Jasmine Nichole Cobb
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- March 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781479817221
- eISBN:
- 9781479830619
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479817221.003.0004
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
This chapter examines Black visibility in public culture and how picturing freedom works as a means of conceptualizing nationhood. It considers the treatment of Black freedom in the Black press and ...
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This chapter examines Black visibility in public culture and how picturing freedom works as a means of conceptualizing nationhood. It considers the treatment of Black freedom in the Black press and explains how the powerful combination of words and images in caricatures became the unchecked representation of Blackness in the larger cultural imaginary. It shows how seemingly disconnected materials like racist caricatures, Black newspapers, and abolitionist material cultures aligned through an inability to elide slavery's visual culture. It also explores how Black women's domesticity undermines Black national identity and connects ideas about visibility in African American public culture to the propaganda of the U.S. antislavery movement.Less
This chapter examines Black visibility in public culture and how picturing freedom works as a means of conceptualizing nationhood. It considers the treatment of Black freedom in the Black press and explains how the powerful combination of words and images in caricatures became the unchecked representation of Blackness in the larger cultural imaginary. It shows how seemingly disconnected materials like racist caricatures, Black newspapers, and abolitionist material cultures aligned through an inability to elide slavery's visual culture. It also explores how Black women's domesticity undermines Black national identity and connects ideas about visibility in African American public culture to the propaganda of the U.S. antislavery movement.
Nicole R. Fleetwood
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- March 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226253022
- eISBN:
- 9780226253053
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226253053.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
This book addresses American culture's fixation on black visibility, exploring how blackness is persistently seen as a problem in public culture and even in black scholarship that challenges racist ...
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This book addresses American culture's fixation on black visibility, exploring how blackness is persistently seen as a problem in public culture and even in black scholarship that challenges racist discourse. It reorients the problem of black visibility by turning attention to what it means to see blackness and to the performative codes that reinforce, resignify, and disrupt its meaning. Working across visual theory and performance studies, the book asks: How can the black body can be visualized as both familiar and disruptive? How might we investigate the black body as a troubling presence to the scopic regimes that define it as such? How is value assessed based on visible blackness? The book documents multiple forms of engagement with the visual, even as it meticulously underscores how the terms of engagement change in various performative contexts. Examining a range of practices from the documentary photography of Charles “Teenie” Harris to the “excess flesh” performances of black female artists and pop stars, to the media art of Fatimah Tuggar to the iconicity of Michael Jackson, it reveals and reconfigures the mechanics, codes, and metaphors of blackness in visual culture.Less
This book addresses American culture's fixation on black visibility, exploring how blackness is persistently seen as a problem in public culture and even in black scholarship that challenges racist discourse. It reorients the problem of black visibility by turning attention to what it means to see blackness and to the performative codes that reinforce, resignify, and disrupt its meaning. Working across visual theory and performance studies, the book asks: How can the black body can be visualized as both familiar and disruptive? How might we investigate the black body as a troubling presence to the scopic regimes that define it as such? How is value assessed based on visible blackness? The book documents multiple forms of engagement with the visual, even as it meticulously underscores how the terms of engagement change in various performative contexts. Examining a range of practices from the documentary photography of Charles “Teenie” Harris to the “excess flesh” performances of black female artists and pop stars, to the media art of Fatimah Tuggar to the iconicity of Michael Jackson, it reveals and reconfigures the mechanics, codes, and metaphors of blackness in visual culture.
Jasmine Nichole Cobb
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- March 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781479817221
- eISBN:
- 9781479830619
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479817221.003.0006
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
This epilogue suggests that Barack Obama's election as president of the United States is a fitting conclusion to the story of Black visibility in the United States, from slavery through civil rights. ...
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This epilogue suggests that Barack Obama's election as president of the United States is a fitting conclusion to the story of Black visibility in the United States, from slavery through civil rights. It considers how the vision of freedom realized in a Black president harkens a visual history that has instantiated U.S. identity in a transatlantic context since the earliest ruminations on the abolition of slavery. This peculiar trajectory is brought into sharp relief by the view of the Black president in the context of the White House. Obama represents a sign of Black freedom for transatlantic circulation in the twenty-first century; this sheer representability is the source of his ability to inspire and disillusion.Less
This epilogue suggests that Barack Obama's election as president of the United States is a fitting conclusion to the story of Black visibility in the United States, from slavery through civil rights. It considers how the vision of freedom realized in a Black president harkens a visual history that has instantiated U.S. identity in a transatlantic context since the earliest ruminations on the abolition of slavery. This peculiar trajectory is brought into sharp relief by the view of the Black president in the context of the White House. Obama represents a sign of Black freedom for transatlantic circulation in the twenty-first century; this sheer representability is the source of his ability to inspire and disillusion.
