Picture Freedom

In the vast archive of visual materials created by both pro- and antislavery forces prior to the invention of the daguerreotype in 1839, progressive depictions of free African Americans are relatively rare, as Jasmine Nichole Cobb points out in her fascinating new study. Moreover, when free African Americans were pictured, these illustrations tended to mock and satirize the supposed strivings of blacks to attain social status or their purported hyperbolic fashions. Cobb’s book perceptively elucidates the ways that picturing African American freedom threatened the visual logic not only of slavery but also of white middle-class subjectivity, in which Anglo-Americans were always the spectator and African Americans were the object of the gaze. For this reason, across a vast array of popular visual cultural modes—cartoons, caricature, broadsides, illustrated magazines, portraiture, and even wallpaper—depictions of free and unfree African Americans tended to support a visual regime of enslavement and colonization in which the bodies of African Americans (and particularly African American women) subtended ideologies of white superiority and dominance.

African american · Art · CobB · Dominance (genetics) · Ideology · Middle class · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Subjectivity · Visual culture · White (mutation) · Anthropology · Gender Studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Photography and Visual Culture