The Photographic Invention of Whiteness: The Visual Cultures of White Atlantic Worlds 2023005112, 9781032227344, 9781032229324, 9781003274797

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The Photographic Invention of Whiteness

Focusing on the creation of the concept of Whiteness, this study links early photographic imagery to the development and exploitation that were common in the colonial Atlantic World of the mid-to-late nineteenth century. With the advent of the daguerreotype in the mid-nineteenth century, White European settlers could imagine themselves as a supra-national community, where the attainment of wealth was rapidly becoming accessible through colonisation. Their dispersal throughout the colonial territories made possible the advent of a new representative type of Whiteness that eventually merged with the portrayal of modernity itself. Over time, the colonisation of the Atlantic World became synonymous with fascination itself within a European mind fixated upon both a racially subordinated world and the technical media through which it was represented. In the intervening centuries, images have acted as a medium of the imaginary, allowing for ideas around classification and the measurement of value to travel and to situate themselves as universal means. Contemporary societies still grapple with the residues of race, gender, class, and sexuality first established by the contrived mores of this representational medium, and those who were racialised by the camera as objects of fascination, curiosity, or concern have remained so well into the post-digital era. The book will be of interest to scholars working in history of photography, art history, colonialism, and critical race theory. Stephanie Polsky is a Senior Academic Program Manager at the College of Arts, Media and Design at Northeastern University.

Routledge History of Photography

This series publishes research monographs and edited collections focusing on the history and theory of photography. These original, scholarly books may take an art historical, visual studies, or material studies approach. Photography and Political Repressions in Stalin’s Russia Defacing the Enemy Denis Skopin Diverse Voices in Photographic Albums “These Are Our Stories” Edited by Mary Trent and Kris Belden-Adams How Photography Changed Philosophy Daniel Rubinstein Eroticism and Photography in 1930s French Magazines Risqué Shop Windows Alix Agret Photographing, Exploring and Exhibiting Russian Turkestan Central Asia on Display Inessa Kouteinikova Pre-State Photographic Archives and the Zionist Movement Rotem Rozental The Photographic Invention of Whiteness The Visual Cultures of White Atlantic Worlds Stephanie Polsky

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-History-ofPhotography/book-series/RHOP

The Photographic Invention of Whiteness The Visual Cultures of White Atlantic Worlds Stephanie Polsky

Designed cover image: [Unidentified man, half-length portrait] [graphic]/ W. & F. Langenheim’s, Philadelphia First published 2024 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Stephanie Polsky ‘The right of Stephanie Polsky to be identified as the author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.’ All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Polsky, Stephanie, author. Title: The photographic invention of Whiteness : the visual cultures of White Atlantic worlds / Stephanie Polsky. Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2023005112 | ISBN 9781032227344 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032229324 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003274797 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Photography--America--Influence--History. | Photography--Social aspects--America--History. | Daguerreotype--America--History. | White privilege (Social structure)--America--History. | Stereotypes (Social psychology) in art-America--History. | White people in popular culture--America--History. Classification: LCC TR183 .P63 2024 | DDC 779--dc23/eng/20230223 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023005112 ISBN: 9781032227344 (hbk) ISBN: 9781032229324 (pbk) ISBN: 9781003274797 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003274797 Typeset in Sabon LT Pro by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.

Contents

Introduction: The Invention of a Photographic Whiteness1 1 Daguerreotypes, the Vanishing Native American, and the Invention of Western Typologies15 2 Mathew Brady’s Civil War, Daguerreotypes, and the Technological Redefinition of White Nationalism 

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3 Ain’t I a Human: Louis Agassiz’s Slave Daguerreotypes and White Scientific Voyeurism62 4 How the West Was Won: America at the Great Exhibition of 185181 5 The Founding of the Great White World: The Arctic Daguerreotypes109 6 White Aesthetics: Daguerreotypes in the Consolidation of Colonial Empires in West Africa126 7 Lewis Carroll and the Imperial Eroticisation of White Childhood 149 8 Material Agency: The Eames Office, Race, and US Cold War Photographic Aesthetics169 9 The Apple and the Anthropocene: The Whiteness of Silicon Valley’s Digital Ecologies188 Conclusion: Entrepreneurs, Clients, and Images: How Photography Inserted Whiteness into a Global Visual Economy210 Index223

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Introduction The Invention of a Photographic Whiteness

A great deal of visual culture’s work examining the history of photography has been concerned with looking for Blackness and searching for Black subjects within a canon of imagery that relegates their presence to the margins or ensnares them in frameworks that demand the exposure of their racialisation either literally or figuratively as proof of type. Of them is demanded a judgement of their presence with special attention always paid to reception of their skin and bodies as conspicuous elements of their being in this space of attention, with a presumed to be responsive in reference to a singular character of Whiteness, as though Whiteness itself were contrasting figure off to the side of a portrait making it so. Whiteness in this moment becomes performative; it completes an action, it races what is before it, as though its purpose was to examine Blackness and, in so doing, complete itself. What is this very act of looking is what is at issue here, and yet, as Richard Dyer observed in his 1997 book White, ‘as long as race is something only applied to non-white peoples, as long as white people are not racially seen and named, they/we function as a human norm. Other people are raced, we are just people.’1 What Dyer’s analysis overlooks is that in the act of racing other people, Whiteness achieves its consummate value as an epistemological formation. Imperialism, science, and culture rely upon categorical distinction that must at every point join up with acts of racialisation to accomplish their meaning. Dyer refers to ‘the aspirational structure of whiteness’ as one that drives the medium of photography as not one concerned exclusively with being able ‘to differentiate the races,’ but equally to function ‘within the white race’ to demonstrate difference and ‘even show degrees of translucence within the individual white (usually male) subject.’2 Dyer describes a ‘culture of light’ that paints the White male subject as uniquely heroic.3 On the other side of the spectrum from this is an understanding of Blackness as a technological challenge; one that I would argue goes far beyond the concerns of lighting, make-up, and film stock to encompass a more profound understanding of the technical having to do with having the continuous means of producing subjects through the denial of a certain portion of humanity its right to an unremarkable existence. Competing modes of representation cannot work in a model where one category, colour, is highly spectacularised, whilst the other is allowed to fade into clichéd recognition. It could be argued that Black suffering has always been valued as a representational formation and that the technical challenge of photography was to obscure White capability in that arrangement of reality. Whiteness is, therefore, not protected in its innocence, so much as cloaked from it, because racism in its most actionable form is conducted through the veil of technological hegemony. As it turns out, we needn’t fear the light, so much as the focus as Dyer is right

DOI: 10.4324/9781003274797-1

2  Introduction to say that Whiteness leads to a dead end in ‘contemporary popular culture.’4 The part he leaves out of his theoretical framework is specifically for whom and specifically when this contemporary era begins. That part comes into being alongside a modern world for whom organisation itself becomes synonymous with racialised emplacement within a larger field discriminatory perception of who belongs to the White West and what is alien to the when of its ongoing creation. Dyer tells us ‘studying whiteness matters’ because it is allowed to go about without a sense of its particularity.5 Yet, no examples of its particularity dominate the modern visual field and are there to reify the pleasure in looking other Whites who understand their privilege through this predominantly self-referential field. Black is excluded from that field but only by virtue of maintaining the partiality of its belonging there. The problem may have to do more so with the perpetuation of typification that allows ‘for white people to look onto with delight at all the differences that surrounds them’ and eventually destroys what displeases them.6 Much has been written and said about the White gaze as necropolitical instrument. We seldom consider it from the perspective of experimentation and invention. Photography became a tool with which a vast diversity of audiences not only learnt about annihilation but also participated instrumentally in it through their understanding. Figuring Witness as Whiteness Chanelle Adams observes that ‘the technology of the museum relies on visual observing, as opposed to more social forms of witnessing and participation.’7 Photography completes this circuit in that it is understood as a social medium, whilst simultaneously making possible collecting and display practices possible ‘which continue to be held in custody for an indeterminable future.’8 Images can be revived where bodies can’t. In many senses, the photograph remains an instrument of eighteenth-century natural philosophy that promoted the idea and practice of extinction as a means of progress. Darwin was an ‘early adopter’ of photography. Although his The Origin of the Species (1859) only contains one illustration, it can be argued that it is based on photographic work in that its descriptions of species portrayed them in ‘composite to prove the connections between a group’s physical attributes and its perceived intelligence, talents, and deviant inclinations, and to define a typology, or a set of common physical characteristics for a group, deemed either negative or positive.’9 The theory of evolution itself could be rapidly embraced because it was able to create a cumulative singular image of life that could be represented as both data and assembly. Annihilation in this schema could be abstracted and proven as inevitable. The Origin of the Species visualised information as a tool of differentiation and photography increasingly contributed its form to this project as the nineteenth century progressed. A decade later, in 1869, Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton would publish Hereditary Genius, wherein he used composite photography to prove that intelligence and physical ability were inherited traits. As the nineteenth century reached its zenith, scientific proof would become a progressively visual phenomenon, borne not solely from the scientific turn towards an evolutionary philosophy of life, but equally through acceptance of a eugenic philosophy of race. Life would, hereafter, be construed in its generic form and particularised only through example. If metropolitan visual observation connoted the passive exercise of imperial power, White attendance to history and natural science museums, art galleries and museums, dioramas and panoramas, national and

Introduction 3 international exhibitions, arcades and department stores, as well as their peripheral photographic ‘taking,’ connoted the exercise of active colonial power through Black presence displayed in these same venues. The ‘inborn qualities of race’ and ‘truth of nature’ found their epistemic complement in the ‘mechanical objectivity’ of the camera and in so doing created a qualified respect for life.10 Alan MacDuffie observes that ‘it is no accident that Galton singles out energy as the prime quality of development: “in any scheme of eugenics, energy is the most important quality to favour, it is, as we have seen, the basis of living action, it is eminently transmissible by descent.”’11 MacDuffie concludes from these remarks that ‘eugenics was, in essence a vast system of evolutionary engineering, to manage the energy of the race.’12 That quality of ‘mechanical objectivity’ makes itself known today through the development of artificial intelligence, which is not only predominantly portrayed as White, to the exclusion of people of colour, but rather because as an industry it cannot imagine a future where Blackness prevails, because the place of its representational labour will be fulfilled by other forms of nonhuman being. Stephen Cave and Kanta Dihal who maintain ‘by virtue of its generality, [AI] is imagined as able to replace all and any unwanted labour—social and cognitive as well as physical …so obviating the need for people of colour in any role.’13 This is to Dyer’s point is ‘making strange’14 Whiteness to itself, but now in ways that enhance its ability to survive in a potentially hostile extended reality environment. The creation of White Western subjects relies on certain types of intimacy with bodies of colour that create a line of visual enquiry that is explored in Lisa Lowe’s book The Intimacies of Four Continents that argues that whilst liberal modernity was made possible only through the labour of people of colour outside of Europe and the West, ‘the “coloniality” of modern world history is not a brute binary division, but rather one that operates precisely through spatialized and temporalized processed of both differentiation and connection.’15 As Richard Dyer writes about White, ‘the idea of whiteness as neutrality already suggests its usefulness for designating a social group that is to be taken for the human ordinary.’16 Anselm Franke will refer to this false premise of inclusion of others within the pantheon of man as a lie based on ‘evolutionist chronopolitics’ that plays a crucial role in supporting the reproduction of the free world as the ‘White West,’ thus allowing it to literally and figuratively to ‘take place’ over others as a matter of ‘natural selection.’17 The concept of self-ownership during America’s formative period as a nation only pertained to those recognised as both White and male. Above all else Nikhil Pal Singh explains, self-ownership was ‘the cornerstone of both the market contract and the social contract. It signified at least a potential, if not actual, access to Indian lands and African slaves.’18 Singh maintains that the liberty to claim selfhood equates with access to ‘cheap, empty, exploitable lands and resources that must be cleared of any competing presence.’19 Indeed, the settlers’ conception of freedom belies the commercial interests in protecting an investment prospectus: ‘the speculative value of the land itself—what surrounds it and what lies beneath it—is of paramount importance.’20 Nikhil Pal Singh characterises the enterprise of building the United States of America, as one preoccupied from the start with ‘demographic engineering.’21 One of its other founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin dreamed that ‘North America might be a production hub for the “world’s purely white people” […] supported by conscious government intervention in the sociobiological constitution of human collectivity.’22 Following Franklin’s vision, Hector St. John Crevecoeur’s 1782 treatise ‘Letters from an American Farmer’ joyfully announces the birth of a new American race of man formulated from the

4  Introduction admixture of Northern European peoples, including the ‘English, Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, Germans and Swedes.’23 Through the burgeoning of their bodies, it would be possible to derive ‘a carefully delimited heterogeneity’ to populate the landscape.24 This ‘promiscuous breed’ of men qualified as human not only by dint of their biological composition, but also equally their constituency as landowners.25 Humanity only conjoins with liberty at the point where the procurement of lands ‘confer on them the title of freemen, and to that title, every benefit is affixed which men can possibly require.’26 Singh’s work on self-ownership demonstrates how race is signified as potential and then unevenly distributed among Whites, Native Americans, and African slaves from the founding of America as a White settler world helps to account for how that operates through the medium of photography to privilege Whiteness and White aesthetics as a continuation of those same arrangements to exploit civilised aesthetic practices as a means of providing evidence for civilised White supremacist assumptions to be carried out in practice so the imperial project is displayed through the imperial subject as a hyphenated White Euro-American man split within himself between the role of modern barbarian breed to overcome the failure of Europe to act anymore in the capacity of the world’s timeless creator. As wild and ruthless as those populations were, they had always imagined in Africa, their frontier appearance as modern men was relayed back to Europe through the intervention of critical tools of representation; none more potent than the daguerreotype. At the turn of the century, European intellectuals who frowned upon White barbarism in the Congo had no such reservations about it being carried out in the American West. They instead both marvelled and invested in the West as a space of exception, where European modes of expropriation could be transformed to suit new commercial landscapes, heretofore, undeveloped. At the end of the nineteenth century, they speculated further in their scramble for Africa that a similar thing could be achieved there. These same ‘hyphenated white men’ will become ‘the principal architects of the often imperialist internal critique of empire,’ whilst at the same time indulging themselves personally in the spoils of imperial ‘expansionism, white supremacy, class domination, and heterosexism.’27 It is hard to think of a photographic trope more decisively gendered than the survey scene of the American West, with a White man acting as both portraitist and possessor of this newly conquered landscape. Charles W. Mills asserts that ‘part of what it means to be constructed as “white”’ is to accede to ‘a cognitive model that precludes self-transparency and genuine understanding of social realities. To a significant extend, then white signatories will live in an invented delusional world, a racial fantasy land, a “consensual hallucination” to quote William Gibson’s famous characterization of cyberspace, though this particular hallucination is located in real space. There will be white mythologies, invented Orientals, invented Africans, with a correspondingly fabricated population, countries that never were—Calibans and Tontos Many Fridays and Sambos—but who attain a virtual reality through travelers’ tales, folk myth, popular and highbrow fiction, colonial reports, scholarly theory, Hollywood cinema, living in the white imagination, and determinedly imposed upon their real life counterparts.’28 White identity is, in turn, made up of a combination of ‘misunderstanding misrepresentation, evasion and self-deception on matters related to race’ and none more so than when in contemplating their own likeness in terms of its relationship to modernity’s racial hierarchisation. It is not a coincidence therefore that what Dirk Moses refers to as ‘the racial century,’ 1850–1950, coincides directly with the rise and domination of photography as the world’s premiere representational formation.29 Moses further asserts that in order to imagine this situation ‘what is required, then, is

Introduction 5 an account of European modernity that links nation-building, imperial competition and international and intra-national racial struggle to the ideologically driven catastrophes of the twentieth century.’30 I would contend that account is only made complete through a consideration of the White photographic enterprise as at once fundamentally imperialistic and inherently genocidal specifically through its role in ‘nation-building and “people making” (that is, the fashioning of ethnically homogeneous populations domestically).’31 This book explores the relationship between the advent of the medium of photography and racial determination within White settler worlds. My premise is that daguerreotypes were active agents in the colonial era’s performative consolidation of Whiteness. In a contemporary sense, they remain as artefacts of a once live performance that now indicates ways to understand how we came to the situation of our contemporary post-digital world, and why, indeed, that world remains highly racialised, despite its recent claims to occupying a territory of post-racialisation. I agree with Ariella Azoulay’s cogent analysis that ‘one needs to stop looking at the photograph and start watching it.’32 Photography is essentially an expansionist medium and therefore it becomes crucial to recognise that whilst ‘the photograph bears the seal of the photographic event reconstructing this event requires more than just identifying what is shown in the photography.’33 This book gives a historical overview which privileges the formal British Empire and its informal American counterpart because these specific empires conspire in very particular ways to formulate settler colonialism’s crucial axis of meaning appearing in the West’s philosophy, painting, and theatre that predate the daguerreotype as a staging ground for Whiteness and therefore critically inform the political value of its production. Beyond that, the book explores an aspect of the American Empire in Africa that is seldom touched upon with regard to photographic history; the antebellum African American colonisation of Liberia and daguerreotype’s critical role in that endeavour. In so doing, it aims to contribute something of a new perspective to the photographic construction and corresponding iconographies of Whiteness in colonial contexts, as compared to other works that endeavour to frame these spaces. My book’s focus on Whiteness is very much about this wider, contextual perspective on the history of photography and how it must be approached to account for both its materiality and its more ambiguous relationships to violent forms of appropriation. Here, I am referring to the ‘stilling’ properties of this medium in its particularity not only as a technology but also as a premise for Whiteness itself to gain territorial traction. I am not arguing that the daguerreotype invented Whiteness, so much as that it generated the conditions for a new representative type of Whiteness to emerge that eventually merged with the portrayal of modernity itself. It did so, based on colonialism’s circular economy and global ubiquity. Indeed, the success of the new medium depended very heavily on the maturation of sophisticated colonial networks that coalesced in the early nineteenth century. Such networks will be elaborated within this volume alongside the charting of photography’s popular progression to make the case not so much for ‘newness’ as its exclusive property, but rather the novelty of its place amongst other types of technical contrivance affording racial, class, and topographical distinction. This book will argue that daguerreotype conducted itself as a novel environment capable of setting the terms through which those living contemporary to its formations, socialised, communicated, and organised their reality as a complement to what it presented to them as viewers. As a technology born in the mid-nineteenth century, photography was simultaneously developed as a means through which to separate, distinguish, classify, and contain. In all of these ways, it functioned readily as an aid to the development

6  Introduction of various forms of discrimination. Included amongst them was the categorical differentiation of race, gender, class, sexuality, and ability. At the time of its invention, it was not obvious that race would have to come to predominate the others as a category, and on an individual basis, since the imposition of identity on nationality was still somewhat in its nascent phase. Rather, to discriminate one category from the other, certain exegetical information had to be added to pattern recognition itself, thus making discrimination an extension of photography’s technical utility. The advent of daguerreotype made it possible for images that had previously acted as a medium of the imaginary, to cross over into the territory of reality, allowing for ideas around classification to materialise themselves into instruments of measurement and so doing transform the value of travel by allowing the circulation of photographs to situate themselves as a universal means of knowing both peoples and places. Over time, they act both as entertainment and fulfilment of an order placed upon others. What is seldom addressed in considerations of Whiteness is how frequently it fails. In many respects, this book is a catalogue of its failures. Chapter 1, ‘Daguerreotypes, the Vanishing Native American and the Invention of Western Typologies’ concerns itself with the coincidence of the advent of the daguerreotype and the era of America’s Westward expansion in the mid-nineteenth century. During this era, daguerreotypes of Native Americans functioned as part of a broader, political framing of this class of people as the calamitous, inevitable, and unresisting victims of a divinely manifest destiny. Native Americans functioned as objects through which White settlers were able to attach a distinctive temporality to the racialising gaze. Consumers of their photographic portraits were invited to gaze without limit at what is presumably disappearing around them in contemporary life; the country’s once-dominant indigeneity. This created a condition of artificial temporality that complemented a White American audience’s fascination for technology as a means through which to quell their anxieties more generally concerning their future powers of acquisition. The preponderance of such works from the mid-nineteenth century onwards within the anthropological canon attests to a faith in the photographic image as a medium able to collect on the relatively recent past as an instrument of unrestricted disciplinary power. The ethnographic and anthropological photography that starts from the mid-nineteenth century extends the classificatory impulses of an earlier natural philosophy that made racialised subjectivity a product of appearance. The scientific racism that followed it continued to make recourse to visual perception, as a way to ‘fix’ racial subjects in their skins and locate them within the framework of material recognition. The sheer number of images that became commercially available to predominantly White consumers in those years seemed to belie any notion of their ‘natural’ disappearance. All of this photographic activity raises the question of where the line of availability of people initially crosses into abolition, and then subsequently crosses into annihilation. Chapter 2, ‘Mathew Brady’s Civil War, Daguerreotypes and the Technological Redefinition of White Nationalism,’ explores the work of Mathew Brady as a pioneer of daguerreotype in America. He invented the idea of the photographic studio as a place in which it was possible to deliver a new kind of Whiteness born from class obscurity. Brady opened his first studio in New York in 1844. He photographed Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, and Abraham Lincoln amongst other public figures, who would go on to achieve immortal political status. In their lifetimes, Brady would rebrand them as ‘national luminaries’ mirroring their larger than life quality through his signature production of large daguerreotypes made in his New York and Washington, DC studios. Their

Introduction 7 premises subsequently became a magnet for the great and good of American society. By ostensibly opening their doors to all comers, these studios perpetuated a mythos around American freedom of movement. In reality, only those materially affluent and culturally refined enough to pass through their doors were given free invitation to gaze upon these great White men. What was obvious to all viewers was that upward mobility remained the sole purview of those who could lay claim to American citizenry. Those denied it to whatever degree and by whatever measure should interpret such spectacle from the perspective of a known inferiority towards what they were observing, because these portraits were nothing less than exemplars of the White male American type. The visual discourses of White supremacy that Brady employed extended downwards, as well as upwards, and informed how his studio would go on to define photographic conventions during the American Civil War. The agility of his mind to capitalise on the photographic enterprise resulted in the establishment of mobile darkrooms that could produce vivid battlefield imagery. Those images, in turn, could be quickly distributed in and amongst the homes of the American public. These images served simultaneously as instruments of spectacle and objects of moral education. Brady and his team were able to produce thousands of images of war scenes, as well as portraits of generals and politicians on both sides of the conflict. Brady expressed no outward loyalty to either side, because his political ambitions resided elsewhere. His objective was to make the daguerreotype itself an invaluable political instrument during these years; one that in Black and White could preserve the existing measure of both humanity and the natural order. To that end, the millions of enslaved African Americans that fled towards Union Army lines featured only parenthetically in Brady’s Civil War images. When they did so, they were portrayed as remaining in the condition in which they were originally subsumed into service for the Union; as ‘contraband.’ Within that framework of apprehension, Brady’s wartime imagery intimates that the Black body is there merely to act as labour and servant to a divided cause that in the end would add up to a national priority of perpetuating White political franchise. Chapter 3, ‘Ain’t I a Human: Louis Agassiz’s Slave Daguerreotypes and White Scientific Voyeurism,’ critically engages with the oldest known photographs of enslaved people; the Zealy daguerreotypes. They are named for South Carolina photographer J.T. Zealy, who took the photographic portraits of these individuals. The photographs were taken in 1850 at the behest of the Harvard zoologist Louis Agassiz. He travelled from Boston to South Carolina for the express purpose of creating a photographic record that would objectively prove the racial inferiority of Black bodies. Through codes of physiognomy and phrenology, Agassiz was able to totally abstract the Black body and approach it as though it belongs to a pure material order. Agassiz took part in this work alongside numerous other racialist thinkers of the mid-nineteenth century, many of whom were also actively involved in the abolitionist movement. They sought to use science as an argument to propose the need for the repatriation of African Americans back to Africa to prevent their further biological mixing with White people. They believed that the African race couldn’t survive freely within the context of European civilisation without it becoming extinct due to its biological inferiority. On the other side of that equation, their arguments for the abolition of slavery had much to do with their belief that African Americans had to be prevented from causing irreparable damage to the superior White racial stock of the nation through their continued intimate proximity to Whites. For his part, Agassiz made arguments in favour of zoological provinces, which would establish separate tropical regions for the African race. To this end, Agassiz decided to

8  Introduction turn to new technical resources such as photography capable of lending credence to the perception that natural scientists now possessed the ability to ‘read bodies.’ Scientific theories thereafter hinged on the development of new forms of capturing the human body, with photography increasingly utilised as a vehicle of racial, as well as sexual classification. The human body itself would become progressively generalised by science in the decades following the American Civil War. Racial classification and differentiation through photography would come in these years to form an essential part of the administration of the modern state. By developing such forensic methods of scientific capture, Agassiz would go on to be the most famous scientist in the United States. Chapter 4, ‘How the West Was Won: America at the Great Exhibition of 1851,’ reconsiders the United States’ appearance at the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London. It was to be an occasion where the country could put on display a story of its exceptional founding, progress, and advancing cultural status as a formerly British colony for the whole world to see. At the time, Americans were particularly sensitive to the ongoing indictment of them in Europe as merely a natural repository of raw materials, rather than a nation that could produce sophisticated, refined products on their own. America was seen as the place where industrial fortunes were made, rather than a place of sophisticated artistic achievement. To challenge these perceptions, it was decided by the Central Committee that America’s contribution to the Exhibition in London would spotlight the nation’s world-beating daguerreotypes. Dauguerreotypy was extolled as an instrument putting America at forefront of art and science. It was out ahead of its European competitors in terms of using the medium to advance political ideology. Daguerreotypy’s very processes suggested that they benefited from direct exposure to a culture obsessed with Black and White, light and shadow, and above all exposure to the rough elements attendant to the ambition of imperialist expansion. That quality allowed America, to be held up as a particular exemplar of White nationalism at mid-century. It was admired as a successful breakaway enterprise, a spirited offshoot owing its beginnings to Britain’s blueprint for creating White dominions. As such, daguerreotypes became something far greater than mere artefacts of the new industrial age, but as a medium capable of preserving the national character as one that was faithful to its racialised aesthetics. American superiority lay within an art capable of demonstrating the difference between the appearance of a civilised man and his savage counterpart, framed through a variety of embellishments that suggested nothing so much as a contrast within the basic formulation of mankind. Inside the daguerreotype studio posing formulas routinely focused on accentuating the White male forehead, cheekbones, jawline, and nose. Those were not aesthetic choices alone. Rather, such judgements were based on theories of eugenics assimilated outside of the studio that were used to politically justify the violently racist institutions of slavery and settler colonialism in the United States. Chapter 5, ‘The Founding of the Great White World: The Arctic Daguerreotypes,’ focuses on the Victorian visual imaginary generated by the Franklin expedition of 1845 to find the North-West Passage. It was an expedition that eventually became notorious because all of the men involved perished in the Arctic. This was the third of Franklin’s voyages into the Arctic. This time his crew were motivated by an imperative to secure the maritime hegemony of the British Empire against rising competition from the Russian Empire. Their mission was to find a short trade route through Asia that would provide clear commercial and strategic advantages for one empire over the other. Franklin’s effort was supported by the British navy’s offering of two large state-of-the-art ships, the Erebus

Introduction 9 and the Terror. The vessels had hot-water heating systems, were equipped with provisions for three years, housed libraries of 1200 books, and messes replete with silver cutlery and china to provide creature comforts to all 134 officers and crewmen onboard. Perhaps the most surprising inclusion amongst their provision were daguerreotype cameras given the extreme physical conditions of their surroundings. No daguerreotypes were made during the actual voyage according to efforts to salvage the remains of the two ill-fated ships. Despite this obvious lack of photographic record, Franklin’s expedition spurred on a mania for the Arctic within the Anglo-American imagination. That fascination to this day corresponds with the most well-known images of the Franklin expedition; the daguerreotypes made of him and his senior officers just before their sailing in 1845. For the average Victorian Briton, the arctic loomed large in their imaginations as the ultimate space of male self-reliance. It was also a powerful diversion away from another troubling reality; that so much of Britain’s domestic social and economic stability was reliant on slavery and colonial exploitation abroad. The historical flipside of Franklin’s arctic expedition is Britain’s colonial incursion into Africa. Whereas this was a somewhat overdetermined canvas overlaid with concerns regarding class, race, and gender, the Arctic was regarded as a blank canvas, where it was still possible to experience White privilege as a pure and honour-bound occupation. The failure of the Franklin expedition signalled to White audiences at home something they had long suspected; that national hubris had its performative limitations. Arctic purity and racialised Whiteness hit hard against the reality of exploitative colonial economics, which after all was the true driver of Franklin’s commercial and strategic mission. It was an ideology horrifically lost and adrift that had representationally collapsed upon itself when it was discovered that the expedition’s last remaining had eventually resorted to cannibalism in their attempt to survive. This discovery led to an even greater fascination amongst Britain’s public about how to make meaning of their demise and recover the moral legacy of Franklin expedition through the production of a vast array of visual artefacts that continued through photographic advancement to allow a sovereign empire to culturally re-envision these events. Chapter 6, ‘White Aesthetics: Daguerreotypes in the Consolidation of Colonial Empires in West Africa,’ examines the work of the first African American daguerreotypist Augustus Washington. In the early part of his career in the United States, the subjects of his daguerrean portraits were, for the most part, prominent White men and women aligned with the abolitionist movement Hartford, Connecticut. Washington’s decision to leave his photographic career in the United States was fuelled in large part by the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, which effectively nullified his free status as a Northern African American man. His interest in emigration coincided with a time when the threat of civil war loomed large in the imagination of both Whites and Blacks. It also corresponded with the revival of the prospects of the Colonization Society during the 1850s. The Society were the founders of the colony in Liberia whose ostensible purpose was ‘returning’ free Black Americans to Africa. The settlement of Liberia also served the cause of American imperialism at a time when expansionist ideas were gaining political currency. White proponents of colonisation maintained that their plans to expand American territory abroad were a moderate and reasonable solution to the threat of disunion at home. Soon after he arrived in 1853, Washington opened his daguerreotypy studio in the Liberian capital of Monrovia. His work would bring him to the neighbouring countries Sierra Leone, Gambia, and Senegal, all with the express purpose of using his work not only to document the progress of the colony for the edification of African Americans within Liberia (henceforth Americo-Liberians) but also to create a progressive image of

10  Introduction the colony for Western audiences abroad. Many of Washington’s daguerreotypes were directly commissioned by the American Colonization Society to be used as propaganda to support the cause of recolonisation in Africa. To that end, Washington’s Liberian portraits feature meticulously posed ‘mulatto’ Americo-Liberians. The emphasis was on showcasing them as well-groomed, attired, and adored specimens of their ‘ethnic type,’ capable of achieving both self-possession and social ascendency on par with that of a middle to upper class White American. ‘Mulatto’ Americo-Liberian men who became the political leaders of the colony featured prominently within Washington’s repertoire. In time, Washington would become a member of this political elite himself, gaining wealth and status not only from his photographic reputation, but more so as the owner of a lucrative sugar plantation within the colony, assuming the racial, social, and political likeness of his former photographic subjects. Chapter 7, ‘Lewis Carroll and the Imperial Eroticisation of White Childhood,’ reexamines the cultural significance of the famed children’s author Lewis Carroll’s photographic career. Carroll—whose real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson—took countless photographs throughout his lifetime; the majority of which were of young girls in various stages of undress. Dodgson was a remarkably talented photographer, and in his circle, these images became his calling card. He was invited into the homes of friends for the express purpose of befriending their girls and later capturing their likeness in exquisite photographic form. It is clear from this imagery that Dodgson held them up as objects of erotic fascination. Within the confines of White English Victorian culture, Dodgson’s sexual proclivities towards girls would have been shared by many men of his class background. Indeed, the sentimentality assigned to the female child of that age often coexisted with the tacit understanding of darker sexual urges circulating within the imperial metropole and the colonial periphery of English society. Both were admitted to the degree that these impulses often coincided with the imperial desire to explore virgin territory; bodies understood as belonging to no one, and therefore, by nature, imminently available. Dodgson’s provocative photographs and drawings of nude and scantily clad girls in compromising positions would have been admired and consumed with pleasure by English Victorians, for the very reason that his position as their photographer corresponded perfectly with the very same relational hierarchy of power and domination that animated the logic of British imperialism. Chapter 8, ‘Material Agency: The Eames Office, Race, and US Cold War Photographic Aesthetics,’ revisits the Cold War propaganda film ‘Glimpses of the U.S.A.’ that at the time of its conception was meant to portray a typical a day in the life of the United States. The United States Information Agency (U.S.I.A.) commissioned the Eames Office to create the film for the occasion of the first USSR-USA cultural exchange taking place in 1959. It set out from the beginning to make the film a technological marvel that would dazzle audiences in the Soviet Union. The 13-minute film, narrated by Charles Eames himself, was projected onto seven 20-by-30 foot screens. For heightened dramatic effect, the screens themselves were installed within a 250-foot diameter geodesic dome designed by Buckminster Fuller, situated in the heart of Moscow’s Sokolniki Park. These seven screens displayed multiple images at the same time generating a mosaic effect to communicate to audiences an American society that was unified and harmonious within its racial diversity. What was made obvious through this project was that the same image was fundamentally compromised by the reality of segregation, evident even in the aesthetic choice to apply fundamental gridding onto what was being projected.

