro-American Studies at University of Massachusetts Amherst and Executive Editor of the Massachusetts Review. She is the author of Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture and coeditor of W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America.
