Race and Visualism

by William Washabaugh

last revised 6/23/04

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Truth	Nation	Art
19th Century	20th Century	Summary

Part I - Strategies of Racialization

The Triangular Foundation of Racism The central problem to be addressed in our course ANTHRO 150 “Multicultural America” is the root and source of practices that involve the generic categorizations of humans by way of allegedly inherent characteristics.  Stated in simpler terms, we will consider the logic and operations of racism. 

Right away, even before explaining “the logic and operations of racism,” I should make it clear that this course will not be about minority cultures.  More precisely, we will not spend much time describing and appreciating the social history or cultural contributions of African-, Asian-, Latino- and Native- Americans.  These matters would be appropriate for courses in Africology or Latino studies, and so on, but not for our course, “Multicultural America.”  Such a focus on the social history and cultural contributions of minorities is frequently tied, implicitly at least, to a political agenda: social and cultural studies of minorities provide the ground of legitimacy for validating minorities politically (by, for example, lobbying for African-, Asian-, Latino-, Native- American issues and voting for candidates who support these issues). 

Such a linkage-- even implicit linkage-- is peripheral to “our concern with the logic and operation of racism,” and perhaps even out of step with it.  I say this because the central concern of our course is to explicate and puzzle over the normally invisible processes through which social groups have become politically ascendant in modern times, roughly since 1800, and to note that such processes frequently draw on the logic and operations of racism.  It would not make sense for us to spend our time documenting the legitimacy of African-, Asian-, Latino-, and Native- Americans as political players, if our primary purpose is ask what it means to be a player. 

Being a political player in our modern world has often-- if not always-- depended on racializing practices, and it is these practices that we will try to understand here. By way of preview, I can summarize our studies this way: racism is rooted in the triad of truth, nation, and art.  The quest for truth paved the road subsequently traveled by racializing practices.  These practices were then promoted and extended in order to meet the pressing political needs of emerging nation-st

ates.  Finally, on the third leg, racism has been naturalized by art, that is, by aesthetic practice, and specifically by visual imagery, even to our own day.   Our racism, in short, is anchored in seeking truth, committing to nation, and visual art. Truth, nation, and vision, these three, form the triadic foundation of modern racism.

We pursue this issue of racism and its operations because we, like Paul Gilroy and a host of other scholars, are convinced that, while race is not real, racism most certainly is.  And, we contend, along former Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackman, that “in order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race.” 

This means that we must learn to think, talk, and act in ways that counteract racism and stanch our tendency to reproduce it in our own day. However, in this effort to nullify racism, we do not consider it to be sufficient to simply proclaim, as many anthropologists have – often with remarkable passion -- that race does not exist, that race is chimerical, that race is a fiction. It is not enough to say that there is nothing natural about dividing up the human species according to skin color any more than in dividing up the human species according to tongue-curling abilities. It is not enough to issue pronouncements against the naturalness of racial categorizations:

"Human populations are not unambiguous, clearly demarcated, biologically distinct groups. Evidence from the analysis of genetics (e.g., DNA) indicates that there is greater variation within racial groups than between them. These facts render any attempt to establish lines of division among biological populations both arbitrary and subjective." (American Anthropological Association, 1998)

Such statements are important. They stand four square against the idiocies of common sense, against those powerful and endlessly influential racializing views that have been passed down to us all. However, they , do not in themselves --because they cannot--  quash racism. To the contrary, we suspect that apodictic statements from scientists and politicians about the nonexistence of race may actually advance racializing practices as much as they stymie them. (Singh, Black is a Country, 2004: 12). 

Such a suspicion, that denying race might indirectly promote racism, will itself remain suspicious until we nail down the first corner of our triad, namely, that racism operates out of goals, assumptions, and practices endemic to truth-seeking and, in our modern history, normal science. Inevitably, therefore, we must attend to these normal scientific practices, and especially to the techniques of thinking, speaking and seeing that are associated with normal science, if we are to penetrate the logic, and counteract the impact, of racism. 

Truth Why do we Westerns racialize humans?  Our contention here is that Western motivations for racializing are less obvious –and much less unsavory than -- conquest, competition, profit, brutality, selfishness, etc.  At their historical roots, racializing practices spring from a theological -- and, increasingly after 1650, from a scientific -- quest for truth. 

The path along which this quest for truth has been pursued, is tortuous.  Its twists and turns are evident in a wide variety of initiatives, discursive practices, and institutions that have appeared and gained strength since about 1650. Not least among these are the utopian movements that became increasingly popular in the seventeenth century (Frank and Fritizie Manuel Utopias and Utopian Thought, 1966; Kumar Utopia and Anti-Utopia), and the decontextualizing discursive styles that gained currency in Europe at the beginning of the eighteenth, paving the way for the language of normal science (Bauman and Briggs, Voices of Modernity, 2003).

One only need consider the changes in the institution of the museum and in their exhibition practices between 1650 and 1800 in order to see how early modern Europeans turned away from imaginative explorations of human experience (constructing of patterns of meaning from signs, as illustrated by Marcia Colish (Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition, 1997, and  Jesse Gellrich The Idea of the Book in the Middle Ages, 1985). Increasingly, they turned towards categorizing behaviors, discourses, and attitudes, all of which aimed to reduce puzzlingly variegated experiences to knowable and manageable simplicities. Stephen Asma (Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads, 2000) and George Lakoff, author of Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things (1994), in their different ways, have clarified this trend, with its passion for categorization while also providing incisive criticisms of its outcome. 

The target of the criticisms made by Stephen Asma and George Lakoff is not yet racism, but something very close to it, namely the generic categorization of humans, now made to seem natural and necessary. Both of these scholars criticize the Enlightenment idea that humans, no less than plants and animals, can and should be categorized.  

The observations made by Asma and Lakoff are straightforward and not difficult to appreciate. They expose for us the concept and practice popularized, during the eighteeenth century, according to which apples and oranges are different and should be described and proclaimed so. These fruits, it was said, are simply different, utterly different, so clearly different that one should shun arithmetic additions that combine the two as if they were plague-ridden. Asma and Lakoff demonstrate how far this mindset extended, showing that Enlightenment philosophes regarded horses and cats to be just as categorically distinct as apples and oranges. And so too, they considered men different from women, citizens different from primitives.  And finally -- closer to our point -- they considered Caucasians and Negroids to be categorically distinct.  

One should not misunderstand their claims.  Before 1650, Europeans were not so blind as to confuse apples and oranges.  On the contrary, the European awareness of what could be done with each was extraordinarily well developed.  However, in their use of these fruits, Europeans were generally not fixated on the problem of boundaries.  They spent relatively little energy trying to figure out how and why they were different. They just were. Enough said.  By the same token, Europeans before 1650, were not at all confused about the anatomical differences between males and females, tall people and short people, dark-skinned people and light.  But, and here is the point, they devoted less energy to clarifying, dramatizing, and problematizing these differences than did Europeans after 1650. 

