Visualizing Equality - (The John Hope Franklin African American History and Culture) by Aston Gonzalez (Paperback)

About the Book

"Visualizing equality ... analyz[es] how previously unexamined or understudied African American artists shaped conceptions of race during the nineteenth century. Marshaling material from 26 private and public archives in the United States and England, Gonzalez charts the changing roles of African American visual artists as they used their work to expand black rights in the United States. Understudied or forgotten artists such as Robert Douglass Jr., Patrick Henry Reason, James P. Ball, and Augustus Washington produced images to persuade viewers of the necessity for black social equality, political enfranchisement, and freedom from slavery, and Gonzalez argues that these cultural producers helped to make the world they envisioned through their art"--

Book Synopsis

The fight for racial equality in the nineteenth century played out not only in marches and political conventions but also in the print and visual culture created and disseminated throughout the United States by African Americans. Advances in visual technologies -- daguerreotypes, lithographs, cartes de visite, and steam printing presses -- enabled people to see and participate in social reform movements in new ways. African American activists seized these opportunities and produced images that advanced campaigns for black rights. In this book, Aston Gonzalez charts the changing roles of African American visual artists as they helped build the world they envisioned.

Understudied artists such as Robert Douglass Jr., Patrick Henry Reason, James Presley Ball, and Augustus Washington produced images to persuade viewers of the necessity for racial equality, black political leadership, and freedom from slavery. Moreover, these activist artists' networks of transatlantic patronage and travels to Europe, the Caribbean, and Africa reveal their extensive involvement in the most pressing concerns for black people in the Atlantic world. Their work demonstrates how images became central to the ways that people developed ideas about race, citizenship, and politics during the nineteenth century.

Review Quotes

"Visualizing Equality meticulously pieces together archival traces to enliven the stories of Black printmakers, printers, and photographers whose aesthetic practices were inextricable from their political convictions. . . . Gonzalez has modeled a mode of studying US history and visual culture that meaningfully engages with the many nodes of the Black diaspora in the Atlantic world and avoids the US-centrism that frequently hampers scholarly and political discourses."--Imprint, Journal of the American Historical Print Collectors Society

"Visualizing Equality successfully demonstrates how early African American visual artists developed ideas and practices of image making linked to politics impacted by their understanding of the intersections of race and images. Meticulously researched, Gonzalez's text focuses our attention on Black artists empowered by their positions as activists in free Black communities in the North."--caa.reviews

"[Gonzalez] narrows his lens to offer rich biographies of his leading characters, opens the aperture to reveal the local contexts and activist networks in which they worked, and then widens it further to show the transnational reach of their work."--North Carolina Historical Review

"Extends the prehistory of the Black Arts movement--as well as the Harlem Renaissance--to a critical period in the middle of the nineteenth century, when imagery was central to the fight against slavery. . . . Illuminates a vital period in the development of African American visual culture."--Black Perspectives

"Gonzalez's thorough research sketches out the reticulation of physical, social, and interpretive pathways through which Douglass's work passed, establishing a groundwork for future scholars."--Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide