America and the Long 19th Century
General Editors
David Kazanjian, Elizabeth McHenry, and Priscilla Wald
Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor
Elizabeth Young
Neither Fugitive nor Free: Atlantic Slavery, Freedom Suits, and the Legal Culture of Travel
Edlie L. Wong
Shadowing the White Man’s Burden: U.S. Imperialism and the Problem of the Color Line
Gretchen Murphy
Bodies of Reform: The Rhetoric of Character in Gilded-Age America
James B. Salazar
Empire’s Proxy: American Literature and U.S. Imperialism in the Philippines
Meg Wesling
Sites Unseen: Architecture, Race, and American Literature
William A. Gleason
Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights
Robin Bernstein
American Arabesque: Arabs and Islam in the Nineteenth Century Imaginary
Jacob Rama Berman
Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the Nineteenth Century
Kyla Wazana Tompkins
Idle Threats: Men and the Limits of Productivity in Nineteenth-Century America
Andrew Lyndon Knighton
The Traumatic Colonel: The Founding Fathers, Slavery, and the Phantasmatic Aaron Burr
Michael J. Drexler and Ed White
Unsettled States: Nineteenth-Century American Literary StudiesEdited by Dana Luciano and Ivy G. Wilson
Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain, Asia, and Comparative RacializationHsuan L. Hsu
Picture Freedom: Remaking Black Visuality in the Early Nineteenth CenturyJasmine Nichole Cobb
Picture Freedom
Remaking Black Visuality in the Early Nineteenth Century
Jasmine Nichole Cobb
New York University Press
New York and London
New York University Press
New York and London
© 2015 by New York University
All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-1-4798-1722-1 (hardback)
ISBN: 978-1-4798-2977-4 (paper)
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A book in the American Literatures Initiative (ALI), a collaborative publishing project of NYU Press, Fordham University Press, Rutgers University Press, Temple University Press, and the University of Virginia Press. The Initiative is supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. For more information, please visit www.americanliteratures.org
For the ladies, especially Lottie Cobb and Helen Webster
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Parlor Fantasies, Parlor Nightmares
1. A Peculiarly “Ocular” Institution
2. Optics of Respectability: Women, Vision, and the Black Private Sphere
3. “Look! A Negress”: Public Women, Private Horrors, and the White Ontology of the Gaze
4. Racial Iconography: Freedom and Black Citizenship in the Antebellum North
5. Racing the Transatlantic Parlor: Blackness at Home and Abroad
Epilogue: The Specter of Black Freedom
Notes
Index
About the Author
Acknowledgments
This book is complete because of an extensive network of family, friends, colleagues, and students who supported me throughout the process. I first owe endless gratitude to the Black women of this study who left an archive for me to consider and lived their freedom in ways that continue to defy documentation. In tracing their lives, I first visited holdings at the Library Company of Philadelphia, with support from their Andrew Mellon fellowship program. I am forever indebted to Phillip Lapsansky for his vast knowledge and good nature, and also to Erika Piola, Cornelia King, Charlene Knight, Krystal Appiah, and Nicole Joniec, who make the Library Company a place to which I will always return.
New York University Press is another significant institution that shaped this project. I appreciate the commitment of Eric Zinner and Alicia Nadkarni, editors for the “America in the Long Nineteenth Century” series, the American Literatures Initiative, and, most especially, my editors, Badia Ahad and Cecelia Cancellaro.
My intellectual community is vast and charitable. John L. Jackson Jr., my advisor, has offered unwavering support for my ideas, and me, even from the very beginning; I continue to rely on his guidance and friendship. Kali N. Gross, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, and Paul Messaris read the earliest iterations of these ideas, along with Oscar Gandy Jr., offering critical insights. Beverly Henry, Nadine Gabbadon, and Robin Stevens, along with Khadijah White and Aymar Christian, helped me thrive at the University of Pennsylvania, making the Annenberg School
