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A highly original history of American portraiture that places the
experiences of enslaved people at its center This timely and
eloquent book tells a new history of American art: how enslaved
people mobilized portraiture for acts of defiance. Revisiting the
origins of portrait painting in the United States, Jennifer Van
Horn reveals how mythologies of whiteness and of nation building
erased the aesthetic production of enslaved Americans of African
descent and obscured the portrait's importance as a site of
resistance. Moving from the wharves of colonial Rhode Island to
antebellum Louisiana plantations to South Carolina townhouses
during the Civil War, the book illuminates how enslaved people's
relationships with portraits also shaped the trajectory of African
American art post-emancipation. Van Horn asserts that Black
creativity, subjecthood, viewership, and iconoclasm constituted
instances of everyday rebellion against systemic oppression.
Portraits of Resistance is not only a significant intervention in
the fields of American art and history but also an important
contribution to the reexamination of racial constructs on which
American culture was built.
Over the course of the eighteenth century, Anglo-Americans
purchased an unprecedented number and array of goods. The Power of
Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America investigates these
diverse artifacts-from portraits and city views to gravestones,
dressing furniture, and prosthetic devices-to explore how elite
American consumers assembled objects to form a new civil society on
the margins of the British Empire. In this interdisciplinary
transatlantic study, artifacts emerge as key players in the
formation of Anglo-American communities and eventually of American
citizenship. Deftly interweaving analysis of images with furniture,
architecture, clothing, and literary works, Van Horn reconstructs
the networks of goods that bound together consumers in Boston, New
York, Philadelphia, and Charleston. Moving beyond emulation and the
desire for social status as the primary motivators for consumption,
Van Horn shows that Anglo-Americans' material choices were
intimately bound up with their efforts to distance themselves from
Native Americans and African Americans. She also traces women's
contested place in forging provincial culture. As encountered
through a woman's application of makeup at her dressing table or an
amputee's donning of a wooden leg after the Revolutionary War,
material artifacts were far from passive markers of rank or
political identification. They made Anglo-American society.
The essays that comprise Elusive Archives raise a common question:
how do we study material culture when the objects of study are
transient, evanescent, dispersed or subjective? Such things resist
the taxonomic protocols that institutions, such as museums and
archives, rely on to channel their acquisitions into meaningful
collections. What holds these disparate things together here are
the questions authors ask of them. Each essay creates by means of
its method a provisional collection of things, an elusive
archive. Scattered matter then becomes fixed within each
author’s analytical framework rather than within the walls of an
archive’s reading room or in cases along a museum corridor. This
book follows the ways in which objects may be identified, gathered,
arranged, conceptualized and even displayed rather than by
“discovering” artifacts in an archive and then asking how they
came to be there. The authors approach material culture outside the
traditional bounds of learning about the past. Their essays are
varied not only in subject matter but also in narrative format and
conceptual reach, making the volume accessible and easy to navigate
for a quick reference or, if read straight through, build toward a
new way to think about material culture.
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