Review of Challenge of Blackness in Journal of American Studies

Souls, 2017

Rhetoric & Public Affairs, 2012

T he problem of textual circulation at the heart of this forum has a rich and complicated genealogy. Issues of textual provenance, authenticity, transcription, translation, and accuracy, so central to the inquiries of the Renaissance humanists, 1 have quite recently given way to questions raised by postmodern culture's media-saturated environments: textual fragmentation, distribution, consumption, and redistribution by and in multicultural and frequently transnational publics and counterpublics, in nonsynchronous, nonlinear, nonpunctual interchanges. 2 Few studies, however, have considered the circulation of photographic texts 3 or the question examined in this essay: how might the strategic circulation of some photographic texts and the noncirculation of others serve to buttress a status quo buckling under the assaulting forces of change? How might circulation and noncirculation serve the rhetoric of those seeking to control or stifle that change?

American Journalism, 2021

Journalism history, 2019

The Arkansas Historical Quarterly, 1999

Taking stock of the universe of positions and goals that constitutes leftist politics today, we are left with the disquieting suspicion that a deep commonality underlies the apparent variety: What exists today is built upon the desiccated remains of what was once possible.

Pictures & Power - Imaging and Imagining Frederick Douglass 1818-2018 Edited by Celeste-Marie Bernier and Bill E. Lawson, 2017

Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist, the civil rights advocate and the great rhetorician, has been the focus of much academic research. Only more recently is Douglass work on aesthetics beginning to receive its due, and even then its philosophical scope is rarely appreciated. Douglass’ aesthetic interest was notably not so much in art itself, but in understanding aesthetic presentation as an epistemological and psychological aspect of the human condition and thereby as a social and political tool. He was fascinated by the power of images, and took particular interest in the emerging technologies of photography. He often returned to the themes of art, pictures and aesthetic perception in his speeches. He saw himself, also after the end of slavery, as first and foremost a human rights advocate, and he suggests that his work and thoughts as a public intellectual always in some way related to this end. In this regard, his interest in the power of photographic images to impact the human soul was a lifelong concern. His reflections accordingly center on the psychological and political potentials of images and the relationship between art, culture, and human dignity. In this chapter we discuss Douglass views and practical use of photography and other forms of imagery, and tease out his view about their transformational potential particularly in respect to combating racist attitudes. We propose that his views and actions suggest that he intuitively if not explicitly anticipated many later philosophical, pragmatist and ecological insights regarding the generative habits of mind and affordance perception : I.e. that we perceive the world through our values and habitual ways of engaging with it and thus that our perception is active and creative, not passive and objective. Our understanding of the world is simultaneously shaped by and shaping our perceptions. Douglass saw that in a racist and bigoted society this means that change through facts and rational arguments will be hard. A distorted lens distorts - and accordingly re-produces and perceives its own distortion. His interest in aesthetics is intimately connected to this conundrum of knowledge and change, perception and action. To some extent precisely due to his understanding of how stereotypical categories and dominant relations work on our minds, he sees a radical transformational potential in certain art and imagery. We see in his work a profound understanding of the value-laden and action-oriented nature of perception and what we today call the perception of affordances (that is, what our environment permits/invites us to do). Douglass is particularly interested in the social environment and the social affordances of how we perceive other humans, and he thinks that photographs can impact on the human intellect in a transformative manner. In terms of the very process of aesthetic perception his views interestingly cohere and supplement a recent theory about the conditions and consequences of being an aesthetic beholder. The main idea being that artworks typically invite an asymmetric engagement where one can behold them without being the object of reciprocal attention. This might allow for a kind of vulnerability and openness that holds transformational potentials not typically available in more strategic and goal-directed modes of perception. As mentioned, Douglass main interest is in social change and specifically in combating racist social structures and negative stereotypes of black people. He is fascinated by the potential of photography in particular as a means of correcting fallacious stereotypes, as it allows a more direct and less distorted image of the individuality and multidimensionality of black people. We end with a discussion of how, given this interpretation of aesthetic perception, we can understand the specific imagery used by Douglass himself. How he tried to use aesthetic modes to subvert and change the racist habitus in the individual and collective mind of his society. We suggest that Frederick Douglass, the human rights activist, had a sophisticated philosophy of aesthetics, mind, epistemology and particularly of the transformative and political power of images. His works in many ways anticipate and sometimes go beyond later scholars in these and other fields such as psychology & critical theory. Overall, we propose that our world could benefit from revisiting Douglass’ art and thought.

Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 2020

Comics, offers a compelling argument of the prominence of graphic narratives in understanding the civil rights movement. Working with the concept of consensus memory, Santos focuses on five graphic novels, all of which seek to expand the archive of the civil rights movement by including narratives of actors and events often left out of mainstream historical narratives. That is, Santos asks us to embrace comics as a way of critically thinking about how history is told and re-told. In his epilogue 'Cyclops Was Right: X-Lives Matter!' Santos considers the X-men comics' role in processing traumatic histories, creating space for imagination in healing practices for kids (and adults) of colour. Citing Michel Foucault in his introduction, Santos writes that graphic narratives emphasise 'multiple temporalities existing "side-by-side"' (8), which makes them a crucial strategy in understanding historical moments. Graphic Memories offers a tremendous contribution to the field of graphic narrative and comics studies concerning how their creative techniques can 'foster in their readers a metacritical awareness of history as an editorial and curative process' (3). The texts Santos engages with in the formation of his argument all offer re-framings and additions to popular memories of the civil rights movement, emphasising the limitations and political nature of the archive. The first chapter, 'The Icon of the Once and Future King,' begins with an analysis of Ho Che Anderson's comics biography of Martin Luther King Jr. Here, Santos analyzes how King disrupts the 'icon King' that the U.S. has come to know and love. In other words, the 'icon King,' as termed by Santos, is a fictionalized, simplified figure that only emcompasses the positives of MLK Jr. and the civil rights movement. Santos emphasises the ways in which King aims to disrupt and complicate the popular narrative to expand the collective memory about MLK Jr. and the civil rights movement. Chapter 2, 'Bleeding Histories on the March,' discusses John Lewis's graphic memoir March, which focuses on the large network of activists that made the civil rights movement happen. With March, Santos returns to the concept of temporality as he first articulates in his citation of Foucault, noting the 'bleeding' of time displayed on the graphic narrative's pages. Santos continues his analysis of graphic narrative's place in the archive by analyzing comic creators that recreate scenes captured in contemporaneous photographs in Chapter 3,'On PhotoGraphic Narrative.' In this chapter, Santos argues that the recreations used by graphic narrative authors and artists prompt readers to rethink the 'objectivity' of a photograph, articulated in his discussion of Lila Quintero Weaver's Darkroom: A Memoir in Black and White. Utilizing specific moments from Weaver's text, Santos discusses how Darkroom posits the Latina immigrant in a unique place defined by her simultaneous juxtaposition of both black or white. With Darkroom, Santos redirects the conversation of the civil rights movements to analyze what Brown, or 'in-between', people were doing and how they were conceptualized in the movement. Moving from 'in-bewteen' bodies to an analysis of physical space, Santos also looks at Mark Long's, Jim Demonakos', and Nate Powell's The Silence of Our Friends: The Civil Rights Struggle Was Never Black and White in his fourth chapter to recount and expand the memory of the locations where the civil rights movement was happening. Santos uses this narrative to analyze how authors seeking