Featuring:
Battleground is the first illustrated history of contemporary African American art. The volume offers an in-depth examination of twenty-five Black artists, discussing their artworks, practices, and philosophies, as expressed in their own words. Celeste-Marie Bernier has done extensive archival work in sources that have not been studied before, and her research provides a foundation for an intellectual and cultural history of contemporary African American artists and art movements from 1990 to the present. The wealth of quoted material--published interviews, artist statements, and autobiographical essays--should inform and inspire additional research in the years to come.
Battleground examines the paintings, drawings, sculptures, and installation, digital, and performance art produced by twenty-five Black artists living and working in the United States over the last three decades. The artists studied in this book include Emma Amos, Radcliffe Bailey, Mary Lee Bendolph, Chakaia Booker, Beverly Buchanan, Willie Cole, Leonardo Drew, Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, Myra Greene, Lyle Ashton Harris, Ronald Lockett, Whitfield Lovell, Kerry James Marshall, Lorraine O'Grady, Jefferson Pinder, Debra Priestly, Winfred Rembert, Nellie Mae Rowe, Alison Saar, Dread Scott, Clarissa T. Sligh, LaShawnda Crowe Storm, Mickalene Thomas, Nari Ward, and Pat Ward Williams.This is the first anthology of eighty speeches by forty-two world famous and under-researched African American freedom fighters, liberators and human rights campaigners living and working in Scotland, Ireland, Wales and England in the nineteenth century. Their pioneering and revolutionary works are supported by an in-depth introductory essay, author biographies, scholarly annotations and detailed bibliographies.
All these human rights orators testify to their lifelong 'fight for freedom' across their radical and revolutionary works. All their lives, they warred against the 'sufferings and horrors' of enslavement as a centuries-old 'cursed institution.' 'Words are weapons' in their fight for Black liberation. Across their life's works, they all protested against the rise of the 'spirit of slavery' in white supremacist and white racist US and British transatlantic societies.
This is the first scholarly anthology of nineteen narratives written by African American authors and published in Britain and Ireland in the nineteenth century.
These literary works share the powerful life stories of inspirationally pioneering writers: Charles Freeman, Phebe Ann Jacobs, Benjamin Crompton Chisley/William Jones, John Hart, John Williams, Henry (surname unknown), James Watkins, William Gustavus Allen, John Comber, Sarah Parker Remond, James Cheeney Thompson, Dinah Hope Browne, John Sella Martin, Lewis Smith, James Alfred Johnson, D. E. Tobias and Benjamin William Brown.
Their narratives are reproduced alongside an in-depth introductory essay, author biographies, scholarly annotations and a detailed bibliography.
All these authors testify to their lifelong 'fight for freedom' across their radical and revolutionary works. Throughout their lives, they warred against the 'sufferings and horrors' of enslavement as a centuries-old 'cursed institution.' 'Words are weapons' in their fight for Black liberation. Across their life's works, they protested against the rise of the 'spirit of slavery' in white supremacist and white racist American and British transatlantic societies.
Pictures and Power: Imaging and Imagining Frederick Douglass 1818-2018 is the result of decades of collaborations and conversations among academics, artists, and activists living and working in the UK and the US. For the first time, contributors map Douglass' eclectic and experimental visual archive across an array of aesthetic, social, political, cultural, historical, ideological, and philosophical contexts. While Douglass the activist, diplomat, statesman, politician, autobiographer, orator, essayist, historian, memoirist, correspondent, and philosopher have been the focus of a scholarly industry over the decades, Douglass the art historian and the subject of photographs, paintings, prints, and sculpture let alone mass visual culture has only begun to be explored. Across this volume, scholars share their groundbreaking research investigating Douglass' significance as the subject of visual culture and as himself a self-reflexive image-maker and radical theorist. Pictures and Power has come to life from a conviction endorsed by Douglass himself: the battleground against slavery and the fight for equal rights had many staging grounds and was by no means restricted to the plantation, the antislavery podium, the legal court, the stump circuit, the campaign trail, or even the educational institution but rather bled through every arena of imaginative, political and artistic life.
Previously unseen speeches, letters, autobiographies, and photographs of Frederick Douglass and his sons, Lewis Henry, Frederick Jr. and Charles Remond Douglass, from the Walter O. Evans collection
While the many public lives of Frederick Douglass - as the representative 'fugitive slave', autobiographer, orator, abolitionist, reformer, philosopher and statesman - are lionised worldwide, If I Survive sheds light on the private life of Douglass the family man. For the first time, this book provides readers with a collective biography mapping the activism, authorship and artistry of Douglass and his sons, Lewis Henry, Frederick Jr. and Charles Remond Douglass. In one volume, the history of the Douglass family appears alongside full colour facsimile reproductions of their over 80 previously unpublished speeches, letters, autobiographies and photographs held in the Walter O. Evans Collection. All of life can be found within these pages: romance, hope, despair, love, life, death, war, protest, politics, art, and friendship. Working together and against a changing backdrop of US slavery, Civil War and Reconstruction, the Douglass family fought for a new 'dawn of freedom'.
Marking the 200th anniversary of Frederick Douglass' birth, this first collective history and comprehensive collection of the Douglass family writings and portraits sheds new light not only on Douglass as a freedom-fighter and family man but on the lives and works of Lewis Henry, Frederick Jr., and Charles Remond. As civil rights protesters, essayists, autobiographers, and orators in their own right, they each played a vital role in the 'struggles for the cause of liberty' of their father. As published here, each of their original writings and portraits is accompanied by an explanatory essay and in-depth scholarly annotatations as well as a detailed bibliography.
Recognising that the Frederick Douglass that is needed in a twenty-first century Black Lives Matter era is no infallible icon but a mortal individual, If I Survive situates the lives and works of Douglass and his family within the social, political, historical and cultural contexts in which they lived and worked. Each unafraid to die for the cause, they dedicated their lives to the emancipation of the slave and to social justice by every means necessary.
The Foreword is written by Robert S. Levine and the Afterword is authored by Kim F. Hall.
Previously unseen speeches, letters, autobiographies, and photographs of Frederick Douglass and his sons, Lewis Henry, Frederick Jr. and Charles Remond Douglass, from the Walter O. Evans collection
While the many public lives of Frederick Douglass - as the representative 'fugitive slave', autobiographer, orator, abolitionist, reformer, philosopher and statesman - are lionised worldwide, If I Survive sheds light on the private life of Douglass the family man. For the first time, this book provides readers with a collective biography mapping the activism, authorship and artistry of Douglass and his sons, Lewis Henry, Frederick Jr. and Charles Remond Douglass. In one volume, the history of the Douglass family appears alongside full colour facsimile reproductions of their over 80 previously unpublished speeches, letters, autobiographies and photographs held in the Walter O. Evans Collection. All of life can be found within these pages: romance, hope, despair, love, life, death, war, protest, politics, art, and friendship. Working together and against a changing backdrop of US slavery, Civil War and Reconstruction, the Douglass family fought for a new 'dawn of freedom'.
Marking the 200th anniversary of Frederick Douglass' birth, this first collective history and comprehensive collection of the Douglass family writings and portraits sheds new light not only on Douglass as a freedom-fighter and family man but on the lives and works of Lewis Henry, Frederick Jr., and Charles Remond. As civil rights protesters, essayists, autobiographers, and orators in their own right, they each played a vital role in the 'struggles for the cause of liberty' of their father. As published here, each of their original writings and portraits is accompanied by an explanatory essay and in-depth scholarly annotatations as well as a detailed bibliography.
Recognising that the Frederick Douglass that is needed in a twenty-first century Black Lives Matter era is no infallible icon but a mortal individual, If I Survive situates the lives and works of Douglass and his family within the social, political, historical and cultural contexts in which they lived and worked. Each unafraid to die for the cause, they dedicated their lives to the emancipation of the slave and to social justice by every means necessary.
The Foreword is written by Robert S. Levine and the Afterword is authored by Kim F. Hall.
Across the centuries, the acts and arts of black heroism have inspired a provocative, experimental, and self-reflexive intellectual, political, and aesthetic tradition. In Characters of Blood, Celeste-Marie Bernier illuminates the ways in which six iconic men and women--Toussaint Louverture, Nathaniel Turner, Sengbe Pieh, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Tubman--challenged the dominant conceptualizations of their histories and played a key role in the construction of an alternative visual and textual archive.
While these figures have survived as symbolic touchstones, Bernier contends that scholars have yet to do justice to their complex bodies of work or their multifaceted lives. Adopting a comparative and transatlantic approach to her subjects' remarkable life stories, the author analyzes a wealth of creative work--from literature, drama, and art to public monuments, religious tracts, and historical narratives--to show how it represents enslaved heroism throughout the United States, Africa, and the Caribbean. In mapping this black diasporic tradition of resistance, Bernier intends not only to reveal the limitations and distortions on record but also to complicate the definitions of black heroism that have been restricted by ideological boundaries between heroic and anti-heroic sites and sights of struggle.
In this collection distinguished American and European scholars, curators and artists discuss major issues concerning the representation and commemoration of slavery, as brought into sharp focus by the 2007 bicentennial of the abolition of the slave trade. Writers consider nineteenth and twentieth century American and European images of African Americans, art installations, photography, literature, sculpture, exhibitions, performances, painting, film and material culture. This is essential reading for historians, cultural critics, art-historians, educationalists and museologists, in America as in Europe, and an important contribution to the understanding of the African diaspora, race, American and British history, heritage tourism, and transatlantic relations. Contributions include previously unpublished interview material with artists and practitioners, and a comprehensive review of the commemorative exhibitions of 2007. Illustrations include images from Louisiana, Maryland, and Virginia, many previously unpublished, in black and white, which challenge previous understandings of the aesthetics of slave representation.
This book was published as a special issue of Slavery and Abolition.
Inside the Invisible provides the first examination of the work of Turner Prize-winning Black British artist and curator Professor Lubaina Himid CBE. This comprehensive volume breaks new ground by theorizing her development of an alternative visual and textual language within which to do justice to the hidden histories and untold stories of Black women, children, and men bought and sold into transatlantic slavery. For Himid, the act of forgetting within official sites of memory is indivisible from the art of remembering within an African diasporic art historical tradition. She interrogates the widespread distortion and even wholesale erasure of Black bodies and souls subjected to dehumanizing stereotypes and grotesque caricatures within western imaginaries and dominant iconographic traditions over the centuries. Creating bodies of work in which she comes to grips with the physical and psychological realities of iconic and anonymous African diasporic individuals as living breathing human beings rather than as objectified types, she bears witness not only to tragedy but to triumph. A self-appointed researcher, historian, and storyteller as well as an artist, she succeeds in seeing inside the invisible regarding untold narratives of Black agency and artistry by mining national archives, listening to oral stories, acknowledging art-making traditions, and revisiting autobiographical testimonies.
Provides a wide-ranging entry point and intervention into scholarship on nineteenth-century American letter-writing
This comprehensive study by leading scholars in an important new field--the history of letters and letter writing--is essential reading for anyone interested in nineteenth-century American politics, history or literature. Because of its mass literacy, population mobility, and extensive postal system, nineteenth-century America is a crucial site for the exploration of letters and their meanings, whether they be written by presidents and statesmen, scientists and philosophers, novelists and poets, feminists and reformers, immigrants, Native Americans, or African Americans. This book breaks new ground by mapping the voluminous correspondence of these figures and other important American writers and thinkers. Rather than treating the letter as a spontaneous private document, the contributors understand it as a self-conscious artefact, circulating between friends and strangers and across multiple genres in ways that both make and break social ties.