With respect to the distinction between men and women, the fashion practices of the past provide us with some fairly strong supporting evidence of the fact that gender differences were not problematized before 1650 as they were after. Joanne Entwistle observes “Until the seventeenth or even the eighteenth century, sexual difference in dress was not strongly marked” (The Fashioned Body, 2000: 152).  Gender differences were there and were recognized, but they were not proclaimed sartorially.

What then prompted the concern with category-boundaries after 1650?  Sander Gilman has contended that the concern with boundaries is a response to threats to the social order. “Difference,” he says, “is that which threatens order and control.” (Gilman, Difference and Pathology, 1985, p. 21).  Such threats were clear enough in the seventeenth century, and they prompted unprecedented concerns about the boundaries of normal people, places, and things.

Fragile order – and this is hardly an overstatement of the case --  was the prevailing condition in mid-seventeenth century England.  The hundred years leading up to 1650 had been roiled by disputes, both rhetorical and military, about religious authority and its ability to provide a foundation for the social order.  Then in 1649, the regicide capped this confusion with its assault against secular political authority; Charles I was hanged drawn and quartered.  Diggers, Levellers, Puritans, and Quakers created new social orders with varying designs as quickly as the old orders fell away.

Nor was this confusion limited to England.  As Jose Maravall makes clear in his Culture of the Baroque (1986), no Western European region was immune. Europeans in every corner were doubled over with confusion.  All were bent on rejecting one order in their feverish search to recover another.  No one seemed to have any sense – to borrow the words of Chief Dan George in Little Big Man—of where the center of the earth was.

 Such confusion prompted a spate of predictable reactions.  Escape, retrenchment, spectacle, and simplification come to mind. All these reactions exerted their influence on the racializing practices that were pursued more feverishly as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth.

Escape and diversion were common reactions to the events that occurred in England during the seventeenth century. On the one hand, the Puritans, sensing the coming disaster, set sail for Plymouth in the north and Providence Island in the south – history provides us with considerably more detail about the former group than the latter.  On the other hand, in the thick of the English confusion Issac Walton gave us The Compleat Angler, 1655, with its heartfelt recommendation that fishing is the only sensible thing to do when the world has gone mad .   

By retrenchment, I mean, the retreat to a higher and safer ground from which to confront the rising tide of disorder.  The Leviathan and the Air Pump, 1986, by Shapin and Shaffer, provides us with a clear picture of the retrenchment efforts by Robert Boyle in the 1670s to construct the safe and promising territory of laboratory life in which to pursue the truth, not so much about society or politics, but simply of the behavior of gases under pressure.  By withdrawing his attention  from contingencies of the street, and by entertaining decontextualized idealizations such as "gas" and "vacuum" in the laboratory, Boyle offered a new model, an extension of Bacon’s novum organum, for attaining to the truth.  By exercising maximal control over a minimum of variables, Boyle was able to provide the world with an unexpectedly positive outcome –for that time at least -- namely a conclusion that all could assent to.  However, when understood in the context of his times and in the light of his ongoing debate with Thomas Hobbes, Boyle’s real accomplishment  –and this is the most surprising feature of the Shapin/Shaffer excursus – was less to inaugurate the new horizon of science, than to shed a ray of hope onto the old horizon of politics: truth had not fled the earthly order; one simply had to use the right method to see it.

Public spectacles were shifting gears in the seventeenth century.  Royal and liturgical spectacles were just then stepping onto the slippery slope that has carried them into disrepair and desuetude over the 300 years leading up to the present.

According to Connerton (How do Societies Remember?, 1989) and Terdiman (Present/Past, 1993), the slope steepened sharply after the French Revolution, sending modern social life into a condition of social amnesia.  Because spectacles perform memories, waning spectacles signal failing memories, that is, social amnesia.

But as fast as the spectacles of the old order were fading, just that fast were new spectacles emerging.  And they were of a sort that could bolster confidence in the face of the disorderliness of the fast changing world.  Returning explorers paraded the results of their exploits in improvizational public theatre (Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations,  1988).  Collectors morphed their private curiosity cabinets into public museums, the first of which, the Ashmole, opened its doors in 1652.  In both cases, the aim was to display, if not flaunt, the rich diversity of the world, in such a way that viewers would be “stopped in their tracks” and caught up in the wonder of it all (Greenblatt, Learning to Curse, 1990). 

These new spectacles worked to cut viewers free from the past (Maleuvre, Museum Memories: History, Technology Art, 1991).  “Curiously, whereas the museum in today's world is associated with cultural preservation, it first appeared as a means of social renewal: as a way of breaking, rather than bonding, with the ways of the past.” (Ibid., p. 9) Always the aim of the new spectacles was to inspire confidence in the new fast-changing order.  How else to interpret the spectacle of music and elephants presented to the new French citizenry in 1794 (McClellan, Michael, 1995 "If We Could Talk with the Animals" Elephants and Musical Performance During the French Revolution. Cruising the Performative, ed Brett & Leigh)?  Though the new music may not appeal to God or the King, nevertheless its power is universal,  and, in addition, so beneficent that even a herd of elephants cannot but respond. Anyone who doubts it can look and see for himself.

Simplification Stephen Asma’s discussion of the history of classification in museums between 1750 and 1850 is a short-hand for the history of science: the description of the world in terms of objects that can be characterized simply and defined unambiguously. For an even quicker study of this penchant for scientific simplicity, we can turn our attention to Dickens's character Thomas Gradgrind (Hard Times, chp. 2) who introduces himself in this way:

“A man of realities. A man of facts and calculations. A man who proceeds upon the principle that two and two are four, and nothing over, and who is not to be talked into allowing for anything over. Thomas Gradgrind, sir -- peremptorily Thomas -- Thomas Gradgrind. With a rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table always in his pocket, sir, ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to. It is a mere question of figures, a case of simple arithmetic. You might hope to get some other nonsensical belief into the head of George Gradgrind, or Augustus Gradgrind, or John Gradgrind, or Joseph Gradgrind (all supposititious, non-existent persons), but into the head of Thomas Gradgrind -- no, sir!   

Nation The preceding paragraphs have outlined the secular quest for truth that was kick-started in the mid-seventeenth century in order to counteract the crumbling foundations of the old religion-based social order. The initiatives, especially retrenchment, spectacle, and simplification, all associated with this renewal, inadvertently encouraged racializing practices in more recent centuries.

But it is difficult to appreciate the connection between truth-seeking and racializing practices without taking into considering a second set of forces, specifically, the new political form that emerged after 1650. We are talking here about the nation-state.  It was the nation-state and its requirements for successful operation that virtually required racializing.

It is true, nation-states did not flower fully until after 1650 (Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, 1992).  Moreover, we conventionally associate the expansive flexing of national muscles with the nineteenth century.  However, seeing as none of this developed abruptly, but grew instead like an oak from an acorn, we should probably start by considering the acorn in its early stage of sprouting.  That is, we can follow the lead of Fredrickson (Racism: A Short History,  2002) and revisit Spain in 1492 in order to appreciate nation, its elements, and its racializing operations.

