Facing America

Ranging among prints, photographs, statuary, and written texts, Shirley Samuels considers the question of representation in the Civil War era. What does it mean, she asks, to be faced or to have a face, at a time when war was disfiguring faces and when other cultural forces made the issue of identity problematic? Is it possible to imagine that the nation has a “face?” The power of Samuels's brief book derives from the provocative nature of her questions and from the confidence with which she considers a wide variety of materials. The book's drawback derives from those same elements: the volume seems finally to be scattered, impressionistic, and undeveloped, a set of stimulating notes for a much more elaborate study. Like Samuels's earlier monograph, Romances of the Republic (1996), Facing America is rooted in a version of new historicism in which popular culture forms interact with more canonized texts to offer new narratives and fresh interpretations. Romances of the Republic revealed Samuels's skillful deployment of revolutionary-era visual and written texts to discern how women and the family represented the struggles over national identity and values and how they also embodied those struggles. She achieved an admirable mix of close readings of texts, theoretical references, and context from social and political history

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Context (archaeology · Face (sociological concept · Iconography · Identity (music · Literature · Narrative · New Historicism · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Representation (politics · Social science · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · History · Law · Photography and Visual Culture