Acknowledgments

Smith, Shawn Michelle

I don't have an account

Create an account to save content, highlights, and notes to your personal bookshelf.

If you do not have access to the eBook content on the A&AePortal via an institutional subscription, you can purchase an individual subscription from your account. Learn more about subscriptions.

Purchase a subscription

Save Cite Share

Free

Acknowledgments

Shawn Michelle Smith

American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture

Acknowledgments

Author

Shawn Michelle Smith

PublisherPrinceton University Press

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-23311

Acknowledgments

This book is indebted to the efforts of many wise and kind people. I would like to thank Mary Ison and Jan Grenci for their generous help in the Prints and Photographs Division at the Library of Congress, Jennifer McClain for her assistance in the archives of the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution, and Lois Kettel for graciously offering me her home while I conducted research in Washington, D.C. My early work on this project was supported by a Predoctoral Humanities Dissertation Fellowship at the University of California, San Diego. A grant from the College of Liberal Arts at Washington State University helped me to secure many of the images for the book.

The members of my dissertation committee, Michael Davidson, Nicole Tonkovich, Wai Chee Dimock, Roddey Reid, Phel Steinmetz, and Stephanie McCurry, helped shape my first thoughts along these lines, and I am grateful for their many insights, which continue to inspire, and for the care with which they directed my research and writing. I am also indebted to Carolyn Haynes and Molly Rhodes for their critical commentary and good humor, and to Marsanne Brammer, Wendy Walters, Elise Hanley, Krista Lydia Roybal, Dave Harden, Mark Jenkins, and Linda Baker for their unwavering support. Lisa Bloom, Priscilla Wald, and Laura Wexler offered thoughtful and important suggestions that helped me to revise and expand the argument of this book, and I am thankful for their keen intellectual generosity. I have learned much from and felt sustained by conversations with Joan Burbick, Carol Siegel, and Maggie Sale, and I have come to depend especially upon the wisdom and cheer of T. V. Reed and Shelli Fowler. Deborah Malmud has been a wonderful editor, and I am grateful to her for guiding me through the final stages of this project. The constant encouragement of Jay, Sandy, and Shannon Smith has meant everything to me, and this book endeavors to live up to their examples of rigor and creativity. Finally, for Joe Masco, who cared for every word, let me count the ways.

Previous chapter

Book details

BOOKAmerican Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture

Shawn Michelle Smith

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00342

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-23309

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.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*

Author

Shawn Michelle Smith

PublisherPrinceton University Press

Print publication date December 1999 (in print)

Print ISBN 9780691004778

EISBN 9780300273175

Illustrations 56

Print Status in print

Publisher (in print)

WorldCat

Google Books

Base text size -

Chapter images ()