Key Features
Draws together different emphases on the intellectual, literary and social uses of letter writing Provides students and researchers with a means to situate letters in their wider theoretical and historical contextsMethodologically expansive, intellectually interrogative chapters based on original research by leading academicsOffers new insights into the lives and careers of Louisa May Alcott, Charles Brockden Brown, Emily Dickinson, Frederick Douglass, Margaret Fuller, Henry James, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Edgar Allan Poe, among many others
Pictures and Power: Imaging and Imagining Frederick Douglass 1818-2018 is the result of decades of collaborations and conversations among academics, artists, and activists living and working in the UK and the US. For the first time, contributors map Douglass' eclectic and experimental visual archive across an array of aesthetic, social, political, cultural, historical, ideological, and philosophical contexts. While Douglass the activist, diplomat, statesman, politician, autobiographer, orator, essayist, historian, memoirist, correspondent, and philosopher have been the focus of a scholarly industry over the decades, Douglass the art historian and the subject of photographs, paintings, prints, and sculpture let alone mass visual culture has only begun to be explored. Across this volume, scholars share their groundbreaking research investigating Douglass' significance as the subject of visual culture and as himself a self-reflexive image-maker and radical theorist. Pictures and Power has come to life from a conviction endorsed by Douglass himself: the battleground against slavery and the fight for equal rights had many staging grounds and was by no means restricted to the plantation, the antislavery podium, the legal court, the stump circuit, the campaign trail, or even the educational institution but rather bled through every arena of imaginative, political and artistic life.
Inside the Invisible provides the first examination of the work of Turner Prize-winning Black British artist and curator Professor Lubaina Himid CBE. This comprehensive volume breaks new ground by theorizing her development of an alternative visual and textual language within which to do justice to the hidden histories and untold stories of Black women, children, and men bought and sold into transatlantic slavery. For Himid, the act of forgetting within official sites of memory is indivisible from the art of remembering within an African diasporic art historical tradition. She interrogates the widespread distortion and even wholesale erasure of Black bodies and souls subjected to dehumanizing stereotypes and grotesque caricatures within western imaginaries and dominant iconographic traditions over the centuries. Creating bodies of work in which she comes to grips with the physical and psychological realities of iconic and anonymous African diasporic individuals as living breathing human beings rather than as objectified types, she bears witness not only to tragedy but to triumph. A self-appointed researcher, historian, and storyteller as well as an artist, she succeeds in seeing inside the invisible regarding untold narratives of Black agency and artistry by mining national archives, listening to oral stories, acknowledging art-making traditions, and revisiting autobiographical testimonies.
In this collection distinguished American and European scholars, curators and artists discuss major issues concerning the representation and commemoration of slavery, as brought into sharp focus by the 2007 bicentennial of the abolition of the slave trade. Writers consider nineteenth and twentieth century American and European images of African Americans, art installations, photography, literature, sculpture, exhibitions, performances, painting, film and material culture. This is essential reading for historians, cultural critics, art-historians, educationalists and museologists, in America as in Europe, and an important contribution to the understanding of the African diaspora, race, American and British history, heritage tourism, and transatlantic relations. Contributions include previously unpublished interview material with artists and practitioners, and a comprehensive review of the commemorative exhibitions of 2007. Illustrations include images from Louisiana, Maryland, and Virginia, many previously unpublished, in black and white, which challenge previous understandings of the aesthetics of slave representation.
This book was published as a special issue of Slavery and Abolition.
For self-made artist and soldier Horace Pippin--who served in the 369th all-black infantry in World War I until he was wounded--war provided a formative experience that defined much of his life and work. His ability to transform combat service into canvases of emotive power, psychological depth, and realism showed not only how he viewed the world but also his mastery as a painter. In Suffering and Sunset, Celeste-Marie Bernier painstakingly traces Pippin's life story of art as a life story of war.
Illustrated with more than sixty photographs, including works in various mediums--many in full color--this is the first intellectual history and cultural biography of Pippin. Working from newly discovered archives and unpublished materials, Bernier provides an in-depth investigation into the artist's development of an alternative visual and textual lexicon and sheds light on his work in its aesthetic, social, and political contexts.
Suffering and Sunset illustrates Pippin's status as a groundbreaking artist as it shows how this African American painter suffered from but also staged many artful resistances to racism in a white-dominated art world.