Passing, lynching and Jim Crow: A genealogy of race and gender in United States visual culture, 1895--1929
This dissertation looks at combinations of race and gender ideologies at the turn of the century generated by U.S. imperialism and the world's fair movement as manifested in visual culture, especially visual art, popular culture and cinema. There is a focus not only on explicating the white supremacist terms, adapted from a plantation slavery context, which generated the criteria of racial hierarchy and the proclivity towards lynching as an expression of its greatest failure, but also the response of black intellectuals, such as W.E.B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells, Mary Church Terrell and Anna J. Cooper to the formulation of these social and cultural restrictions and limitations imposed upon the descendants of former slaves. These race/gender ideologies (combinations of race and gender) are then concretized in visual imagery in fine art, illustration, material culture, photography, performance and practices of human display in natural history museums, zoos, and world's fairs. The first half of this dissertation looks at the general trends in U.S. visual culture up to, and including, the innovation of cinema at the turn-of-the-century; the second half considers, in particular, the emergence of Afro-American, or black images in silent cinema (1895--1929) with a specific focus on gender, homoeroticism and (mostly hetero)sexuality. Considered in more exhaustive detail are the various film versions of Uncle Tom's Cabin, D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation and Oscar Micheaux's Within Our Gates
Thesis, Dissertation, English, 1999