National Imaginaries, American Identities: The Cultural Work of American Iconography

Přední strana obálky
Larry J. Reynolds, Gordon Hutner
Princeton University Press, 26. 11. 2000 - Počet stran: 245

From the American Revolution to the present, the United States has enjoyed a rich and persuasive visual culture. These images have constructed, sustained, and disseminated social values and identities, but this unwieldy, sometimes untidy form of cultural expression has received less systematic attention than other modes of depicting American life. Recently, scholars in the humanities have developed a new critical approach to reading images and the cultural work they perform. This practice, American cultural iconography, is generating sophisticated analyses of how images organize our public life. The contributions to this volume exhibit the extraordinary scope and interpretive power of this interdisciplinary study while illuminating the dark corners of the nation's psyche.


Drawing on such varied texts and visual media as daguerreotypes, political cartoons, tourist posters, and religious artifacts, these essays explore how pictures and words combine to teach us who we are and who we are not. They examine mimesis in elegant portraits of black Freemasons, industrial-age representations of national parks, and postwar photographs of atomic destruction. They consider how visual culture has described and disclosed the politics of racialized sexuality, whether subconsciously affirming it in the shadows of film noir or deliberately contesting it through the interethnic incest of John Sayles's Lone Star. Students of literature, film, and history will find that these essays extend the frontier of American studies.


The contributors are Maurice Wallace, Dennis Berthold, Alan Trachtenberg, Shirley Samuels, Jenny Franchot, Cecelia Tichi, Eric Lott, Bryan C. Taylor, and José E. Limón.

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Obsah

American Cultural Iconography
1
BETWEEN IMAGE AND NARRATIVE FIGURING AMERICAN COLLECTIVITY
27
Seeing and Believing Hawthornes Reflections on the Daguerreotype in The House of the Seven Gables
29
Nuclear Pictures and Metapictures
50
Pittsburgh at Yellowstone Old Faithful and the Pulse of Industrial America
81
Melville Garibaldi and the Medusa of Revolution
102
REPRESENTATIONAL FRAMEWORKS AND THEIR OTHERS THE POLITICS OF RACIALIZED GENDER AND SEXUALITY
137
Miscegenated America The Civil War
137
The Whiteness of Film Noir
153
Are We Men? Prince Hall Martin Delany and the Masculine Ideal in Black Freemasonry 17751865
176
Unseemly Commemoration Religion Fragments and the Icon
205
TexSexMex American Identities Lone Stars and the Politics of Racialized Sexuality
223
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