Eakins, Race, and Ethnographic Ambivalence

Braddock, Alan C.

doi:10.1086/496743

Cited by 10 publications

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“…Less complex than Eakins's design and lacking its intense observation and seriousness, Kemble's unpublished watercolor focuses on a single dominant figure sharing the foreground with large cotton blossoms—a harmless stereotype. This example of genteel sentimentality—what most viewers today would call a charming, if vacuous image—may explain how some of Kemble's contemporaries perceived him as a sympathetic portrayer of black Americans (Braddock 137).…”

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To Ignore Is to Deny: E. W. Kemble's Racial Caricature as Popular Art

Fortin

2007

The J of Popular Culture

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LTHOUGH WE MAY NOT FEEL COMFORTABLE ACKNOWLEDGING IT, popular culture of the nineteenth century frequently included the depiction of African Americans, and, to a lesser degree, members of other minority groups, as ugly, worthless, irresponsible, and buffoonish. Depicted in the illustrated press by white illustrators for an essentially white audience, the black caricature developed an aspect of the ''comic-grotesque,'' a vernacular unique to American illustration that revealed the social intricacies of black -white relationships. In the late nineteenth century, illustrators like E. W. Kemble conveyed the white social consciousness about blacks and reinforced a crystallized set of white beliefs about black culture. Minstrel shows, for example, one of the early forms of late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century American popular entertainment, created exaggerated images of black men and women that endured throughout much of the nineteenth century in popular illustration, advertising, and the decorative arts. These images were a white fantasy projected upon black people that had a powerful and lasting appeal for American whites. To ignore the art that reflects this fantasy effectively denies its existence and prevents a full understanding of the attitudes of many readers, writers, publishers, and artists that persisted well into the twentieth century. A careful study of these images and the artists who produced them, I contend, can broaden our understanding of the evolution of racial stereotypes reflected in popular culture.Edward Windsor Kemble (1861Kemble ( -1933 was one of the most popular caricaturists at the turn of the century (Figure 1). Kemble's racist

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To Ignore Is to Deny: E. W. Kemble's Racial Caricature as Popular Art

Fortin

2007

The J of Popular Culture

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Introduction

2024

Heavyweight

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The introduction reconsiders sporting images, particularly those of Black boxers, as integral to both the wider visual and cultural history of Blackness in the United States as well as the ecology of white violence that continues in our present moment. Although art historians tend to overlook images of athletes, along with other iconic and/or popular images, Heavyweight recognizes the ways in which Blackness is produced, rehearsed, and regulated through images of athletes that circulated in the Reconstruction period and after. These Black men were among the most reproduced in a thriving media culture, and as such should be considered as part of the visual record of Blackness. It is in these historical sporting images that we find the blueprint for our conceptions of the Black male body as existing somewhere between fear and fantasy, simultaneously an object of desire and an instrument of brutal violence.

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The Bare-Knuckle Breed

2024

Heavyweight

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The first chapter provides an overview of the sport of boxing in the United States, its place within the critical project of white manhood in the nineteenth century, and its intersections with an increased focus on the physical body as the site of masculinity. A particular focus is the circulation of images in popular illustrated print media, including the sporting paper the National Police Gazette, which provided a model for the monetization of visual culture and the cult of celebrity that still operates today.

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Eakins, Race, and Ethnographic Ambivalence

Cited by 10 publications

References 0 publications

To Ignore Is to Deny: E. W. Kemble's Racial Caricature as Popular Art

To Ignore Is to Deny: E. W. Kemble's Racial Caricature as Popular Art

Introduction

The Bare-Knuckle Breed

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