Introduction 11 The heightened imagery of highways and automobiles as fundamental elements within the fabric of American life belied the fact that their manufacture was an outgrowth of the racialised redistricting of urban centres. Similarly, highways and automobiles functioned as conduits to White flight out of city centres when it became obvious to civic planners that densely populated city centres would become targets for nuclear strikes. For White communities, the advent of these suburban sprawls was as much networks of freedom as they were avenues of self-preservation. Even the film’s depiction of loving images of families hugging goodbye before work and kissing goodnight before bed implies an understanding that their internal peace and security is supported by structural segregation. This attitude of alleged culture- and values-free universalism characterises both the work of the Eames Studio and mid-century modernism in general. Photography here acts once again as a mode to recapture the common traits of humanity. To that end, the film portrays only certain races having full access to the middle class ‘good life’ that naturally goes along with a certain acceptance of White entitlement as the natural order of things. It could be argued that the Eames photographs stand as a testament to the enduring power of White racial entitlement. Moreover, the film suggests that the secure maintenance of such entitlement is perhaps the signature achievement of the American experiment in democracy at mid-century. Chapter 9, ‘The Apple and the Anthropocene: The Whiteness of Silicon Valley’s Digital Ecologies,’ elucidates how Silicon Valley’s digital ecologies remain seeded with the colonial postures of arrogance, avarice, seizure, and control and are motivated by activities of classification, exclusion, denial, and refusal in their gatekeeping of the tools of visual representation. Digital visual technology promises to modernise the lives of those in developing countries and to bring the pleasures of distant environments into the homes of the Westernised consumer. Once again it is showing both constituencies that the way forward comes to them through channels of technological joining. Silicon Valley’s neocolonial culture of entrepreneurship is in some ways little more than an extension of this set of beliefs, insofar as its unprecedented cultural and economic influence hinges upon humanity’s preoccupation with the photographic image as a marker of verisimilitude. It is that world-changing tool of colonial apprehension that is leading human civilisation to self-termination through a potent concoction of extractive capitalism, wealth accumulation, and White supremacist culture that has everything to do with the monopolisation of cerebral and scientific ways of knowing. Photography as a practice names, defines, articulates, and narrates life in ways that allow it to be used to define both difference and sameness. Within that practice, it becomes imperative to establish a universal through which to rule or, indeed, measure. Historically that metric has been the European body and its surrounding ecology. In terms of digital ecology, there remains the founding assumption that only Whites can truly own intellectual property. This conceit applies when it comes to the fetishisation of Whiteness in Silicon Valley and indeed in the shape of its tools of visualisation. Embedded within that apprehension of ecology are the figure of a David Attenborough, or BBC Earth, and the reasoning behind why they specifically are chosen to narrate the Anthropocene for ‘global’ audiences. Similarly, the arrogance and hubris in knowing what is best for others derive from a compulsion to transform, develop, temper, change, and salvage them always with an eye towards their consumption. The Apple in this way becomes the symbol of White genius; a symbol of both consumption and exposure to the principle that what comes up must come down. These chapters do not function as merely case studies, but rather more on the order of presenting a series of environments through which to judge the photographic construction

12  Introduction of Whiteness along and across the colonial circuit and the postcolonial world. That said, in many respects, through what I am presenting here, I am offering the argument that there is no postcolonial world, so long as we fail to adequately address Whiteness as the founding concept of the universal that remains the premise of this photographic imaginary, nor question whose universal is being represented to this day in the majority of photographic outputs that feature both materially and virtually within our contemporary world view. This also applies to the way we frame the Anthropocene largely as a crisis impacting the developing world and developing communities within a White world framing of Anglo-European natality and nativity. I would offer that criticism that this book does not focus enough on the representation of peoples of colour perhaps misses the core argument that so much of their representation is enacted in this period through visual conventions that continue to implicitly privilege Whiteness, and that White’s representation of themselves requires critical problematisation. I would maintain that if you read the chapters in the sequence, they do present something of a unified field in terms of concerns around the geopolitical significance of interpreting race, gender, sexuality, and class through the photographic medium, as well as their historicisation. The book concerns itself with the various degrees of violence performed in the cause of shoring up a White identity in the modern era and beyond. For many readers it will be difficult to accept in the contemporary context, what was happening in the historical one with regard to racialised thought and conduct. Terms such as ‘mulatto’ and ‘Negro’ will be used according to their understanding within a historical context. In accordance with that, at the time of their usage they were not uniformly perceived as racial slurs, but in a contemporary sense are, of course, construed as that. Many of the key White figures in this book will express what today are widely considered brutal and maniacal approaches to race, its classification, and representation. Nevertheless, the violent practices associated with them would have been undertaken as legitimate political, social, cultural, and economic practices within their lifetimes. The chapters devoted to their work in no way condone their behaviour; rather my aim is to describe these practices as crucial to an appreciation of how Whiteness was enforced and reinforced through them in ways that radically shaped racial perception and indeed, continue to do so to this day. However painful these accounts are to read, it is imperative that we accept that their professional conduct would not have been considered ‘pseudoscience’, but rather was the prevailing institutional science of the modern era within the transatlantic world. As painful as that is to acknowledge, is it imperative that we use this historical knowledge to recognise how this carries over today into scientific practices less named as racist such as the White supremacy laden into artificial intelligence. It is of crucial value to note that men such as Samuel George Morton and Louis Agassiz were from the most eminent universities in the world in the mid to late nineteenth century, Harvard, and Edinburgh, respectively. Their scientific theories hinged on the development of new forms of capturing the human body, with photography increasingly utilised as a vehicle of racial, as well as sexual classification. The human body itself would become progressively generalised by science in the decades following the American Civil War. Racial classification and differentiation through photography would come in these years to form an essential part of the administration of the modern State. By developing such forensic methods of scientific capture, Louis Agassiz, in particular, would go on to be the most famous scientist in the United States. Indeed, at the time of writing this, I am mere miles away from a neighbourhood in Cambridge, Massachusetts that proudly bore his name until the year 2020. In 2021, the

Introduction 13 neighbourhood was renamed for Maria Louise Baldwin (1856–1922), an African American educator who, as principal of the former Agassiz School, was the first Black woman principal in New England. Like many places and buildings formerly named for Agassiz, this change came following controversy over his scientific racist beliefs, including polygenism and eugenics. The change was first proposed in Cambridge City Council by a young Black high school student at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, Maya Counter, in 2020. Whilst it is laudable that this neighbourhood no longer bears Agassiz’s name, it is vital that contemporary generations of students such as Counter continue to appreciate that the world of a nineteenth-century Harvard professor and proponent of scientific racism continues nonetheless to bear upon their own, and therefore, crucial that his work and the work of others documented here remain known and knowable to them.

Notes 1 Richard Dyer, White: Essays on Race and Culture (London: Taylor & Francis, 2013), 1. 2 Dyer, White, 115. 3 Ibid., 1. 4 Ibid., xxxv. 5 Ibid., 4. 6 Ibid., 4. 7 Chanelle Adams, “Right to Rest (In Peace),” a text for Sunlight Doesn’t Need a Pipeline at Stanley Picker Gallery October 7, 2022, 4. 8 “Right to Rest (In Peace),” 4. 9 Kris Belden-Adams, Eugenics, ‘Aristogenics’, Photography: Picturing Privilege (London: Taylor & Francis, 2020), 53. 10 Belden-Adams, Eugenics, ‘Aristogenics’, Photography, 24. 11 Alan MacDuffie, Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 280, footnote 25 quoting Francis Galton, Inquires into Human Faculty and its Development (London: MacMillan 1893), 27. 12 MacDuffie, Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination, 280, footnote 25. 13. Stephen Cave and Kanta Dihal, “The Whiteness of AI.” Philosophy & Technology 33, no. 4 (2020): 699. 14 Dyer, White, 10 15 Lowe, Lisa. The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 8. 16 Dyer, White, i. 17 Ana Teixeira Pinto and Anselm Franke, “Introduction: Ana Teixeira Pinto and Anselm Franke,” Welcome and introduction to the conference Whose Universal? As part of the 12th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art on July 2, 2022 at Akademie der Künste, Hanseatenweg. 18 Nikhil Pal Singh, Race is a Country (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 9. 19 Nikhil Pal Singh, “The Pervasive Power of the Settler Mindset.” Boston Review, November 26, 2019. http://bostonreview.net/war-security-race/nikhil-pal-singh-pervasive-power-settler-mindset. 20 Ibid. 21 Nikhil Pal Singh, Race and America’s Long War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017), 40. 22 Singh, Race and America’s Long War, 40. 23 J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, “Letters from an American Farmer.” Letter III, The Avalon Project. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/subject_menus/letters.asp. 24 Singh, Race is a Country, 9. 25 Ibid., 9. 26 De Crevecoeur, “Letters From an American Farmer.” 27 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Taylor & Francis 2007), 206. 28 Charles W., Mills, and Tommie Shelby. “Overview.” In The Racial Contract, 2nd ed. (Cornell University Press, 2022), 18–19.

14  Introduction 29 A. Dirk Moses, “Conceptual Blockages and Definitional Dilemmas in the ‘Racial Century’: Genocides of Indigenous Peoples and the Holocaust.” Patterns of Prejudice 36, no. 4 (2002): 33. 30 Moses, “Conceptual Blockages and Definitional Dilemmas in the ‘Racial Century,’” 34. 31 Ibid., 33. 32 Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (New York: Zone Books, 2021), 14. 33 Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, 14.

Bibliography Adams, Chanelle. “Right to Rest (In Peace),” a text for Sunlight Doesn’t Need a Pipeline at Stanley Picker Gallery October 7, 2022. https://sunlightdoesntneedapipeline.com/wp-content/ uploads/2022/09/Chanelle-Adams-R2RIP-v3.pdf. Azoulay, Ariella. The Civil Contract of Photography. New York: Zone Books, 2021. Belden-Adams, Kris. Eugenics, ‘Aristogenics’, Photography: Picturing Privilege. London: Taylor & Francis, 2020. Cave, Stephen and Kanta Dihal. “The Whiteness of AI.” Philosophy & Technology 33, no. 4 (2020): 685–703. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-020-00415-6. Dyer, Richard. White: Essays on Race and Culture. London: Taylor & Francis, 2013. Lowe, Lisa. The Intimacies of Four Continents. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015. MacDuffie, Allen. Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Mills, Charles W. and Tommie Shelby. “Overview.” In The Racial Contract, 2nd ed., 9–40. Cornell University Press, 2022. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7591/j.ctv1xtwq8p.8. Moses, A. Dirk. “Conceptual Blockages and Definitional Dilemmas in the ‘Racial Century’: Genocides of Indigenous Peoples and the Holocaust.” Patterns of Prejudice 36, no. 4 (2002): 7–36. https://doi.org/10.1080/003132202128811538. Pinto, Ana Teixeira and Anselm Franke. “Introduction: Ana Teixeira Pinto and Anselm Franke”, Welcome and introduction to the conference Whose Universal? as part of the 12th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art on July 2, 2022 at Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Germany. https://12. berlinbiennale.de/media/introduction-ana-teixeira-pinto-and-anselm-franke/. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Taylor & Francis, 2007. Singh, Nikhil Pal. “The Pervasive Power of the Settler Mindset.” Boston Review, November 26, 2019. http://bostonreview.net/war-security-race/nikhil-pal-singh-pervasive-power-settler-mindset. ———. Race and America’s Long War. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017. ———. Race Is a Country. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. St. John de Crevecoeur, J. Hector. “Letters From an American Farmer.” The Avalon Project, 1782. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/subject_menus/letters.asp.

1

Daguerreotypes, the Vanishing Native American, and the Invention of Western Typologies

From the time of Sir Walter Raleigh’s first colonial voyages into the Americas at the behest of Elizabeth I, the Native American was viewed as something to be inventoried by way of declaring ownership over it. The approach mimicked what was previously being done by the Spanish in the New World. Plants, animals, minerals, and peoples were to be documented and classified to produce a visual record of what the English crown now owned. It was from the works of these painters, cartographers, and collectors that the educated White European male was able to picture the New World in the sixteenth century, capturing his imagination for what constituted its alien forms of life. Michael Moran maintains that this took place at two levels. The first was through ‘panoramas of Virginia that conveyed a sense of mastery over the unknown territory,’ while at the same time implicitly claiming ‘control of ownership over all that was pictured.’1 The second, was through the objectification of the Native American body, capturing the ‘the intimate actings of daily life including eating, dancing and conversing’ in the form of illustrations that would make their way back to the collections of the English merchants, keen to inspect what was effectively part the merchandise.2 These surveyors of lands and places approached them as a continuous entity whose existence down to the individual was something ‘rightly belonging to the civilised English.’3 It was they who would go on to exploit this relationship to what was thought of as ‘the natural world’ through a combination of technology and military might. The American colonies, over time, become synonymous with fascination itself within a European mind fixated upon both the New World and the technical media through which it was represented. Encounter becomes the foundation of what we now commonly refer to as visual culture from its inception is a time-based medium. In the five intervening centuries, images have acted as a medium of the imaginary, allowing for ideas around classification and the measurement of value to travel and to situate themselves as universal means. They act as both an entertainment and fulfilment of orders placed upon others. Photography performs the work of a kind of transplantation wherein it is possible for materiality to travel while at the same time preserving its engagement with European routes of meaning. Thus, photography serves not merely to depict, but rather to artificially enliven American life through its emphasis on continuities between and amongst categories of separation and belonging according to their cultural origin and the ways in which they are intelligibly registered. Elements of the American landscape become liberated from their places of origin through the portability of the photographic medium, while at the same time becoming evidence of the trauma involved in these startling acts of encounter. What liberates them from this association with danger, or charge, comes by way of investing these images with DOI: 10.4324/9781003274797-2

16  Daguerreotypes, the Vanishing Native American, the Invention authoritative meaning in a retroactive fashion. The static nature of the photograph enables its viewer to countenance it as a background to a greater narrative of imposed stability. From a temporal distance, its purpose is to invest the viewer with a sense of mastery and control. The photographic portrait participates in the project of colonisation to the degree that it promotes a fragmentation, shattering, and dispersal of our apprehension of time and space. It, in and of itself, becomes a climactic event, by firstly bringing attention to the viewer’s profound alienation from their surrounding world, and secondarily, their indifference towards it. While the technology on one hand promotes itself as a tool through which humanity can exercise a greater degree of visual control over their world, it can only do so to the extent that it reinforces contrasts between acceptance and rejection, identification, and dissociation. In many ways, it also points to another process of obliteration: the symbolic annihilation of the body of the Native American through various stages of American imposition into its territorial domains through the agency of White patriarchal authority. The photographic mechanism of their survey makes these bodies’ imagistic capture a non-event, which signifies in racialised terms the obliteration of their significance at the individual level, as well as at the world level. The individual Native American sitter as a generic category of difference has to be removed from the photographic stage in order for the inherent correlations between old and new, tradition and progress, and Old World and New to be maintained. The photographic negative is one of modernity tinged by various scenes of trauma and violence which act as the reverse of progressive development and participatory democracy meaning that the New World never can fully arrive. As a consolation, it has chosen to relentlessly document itself by displaying its objects of status, as though this were evidence of its advancement. The photographic portrait becomes at every point complicit with a fantasy of dominion, based primarily on an imperial logic of conformity and de-individualisation. It is only through this logic that it is possible for Native Americans to become the stuff of natural history, because there could be no evidence of having a relation to either God and by extension history on the timeline of his founding of this world. Monica Rico makes the case for what transpired the American West to be judged within a context of the greater ‘global West, as one developing frontier, one colonial enterprise, among many around the globe.’4 She argues that this view ‘did not necessarily contradict a simultaneously held image of the of the settling of the American frontier as the defining process of American history.’5 In both the American West and the global West, imperial self-fashioning was about drawing lines between savagery and civilisation, frontier and metropole that existed, firstly, in the imagination as a proving ground for the furtherance of White humanity at a time when rentier wealth hierarchies were waning as the basis of power within Europe, and secondarily through ‘frontier stories [that] offered a set of cultural tools that enabled upper class men struggling to make sense of a new democratic, industrial society to make meaning in their lives.’6 Brian Roberts is quick to point out that despite how many writers portrayed and artists envisioned it, the frontier was not ‘a place for the rootless and purseless’ nor ‘freebooting types, but substantial individuals with money to invest.’7 Those undertaking ‘the trek out West’ were prepared for it to be expensive, as ‘only the more stable and solvent could afford it.’8 It was not just American emigrants who saw promise in this new strand in the narrative of empire. According to Rico, ‘the American West exercised a particularly strong pull on members of the British landed classes, the titled aristocracy and gentry who for centuries had held a dominant position in British society.’9 The frontier stories legitimised

Daguerreotypes, the Vanishing Native American, the Invention 17 the power these men exercised—over women, workers, colonial subjects—by testifying to their capacity for and even of excellence at ‘violence.’10 At the same time, ‘hunting disciplined violence by constraining it within a complex, nuanced web of texts, customs, rules, and institutions that defined elite hunters, as sportsmen and not so-called gamebutchers.’11 Rico explains that ‘the pursuit of killing animals in the wilderness was a meaning-making activity that actively constructed the class, race, and gender identities of many of the men who incorporated the American West into the global economy.’12 For such men, ‘the ritualized killing of wild animals incorporated a rich vocabulary of gestures, objects, sayings, clothing and images that, when woven together, told a story about masculine triumph over nature.’13 A similar level of exegesis had to be applied to the handling of the dead animals themselves, which were shifted into their appropriate cultural containers of trophy making through the arts of taxidermy and photography that retooled them into representations forms, ‘whose very inutility signalled their symbolic value and the high social position of their owners. Displayed prominently in rooms that spoke eloquently of the “juxtaposition of private and public spheres of play and work, of animal and human worlds, and the interpenetration of wilderness and civilization”, such objects testified to their owner’s power to kill and resurrect.’14 In particular, photography ‘did a great deal to advance the creation of an imagined global West, a fantasy playground of cowboys and Indians that could be experienced through new forms of representation even if viewers never went to the West.’15 Wild West Shows would act as companion media to these static images allowing Britons to imagine ‘that they could be part of the world-historical progress of Anglo-Saxonism.’16 Added to this eventually was the Western genre film, as the ultimate provision for ‘Western masculinity became detached from any specific place and developed into a template for hegemonic masculinity on any frontier, in any space where civilization grappled with recalcitrant colonial subjects.’17 Imagery as Projection Native Americans were depicted always in what was assumed by Whites to be their ‘natural setting’ be it through illustration, painting, or photography. They were never portrayed as living in a contemporary sense, but rather as people whose advancement was made in some bygone era. The cameras that captured them by the late nineteenth century did so as part of Westward expansion campaigns. Their inclusion was a piece of kit that alongside many other items allowed those travelling to assume occupancy as they went along. Steven Conn recognises Edward S. Curtis as a giant of this era of ethnographic photography and credits him with ‘probably having done more to shape the way we imagine Native Americans visually than any other single individual.’18 The apex of his career coincides with that of European empires of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is important to note that Conn credits his work with ‘imagining’ versus ‘seeing’ Native Americans. This is significant, because Curtis describes his work with these subjects as ‘a complete and systematic text…so seriously handled that the most critical scientific worker cannot take exception.’19 The photograph, for Curtis, was an instrument of accuracy aimed at demonstrating the facts of life for these various peoples. It, according to Conn’s estimation, was embarked upon ‘as an encyclopedic’ project that aspired to both ‘completeness and finality.’20 Curtis’ photographs were effectively going to be a record of extinction, not of individual lives, but rather of group types which he would classify and present as Apache,

18  Daguerreotypes, the Vanishing Native American, the Invention Navajo, and so on. The aim was to ‘preserve their likenesses,’ meaning the equivalency to both one another and their exceptionality standing apart from the greater human record. Conn tells us that ‘many portraits of individuals did not contain their names in the titles. Biography that important “department” of history has largely disappeared.’21 Conn is partially correct in making this assumption of a type of disappearance occurring here. However, what is missing is any acknowledgement that this was not a sin of omission, but a condition of commission Curtis acceded to, along with his adopting a technical role in White westward expansionism. The only omission that is recognised here is that of Curtis who does not comment on the relationship of Whites like himself to Native Americans. This is the case because in his mind none had existed. For that to happen would require an admission of Native American presence within the future of the nation. What he wished to imagine instead was ‘a pre-contact Edenic World’ in which the Native American dwelt in a state of nature.22 So great was his belief in the veracity of this world, that he had caused to title a photograph made in 1924, ‘Before the White Man Came.’ Curtis literally does not see himself anywhere in this situation. He cannot imagine himself there because as a White man, he exists in the world of events and history, whereas his native subjects live in a state of being for which such punctuation is impossible to conceive. The fact of their timelessness allows Curtis to be the one that assigns a before, and presumably an after, to solely his own appearance, as the one who comes. The native, as a natural resource, cannot only ever be visited upon and then, subsequently, mined for their finite worth. As a resource, they are always threatening to vanish in a race against time. It is through the absence of time that they are raced altogether, meaning that they only appear as grouped types when it suits Curtis’s desire as a scientific ethnographer to do so. Conn describes Curtis’ photographs as ‘beautiful’ for the reason that ‘they penetrate, they captivate, they haunt’ the imagination of he and other White spectators who make up the audience for these images, then as now.23 Conn’s aesthetic judgement of these images presumes a kind of innocence on the part of Curtis regarding the full extent of the genocide taking place in the context of America’s removal campaigns waged against its indigenous peoples. Conn acts as though Curtis as a man on the ground of the American West a hundred years ago was somehow shielded from these visceral realities in carrying out his pseudo-documentary work. The irony of this line of argument to salvage Curtis from the deeply problematic nature of his photographic involvement is that Conn’s terms apply to Curtis, and not to his subjects. It is the White settler that acts as a penetrator, captivator, and spooks to the native peoples who must warily confront his presence. Curtis does not find his subjects in anything like a state of nature. Rather, he forcibly denatures them from their cultural context through his ‘dressing up of his subjects, posing them, and moving them around.’24 This implies that from beginning to end, they were products of his imagination. He is both technically and commercially able to fulfil the world giving mission of his photographs through the perpetuation of the myth of biological erasure of native peoples as something that was naturally taking place. This happened with, or without, the added artifice of scientific reasoning as to why. Curtis’ photographic works short-circuit any need to enquire further because Conn believes this disappearance of the Native American is something ‘that tragically but inevitably happened.’25 It is the very causal logic of the inevitability of empire to expire certain resources in the name of progress that serves to further historical investigations, scientific enquiries and political debates that overwhelmingly privilege White settler regimes of understanding over those of indigenous subjects.