First – and let’s get this straight at the start – when we talk about Spain in 1492 we will not talk about those footnote-events of October associated with the name of Columbus.  While Columbus’s discovery of new lands to the west shaped history thereafter, they did not significantly affect Spain’s nationhood in that extraordinary year of 1492. 

What did affect Spain in 1492 was the fall of  Granada in January, the expulsion of the Jews in March, and the publication of the grammar of Spain in June.  These were the signal and seminal events that propelled Spain from its condition of acorn to a sort of sapling-nation status in very short order.

From a time 700 years earlier, when Islamic forces had squeezed the Christians into the northern quadrant of the Iberian peninsula, those Christians waged a struggle of reconquista to recover what they saw to be their land. The struggle was long and slow, as the map will show.  Needless to say, 700 years of occupation led the Muslims in 1492 to believe that it was THEIR land. The matter was finally decided by  a six-month siege of the Alhambra in Granada, after which this last Muslim fortress fell, and the reconquista was complete. (map source: website for "Sephardic Genealog Resources," www.orthohelp.com/ geneal/maps1.htm)

The battle was won only because the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella made it possible to combine the armies of the erstwhile feuding provinces of Ferdinand’s Castile and Isabella’s Aragon. Then as now, the enemy of one’s enemy was one’s  friend, and maybe even one’s spouse. 

The early and prolonged reaction to this achievement was paranoia. The Christian Kings--as Ferdinand and Isabella were called –were afraid of a counter attack.  Muslim Africa, then as now, lay just 12 miles across the straits of Gibraltar.  Moreover, the population of southern Spain, Andalusia, included a great number of Muslims and Muslim sympathizers, including Jews and Gypsies.  So the first of the homeland security measures to be adopted was a boundary-defining measure, a population-fencing initiative. (Remember people attend to boundaries in times of disorder.)  Muslims, Jews, and Gypsies were required to live in identifiable ghettos.  There, they were made spatially distinct from the dominant cristianos.  They were  considered the contra-cristianos.  They were the contras. (Incidentally, our penchant for calling a nation-state a “country” harks back to such acts of bounding and contra-definition.)

The second major homeland security measure was forced conversion.  Muslims and Jews who continued to live in Spain had to undergo baptism and renounce their “infidelities.”  Considering the consequences, many Muslims and Jews obliged. They become “new Christians,” conversos, moriscos, marranos –terms are listed here in their order of decreasing delicacy.   The willingness of these conversos, however, generated the suspicion among dominant Christians, a fear that perhaps the conversos were surreptitiously clinging to their religions and continuing to practice their infidelities behind closed doors.  Accordingly, as Root (“Speaking Christian,” 1988, Representations 23) and Yovel  (Spinoza and Other Heretics, 1988) have made clear, the Spanish Inquisition --having been placed under the auspices of the King in the 1480s -- initiated some alarmingly sophisticated procedures to ferret out the closet-Islamic and secretly judaizing Christians.  They identified essential cultural traits associated with Judaism and Islam and then went about prosecuting conversos who exhibited these traits.  So one poor victim was burned at the stake for refusing to eat eggs cooked in pork fat.  Another was expelled from the country for bathing -- Christians rejected bathing with as much enthusiasm as Muslims embraced it. (Corbin  The Foul and The Fragrant, 1988) 

These measures were the first sophisticated efforts to distinguish people by internal and essential traits, setting aside  Christians from contras on the basis of abstract features that were nonetheless documentable. In this light of these 500-year old tactics, we must conclude that Clifford Geertz ‘s embrace of the mission of getting “inside the skin” of the natives was nothing so very new (1976 "'From the native's point of view': On the nature of anthropological understanding." in Meaning in anthropology, Edited by K. Basso and H. Selby, 221-237).  Getting “inside the skin” was the mission of the Spanish inquisition.  And we must concur that inquisitors knew what modern nationalists all now know so very clearly, that nationhood requires identifying and distinguishing cultural “identity badges” that lie  “inside the skin.”

It should be noted here that this Inquisitional quest to unearth deep-seated components of identity did not flower into maturity until the nineteenth century. For most years between 1500 and 1800, what counted was the outside not the inside. Heartfelt convictions, sincere beliefs, and deep desires registered not at all on the radar screens of officials.. Or if sincerity counted at all, it counted against the poor folks who confessed sincerely. As Isaiah Berlin notes, "The deeper the sincerity of such heretics, or unbelievers - Muslims, Jews, atheists - the more dangerous they are, the more likely to lead souls to perdition, the more ruthlessly should they be eliminated."

An official decree expelling Jews from Spain was promulgated in March of 1492.  Its aim was to homogenize the population in hopes of making it more docile, more easily governed.  In June, the homogenization effort took a great –one might even say momentous – leap forward with the publication of Nebrija’s grammar of Spanish. The introduction to his book, addressed to Queen Isabella, makes a sobering case for the use of language-engineering to control the spirits of citizens: “Together language and empire start and together they grow and flower, and together they decline…So far this Castilian language has been left by use loose and unruly, and in just a few centuries this language has changed beyond recognition because comparing what we speak today with the language of five hundred years ago, we notice a difference and diversity that could not be greater if these were two alien tongues.  To avoid these variegated changes I have decided to the turn the Castilian language from a loose possession of the people into an artifact so whatever shall henceforth be said or written in this language, shall be of standard coinage.” (Doe, Speak Into the Mirror, 1988, p. 252)

This grammar, the first of any vernacular European language, paved the way for other grammars, of French, Italian, English, and so on.  And in addition, it paved the way for  monolingual dictionaries of European languages, the affects of which were to homogenize languages in tandem with grammars and to sprung them free of history and context.  By defining every word in terms of other contemporary words,  monolingual dictionaries effectively wiped history aside while simultaneously relegating experience and context to a minor role. (Roy Harris (The Language Makers, 1980, p. 140)

These events, played out in 1492 in Spain, laid the foundation for the new political order that subsequently became known as the nation-state.  Its core components were xenophobia, homogenization, and objectification.  First, the xenophobia was orchestrated to repress or expunge social diversity.  Second, homogenization operated more positively to creative a conventionality and uniformity, first of behavior, then of thought and value within the citizenry.  Finally, objectification was the process that led citizens to believe that the root and foundation of their uniform practices and beliefs were objects, measurable things.  Just as Castilians after Nebrija could say that they are who they are by reason of the grammar that they know; so Frenchmen, Englishmen, and Germans, three hundred years later, could say that they are French, English, and German because of the distinctive cultures t hat lie within them.  They are who they are by reason of the cultural objects that really exist inside their skins.  Moreover, these objects provide a warrant for, and legitimation of, distinctive state institutions.  Distinctive states are required by distinctive nations.

