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

Abstract

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