Inventing Stereotype - by Martin A Berger (Hardcover)

About the Book

"How do we know if a painting, play, or novel contains stereotypes? Most of us think we recognize them when we see them, but this book reveals that the matter is far more complex. Inventing Stereotype traces the emergence of our present-day understanding of stereotype to the 1920s, when the American journalist and public intellectual Walter Lippmann took a word coined for an eighteenth-century printing technique and attached it to a vastly more powerful concept. Martin Berger explores how the idea evolved as it gained traction in the interwar period, fueling a scholarly and popular impulse to search for stereotypes in art. Delving into the original reception of Black, Jewish, and white characters in 1920s productions of Eugene O'Neill's All God's Chillun Got Wings and Anne Nichols's Abie's Irish Rose as well as paintings by artists including George Bellows, Thomas Hart Benton, Winslow Homer, Archibald Motley Jr., and Henry O. Tanner, Berger reveals how works we view as stereotyped today might have appeared nonstereotyped to their original audiences-and vice versa. Along the way, we come to a new understanding of what debates over stereotypes in art can and cannot reveal about America's racial values"--

Book Synopsis

Berger excavates the lineage of stereotype as a concept, illustrating how perception of stereotypes in works of literature and fine art shifts relative to representational norms.

Upending a century of scholarly and popular thinking about stereotype, Martin A. Berger traces our current understanding of it to the 1920s, when American journalist and public intellectual Walter Lippmann borrowed the term from printmaking techniques and defined it as a shared mental picture that simplified a person, event, group, or thing so it could be easily grasped. Berger uncovers stereotype's intellectual debts to philosophy, psychology, political science, and, in particular, art history and interwar racial theories.

Inventing Stereotype analyzes a series of plays, novels, and paintings from the 1920s and 1930s that sparked fierce debate about whether they employed racial stereotypes in the depiction of Black, Jewish, and other characters. Through careful attention to audience responses--parsed by race, political leanings, religion, and class--the book illustrates how artistic depictions are categorized as either stereotyped or not, relative to current representational norms, rather than to their success in conveying the authentic identities of individuals or racial groups.

Review Quotes

"Berger's Inventing Stereotype offers a clear, concise, and accessible contribution to the literature on arts and racial representation."--Tina Post, author of "Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression"

"Through a careful, refreshing, and compelling historicized analysis, Berger's Inventing Stereotype demonstrates that there is no simple 'seeing' of stereotypes in the history of American art. Berger shows us how and when the stereotype became a problem for artists and art critics and why the concept reveals more about the historically situated viewer than the artwork itself. Inventing Stereotype offers a much-needed corrective to our misunderstanding of stereotype, and in a fine and poignant final chapter on the painter Archibald Motley, Berger proves himself masterful in helping us see artworks through and beyond our preconceptions."--Kenneth W. Warren, author of "What Was African American Literature?"

"A remarkable feat of clarity and nuance on a topic made for simplicity. There's so much here to like (e.g., on Eugene O'Neill and Archibald Motley), but I especially appreciate Berger on the crucial role of historical context."--Nell Irvin Painter, author of "The History of White People"

"Berger's immensely readable account of how stereotypes--of Jews, of African Americans, indeed of virtually everyone else in the early twentieth century--shift as they become more or less useful to the groups portrayed, is a tour de force. Simultaneously funny and sad, Inventing Stereotype reveals how caricatures are still used as hammers on both sides of the political spectrum: nothing new here, folks. What is new is the brilliance of Berger's consideration not only of the functions of such stereotypes but of the very category of the stereotype, which was coined by an American Jewish thinker and shaped by antisemitic stereotypes."--Sander Gilman, author of "Jewish Self-Hatred" and "Doc or Quack: Science and Anti-science in Modern Medicine"

About the Author

Martin A. Berger is provost and senior vice president of academic affairs at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Berger is the author of Man Made: Thomas Eakins and the Construction of Gilded Age Manhood, Sight Unseen: Whiteness and American Visual Culture, Seeing through Race: A Reinterpretation of Civil Rights Photography, and the exhibition catalog Freedom Now! Forgotten Photographs of the Civil Rights Struggle.