Reviewed by:

• Race and Vision in the Nineteenth-Century United States ed. by Shirley Samuels
• Frederick C. Staidum Jr.

Visual culture, and vision itself, have long been central to the development of modern racial formations. From exotic illustrations of Indigenous peoples framing early modern maps to the famed casta paintings depicting a taxonomy of new American race mixtures, visuals of so-called corporeal and moral difference and inferiority traversed the Atlantic, presenting discernible evidence used to rationalize colonization and enslavement. As early modern definitions of race collided with the liberalism and humanism of the post-Revolutionary United States, visual culture became increasingly important in resolving philosophical hypocrisies and codifying the color line. The grotesquery of minstrel makeup and costuming and the anthropological realism of Louis Agassiz’s photography capturing nude enslaved people are great examples. Across the nineteenth century, these objects and performances, through the techniques unique to the visual (for example, composition, light, color, scale, and so on), dictated how physical human difference was perceived and what philosophical, political, and cultural meanings were attached to those differences.

In recent years, scholars have offered important monographs and essay collections addressing the intersection of race and a single visual medium in the nineteenth century, such as photography, painting, or sculpture; however, there has been an infrequency of work simultaneously addressing the particular modalities of multiple media. Through astute editorship (or dare I say curation), Shirley Samuels has assembled an excellent collection, Race and Vision in the Nineteenth-Century United States, which offers far-reaching case studies of myriad forms, such as land surveying, theatrical staging, sheet music, stereography, and literature, attending to the distinct properties of each.

Samuels is a professor of English and American studies at Cornell University, where she also chaired the History of Art Department from 2006 to 2012. She is a prolific scholar of gender, race, and literary and visual cultures of the nineteenth century, having previously published several volumes on the subject, including Facing America: Iconography and the Civil War (New York, 2004). The individual contributors are experts and practitioners in photography, art history, literary criticism, folklore studies, and architecture. Thanks to this interdisciplinarity, the collection produces a wide-ranging, albeit episodic, [End Page 137] cultural and intellectual history of how people living in nineteenth-century United States came to see race and difference.

The collection is composed of twelve essays; taken together, the essays contend that technological innovations in science, engineering, and aesthetics that emerged throughout the nineteenth century radically influenced and reoriented the perception of who were and could be U.S. citizens. These technologies changed how humans saw and what they expected to see—that is to say, vision. Throughout the book’s introduction, Samuels deploys vision and visualizing as central analytical concepts and objects of study, which encapsulate all sorts of visual sensations from physical ocular function of the human eye to the figurative language of literature and other media. In this way, Race and Vision in the Nineteenth-Century United States is much less about visual culture as a discrete product; rather, it foregrounds the ways those visibly rendered products are tethered to and constituted by the processes, instruments, and conditions—social and otherwise—by which we see. Further, the essays collectively assert that the intersection of vision and technology informed racial formations “in alternately democratic and anti-democratic” ways (p. 1).

The essays are arranged into two discrete yet interrelated thematic sections—“Articulate Spaces” and “Democratic Visions.” The first section undertakes the entanglements of race, vision, and spatiality or the social construction of space and its organization by way of human interactions and behavior. For example, Irene Cheng, in the opening chapter, demonstrates how Thomas Jefferson’s strategies for both territorial and architectural design consummated “his ideal of a liberal, agrarian republic” in particularly exclusionary and oppressive ways (p. 17). Jefferson’s rational, grid-like geographical patterns validated the land tenure system and the subsequent displacement of Native Americans, while his similarly rational octagonal house plan enabled the...

审核人：

• 《十九世纪的种族与视野》（美国）。通过雪莉·塞缪尔（Shirley Samuels）
• 小弗雷德里克·施泰登（Frederick C.

视觉文化和视觉本身长期以来一直是现代种族形态发展的核心。从构成早期现代地图的土著人民的异国插图到描述新的美国种族混合物分类法的著名种姓绘画，所谓的物质和道德差异和自卑感的影像穿越大西洋，提供了可用于合理化殖民化和奴役的明显证据。随着早期种族的现代定义与革命后美国的自由主义和人本主义相冲突，视觉文化在解决哲学上的虚伪和编纂种族分界线方面变得越来越重要。敏锐的化妆和服饰的怪异查询以及路易斯·阿加西兹（Louis Agassiz）拍摄裸体奴隶的摄影的人类学现实主义就是很好的例子。

近年来，学者们提供了重要的专着和论文集，以解决19世纪种族与单一视觉媒介（例如摄影，绘画或雕塑）的交集的问题。然而，同时解决多种媒体的特定形式的工作频率不高。通过精明的编辑（或敢于策展），雪莉·塞缪尔（Shirley Samuels）在19世纪的美国收集了出色的《种族与视觉》系列，该书提供了无数形式的深远案例研究，例如土地测量，戏剧演出，片材音乐，立体学和文学作品，它们各具特色。

塞缪尔（Samuels）是康奈尔大学（Cornell University）的英语和美国研究教授，她还曾于2006年至2012年担任艺术史系主任。她是十九世纪性别，种族以及文学和视觉文化的多产学者，之前曾发表过论文。关于这一主题的几卷，包括《面对美国：肖像学和内战》（纽约，2004年）。个人贡献者是摄影，艺术史，文学批评，民俗研究和建筑领域的专家和实践者。由于这种跨学科性，该馆藏产生了广泛的，尽管是偶发的[End Page 137]文化和知识史，讲述了生活在19世纪美国的人们如何看待种族和差异。

该馆藏有十二篇论文。综上所述，论文认为，整个19世纪出现的科学，工程和美学技术创新从根本上影响和重新定位了谁是美国公民以及可能是美国公民的观念。这些技术改变了人们的观看方式以及他们期望看到的内容，即视觉。在本书的整个引言中，塞缪尔斯将视觉和可视化作为中心的分析概念和研究对象，它们封装了从人眼的肉眼功能到文学和其他媒体的象征性语言在内的各种视觉感受。这样，十九世纪美国的种族与愿景视觉文化作为一种​​离散产品要少得多；相反，它着眼于那些可视化呈现的产品与我们所看到的过程，工具和条件（社交和其他）捆绑在一起并由其构成的方式。此外，论文集体断言，视觉和技术的交叉“以交替的民主和反民主的方式”为种族形态提供了信息（第1页）。

论文分为两个独立但相互关联的主题部分：“表达空间”和“民主视野”。第一部分通过人类的互动和行为来进行种族，视觉和空间的纠缠或空间及其组织的社会建构。例如，艾琳·郑（Irene Cheng）在开篇中展示了托马斯·杰斐逊（Thomas Jefferson）的领土和建筑设计策略如何以排他性和压迫性的方式完善了“他的自由，农业共和国的理想”（第17页）。杰斐逊（Jefferson）合理的，网格状的地理格局验证了土地保有权制度以及随后美国原住民的流离失所，而他类似的理性八角形房屋计划也使该计划得以实现。