The matter of Black living : the aesthetic experiment of racial data, 1880-1930 / Autumn Womack.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Womack, Autumn, author.

Series:

Chicago scholarship online.

Chicago scholarship online

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American literature--20th century--History and criticism.

American literature.

African Americans in literature.

African Americans in motion pictures.

African Americans in art.

Motion pictures--United States--History--20th century.

Motion pictures.

Photography--United States--History--20th century.

Photography.

African Americans--Social life and customs--19th century.

African Americans.

African Americans--Social life and customs--20th century.

Social surveys--United States.

Social surveys.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (287 pages)

Place of Publication:

Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2022.

Summary:

As the 19th century came to a close and questions concerning the future of African American life reached a fever pitch, many social scientists and reformers approached post-emancipation Black life as an empirical problem that could be systematically solved with the help of new technologies like the social survey, photography and film. What ensued was nothing other than a 'racial data revolution', one which rendered African American life an inanimate object of inquiry in the name of social order and racial regulation. At the very same time, African American cultural producers and intellectuals such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Kelly Miller, Sutton Griggs and Zora Neale Hurston staged their own kind of revolution, un-disciplining racial data in ways that captured the dynamism of Black social life. This book excavates the dynamic interplay between racial data and Black aesthetic production.

Contents:

Intro

Contents

Introduction: Data and the Matter of Black Life

Undisciplining Data

The Social Life of Racial Data

Racial Data, Visual Revolutions

The Aesthetics of Data

Undisciplining as Method

Overview

1. The Social Survey: The Survey Spirit

"The Survey Spirit": Origins, Evolution, and the Radical Operations of the Social Survey

"Ugly Facts" and (Anti)Social Data: Kelly Miller, the American Negro Academy, and the Call for the Social Survey

A Book to Do Some Good: Kelly Miller, Sutt on Griggs, and the Emergence of Social Document Fiction

Faulty Surfaces, Unruly Eyes

Everywhere and Nowhere: The Social Survey's Nongeography

2. Photography: Looking Out

Seeing Survival

Deep Black Mourning: Lynching's (Anti)Photographic Logic

"Let Them See": Photography, Performance, and Reform

Looking Out: Toward a New Visual Epistemology of Survival

Photographically Hesitant: The Visual Politics of W. E. B. Du Bois's "Jesus Christ in Georgia"

3. Film: Overexposure

Beyond the Frame: Overexposure and Zora Hurston's Filmic Practice

"Drenched in Light"

Recording Racial Feeling

Contraband Flesh

Cinematics of Negro Expression

Coda: Racial Data's Afterlives

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Plates.

Notes:

Also issued in print: 2022.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (viewed on October 24, 2022).

ISBN:

9780226806884

022680688X

OCLC:

1291319102