In Europe after 1818, with the rise of ethnic nationalism, during the Romantic period, Germany and England, in the vanguard of the movement, pressed forward this idea that an spiritual object --often a persecuted spiritual object-- residing inside citizens was the key to political autonomy and personal authenticity.  (Isaiah Berlin The Crooked Timber of Humanity)  During this nineteenth century, politics joined forces with science to explicate and clarify the nature of these spiritual objects.  The concept of culture led the way.  But close behind were concepts such as hysteria (Didi-Huberman The Invention of Hysteria), archive (Thomas Richards, Imperial Archive, 1993), and maps/charts (J. Fabian Time and the Other, 1983, Chapter four), all of which, we shall see, were manifested visually. 

We conclude this section with a summary and an observation. The summary statement is that the nation-state as an abstract principle, our particular concrete nation-state, the U.S., "has been a powerful mechanism for at once instituting racial division." (Singh, op. cit, p. 13) Race and racism are not accidental by-products of nation-states. They form part of their very core, and nowhere has this core-status been clear than in the history of the U.S.

Our observation, however, is that the operations of a nation-state are internally unstable and even self-contradictory in a number of ways. In the following sections we will explore one particular instability, the reliance on external characteristics as a road to deciphering internal characteristics. As nationalistic thinking developed in the nineteenth century, the issue of interiority became more prominent. How was one to know with scientific certainty what is inside others, or for that matter, inside oneself? Paradoxically, but predictably given the rise of the scientific method, exteriorities, and particularly visually apprehended exteriorities, played a key role in defining interiorities.

Art and Vision  If you have read the previous sections on “truth” and “nation” carefully, you will note that they present two historical developments with mismatched conclusions.  The quest for truth led to Gradgrindian discourses including, for example, the plain-style descriptions of objects along with a panoply of techniques for measuring them.  The quest for nation led to foggier discourses, for example, the concepts of volksgeist and national culture couched in a rhetoric of honor and country. Gradgrindian objects were discussed with clarity, simplicity, and measurability.  Cultural objects were suffused with profundity, secrecy and ambiguity.

This mismatch, however, was effectively resolved in the nineteenth century, at least with respect to our central issues of culture and ethnicity, by the mediation of the third element of our triad, namely art. Art functioned as a bridging third. It spanned the gap between sensory/factual and spiritual/national experiences.

Our discussion of art-as-bridge must be prefaced by some history about language and imagery.

Throughout western Europe, up until the end of the medieval period, , texts and images were not considered two things but one. Words and pictures were the recto and verso of the world-page that God had crafted so carefully so as to reflect his own image.  This page, with images on the one side and words on the other, were regarded as faithful representation of God, but nevertheless always ambiguously and indirectly reflective of God.  It was the human challenge to penetrate the fog and blur of both in order to see God more clearly.

Even as late as 1625 – the date that Berman says signaled the end of the medieval and the beginning of the modern (Reenchantment of the World, 1981)—vision and word were thought to work together, each in its own way mediating divinity. It is in just such a spirit  Sir Thomas Browne’s wrote about Nature in 1625:  “Thus there are two bookes from whence I collect my Divinity; besides that written one of God, another of his servant Nature, that universall and publik Manuscript, that lies expans’d unto the eyes of all; those that never saw him in the one, have discovered him in the other. Surely, the Heathens knew better how to joyne and read these mysticall letters, then wee Christians, who cast a more carelesse eye on these common Hieroglyphicks, and disdain to suck Divinity from the flowers of nature.” (Gellrich The Idea of the Book in the Middle Ages,  1985, p. 29). Browne's words suggest that inspiring natural vistas were understood as texts redolent with signs of divinity and generally more accessible than language-texts. For Browne, a bucolic scene was a inspirational public manuscript authored by God.

By 1650 however, both texts and images had begun to be stripped of their cosmic significance.  Not that such divestiture came easily or painlessly.  Consider, for example, that the prescient John Donne wrote his Anatomie of the World, in 1611, foreseeing the coming world and its ills:   ‘Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone, All just supply, and all relation; Prince, subject, father, son, are things forgot,   For every man alone thinks he hath got To be a phoenix, and that then can be None of that kind, of which he is, but he. The secularization that Donne anticipated meant that words and images would be stripped of their power to reflect the face of God.  And so it came to be. After 1650, words and images were consigned to things of the world.  And if they represented anything at all, they represented only things in the world.

Words fell hard. Indeed, some communities, like the Quakers (Bauman Let Your Words be Few, 1983) dug in their heels and tried to maintain the medieval regime of signification even as it was, like Humpty Dumpty, crumbling into "peeces."  They continued to hold onto the idea that good words spring from human mouths at the behest of God. All other words, being bad words, are best not spoken at all. Hence the Quaker prescription of silence. But aside from such holdouts, language's fall from grace accelerated during the eighteenth century ( Bauman and Briggs Voices of Modernity,  2003). By 1750, severe doubts had arisen as to the capability of any words, even the most abstract words, to represent experiences faithfully and profoundly (Olivia Smith The Politics of Language 1791-1819, 1986; Rorty Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 1979). When, after Locke, words were understood to be arbitrarily connected to their denotata, suspicions grew. The fears were these, that words were either merely human constructs and therefore superficial, or else that they were coopted by rulers to oppress their subjects (Keach Arbitrary Power, 2004).

These suspicions about the trustworthiness of verbal representations led to the rise of interest in both mathematics and music as universal languages (Kevin Barry, Language, Music, and the Sign, 1987). Music and math were new and promising foundations for philosophers bent on serving  humans in all times and place….and maybe even elephants (op. cit.).

Images, for their part, were denigrated as illustrations and amusements (Stafford, Artful Science, 1994). And, as Stafford points out, have remained marginal to serious discourse until recent times (Stafford, Good Looking, 1996).

After the Napoleonic wars, "Romantics" sought words of a different sort (Babbitt Rousseau and Romanticism, 1977). Their quest was driven in part by their desire, as citiziens of formerly oppressed nations, to flex some national muscle, show some national starch, and bear witness to national authenticity. Romantics sought words sprung from the soul. As Hacking's Rewriting the Soul (1995) suggests, the age of mechanical rationality -- the Enlightenment -- gave way to an age of rational spirit, intelligent interiority, and profound mentality. Swept up in this shift, the Romantics struggled mightily at the task of finding words-of-the spirit. They sought words that would represent and even instantiate or corporealize the profundities German or English culture, words that would somehow parse the blood of generations stretching limitlessly into the past. Their search for words-of-profundity was ambitious to say the least.

In their quest for soul-words, Romantics inevitably resorted to sensuality and ultimately visuality, paradoxically bringing words and images back together in a new and distinctly modern amalgamation. This turn of events emerged out of a sea change in aesthetics, in how "the beautiful" was understood and appreciated at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

All the arts took on new airs of gravity, even solemnity (Johnson Listening in Paris, 1995) It was a time "when the art of listening to music and poetry developed into a posture almost religious in its ardor" (Gay, The Naked Heart, 1995, p 8). In the 1840s, when the celebrated ballerina Fanny Elssler performed in Boston, Margaret Fuller is reported to have whispered to Ralpha Waldo Emerson, sitting next to her, "This is poetry," to which Emerson whispered back, "No Margaret, It is religion." (Ibid.)