Daguerreotypes, the Vanishing Native American, the Invention 19 At a fundamental level, Curtis’ ‘skillful use of aesthetic conventions such as soft focus and vignette’ contributed to not only a belief in ‘the inevitability of extinction’ for Native American peoples but also to a naive romanticising of their demise such that their likeness would immediately be deposited into the realm of collective White nostalgia for the vanishing frontier.26 Deborah Poole argues that the particular aesthetic of Curtis’ portrait photography functioned at one level ‘as part of a broader, political framing of Native Americans as the sad, inevitable, and unresisting victims of a divinely manifest destiny’ and at another perhaps more significant level, as objects that were able to attach ‘a distinctive temporality to the “racializing gaze.”’27 Curtis allows his audience ‘to gaze without limit on what is presumably disappearing around them in contemporary life,’ and thus, creating a condition of artificial temporality that complements his audience’s fascination for technology as a means through which to quell their anxieties more generally concerning their future powers of acquisition.28 The preponderance of Curtis’ collective works in the Native American anthropological cannon attests to the faith in the photographic image to be able to collect on the relatively recent past as an instrument of unrestricted disciplinary power. The sheer number of Curtis’ images that became commercially available to predominantly White consumers up to and including the decades of the 1960s and 1970s when White Americans became more viscerally aware of the contemporary plight of Native Americans seemed to belie any notion of their ‘natural’ disappearance. Instead, these images appear to trade on their enduring ability to apply fixity to racial categorisation through the physical, chemical, and technological means. The ethnographic and anthropological photography that starts from the mid-nineteenth century extends the classificatory impulses of an earlier natural philosophy that made racialised subjectivity a product of appearance. The scientific racism that followed it continues to make recourse to visual perception, as a way to ‘“fix” racial subjects in their skins’ and locate them within the framework of material recognition.29 This situation suggests that we have been living in and amongst bodies that were both corporeal and incorporeal for quite some time now and that biologically speaking they have been the source of a mania for the distribution of bodies across a register of mattering that is constantly adjusted to serve the cause of speculative accumulation. It is crucial to consider how photography through its reproductive chemistry played a role ‘as a discipline of extractive and originary science’ catering ‘to a philosophical material formation’ that essentially provided the means through which to continue efforts to racialise matter.30 Photography comes into service as a means with which to deal with racialised people as though they were the ‘matter’ of society. This was most often done through enacting them as ‘sexual matter,’ which meant dividing them into ‘male and female, adult and child’ within ‘their home structure, their environment, their handicraft, their games, ceremonies, etc.’31 All of these were made component to an ethnographic science that was wholly preoccupied with the fraught problem of bringing liveliness to matter and to make these peoples fit within the categories of humanity and animality. Virtualising the Native Subject Curtis Marez argues that ‘from the 19th century to the present a mass of romantic decontextualized photos and films for which the ubiquitous images of Edward Curtis are but the tip of a vast iceberg, have dominated the visual field and marginalized alternative images. To the extent that such images have lodged themselves in the consciousness of

20  Daguerreotypes, the Vanishing Native American, the Invention many non-Indians they have been “construed as evidence of a real history, no matter what the truth of that history may have been.”’32 The vast quantity of material produced to represent the Indian, as well as the intensity of their global circulation created the conditions for an ‘influential form of “real virtuality”’to emerge, constructed from the White settler depictions of ‘Indian history, identity and sovereignty.’33 Those images when brought together effectively influenced the construction of social reality itself and had moreover ‘a more or less direct effect upon the survival of Indian peoples.’34 This fact was not lost on Edward Curtis nor the team of Indian interpreters and ethnologists who worked alongside him who were forced to ‘grappled with how to respond to ongoing histories of colonialist representations and how to use visual technologies in support of Indian communities.’35 This difficulty was compounded by reality that all Native Americans photographed by Curtis were confined to live on reservations. One key figure amongst them was Alexander B. Upshaw, a member of the Crow tribe, who went on to produce crucial ethnographic material for the fourth volume of Curtis’ project, The North American Indian. Upshaw was one amongst a vast number of Native Americans who took up employment on Curtis’ project, which at the time paid a relatively meagre amount to their White counterparts for the privilege of such their capacities to act as translators and informants on their fellow tribespeople. Ellie Gascoigne asserts Upshaw possessed a few notable characteristics that crucially informed his contribution to Curtis’s project. Firstly, ‘Upshaw had been the product of ‘the infamous Carlisle Indian School, one of hundreds of boarding schools intended to strip Native Americans of their cultural identity. At the opening ceremony, the school’s founder, Richard Henry Pratt, declared the school’s purpose to ‘kill the Indian and save the man.’36 Established by an act of Congress in 1879, the school in central Pennsylvania was conceived as a paramilitary residential boarding school that would solve the then-pressing ‘Indian Question’ by forcibly assimilating and Americanising Native American youth. Pratt was an army officer who had served in the Union Army during the Civil War and afterwards served as a ranger on the Western frontier. According to Hayes Peter Mauro, ‘his job was to go out and round up the most subversive Native American warriors, those seen as the biggest threat to Anglo-American advancement on the frontier.’37 Pratt rounded up these individuals and brought them to a federal prison in Marion, Florida. From there, he set out to create sort of indoctrination protocol for these inmates so they could be reintegrated into American society. For males, this meant performing manual labour or working in agricultural trades, whereas, for females, this meant domestic service. The site at Carlisle was to act as a facility to essentially develop that protocol. Gascoigne maintains that ‘this programme of indoctrination had a profound impact on Upshaw,’ as evidenced by the fact that ‘shortly after graduating he published an article titled “What the Indians Owe to the United States Government.”’38 This article essentially made the case for giving up ‘the old ways of life and acting like a white.’39 The goal of the education received by Upshaw and numerous others like him was to preserve the Indian by destroying every last vestige of his cultural understanding through educational programming that was literally conducted at the historical staging grounds of White Western settlement. ‘Carlisle was historically a key location for the Indian wars west of the Susquehanna river, dating to the time of the town’s founding in 1751.’40 Beginning in 1879, the town could be showcased as the place where the Indian was finally and absolutely subdued into a modern American landscape of White-owned industry and prosperity. The goal of these institutions was to showcase to White audiences evidence of how ‘living Indians’ could be trained to subsist in a ‘contemporary’ environment. Proof

Daguerreotypes, the Vanishing Native American, the Invention 21 of this concept was produced daily through Pratt’s incessant promotional photography of their various activities. The students themselves were displayed as remnant products of another world, made useful to this one, ostensibly through Carlisle’s trademark process of intellectually and morally reprogramming them at the most basic level of their being. This meant that their capacity for self-appreciation was coercively arranged before them as adhering to category of civilisation that was the extraordinary purview of the White man, whereas with their part in the pageant of man limited to their ability to temporarily step into the ideological framework, with the understanding that such an inhabitation was only ever that of an adopted persona, rather than an owned personhood. This obviously created a great deal of conflict within Carlisle’s student body with regard to appreciating the position of own rarefied identities. In terms of his own level of complicity within this arrangement, Gascoigne concludes that ‘while Upshaw maintained a connection to his tribe through his work, he sought to minimise any possibility of being perceived as “primitive.”’41 Pratt used before and after photographs to prove the assimilation of his pupils into White civilisation as a means essentially of securing further funding for his institution, and recognised photography itself as crucial to ‘the demonstration of efficacy of his “final solution” to the “Indian problem.”’42 This started with the stripping off of native dress in favour of military style uniform during school hours and ‘citizens’ dress outside of that. The express goal was for all of the Native student population to not only adopt the outward appearance of ‘soldiers,’ but also to literally be subject to drills and other types of disciplinary rituals such as marching and standing at attention.43 The after photographs captured this formalism, as well as another perhaps more crucial one; ‘whether full length or head shot (often both were made from the same negative), the photographs conform fully to white portrait conventions of the time.’44 The before images, by contrast, tend to have been staged outdoors to confer the idea of the Native in his ‘natural’ situation. The after versions ‘conform to patterns of self-presentation in the period portraits of middle-class whites […] any interaction between these subjects is clearly engineered by the photographer, and the props are routine for the studios of the period. The portraits express an ideology of propriety and complete bodily control.’45 What is remarkable about this is that these portraits would have been taken at a time when the remaining Native American population would have been subject to complete bodily control of a collective type within the reservation system as the mark of their impropriety to become part of the greater social fabric of the nation, and yet here we find the solution as one where they are made so not as gentleman civilians, but as citizen soldiers. The patterns of self-presentation in the period portraits of middle class Whites mimicked here are those expressly of an army militia class. The photographer J.N. Choate, who made these images, did not do it simply as a documentary ethnographic exercise. From the offing, he recognised their commercial potential. He made these school portraits ‘available for public purchase’ and ‘advertised widely in newspapers and broadsides, and on the backs of Choate-made cabinet cards.’46 Choate made them in stereographs to meet the standards of a growing commercial network of distributors that ‘catered to the popular tastes for such items as souvenirs, educational aids, and parlor entertainment.’47 Pratt obtained a printing press himself from a benefactor so that he could also profit from these images through the creation of monthly publication featuring these images. Subscription rates were established. The production labour was carried out by ‘Indian apprentices.’ The images, after publication, were then sold onto further to local and national media outlets. It would seem the civilising process

22  Daguerreotypes, the Vanishing Native American, the Invention was the site of endless forms of fascination for White viewing audiences, who could see Native Americans as no longer at war with Whites, but rather new in the enviable position of being able to delightfully mimic his former captor. These subjects were of course not typically what one would picture as school children as many were in their late teens and even early twenties when they arrived at the school, drawn from reservations or local prisons, these young men were of enlistment age and all were drawn from tribal backgrounds considered the most hostile to Whites. Their ‘taming’ was literally enacted before us through the staging of them in primitive Native dress, through to their after staging as ‘citizens’ in modern dress. Their very features, accordingly, stress their newly acquired self-containment through the adoption of a direct gaze, as well as their apparent Whitening affected through studio lighting and other post-production printing techniques.48 These images would make their way into photographic catalogues that featured on the local, state, and national and international levels. They were circulated at state fairs, museums, exhibition halls, and major wellknown expositions of the late Victorian period including appearing in the World Columbian Exhibition of 1893. Pratt took exception to the themes of the exhibition because he felt that they romantically exalted an Indian past that for him was totally unredeemable to civilisation, rather he wanted his Carlisle school portraiture to represent the idea that if Native Americans could be White(ened) as a means of making them useful as live specimens, as opposed to extinct relics. Their use was in live exhibitions, as means of showcasing his lucrative model of before and after tableaux. Far from being one with the White race, these demonstrations assured audience of nothing so much as their continued social subordination and cultural erasure. They are called upon to assume a ‘posture genteel and polite, even scientific contemplation of their own cultural nihilation’ even as they themselves assume the position of ‘specimen.’49 They have been sold through these staged photographs of themselves on the idea that at a deeper level, they can achieve deracination, rather than realising that their continued racialisation continues to serve commercial, social, and political far too lucrative for their material degradation to ever be at an end. The rhetoric of assimilation was only, therefore, an ideological device, standing in for the reality of continued categorical exploitation under the auspices of racial development. The Carlisle school built its own state of the art photographic studio in 1906. It was described at the time as ‘one of the finest and best equipped photography studios in the state of Pennsylvania.’50 The quality of the equipment was not matched by the training offered to Native American studies. Indeed, only one student was ever identified as a photographer at Carlisle—John Leslie (Pullyap)—and he attended more than a decade before the famed studio was completed. ‘On 1 June 1894, Carlisle’s school newspaper, The Indian Helper, described Leslie as the “right hand Indian man” to John Choate, the official school photographer.’51 A later issue advertised the 1895 souvenir catalogue of the school as including photographs by Leslie, ‘announcing that, “Remember this is Indian work and the first sent out from Carlisle school.”’52 The injunction here to remember this was Indian work could be taken in two ways, one as a qualifier for its general inferior nature or that Leslie was the first to produce something of quality enough to be released on par with the work of a White photography. This comment suggested that Leslie’s talent would have to imitate the standards of his White betters, rather than the cause for their admiration of his work to be rooted in the fact that he showcased here any unique type of Native sensibility. Endorsement of that would have been incompatible with the school’s strict ethos of assimilation. As such, most of what Leslie ended up producing at

Daguerreotypes, the Vanishing Native American, the Invention 23 the school were architectural photographs, rather than portraits, and this suggests that his work was there to service a practical application versus an artistic one. Moreover, as a studio apprentice, an Indian helper would have little say in the focus of his work. Leslie’s work, therefore, to be clear would be classified as an example of outstanding manual labour, rather than artistic expression. There is an element of commerce involved here, as in the presentation of counterfeit goods, which coincided with such a projection of Upshaw’s meaningful value. It is certainly conceivable that Curtis, like his predecessor Pratt, would take every opportunity to make strategic display of Upshaw. This was certainly the experience that Carlisle students had been inured to during their schooling. One example is that of Luther Standing Bear who recounts how when he was sent to work at Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia, he was placed on open display in the store while he was pricing jewellery: “So every day I was placed in his little glass house, opening the trunks, taking out the jewels and putting prices tags on them. How white folks did crowd around to watch me! They were greatly surprised that John Wanamaker could trust an Indian boy with such valuables!”’53 Standing Bear, like Upshaw, was the son of a prominent chief, in this case of the Lakota people. His internship in 1883 at Wanamaker’s was a reward for his outstanding behaviour at Carlisle. He started there in the janitorial service.54 He was told by Pratt at the time that proving himself at that level would be a way of proving ‘the value of his whole race.’55 Apparently Standing Bear had a natural flair for the performative, having led the Carlisle Indian Band across the Brooklyn Bridge upon its opening ceremony on May 24, 1883, prior to his time at Wanamaker’s and it is likely that characteristic ability eventuated his promotion to the display floor when he came to work their the following year. This might have had to do with the fact that ‘his father was half white and owned a general store on the Brule reservation’ that Standing Bear was chosen for this particular line of work.56 Equally, it might have to do with the fact at this point, the school itself would have been producing Indian handicraft to be sold on the shop floor and shoppers encouraged to make ‘Indian corners’ in their homes to display the acquisition of prized objects from exotic, primitive cultures. The situation of Standing Bear pricing jewellery, in this instance, might be interpreted as a practice that shares display strategies with museums and expositions of the time. The premise is that he was set amongst the other objects as one rare and precious ‘find’ situated amongst others. Pratt did not seem to be aware of the fact that Standing Bear was not a ‘full blooded’ Indian, nor that he was a member of the Lakota tribe and not the Sioux. Before he starts his placement, Pratt counsels Standing Bear that the majority of White people at Wanamaker’s will ‘think he cannot neither learn or work anything; that he is very dirty.’57 At this point would have had been educated for years at Carlisle in order to ostensibly appear as the equivalent to a working class White man. Pratt’s remarks, therefore, reveal the failure of his own system to oblige that consideration at even the most superficial level of appearance. Standing Bear’s career would eventually progress towards appearances in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows, where show up every night in full ‘Indian’ regalia. What he learnt, however, at Carlisle would not fully go to waste as he also acted as an interpreter for Lakota performers involved in the shows so they could take direction from their White producers. A similar arrangement pertained when Standing Bear moved on from working with Buffalo Bill onto a brief stint in Hollywood playing both Indian and non-Indian roles.58

24  Daguerreotypes, the Vanishing Native American, the Invention Luther Standing Bear’s real name was Kills Plenty and, by his own account, he arrived in Carlisle in the year 1879 with ‘the blanket on.’59 ‘He and his father concurred that Plenty Kill was not a prudent name for a Lakota to use east of the Mississippi in the aftermath of the Little Bighorn. By the time the boy arrived in Carlisle in 1879, he had already taken his father’s less-menacing name, Standing Bear.’60 Standing Bear gives us insight on how names were chosen at Carlisle that goes some way towards explaining how Alexander B. Upshaw would have arrived at his name. Apparently, an instructor at Carlisle ‘called up each student before a blackboard chalked with Anglo first names and told him or her to point out a first name. “When my turn came,” Standing Bear remembered, “I took the pointer and acted as if I were about to touch an enemy.” The pointer fell on the name “Luther,” and thereafter he became Luther Standing Bear of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School.’61 So began the process of ‘civilising’ these young men, whose fathers taken the first steps in that direction for them by through previous orders of coercion associated with survival in a post-reservation world. Upshaw was born in 1871, he entered the Carlisle Indian School in 1888 at 17 and graduated in 1897 at the age of 22, only to stay on a further two years as teaching assistant until 1899. What was perhaps remarkable about Upshaw that is he was one of only ‘750 of 10,500 students at Carlisle’ to graduate.’62 ‘The vast majority did not assimilate into mainstream society as Pratt had envisioned but instead returned to their reservation homes, often feeling caught between two cultures […] [and] lived with stress and disturbance upon their return.’63 It was not until 1904, perhaps not coincidentally the year of Pratt’s dismal from Carlisle, that he starts to work with Curtis on a casual basis. His occupation at the end of his life is listed as ‘farmer,’ despite his having been understood as an exceptional scholarly contributor to the project dying less than a year after his volume’s completion in 1909.64 In a school photograph of 1891, Shaw poses in full military dress and is pictured sitting atop a pile of animal skins (Figure 1.1).65 Shaw’s outfit resembles the dress uniform used by the United States army of the late 1880s through the turn of the century, typically worn by frontier cavalrymen. Post-Civil War legislation changed the racial make-up of the regular Army force patrolling the American West. Among these frontiersmen in blue were new additions which included African Americans, commonly referred to as ‘buffalo soldiers,’ Indian scouts drawn from ‘the Apaches, Cheyennes, Yavapais, Pimas, Crows, Arikaras and other members of other Indian tribes’ and a ‘large number of the whites hailed from Europe with a strong representation from the British Isles and today’s Germany.’66 Upshaw might well have viewed himself in the guise of one of these contemporary Indian scouts, or better still as an American serviceman, more readily than he did as a tribal representative in the work her performed for Curtis. Nevertheless, ‘he was photographed by Curtis in 1905 for the fourth volume of the project, in traditional indigenous attire, bare-chested and wearing a headdress (Figure 1.2). It stands in direct contrast to a portrait taken by Frank Rinehart seven years prior in 1898. In this instance, Upshaw is shown in a buttoned up suit and tie.’67 According to Ken Gonzales-Day, ‘in his real life Upshaw wore his hair short, had a white wife and three children, and looks rather impatient when his boss finally releases the shutter.’68 Coercion into this pose by Curtis must have felt to him like a betrayal of his lifelong quest to achieve something like social assimilation within the White world. Again, he was being reduced to an artefact situated amongst artefacts, made specimen in quick succession of a vanishing race for which he was both representative of sovereign independence and tribal repossession; between those photo-visual standards, very little of his material being is admitted into acceptance.

Daguerreotypes, the Vanishing Native American, the Invention 25

Figure 1.1 Studio portrait of Alexander Upshaw (Crow Nation) wearing the Carlisle Indian School uniform, c. 1891. Photo by John N. Choate. Cumberland County Historical Society, Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

26  Daguerreotypes, the Vanishing Native American, the Invention

Figure 1.2  Upshaw—Apsaroke, 1905. Photo by Edward S. Curtis, Library of Congress.

Artefactual Contrivance Returning to Upshaw’s relationship with Curtis and his inclusion within his body of work, what is remarkable about Upshaw’s story is how within a single generation it was possible for a Native individual living in the United States to have ‘had no direct or significant experience of pre-reservation life. By contrast, almost all the other Crow individuals whose portraits and life stories are included in the fourth volume were male elders with substantial experience of prereservation days.’69 That phenomenon speaks to

Daguerreotypes, the Vanishing Native American, the Invention 27 the success of America’s cultural genocide of Native peoples to the vast degree that Shamoon Zamir is able to conclude that, ‘both for the elders and for Upshaw’s generation, the border between “invented” and “lived” tradition was no doubt a fluid one, if it was experienced as real at all. It is possible to conceive of Upshaw’s relationship to tradition “as a legitimate return to ways of knowing that were not extracted from him at Carlisle,” while simultaneously recognizing that his participation in cultural salvage differed from the motivations of the elders in that it was a willed affiliation not to a personally experienced cultural past but to a tradition transformed into a symbolic form, into an idea of itself.’70 The logical conclusion of all of this is the Curtis’ portrait displaying Upshaw in Native Crow dress was contrived for him to act as an idealised version of his recently deceased father Crazy Pend d’Oreille, who despite having passed away in 1907, was, in fact, never Curtis’ photographic subject. This unsettling tension between ideal and article is further underlined by Zamir’s argument that, ‘by tying together Upshaw’s portrait and the father’s narrative through photo-textual combination, Curtis in a way substitutes the son’s image for the father’s, and so he makes available a reading of Upshaw’s portrait as an embodiment or statement of sympathetic connection, even filial homage’ that it itself might have been a rather more fraught connection.71 Perhaps, this is so because by Zamir’s own account, ‘it was not uncommon for Native Americans’ educated at schools like Carlisle, ‘to return to their tribal communities […] in the capacity of missionaries, reformers, or facilitators of the transition into modern life,’ making their reappearance that of unwanted subjects.72 Zamir further surmises that ‘the narrative of his father’s life and the costume that Upshaw wears enfold him in Curtis’s portrait, but they do so without necessarily resolving the tension between tradition and modernity into a narrative of return to roots and primal affiliations.’73 Again, this is likely so because there is no route of return through agents like Upshaw who might well have insisted on progress for these communities at the time that affiliations with past identities were most vulnerable to comprise or adulteration by the same forces that figures like himself were inviting onto the scene. Notably, it is Curtis, rather than Upshaw, who insists on promoting that tension at both the photographic and textual level as one ‘that illustrates the valuation of bravery and honor that lies at the heart of conceptions of masculine self-worth in traditional Crow culture’74 Zamir’s assertion that Curtis had been given over by Upshaw to appreciate ‘Crow tribal societies’ as immersed in ‘the culture of military prowess, valor, and status’ that in many ways belies not a ‘cross-cultural tension’ as Zamir would have it, but rather reflects Curtis’s compelling of Upshaw to inhabit that position of conjecture in order ‘to lend further credence to Curtis’ photographic observation.75 Curtis’ portrayal of Upshaw as his father’s son in many respects could not be further from the truth of his upbringing. Rather than being preserved through identification with his father, Upshaw’s self-understanding had been thoroughly re-inscribed upon him through his strict assimilationist training at Carlisle. Upshaw was not participating in the living continuity of his people, nor with himself, but rather contributing to a commercial photographic and textual venture about the production of representations of a once great race now finding itself contemplating the irrevocability of its own extinction. Its populations declining beyond recognition, the only requirement now of its remaining peoples was to appear as and in spectacular preservation of their previous relevance within a greater, White record of settler time. Take, for example, Upshaw’s father’s name Crazy Pend d’Oreille. ‘Crazy’ might have been borrowed from a vague Anglo association with Sioux warrior Crazy Horse. What

28  Daguerreotypes, the Vanishing Native American, the Invention was considered ‘crazy’ about Crazy Horse by his own people was that he had lighter complexion and hair than others in his tribe and had light hair with prodigious curls. As an adolescent, he was called ‘His Horse Looking’ which could refer to the boys’ aquiline features and general mixed-race appearance. The name Pend d’Oreille is a French term, which means ‘hangs from ear,’ and was attributed to them by French colonists and traders in reference to the large shell earrings worn by these people. In English, they are referred to as the Kalispel after the Camas, a garlic-like root that was a staple of their diet. In each instance, it is their proximity to a natural resource that becomes the feature of recognition for these peoples, rather than their humanity per se. Even through these modest examples, it is possible to appreciate how Native Americans were in the process of being manufactured as pre-historic elements within the narrativization of the American landscape, belonging most fully to natural philosophy collections being built up simultaneously across the Atlantic world in the late eighteenth century. Later, as America matured into an imperial entity in its right, it would inherit the classificatory rites of those previous enterprises in the late nineteenth century. Whilst I concur with Zamir that Upshaw is ‘not required as a kind of extra to step in and illustrate typicality or to fake authenticity,’ within his portrait, I part ways with Zamir’s conclusion that the only explanation for its existence is ‘as a form of honoring Upshaw, a way of giving thanks for his collaboration.’76 I do so because I would argue that this reading neglects to acknowledge the historical context of the portrait’s making. As a consequence of this, I would argue its fails to recognise that the reason that Upshaw’s face in the portrait ‘does not seem to embody difference in quite the same way as the other faces do; it does not, to put it bluntly, appear to be as securely and instantly “Indian” as the others’ and why indeed ‘it is easy to imagine this face rising above a suited torso, but it is far more difficult to do so in the case of the portraits of Plenty Coups, Wolf, Two Leggings, or Whiteman Runs Him’ i.e., ‘authentic Native elders’ is expressly due to Upshaw’s involvement with institutional assimilation through the Indian boarding school system.77 This has nothing whatever to do with ‘a matter of the natural lineaments of the face,’ but rather how these men of a particular generation have been made to suffer under the conditions of progressive deprivation under the imposition of the reservation system of what remained of native peoples.78 It is not only his young age (Upshaw would have been 33, whereas his Native elders would have been in their early 50s in 1905) that accounts for the relative ‘smoothness of the skin and the fleshiness of the face distinguish it from the handsomely craggy-textured and bony appearance of the other men.’79 What accounts for this is that these men are quite literally battle-scarred through the exceptional condition of their life circumstances. This, as compared to Upshaw, who was allowed to mature into manhood quite apart from the ravages of reservation life at Carlisle Indian Industrial School and, therefore, remains to a certain degree, albeit precariously, sheltered within the White world. These circumstances are what account for these differences in appearance, as much as gaps within physical age. Zamir maintains that these effects ‘have more to do with the way the face and the body compose themselves before the camera’ rather than the way they have been contrived to do so by the White photographer as opposed to the Native sitter.80 Again, it is important to acknowledge the asymmetry of power which exists in such a relationship at the time of these portraits manufacture between the White photographer and the Native sitter, as well as the technological apparatus itself, which makes the description of ‘ease’ at this particular time, extremely difficult to assign. If Zamir detects an ‘ease’ to the position Upshaw occupies and ‘the pose he strikes and the way he inhabits photographic conventions,’ this

Daguerreotypes, the Vanishing Native American, the Invention 29 too emerges as a product of unequal contrivance to the extent that Zamir fails to qualitatively account for why ‘that is missing from the other portraits.’81 To compensate for that loss, Zamir rationalises the difference between these poses as having ‘more to do with culturally determined inflections of body language and social decorum and differing degrees and forms of habituation to the photographic process than it has to do with discomfort in front of or resistance to Curtis.’82 Zamir’s comments reinforce a conclusion that what Upshaw holds over these men is ability to match his body language and manner to mirror White photographic conventions. The degree and form of habituation of a White appearance are so profoundly instilled within him that despite his temporary (re)adoption of Native dress, there is within him no trace of opposition to his total supervision over the conditions of the shoot. Such faithful adherence to the photographic process intersects directly with the assimilationist ideology of a figure like Pratt. Zamir asks us to consider the manner in which Upshaw leans on his right elbow and in the photograph and links ‘such a pose’ to one that ‘is a commonplace of Western art (dating as far back at least as Raphael’s early sixteenth-century portrait of courtier Castilglione leaning on a ledge or parapet).83 This pose, we are told, ‘was inherited by the Victorian, especially studio, portrait on both sides of the Atlantic’ as a marker presumably of their lasting, universal cultural value.84 Zamir assumes that Upshaw would be exposed to knowledge through his work with Curtis and his team of photographers and yet there is no evidence of Upshaw participating in the aesthetic choices they would have made to orchestrate their images. He credits Upshaw with choosing this pose he strikes while donning Native dress, while in the same breath conceding that Victorian conventions such as ‘individuals lean on chair backs, desks, architectural columns, or any similar object, [were there] partly to steady themselves before the slow exposures of the camera and partly to support themselves in composing their faces, while imitating unconvincingly a sense of casual ease.’85 In other words, they were there for practical purposes in order to achieve certain desired effects that were admittedly artificial in nature. Zamir’s assertion that the pose that Upshaw strikes ‘does not occur in the other Crow portraits’ leads us to believe that Upshaw is a highly exceptional Native subject, and that the specific nature of that exceptionalism stems from Upshaw’s capacity to assimilate the values of Western art to such a profound degree through his education that he is then able to spontaneously mimic these conventions.86 The problem, however, is that he cannot altogether convincingly do so because despite the development of his mind, his biological body continues to betray him in his efforts to assume for himself ‘Victorian conventions of public and private self-presentation.’87 Ultimately, it is his ‘large (almost disproportionate) and heavily veined hand in the foreground demurs and ripples the surface of delicacy and decorum; its broad and heavy fingers and its strong knuckles’ that give away the visual evidence that he remains a savage.88 No matter how Zamir wishes to dress this statement up by saying that this characteristic is in belonging ‘with the accomplished celebration of masculinity that characterizes many of the other Crow portraits,’ it is nonetheless evident that he has lapsed into appraising Upshaw as, a strangely incongruous blend of ‘feathering of the headdress’ biological ‘vigor’ and the assumed ‘gentility’ that together remain distinctly non-equivalent to Victorian conventions of registering Whiteness.89 This is further born out in Zamir’s observation that ‘Curtis’s image of Upshaw may not represent the normal outward appearance of the man named Upshaw, but its very masked quality may represent an aspect of the inner self that is nevertheless “true.”’90 This aspect of an inner self, a soul assigned to the savage as it were, does little to belie the

30  Daguerreotypes, the Vanishing Native American, the Invention fact that Upshaw’s countenance simply cannot pass for a White man whatever you label him or, indeed, in whatever way you dress him up. This truly is an awkward arrangement that simply fails to add up. A final example of the persistence of this dilemma incongruity is evident in what Zamir rather awkwardly concludes about it: ‘the very theatricality of the image,’ that it ‘guarantees its success in simultaneously capturing Upshaw’s ties to and respect for Crow culture while also signalling his distance from it. And Upshaw’s willing participation in the making of the portrait makes plain that he cannot be seen as a manikin posed to display artifacts of ethnographic interest; his performance was the vehicle for a genuine self-expression. Curtis appears to understand something of this sense of self and offers us a subtle visual interpretation of it.’91 This last statement is truly unreconcilable through the series of oppositions it presents and this is, furthermore, the case if we consider for whom the image is a success; Curtis rather than Upshaw. Coercive Salvage Curtis would subsequently comment that Upshaw ‘in some respects was the most remarkable man I ever saw. He was perfectly educated and absolutely uncivilized.’92 Far from being complimentary, Curtis’ gage of Upshaw focuses on his incapacity to convincingly display evidence of his successful evolution into White manhood within the space of a single generation. Instead, what he is suggesting is that despite his education, Upshaw remained culturally primitive. What is being acknowledged here is not a sense of cultural duality present within Upshaw per se, but rather a demonstration of a deeper compromise on his part in assuming the pose of ‘semi-civilisation’ through a calculated gesture aimed at satisfying Curtis’ cultural adulation versus his own.93 If we are to believe an early newspaper account of their relationship Upshaw was classed as a figure that Curtis ‘found’ alongside many other vanquished ‘Indians’ and despite the ‘lowness of their present condition, between languishing between two worlds, but perhaps more accurately two eras of territorial empire, it was Curtis himself who is credited with ‘rebuilding’ them: ‘even better than he knew, for, with a byronic flight of imagination, he changed the degenerated Indian of today into the fancy free king of yesterday…he has caught the redskin, as it were in flashlight of fancy; has transplanted him from his wild wood haunts into the art galleries of Gotham…Curtis isn’t a photographer…he is an artist.’94 Curtis literally invents Upshaw, by stripping him of context, his biography, and photographically superimposing on it a portrayal of his father as a warrior and elder replete with experience of pre-reservation life. In so doing, Upshaw is further subsumed by the text that Curtis writes that accompanies his image, placing stress upon his body to assume the burden of ‘traditional’ cultural forms characteristic of the other portraits in the Crow series. The cost of this is profound, because it is a different affront to Upshaw’s claim that through assimilation he had achieved equivalency with a type of masculine Whiteness associated with modernity itself. Outside the preserve of the reservation, Upshaw’s body is made wholly vulnerable to violence. This is the reason for his exceptional inclusion in the volume to act as a cypher for this failure to account for himself in the wider White world convincingly as a discreet subject in his own right. The exception in this instance proves the rule. If Pratt is dedicated to functionally killing the Indian, Curtis, as his successor, is dedicated to figuratively vanishing him and in so doing, preserving the man. The Native men technically worthy of such a ‘salvage’ operation were those who had proven themselves to have the capacity to be trained into service. The core challenge of Curtis’ decadeslong photographic enterprise was to demonstrate the degree to which a former labelled

Daguerreotypes, the Vanishing Native American, the Invention 31 terroristic race can now be portrayed as a pacified one. This is evident in Curtis’ portrait of White Man Runs Him. White Man Runs Him was well known as a Crow scout who worked for Custer’s Seventh Cavalry and was one of the scouts who accompanied Custer at the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876. He was photographed several times in his lifetime because of his ongoing cooperation with the American military to rout his tribal enemies, the Sioux and Cheyenne, including featuring in The North American Indian. He, like Upshaw, was appreciated because he acted as a friendly helper to the White man as his name quite literally suggests. Zamir’s supposition that the quality of his use was determined by his exposure to education or lack thereof corresponds perfectly with Pratt’s use of photography to substantiate his claims ‘that “savage” Indians could indeed be “civilized” […] into taking their place modern America’ through a regime of quasi-military training and trades education, including in some instances learning the technical aspects of producing photography.95 This would have been ‘quite a radical idea for many Americans just three years after the Battle of Little Big Horn.’96 In many ways, John Leslie’s experience of work in this capacity at the school reflects negatively on Zamir’s judgement of the photographic contribution of Upshaw to Curtis’ project. Despite Zamir’s insistence that Upshaw is unique specimen of Indian based on his ‘education in Indian school, postgraduate work in theology, and public career as delegation representative,’ none of these attainments would have set him radically apart from the experience of other Native Americans, at the time, who served in the capacity of a “right hand Indian man.”97 A similar fallacy takes place when Zamir argues that Upshaw would ‘have understood and engaged with white cultural and photographic conventions’ and thus would align himself in that sense to Curtis’ aesthetic aspirations. His argument implies that same understanding would have been totally inaccessible for a White cultural ignoramus like White Man Runs Him. Zamir further maintains that Upshaw, unlike his unskilled Native counterpart White Man Runs Him, had ‘agency’ because he had already assimilated these conventions within his ordinary appearance as a contemporary person. Interestingly, how this is revealed is not in their ability to both don blue jeans, but rather how they wear their now antiquated Native dress. Zamir offers that ‘White Man Runs Him may have put on clothes that he, like most other Native Americans at that time, had ceased to wear as a norm, but he inhabits them with a conviction that suggests they are the markers of a very tangible and still readily available sense of self, [whereas] Upshaw’s donning of costume lacks such conviction, but this is the truth of his image.’98 For Zamir, both of the men are in essence performing for Curtis, but the difference between them is that White Man Runs Him isn’t clever enough to spot the performance itself as a fake, whereas Upshaw’s ability to do so reinforces Zamir’s contention that genuinely in on the act here. While Zamir acknowledges a certain degree of ‘conflicted acculturation’ on the part of Upshaw, this is at least partially absolved by the fact he has acquired through his training an ‘ease and familiarity with photographic conventions.’99 Upshaw, in other words, may be coerced to wear a costume, but the manner in which he does it speaks to his edification versus his degeneration in the pose of a Native person. By this point in the history of assimilationist policy within the United States, Upshaw’s identity would have been forcibly decoupled from his Crow heritage. His ‘aberrant’ name was one imposed upon him by the boarding school system of transforming its students so that there could finally be no reconciliation of a before to an after of their persons. The anglicised name attaches to his contrived visage to come across as the genuine article of proof of the efficacy of the system. Through entrance into it he already at one remove from anything like his father’s classificatory relevance to the American state.100 This does

