National imaginaries, American identities : the cultural work of American iconography / edited by Larry J. Reynolds and Gordon Hutner.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Reynolds, Larry J., editor.

Hutner, Gordon, editor.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Symbolism--Social aspects--United States--History.

Symbolism.

National characteristics, American.

Group identity--United States--History.

Group identity.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (264 pages)

Place of Publication:

Princeton, New Jersey : Princeton University Press, [2000]

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Contributors

Introduction American Cultural Iconography

PART ONE: BETWEEN IMAGE AND NARRATIVE: FIGURING AMERICAN COLLECTIVITY

CHAPTER 1 Seeing and Believing: Hawthorne's Reflections on the Daguerreotype in The House of the Seven Gables

Chapter 2 Nuclear Pictures and Metapictures

CHAPTER 3 Pittsburgh at Yellowstone: Old Faithful and the Pulse of Industrial America

Chapter 4 Melville, Garibaldi, and the Medusa of Revolution

PART TWO: REPRESENTATIONAL FRAMEWORKS AND THEIR OTHERS: THE POLITICS OF RACIALIZED GENDER AND SEXUALITY

Chapter 5 Miscegenated America: The Civil War

Chapter 6 The Whiteness of Film Noir

Chapter 7 "Are We Men?": Prince Hall, Martin Delany, and the Masculine Ideal in Black Freemasonry, 1775-1865

Chapter 8 Unseemly Commemoration: Religion, Fragments, and the Icon

Chapter 9 Tex-Sex-Mex: American Identities, Lone Stars, and the Politics of Racialized Sexuality

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780691009957

0691009953

9780691227726

0691227721

OCLC:

1241256171