The new religious dimension of artistic beauty was mediated for its part by an equally newfound sensuality, a new appreciation of the body, of the senses, and of their profound social significance. This new appreciation was, partly at least, a reaction against the exaggerated rationalism and mentalism that dominated eighteenth century Europe. Edmund Burke, for example, tried to bring the world back into balance with his Reflections on the Revolution in France; he makes it clear that customs and traditions of the body are required if social and political life is to avoid the debacle like that of 1789.

"Burke is fascinated by what happens when we hear low vibrations or stroke smooth surfaces, by the dilation of the eye's pupil in darkness or the feel of a slight tap on the shoulder. He is much preoccupied with sweet smells and violent startings from sleep, with the vibratory power of salt and the question of whether proportion is the source off beauty in vegetables. All of this strange homespun psycho-physiology is a kind of politics, willing to credit no theoretical notion which cannot somehow be traced to the muscular structure of the eye or the texture of the fingerpads. If there are indeed metaphysical rights, then they enter this dense somatic space as dispersed and non-identical: like 'rays of light which pierce into a dense medium,', Burke argues in Reflections on the French Revolution (sic), such rights are 'by the laws of nature, refracted from their straight line', enduring 'such a variety of refractions and reflections, that it becomes absurd to talk of them as if they continued in the simplicity of their original direction'. What is natural about such rights is their deviance or aberrancy; their self-disseminatory power is part of their very essence. When Burke adds that 'the nature of man is intricate; the objects of society are of the greatest possible complexity', he speaks, in the original sense of term, as an aesthetician. In forging this new aesthetics, Burke unwittingly licensed the nineteenth-century cultural disciplines that were to come, including anthropology and cultural studies with their gospels of relativism and aestheticism." (Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, p. 57)

People started listening to their own bodies, and listening seriously for social and political resonances.

"What more flattering compliment could there be to the rationality of the social whole than that we apprehend it in the least reflective aspect of our lives, in the most apparently private, wayward of sensations.... Unable to found ideological consensus in its actual social relations, to derive the unity of humankind from the anarchy of the market place, the ruling order must ground that consensus instead in the stubborn self-evidence of the gut....If ideology is to work efficiently, it must be pleasurable, intuitive, self-ratifying; in a word, aesthetic. But this, in a striking paradox, is exactly what threatens to undermine its objective force....(The body's taste, i.e. morality, is therefore considered) "somehow anterior to self-interested rationality....If the aesthetic comes in the eighteenth century to assume the significance it does, it is because the word is shorthand for a whole project of hegemony, the massive introjection of abstract reason by the life of the senses.” (Ibid.)

The importance of this new attention to things beautiful and their bodily resonances is worth discussing at greater length.  William Ray (The Logic of Culture, 2002) suggests that “the beautiful” is uniquely situated to affirm the authenticity of individuals while simultaneously facilitating the emergence of authoritative conventions and hegemonic rule.

One might well compare and contrast the politics of beauty with the exercise of power by the Spanish Inquisition. Both regard the interiority of the individual to be the seat of identity. Both embrace the social goal of bringing such interiorities into line with conventional norms, that is, of making the abnormal normal. However, the Inquisition accomplished both through the application of external force, whereas the regime of the beautiful is one in which individuals selected themselves for normalization, and then police themselves. For example, the Inquisition, as we saw, decided to focus on the penchant for cleanliness of the poor souls brought to trial in the early sixteenth century.  But by the early nineteenth,  penchants for cleanliness, brightness, sweetness, and lightness were identified and vetted by the protagonists themselves.  Even those who flouted the norms of, say, cleanliness, inadvertently also recognized and affirmed the dominance of these norms and their role as moral supporters of the nation-state. Thus, even resistances to dominant norms to reaffirm them, thereby clarifying the interior nature of citizens.

Not everyone likes baseball and apple pie, but no one can miss the power of these concepts to rally the masses in the U.S. A. So even when an American plays handball, instead of baseball, and eats pasties, instead of pie, he reserves a portion of his emotional energy to resist baseball and apple pie, thereby reaffirming the latter despite his penchant for the former. (It will be worth our while to explore the Internet for the most beautiful image to be found and consider our choices: image #1, image #2, image #3)

Identifying the interiority of the individuals, their "soul," is no mean feat, not even for those very individuals who are searching their own. The nineteenth century, so fixated on this business, is filled with examples and anecdotes that reveal the complexities of what might, at first, seem to be

a straightforward task.

Science and Vision in the 19th Century Here we will focus our attention on "visualism," attending closely to its role in representing interiorities. Our contention is that this visualism contributed a great deal to the racializing practices of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Fabian Time and the Other, 1983, p. 106)

Visualism involves the use of "quantification and diagrammatic representation so that the ability to 'visualize' a culture or society almost becomes synonymous for understanding it." (Fabian Time and the Other, 1983, p. 106) Fabian illustrates this visualism -- his term, I think --by discussing the use of maps and charts in anthropological discourse. But a host of scholars have linked similarly visualist thinking to the heavy use of photography in the human sciences as well (Griffiths Wondrous Differences, 2002; Orvel American Photography, 2003; Edwards Raw Histories, 2003). We will elaborate both of these developments --the use of maps and photographs in the human sciences. And then we will proceed at least one step further, by reflecting on the journalistic practices of caricature and cartoon that emerged in the first half of the nineteenth century to become wildly popular in the twentieth.

The visualist practices of the nineteenth century that we survey here are generally remarkable for their ability to knit together scientific procedures with inquiries into interiorities. This new alliance marks a shift from eighteenth-century preoccupations. Back then, scientific procedures were devised and refined so as to provide a valid and replicable representation of sensory experience. If these procedures were applied to life forms, as Asma (op. cit.) makes clear, but always with the assumptions that living organisms were essentially machines -- see, for example, Vaucanson's duck. Human beings, were similarly considered to be robotic in all respects available to the senses, but, with a wink and a nod, were additionally endowed with an utterly inscrutable soul (Becker The Heavenly City of Eighteenth Century Philosophers, 1932). As a result, science restricted its attention almost entirely to the human machine, but not the soul.

With developments the arts in the eighteenth century (Ray, op. cit.; Toby Miller The Well-tempered Self : Citizenship, Culture, and the Postmodern Subject, 1993), increasingly attention was directed to human interiorities. These shifts in attention resulted, among other things, in some dramatic advances in human anatomical descriptions (Stafford Body Criticism, 1991). With such descriptions, the need for explicating interiorities was satisfied, and the conventionally understood power of the scientific method to describe only mechanisms available to the senses was preserved.