32  Daguerreotypes, the Vanishing Native American, the Invention not diminish the fact that Upshaw will remain accounted for by his tribal affiliation, nor that his value remains as an object through which White audience could appreciate what could still be figured as ‘Indian.’ Rather, it suggests that Upshaw remains an object amongst objects. Similarly, the Native artefacts Curtis appropriated for himself will be used for portraits of other tribesmen that are not Crow, implicating them for what they really were, dumb props that are thrown onto the body of the sitter, who themselves act as ‘anybodies’ for that matter – to flatter by association. Therefore, Upshaw, like White Man Runs Him, is treated as a performance vehicle, versus a conduit for anything approaching self-expression. Upshaw is literally there as a stand in for his father, and for a generation that has since passed on. In this, he is quite literally portraying the artefact of his father’s dead body. This approximation of an inanimacy necessarily makes of him a kin to man, a ‘manikin’ poised to display itself as something of notable ethnographic interest; a before and after of a past dominant culture that has now fallen.101 As Mike Gidley observes, ‘there is in all this a profound Eurocentrism.’102 As Curtis said upon the founding of a commercial venture directly related to this one called ‘The Modern Historic Records Association,’ the ‘Native American offers the best opportunity to study living man primitive man as a living human document of supreme importance. ‘His life history in its evolution of thousands of years is a unique story of beginnings early stages and developments in language, customs, manners and institutions…It cannot be deferred if it is to be done at all. For this work there is no tomorrow.’103 The record of Indian life was presented as though it were a natural phenomenon on the order of geology, as opposed to a representational contrivance devised for the viewing pleasure of its elite, amateur scientific audiences. Although figures like White Man Runs Him and Upshaw are ‘obviously contemporary with their observers,’ they ‘were somehow regarded as ancient forms’ of humankind, as examples of what Stone Age Europeans were like.’104 In the minds of those holding this attitude, it was precise as such representations that Indians had their ‘fullest meaning, and, possibly, being.’105 This fits perfectly with Curtis placing Upshaw in front of his camera as part and particle this ancestor-descendant model of understanding on what basis either man could be considered human with regards to an underlining standard of Whiteness. Unfortunately, Zamir’s reading continues with this line of pseudo-evolutionary thought in the way that he attempts to distinguish White Man Runs Him and by way of estimating the authenticity of the racialised appearance of one specimen over the other. This failure of the promise of assimilation and assumption of the powers attendant to White privilege would eventually end up costing Upshaw his life. He died in a jail cell in Billings, Montana October 22, 1909, after being ‘badly beaten for talking back to some white men in town and left bleeding in a jail cell overnight. His body was found the next morning in the bottom of the jail cell, covered in blood, and most accounts simply state that he bled to death in his cell. He was 38 years old.’106 What makes his story perhaps even more tragic is that it came a mere month after ‘Upshaw’s White House visit, which according to a story that appeared in the Washington Post, March 26, 1909, lent him the aura of the exotic as “a full-blooded Crow Indian”’ (Figure 1.3).107 In late February 1909, Curtis and Upshaw were invited to the White House. This was the last month of Theodor Roosevelt’s presidency. Roosevelt intended to leave the White House and go straight to Africa to embark on a year-long safari hunt and had invited Curtis there for the express purpose of having him photograph the affair.108 He had no interest in Upshaw being there to argue the case against the further demise and disenfranchisement of the remaining American Crow population now living on reservations; rather his purpose in being was a mere publicity opportunity for the President.

Daguerreotypes, the Vanishing Native American, the Invention 33

Figure 1.3 Portrait (Front) of Alexander Upshaw, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution NAA INV 06572700; OPPS NEG 03399 A.

This reality in no way diminished Roosevelt’s direct investment in the work Curtis and Upshaw had undertaken. Indeed, in many ways, this meeting took place at the vanguard of a multimedia project that would conclude formally some 20 years onwards from this formal meeting point. Indeed, had Roosevelt had his request honoured it is unlikely that

34  Daguerreotypes, the Vanishing Native American, the Invention the 20-volume set comprising text, photographs and Edison wax cylinder sound recordings would have ever been able to effectively ‘illustrate’ the passing of the North American Native population from the landscape. Each volume contained a large-scale portfolio of sepia-toned photogravures that have gone to be ‘widely collected and reproduced as icons of Native American culture,’ achieving their afterlife in most instances wholly separated from the Curtis’ text for these volumes. This was of little matter, because Curtis had, in fact, crafted an entire visual language through which White audiences could interpret the significance of the Native American bodies he created through large-scale works that turns the West’s now privatised and industrialised lands back ‘into a lush Eden, enjoyed by non-materialistic people who bathed themselves in the cool desert springs, build their houses from the earth and trees, and picked their nourishment from the bounty of the desert.’109 This iconography from its inception played to a rarefied New York audience who were already familiar with the Indian body as a spectacular format in its own right that at the dawn of the twentieth century, that took on added currency by virtue of the fact that by 1905 the frontier of the Western United States, had already vanished. This was evidenced by the commercial nature of the fortunes of the social luminaires assembled to purchase Curtis’ wares in the form of motion pictures, Edison cylinder recordings, stereoptican views, photographs and engravings of Southwestern Indian that convinced them that the ‘Vanishing American’ was an item worth having. No one assembled would have been particularly concerned about ‘pre-contact’ as the genuine article of Curtis’ tender, but rather how it could be made marvellous when brought into romantic relief in a way that reinforced a fantasy of Indian life as a pre-historical, pre-technical formation that simply could not survive the transition to modernity that the likes of New York tycoons and financiers forced into being through sheer dint of character and daring. The end of traditional Native life, in America, essentially marked the beginning of theirs. As the now pre-eminent life form in this territory, the likes of Jay Gould, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Pierport Morgan, E.H. Harriman, and James J. Hill had come to own the late nineteenth century through Indian ‘clearance’ to make way for the railroads. A potent combination of capitalism and politics afforded the means of hastening their extinction and enforcing civilisation upon them through the concentration of their remnant species into camps. This had been clear policy ‘to use the western railroad system as a means to confront the Indian nations and “clean out Indians as we encounter them.”’110 This audience, more than most, would have been familiar with that fact, and as such, what it was that they were buying were essentially trophy items, that far from as Goetzmann argues were simply premised on ‘replacing the threatening image of American Indians with a pacific one,’ but rather more significantly implied their dominance and ownership over these challengers as naturally weaker opponents.111 The plan from the offing was to sell his North American Indian project to ‘just twentyfive percent of New York’s famous 400’ and for the initial outlay to be covered by the mighty ‘James Pierpont Morgan.’112 Curtis included himself in those expenses, to the tune of asking for him for ‘$15,000 per year for five years’ in order ‘to produce 100 sets of the book and price them at $5,000.’113 Morgan wanted a monopoly on this material and thus ‘agreed to give $75,000 to Curtis in exchange for 25 sets of the North American Indian, as well as three hundred large photographic prints and 200 small photographic prints. In addition, he persuaded Curtis to make his profit on volume rather than margin by lowering the price to $3,000 per set. Thus, for his commitment to purchase 25 sets of the book at $3,000 each, Morgan got an additional 500 of Curtis’ fine photographic

Daguerreotypes, the Vanishing Native American, the Invention 35 prints so admired by the financier’s daughter-in-law.’114 It was Morgan, not Curtis, who also gained social currency from this deal, convincing the American public that has was not a chief patron of American Indian culture. Curtis was left with the task as it were of bringing the lambs to slaughter, in the sense that he had to convince the Native American elite to participate in this somewhat farcical charade of Native American life. ‘Among the famous Native Americans whom he persuaded to pose for him were Princess Angeline, whose father was the Squamish chief for whom Seattle is named, Nez Percé Chief Joseph and the Apache chief, Geronimo.’115 These people were not simply duped into participating, rather it was more likely to case that in recreating tableaux from their vanished past, the individuals and groups believed that they were ensuring their precarious rights to exist in the present as an aristocracy in their own right, albeit one that was now debilitated beyond all former recognition. These instances of collaboration stretched the definition of consent to the degree that even for individuals from elite indigenous backgrounds, there were few opportunities open to them within the new industries emerging within Anglo-European culture, including within theatre, film and photography other than to play themselves in every conceivable way. Curtis eliminated modern details from these productions, because there was no way to admit the modernity of the Native American condition such as it was on reservations and still satisfy those he took care to cultivate as his audience. Curtis was aware that Indian life was not ‘nearer to Nature’ than White life, but rather than its historical fate had, in fact, overlapped murderously with commercial conquest in recent decades. What was phenomenal was just how quickly a race could be documented to ‘vanish’ through the sheer onslaught of coordinated imperial violence. Hence, the story of this project, rather than being replete with the statistics of Native life, came instead to stand as a record of the Indian’s relationship with his new dependency on the White world to exist within the greater universe of things controlled by as animate objects as surely as any other of the Earth’s natural resources now made open to his contemplation, exploration, and exploitation. As Mathilde Arrivé notes, ‘Curtis created his enormous pictorialist saga in the context of the federal government’s assimilationist policies.’116 Accordingly, Curtis’s use of ‘near-theatrical devices’ to obtain an authentic look for his imagery, at the time of their making, ‘were seen as acts of cultural “purification” and justified by a moral discourse of preservation.’117 While ‘he strove to conceal all signs of deculturation’ from his photographs, they nonetheless persisted as the rationale behind his entire project of documenting a cultural in the process of disappearing from the ethnographic record.118 To this same end of ideological preservation, ‘in the early twentieth century reconstruction and scenographic manipulation in the photographic field were still often considered valid ethnographic strategies by museums and the Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE).’119 Curtis was very much a product of its approach to portraiture as one amongst a number of scientific instruments open to the ethnographer. In the case of Curtis, it was one ‘that relied on a face/profile arrangement inspired by anthropometrics.’120 In terms of generating a context for his portraits of Native Americans, Arrivé observes for Curtis and his team, ‘this involved applying the rhetorical codes of genericity—frontal view, rigid pose, centripetal organization, static framing, and decontextualization—demanded by a quest for physical invariance and epistemic stability. Such photographic signposting was sometimes backed up textually: in the tradition of natural history typology, the captions provided the subject’s name, sex, and tribal affiliation in a taxonomic strategy evocative of the imposing architecture of the encyclopedia itself.’121 This painstaking work was not

36  Daguerreotypes, the Vanishing Native American, the Invention there to buck the system, but rather to garner intellectual recognition from it on explicit terms. Curtis had the scientific backing of the Smithsonian Institution’s Frederick Webb Hodge, a member of the BAE to produce his work, as well as the political backing of President Theodor Roosevelt to pursue his work.122 As times change and economic fortunes dwindle in the United States culminating in the Great Depression, so too did the appeal of Curtis’ project in the mainstream of the arts and culture. He, like them, would fall into obscurity in the 1930s. Indeed, after 1928, no significant work was produced until his death in 1952. In 1971, his work resurfaced through the mounting of his work at two major retrospectives: the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York and the Museum of Art in Philadelphia. Not coincidentally these two cities, via their philanthropic bases, had been crucial to Curtis’ initial success. The great irony of their revival into mainstream acclaim was that this coincided with a fundamental misapprehension of them as ‘the last direct testimony to Indigenous People of the Americas,’ despite the fact that the case that Curtis was mounting could not have been further from displaying the truth of their situation at the start of the century.123 Arrivé describes the ‘long series of further exhibitions, numerous publications, and glossy monographs’ as well as the popular use of ‘Curtis’ photographs […] as primary sources for magazine articles and television documentaries’ as a practice that ‘accepts too readily the content of his pictures, confusing image with referent.’124 The referent in this case is the Native American body itself as an enduring popular media object, that functioned as little more than a superficial artefact, once again of America’s past versus its future. The fact is that it is Curtis and not any specific posthumous Native figure featured in his volumes, that is propelled to fame by the renewed interest in Curtis’ collection, speaks to the fact that the revival of interest in Native culture in the 1970s, was a popular infatuation with the role Whites had played in West. Their preoccupation with the life story of figures like Curtis suggests that the subject of their romantic projects was someone who was there to ‘witness’ history and who was a friend to the Indian to the degree that he devoted his life to ‘capturing’ and ‘documenting’ their demise at whatever personal cost to himself. By being there, he was presented as somehow ‘defending’ the interests of Native Americans, who could assumedly not defend themselves and in this, he becomes quite naturally a heroic figure within the story of resistance to things like mass industrialisation and urbanisation. Given the background and ideology behind his financial resources, this could not be further from the truth. His staging of the Native American as an American icon gave rights only to himself as a figure of cultural importance. What gets lost in all of this is the intention of Curtis’ project beyond the interpretation of it as a generous offering to a people, rather than as something that was both ideologically and financially resourced by those who quite literally was responsible for the ‘clearing’ of these indigenous peoples. Far from being a countercultural hero, in many respects, Curtis’ work was about posing Whiteness as the dominant form of nativity that would take over from where history left off in telling the continuing story of this land. Heritage itself was to become the property of Whiteness, as Americans to this day give over their wistful adulation to America’s Cowboys rather than its Indians—as does the Atlantic world with every child intuitively knowing which is the losing side. The value of this understanding remains priceless to the American enterprise and its consolidation of Whiteness as the prestige category that continues to illuminate our appreciation of all others. The infatuation with Curtis’ work from the 1970s onwards speaks to a world in which the image itself is expressed as a ‘cheap good’ in the sense of what Jason W. Moore refers to ‘as labor, food, energy and

Daguerreotypes, the Vanishing Native American, the Invention 37 raw materials are made cheap—through the appropriation of the unpaid work’ of women, animals, and colonised peoples.125 The mass-production coupled on the spectrum with the value of poor quality reproduction to the sought after original print as a means of stripping of its original context and putting its place a reverence for Curtis as sort of keeper of a fidelity to nativism that reverses the proposition of preservation into one of reservation and is so doing establishes a policy towards life, in general, that refers to a set of belief that favours the interest of immigrants over the native population of a country to the degree that is possible to associate their extinction with a category of prestige within the popular imagination, Curtis’ photographs do so in terms of value rather than meaning. Their symbolic culture value speaks to a greater ethos of acquisition that favoured the initiative Westward as the occupation of the collector. Through a series of movements and expositions, the White settler is not only able to title himself, transferring sacred rights to the land onto himself, but equally about to draw power from the legacy of White supremacy that was previously organised abroad. Whereas the image of the Native American was put forward as both an artwork and artefact within a greater congregation of how the West might configure its understanding of the progress towards civilisation, initially in Europe, these images were confused with and presented alongside other types of extractable resource associated with the natural terrain. The consequence of this is evident in the form of homage paid to the ‘American Indian’ later on by figures like Curtis who preface their catalogue of these beings as examples of rare specimens of a uniquely American type of ‘treasure.’ The requirement for there to be ethnographic validations associated with the ‘authenticity’ of their presentation speaks to an important and unique moment in the evolution of an American identity that builds its reputation from the classification of those made ancillary to it. The present and future moment clearly belongs to Curtis, whereas his Native American counterpart must be content with appreciating himself simply as what remains of past credit. By 1900, it is the White man who has achieved mythic status on the imperial stage; it is he who would go on to determine the elevation of others through the pretence of his likeness. In this case, equivalency gives meaning to the rhetoric used by Curtis himself, not of a vanishing race, but rather the vanishing of a race through something akin to the profound neutralisation of their activity, by positioning his photographic work to only reflect back on cultural coordinates that have consequently expired. Notes 1 Michael G. Moran, Inventing Virginia: Sir Walter Raleigh and the Rhetoric of Colonization, 1584–1590 (Vienna: Peter Lang, 2007), 140. 2 Moran, Inventing Virginia, 140. 3 Ibid., 141. 4 Monica Rico, Nature’s Noblemen: Transatlantic Masculinities and the Nineteenth-Century American West (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 4. 5 Rico, Nature’s Noblemen, 4. 6 Ibid., 6. 7 Brian Roberts, American Alchemy: The California Gold Rush and Middle-Class Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 20. 8 Roberts, American Alchemy, 20. 9 Rico, Nature’s Noblemen, 6. 10 Ibid., 4. 11 Ibid., 6–7. 12 Ibid., 10.

38  Daguerreotypes, the Vanishing Native American, the Invention 3 Ibid., 4. 1 14 Ibid., 179. 15 Ibid., 163. 16 Ibid., 163. 17 Ibid., 163. 18 Steven Conn, History’s Shadow: Native Americans and Historical Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 73. 19 Edward S. Curtis, The North American Indian (Koln: Taschen, 2005), quoted in Curtis, History’s Shadow, 74. 20 Ibid., 74. 21 Ibid., 74. 22 Ibid., 74. 23 Ibid., 76. 24 Ibid., 76. 25 Ibid., 76. 26 Deborah Poole, “An Excess of Description: Ethnography, Race, and Visual Technologies.” The Annual Review Anthropology 34 (2005): 165.159–179 at 165, https://doi.org/10.1146/ annurev.anthro.33.070203.144034. 27 Poole, “An Excess of Description”, 165. 28 Ibid., 165. 29 Ibid., 172. 30 Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 14. 31 Conn, History’s Shadow, 74. 32 Curtis Marez, “Looking Beyond Property: Native Americans and Photography.” Rikkyo American Studies 29 (2007): 9–28, at 12. 33 Marez, “Looking Beyond Property,” 12. 34 Ibid., 12. 35 Ibid., 12. 36 Ellie Gascoigne, “Edward Curtis and ‘The North American Indian’: An Exploration of Truth and Objectivity.” Photo Ethics Center, https://www.photoethics.org/content/2021/2/24/ edward-curtis-and-the-north-american-indian-an-exploration-of-truth-and-objectivity. 37 Hayes Peter Mauro, ““The Art of Americanization at the Carlisle Indian School” (University of New Mexico Press, 2011).” Podcast by New Books in Native American Studies, December, 22, 2011, https://archive.org/details/1oad2ql6gjrwljslsafhfgm8vssxw4dzmmvztqzb. 38 Gascoigne, “Edward Curtis.” 39 Timothy Egan, Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2012), 149. 40 Jacqueline Fear-Segal and Susan D. Rose, “Introduction.” Carlisle Indian Industrial School: Indigenous Histories, Memories, and Reclamations (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016), 1–32, at 9. 41 Gascoigne, “Edward Curtis.” 42 Lonna M. Malmsheimer, “‘Imitation White Man’: Images of Transformation at the Carlisle Indian School.” Studies in Visual Communication 11, no. 4 (1985): 54–75, at 55. 43 Malmsheimer, “Imitation White Man,” 59. 44 Ibid., 59. 45 Ibid., 59. 46 Ibid., 63. 47 Ibid., 63. 48 Ibid., 67. 49 Ibid., 73. 50 Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie, The Oxford Companion to the Photograph. Edited by Robin Lenman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 437. 51 Linda Witmer, The Indian Industrial School, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, 1879–1918 (Carlisle: Cumberland County Historical Society, 2000), 116. 52 Witmer, The Indian Industrial School, 118. 53 Fear-Segal and Rose, “Introduction,” 9.

Daguerreotypes, the Vanishing Native American, the Invention 39 54 Robert Warrior, “Lone Wolf and Du Bois for a New Century: Intersections of Native America and African American Literatures.” In Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora in Indian Country (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 191. 55 Warrior, “Lone Wolf and Du Bois for a New Century,” 191. 56 Roger L. DiSilvestro, The Shadow of Wounded Knee: The Untold Final Story of the Indian Wars (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2009), footnote 17, 234. 57 Warrior, “Lone Wolf and Du Bois for a New Century,” 191. 58 Ibid., 191. 59 John Koster, “Luther Standing Bear Went From Pine Ridge to Carlisle to Hollywood.” Historynet, n.d. https://www.historynet.com/luther-standing-bear-went-pine-ridge-carlisle-hollywood.htm. 60 John Koster, “Luther Standing Bear.” 61 Ibid. 62 Fear-Segal and Rose, “Introduction,” 2. 63 Ibid., 2. 64 “Alexander Upshaw Student File.” Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center, https:// carlisleindian.dickinson.edu/student_files/alexander-upshaw-student-file. 65 Wendy Red Star, Shannon Vittoria “Apsáalooke Bacheeítuuk in Washington, DC: A Case Study in Re-Reading Nineteenth-Century Delegation Photography.” Panorama the Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art (Fall 2020) (6.2), https://editions.lib.umn.edu/ panorama/article/re-reading-american-photographs/apsaalooke-bacheeituuk-in-dc/. 66 John Langellier, “Red, White, and Black: The US Army in the West 1866–1891.” True West Magazine, January 2021, https://truewestmagazine.com/article/red-white-and-black-the-us-armyin-the-west-1866-1891/. 67 Egan, Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher, 149. 68 Ken Gonzales-Day, “Visualizing the ‘Vanishing Race’: The Photogravures of Edward S. Curtis (6/13), Upshaw – Apsaroke.” https://scalar.usc.edu/works/performingarchive/visualizing-thevanishing-race-7. 69 Shamoon Zamir, “Native Agency and the Making of The North American Indian: Alexander B. Upshaw and Edward S. Curtis.” American Indian Quarterly 31, no. 4 (2007): 613-653, at 631. 70 Zamir, “Native Agency and the Making of The North American Indian,” 637. 71 Ibid., 641. 72 Ibid., 640. 73 Ibid., 641. 74 Ibid., 641. 75 Ibid., 641. 76 Zamir, “Native Agency and the Making of the North American Indian,” 643. 77 Ibid., 644. 78 Ibid., 644. 79 Ibid., 644. 80 Ibid., 644. 81 Ibid., 644. 82 Ibid., 644–645. 83 Ibid., 647. 84 Ibid., 647. 85 Ibid., 647. 86 Ibid., 647. 87 Ibid., 647. 88 Ibid., 647. 89 Ibid., 647. 90 Ibid., 647. 91 Ibid., 647. 92 Gidley, Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indian, Incorporated, 96. 93 Ibid., 641. 94 Gidley, Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indian, Incorporated, 102. 95 Jacqueline Fear-Segal and Susan D. Rose, “Introduction.” In Carlisle Indian Industrial School: Indigenous Histories, Memories, and Reclamations (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016), 1–32, at 9.

40  Daguerreotypes, the Vanishing Native American, the Invention 96 97 98 99 100 101 102

Fear-Segal and Rose, “Introduction,” 9. Zamir, “Native Agency and the Making of the North American Indian,” 645. Ibid., 645. Zamir, “Native Agency and the Making of the North American Indian,” 647. Ibid., 647. Ibid., 647. Mick Gidley, Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indian, Incorporated (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press 1998), 103. 103 Gidley, Edward S. Curtis, 103. 104 Ibid., 103. 105 Ibid., 103. 106 Gonzales-Day, “Visualizing the ‘Vanishing Race.’” 107 Gidley, Edward S. Curtis, 300 Footnote 24. 108 Egan, Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher, 187. 109 William N. Goetzmann, “The Arcadian Landscapes of Edward Curtis.” Yale School of Management, Yale University, https://viking.som.yale.edu/the-arcadian-landscapes-of-edward-curtis/. 110 Ibid. 111 Ibid. 112 Ibid. 113 Ibid. 114 Ibid. 115 Ibid. 116 Mathilde Arrivé, “Beyond True and False? The Artificial Authenticities of Edward S. Curtis: Responses and Reactions.” Études photographiques 29 (2012): 1–12, at 3. http://journals. openedition.org/etudesphotographiques/3474. 117 Arrivé, “Beyond True and False?,” 3. 118 Ibid., 3. 119 Ibid., 3. 120 Ibid., 3. 121 Ibid., 3. 122 Ibid., 4. 123 Ibid., 4. 124 Ibid., 4. 125 Jason W. Moore, “The End of Cheap Nature, or, How I learned to Stop Worrying about ‘the’ Environment and Love the Crisis of Capitalism.” In Structures of the World Political Economy and the Future of Global Conflict and Cooperation, 285–314, edited by Christian Suter and Christopher Chase-Dunn (Berlin: LIT 2014), 288.

Bibliography “Alexander Upshaw Student File.” Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center, December 16, 1888, https://carlisleindian.dickinson.edu/student_files/alexander-upshaw-student-file. Arrivé, Mathilde. “Beyond True and False? The Artificial Authenticities of Edward S. Curtis: Responses and Reactions.” Études photographiques 29 (2012): 1–12, http://journals.openedition. org/etudesphotographiques/3474 Conn, Steven. History’s Shadow: Native Americans and Historical Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Curtis, Edward S. The North American Indian. Koln: Taschen, 2005. DiSilvestro, Roger L. In The Shadow of Wounded Knee: The Untold Final Story of the Indian Wars. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2009. Egan, Timothy. Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012. Fear-Segal, Jacqueline and Susan D. Rose, “Introduction.” In Carlisle Indian Industrial School: Indigenous Histories, Memories, and Reclamations, 1–32. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016.

Daguerreotypes, the Vanishing Native American, the Invention 41 Gascoigne, Ellie. “Edward Curtis and ‘The North American Indian’: An Exploration of Truth and Objectivity.” Photo Ethics Center, February 24, 2021 https://www.photoethics.org/content/2021/ 2/24/edward-curtis-and-the-north-american-indian-an-exploration-of-truth-and-objectivity. Gidley, Mick. Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indian, Incorporated. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Goetzmann, William N. “The Arcadian Landscapes of Edward Curtis.” Yale School of Management, Yale University, n.d. https://viking.som.yale.edu/the-arcadian-landscapes-of-edward-curtis/ Gonzales-Day, Ken. “Visualizing the ‘Vanishing Race’: The Photogravures of Edward S. Curtis (6/13), Upshaw – Apsaroke,” n.d. https://scalar.usc.edu/works/performingarchive/visualizing-thevanishing-race-7. Koster, John. “Luther Standing Bear Went From Pine Ridge to Carlisle to Hollywood.” Historynet, n.d. https://www.historynet.com/luther-standing-bear-went-pine-ridge-carlisle-hollywood.htm. Langellier, John. “Red, White, and Black: The US Army in the West 1866–1891.” True West Magazine, January 2021, https://truewestmagazine.com/article/red-white-and-black-the-us-army-inthe-west-1866-1891/. Malmsheimer, Lonna M. “‘Imitation White Man’: Images of Transformation at the Carlisle Indian School.” Studies in Visual Communication 11, no. 4 (1985): 54–75. Marez, Curtis. “Looking Beyond Property: Native Americans and Photography.” Rikkyo American Studies 29 (2007): 9–28. Mauro, Hayes Peter. “The Art of Americanization at the Carlisle Indian School” (University of New Mexico Press, 2011).” Podcast by New Books in Native American Studies, December, 22, 2011, https://newbooksnetwork.com/hayes-peter-mauro-the-art-of-americanization-at-thecarlisle-indian-school-university-of-new-mexico-press-2011/ Moore, Jason W. “The End of Cheap Nature, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying About ‘the’ Environment and Love the Crisis of Capitalism.” In Structures of the World Political Economy and the Future of Global Conflict and Cooperation, 285–314. Edited by Christian Suter and Christopher Chase-Dunn, Berlin: LIT, 2014. Moran, Michael G. Inventing Virginia: Sir Walter Raleigh and the Rhetoric of Colonization, 1584– 1590. Vienna: Peter Lang, 2007. Poole, Deborah. “An Excess of Description: Ethnography, Race, and Visual Technologies.” The Annual Review Anthropology 34 (2005): 159–179. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev. anthro.33.070203.144034. Red Star, Wendy and Shannon Vittoria. “Apsáalooke Bacheeítuuk in Washington, DC: A Case Study in Re-Reading Nineteenth-Century Delegation Photography.” Panorama the Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art (Fall 2020) (6.2). https://editions.lib.umn.edu/ panorama/article/re-reading-american-photographs/apsaalooke-bacheeituuk-in-dc/. Rico, Monica. Nature’s Noblemen: Transatlantic Masculinities and the Nineteenth-Century American West. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. Roberts, Brian. American Alchemy: the California Gold Rush and Middle-Class Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Tsinhnahjinnie, Hulleah. The Oxford Companion to the Photograph. Edited by Robin Lenman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Warrior, Robert “Lone Wolf and Du Bois for a New Century: Intersections of Native America and African American Literatures.” In Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora in Indian Country, 181–195. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. Witmer, Linda. The Indian Industrial School, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, 1879–1918. Carlisle: Cumberland County Historical Society, 2000. Yusoff, Kathryn. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018. Zamir, Shamoon. “Native Agency and the Making of the North American Indian: Alexander B. Upshaw and Edward S. Curtis.” American Indian Quarterly 31, no. 4 (2007): 613–653. http:// www.jstor.org/stable/30113979.

