The New York Concert Saloon: The Devil's Own Nights (review) (original) (raw)
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Art and Class in the Era of Barnum
Visual Resources, 2006
One thing learned from a century and a half of mass culture is that its effects are complex and contradictory. Cultural homogenization has been real, but it has not brought reduction of cultural hierarchy, division and difference. Mass culture has in fact distinguished itself as consummately capable of merging these opposing tendencies into the very fabric of society and culture. This article examines case studies that feature crossover viewing situations: mass audience encounters with progressive art at the Armory Show in New York in 1913 and, conversely, elite audience experiences of lowerclass attractions in dime museums and the Bowery in the later nineteenth century. The comparison strives to elucidate mass culture's dialectic of homogenization and differentiation.
Slide 2] Microcephaly, meaning "small head", is the medical term given to a cluster of conditions that result in unusually small skulls and varying degrees of cognitive impairment. Microcephalic performers, dubbed "pinheads" were a staple of freak shows throughout the 19 th and early 20 th centuries. For instance, this is Simon Metz[Slide 3], better known by his stage name "Schlitzie", a pinhead performers featured in Tod Browning's 1932 film, "Freaks." Freak show pinheads were such an established element of American culture that the word "pinhead" is, to this day, a common insult that implies low intelligence. In the 1860's, showman P.T. Barnum introduced an immensely popular innovation in the theatrical presentation of "pinheads". Barnum began framing them as members of newly discovered races or missing-link species, rather than merely physically unusual human beings. These "pinhead race" acts were a huge and long running hit with the American public.
2016
The initial focus of my analysis is Washington Irving’s “The Devil and Tom Walker,” an American retelling of the Faust myth. Through racializing the Devil, Irving constructs a problematic racial ontology that conflates the devil’s blackness with the blackness of 19th Century Afro-Americans. In choosing to portray the devil as black, Irving, knowingly or not, demonizes black bodies and places them onto a cartography that relegates identity. Using Memetics, Toni Morrison’s “Unspeakable Things Unspoken,” and Katherine McKittrick’s Demonic Grounds as primary theoretical lenses, I seek to uncover and begin mapping these bodily cartographies in relation to intersectional struggles of class and diaspora. From a socio-historical perspective, I explore how these bodily cartographies connect with a larger narratological framework of blackness in white 19th century society and literature prior to 1870. Drawing from a set of texts as varied as Joseph Smith, Jr.’s The Book of Mormon and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, I seek to map out a Migration of Blackness throughout white spaces, religious and secular, North and South.
Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (review)
Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 2001
ABSTRACT Journal of Interdisciplinary History 31.3 (2001) 469-470 This study considers the market for slaves as a multidimensional human experience, focusing primarily on New Orleans. Gracefully written, its most original contribution is a vivid account of life in the "slave pens," where new arrivals were locked up at night and paraded for potential buyers during the day. Although he draws upon diverse and previously underutilized evidence, such as slave sales disputes from the Louisiana courts, notarized acts of sale, and slave narratives, Johnson presents no original quantitative information about the slave markets, these being (in his words) "less important to my argument than the window into slavery provided by the moment of the slave sale" (18). There is certainly a valid place for non-quantitative studies of these matters, emphasizing the subjective role of slave markets for both owners and slaves. But it is somewhat harder to accept that Johnson makes no attempt at an authoritative description of the institutional arrangements and practices in these markets. For example, he places heavy emphasis on "the daily dialectic of categorization and differentiation," in which slaves were grouped into categories for purposes of universal price comparisons (58, 118-119). One might reasonably expect that a specialized study would present detailed evidence on what these categories were and how they developed over time, but the book does not do so. All summary statements about magnitudes invariably come attached to the citation of a secondary work, most often Michael Tadman's Speculators and Slaves (Madison, 1989). Despite these shortcomings, Soul by Soul proffers many original insights about the implications of these markets for the lives of slaves. Most compelling are the ways in which the feelings and behavior of the slaves themselves unavoidably played a role in market transactions. Widely suspected of "buying the sick and malign on the cheap only to sell them at premium prices" (124)--a phenomenon known in economics as the "lemons problem"--slave traders had a "story" for every slave on sale, explaining why they happened to be on the market, through no fault of their own (for example, "the Owner being on the eve of departure for Europe.") But since the slaves, being human, were in position to falsify these claims, the traders gave them a carefully scripted role, often with inducements of promised privileges. If particularly fortunate or clever, slaves could manipulate the terms of their own sale, and Johnson shows that a considerable lore of knowledge accumulated among the slaves about this art. Information provided by slaves could also be important in post-sale disputes under Louisiana's "redhibition" (or implied warranty) laws, when slaves were in poor health or did not possess the skills for which they were advertised. These parts of the book will interest students of slavery from all disciplines. Less successful is the argument that the slave market was the essence of self-definition for white southerners. Johnson is persuasive in suggesting that awareness of slave values was pervasive, and that this wealth was an essential basis for the southern economy. However, his belief that this consideration "is peculiarly absent from antebellum studies of slavery" is only possible because of his neglect of much of the economic history literature (230-231). But the subjective attitudes that receive much attention -- bragging about bargain prices, embarrassment over imprudent purchases, even the elaborate self-deceptions and rationalizations -- could apply to many other markets in conspicuous durables, such as horses, houses, and automobiles. Perhaps the most chilling feature of slave-owning class attitudes was their banality. Gavin WrightStanford University
The Journal of Religion, 2013
Perhaps the novel evolved in order to deal with man's growing awareness that behind the façade of social organization, manners, customs, myths, rituals and religions of the post-Christian era lies chaos. Man knows . . . that he did not create the universe, and that the universe is not at all concerned with human values. Man knows even in this day of marvelous technology and the tenuous subjugation of the atom, that nature can crush him, and that at the boundaries of human order the arts and the instruments of technology are hardly more than magic objects which serve to aid us in our ceaseless quest for certainty. We cannot live . . . in the contemplation of chaos, but neither can we live without an awareness of chaos, and the means through which we achieve that awareness, and through which we assert our humanity most significantly against it, is in great art. In our time the most articulate art form for defining ourselves and for asserting our humanity is the novel. Certainly it is our most rational art form for dealing with the irrational. ðRalph Ellison, "Society, Morality, and the Novel"Þ 1 This essay reads two historical debates concerning novelistic "just representations"-ð1Þ the problem of poetic justice in the novels of longeighteenth-century England and ð2Þ the nature of race and its representation in the development of the twentieth-century African-American novel-as progressive iterations of a crisis of certainty that characterizes modernity. Both examples address, according to their own cultural and historical contexts, questions of epistemology-the problem of knowledge-in the * The author would like to thank Richard A. Rosengarten and two anonymous reviewers for their careful reading and helpful insights in the preparation and revision of this essay.