With the sea change of interests in the nineteenth century, and in particular with the new found recognition of the central role that non-mechanical interiorities played in social formations (Ray The Logic of Culture), scientists began targeting the soul. Their advances in this new quest relied heavily on visualist practices associated with cartography, photography, and museology.

Cartography

Fabian's analysis of the role of mapping in cultural studies begins with a recognition that words at the beginning of the nineteenth century were regarded as inadequate for the human sciences. Having fallen from grace, words were considered incapable of getting inside the skin of the native, and unable to explicate cultural interiorities. Maps, enjoy the benefit of association with topoi, which are not so much topics, as discursive places. For a clarification of "topoi", Fabian appeals Francis Yates's celebrated The Art of Memory, (1966).

Yates points out that in classical rhetoric, topoi were mnemonics, memory-serving devices that enabled speakers to remember their speeches by relating those issues to places (topoi) in an imaginary building or town. A speaker keeps track of his speech by saying to himself something like: "The introduction is the threshold through which I enter the house; my humorous aside is the closet where I hang my coat; my first premise is the pantry where the food is stored; my second premise is the kitchen where dinner is prepared; and my conclusion is the dining room. Dinner is served." The topoi are the places mapped out in the imaginary house. The places are each linked to mental objects, namely the topics or issues in the speech to be presented. Mapping the externalities of the house provides the speaker with privileged access to internal landmarks of the speech.

As Fabian sees it, Yates's "view of memory/knowledge as an 'art' favored pretentions to exclusive and arcane knowledge.... special and exclusive knowledge conceived as manipulation of an apparatus of visual-spatial symbols removed from ordinary language and communication." (Ibid., p. 112) Through artistic imagery, a crucial component of interior life is revealed and made external and public. This, Fabian suggests, was open-sesame for anthropologists who devoted themselves to getting inside the skin. It suggests a general method of using visual artistry to reveal inward characteristics.

A map does indeed reveal the inner life of the people being mapped, though often indirectly. Consider for example, Leo Steinberg's famous map of Manhattan, along with the its many spinoffs, reveal a great deal about the people who embrace them. It is a worthwhile exercise to reflect on the inner experience that is associated with this map.

Similarly, the mapping task itself can often reveal a great deal about the inner life of the cartographers. people. Consider for example Montgomerie's mapping of Tibet in 1870: "The mapping of Tibet required the imposition of a new kind of grid. The India Survey ...had divided India into a cellular network of quadrants. The Tibetan government, however, had refused to allow the kind of generalized access this procedure required. (The British...wanted to lay out a civil network that could serve as a military artery at an unspecified later date.)...Montgomerie decided to disguise his surveyors as monks. in 1862 he trained the first of a series of Hindu pundits in the use of basic instrumentation --compass, sextant, and thermometer. ....With much effort he trained his recruits to walk up down, or on the level at a set pace. He also taught them to count the number of paces they took in a day, and to keep count by using a Buddhist rosary. A rosary did not have to be hidden, but to simplify matters, Montgomerie had special rosaries built with 100, rather than the customary 108 beads, so that they could be used as decimal abacuses. The average monk stride turned out to be 33 inches. Every hundredth pace a monk slipped a bead. Every complete circuit of the rosary meant ten thousand paces, or five miles." (T. Richards The Imperial Archive p. 18)

Photography

The anthropologists' adopted photography as a primary research tool in the mid-nineteenth century. This adoption enabled them to achieve three goals at once. First, it helped them convince the world that their research was being pursued with methodological rigor. Thus, as Griffiths contends, photography was crucial for the historical development of anthropology as a normal science in the nineteenth century: "One goal of anthropometric photography was to make the native body legible as an ethnographic sign, since the detection and measurement of individual anatomical features were seen as offering the perfect solution to the problem of how to guarantee objectivity and 'truth' in anthropological investigation. (Griffiths Wondrous Differences, 2002, 96). Second, photography advanced the scientific quest to categorize experience, and specifically to categorize human beings, distinguishing male and female, sick and healthy, criminal and law-abiding, along with racially inferior and superior categories of humans. "Proponents of anthropometric photography invested a great deal of faith in the visual sign as a means of bolstering prevailing social and evolutionary theories, which used photographs as evidence of the racial inferiority of native peoples." (Ibid. 99).

Photographic techniques for human categorization are still used today. Compare, for example, the use of "composite portraiture" by Francis Galton in 1883, by the Harvard Medical School in 1897, and by Time Magazine in 1999 (Fall).

 

Third, photography offered a leap forward in the nineteenth-century quest to recover the female soul. (Hacking, 1995, Rewriting the Soul) Why it should be that the "souls of women" should have figured so prominently in this research is a complicated questions indeed. Undoubtedly the changing place of women in the political order, contributed to increased curiosity about femininity (Dana Nelson, National Masculinity) Then too, the increasingly strong role that women began to play in literary activities also generated interest and not a little concern (Kittler Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, 1990). All things considered, it is no exaggeration to say that womanhood was at the swirling center of popular culture at mid-century. (Huyssen After the Great Divide , 1986).

Not a little of this interest was directed to women's ills, especially their mental ills.

Consider, for example, Holman Hunt's mid-century painting "Awakening Conscience."  According to Richard Leppert (The Sight of Sound, 1993), it depicts the stroke of self-awareness experienced by Annie Miller. Not incidentally Annie is a woman, whose understanding of herself had been buried --repressed--over the years, only to suddenly come forth here, perhaps as a result of her hearing a particular melody. In this popular and controversial painting, female repression is rendered in graphic form. The canvas provides viewers with a royal road of access to the troubled female soul.

More striking -- in part because of the verisimilitude -- are the photographs of hysterical women associated with the Parisian asylum Salpetriere and the colossal figure, Martin Charcot. Charcot's work is notable for its combination of conventional medicine and precocious approaches to what would later come to be called "the unconscious." His analysis and graphic illustration of hysterical symptoms paved the way for modern psychology, anthropology, and every other discipline devoted to getting inside the skins of human beings. (Rewriting the Soul, 1995)

The whole enterprise fell into place around 1875 "when a 'devoted and able' photogrpaher, Paul Regnard, was able to settle in for good at the Salpetriere." (Didi-Huberman The Invention of Hysteria, 2003, p. 44). Didi-Huberman summarizes the situation in this way: "Photography had to crystallize the case into the Tableau: not an extensive tableau, but a tableau in which the Type was condensed in a unique image, or in a univocal series of images" of female faces in pain.... "Why the face? Because in the face the corporeal surface makes visible something of the movements of the soul, ideally....Photography was the new machinery of a legend: the having-to-read of identity in the image" (Ibid., 48, 49, 54).

The fact that Hunt's and Charcot's women were pained is not incidental. Visible pain is central to their task of representing soul. First, pain has long been considered an authenticator of consciousness. Who so ever suffers provides direct and unmediated access to authentic experience within (DuBois Truth and Torture, 1991; I. Berlin op. cit.). Second, suffering people direct the full force of their attention to their internal experience (Leder Absent Body, 1990; Scarry, Body in Pain, 1985); accordingly, the image of a suffering person provides privileged access to that person's interior experience.