2

Mathew Brady’s Civil War, Daguerreotypes, and the Technological Redefinition of White Nationalism

When Mathew Brady rose to fame as America’s premiere daguerreotypist, photography was being introduced to the public as very much a conservative medium. As Allan Sekula argues, what it preserves becomes operational at two levels: portraiture as a means of making visible the ‘bodies of heroes, leaders, moral exemplars, celebrities’ and making invisible ‘those of the poor, the diseased, the insane, the criminal, the non-White, the female, and all other embodiments of the unworthy,’ and in his words, ‘the general all-inclusive archive necessarily contains’ traces of both.1 The photograph in many respects lends itself to the archive, because of its exceptional ability to apparently freeze time. This was not a neutral characteristic, but rather one installed within it, as Rachel Hall writes as means of assuring ‘white viewers that, despite the revolutionary changes taking place in the United States, the nation would remain White. Like a photograph soaked in the proper chemical solution, the nation’s composition was fixed.’2 The photographic subject that could claim self-possession was equally able to lay claim to a right of self-government, self-directing freedom, and especially moral independence in their relationship to the social, political, legal, and material frameworks of the nation. The Black body remained a mercantile object fundamentally incapable of appearing as anything more. In documenting it photographically, it remained in its rendering a commodity for mass consumption. As a photographic presence, therefore, the image of the Black body was a provocative reminder of the historical connections between the obscured reproductive practices involved in perpetuating domestic slavery in the United States at mid-century and the prominent display of White bourgeois domestic practices involved in staging the daguerreotype. All of these were part of what Simon Strick refers to as America’s ‘racial logics’ that ‘constructed white and black racial reproduction’ in the antebellum era based on a ‘rigid paradigm of “breeding” and/or “sexual exploitation”’ and continued to do so on ‘biopolitical terms’ when it came to managing the purity of racial populations’ in the 1860s as the tortured discourse of ‘miscegenation’ rose to prominence in its place.3 Both of these models of understanding relied upon photography’s stillness, as a means of signifying opposition to a multiracial democracy. The Civil War was not fought for the transformation of its citizenry, but rather the safekeeping of the Union as a singular domain of Whiteness. In the case ‘in which a particular black person appears in white imagery or is interpolated into white discourse,’ its purpose therefore is ‘to serve the communicative and representational needs of diverse white cultures.’4 Where the Black body is allowed to appear in photography it does so in ways that depict the limits of its ability to determine its own fate and make decisions about its own course of activity, its body is of service to a White other performing functions that could only be committed by persons with the status of property. As such the way to understand the ethnographic capture of DOI: 10.4324/9781003274797-3

Mathew Brady’s Civil War, Daguerreotypes 43 Black bodies is to consider foremost their photograph treatment as akin to the handling of property. The apparently liveliness of that property, moreover, in no way detracts from their composition but instead enhances the value of their capture. This was so because as Rachel Hall observes the enslaved person ‘possessed the uncanny power to steal him- or herself and thereby posed a unique threat to the slave owner and to the entire plantation economy.’5 The intimate relationship between the plantation of the American South and the financial and industrial economies of the American North meant that both required the availability of the Black body in order to continue to profit from it. The manufacture of a visual record of Blackness heighted the value of the Black body so that was able to take on additional labour in White households as a further representation of White command over the greater whole of society. Their ability to demand performance from these bodies and to position them as objects of servitude before the camera meant that they were able to further that understanding of a racial hierarchy into the newer realms of representation emerging at this time in history. Rebecca Solnit describes photography as part of a trifecta of technology, alongside the telegraph and the railroad that would ‘transform time.’6 She describes the photograph as Europe’s most ‘paradoxical invention’ insofar as it was ‘a technological breakthrough for holding onto the past, a technology always rushing forward, always looking backwards.’7 Photography, telegraphy, Darwin’s theory of evolution, and the railroad would converge at virtually the same time in the 1840s. All in their way were technologies bent on freezing time and passing it off to consumers as a saleable object. Solnit notes that ‘geology was the key science of the Victorian era, as physics was the modern era and perhaps genetics is today and in that era geology texts sometimes outsold novels.’8 A popular mania for geology came from ‘the rich resource of the railway cuttings that laid bare Britain’s rocks and fossils.’9 If ‘the railroad shrank time by the speed of its motion,’ ‘[…] geology expanded time through the slowness of its processes and the profundity of its changes.’10 The tension between compression and expansion would become the motif of the century itself. If ‘the Industrial Revolution is most often represented by the bleak textile mills of the British Midlands,’ its shadow is most often represented by the wretched cotton fields of the American South. The same steam engines that drove the factories, drove the railroads, drove the cotton gins, each requiring that ‘they themselves produced exhilarating effects.’11 Here I part ways with Solnit in her assertion that photography generated few […] impositions on the landscape or on workers’ as compared with these other technologies; rather I would argue that it carried within it from its conception a toxicity on par with other types of manufacture common to the era.12 Far from being simply an artisan technology, photography borrows its logics from extraction in a way not dissimilar from the railroad in its dependency on matter to power itself into being. In the case of photography, mercury and cyanide are required for it to be transmuted back into the Earth’s record of time. What we have come to appreciate as ‘communication’ what came to us by way of the photograph, the telegraph, and the railroad coming together as culturally imbued forms at a very particular time in history where a racialised understanding of civilisation was hardening as a scientific, as well as, popular discourse. An understanding of what was broadly meant by civilisation would be predicated on this linear order that at particular junctures intersected with the British North, the American South, and the American West at mid-century that would seek to separate out the labour of White mind from that of the Black body through imposing racialised barriers to movement.

44  Mathew Brady’s Civil War, Daguerreotypes The association of progress with the power to destroy is writ large across the mythology of America’s right to Westward expansion as much as Europe’s right into global expansion into the Orient, Africa, and Asia. What would and could not be split apart was the global Union of White men, and therefore, another type of sacrifice would have to made of Blackness itself in order to secure the connection between America and Europe as the natural terrain of one species of human specially poised to dominate the others. For this greater Union to be upheld, the new technologies themselves would have to be cast into this same line of apprehension; as the means that would allow for the perpetuation of control of inferior races both within and outside of that territory. The telegraph, the photograph, and the railroad communicate in a universal language that compels everyone to assimilate to common understanding. In this way, racial difference becomes synonymous with the potential for technological deracination. These not only distinguishes between civilised and uncivilised races their utility came by way of being able to act as both an instrument and demonstration of the productivity of White dominance over the brutal nature of Black power, and henceforth, the divide between the two was then repositioned as the essential division of mankind. The technologies of imperialism, photography, telegraphy, and the railroad will ultimately come to act as wholesale engines of war turned against colonised peoples. Solnit’s assertion that photography acted as the exception to that destructive possibility, in terms of capacity to impose itself upon the landscape, or the workers is contradicted when we recognise how it is specifically turned onto those in the context of war. What Jenna Supp-Montgomerie refers to as ‘the implicit raciality of technology’ is everywhere in the way that made a pretence for the idea that European settlers, enslaved African slaves, slaughtered ‘Indians,’ and indentured Asians somehow occupied discreet positions from one another within the context of representing America as expansionist power in the world.13 Indeed, ‘the power of the imaginary of national unity relied upon profound national exclusions, corporeal, material, and discursive – and all were bolstered by multiple modes of violence.’14 Photography became a part of that infrastructure which maintained such practices. This was fundamentally about preserving the Union of White Christendom against the incursions of its others whose very appearance threated to distance kin from kin. The photograph during was key to erasing the bodies of both Blacks and Native Americans from the scene of America’s Civil War so that we to this day continue to imagine it as primarily as a scene of White conflict pitting brother against brother. ‘The telegraph here,’ alongside the railroad and the photograph, ‘represents a space of whiteness,’ a culture of Whiteness, one untroubled by other kinds of transatlantic passage. Michael Hatt observes that ‘the erasure of the black presence is troubling to modern viewers, not least because it signals the fact that a commitment to abolition and a belief in racial hierarchy coexisted easily in the nineteenth century.’15 During that same era, ‘a belief in liberty and self-possession for all humans was not necessarily at odds with a notion of unequal human development.’16 Such racial inequality became the signature of the technology that grow up around that conveyed an ability for Whites to pass meaning bath the forth across from Europe to America, whereas for Blacks, movement through a middle passage held between construed as be only one way, unable to reflect back upon itself the meaning of Britain’s separation from America as being one that was premised on technological precedents of the past that made that connection possible in the first place. The slave system undergirded at every point the historical advancement of Whites towards freedom and self-determination. Similarly, photograph was required to mirror that long shadow of progress and record it against the dark shadow of human

Mathew Brady’s Civil War, Daguerreotypes 45 limitation through the imposition of racial hierarchy onto the meaning of its form. Different connections persist here ‘between time and morality’ and the ‘deep racial history’ that subtended the ‘modern historical division in slavery.’17 In this, Britain ultimately would side with South in its demands for brute labour, and equally the Union its need to build itself up as an imperial power from and through the Black and White Atlantics continuing to flow into one other. To trace these route requires an understanding of what emerges from them as ‘a network of objects’ built around ‘Anglo-Saxon racial unity and Anglo-American moral division; manufacture and personhood; the demands of business and the imperatives of abolition; deep pacific history and modern Atlantic turpitude.’18 The crossing between them ‘articulates these tensions between transatlantic unity and the terrible distances of the middle passage.’19 That physical and psychic geography are apparent to onlookers at the time of the Great Exhibition of 1851. In the previous year, American government was involved in legislating a series of five bills that sought to balance the slave and free states. The most egregious of all of them was the one brokered by US senator Henry Clay known as The Fugitive Slave Act. This bill ‘allowed slaveholders to reclaim escaped slaves without legal proof of ownership. To an international audience, the bills branded the United States as a nation defined by slavery.’20 That same year Clay posed for Brady to be included in his volume The Illustrious Americans. The significance of the inclusion of Clay’s likeness in the lithographs transported to London could not have been lost on its British audience (Figure 2.1). When it came to the fate of free Black people, Clay was the instrument of their destruction. His looming presence took pride of place against the glaring absence of the appearance of his slaves, who produced corn, wheat, and rye, as well as the main cash crop hemp on his Ashland plantation in Kentucky. His wealth and status were surrogate to his illustrious appearance. His inclusion functioned as a delegate for their appearance; the United States having branded its products by association with ‘the human instruments of their production.’21 The passing of the Fugitive Slave Act prompted slaves not to escape only to the American North, but equally to seek passage to the Britain. Here they became human instruments of another sort, now bent the cause of promoting antislavery abroad. Acting in this capacity, they publicly lectured on slavery, wrote biographies detailed their former conditions, and displayed their scarred bodies, and in some instances, the instruments of torture that would have inflicted such injury upon their person—all of it catering to a White audience for whom it was crucial that they be distinguished in their interests from their American brethren.22 There was a hollowness to these protests because of the indirect revenue American slavery was bringing to these shores, alongside with the addition of the commercial talents of American fugitive bodies that Britain now culturally reaped. To this scene, entered Mathew Brady, a child of Irish émigrés, who had won fame in America as a pioneer of daguerreotypy. He opened the Daguerrean Miniature Gallery in New York in 1844 and through it invented the idea of the studio as a place in which it was possible to deliver a new kind of Whiteness born from class obscurity. He photographed Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, Zachary, Taylor Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, and Abraham Lincoln amongst other public figures, who would go on to achieve immortal political status. In their lifetimes, Brady would rebrand them as ‘national luminaries’ mirroring their larger than life quality through his signature production of large daguerreotypes made in his New York and Washington, D.C. studios. Their premises subsequently became a magnet for the great and good of American society. By ostensibly opening their doors to all comers, these studios perpetuated a mythos around American freedom of movement. In reality, only those materially affluent and culturally

46  Mathew Brady’s Civil War, Daguerreotypes

Figure 2.1  Photograph of Henry Clay in 1849, by Mathew Brady. Library of Congress.

Mathew Brady’s Civil War, Daguerreotypes 47 refined enough to pass through their doors were given free invitation to gaze upon these great White men. What was obvious to all viewers was that upward mobility remained the sole purview of those who could lay claim to American citizenry. Those denied it to whatever degree and by whatever measure should interpret such spectacle from the perspective of a known inferiority towards what they were observing, because these portraits were nothing less than exemplars of the White male American type. Those who could not afford themselves the opportunity to enter the physical space of these galleries could access this experience virtually through the purchase of a book featuring exquisite lithographs made from the Brady studio’s daguerreotypes. Published in 1850, Brady’s book was extravagantly entitled The Gallery of Illustrious Americans, Containing the Portraits and Biographical Sketches of Twenty-four of the Most Eminent Citizens of the American Republic. Through it, a greater portion of the White population could feel themselves taking part in this movement towards national ascendency and moral agency supporting the cause of White nationalism. Alan Trachtenberg maintains that the terms ‘illustrious or representative (Brady used both words) meant that each imaged face and body while distinctly itself also stood for something beyond itself, something which might endow other persons with the same traits of character and presence. It is by this supplemental signification, vague, indeterminate, but a cultural force of great power, that likenesses could be taken as a visual norm in the construction of an imaginary nation.’23 That same imaginary was to be conveyed across to Britain through Brady’s exhibit of The Gallery of Illustrious Americans at the Crystal Palace in London the following year. Prior to arriving at the Crystal Palace exhibition, Brady’s images had received a positive reception and a wide audience across America. For Lisa Volpe, while ‘each of Brady’s daguerreotypes was seen as a direct transcription of both the physiognomy and the internal character of the sitter,’ there was also a racial casting them that equated in the eyes of their viewers with ‘the moral characteristic of purity that was connoted by … white skin,’ and thus, ‘the exterior and interior qualities of Brady’s sitters were thought to exist in a reflexive relationship’ to that understanding.24 The authenticity of these images did not derive from the originality of the daguerreotypes display, for what appeared at the exhibition in fact was a printed version of The Gallery that travelled in the format of lithographs. This did not deter audiences from reading into ‘the strong chins, determined eyes, and broad brows of the men’ displayed ‘as signs of honor and patriotism’ but also markers of an authentic value assigned to Whiteness itself.25 The texts accompanying each image played an equally important role in reinforcing The Gallery of Illustrious Americans as a showcase where White audiences could imagine a fidelity between these visible portraits and the ways through which they could be imagine an invisible concept, a greater natural unity of mankind that capable of eventually transcending oceans; this at a time when America’s imperial ambition was burgeoning. Staging Ground The visual discourses of White supremacy that Brady employed extended downwards, as well as upwards, and informed how his studio would go onto define photographic conventions during the American Civil War. The agility of his mind to capitalise on the photographic enterprise resulted in the establishment of mobile darkrooms that could produce vivid battlefield imagery. Those images, in turn, could be quickly distributed in and amongst the homes of the American public. These images served simultaneously as instruments of spectacle and objects of moral education. Brady and his team were

48  Mathew Brady’s Civil War, Daguerreotypes able to produce thousands of images of war scenes, as well as, portraits of generals and politicians on both sides of the conflict. Brady expressed no outward loyalty to either side, because his political ambitions resided elsewhere. His objective was to make the daguerreotype itself an invaluable political instrument during these years; one that in Black and White could preserve the existing measure of both humanity and the natural order. To that end, the millions of enslaved African Americans that fled towards Union Army lines featured only parenthetically in Brady’s Civil War images. When they did so, they were portrayed as remaining in the condition in which they were originally subsumed into service for the Union; as ‘contraband’. The African Americans who escaped from Southern plantations to cross over into Union lines were ultimately rounded up into contraband camps with poor sanitation where up to 25% would die of infectious diseases. Those who survived were put to work fulfilling the capacities they had done as slaves. While they were no longer technically enslaved, there wages often were paid to them in the form of room, board, and clothing, which meant effectively there was little distinction within the conditions of their everyday lives from what they had previously been. At the same time, White northern entrepreneurs were solicited by the Union government to manage the Southern plantations that the army had seized as property during the early part of war. These White entrepreneurs and the Union government continued to profit jointly from their agricultural yields through the space of the war. The slaves who dwelt there originally continued their work producing cotton, sugar, and other lucrative cash crops, for their trouble they were paid a nominal wage. This situation presaged what was to come for African Americans should the Union triumph; that they would continue to toil under substandard conditions applied to basic existence within the nation. Within that framework of apprehension, Brady’s wartime imagery intimates that the Black body is there merely to act as labour and servant to a divided cause that in the end would add up to a national priority of perpetuating White political and economic franchise. The Racialisation of the Battle Line In 1862, Brady’s exhibit The Dead of Antietam showed the public the first ever photographs of a battlefield before the dead had been removed. Antietam was the first battle ever to be documented photographically. The resulting images allowed the public to see the devastation of war for the first time. Mathew Brady’s exhibit in New York, called The Dead of Antietam, attracted hundreds of patrons and their enthusiasm for seeing such works created a whole new industry of selling battlefield photographs. In these photographs, the faces of the dead men are blurred, but what remains evident is that these are White men. The public had access to the images through an exhibit in Brady’s studio and illustrated newspapers like Harper’s Weekly and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. What is omitted from these portraits of war are evidence of their disfigurement or decomposition, rather despite casualties mounting into the hundreds. By contrast, Brady’s White audiences were positioned only to observe those corpses in relatively perfect condition (Figure 2.2). Mangled limbs and other missing parts were left out of the frame. The gory horrors of war and its aftermath would be carried instead by the African American contrabands tasked with collecting bones of soldiers killed in the battle. As had been the case with portraiture before it the photographs made of the Civil War has to make their business from providing not reality to the consumer but as embellished version that would provide assurances that the existing social order would be maintained. War, for all its horrors, became a type of pass time for those not involved in direct combat.

Mathew Brady’s Civil War, Daguerreotypes 49

Figure 2.2 Antietam, Maryland. Bodies of dead, Louisiana Regiment. United States, Sept.1862 by Alexander Gardner for the Brady Studio, Library of Congress.

Kristilyn Baldwin observes that it was common for both Northerners and Southerners alike ‘to collect images of their favorite generals, much like modern baseball cards.’26 This practice democratised another one; the collecting of photographs of family members serving on both side of the conflict. Dressed in their full regalia these fresh recruits posted cheap ‘carte-de-visite’ photographs back home before embarking on the battlefield. ‘They were easily and cheaply reproduced, making the both practical and affordable souvenirs for anyone.’27 Photography became associated in the American imagination for the first time with real-time events, both not only in the case of wartime photojournalism, but also in these mementoes which allowed spectators to embed themselves in the action through these photographic proxies of familiar, or known entities viscerally taking part in events. Baldwin observes that, ‘after Antietam, the public expected war images, which created a demand for additional photographers.’28 Hence, photographers became a critical component of personnel on the battlefield, whereas they had been previously an occupational

50  Mathew Brady’s Civil War, Daguerreotypes feature of the urban civilian landscape. These positions, soldier and photographer, were heavily racialised and gendered in the public imagination regardless of their location. Maria Gabriela Ferreira Gomes concurs that ‘the feeling that it was a white man’s war circulated among the public and the press alike.’29 It was not necessarily done so using photograph as its primary instrument. Here, Ferreira Gomes refers to ‘a cartoon published in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper on October 12, 1861, shows Abraham Lincoln pushing away an African American who had been clinging to him. The caption is suggestive: “I’m sorry to have to drop you, Sambo, but this concern won’t carry us both.”’30 Shortly thereafter realities on the ground would shift Lincoln’s position, meaning that he would require the services of African Americans, ironically to further his concern. Much of this would have to do with ‘the humiliating defeat at the Battle of Bull Run, on July 21, 1861, along with the unexpected setbacks experienced by the Union army during 1862’ both of which contributed to the gradual change of opinion concerning African American’s presence in the armed forces.31 Lincoln’s Union army benefited from an initial burst of enthusiasm from young White men at the outset of hostilities that quickly faded when the austerities and casualties of war were made apparent to the public, even in their sanitised and sentimentalised form the constant in flux images of the battlefield eroded public morale, and dented recruitment of new members to replace the wounded, crippled, and dead. Essential recruitment was becoming increasingly difficult. Just a year on things stood in sharp contrast to how the war had begun and indeed how it was visualised. ‘When Mathew Brady set off […] to photograph what would be the first great battle of the Civil War, at Bull Run, he wore a cross tie and white shirt under a long white linen dustcoat. A gold watch chain drooped below his belt, and a straw hat would protect him from the sun, if nothing else. He looked like a French landscape painter.’32 What is curious about this image are two things; firstly that it was not taken on the battlefield, but rather ‘in his Washington, D.C., studio on Pennsylvania Avenue’ and secondly that it is ‘one taken of him the day after the battle.’33 Moreover, ‘it stands as only known Brady image related to Bull Run.’34 This situation sets a precedent for Brady to rewrite history through his battlefield imagery, and indeed reposition it at will, in alignment with the values of European aesthetics, while burnishing his own reputation as one the era’s great conceptual masters. Brady does not merely sit for this image, he actively inscribes it. This triumphant portrayal of himself displays ‘words inked over it in white asserting that he was at the battle’; in this it came said that Brady literally is prepared to White wash events, equating in the minds of viewers presence with participation and participation with value. Subsequent to its printing, this imagine, according to Robert Wilson, ‘would contribute mightily to the myth of Mathew Brady the Civil War photographer, whose name appears on thousands of wartime shots that form our first national memories of war.’35 Here again Brady will take credit where credit is not do, as Brady appears as the overarching signature attached to every imagine, concealing the fact that it’s a legion of White male photographers who make up the cause of his success that will for the most part remain anonymously in the shadows of his commercial enterprise. Their subordination will mirror another phenomenal omission of war; the obscuration of the African America soldier. Amongst the Ranks As a consequence of vastly dwindling numbers of White recruits, on July 17, 1862, Congress passed two laws providing for the enlistment of African Americans as soldiers. Rather that this being an act of respect or recognition, the work assigned to them

Mathew Brady’s Civil War, Daguerreotypes 51 perpetuated the understanding of their inferiority to cause of national reunification. Amongst the primary tasks of these new Black regiments was burial of the wounded and mangled bodies of dead White soldiers, so as to spare their compatriots the agony and disgust in facing the reality of the fate of their own kind. Other tasks were designed to reinforce the understanding of them as capable of taking on the most dehumanising of work within the theatre of war. Their inferior as ranked soldiers was further reinforced by their lower rates of pay and structured inability to rise above their initial, servile rank. Black regiments were subject to frequent punishment for minor offences and at times subject to whipping by their White superior in ways not dissimilar to what they would have experienced on the plantation from their White masters. Ferreira Gomes contends that, ‘although whipping would be outlawed by Congress, its striking similarity with the punishment of slaves is revealing.’36 In this, she refers to Franny Nudelman’s argument that for African Americans, ‘military service most resembled enslavement and that the soldier who fought, and perhaps died, for his country did not exemplify heroic agency so much as effective subordination.’37 The paucity of photographic imagery further nullifies their position as significant actors furthering Lincoln’s concern. While it was the case that ‘a hundred thousand black males are reported to have fought in the Union regiments,’ it is important to appreciate that their lives being compromised or lost would have been of concern to their White superiors let alone the scores of White photographers staging witness to events on the field of battle for White audiences at home.38 The scene of Black death would not have been unfamiliar to them so much as banal, as compared to their outrage, fascination, and grievance at the injury loss of White life. As far as the fate of African Americans, it was indeed in keeping with line of even popular abolitionist policy to eventually ‘drop’ such bodies by throwing away to the far flung corners of the colonised world where they could no longer disturb the integrity of the Union. Far from having gone unnoticed, these bodies were largely omitted from the record of battle as a means of imagining a world to come in which their absence would ideally be made permanent. Where they are pictured the examples given are always as plain objects, being put to basic use, rather than being glorified as subjects of distinction through their activities. The exception to this is the cheap cartes de visites that were purchased by African Americans prior to their deployment, which would depict them not as ‘contrabands,’ but rather as order young men preparing for involvement in military type activity. These photographic sessions would have taken place in urban studios and possibly would have been made at the hands of a minority of African American daguerreotypists operating at this time. The goal of this the photographic production would have been in many ways aspirational in depicting African American soldiers as on par with Whites, bearing a likeness to them through the conventions of studio portraiture. But there was, of course, little evidence in real life of these soldiers and officers setting out to war on equivalent terms. Even if it remained uncertain of the outcome of this White fratricidal conflict, Blacks still were wholly aware that they were not to be recognised as an equally valued brother, and as such wished to provide their family and friends with something that was reflective not of that reality, but rather a picture of an alternative type of reality they hoped might one day come to pass. Presently there would have been no space offered for this to take place. Ferreira Gomes notes that ‘in several images depicting “colored” regiments, only the white officers are present.’39 If we take this arrangement as a volitional practice then it is possible to admit a larger rhetoric that supports this pattern of erasure. The Union could

52  Mathew Brady’s Civil War, Daguerreotypes only ever refer to the whole of the White American population returning in unity to one another’s concerns. Those who opposed this were rebellious only to the degree that they philosophically disagreed on the future of the Constitution of the United States, meaning one where America would continue to restrain her Black population, or exile them as the chosen means of furthering the nation’s rising imperial status. The photographic banishment of African Americans simply underlines their greater marginality to this conflict as well as the more prominent goals the war had of preserving the relevance of Southern slaveholders, and Northern industrialists alike regardless of outcome. Blacks could not aspire to such a posture because they were understand as fundamentally ancillary to its outcome. What would be required of them regardless of outcome would be a deportment of sorts involving their continue submission and obedience to an historical record that would depict scenes of White triumph against the shadow of their bearing sufferance. As lesser versions of human being, they are never going to be naturally elevated, as compared with their hierarchical superiors, that will always be fundamentally behind what is expected or requested of within a White supremacist order reliant on their servitude to lend an appurtenance of their mastery. The Documentation of Deferential Suffering The New York Draft Riots that took place mid-July 1863 would become an object lesson in the logistics of race and racialisation between the North and South. The riots took place ‘after it became clear that the recent Conscription Act would indeed be enforced in New York, despite resistance from local Democrats and the Democrat-controlled state house. Two provisions of the act, which passed in March of 1863, ensured that the working class, and in New York this included the sizable Irish immigrant population, would bear the brunt of the conscription drive.’40 There was also a religious element to this in that those citizens, ‘who could find (and thus pay) a substitute or pay a three-hundred-dollar fee were exempted from service’ where overwhelmingly from middle- and upper class White Anglo-Saxon Protestant backgrounds.41 Freed Blacks did not come into the equation here, because they were not eligible for citizenship and thus not eligible for the draft. Anger was directed at both the elite White classes and the Black underclass. The White classes beneath the former who were socially, politically, and economically diminished by dint of their ethnographic association with ‘blackness’ in Europe, as immigrants to American, faced now a further threat of denigration through their forced entry into the war. Indeed, it would seem too many that Blacks were granted greater rights to choose their enlistment than the Irish had been granted by the Union. When the war broke out two year prior, it was not at all certain that New York wanted to side with the Union because this went against its own economic interests as well as its negative attitudes towards federal interference in the business of the state. There were further concerns that with conscription would come loss of livelihoods to return to as free Blacks would be hired to fulfil the local demand for workers. War pay was no equivalent in support of their families as compared to what they earnt. Their decision to act was from a place of calculation that is they could eliminate the Black alternative from their bosses they would be able to overthrow the support of the draft at all levels of New York society. This effort started from the point of terrorising local Black communities and ended in the lynching of at least a dozen individuals before the weeklong riots ended. The Irish Mob stopped at intimidation when it came to striking out at the White Middle and Upper classes of the city. These classes interpreted the week of violence in Union

Mathew Brady’s Civil War, Daguerreotypes 53 America’s urban heart, as episode of unrest that ‘reflected both the racial tensions and the increasing “compassion fatigue” among Northerners.’42 After these events subsided, ‘abolitionists of the North widely distributed photographic prints—in the popular format of “cartes de visite”—as a means of visual propaganda to turn public opinion in their favor. These pictures, depicting black and white injured bodies, sought to both visualize the “dehumanizing pain” of slavery and the “heroic pain” of fighting it.’43 The most famous of these is the photograph that came to be referred to as ‘The Scourged Back.’ (Figure 2.3) 44 For White abolitionists of the time, the object of distributing this image was to turn the ‘thing into man’ and in doing so suggest that through experiencing pain the slave transforms into a recognisable as having an equivalent capacity for human form.45 What is problematic about this photograph display is the way it uses the pain inflicted upon Black bodies as shorthand for greater American trauma of Civil War, a situation that the White public of the time would have no way of reconciling as true. The aim of the war had never been fought over the prospect of producing an African American citizenry, nor for African American presence to become something that could be admitted into the way the country visualised it reunified future. Rather for that to have been healed, it required instead the continued reduction of African American bodies to the value of 3/5 of a man. American democracy as it had come to be known would indeed falter were it ever to be the case that their bodies were not used as evidence of the fundamental condition of superiority of Whites as compared the suffering Black must endure. White audiences after the Civil War ended would come to regard this image as a type of historical memento of a traumatic period in the nation’s history that had now passed. It would come to represent a before and after, defined always and only through the remembrance of a failed Confederacy; not a failed slavery. Whites healed the rift amongst themselves by focussing their attention on the blighted Black bodies that persisted within the national landscape beyond the war as simultaneously referencing both the miscarriage of White insurrection and the triumph of White self-governance. This particular image tells the story of a Black man having escaped from slavery, only to have his body permanent imprisoned within its deformities. Photography acts as an accomplice to this agonising state of affairs insofar as ‘the photograph freezes the body in a state of hurt, and forces a passive, nonrelational display of pain onto the photographic “subject.”’46 The camera here acts a further coercive instrument heaping pain upon pain and keeping it there. It does not suggest the presence of the photography as having any responsibility for the wounds inflicted. This situation mirrors the inculpability of the slaveowner. Both in the assumed Whiteness take on the privilege of have conceptualised and situated their function as thought they were witnesses to violence, rather than its perpetuators. They are able to do so because they can claim their actions were meditated through a greater apparatus. In this way, the Black experience of trauma is one that is displaced and distilled into a framework where White looking relations take precedent. As such Whiteness can interpret slavery as an ideological configuration and therefore brought into view as a series functions that arrest Black subjects, as opposed to directly instigating their destruction. This arrangement allows for pain to be interpreted in the past tense and for political and visual autonomy to persist as the qualities that sever the possibility of Whites claiming responsibility, in the present, for such suffering. What is wrong with this picture isn’t the utter brutalisation that is being displayed upon the Black body, but the fact that ‘rather than merely referring to acts of atrocity, the photography builds and confirms these acts.’47 In that respect, this photograph constitutes what Judith Butler refers to as ‘scene that should not be seen.’48 The act of

54  Mathew Brady’s Civil War, Daguerreotypes

Figure 2.3 Gordon, ‘The Scourged Back – The furrowed and scarred back of Gordon, a slave who escaped from his master in Mississippi and made his way to a Union Army encampment in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1863.’ Matthew Brady Studio 1863, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.

