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Looking for America
The Visual Production of Nation and People
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Edited by Ardis Cameron
Blackwell Publishers
Due/Published
January 2005, 408 pages,
paper
ISBN
1405114665
Looking for America: The Visual Production of Nation and People is a collection that explores the "visual" in defining the kaleidoscope of American experience and American identity in the 20th century. Introducing students to the visual in all its complexity and variety on the American scene across 100 years-the language of signs, the historical construction and meaning of "types," the uses and politics of photography, film, bodily display and documentaries--the volume underscores the productivity of the visual in thinking about race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and regionality. It clearly demonstrates that the ways people see and are seen determine who they are and how they see themselves as citizens and Americans.Looking for America tackles subjects of enduring importance in the history of America: nationhood, class, the politics of identity, and the visual mapping of "others." An editorial introduction places the articles within a narrative structure that tells a collective tale of how this experiment called "America" took on visual shape and meaning. Suggested readings, a primer on how to "read" an image, and a guide to visual archives and collections round out the volume. Contents Introduction
Suggested Readings
PART I: 1860-1900
Modern Types
1 Sleuthing Towards America: Visual Detection in Everyday Life
Ardis Cameron
2 Cartes De Viste Portrait Photographs and The Culture of Class Formation
Andrea L. Volpe
Suggested Readings
PART II: 1900-1940
The Embodied Nation: Race, Gender and the Politics of the Camera
3 Photographing the American Negro”: Nation, Race, and Photography at the Paris Exposition of 1900
Shawn Michelle Smith
4 Techniques of the Imaginary Nation: Engendering Family Photography
Laura Wexler
“The Eye of Power”: Cross-Class Looking
5 Private Eyes, Public Women: Images of Class and Sex in the Urban South, Atlanta, Georgia, 1913-1915
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall
6 Margaret Bourke-White’s Red Coat; or, Slumming in the Thirties
Paula Rabinowitz
Suggested Readings
PART III: 1940-2000
Home and Nation: Imagining the “All-American” Family
7 The Kind of People Who Make Good Americans: Nationalism and Life’s Family Ideal
Wendy Kozol
8 Visual Culture and Working Class Community: Photography and the Organizing of the Steelworkers’ Union in Chicago
Larry Peterson
9 Sit-coms and Suburbs: Positioning the 1950’s Homemaker
Mary Beth Haralovich
The Eye of Difference: The Politics of Appearance
10 The Zoot-Suit and Style Warfare
Stuart Cosgrove
11 Looking Jewish, Seeing Jews
Matthew Frye Jacobson
Troubling Sights (Sites): Visual Maps and America’s “Others”
12 The Photograph as an Intersection of Gazes
Catherine A. Lutz and Jane L. Collins
13 When Strangers Bring Cameras: The Poetics and Politics of Othered Places
Ardis Cameron
Suggested Readings
Appendix A
"Reading the Visual Record", Elspeth H. Brown
Appendix B
List of Visual Archives, Ardis Cameron |
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