Description
Although Uncle Tom is a recognized icon of American culture, this is the first book to concentrate on the visual discourse involving the character, interpreting a period of American sociocultural history that has been neglected by art historians. Morgan shows how these iconic images offered the country a means of both representing and reinventing its slave past. By examining illustrations by Hammatt Billings and George Cruikshank and the work of painters such as Winslow Homer, Eastman Johnson, Henry Ossawa Tanner, and Thomas Satterwhite Noble, she breaks down boundaries between high art and popular culture to demonstrate how these distinctions helped validate the views of elite producers of culture.
Morgan argues that the popularity of Uncle Tom's Cabin made it dangerous to prevailing attitudes and the institutional structures kept in place by them, as pictures joined words to challenge patriarchy. She shows how subsequent visual strategies were used to coax the subversive potential of Stowe's work back within accepted boundaries, as imaging of black people was involved in a cultural backlash against decades of abolition propaganda. Pictures of figures once read as sympathetic were redefined into an alternative propaganda to reinforce white supremacy and put limits on African Americans' access to citizenship after emancipation.
Despite the simultaneous existence of an urban-based, business-class clientele for paintings and a more popular audience for book illustrations, show posters, and sheet music, Morgan shows that representations of blacks tended to reinforce social hierarchies and protect established regimes. Uncle Tom's Cabin as Visual Culture is a compelling reexamination of an American icon-and a persuasive case study in how representations of African Americans change in response to social and political agendas.
About the Author
Jo-Ann Morgan is associate professor of art history with dual appointments in the Department of African American Studies and the Department of Art at Western Illinois University, USA. She is also a visual artist.
Book Information
ISBN 9780826220776
Author Jo-Ann Morgan
Format Paperback
Page Count 277
Imprint University of Missouri Press
Publisher University of Missouri Press
Weight(grams) 400g