Mathew Brady’s Civil War, Daguerreotypes 55 recording this image acts in its own way as a gesture of torture. When viewed that effect is further magnified outwards. When these views intersect with a society whose own concern with ‘grievable lives’ are distorted, the question of whose pain, life, death, and suffering achieve accountability effectively results in the opposed effect of denying that right to society’s others and determining under what conditions any type of quality of life gets to endure. The photograph lends the events of this Black man’s vicious beating a quality of ‘absolute pastness’ and as such, that quality is conferred on a living being precisely as the quality of ungrievability.49 White audiences cannot truly feel for this man for to do would be to confirm that this was a life that was even with their own, and with life itself, as a category of registerable being. What in fact underscores is that it that is grievable. So, we must ask where does this Black man reside in the framework of this photograph, and how through its relation ‘to the future anterior’ to the antebellum era, can it insatiate ‘grievability’?50 The photograph itself becomes the intimate of a past ‘tense’ of life, giving weight to grievability as something that is met with both anticipation and as an act of performance. That grievability is weighted with the anticipation of a past underwrites the photograph’s distinctive capacity to embellish the past and establish intervention as a precondition for the knowability of human life over other forms. Hence, the inability to grieve Black life is because it is fundamentally unknowable, and therefore, unrecognisable as wholly human life, but as something more of fantastical and tense quality. At the juncture, it’s useful to recall that ‘the first major war film in the history of American cinema’ was D. W. Griffith’s landmark epic, The Birth of a Nation, (1915), ‘[…] about the American Civil War.’51 Some of Griffith’s famous shots in the film that depict Civil War battles aim to ‘faithfully’ reproduce Mathew Brady’s photographs.52 The Birth of a Mythic Whiteness Amy Kaplan observes that ‘amongst the most striking visual threats in The Birth of a Nation, against which the Klan must do battle, are scenes of black soldiers in Federal uniforms exerting their authority as the occupying force.’53 These soldiers are not identified as African Americans, because the admission of such a thing is itself an impossibility, so instead these occupying figures are cast as ‘pure blooded’ Africans. The fact that these parts are played by White actors in Black-face encourages audiences to further suspend their disbelief to accommodate a heightened awareness of Black visibility versus White invisibility at play here. Indeed, by virtue of being cloaked in Whiteness, the Klan can mobilise itself as figuratively at the forefront of ‘the invisible empire’, meaning modern America, which is then capable of mounting ‘as an insurgent force rebelling against an African empire.’54 Griffith poses this an imperial match up versus a Civil War. By doing so, he allows the American and African empire to be figured as even opponents to one another, and suggests furthermore, that African American soldiers within the Union army somehow are acting as proxies for Black African interests. Griffith’s take on American Civil War history is particularly significant if we consider it in the context of multi-ethnic White European colonial rule within the African continent in the latter half of the nineteenth century and early part of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, in Griffith’s version, imperial rule of Africa has remained firmly in the grasp of Black Africans. Another peculiar feature of The Birth of Nation is that ‘the first shot of the film’ onwards Griffith ‘figures slavery as an invasion by blacks, an original threat to the protonational unity of white European settlers.’55 Again this would suggest some type of imperial strategy on the part of the African empire to seed slaves going back the very beginnings of White

56  Mathew Brady’s Civil War, Daguerreotypes settlement in order to sabotage the development of the colonies into a White nation. This capacity for invasion suggests a guile on the part of Africa that would have been equal, or superior to the strategic designs of the British empire for this New World territory. What is omitted from Griffith’s framework is any historical reference to the importation of Africans by the British to perform hard labour within the nascent colony of Virginia, thus beginning the era of race-based bondage that would come to define antebellum America. This is the case, because, in entertaining the concept a proto-national unity, we find ourselves as viewer in the representational space of the future anterior. Time within this fantastical context forks to accommodate Griffith’s desired conclusions; the material achievement of ‘Lincoln’s vision to send all blacks to Africa,’ and the immaterial accomplishment of ‘a Christian god of peace defeating a god of war, who looks like an African icon.’56 It is at these two levels, body and spirit, that Blackness as a force in the world must be conquered for the good of the future. The White man alone cannot exact these outcomes, and as such, Griffith demonstrates ‘the Christian god’ as the agent who […] ‘purges the white nation of black soldiers.’57 While mankind enacts his punishment against the Black soldier on grounds of territorial trespass, the Christian does so because of transgressions made against ‘natural order.’58 It is for this reason that the Black solider must ‘been collapsed into the figure of the black rapist’ in his final portrayal here and as a consequence invite themselves into a position of double jeopardy.59 Given that occupation, invasion, insurgency, and rape were amongst the chief instruments used by European settlers to fundamentally eliminate indigenous populations under the auspices of divine Christian right, it seems clear that Griffith’s film is using the future anterior to describe a future action or revenge through these means, within events that will have been completed in the future. The perfect future is one loaded with potentiality it shifts the course of any given present, through the way it imagines what will have been, allowing audiences to a time before an event actually comes to pass and in doing so insert within it moments of bifurcation, so that to return to them is an objective of provisional index. This means that lost or misplaced futures might somehow still be recovered in an alternative present where future has not yet become past and multiple futures remain compossible within a single present. One wonders had he lived if Lincoln’s favoured path of colonisation would have been eventually realised as he continued negotiations not only with Britain, but also other colonial powers including the Danes and Dutch for agreements towards a path to ‘eliminate every last black person’ from American soil as ‘the glorious culmination’ of his Presidency.60 In Lincoln’s home state of Illinois, the state constitution had already been amended ‘to prohibit the emigration of blacks into the state.’61 Indiana and Oregon held similar statues. These new territories weren’t anti-slavery—they were anti-Black. Unlike in Britain, there was no political imperative for compensated emancipation to slave owners, because there was the outstanding preoccupation of what to do with a large Black population physically situated within the borders of the nation. It was this question of how to eliminate or severely confine the fortunes of this population that would dominate America’s political imagination for the next century following on from the Civil War. All of the West was to be the preserve of the White race. Slavery would interdict that ambition should it be extended into those territories formally so there could be no competition of labour between free Whites and enslaved Blacks. In free states, as well as slave states, the imperative remained the same to deprive Blacks of economic and political liberties so that the public understanding of their inferiority as a class of human being was everywhere made apparent. The premise of the Union was based on these assumptions.

Mathew Brady’s Civil War, Daguerreotypes 57 The Imperial Settlement What is remarkable about Lincoln’s famed Emancipation Proclamation was how profoundly entwined it was to the colonisation of African Americans in Africa. Lincoln’s interest in this outcome applied to both free Blacks and those classified as ‘contraband.’ In 1862, Lincoln entered into formal and direct negotiation with the British government, which was interested in acquiring America’s Black population to work as labourers within its West Indian empire, where their plantations ‘suffered a constant shortage of manpower and held out hope of obtaining a supply of agriculturally proficient black workers from the soon the be emancipated populations in sections of the Southern United States.’62 The British government would provide ‘passage-money’ for these populations to be ‘transported’ to Jamaica and other West Indian islands ‘requiring population.’63 Lincoln wanted not only these terms of be consensual, but it was also implicit that those involved would face a situation where there were better prospects for them outside the nation rather than within it, in a post-Civil War America. Lincoln called Black leaders to the White house for the express purpose of them imploring their people leave the country.64 This was particularly true for those Black individual considered contrabands, those that they were former slaves who had achieved their liberation from their owners by falling behind or escaping into Union lines who fell with the complicated legal structure of being seized property. For the British government, it was ‘these laborers were also considered the most appealing, as they knew the trades of agriculture through slavery, and in many cases had cultivated the same crops, sugar, cotton and rice’ that they would be expected to work in the British West Indies upon their arrival.65 The remarkable similarity of their proposed situation to the former situation of slavery should they take up this agreement was not lost on antislavery campaigners in Britain at this time. They could easily recognise the arrangement as one that perpetuated inhuman conditions of existence rather than departing in any way from them when it came to Blacks being treated in effect an article of property. This is further revealed by the fact Britain took issue with America’s failure to induce these parties to travel and Lincoln’s personal enthusiasm for a plan that would result in the large-scale deportation of Blacks under conditions that would effectively preserve the old plantation model. Indeed, the whole of the British empire was preoccupied with the transportation of workers draw from its global holdings to service the voracious growth of extractive industries. The only issue holding them back with the concern that this policy of transporting American slaves would be viewed as ‘kidnapping’ by members of the Confederacy. Therefore, it became commercially imperative for Lincoln to win the war to honour his agreements and deliver on this order under the proviso that these individuals would be legally freed of former claims of ownership prior to departure. Another prospect on the table at this time was that America would keep her Black population, confining them to the South and have the North be the reserve of Whites introducing a system of formal apartheid into the reunited states. In this instance, the colonial model would be turned inward to serve the need for what effectively became a system of indentured, nominal wage, and forced labour to reconstruct the country after the Civil War had ended eventually leading to the formal adoption of Jim Crow laws. Phillip W. Magness and Sebastian N. Page argue that the Civil War was not fought over the issue of slavery, but as a means through which the government could centralise its authority in order to take on the task of imperial expansion.66 This expansionist policy would be turned inwards following the Civil War when Lincoln’s prized Union generals

58  Mathew Brady’s Civil War, Daguerreotypes Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan would be turned to the task of applying their military prowess to the task of annihilating the Western Native American population to make way for the government subsidised railroad industry to make fortunes for the AngloAmerican White settler class. Mathew Brady played no small part in the cementing the significant impact these figures would have on American history. It was his portrait of Abraham Lincoln, taken on February 27, 1860, the day Lincoln addressed a large Republican audience in the lecture hall at Cooper Union in New York, which Lincoln himself would credit with making him President. The images of Lincoln on the American five dollar bill and penny, based on Brady portraits, attest to the enduring power of his imagination for and of Whiteness to becoming the enduring legacy of how a nation assigns material value and materially accounts for itself. It could be readily argued that Brady’s winning of an international award for his daguerreotypes at the Great Exhibition paved the way for the global accepting of the verisimilitude of the American experience in racialised democracy. Through the seemingly prosaic instruments of newspapers, advertising, and handbills, the White world seeded itself from Europe. Brady, himself a student of its most celebrated galleries and works of art, sought to introduce what he saw as improvements onto the form of enlightenment. The previous discoveries of those nations were introduced into his establishment of photography as a singular medium capable preparing the way to execute every description of world. Through images pertaining to his business, Brady’s own Whiteness, similar to Griffiths, was elevated in the highest echelon of that art form. Joyce E. Jesionowski describes Griffith’s filmic work as a type of portraiture that in a similar manner to the daguerreotype merges ‘memory and history; interior and exterior, stillness and momentum, temporality and transcendence.’67 What is technically contrived about White portraiture is set against what is naturally evidenced about Black portraiture. What separates, as well as uniting the two, are a recourse to trauma as the ballast of particular brand of Victoria identity framed within the context of shifting individual, social, and national hierarchies. This happens as America emerges at mid-nineteenth century as a serious imperial contender on the world stage. What is fundamentally broken is the unity of what America poses to the world by way of an appearance that reproduces that of Europe. In its place emerges a system of hardening standards for classification or race, gender, class that accommodates a plasticity in status and station that appearances to the world in many ways a uniquely American phenomenon. The ability to admit the possibility of change amidst a background of static nature granted America’s modern White individual an innovative capacity for of self-expression. They served as a blueprint to the world of how such an ability could complement others sorts of progressive industries. The American self was one that ‘became uniquely publicized by the introduction of mechanical representation and were uniquely circulated in a time of national conflict that threatened to sweep away all possibilities of a family national album.’68 That album never was always cast as a completely White artefact. It belonged to a land that never was. The nostalgia for such a world is what, however, continues to drive the nation’s anxiety that such a fundamental disunion with reality right from the beginning will be revealed and, in so doing, destroy national memory itself. The daguerreotype in this sense becomes an instrument of particular necessity in blocking access to another version of understanding. Griffith, like his predecessor Brady, recognised the fundamental principle of their work was to create cultural objects that were outside of time, creating the channel for their representational narratives to ultimately dominate over

Mathew Brady’s Civil War, Daguerreotypes 59 time itself and this way strategically oppose it. Even the dead could be brought back to life if only for the value of performing a particular kind of habitation whose presence largely obscures the national patterns violence, domination, and exclusion that had shaped their progress through life. The national character similarly must be subject to a constant state of preservation lest its sentimental version of itself be divided against its insurgent self. Notes 1 Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (1986): 10. 2 Rachel Hall, “Missing Dolly, Mourning Slavery: The Slave Notice as Keepsake.” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 21, no. 1 (2006): 71–103 at 90. doi:10.1215/ 02705346-2005-009. 3 Simon Strick, American Dolorologies: Pain, Sentimentalism, Biopolitics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014), 130. 4 Hall, “Missing Dolly, Mourning Slavery,” 72. 5 Ibid., 80. 6 Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (New York: Penguin Publishing Group, 2004), 17. 7 Solnit, River of Shadows, 15. 8 Ibid., 13. 9 Ibid., 13. 10 Ibid., 13. 11 Ibid., 14. 12 Ibid., 14. 13 Jenna Supp-Montgomerie, When the Medium Was the Mission: The Atlantic Telegraph and the Religious Origins of Network Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2021), 100. 14 Supp-Montgomerie, When the Medium Was the Mission, 100. 15 Michael Hatt, “Sculpture, Chains, and the Armstrong Gun: John Bell’s American Slave Nineteenth-Century.” Art Worldwide 15, no. 2 (2016): 220–238 at 232. 16 Hatt, “Sculpture, Chains, and the Armstrong Gun,” 232. 17 Ibid., 233. 18 Ibid., 234. 19 Ibid., 235. 20 Lisa Volpe, “Embodying the Octoroon: Abolitionist Performance at the London Crystal Palace, 1851.” Nineteenth Century Art Worldwide 15, no. 2 (2016): 207–219 at 214. 21 Volpe, “Embodying the Octoroon,” 216. 22 Ibid., 208. 23 Alan Trachtenberg, “Imaginary Nation: Photographic Constructions of ‘America’.” Revue francaise detudes americaines 3 (2001): 10–19 at 17. 24 Volpe, “Embodying the Octoroon,” 214. 25 Ibid., 214. 26 Kristilyn Baldwin, “The Visual Documentation of Antietam: Peaceful Settings, Morbid Curiosity, and a Profitable Business.” The Gettysburg College Journal of the Civil War Era 1, no. 1 (2010): 1–21 at 20. 20. 27 Baldwin, “The Visual Documentation of Antietam,” 20. 28 Ibid. 20. 29 Maria Gabriela Ferreira Gomes, “American Civil War Photography: Traces of Death, Injury, Discrimonation and Wreckage.” MA Diss., Universidade Aberta, 2009, 51, http://hdl.handle. net/10400.2/1369. 30 Ferreira Gomes, “American Civil War Photography,” 51. 31 Ibid., 54. 32 Robert Wilson, “The False Heroism of a Civil War Photographer.” The Atlantic, July/August 2011 Issue, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/07/the-false-heroism-of-a-civilwar-photographer/308543/. 33 Wilson, “The False Heroism of a Civil War Photographer.”

60  Mathew Brady’s Civil War, Daguerreotypes 4 Ibid. 3 35 Ibid. 36 Ferreira Gomes, “American Civil War Photography,” 55. 37 Ibid. 55, quoting Franny Nudelman, John Brown’s Body: Slavery, Violence, & the Culture of War (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press), 133. 38 Ferreira Gomes, “American Civil War Photography,” 57. 39 Ibid., 58. 40 Ross Barrett, “On Forgetting: Thomas Nast, the Middle Class, and the Visual Culture of the Draft Riots.” Prospects 29 (2005): 25–55 at 28. 41 Ibid. 28. 42 Simon Strick, American Dolorologies: Pain, Sentimentalism, Biopolitics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014), 97. 43 Strick, American Dolorologies, 97. 44 Ibid., 97. 45 Ibid., 114. 46 Ibid., 114. 47 Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso Books, 2016), 70. 48 Butler, Frames of War, 79. 49 Ibid., 79. 50 Ibid., 97. 51 Amy Kaplan, “The Birth of an Empire.” PMLA 114, no. 5 (1999): 1068–1079 at 1074. 52 Kaplan, “The Birth of an Empire,” 1074. 53 Kaplan, “The Birth of an Empire,” 1074. 54 Ibid., 1074. 55 Ibid., 1075. 56 Ibid., 1075. 57 Ibid., 1075. 58 Ibid., 1075. 59 Ibid. 1075. 60 Thomas J. DiLorenzo, The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2003), 18. 61 DiLorenzo, The Real Lincoln, 28. 62 Phillip W. Magness and Sebastian N. Page. Colonization after Emancipation: Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011), 15. 63 Magness and Page, Colonization after Emancipation, 15. 64 Ibid., 17. 65 Ibid., 17. 66 Ibid., 2. 67 Joyce E. Jensionowski, “Living Portraits: Signs of (the) Time in D.W. Griffith.” In A Companion to D. W. Griffith, (London: Wiley, 2018), 216. 68 Jensionowski, “Living Portraits,” 217.

Bibliography Baldwin, Kristilyn. “The Visual Documentation of Antietam: Peaceful Settings, Morbid Curiosity, and a Profitable Business.” The Gettysburg College Journal of the Civil War Era 1, no. 1 (2010): 1–21, https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/gcjcwe/vol1/iss1/3. Barrett, Ross. “On Forgetting: Thomas Nast, the Middle Class, and the Visual Culture of the Draft Riots.” Prospects 29 (2005): 25–55. https://do.org/10.1017/S036123330000168X. Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? United Kingdom: Verso Books, 2016. DiLorenzo, Thomas J. The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2003. Gomes, Maria Gabriela Ferreira. “American Civil War Photography: Traces of Death, Injury, Discrimonation And Wreckage.” MA Diss., Universidade Aberta, 2009, http://hdl.handle.net/ 10400.2/1369.

Mathew Brady’s Civil War, Daguerreotypes 61 Hall, Rachel. “Missing Dolly, Mourning Slavery: The Slave Notice as Keepsake.” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 21, no. 1 (2006): 71–103. https//doi.org/10.1215/ 02705346-2005-009. Hatt, Michael. “Sculpture, Chains, and the Armstrong Gun: John Bell’s American Slave Nineteenth-Century.” Art Worldwide 15, no. 2 (2016): 220–238. http://www.19thc-artworldwide. org/summer16/hatt-on-sculpture-chains-and-the-armstrong-gun-john-bell-american-slave. Jensionowski, Joyce E. “Living Portraits: Signs of (the) Time in D.W. Griffith.” In A Companion to D. W. Griffith, 216–244, London: Wiley, 2018. Kaplan, Amy. “The Birth of an Empire.” PMLA 114, no. 5 (1999): 1068–1079. https://doi. org/10.2307/463466. Magness, Phillip W. and Sebastian N. Page. Colonization after Emancipation: Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011. Sekula, Allan. “The Body and the Archive.” October 39 (1986): 3–64. The MIT Press, http://www. jstor.org/stable/778312. Solnit, Rebecca. River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West. New York: Penguin Publishing Group, 2004. Strick, Simon. American Dolorologies: Pain, Sentimentalism, Biopolitics. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014. Supp-Montgomerie, Jenna. When the Medium Was the Mission: The Atlantic Telegraph and the Religious Origins of Network Culture. New York: NYU Press, 2021. Trachtenberg, Alan. “Imaginary Nation: Photographic Constructions of “America”.” Revue francaise detudes americaines 3 (2001): 10–19. https://doi.org/10.3917/rfea.089.0010. Volpe, Lisa. “Embodying the Octoroon: Abolitionist Performance at the London Crystal Palace, 1851.” Nineteenth Century Art Worldwide 15, no. 2 (2016): 207–219. http://www.19thcartworldwide.org/index.php/summer16/volpe-on-abolitionist-performance-at-the-london-crystalpalace-1851#our-chief-attraction. Wilson, Robert. “The False Heroism of a Civil War Photographer.” The Atlantic, July/August 2011 Issue. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/07/the-false-heroism-of-a-civilwar-photographer/308543/.

3

Ain’t I a Human Louis Agassiz’s Slave Daguerreotypes and White Scientific Voyeurism

In a letter dated March 23, 1863, to his father-in-law Thomas Graves Cary, the famed naturalist Louis Agassiz makes reference to the Museum of Cambridge and its involvement in collecting ‘everything related to the Natural History of California.’1 Agassiz’s aim is now to move far beyond that territory alone because as he sees it, ‘everyday this history of mankind is brought into more and more intimate connection with the natural history of the animal creation, and it is now indispensable that we should organize an extensive connection of to illustrate the natural history of uncivilized races.’2 While Agassiz explicitly conflates creation, classification, racialisation, habitation, and civilisation in his reasoning, another feature, capital, remains the only figure that is implied. Agassiz is imploring Cary to help him to fund this venture amongst his business friends, whose concerns for collecting on the natural history of mankind are left somewhat ambiguous in the letter. Agassiz outlines other concerns much more explicitly; the need to acquire specimens that will allow audiences to witness ‘the habits and pursuits of the races,’ as well as the ‘the physical constitution of the races themselves.’3 There will quite naturally be a price of admission for such a showing. In order to dramatise distinctions amongst the various ‘races of men,’ artefact is just as critical as embodiment and acquisition of the property formerly accrued to them and becomes crucial to what Agassiz imagines as the success of this enterprise.4 Amongst the most desirable items to be acquired are ‘articles of clothing or ornaments’ as well as ‘implements, tools, weapons,’ etc. that will ‘indicate the dawn or progress amongst them.’ Preferable amongst these are ‘items of clothing that would have been worn or cast off, rather than new things which may be more or less fanciful and not indicate the real natural conditions or habits of a race.’5 Agassiz’s concerns for the curation of this display already indicate that these are highly constructed situations of these races. Again, what is less apparent is his concern, not for authenticity, but rather, the ability of these staged collections to convincingly ‘illustrate the physical constitution of the races,’ and for this reason, these objects alone cannot adequately suffice.6 Instead, what must be acquired from these races are the ‘skulls’ of their ‘dead.’7 Taking these objects off them will be particularly ‘difficult’ because they hold such things ‘sacred.’8 That is not important whatsoever to acknowledge so much as the need for these skulls to be obtained ‘industriously’ and for them to be taken with care to the degree that their ‘origin cannot be mistaken.’9 For Agassiz, this is a supply chain issue, as much as anything else, and that is potentially costly given that it will now have to be extended globally far beyond the continental reaches of the United States. Shipment cost was always an issue, as has been the case when this endeavour was originally conceived of in the furthest California. Whatever their geographical origin, ‘every effort should be made to obtain perfect heads, preserved in alcohol, so that their features may be studied DOI: 10.4324/9781003274797-4

Ain’t I a Human 63 minutely in detail and compared. When this cannot be done portraits or photographs may be substituted.’10 All this was to construct ‘a natural history of mankind’ unrivalled anywhere else in the world. Agassiz signs off his letter, ‘I remain, forever your friend and brother.’11 What is conspicuous about this salutation is that Agassiz is in fact Cary’s son-in-law by marriage to his daughter Elizabeth Cabot Cary, who like her father was born into a Boston Brahmin family of New England ancestry. She would have indeed come from a very long line of New England ancestry dating back directly to the White colonial settlement of Charlestown in 1670. Prior to that, her family would have been members of the English upper classes, and thus upon their arrival to the New World, would have become members of the colonial ruling class of Massachusetts, assuming roles as governors and magistrates. In Boston, this class held their English heritage very dear to them and maintained what they perceived as an authentically English manner in their choice of dress, manner, and comportment. They were eager patrons of the arts, charities such as hospitals and colleges, and assumed the roles of economic drivers within their surrounding communities. Men like Cary would have been identified as such a leader and someone who closely guarded ties to entry into Boston’s rarefied social milieu. Agassiz’s entry into marriage with Elizabeth Cabot Cary would have been something that was carefully weighed as he would have been outside of the circle of suitors that would have normally preserved the family’s blood line and class status. As it turned out, Elizabeth, who had been plagued with ill health for much of her early age, bore no children of her own with Agassiz. At the time of their marriage in 1850, this could not have been known as she would have been 28 and he 43. The two met by travelling in much the same circles consisting of a cadre of intellectuals that would go on to become Harvard presidents, distinguished clergy, and fellows at leading scientific societies, and leaders in commerce and trade, whose offspring married one another to keep the established order going. The two have met the very same year that Agassiz crossed the Atlantic with grant money furnished to him at the behest of the King of Prussia, via his scientific mentor Alexander von Humboldt. Immediately Agassiz was met with support from Boston’s aristocratic community who showered him with financial support for his work. Almost instantly he was elected as a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Leaving behind his wife and three children in Switzerland, Agassiz commenced an affair with Cary that same autumn and officially married her in 1850, after his wife had passed away in his absence. Their children were then sent for and eventually raised by Cary. Cary worked closely with her husband in his scientific research. Specifically, she accompanied him as the main writer and record keeper for the Thayer Expedition to Brazil, from April 1865 to August 1866, a subject that will be later discussed in this chapter. Morton’s Skulls That same autumn following his arrival to the United States, Agassiz immediately sought out the company of Samuel George Morton, travelling down to the East Coast to meet with him in Philadelphia. Morton’s 1839 volume Crania Americana was based on the collection of a vast number of American Indian skulls, which had become a sensation in the United States, Britain, and throughout Europe. Those examining his volume ‘were astounded by the eerie, life-like quality of the skulls’ presented within it.12 That effect was achieved by Morton’s artist, John Collins, through the use of a ‘new technique called

64  Ain’t I a Human lithography.’13 He first drew each image onto a limestone block in wax before fixing, inking, and printing. The limestone allowed Collins to create fine-grained textures, reproducing ‘the subtle contours of each skull in Morton’s collection.’14 This collection represented a landmark in American scientific publication, because prior to its release, ‘such impressive images could only be found in European scientific metropolises such as Paris and Edinburgh.’15 Not incidentally, these were the very places where Morton had studied medicine and become convinced that intelligence was a feature of humanity that was innately fixed within the skull. So compelling were the images presented in Crania Americana that the American scientific community, as well as its European counterparts, ‘were overwhelmingly convinced that Native American skulls were actually of a different consistency to Europeans.’16 Ownership of these images became a mark of prestige for institutions, but also of financial solvency because of the exorbitant cost of acquiring such a volume. In many ways, lithography acted as a precursor technology to the daguerreotype. Whilst the original format was initially only obtainable by the elites of society, very quickly the technology afforded the opportunity for reproduction into cheaper formats that allowed for the wide availability and mass circulation. Similar to lithography, daguerreotype would come to aid the work of phrenologists in promoting firstly a scientific and thereafter a laymen’s appreciation for identifying racial characteristics through widely accessible formats. The consequences would have been immediately felt in areas where Native Americans materially resided. For Morton, the presentation of their skulls was there to reinforce perceptions of these types of mankind as ‘adverse to cultivation, and slow in acquiring knowledge; restless, revengeful and fond of war’ and therefore fundamentally unsuited to live peaceably in contemporary America.17 In the West, Morton’s scientific opinion lent principle to further clearance of them from territories desirable to White settlers. Robert E. Bieder explains, ‘to collect these crania, Morton enlisted the aid of Indian agents, along with civilian and military physicians, various parts of the country. Grave robbing kept people busy on the frontier supplying Morton and the growing number of phrenologists. Angry and horrified Indians tried to prevent the desecration of their graves, but such activity was often carried out by military personnel against defeated tribal groups.’18 Bands of marauders scoured the battlefields to locate and distribute these skulls to learned institutions on the East Coast as a means of scientifically confirming that each race was a separate species of human, thus reaffirming the sub-humanity of those species, namely the Mongolian, American, Malay, and Ethiopian, dwelling beneath the Caucasian in terms of sheer cranial volume equating to intelligence. Morton did not stop at species of human in his study, but measured the volumes of a vast number of members of the animal kingdom which extended his project to the end of the 1840s, as evidenced by his Catalogue of Skulls of Man and the Inferior Animals, in the Collection of Samuel George Morton published by Harvard University in 1849 so as to register material intelligence on a descending continuum. Crania Americana played a pivotal role in promoting the campaigns of genocide sweeping the West in the decade of the 1840s. A decade later, Morton’s text would become crucial to political discussions about what to do about the American South’s African American population, and in particular, its ‘mulatto’ population. In the American North and West as well as Europe, the majority of Morton’s readers would have been abolitionists who heavily favoured African American ‘freedom’ through colonisation as the means with which to control, cultivate, and concentrate this population to serve the goals of White imperial

