Shawn Michelle Smith’s new book is right on time. Photographic Returns: Racial Justice and the Time of Photography helps us better understand our current cascade of crises, especially the lethal epidemic of police brutality and anti-Black violence in the United States. With a text centered on contemporary photography and theory, Shawn Michelle Smith, professor of visual and critical studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, brings together the history of photography, the history of race and racism in the United States, and a clear-eyed commitment to social justice. Her aim is to shine light on how the medium of photography can enable viewers to confront the life-threatening—and life-ending—structural racism of the past and the present while also holding space for viewers to envision and work toward a safe, healthy, and just antiracist future. Like the artists whose work she engages, the talented interdisciplinary scholar is interested in photographs and photographic projects that, as she explains, draw “into view historical moments of racial crisis and transformation in the United States that have also figured prominently in the history of photography” (1). In other words, these are pictures that capture watershed moments and events in American history—major turning points that have also been catalytic to the medium’s trajectory. Both historically grounded and theoretically immersed, Photographic Returns: Racial Justice and the Time of Photography investigates twin concerns of time and meaning. Smith is interested in exploring what she sees as the “temporal disruption” inherent in photography (24)—the way the medium “brings a past and also a future into the present” (31). At the same time, Smith is also interested in exploring what she calls “photographic mutability” (17), which she defines as the ways photographs allow for varied and varying meanings, including iconic images that “have become stand-ins for expansive, mobile, and sometimes contradictory meanings” (4). Organized both chronologically and thematically, each chapter explores a photographic project or projects by a contemporary artist that invites contemplation on, or conversation about, the potent nexus of photography, race, and social justice across time. With focus on the era of slavery and abolition, chapter one, “Looking Forward and Looking Back,” focuses in part on Rashid Johnson’s Self Portrait with My Hair Parted Like Frederick Douglass (2003), a photograph based on a well-known daguerreotype of abolitionist Frederick Douglass produced around 1850 soon after the fugitive’s legal emancipation. Smith first considers Douglass’s Civil War era essays and lectures regarding photography, representation, personhood, and social progress, as well as the famous activist’s own “repeated photographic performances.” Smith argues that Douglass—“the most photographed American of the nineteenth century” (27)—understood incisively how the medium could slide between the
{"title":"Photographic Returns: Racial Justice and the Time of Photography by Shawn Michelle Smith (review)","authors":"L. Collins","doi":"10.1353/afa.2022.0032","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/afa.2022.0032","url":null,"abstract":"Shawn Michelle Smith’s new book is right on time. Photographic Returns: Racial Justice and the Time of Photography helps us better understand our current cascade of crises, especially the lethal epidemic of police brutality and anti-Black violence in the United States. With a text centered on contemporary photography and theory, Shawn Michelle Smith, professor of visual and critical studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, brings together the history of photography, the history of race and racism in the United States, and a clear-eyed commitment to social justice. Her aim is to shine light on how the medium of photography can enable viewers to confront the life-threatening—and life-ending—structural racism of the past and the present while also holding space for viewers to envision and work toward a safe, healthy, and just antiracist future. Like the artists whose work she engages, the talented interdisciplinary scholar is interested in photographs and photographic projects that, as she explains, draw “into view historical moments of racial crisis and transformation in the United States that have also figured prominently in the history of photography” (1). In other words, these are pictures that capture watershed moments and events in American history—major turning points that have also been catalytic to the medium’s trajectory. Both historically grounded and theoretically immersed, Photographic Returns: Racial Justice and the Time of Photography investigates twin concerns of time and meaning. Smith is interested in exploring what she sees as the “temporal disruption” inherent in photography (24)—the way the medium “brings a past and also a future into the present” (31). At the same time, Smith is also interested in exploring what she calls “photographic mutability” (17), which she defines as the ways photographs allow for varied and varying meanings, including iconic images that “have become stand-ins for expansive, mobile, and sometimes contradictory meanings” (4). Organized both chronologically and thematically, each chapter explores a photographic project or projects by a contemporary artist that invites contemplation on, or conversation about, the potent nexus of photography, race, and social justice across time. With focus on the era of slavery and abolition, chapter one, “Looking Forward and Looking Back,” focuses in part on Rashid Johnson’s Self Portrait with My Hair Parted Like Frederick Douglass (2003), a photograph based on a well-known daguerreotype of abolitionist Frederick Douglass produced around 1850 soon after the fugitive’s legal emancipation. Smith first considers Douglass’s Civil War era essays and lectures regarding photography, representation, personhood, and social progress, as well as the famous activist’s own “repeated photographic performances.” Smith argues that Douglass—“the most photographed American of the nineteenth century” (27)—understood incisively how the medium could slide between