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Bottles of ink, and reams of paper: Clotel, Racialization, and the Material Cultue of Print
- Author(s):
- Jonathan Senchyne (see profile)
- Date:
- 2012
- Group(s):
- LLC 19th-Century American, LLC African American, MS Visual Culture, TM Book History, Print Cultures, Lexicography
- Subject(s):
- American literature--African American authors, American literature, Mass media--Study and teaching
- Item Type:
- Book chapter
- Tag(s):
- print culture, book history, early african american, william wells brown, clotel, African American literature, Media studies
- Permanent URL:
- http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M69K5P
- Abstract:
- This essay argues that greater attention to the significance of the material culture of print, especially in early African American print culture, shows how technologies of racialization emerge in conjunction with technologies of printed words and images. The stereotype is perhaps the most familiar case. In one sense it offers quick reproduction of legible text, and in another it of- fers quick reproduction of a legible social type. In the rest of this essay, I ex- amine how another technology of legibility, black/white dualism, structures both print legibility and racial legibility. This essay proposes that the material culture of whiteness in antebellum print culture participates in nineteenth- century racial formation by modeling how whiteness is to be seen while un- seen, providing the structural backdrop against which marks or types become legible.
- Metadata:
- xml
- Published as:
- Book chapter
- Status:
- Published
- License:
- All Rights Reserved
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