Race and Vision in the Nineteenth-Century United States is a collection of twelve essays by cultural critics that exposes how fraught relations of identity and race appear through imaging technologies in architecture, scientific discourse, sculpture, photography, painting, music, theater, and, finally, the twenty-first century visual commentary of Kara Walker. Throughout these essays, the racial practices of the nineteenth century are juxtaposed with literary practices involving s...

In Relative Races, Brigitte Fielder presents an alternative theory of how race is ascribed. Contrary to notions of genealogies by which race is transmitted from parents to children, the examples Fielder discusses from nineteenth-century literature, history, and popular culture show how race can follow other directions: Desdemona becomes less than fully white when she is smudged with Othello's blackface, a white woman becomes Native American when she is adopted by a Seneca family, ...

Producing Children imagines the possibility, indeed the inevitability, of a creative relation between children as producers and consumers by revising the long-established, hierarchical relation between adults and children. The chapters in this collection reveal that studying child-produced culture complicates our received understandings of children’s culture as culture by adults, for children, about children. They also underscore “children’s literature” as a cultural phenomenon th...