the","PeriodicalId":44779,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45820714","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Forms of Contention: Influence and the African American Sonnet Tradition by Hollis Robbins (review)","authors":"P. Howarth","doi":"10.1353/afa.2022.0030","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/afa.2022.0030","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44779,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42779251","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Spotlight","authors":"Darryl Holmes","doi":"10.1353/afa.2022.0026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/afa.2022.0026","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44779,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43672781","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:Most critics of William Demby's Love Story Black have focused on its gender politics and satirical treatment of the Black Power movement. This essay focuses on the novel's under-examined references to homosexual identity and positions these "funny" figures within a broader queer discourse that reflects Demby's interests in artistic performances, racial-sexual trauma, and unconventional approaches to time.
{"title":"The \"Funny Fairies from Downstairs\": Queer Creativity in William Demby's Love Story Black","authors":"T. Schmidt","doi":"10.1353/afa.2022.0022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/afa.2022.0022","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Most critics of William Demby's Love Story Black have focused on its gender politics and satirical treatment of the Black Power movement. This essay focuses on the novel's under-examined references to homosexual identity and positions these \"funny\" figures within a broader queer discourse that reflects Demby's interests in artistic performances, racial-sexual trauma, and unconventional approaches to time.","PeriodicalId":44779,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46140271","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Afrofuturism Rising: The Literary Prehistory of a Movement by Isiah Lavender III (review)","authors":"M. Magloire","doi":"10.1353/afa.2022.0013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/afa.2022.0013","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44779,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49590527","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This essay examines two novels serialized during the 1860s by embracing the incompleteness of their publication and recovery. This approach views incompleteness not only as a material difficulty for reading these novels but as a methodology for making sense of them. Prioritizing speculative readings that hold open possibilities rather than attempt to fill in the gaps allows us to better understand the complexities and breadth of these texts as well as the generic relations between them.
{"title":"Embracing the Incomplete: Speculative Reading in The Curse of Caste, Minnie’s Sacrifice, and the Christian Recorder","authors":"B. Fielder","doi":"10.1353/afa.2022.0000","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/afa.2022.0000","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay examines two novels serialized during the 1860s by embracing the incompleteness of their publication and recovery. This approach views incompleteness not only as a material difficulty for reading these novels but as a methodology for making sense of them. Prioritizing speculative readings that hold open possibilities rather than attempt to fill in the gaps allows us to better understand the complexities and breadth of these texts as well as the generic relations between them.","PeriodicalId":44779,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47682968","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Distance Between Us, and: Answered, and: Breath","authors":"Peggy Ann Tartt","doi":"10.1353/afa.2022.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/afa.2022.0007","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44779,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48134216","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Race and Vision in the Nineteenth-Century United States ed. by Shirley Samuels (review)","authors":"Ashley Rattner","doi":"10.1353/afa.2022.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/afa.2022.0008","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44779,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43187281","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
tactics of Afrofuturism to propel Black militants toward a final, “flawless victory, a bloodless revolution” (184). Lavender poignantly centers a key aspect of Afrofuturism—what he calls “the hope impulse”—as an animating force behind all African American literature from the very first narratives of enslaved people to Black cultural productions of the present day. However, to say that African American literature is Afrofuturist because it is hopeful, as Lavender constantly does throughout the book, is somewhat reductive. Lavender’s other critical terms, such as “the transhistorical feedback loop” and “networked consciousness,” also work against his analysis at times by shoehorning the texts into predetermined conclusions rather than considering their individual nuances. However, the book’s missteps are all in the service of building up Afrofuturism not just as an aesthetic but also as an analytic in which “finding the future in the past should be a core tenet” (112). In this way, Lavender’s work complements the recent scholarship of Kara Keeling (2019), Sami Schalk (2018), and Ytasha Womack (2013) by providing their objects of analysis with an origin story deeply rooted in the world of the Americas. Although Lavender’s analysis does not always live up to his aspirations, he opens a discussion about the wider applicability of Afrofuturism as a reading practice that has its own history beyond the 1993 coinage of the word and its 1970s ur-texts. Like Sun Ra, who claimed to be “on the other side of time,” Afrofuturism Rising makes a bold claim for the Black experience as unbounded by linear time.
{"title":"The Blackademic Life: Academic Fiction, Higher Education, and the Black Intellectual by Lavelle Porter (review)","authors":"Stephanie Brown","doi":"10.1353/afa.2022.0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/afa.2022.0014","url":null,"abstract":"tactics of Afrofuturism to propel Black militants toward a final, “flawless victory, a bloodless revolution” (184). Lavender poignantly centers a key aspect of Afrofuturism—what he calls “the hope impulse”—as an animating force behind all African American literature from the very first narratives of enslaved people to Black cultural productions of the present day. However, to say that African American literature is Afrofuturist because it is hopeful, as Lavender constantly does throughout the book, is somewhat reductive. Lavender’s other critical terms, such as “the transhistorical feedback loop” and “networked consciousness,” also work against his analysis at times by shoehorning the texts into predetermined conclusions rather than considering their individual nuances. However, the book’s missteps are all in the service of building up Afrofuturism not just as an aesthetic but also as an analytic in which “finding the future in the past should be a core tenet” (112). In this way, Lavender’s work complements the recent scholarship of Kara Keeling (2019), Sami Schalk (2018), and Ytasha Womack (2013) by providing their objects of analysis with an origin story deeply rooted in the world of the Americas. Although Lavender’s analysis does not always live up to his aspirations, he opens a discussion about the wider applicability of Afrofuturism as a reading practice that has its own history beyond the 1993 coinage of the word and its 1970s ur-texts. Like Sun Ra, who claimed to be “on the other side of time,” Afrofuturism Rising makes a bold claim for the Black experience as unbounded by linear time.","PeriodicalId":44779,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41849181","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
which is planted in a field, watered by the enslaved man, and eventually grows into a tall tree that becomes a lynching site for multiple black men” (200). Here, “Walker revises the creation of ‘America’ as the creation of ‘African America,’ recovering the black origins of a history that has been sanitized and whitewashed” to “present racial slavery as myth” (201, 203). The implications of this powerful essay, and indeed Race and Vision as a whole, urge us to consider the “relationship between flesh and myth,” sight and sense, power and perception.
{"title":"Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality by Jennifer Nash (review)","authors":"Brenna M. Casey","doi":"10.1353/afa.2022.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/afa.2022.0009","url":null,"abstract":"which is planted in a field, watered by the enslaved man, and eventually grows into a tall tree that becomes a lynching site for multiple black men” (200). Here, “Walker revises the creation of ‘America’ as the creation of ‘African America,’ recovering the black origins of a history that has been sanitized and whitewashed” to “present racial slavery as myth” (201, 203). The implications of this powerful essay, and indeed Race and Vision as a whole, urge us to consider the “relationship between flesh and myth,” sight and sense, power and perception.","PeriodicalId":44779,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44073144","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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