Vision Race And Modernity

Through an intensive examination of photographs and engravings from European, Peruvian, and U.S. archives, Deborah Poole explores the role visual images and technologies have played in shaping modern understandings of race. Vision, Race, and Modernity traces the subtle shifts that occurred in European and South American depictions of Andean Indians from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, and explains how these shifts led to the modern concept of "racial difference." While Andean peoples were always thought of as different by their European describers, it was not until the early nineteenth century that European artists and scientists became interested in developing a unique visual and typological language for describing their physical features. Poole suggests that this "scientific" or "biological" discourse of race cannot be understood outside a modern visual economy. Although the book specifically documents the depictions of Andean peoples, Poole's findings apply to the entire colonized world of the nineteenth century. Poole presents a wide range of images from operas, scientific expeditions, nationalist projects, and picturesque artists that both effectively elucidate her argument and contribute to an impressive history of photography. Vision, Race, and Modernity is a fascinating attempt to study the changing terrain of racial theory as part of a broader reorganization of vision in European society and culture.

David Ciarlo offers an innovative visual history of each of these transformations. Tracing commercial imagery across different products and media, Ciarlo shows how and why the "African native" had emerged by 1900 to become a familiar figure in the German landscape, selling everything from soap to shirts to coffee. The racialization of black figures, first associated with the American minstrel shows that toured Germany, found ever greater purchase in German advertising up to and after 1905, when Germany waged war against the Herero in Southwest Africa. The new reach of advertising not only expanded the domestic audience for German colonialism, but transformed colonialism's political and cultural meaning as well as, by infusing it with a simplified racial cast.

In the early twentieth century, the life philosophy of Henri Bergson summoned the élan vital, or vital force, as the source of creative evolution. Bergson also appealed to intuition, which focused on experience rather than discursive thought and scientific cognition. Particularly influential for the literary and political Négritude movement of the 1930s, which opposed French colonialism, Bergson's life philosophy formed an appealing alternative to Western modernity, decried as "mechanical," and set the stage for later developments in postcolonial theory and vitalist discourse. Revisiting narratives on life that were produced in this age of machinery and war, Donna V. Jones shows how Bergson, Nietzsche, and the poets Leopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire fashioned the concept of life into a central aesthetic and metaphysical category while also implicating it in discourses on race and nation. Jones argues that twentieth-century vitalism cannot be understood separately from these racial and anti-Semitic discussions. She also shows that some dominant models of emancipation within black thought become intelligible only when in dialogue with the vitalist tradition. Jones's study strikes at the core of contemporary critical theory, which integrates these older discourses into larger critical frameworks, and she traces the ways in which vitalism continues to draw from and contribute to its making.

"Making Sense: Race and Modern Vision" explores how race as we know it becomes visually recognizable. It does so by historicizing the perceptual knowledge produced by race and vision and by demonstrating how the relationship between race and vision has come to be regarded as common sensical. In particular the dissertation examines how race has been visually structured by the development of writing practices in the modern transatlantic context. Through the analysis of a wide textual field including fiction, philosophy, and visual art, "Making Sense" traces how race has acquired "visuality" via writing that represents race as self-evidently visible. The central argument is that the practice of writing literally makes sense of race because, tautologically, the visuality of race is represented as existent prior to its discursive presentation. While scholars have offered rich critiques of the role scientific vision has played in defining race (and justifying racial subjection), they have tended to explain the relationship between race and vision as overdetermined. "Making Sense" takes a different approach. It asks how the relationship between race and vision has been generated as common sensical in exploring vision through its historically aesthetic, or, sensorial structure. The story that "Making Sense" tells is narrated across four chapters. The chapters analyze a wide and unusual range of literary, visual, scientific, and philosophical texts that engage in racial discourse, including runaway slave advertisements, Kantian aesthetic philosophy, Darwinian evolutionary theory, turn-of-the-century architectural theories, black modernist fiction, and contemporary visual artwork. This collection of texts, produced in the context of national and global discourses of race, aesthetics, and modernity, is regarded as an archive of common sense vision. "Making Sense" examines how this archive demonstrates and exposes the fundamentally discursive structure and the formalist organization of the visual sense. In tracking the universalizing moves of formalist discourses, "Making Sense" utilizes formal methods, including close reading. This dissertation's innovation on formal analysis reorients what it means to perform historical scholarship and shows how narrow forms of disciplinary study have produced platitudes about race and vision.

DIVA collection of essays arguing for a global and economically based modernity driven by capitalist development./div

This book reconsiders the relationship between race and nation in Argentina during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and places Argentina firmly in dialog with the literature on race and nation in Latin America, from where it has long been excluded or marginalized for being a white, European exception in a mixed-race region. The contributors, based both in North America and Argentina, hail from the fields of history, anthropology, and literary and cultural studies. Their essays collectively destabilize widespread certainties about Argentina, showing that whiteness in that country has more in common with practices and ideologies of Mestizaje and 'racial democracy' elsewhere in the region than has typically been acknowledged. The essays also situate Argentina within the well-established literature on race, nation, and whiteness in world regions beyond Latin America (particularly, other European 'settler societies'). The collection thus contributes to rethinking race for other global contexts as well.

This book discusses the work of José Vasconcelos, Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, Emilio "El Indio" Fernández, El Santo, and Carlos Olvera. These artists--and many others--held diametrically opposed worldviews and used very different media while producing works during different decades. Nevertheless, each of these artists posited the fusion of the body with technology as key to forming an "authentic," Mexican identity.

DIVExplores how elites and commoners in Oaxaca constructed and experienced the process of modernity during President Porfirio Diaz's government./div

Finalist for the 2019 Edinburgh Gadda Prize This book explores intersectional constructions of race and whiteness in modern and contemporary Italy. It contributes to transnational and interdisciplinary reflections on these issues through an analysis of political debates and social practices, focusing in particular on visual materials from the unification of Italy (1861) to the present day. Giuliani draws attention to rearticulations of the transnationally constructed Italian ‘colonial archive’ in Italian racialised identity-politics and cultural racisms across processes of nation building, emigration, colonial expansion, and the construction of the first post-fascist Italian society. The author considers the ‘figures of race’ peopling the Italian colonial archive as composing past and present ideas and representations of (white) Italianness and racialised/gendered Otherness. Students and scholars across a range of disciplines, including Italian studies, political philosophy, sociology, history, visual and cultural studies, race and whiteness studies and gender studies, will find this book of interest.

Anti-Imperialist Modernism excavates how U.S. cross-border, multi-ethnic anti-imperialist movements at mid-century shaped what we understand as cultural modernism and the historical period of the Great Depression. The book demonstrates how U.S. multiethnic cultural movements, located in political parties, small journals, labor unions, and struggles for racial liberation, helped construct a common sense of international solidarity that critiqued ideas of nationalism and essentialized racial identity. The book thus moves beyond accounts that have tended to view the pre-war “Popular Front” through tropes of national belonging or an abandonment of the cosmopolitanism of previous decades. Impressive archival research brings to light the ways in which a transnational vision of modernism and modernity was fashioned through anti-colonial networks of North/South solidarity. Chapters examine farmworker photographers in California’s central valley, a Nez Perce intellectual traveling to the Soviet Union, imaginations of the Haitian Revolution, the memory of the U.S.–Mexico War, and U.S. radical writers traveling to Cuba. The last chapter examines how the Cold War foreclosed these movements within a nationalist framework, when activists and intellectuals had to suppress the transnational nature of their movements, often rewriting the cultural past to conform to a patriotic narrative of national belonging.