Museology expositions, life groups, and dioramas

William Gilbert, played by Jim Broadbent in the recent movie Topsy Turvy, was going nowhere in his efforts to devise a script to rival the success of his "The Pirates of Penzance." His wife, Lilly, sensing his blockage, dragged him --kicking and screaming-- to a London exposition of the people and cultures of Japan. Gilbert's experience at the exposition is worth some reflection.

First, the exposition was a manifold spectacle replete with displays of people at painting, cooking, fighting, dressing, dancing, and singing. At each display site, Gilbert was transfixed; his eyes darted here and there, like the jaws of a hungry dog snapping up scattered morsels of food. He asked question occasionally, and interacted haltingly, almost always betraying his ethnocentric biases: he described green tea as "spinach water." Observations about others, in museology, anthropology and life, have often been accurate without being sympathetic. Second, besides being a spectacle, the exposition condensed and simplified Japanese culture, distilling it down to a handful of traits that could be easily remembered and handily caricatured in his Mikado. As Griffiths says of similar North American cultural expositions presented during the same decade, "The fragmented native dance or performance imposed an entirely new use-value upon indigenous culture, turning what was essentially an expression of cultural idenitty that was embedded within a c omplex and intricate social web of meaning, into a three-minute routine, that could be watched, photograhed, and quickly forgotten" (Griffiths Wondrous Differences, 2002, p. 69). Third, while the spectacles were alienated from Japan and transmogrified for English consumption, still the fact that they were staffed enacted by Japanese natives elevated them beyond the status of mere illusion. The exposition was indeed Japanese culture, presented in London for English consumption. As such it satisfied viewers' interests for authentic contact, but still ensured a safe and privileged coign of vantage. As Griffiths notes, these expositions play out an "ambivalence between the spectator's desire for immersion on the one hand and for separation and distance from the threat of alterity on the other." (Ibid., p. 73)

As such, the exposition was a model for how visual experience was shaped and consumed for cultural representation at the end of the nineteenth century, and powerfully influential over visual displays in the twentieth-- not the least of which is cinema. Museum displays involving humans, both living and artificial, followed the suite of nineteenth-century expositions (see Coco Fusco's "Couple in a Cage"). Museum "life groups" and dioramas similarly immersed viewers in alternative realities, while insulating them from the threat of alienation from their own comfortable surroundings, e.g. the Chippewa village "life group" at the Milwaukee Public Museum.

Language, from Freud through Chomsky, is a mediator of interiorities . (see for example, Bandler & Grinder The Structure of Magic, 1990)

 

Journalism: caricatures, cartoons, and comics

Cartography, photography and museology have all taught us moderns how to use our eyes. Specifically, they have taught us to scan surfaces for identifiable signs of interior characteristics. Cartoons and comics must be added to our list, for they too have schooled us all in the art of simplistic type-casting. In the course of the last two centuries, they have contributed a great deal to the racializing modern vision.

Caricatures have been around for a long while. In the eighteenth century, Hogarth advanced this art considerably, using caricature to carry comments on social events and on public figures both high and low. No less a figure than King George III was subjected to brutal satire at the hands of James Gillray, 1787 (see Rempel, "Carnal Satire and the Constitutional King," Art History, vol. 18 (1): 4-23). Two features of such caricatures are noteworthy. First, caricatures identify individuals by exaggerating and/or satirizing distinctive features, usually facial features. More than just identifying an individual by focusing on their visible peccadilloes, caricatures almost always leave the viewer with a hint about the individual's internal constitution, that is, his spirit or his soul. What is so unsettling about the caricature of George III with his "monstrous craw" is not merely the king's grotesque appearance, but the insinuation that this outward appearance is the tell tale sign of his soul. Anticipating the Realist movement of the nineteenth century, the caricature seems bent on examining faces as if they were windows to souls as had never been done before. In terms such as were used by Michel Foucault, this new approach assumes "the body ...(to)...house a mystery, an enigma wrapped around an essence, that may or may not be known but that supplies the key to being." (Prendergast, "Introduction," Spectacles of Realism, p. 7). Second, caricature, as a open-sesame to the soul, paved the way for its polar opposite graphic image, the cartoon.

Cartoons offer an about-face to caricatures. Rather than identifying a single individual, they manage to finger a whole group of people by refusing to focus on individuals. A cartoon features superficial commonalities in the outward appearances of people in such a way that everyone in the group can self-identify with the cartoon image. Cartoon images still hint at personal, often ethical interiorities, as caricatures do, but, unlike caricatures, they spread their hints across a category of people, with categories being defined by graphic generalities. For an illustration of a cartoon's generality, see Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics.

The evolution of cartoons out of caricatures was not promoted simply by forces internal to the visual arts themselves. Cartoon artistry was not an inevitable development. Instead it came about over the course of the nineteenth century in concert with the growing scientistic and nationalistic passions for classifying people and for characterizing groups. If caricatures had been left on their own, and insulated from the events and attitudes that overtook Europe in the nineteenth century, cartoons might not have emerged as they did.

As they responded to these powerful contextual social forces, cartoon artists experimented with different forms. Notably, Jean Grandville experimented with animalistic representations of human social types. As Goldstein sees it ("Realism without a human face," 1995 Spectacles of Realism), Grandville was doubtful about the ability of images of human faces, particularly female faces, to generate general sympathetic emotions about whole categories of people. Instead, as he saw it, viewers fix their attention on the beauty of the face, or the lack of it, and generate emotions accordingly. By creating hybrid figures of human bodies with animalistic faces, Grandville was able to restrict viewers' attentions to the quality of social interaction depicted, and to focus their gaze on social categories rather than on individuals. These and other advantages of hybridized images have obviously proven their worth in the subsequent history of cartoons and comics and in realms beyond, e.g. Lee, Wegman.

Comics are, as McCloud contends, cartoons that operate in time, enlisting viewers in the task of constructing a conceptual link between what comes before and what comes after. Rodolphe Topffer, working in the 1840s, anticipated this step into comics (Lefevre and Dierick, Forging a New Medium, 1998: 20).

The power of this newly synthesized art form, the comic, should be appreciated in the context of the last half of the nineteenth century when it gained widespread popularity. First, the comic, like the caricature made it possible for viewers to use external features to key in on internal characteristics. Second, the comic, like the cartoons it includes, makes it possible for artists to characterize the internal characteristics of groups, not just individuals. Third, comics rely on, and therefore celebrate, the intuitive interpretations of viewers. Notably, they allow viewers, each in his own way, to feel success, for example, in linking the right-frame of McCloud's cartoon to the left. Inevitably, all the other successes that viewers experience when they "get it" are also encouraged and celebrated including the successes viewers feel when they recognize human stereotypes.

