a Woman
A01=Shawn Michelle Smith
Abolitionism
African Americans
Anti-miscegenation laws
Author_Shawn Michelle Smith
Bell hooks
Black people
Category=AJ
Category=JBCC
Category=JBSF
Category=JBSL
Category=JBSL1
Category=NHTB
Cesare Lombroso
Color line (civil rights issue)
Commodity
Composite portrait
Cultural imperialism
Daguerreotype
Dick and Jane
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Eric Hobsbawm
Eugenics
Exchange of women
Family resemblance
Francis Galton
Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Heredity
I
Ibid (short story)
Indian removal
Iola Leroy
Jacob Riis
Jean Fagan Yellin
John H. Van Evrie
Judith Butler
Kwame Anthony Appiah
Lynching
Male gaze
Manifest destiny
Mathew Brady
Middle class
Miscegenation
Moral suasion
Mrs.
Narrative
Nathaniel Hawthorne
New Negro
Of One Blood (novel)
Oppositional Gaze
Patriarchy
Pauline Hopkins
Photography
Phrenology
Physiognomy
Pyncheon
Race (human categorization)
Racial hierarchy
Racial segregation
Racialism
Racism
Reproduction
Scientific racism
Separate spheres
Sister Carrie
Slavery
Stephen Crane
Superiority (short story)
The Bell Curve
The Fountainhead
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Theodore Dreiser
Thorstein Veblen
V.
W. E. B. Du Bois
Wai Chee Dimock
Walter Benjamin
White people
White Rage
White supremacy
Product details
- ISBN 9780691004785
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 197 x 254mm
- Publication Date: 19 Dec 1999
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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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.
Shawn Michelle Smith is Assistant Professor of English and American Studies at Washington State University.