Ain’t I a Human 65 expansion. The ‘Negro’ would accede to whatever conditions placed upon him by Whites due to his ‘joyous, flexible, indolent’ nature.19 Morton held that ‘the more pliant Negro, yielding to his fate, and accommodating to his condition, bore his burden of slavery with comparative ease’ to the more ‘spirited’ Indian, implying that exile would be something that was much more feasible option for managing the fate of one race over another. The qualitative differences between American Indians however were not limited to the measurement of skulls in Morton’s work. Rather, he relied upon another feature in his ranking of mankind. Morton ‘was aware that unions between Caucasians and American Indians could produce fertile offspring, thus members of these races presumably descended from a common origin.’20 However, when it came to the differences between ‘Negroes’ and Whites, Morton proposed something of a fundamental difference; that their origin meant that they were a wholly separate species to Whites, as opposed to simply being racially separate from one another. This distinction formed the basis for the argument of polygenesis; a scientific theory that suggested that mankind was made differently according to the region for which it had been created, and thus these ‘species of man’ existed as nations themselves. When species such as this combined, it presented the spectre of the eventual extinction of both and thus had to be dealt with through enforced political policies of species identification and separation. Agassiz had not encountered an African American person prior to his arrival in Philadelphia and his first impressions were ones of horror. He was viscerally disgusted by his own account of their presence as waiters at the hotel he stayed at in Philadelphia in December 1846. Of this he writes immediately to his mother back in Switzerland about their degeneracy and denigration. Were he to consider them really men, he could have done nothing except showing pity towards them; however, upon closer inspection, he comes to realise that they are ‘not the same blood as us’ and this is borne out in the various physical characteristics of having ‘thick lips and grimacing teeth, the wool on their head, their elongated hands, their bent knees, their large curved nails and especially the livid color of the palm of their hands’; all giving him the distinct impression that these waiters were apart from his own natural likeness.21 What must horrify Agassiz is that ‘the white race’ would have chosen ‘to tie their existence so closely with that of negroes in certain countries. God preserve us from such contact!’22 What is most curious about this scene is that Agassiz has no sense of the ‘Negro’ being put into service quite literally for the pleasure of his consumption, not simply as the waiter, but as the producer of his bread, nor that his condition as a European settler to America requires him to admit himself as the instigating party of such contact.23 There can be no evolution of such positioning for Agassiz and thus he is doomed to remain a relic in terms of his own conspicuous social origin as a separate matter. Moreover, there is something theatrical versus scientific in Agassiz’s description of this encounter: ‘I could not take my eyes off their face in order to tell them to stay far away. And when they advanced a hideous hand in order to serve me, I wished I were able to depart in order to eat a piece of bread elsewhere, rather than dine with such service.’24 The description here is almost filmic in its melodramatic quality, as though Agassiz was anticipating the medium which might capture the emotion of this encounter. Agassiz’s Photographic Specimens When Agassiz moved on from Philadelphia, he carried with him a departing present from Morton, ‘a daguerreotype of a young African boy he exhibited before the Academy

66  Ain’t I a Human of Natural Sciences.’25 Brian Wallis observes that Agassiz by that time would have been familiar with various calls from calls in contemporary European scientific journals for the creation of a photographic archive of human specimens, or types. For instance, Agassiz’s colleague Etienne-Reynaud-Augustin Serres, a professor of comparative anatomy at the Jardin des Plantes and the president of the Academy of Sciences in Paris, had proposed the establishment of a museum of photographs of the races of mankind. And, in 1845, a French daguerreotypist named E. Thiessson had taken studies of Brazilians and Portuguese Africans in Lisbon. But there was no precedent in America for the type of photographic collection that Agassiz sought to build.26 There is evidence that Morton played a direct role in fanning Agassiz’s interest in pursuing such a project. Within weeks of his visit to Philadelphia, Agassiz delivered his very first lecture in America, where he suggested that African peoples may have descended from different ancestors than White Caucasian peoples. ‘At an 1847 lecture at the Charleston Literary Club in South Carolina, he told a rapt crowd of naturalists that Black people were physiologically and anatomically distinct from white people.’27 South Carolina would continue to hold a particular allure for Agassiz in the immediate years to come because his theories of polygenism were received with particular zeal in America’s slave-owning states. Following his attendance at a scientific meeting on the polygenism debate, he received an invitation to examine African-born enslaved people in Columbia. ‘By March of 1850, Agassiz commissioned J.T. Zealy, a local daguerreotypist, to photograph seven enslaved people from plantations in Columbia, S.C.’28 So enthralled was he with the idea of being able to capture what he believed to be specimens of ‘pure’ African blood, Agassiz sacrificed several paid speaking engagement in order to personally supervise this undertaking. Agassiz would have few comparable opportunities, because in the import of slaves from Africa had been banned by an Act of Congress dating back to 1808, meaning that those slaves born in the United States after that time were produced through other means that would likely have involved the mixing of blood and ancestry. It would have indeed been nearly 40 years and at least two generations onwards since contemporary plantation system reproduced its slaves domestically through sexual ‘breeding,’ rather than having them imported as a ‘live’ commodity from Africa. What this suggests is that Agassiz’s pure specimens were little more than a fantasy of racial purity, as was his faith in his ability to discern visually those of African origin and limit them according to his desired effect. Agassiz took part in this fantasy alongside numerous other racialist thinkers of the mid-nineteenth century, many of whom were also actively involved in the abolitionist movement. They sought to use science as an argument to propose the need for the repatriation of African Americans back to Africa to prevent their further biological mixing with White people. They believed that the African race couldn’t survive freely within the context of European civilisation without it becoming extinct due to its biological inferiority. On the other side of that equation, their arguments for the abolition of slavery had much to do with their belief that African Americans had to be prevented from causing irreparable damage to the superior White racial stock of the nation through their continued intimate proximity to Whites. For his part, Agassiz made arguments in favour

Ain’t I a Human 67 of zoological provinces, which would establish separate tropical regions for the African race. To this end, Agassiz decided to turn to new technical resources such as photography capable of lending credence to the perception that natural scientists now possessed the ability to ‘read bodies.’ Scientific theories thereafter hinged on the development of new forms of capturing the human body, with photography increasingly utilised as a vehicle of racial as well as sexual classification. It was a close colleague of Morton, Dr Robert W. Gibbes, who convinced Agassiz that pure specimens of African descent could be procured for him from the plantations around South Carolina. Gibbes was from a similar White background to the Cary family in that he descended from an aristocratic caste of Southern slaveowners whose routes would have gone deeply back to England. The planter class was as tiny as his circle at home in Boston, and through their networks of authority and ownership, Agassiz became convinced that he could trust Gibbes’ opinion on the matter. Gibbes, at the time, ‘was a nationally recognised expert on American paleontology, and like Agassiz obsessively collected scientific specimens.’29 Gibbes arranged for Agassiz to essentially have his pick of slaves to photograph, curating a group of Ebo, Foulah, Gullah, Guinea, Coromantee, Mandingo, and Congo ‘Negroes’ for the pleasure of his examination. Agassiz was persuaded that amongst those seven he eventually settled upon there were evident differences that could be displayed to sustain his argument purporting them to be of another species entirely to the Caucasian race. So fully convinced of this was Agassiz that he did not bother to hang about to orchestrate the actual photographing of his specimens. Rather, it was Gibbes who had brought the slaves to the local daguerreotypist, Joseph T. Zealy, for photographic capture. The 15 daguerreotypes that Gibbes commissions Zealy to make represent a careful sectioning of the features of the ‘Negro’ body. This was done firstly through images that display them from front, side, and rear views, in order to record aspects of their shape, proportion, and posture. These poses then proceeded to further fragment the ‘Negro’ body by turning the camera’s focus specifically towards the heads and torsos of these bodies, concentrating attention on the size and shape of these particular physical aspects. These photographic methods were employed to dissect the ‘Negro’ body, as much as to discipline it. Through codes of physiognomy and phrenology, Gibbes was able to totally abstract the ‘Negro’ body and approach it as though it belonged to a pure material order. Brian Wallis observes that in numerous ways the staging of the Zealy daguerreotypes relied on conventions of measuring race that had their beginnings in the eighteenth century in Europe where ethnographic illustrations comparing various skulls, conducted by taxonomists, often relied on the device of the facial angle. ‘Representations of the facial angle of the Negro skull almost always showed an abnormally pronounced brow, protruding lips I teeth, and a back-sloping forehead’ to show that these species of humanity were ‘backward in the linear progression of mankind; closer in proportion to the ape than to the classical ideal.’30 Following the slope of descendent backwards, the ‘Negro’ body in Zealy’s set of 15 daguerreotypes displayed them as subjects that were either stripped down to their waists, or entirely devoid of clothing. Breasts, buttocks, and genitals were on display in ways that would have served the desire for comparison on an erotic level, as well an instrumental one. The nudity on display would have not only had these images veer into the territory of pornography, but also equally figure as a memento of violence through their display of scaring from past injuries inflicted upon these enslaved African American bodies by their White masters. Their posing in this manner was done to emphasise their bodies as

68  Ain’t I a Human though they were the equivalent of unruly beasts. Wallis’ argument appears to be suggesting that Zealy’s 1850 daguerreotypes relate directly to a greater catalogue of ‘proslavery images,’ many of which featured ‘the exposed and attacked bodies’ that were shown in explicitly erotic poses, and for these reasons ‘functioned as a type of pornography.’31 The conventions associated with this type of pornography would have been a product not of the United States, but rather Europe; thus, if viewed in that context, their nudity would not have been unprecedented as such, but rather what would have been novel is its application to the body of the African American slave. Their intersection, Wallis argues, would have existed within a more generalised space of voyeurism concerning the racialised human body. This situation returns us to the scene of Agassiz’s encounter with the African American waiters in Philadelphia. What was repulsive to him was all that he could survey with his eyes along the surface of his African American waiters’ bodies, and yet what he feared most was the potential of them to touch him, and by extension it penetrate him by virtue of his want for consumption. From this, Agassiz desires to both distance himself and make further intimate acquaintance with these ‘horrifying’ specimens. The denuded body and racialised pornography very much stand together within the larger regime of scientific concerns. Photography’s role in its earliest scientific iterations was to survey and catalogue these bodies as ‘Africans,’ as a means with which to de-animate them, and to display them categorically irrespective of these subjects’ lives. Agassiz’s fascination for capturing is that, which is not yet extinction, the ‘pure blooded’ African in American exists to deny the very possibility that this life form will live on in the future. It is their death that is assured and becomes in its own right the source of these daguerreotypes’ erotic charge. They are safely distanced from the White viewer literally by being captured outside of the order of time as it now stands and relegated to a past perfection that is no longer accessible in any other way than through ethnographic rendering and appropriation. Douglass’ Photographic Counter Iteration In an address before the literary societies of Western Reserve College at commencement on July 12, 1854, entitled ‘The Claims of the Negro, Ethnologically Considered,’ Frederick Douglass directly credits figures, including Morton and Agassiz as scientific figures that ‘were duly consulted by our slavery propagating statesmen.’32 As a cultural figure contemporary to Agassiz, Douglass laments that daguerreotypes such as these exaggerate difference, by displaying the best specimens of Whiteness, against the worst specimens of Blackness. Douglass argues that the White daguerreotypist when given the opportunity as instructed by ‘a phrenologist or naturalist, to represent the differences between the two races—the Negro and the European—he will invariably present the highest type of the European, and the lowest type of the negro.’33 The only way, therefore, to rectify the judgement of these images, for Douglass, would be to have daguerreotypes that made ‘the very best type of the negro.’34 If we consider that Agassiz was after capturing ‘the very best type of negro,’ meaning one that did not have a drop of White blood in him and thus could be said to be racially unadulterated; this fully contradicts the order Douglass envisions. As it was, Douglass, a former slave and a ‘mulatto’ subject, was the most photographed Black man of his era. Douglass described himself as something of ‘an Irishman as well as a Negro.’35 The fascination for his appearance by White audiences came as a virtue of the apparent Whiteness

Ain’t I a Human 69 of his features. Gregory Stephens asserts that when it came to Douglass ‘women of all colors saw him both as a sex symbol as well as a model for intellectual growth; presidents employed him as a diplomat to the Caribbean.’36 Stephens also asserts that his late interracial marriage demonstrated his ‘multiple allegiances.’37 In his speech, Douglass refers to the White American as a type of ‘mulatto,’ whose claim to English Whiteness is adulterated by its mixture with German, Irish, and French blood in America. It can, therefore, lay little claim to its ‘former distinctive national peculiarities […] of the full, round Englishman, of clear, blonde, complexion.’38 By contrast, ‘the lean, slender American, plain and swarthy, if exposed to the sun wears a very different appearance.’39 In other words, Americans are ‘blackening up’ outside of their native soil. One has only to look at the ‘progress of this difference’ by examining ‘the common portraits of the American Presidents.’40 ‘Just study the faces beginning with Washington; and as you come thro’ to ‘the Jeffersons, the Adamses, and the Madisons, you will find an increasingly boney and wiry appearance about those portraits and & a greater remove from the supreme amplitude which characterises the countenances of earlier Presidents.’41 There is a curious affinity here with Douglass’ and Morton’s comments when it comes to his assertion in Crania Americana that Egyptians were ‘some mixture of Greek, Arabian and perhaps even Negro blood.’42 Added to this is Douglass’ assertion that ‘mulattoes, in this country, may almost wholly boast of Anglo-Saxon male ancestry.’43 Adding this all together implies some acknowledgement that all of the Presidents with the exception of the Adameses that Douglass mentions fathered children with their ‘pure’ ‘Negro’ slaves, who in fact may themselves have gone onto count as American ‘Egyptians,’ meaning those representing the greatest intelligence of their race were actually the products of a racial diminution similar to what has now become apparent amongst Whites in America. Douglass continues to underline his point that ‘there is the greatest variety of form and feature amongst’ ‘Negros’ if one has eyes to see it.44 Therefore, White claims ‘that negros all look alike’ and that they could ‘not distinguish from old and young’ is nonsense to the degree that ‘there are those, from which the marks of African descent (while, their color remains unchanged, have disappeared entirely.’45 Marcy J. Dinius makes the case that Douglass is counted amongst these types, for as compared to the slaves featured in the Zealy daguerreotypes, he in comparison to them has been afforded certain privileges associated with Whiteness. Douglass did not work outside in the field or the docks. Added to this, ‘Douglass was racially mixed, and therefore did not suffer the both the natural and environmental effects capable of further “darkening” of his appearance.’46 Whilst Douglass’ hair would have ‘read as African in its similarity to that of slaves, […] unlike theirs it is not close cropped for utilitarian purposes. Rather, Douglass’s hair was longer and styled more like the European’s in the Types of Man tableau.’47 Finally, what quality sets Douglass apart from the generic type of slave is that he is fully and voluntarily attired in clothes befitting a White gentleman. This, as opposed to a slave, forced to wear the coarsest of fabrics, only for those close to being stripped or torn from their bodies at will by their White overseers for purposes of inflicting either sexual or physical violence, or a combination thereof. Douglass, as a now freed slave, possesses ‘a different legal and economic status’ at the time these images are taken and he circulates as a public figure in the North; however, this is the most fleeting of his qualities as noted by Dinius.48 It is, as Dinius remarks, only in the realm of representation that Douglass can project himself as free, and it is the White photographer who is, in the end, responsible for this misrepresentation of him as

70  Ain’t I a Human more European than African through their exaggeration of his ‘thin lips,’ ‘too sharp and pinched up’ nose, his ‘lantern-like’ cheeks, ‘his hair too lank and lifeless,’ and his face ‘altogether too cavernous.’49 In this he comes across as a true American type, rather than an Anglo-Saxon. His humanity is bestowed upon him, because his countrymen can see something of a likeness of themselves in the way these features are highlighted before the camera and the way in his daguerreotypes he features in profile, as if turning towards the better angels of his make-up ‘that work in shades of gray, reflecting rather than reconciling the impossible binaries of subjectivity and objectivity and black and white in antebellum America.’50 Douglass in Likeness In many ways through being the most photographed man of America’s daguerreotype era, Douglass becomes its main artefact of Blackness. This is especially true if we consider that the Zealy daguerreotypes were never publicly distributed within Agassiz’s lifetime. In this way, it is Douglass the ‘mulatto’ versus the pure type that becomes the genuine article of fascination for the age to contemplate its nature and it is he who becomes the specimen of the age (Figure 3.2). What separated Douglass out from Jem, Alfred, Delia, Renty, Fassena, Drana, and Jack, the slaves featured within Zealy’s daguerreotypes, was that their likeness preserves only the names given to them as photographic objects but for a series of moments, whereas ‘any biographer of Douglass knows, there was not a Frederick Douglass; there were many Douglasses.’51 Henry Louis Gates argues, ‘that, for him, was his ultimate claim on being fully and equally and complexly human. (After all, we know this about ourselves, don’t we?) Not only did the black object actually, all along, embody subjectivity, but this subjectivity evolved and mutated over time.’52 ‘As any biographer of Douglass knows, there was not a Frederick Douglass; there were many Douglasses. And that, for him, was his ultimate claim on being fully and equally and complexly human. (After all, we know this about ourselves, don’t we?) Not only did the Black object actually, all along, embody subjectivity, but this subjectivity evolved and mutated over time.’53 Gates credits Douglass with politicising his public image so that questions concerning ‘the nature of the Negro’ could not be put to rest. Using his own body, Douglass in many ways outpaced the technology of plate photography, and through anticipating its faults, he was able to ‘achieve over half a century’ the ‘manipulation of his own image.’54 In this, Douglass wasn’t able to ‘demonstrate the inherent capacities of the African people,’ but perhaps he did something far more significant when ‘it came the lens through which he was viewed.’55 Gates, points the fact that his lack of ‘pure blood’ had meant that ‘Douglass’s hecklers would use this fact to question Douglass’s use of himself as proof of black-white intellectual equality, which is probably the reason that Douglass transformed his father from a white man to possibly being a “nearly white” mulatto between his first and his second autobiographies.’56 This shift coincides with Douglass’ ‘embracing the new technology of photography and repeatedly using that technology to fashion and refashion an image of a physical self, elegantly clothed in his own unique genetic embodiment of that sui generis American ethnic self linked, inextricably and inevitably connected, to both black and white: “the mulatto.” Black, yes, but white as well. Black-ish.’57 In doing so, Douglass draws in his audience towards the tantalising yet frightening possibility that the identity of the presumed White observer lies with the observed Black. At the centre of it, all was a concentration on one

Ain’t I a Human 71 fact along that there had always been some degree of overlap sustained within these positions. Photography, in this way, becomes Douglass’ rhetorical strategy, through his selfstyling every opportunity before the camera represents a chance to show is ‘nearly white,’ this is as much as anybody around him could claim to be. He like his father before him, his master was one of those ‘adulterated’ types that hid themselves in plain sight through taking on refined middle class moirés and appearing in parlour rooms much the same as his son was now doing. The images, therefore, speak for themselves. The last image the world would ever see of him was a photograph taken of his dead body. This in some ways feels like a riposte to Agassiz’s determination to witness him and his ilk as yesterday’s man. In doing so, Douglass refuses his negation, but appears positively as a man finally resting within a White society, whose goal for many others like him was total negation. This is evident from Zealy’s daguerreotypes that these were not images of Africans per se, but a recording of their suffering brought on by the fundamental inherent defects surfacing. In Renty’s side view portrait, he appears to have great swelling on his neck. In Drana’s front view portrait, her breasts appear disfigured, the skin possibly scarred from being burnt (Figure 3.1). And then there were Delia’s tears that spoke to a different type of abuse taking place in an immediate sense—this time at the hands of the photographer himself. Taking Pleasure in the Painful Regard of Others Karen Halttunen has termed this taboo as a phenomenological logic that distinguishes itself specifically with context modernity itself; the ‘pornography of pain.’58 The ‘pornography of pain is that which represents pain as obscenely titillating precisely because the humanitarian sensibility deemed it unacceptable, taboo.’59 It is remarkable to consider the inversions necessary to perpetuate the perversions of slavery, such that the enslaved Black body itself had to be denied feeling in order for it to be summarily destroyed. That this was done so at the hands of the White sentimental ‘man of feeling,’ who ostensibly desired nothing more than to be ‘associated the “civilizing process”’ in the context of his colonial enterprise, can only be condoned by his natural ‘capacities for compassion and a reluctance to inflict pain’; i.e., his distinctly civilized emotions, as compared to other men’s ‘cruelty […] labelled savage or barbarous.’60 The moral philosophy that arose in eighteenth-century England held that misery is a quality that must be seen to be appreciated. The attitude would mature into the nineteenth century to ‘become an integral part of the humanitarian sensibility,’ meaning that sympathy and arousal became intimately linked within the sentimental imagination.61 Halttunen goes on to describe a situation where ‘viewing the pain of another, from the outset lent itself to an aggressive form of voyeurism in which the spectator identified not just with the sufferings of the virtuous victim but with the cruelty of his or her tormentor.’62 At the time that Zealy made his daguerreotypes, mid-nineteenth-century culture was one awash in violence and one that had an insatiable hunger for the visual depiction of lurid acts of violence that often intersected with sexualised cruelties that were often depicted visually through lithography in the print media of the age. Halttunen argues that by the early nineteenth century, ‘the spectacle of suffering’ had emerged as the ‘dominant convention of sexual pornography.’63 Zealy’s images, therefore, speak to a convention already long established in the United States, of picturing slaves as bodies, subject to an endless round of flogging. That his images begin with Agassiz’s chosen slaves stripped

72  Ain’t I a Human

Figure 3.1 ‘Drana country born, daughter of Jack Guinea. Plantation of B.F. Taylor, Esq.’ Daguerreotype taken by J.T. Zealy, Columbia, S.C., 1850, Peabody Museum, Harvard University.

down to the waist, before being entirely stripped, speaks metaphorical to the progress that was anticipated here of eventually inflicting them with unbridled pain. It was the promise of a violation to come that perhaps made these images available to a voyeuristic arousal of the flesh. The images here need not ‘realistically represent sexual or genital behavior’ in order to ‘eroticize pain’ and relate to sex in terms of indecency and as a crossover between

Ain’t I a Human 73

Figure 3.2 ‘Jem, Gullah, belonging to F.N. Green.’ Daguerreotype taken by J.T. Zealy, Columbia, S.C., 1850, Peabody Museum, Harvard University.

74  Ain’t I a Human ‘corporal punishment and illicit sexuality.’64 The revulsion and disgust Agassiz expressed when first encountering African Americans became something that he wishes to repeat again and again as a source of prurient interest awakening in him a particular passion that in many ways publicly defined his work. That these images should be chosen by him for wider circulation, perhaps speak to the inadequacy to fully arouse him—because of their blunted and muted nature as compared to what else was on offer culturally, and indeed, within scientific iconography of the time. What was missing from this tableau were the instruments of torture themselves that were most often featured in the scenes that showed the whippings of slaves; this is not to say not merely the gross display of whips, paddles, or brands, but rather the depiction of the observers who are often surrounded by these scenes of violence and whose gaze at the victim’s bare backs, exposed buttocks, and breasts made up perhaps the greater spectacle of this scene. Its inclusion provides the narrative basis for understanding the iconography of such implied torture, as well as the complexity of distress experienced within the body of the spectator to such acts. The degraded Black body that is the focus of Zealy’s daguerreotypical gazes is limited to the degree that it cannot technically capture such activity; however, in its stilling effects, it does much to extend this iconography one stage further in making such lingering effects racially ‘typical.’ The supplicant pose of each of Zealy’s framings speaks to this suffering as one based on the survival of ethnographic identities from Africa that are presently determining the condition of these bodies. This makes passivity a hereditary condition to the degree that it cannot be lifted and remains the preoccupation of White paternalism bent to capture and exploit it. If, as Zoe Trodd observes, ‘a slave society has to demonstrate enslavement, relying on the power of spectacle to create its prevailing order,’ then it can be to said of the Zealy daguerreotypes that their making is part of a ritual violence, which implies a ‘performative spectacle of dehumanisation within it.’65 Agassiz’s Global South Agassiz’s decision not to publicise these images is all the more striking because of his decision to subsequently go to Brazil in 1865 for the express purpose of making naked photographs of Rio’s African population in what was to be the final year of America’s Civil War. Brazil had been recognised as one of the world’s leading areas for daguerreotypy. The Emperor of Brazil, Dom Pedro II, was an avid follower of the new technology. He also had a ‘passionate interest in the natural sciences.’66 Dom Pedro was ‘a fashionable’ public figure, who soon acquired his own equipment, commissioned daguerreotypes of his family, and encouraged photography both an art form and for documentary purposes.67 Agassiz had an audience with Dom Pedro himself on the subject of ‘negro inferiority, mulatto degeneration and tropical decay,’ presenting to him the dangers of racial mixing as a threat to public safety in his country.68 This was ironic given that the foundations for Brazil’s nationhood were built upon the feature of its racial miscegenation as the source of its strength, bringing together, as it were, the Indian, the European, and the African to create a new functional type. There was a boon for going to Brazil to study such a racial phenomenon in the decades between the 1840s and 1860s. Agassiz’s visit would have been amongst a crowded field of pre-eminent European, British, and American naturalists, involved in studying the peoples of Brazil as well as various colonial collecting missions in and around the Tropics to benefit their nations at home. None appeared terribly bothered about Brazil being a slaving society. They commonly used slave labourers within the remit of their professional tasks. Nevertheless,

Ain’t I a Human 75 Agassiz took with him a letter from the US Secretary of State imploring him to support the Union side in the Civil War.69 Nancy Stepan identifies this as a contradiction, because of Brazil’s reliance on slavery, and yet it would have indeed benefited Dom Pedro to support the Union cause, because even prior to Lincoln’s administration, the US government was steadily making plans to send all freed slaves to the jungles of Africa, Central America, and South America, including Brazil, once the Civil War was won. Within that same time period, a Brazil led by Dom Pedro entertained similar ideas to Lincoln concerning the possibility of sending its freed slaves to Africa. Agassiz, who became a personal friend and advisor to Dom Pedro, for his part would have been conceptually delighted with the attention being paid to such a plan. The Brazil that Agassiz entered in 1865 was one that was economically booming thanks to America’s Civil War, causing the Confederate South to cease production of its cash crops in favour of food crops to feed their troops. Over time both the economies of the North and South would have been adversely affected in different ways by ‘Brazil having replaced the Confederacy as a primary exporter of cotton to Europe.’70 The wealth of the American Northeast would have been under considerable strain at this time, perhaps prompting the Agassiz to make haste southward as there were no guarantees that America would win the war. Similar to the situation in America, Brazil had officially abolished the slave trade in 1850, but during Agassiz’s 14-month stay in the country, slavery itself continued to be legal. In addition to cotton production, coffee was king in Brazil, and these two crops fuelled an internal slave trade not dissimilar to what was happening in the upper and lower South of the United States. Agassiz was accompanied during his stay in Brazil by his wife Elizabeth Cabot Cary Agassiz. Mrs. Agassiz adopted many of the superficial prejudices of her husband when it came to typing Brazil’s enslaved populations according to the purity of their blood. Whilst travelling to Brazil in aide of her husband’s work, ‘she notes the differences between the acculturated ladino slave, the “fine-looking athletic [negro] of a nobler type” in Minas Gerais, and the unintelligent newest arrival, the boçal.’71 The boçal were newly imported slaves from Africa, whereas the ladino slave was one of a product of racial mixing that had taken place over generations with Brazil. The boçal was technically subject to freedom because of the prohibition on slave importation into Brazil, whereas ladino slaves who were born in Brazil remained legally subject to their bondage. Ladinos were considered to be ethnic Brazilians through a combination of nature as well as nurture. Biologically they were the products of mixed marriages that resulted in a large proportion of them physiognomically registered as White. Ladinos were raised among the children of Whites and became culturally assimilated into Brazilian customs through those encounters, as well as through their standard education. This order was threatened by the illegal importation of Black Africans that contravened the nation’s abolition laws, and as a consequence, they were afforded a greater degree of freedom that the Ladino ‘mulatto’ population at mid-century. The prospect of their elevated status over the Ladino population created a fundamental contradiction in the social hierarchy of Brazilian slave society. The obvious moral solution would be to grant them equal liberated status, but the planter society of Brazil could hardly contemplate parting with their slaves amidst a booming agricultural economy and therefore their recourse was to insist that it was the newly arrived Africans who were, in essence, best suited to slavery. If law could not solve the dilemma of what to do with this group, then science could, by providing evidence that this group was inherently suited to bondage. If the abolition of law insisted them to be liberated, it would be on the most minimal of terms,

76  Ain’t I a Human as continued by custom to be seen by Brazilians as at the bottom of the social scale, because by nature, liberated Africans could not be free within themselves. A sentimental Mrs. Agassiz laments, ‘what will they do with this great gift of freedom?’72 The Brazilian government responded to this dilemma by making these newly arrived Africans wards of the state. They were then put to hard labour not dissimilar to the conditions of slavery. They were exiled from the metropolitan core of Brazil Rio de Janeiro in the uncultivated interior of the country to do the back-breaking work of building roads, and creating basic infrastructures for the development of provincial capitals. They were formed into a settler class of their own tasked with seizing parts of the interior for the imperial government over and above the claims of Brazil’s indigenous peoples. This labour effectively kept them racially segregated from Rio de Janeiro and at the same time, remaining engaged with extractive activities that enriched the imperial government, as opposed to Brazil’s elite planter class, fundamentally shifting the economic model on which the country would base its wealth in the second half of the nineteenth century as nation-state administering a biopolitical agenda. The United States was on a similar path as its Civil War was drawing to its conclusion. Beatriz Eugenia Rodríguez Balanta maintains that, as one of America’s leading scientists, in Brazil, Agassiz would have played a crucial role in promoting photography as a means of both ‘constructing and dissemination of racial discourses and stereotypes in the first moments of North American expansion in Latin America.’73 His journey set against the backdrop of ‘the abolition of forced labor in Brazil and the United States, and the symbolic construction of the nation-state’ would have been conducted not solely with the aim of promoting certain photographic viewing conventions associated with ethnology at that time, but perhaps would have more significantly ‘contributed to reassembling systems of dominance in which racial stigmatization stands as the organizing axis of the new republics.’74 This helps to make further sense of why the Agassizes arrived in Brazil, ‘just at the moment when the “black” body is enveloped in legal subjectivity.’75 If we take these propositions seriously, they lead to the conclusion that Agassiz’s trip to Brazil wasn’t as much to collect photographic information as it was to produce race itself on behalf of the furtherance of America’s imperial enterprise. Agassiz became adept at the use of the standard technologies of anthropology, during the Civil War. During the early phases of the war, he acted as ‘part of a research group that measured the troops of the American Union to determine what were the most significant physical dimensions commonly held amongst soldiers. Once in charge of such functions, he used then contemporary devices such as the andrometer or spirometer to take, record, and classify this data through instruments that were essentially the same as those used by anthropologists and criminologists during this period. He also advocated for ‘the inclusion of Afro-descendant soldiers in the sample to determine the differences between the racial types that made up the Army.’76 Rodríguez Balanta makes an extremely powerful argument when she asserts that European modernity relied upon that approach to be abandoned ‘at the end of the Civil War in the United States,’ in favour of a deploying ‘anthropometric photography’ capable of restoring ‘the “master” to his position of Sovereign.’77 Photography after the war ‘became a symbolic and political strategy,’ and in as much ‘that conflict’s central axis’ was about ‘the transmutation of the African body from merchandise to a political subject,’ this one was about the transmutation of the European body from person to a biopolitical subject.78 I would only diverge with her argument to the degree that Agassiz had a desire to acquire these bodies for himself for purposes of his own design. Rather, his racial