Unsurprisingly, therefore, comics became major vehicles of racialization in the late nineteenth century. Eugene Zimmerman's images in Puck and Judge and Outcault's Yellow Kid set the precedent for racialization (Kunzle, "Precursors in American Weeklies to the American Newspaper Comic Strip," Forging a New Medium, op. cit.). The Yellow Kid was, by all accounts, a stand out. (Lefevre and Dierick, op., cit., p. 17). It featured an endearing character with street-language and street-smarts, all of which made it possible for Pulitzer and then Hearst to shroud their political agenda in benign clothing. Using these images, the press was successful in purveying an image of red-blooded American intelligence by playing with contrasting images of weak but wily Blacks and immigrants.

It is not too difficult to connect the dots, running a line from Zimmerman and Outcault to many of the unsettling cartoon images and comic strip characters that confront us even today (Jim Crow Museum). More difficult is the task of discerning who is being served by such images and how. Whose identity, for example, was being manipulated by the 1904 cartoon in the Cleveland Leader? A good case can be made for saying that the target of this image was not the African-Americans of Panama, San Andres or Providence Island, but rather that the real target is white America, symbolized by Uncle Sam. In those times of high-stakes nationalism, the white press -- then thoroughly "yellowed" (see yellow journalism) -- took advantage of every vulnerable group to enhance the political stature of the white American citizenry. (Remember, this cartoon appear barely five years after the Spanish-American war had catapulted the U.S. onto the world's political stage.) The cartoon's infantilization of the marginalized islanders served the purpose of clarifying who this new world power was and how it would operate: next to these pleading children with dark skins, the tall, white, elderly Sam came off as a beneficent imperial power. "Even though whiteness and Americanness were never perfect synonyms, during the imperial scramble for territories they increasingly operated in concert as signs of universality, humanity, and civilization as the nation enetered the globalizing epoch" (Singh, Black is a Country, 2004: 32)

Whose identity is manipulated by Al Jolson in blackface? Lott contends that blackface-imagery satisfies the white majority's search for roots: "partisans of blackface have always longed for the imaginary days of the strumming Sambo" (Lott Love and Theft, 1993: 7). Faced with the challenge of locating authentic and embraceable roots comparable to those of England (the legend of Arthur), France (the Sun King), or Spain (the Reconquista), white Americans harked back to the "simple beauties" of the antebellum south. Using blackface, they cosmetically smoothed over the horrors of slavery and salvaged picturesque memories of multicultural harmony. Blackface was cultural alchemy. It generated light sentiment from brutal times, all the while keeping the structural relations of racism carefully hidden. It co-opted African-American ness for the purpose of providing a cultural basis for white American ascendance.

Whose identity is manipulated by Aunt Jemima?

By the end of the twentieth century, we can see that the seventeenth century rift between text and image, which was followed by 300 years of efforts to marginalize imagery, was replaced by new text-image initiatives. Our review of advances in cartography, photography, museology, and comics suggest that images have not only retaken center-stage but have begun to play strong roles as racializers. The twentieth century, with its development in cinema and Internet only confirm the accuracy of this suggestion.

Summary The task of identifying the racializing practices in which we are immersed is akin to the thoroughly underestimated challenge of learning to see. Both require one to "overcome the veil of familiarity and self-evidence that surrounds the experience .., and to turn it into a problem for analysis, a mystery to be unraveled." (Mitchell, "Showing Seeing: A critique of Visual Culture," Art History, Aesthetics, Visual Studies, 2003, p. 231)

                                 

Nation and Vision in the 20th Century

Racial categories were made to seem natural and common sensical in the nineteenth century. This process, the naturalization of race or racialization, was confirmed and expedited by visual practices. This link between visualism and racialization has not been hard to fathom. As we showed in the preceding discussions, the search for reliable representations of experience led nineteenth-century scientists to embrace new horizons of visual representation in cartography, museology, photography, and all these advances served to reify racial categorizations. The ground-breaking character of methods used in these fields only served to broaden and deepen the acceptance of their central accomplishments as well as of their racialization implications. The excitement generated by maps, museums, and photographs inevitably -- even if unintentionally -- resulted in the entrenchment of racializing assumptions amongst moderns. By the end of the century, as we showed, such visual racialization made its way into the popular media -- newspapers and the comics -- where it served to confirm the racial foundations of nations.

Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the visual representation of race continued to deepen the connections between naturalized race and nation and national interests. Movies played a major role in this twentieth-century racialization process. One reason for this powerful influence is that movies generally make a powerful impact on viewers' imaginations. Simply put, movies encourage viewers to imaginatively generate models for the images they see, and then they embrace those models, identifying with them, and ultimately incorporating them into their own practices. Once viewers' imaginations have been launched in this way, the movie itself - the director - can then deny responsibility for the models that are imaginatively embraced. Claiming artistic privilege, directors can shift the primary responsibility for racialized conclusions onto the shoulders of viewers. The central feature of this process may be, as suggested by Paul Gilroy ( p. 43), the displacement of verbal argumentation - "logos" - by visual imagery: Movies invite "us to rethink the development of a racial imaginary in ways that are more distant from the reasoned authority of logos and closely attuned to the different power of visual and visualizing technologies."

The imagery of movies contributes to racialized identities partly because movies mirror viewers. Movies provide viewers with specters, doubles, alter-selves. When viewers watch characters wrestling with identities on screen, they respond as if to themselves in a mirror. At the movies, we are forever meeting our doubles (N. Royle The Uncanny, 2003: 76), ourselves as if in our dreams. (Frequently enough, movies make this mirroring effect clear and explicit, as in The Jazz Singer, Imitation of Life, Carmen, Memento, and KPAX.) Thus, the fictional images on screen work their way into the imaginative constructions of our own selves. When Harry Potter's double-self shouts "expecto patronus" to save Harry Potter from the clutches of the dementors in The Prisoner of Azkaban, he is realizing on screen what we all implicitly experience as we stare at screens in the movies. We confront images of ourselves, and always, it seems, we find it necessary to wrestle with their constitution.

Wolfgang Kittler (Literature, Media and Information Systems, 1997: 94) goes so far as to say that the movies are largely responsible for the fact that modern images of self are fragmented in contrast to Romantic poetry-based images of self. The "fragmented body is a positivity...ever since film cameras first shot their 24 pictures per second by chopping up the body before the viewfinder with the blades of the shutter and a maltese cross. The fragmented body appears in the place of those whole persons that classical Romantic poetry celebrated or produced. (For more on "fragmented identity" see Part III of this essay).

National Purification

Cinematic wizardry can, by its sheer power, back viewers into accepting the racializing implications of images. The use of montage towards the end of D.W. Griffth's Birth of a Nation (1915) has been properly praised as an artistic coup (MacDougall, "The Subjec(ive) Voice," Fields of Vision, 1995: 248), but one should not overlook the power of this depiction of a clan rally to secure sympathy for the KKK. More recently, but In a similar way, the use of special effects hides the darker ramifications of the Mecha-destruction scene in Spielberg's AI