Ain’t I a Human 77 photography contributed to something far subtler to understanding than voyeurism alone would afford to this endeavour. Once installed within Brazil, Agassiz employs the services of none other than Dom Pedro’s professional photographer, Augusto Stahl, to provide him with daguerreotypes of newly arrived Africans that he similarly classified as pure racial types to the ones he selected in South Carolina. The daguerreotypes themselves are once again denuded individuals posed before the camera in three fixed positions: front, back, and side. However, something else is also taking place here, and that is the insertion of Mrs. Agassiz into these proceedings. In requiring her presence, Agassiz fundamentally shifts the terms of colonial power as it is being projected into this new era that allows the ‘master’ to do whatever he wants with the bodies of others. What is different here is that this is not necessarily through brute submission, but rather through ancillary consumption. The situation is no longer simply about the rights to dominate and torture Black bodies, but instead to immortalise the trappings of White power through their unlimited photographic intake. This is why Agassiz’s tool of choice in Brazil is the camera alone. On a superficial level, the camera aligns with his project to ostensibly ‘discover where the atavisms of the race were hiding.’79 At a deeper level, it aligns with his greater ambition ‘to build a “natural history” of the various human species’ through the simple comparison of ‘individuals of different types with each other, in the same way that naturalists compare specimens of different species.’80 To reinforce this differentiation, Agassiz does something seemingly rather unusual to the contemporary understanding of how scientific objectivity works. Rather than using his photographs of ‘Negroes’ to compare them to similar photographs of Whites, Agassiz contrasted his ‘Negro’ images with photographic images taken of classical Greek statues. This method comparison, of course, had no basis in scientific method, nor could be considered, even then, as a legitimate approach to the anthropological study of race. This method suggests that Agassiz had another object in mind altogether when he set out to Brazil before that war’s end. What Agassiz was trying to install here was a sense of the immutable and invulnerable within racial classification itself. Agassiz was not concerned with using photography ‘to translate the body into data,’ so much as he was with the use of anthropometric photography to design and shape such differences as a way to consolidate White power.81 In doing so, they had to build imperial identity essential through making Blackness its own artefact. The way this was achieved was by stripping back the photographic space itself so that it was impossible to locate these enslaved African bodies as existing within a specific time or place. In this way, they become their own universal currency, there to make a purchase on Whiteness as the category that bears history, and by extension, individuation as distinctly human. Agassiz’s photographs rob their Black subjects of specificity in the act of making them. There is no further requirement of displaying them for this reason; that their value has always already been collected on and as categories of being their race and sex are fundamentally interchangeable, whilst at the same time, being reduced to mere specimen. Their type in fact only exists as a multiplicity for Agassiz. His visual strategy then is one bent on disorientation, of producing more than is subject to requirement, making that production a generic determinism in its own right. They are the obverse of what sustains the portrayal of the White bourgeois subject as distinguishable and valuable. Situated amongst other signifiers of human belonging: clothing, books, lamps, umbrellas, and curtains that decorated domestic spaces, or embellished natural landscapes, Whiteness is positioned as the fulcrum of photographic meaning par excellence, bolstered within a specific point of reference, however contrived and mannered. The Agassizes simply must be there, as must their friends

78  Ain’t I a Human and relations. What exalts them is the way they are portrayed, and the places that admit them into their social and economic environments as though they already own the place. It is they who should by rights have opinions on how liberty and democracy are, in turn, furnished in such places for them to be registered as ‘modern, proprietary, consumer and cosmopolitan entities’ within themselves.82 In order for this all work, there needs to be an element of performance and here lies the true object of Agassiz’s missions down South; to petrify the Black body so as to preserve the impression of its inferiority for all posterity. At a time of political transition, no work could be more precious to the reunified power that was to become the United States as the next hegemon dictating how bodies, spaces, and resources might be figured. Blackness has to be put to use as a way for White Americans to imagine themselves as uniquely sovereign, powerful, and effective in putting not just their own, but the world’s others to work for them. The photographic universe fundamentally supported this need for the symbolic and political elaboration of White Americans as the natural leaders of this process of remaking the world through mastering its composition. Notes 1 Louis Agassiz, “Letter of 1863 to Thomas G. Cary.” In Museum Studies: An Anthology of Contexts. Edited by Bettina Messias Carbonell (Hoboken: Wiley, 2012), 125. 2 Agassiz, “Letter of 1863 to Thomas G. Cary,” 125. 3 Ibid., 125. 4 Ibid., 125. 5 Ibid., 125. 6 Ibid., 125. 7 Ibid., 125. 8 Ibid., 125. 9 Ibid., 125. 10 Ibid., 125. 11 Ibid., 125. 12 “Skulls In Print: Scientific Racism in the Transatlantic World.” University of Cambridge Research, March 19, 2014. https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/skulls-in-print-scientific-racismin-the-transatlantic-world. 13 “Skulls In Print: Scientific Racism in the Transatlantic World.” 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 Robert E. Bieder, “The Representations of Indian Bodies in Nineteenth-Century American Anthropology.” In Repatriation Reader: Who Owns American Indian Remains? Edited by Devon Abbott Mihesuah (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 24. 19 Bieder, “The Representations of Indian Bodies in Nineteenth-Century American Anthropology,” 24. 20 John P. Jackson and Nadine M. Weidman, Race, Racism, and Science: Social Impact and Interaction (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 47. 21 Agassiz quoted in Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1996), 77. 22 Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, 77. 23 Ibid., 77. 24 Ibid., 77. 25 Brian Wallis, “Black Bodies, White Science: The Slave Daguerreotypes of Louis Agassiz.” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 12 (1996): 102–106 at 104–105. https://www.jstor.org/ stable/2963000. 26 Wallis, “Black Bodies, White Science,” 105. 27 Saima S. Iqbal, “Louis Agassiz, Under a Microscope.” The Harvard Crimson, March 18, 2021. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2021/3/18/louis-agassiz-scrut/.

Ain’t I a Human 79 8 Ibid. 2 29 Wallis, “Black Bodies, White Science,” 104. 30 Ibid., 105. 31 Ibid., 106. 32 Frederick Douglass, “The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered, Address Delivered at Case Western Reserve College, July 12, 1854.” In Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2000), 288. 33 Douglass, “The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered,” 289–290. 34 Ibid., 290. 35 Gregory Stephens, On Racial Frontiers: The New Culture of Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, and Bob Marley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 2. 36 Stephens, On Racial Frontiers, 2. 37 Ibid., 2. 38 Douglass, “The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered,” 290. 39 Ibid., 290. 40 Ibid., 290. 41 Ibid., 290. 42 Ibid., 289. 43 Ibid., 289. 44 Ibid., 289. 45 Ibid., 289. 46 Marcy J. Dinius, The Camera and the Press: American Visual and Print Culture in the Age of the Daguerreotype (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 231. 47 Dinius, The Camera and the Press, 231. 48 Ibid., 231. 49 Ibid., 231. 50 Ibid., 232. 51 Henry Louis Gates, “Frederick Douglass’s Camera Obscura: Representing the Antislave ‘Clothed and in Their Own Form.’” Critical Inquiry 42, no. 1 (2015): 31–60 at 38. 52 Gates, “Frederick Douglass’s Camera Obscura,” 38. 53 Ibid., 38. 54 Ibid., 39. 55 Ibid., 39. 56 Ibid., 40. 57 Ibid., 45. 58 Karen Halttunen, “Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-American Culture.” The American Historical Review 100, no. 2 (1995): 303–334 at 304. 59 Halttunen, “Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-American Culture,” 303. 60 Ibid., 304. 61 Ibid., 304. 62 Ibid., 309. 63 Ibid., 317. 64 Ibid., 325. 65 Zoe Trodd, “Am I Still Not a Man and a Brother? Protest Memory in Contemporary Antislavery Visual Culture.” Slavery & Abolition 34, no. 2 (2013): 338–352 at 345. 66 Nancy Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 120. 67 Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature, 120. 68 Ibid., 125. 69 Ibid, 125, footnote 22. 70 Caroline Landau, “The Agassizes Take Brazil: The Foreigners’ Approach.” Latin American Travelogues, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Brown University. n.d., https:// library.brown.edu/cds/travelogues/landau.html. 71 Elizabeth Agassiz quoted in Laudau, “The Agassizes Take Brazil.” 72 Ibid. 73 Beatriz Eugenia Rodríguez Balanta, “Anthropometric Specimens and Picturesque Curiosities: The Photographic Orchestration of the ‘black” body’ (Brasil, Circa 1865).” Revista Ciencias de la Salud 10, no. 2 (2012): 223–242 at 224.

80  Ain’t I a Human 4 Balanta, “Anthropometric Specimens and Picturesque Curiosities.” 224. 7 75 Ibid., 224. 76 Ibid., 231. 77 Ibid., 231. 78 Ibid., 230. 79 Ibid., 231. 80 Ibid., 231. 81 Ibid., 231. 82 Ibid., 239.

Bibliography Agassiz, Louis. “Letter of 1863 to Thomas G. Cary.” In Museum Studies: An Anthology of Contexts. Edited by Bettina Messias Carbonell, Hoboken: Wiley, 2012. Balanta, Beatriz Eugenia Rodríguez. “Anthropometric Specimens and Picturesque Curiosities: The Photographic Orchestration of the ‘black” body’ (Brasil, Circa 1865).” Revista Ciencias de la Salud 10, no. 2 (2012): 223–242. http://www.scielo.org.co/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S169272732012000200005. Bieder, Robert E. “The Representations of Indian Bodies in Nineteenth-Century American Anthropology.” In Repatriation Reader: Who Owns American Indian Remains? 19–36. Edited by Devon Abbott Mihesuah, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000. Dinius, Marcy J., ‘“I Go to Liberia”: Following Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Africa.’ In Uncle Tom’s Cabins: The Transnational History of America’s Most Mutable Book, 59–78, Edited by Mihaylova, Stefka, and Tracy C Davis, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018. https://doi. org/10.3998/mpub.8057139. Douglass, Frederick. “The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered, Address Delivered at Case Western Reserve College, July 12, 1854.” In Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2000. Gates, Henry Louis. “Frederick Douglass’s Camera Obscura: Representing the Antislave ‘Clothed and in Their Own Form.’” Critical Inquiry 42, no. 1 (2015): 31–60. https://doi.org/10.1086/ 682995. Gould, Stephen Jay. The Mismeasure of Man. New York: Norton, 1996. Halttunen, Karen. “Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-American Culture.” The American Historical Review 100, no. 2 (1995): 303–334. https://doi.org/10.2307/2169001. Iqbal, Saima S. “Louis Agassiz, Under a Microscope.” The Harvard Crimson, March 18, 2021, https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2021/3/18/louis-agassiz-scrut/. Jackson, John P. and Nadine M Weidman. Race, Racism, and Science: Social Impact and Interaction. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2006. Landau, Caroline. “The Agassizes Take Brazil: The Foreigners’ Approach.” In Latin American Travelogues, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. Brown University, Providence, RI, https://library.brown.edu/cds/travelogues/landau.html “Skulls In Print: Scientific Racism in the Transatlantic World.” University of Cambridge, March 19, 2014. https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/skulls-in-print-scientific-racism-in-thetransatlantic-world. Stepan, Nancy. Picturing Tropical Nature. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001. Stephens, Gregory. On Racial Frontiers: The New Culture of Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, and Bob Marley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Trodd, Zoe. “Am I Still Not a Man and a Brother? Protest Memory in Contemporary Antislavery Visual Culture.” Slavery & Abolition 34, no. 2 (2013): 338–352. https://www.tandfonline.com/ loi/fsla20. Wallis, Brian. “Black Bodies, White Science: The Slave Daguerreotypes of Louis Agassiz.” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 12 (1996): 102–106. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2963000.

4

How the West Was Won America at the Great Exhibition of 1851

In order to contextualise America’s appearance at the Great Exhibition of 1851, it is critical to first understand the impetus of its offerings. Matthew Brady’s work, in particular, must go beyond the spectacle of enterprise in order to be seen to outpace the Old World as the proprietors of White homogeneity. Paul Gilmore’s insights into the significance of Brady’s work for a British audience are invaluable if we take seriously the brief he assigns to him; ‘to situate the middle class family and a model of artistic reproduction outside the realm of market exploitation.’1 In order to do so, Brady’s work must transcend the material limits of the daguerreotype so as envelop the gallery itself into the space of production. What is being manufactured within is a new version of respectability that is premised on ‘the revelatory rendering of interior character via visible external signs.’2 This is revolutionary to the degree that it suggests a reordering of space itself, turning the body into a site of projection. Gilmore argues that, ‘through this exteriorization of character, the daguerreotype gallery produced a vision of the United States as a homogeneously white, virtuous republic.’3 I would bring that argument one step further to suggest that within the context of the Great Exhibition it produced a vision of the United States as a heterogeneously White, speculative settlement. What was respectable about it lay at its surface, making of America a body that was imagined as readable only in contrast to what lay beneath its façade. In the British imagination, the American identity necessitated recourse to the Black(ened) bodies of African Americans and Indians to make itself materialise. By contrast, the British body knew no such requirement. A subsequent association of the American with animalistic passions served to reinforce ‘the racial unconscious of daguerreotypal practices’ ultimately as ethnographic practices.4 Therein, the photographs that hung in daguerreotype galleries did so at the behest of making fact the superiority of White manhood as a form of possession in its own right. Gilmore asserts that it is this characteristic that brings it back into proximity with trade, and moreover it is this situation that ‘continues to haunt daguerreotypy’ and dog it as an artform as it makes its way back across the Atlantic.5 It becomes the object of ridicule, as well as fascination, because it is understood by viewing audiences that this is an emergent form of White identification that is being put on display before them as a spectacle that, at the same time, requires the shadowing of Blackness to make it appear real. The delineation between the two is where art converges with science and photography itself it given rights to carry out its ethnographic role. The White middle class as a truly international phenomenon is being put to the test here and if it is found wanting, this risks the whole project of its uniformity. Blackness stands there generically at the periphery to all that is currently being portrayed here, DOI: 10.4324/9781003274797-5

82  How the West Was Won figured always as a marker of boundaries between man and beast, and as the remains of what has gone before to become an indispensable part of demarcating American culture limits between past and future. Gilmore observes that within the United States, ‘the best known daguerreotypal parlors rarely exhibited portraits of blacks and Indians.’6 Their absence within what stands with the American galleries at the Great Exhibition reflects that situation. However, they are not entirely excluded on the home front, when Brady stages his Gallery of Illustrious Americans in New York. Rather, ‘the placement of Indians at the exhibit, on the door posts, replicates the ethnographic logic of the daguerreotypes, which placed the Indians on the outskirts of humanity defined at its center by the respectability displayed in the portraits of eminent citizens and statesmen within the gallery.’7 A review of this display written by C. Edwards Lester, in the Photographic Art-Journal of New York in January of 1851, credits Brady’s works as being above that of ‘any artist in the world,’ based on his ability ‘to execute such faithful, life-like, and strikingly beautiful portraits of our public men.’8 Brady’s daguerreotypy ‘transfers the vital energy and living truth which are so conspicuous in works that are produced in our times. It will not be disputed that such a work as the Gallery of Illustrious Americans could not have been made before the art of Daguerre was discovered.’9 He concludes that daguerreotypes ‘will make posterity as familiar with the faces and forms of distinguished men, as are their own contemporaries.’10 Almost immediately this account runs to racial classification, as he proclaims, ‘there is about them a naturalness of flesh tint, and the extreme fidelity with which the prevailing expression of the face and the distinguishing hue of the complexion are brought out.’11 It was of no matter that Brady’s portraits were technically in Black and White, as clearly what is relevant for the viewer are the notability if their Whiteness. As these remarks were be applied to specifically to one man’s portrait, John C. Calhoun, one would assume from C. Edwards Lester’s description that he was a man in the flower of his youthful here, whereas the image itself ‘reveals his sunken features, devastated by the tuberculosis that would soon take his life.’12 In Ines Andrade’s estimation, ‘no amount of posing, clever lighting, or rendering could hide the malaise in Brady’s final photograph of Calhoun.’13 This comment refers to the fact that this was a portrait of a man in terminal illness. Brady printed his image in 1850, posthumously alongside others of his likeness in national catalogue for express purpose of having these exemplary specimens of men, bound together a nation, by virtue of their fundamental American characteristic: White face. Within John C. Calhoun’s portrait, C. Edwards Lester insists, ‘we find a nearer counterpart to that great man’s countenance than almost any thing we ever saw, either in oil, or in Daguerreotype. There is depth, and earnestness, and intensity, and spiritualism, which so eminently distinguish him from almost all other men, and which drew from the most critical of our journals the expression that “his face looked more like that of a seer than of an ordinary man.”’14 Surmise it to say, what he was foreseeing was the extinction of the African race. In this, he was a visionary of a sort. In his later life, Calhoun had famously argued that what was positive about slavery was that defined Americans ‘as a people.’15 In this, he sought to ‘appeal to facts. Never before has the black race of Central Africa, from the dawn of history to the present day, attained a condition so civilized and so improved, not only physically, but morally and intellectually’ as it had done under conditions of Southern slavery.16 Parallel to that development was a concurrent one where, ‘the white or European race, has not degenerated. It has kept pace with its brethren in other sections of the Union where slavery does not exist.’17 This is because the North and South both contain men who are ‘equal

How the West Was Won 83 in virtue, intelligence, patriotism, courage, disinterestedness, and all the high qualities which adorn our nature …,’ meaning their White nature.18 There are not multiple races of Whiteness making up the Union in its ‘present state of civilization,’ but rather ‘where two races of different origin’, this is ‘distinguished by color, and other physical differences, as well as intellectual,’ and when these ‘are brought together,’ ‘a positive good’ is achieved insofar as ‘a wealthy and civilized society’ quite rightly depends upon ‘one portion of the community […]’ living ‘on the labor of the other.’19 Calhoun’s remarks do not except one region from the other in that model of exploitation and imply that the exploitation of African Americans in the North differs little from that in the South. The difference is that the condition of society in the South allows for the exertion of a greater degree of control over these bodies, ‘which explains why it is that the political condition of the slaveholding States has been so much more stable and quiet than that of the North.’20 Calhoun, even in death, animated the division between North and South in America’s political imagination in ways that a decade later would ignite the nation into Civil War. Calhoun predicted that ‘they who imagine that the spirit now abroad in the North, will die away of itself without a shock or convulsion, have formed a very inadequate conception of its real character; it will continue to rise and spread, unless prompt and efficient measures to stay its progress be adopted.’21 What was required was a type of arrested development, for if the progress of abolition as a force in the Union was permitted to grow up unchecked, ‘by the necessary course of events, if left to themselves, we must become, finally, two people.’22 The natural exceptionalism of Whiteness itself would effectively risk being torn asunder. When asked by an associate to eulogise Calhoun in Congress on the event of his passing on March 31, 1850, US Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri sternly rebuked him by remarking, ‘He is not dead, sir—he is not dead. There may be no vitality in his body, but there is in his doctrines.’23 Benton was a strong Unionist and, in life, was one of Calhoun’s greatest foes. Perhaps it was Benton who was the seer at this moment, because a decade later, the country would be engulfed in a war that was less about slavery than it was about preserving slavery as the defining feature of how Whiteness was conceived and perpetuated as the basis for a ‘We the People’ of the United States. If Benton and his ilk were ill prepared to eulogise Calhoun, men like Brady would step into the breach through the distribution of his daguerreotypes. At mid-century, another form of politics was taking precedent that cares more for the past than the future, thus ‘so perfect have these likenesses been regarded, that there have been requests proffered from families, from societies, from publishers and engravers, and even from the committees of both Houses of Congress, as in the case of General Taylor, for permission to copy them in getting up memorials of those distinguished men after their death.’24 This imagery was the very thing to make the Union appear more perfect. A similar impetus comes into the manufacture of Calhoun’s image by Brady. Whilst contemporary accounts indicate that ‘Calhoun’s eyes were naturally sizeable,’ it is Brady who determined ‘his aggressive look out towards the viewer’ as a means of drawing ‘emphasis to them, making them appear larger as a result.’25 What is meant to be a physiognomic measurement becomes a trick of the lens, prompting audiences towards a conclusion about the man that is firstly conceptualised by his photographer. If the image is meant to convey Calhoun’s innate intelligence, it does so as the cost of rendering his character secondary to that imperative. A similar thing takes place when Brady casts his light to make the shape of his nose appear more aquiline, so that it read racially as White.

84  How the West Was Won Brady gave this same treatment to Abraham Lincoln so that he appeared more English in his countenance. Calhoun became a darling of The American Phrenological Journal, which ran a lengthy article on his facial structure in 1846, elaborating how ‘his features were a testament to his strength, courage, intelligence, and kindness’ (Figure 4.1).26 Ines Andrade comments on how ‘this love letter to Calhoun noticeably comprises a lengthy article,’ whilst the others ‘receive an only cursory reference.’27 The American Phrenological Journal had a large Southern readership, many of whom ‘were patrons of craniology, physiognomy, and phrenology’ scholarship and came from that region.28 Calhoun’s daguerreotypes became exhibition materials for an emerging racial science routed in the South and was employed to animate scientific discussions on the speaking circuit aimed at popular audiences. For Andrade, this ‘perhaps explains the description of one physiognomist that Calhoun’s features emblemized his character as a “champion of the South”—as though regional difference could also be understood through these fields.’29 Calhoun’s notoriety corresponds with a rising engagement with daguerreotypy as a scientific medium, capable of registering identity in ways that both emphasised and transcended regional and national difference, so as to complement Whiteness as an identity within itself. This feature was what gave it the ability to act as means of equating the South with modernity. The reconceptualisation of the Southern self, of course, was not limited to an analysis of Calhoun’s image. This indeed was an issue that was larger than the presentation of a Southern brand of racial supremacy. What it indicated, by contrast, was a means through Calhoun, for African Americans to be presented as nothing more than an object of White surveillance, hence the lively glint in his eye at the prospect of controlling them forever.

Figure 4.1  John C. Calhoun, 1855, by Matthew Brady, Library of Congress.

How the West Was Won 85 Brady welcomed Calhoun ‘into the pantheon of modern American heroes, on these very terms referring to him as “the most humane and indulgent of masters.”’30 Here was not a man in need of reform so much as preservation of a very particular sort. Brady made of Calhoun’s ‘Southerness’ not simply a virtue, but also an identity that could stand in for modernity itself. His greatness in death was ingrained by his fidelity to slaveholding as a principle if not fact of the Republic from which it was born. In this way, he becomes an indominable figure of the American landscape. All this begs the question of how English audiences would construe the appearance of this man. This understanding requires yet another detour through Blackness in order to understand Whiteness. This brings us to Frederick Douglass’s lecture tour of the British Isles in the years 1845–1847. An Exchange of Views Much of Douglass’s work involved leveraging British elites to provide financial assistance to bolster the anti-slavery cause in the United States. By the summer of 1846, he would have reached Scotland. During that leg of his itinerary, Griffith Black relays that Douglass has his head examined by the famed phrenologist George Combe in Edinburgh. Douglass would have been aware at the time of Combe’s reputation as one of the most prolific British phrenologist of the nineteenth century and as someone who had played a crucial role in bringing Morton’s Crania Americana into renown amongst Britain’s naturalist community. Combe did not merely endorse Morton’s work but also publicly espoused its affinity with his own views during a speaking tour of the United States in the years 1838–1840 that capitalised on his endorsement of racial determinism. Douglass had escaped slavery in the same year, when Combe commenced his tour. During his visit to the United States, Combe had on occasion stayed in Baltimore, the very city, that a fugitive Douglass had fled. In Combe’s ‘Notes on the United States of North America during a Phrenological Visit,’ he decries slavery as ‘a canker on the moral institution of the country, that must produce evil until it is removed.’31 Nevertheless, Combe remained comfortable with maintaining his belief in the natural inferiority of the African race based on the purported understanding that the brain of Africans and American Indians as inferior in size, particularly in the moral and intellectual regions, to that of the Anglo-Saxon race, and hence, the foundation of the natural superiority of the latter over both. Douglass may have wished for Combe to see him as a racial outlier. Whilst Combe did not dwell explicitly on Douglass’s mixed ancestry in his notes on his appearance, it was well known from Douglass’s biographical tract documenting the beginning of his life as a slave having been born to an enslaved mixed-race African and American Indian woman and the Irish man who owned her on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. In his diary, Combe recorded an account of his breakfast with Douglass at his home in Edinburgh on June 8, 1846, where it seems he took measurements: ‘His head is very high from the ear to Firmness & to Benevolence, and the line forward from the ear is long. The base is full. … Ideality & Wit moderate: The lower ridge & middle perpendicular line of the frontal lobe are large. … The head is well balanced, and his manner is that of a born gentleman, it is soft, quiet, yet firm: His manner of speaking is deliberate, but natural & without embarrassment. His style of language & pronunciation are remarkably fine; and altogether he is a very interesting man … one cannot realize his having been born & reared in slavery.’32 Combe’s diary reveals how impressed he was with Douglass by essentially pointing to his ‘“European” or “Anglo-Saxon”’

86  How the West Was Won characteristics.33 Douglass’s acquiescence to such as assessment of himself confirms his appearance as a sort of racial outlier and relates conspicuously back to Douglass’s conviction that ‘he had “reason to love England.”’34 For Vanessa D. Dickerson, what makes this sentiment so awkwardly ‘compelling is that it is voiced during a century that saw the nation colonize other, often darker-skinned people and also saw Britain contribute its share of so-called empirical evidence to the European underwriting of biological determinism and scientific racism.’35 As for Combe, his reasons to be enamoured with the United States generally, and Douglass, specifically, can be explained by the fact that it became de rigour amongst a certain privileged class of Britons to travel to America in the 1830s and 1840s to report upon their findings with regard to ‘its red and black men and women.’36 Travelogues, books, and essays were produced to register a fascination not with America’s White culture, but rather its Black(end) one. Interest in Native Americans in these accounts was in many ways overshadowed by a preoccupation with the enslaved African American body. This meant for the average Briton there was a much more vivid picture of the American South as the real America, as opposed to the American North or American West. ‘As late as 1853 Thackery still experienced blacks in America as one of the single defining features of the country. In a letter written to his mother during the first of two of his two trips to the United States, he confessed that “I feel as if my travels had just begun there was scarce any sensation of novelty until now when the slaves come on the scene; and straightway the country assumes the aspect of queerest interest.”’37 At midcentury, America differentiated itself culturally from Britain solely through this feature of slavery. Whilst it was certainly possible for visitors to casually interact with free Blacks in the North and indeed, to witness brutality inflicted upon them at the hands of Whites, these encounters were not classed as ‘authentic’ representations of the African American experience. It was only in the South that one could gain a true measure of their situation. The 1830s and 1840s were decades visually defined by the mass circulation of imagery of slaves for sale in newspapers. Slave advertisements depicted Black bodies marked with irons, mangled, scared, and burnt and tortured in every conceivable way, their subsequently lost or destroyed body parts now typified as characteristics. This promoted the queerest of interests amongst a White British audience, who could readily partake in such information, whilst at the same time feigning innocence for their part in this miserable trade. Scenes of slavery alone did not satisfy the grizzly imaginations of the rarefied British tourist eager to witness the institution at play. The British tourist gained an elicit form of pleasure from the ‘Negro’ slave’s apparent humility towards them. Moreover, their presence was revered by the White Southern aristocrat who sought to emulate their culture, regarding the English as their ethnic progenitors. In the American North, reverence for British hegemony and the assignment of moral prestige came from efforts within Britain to philanthropically purchase the freedom of exceptional Black figures from their wicked White American slaveowners. This practice helped to distance it from the taint of its own association with slavery abolished a mere decade earlier. The British abolition movement itself was an overwhelmingly White enterprise having more to do with concerns for free trade, rather than free people. It, nonetheless, covered itself internationally and in particular in America, in a band of glory. The somewhat dubious attentions it paid to figures like Douglass spoke to other unreformed behaviours in British society that continued to align it with visceral attitudes to Blackness that were in many respects not dissimilar to what would take place in the United States.

How the West Was Won 87 Alan J. Rice and Martin Crawford raise the spectre of a sexual interest in Douglass as he tours the British Isles, by White female upper class abolitionist who insist on ‘petting’ him. ‘The word which hints at the indulgence given to a domesticated animal, uncomfortably resembles the language used by slaveholders about their favourite slaves.’38 These women had literally purchased him in order to ‘free’ him from his former bonds of slavery, and in doing so, they had embroiled him in another form of transactional relation that required that he appear ‘available’ to them. This makes Britain a place of sexual disease for a liberated ‘mulatto.’ young man, ‘undermining Douglass’s fond hope of a Britain “where no delicate noses grow deformed in my presence.”’39 The ‘delicate noses’ here might, as Rice and Crawford contend, have ‘been more discreet,’ but in reality, they were no less seen as corruptible.40 What was always at issue was Douglass’s sexual attractiveness and its draw for the ‘noses’ of young highly educated women who might fail to remain idle, as much as he failed to remain persistent in his moral cause. As Dickerson points out, slavery in Britain was only outlawed by the 1830s in the British West Indies, ‘because it became commercially obsolete,’ rather than for any strictly moral imperative against what had happened to ‘Africans on English soil or finally in British colonies.’41 Arguments to the contrary would have rung false within the framework of a British Victorian world still very much involved in abuses of Black and Brown peoples, with the worse abuses yet to come in India and Africa. The Show and Tell of Races Charles Dickens was slated to meet the famed former slave during his tour of Britain but in the end did not, due to prior engagements. His interest in Douglass in no way conflicted with his view that those from Africa, the West Indies, or Ireland for that matter were burdened with a lesser development than his own. According to his biographer Peter Ackroyd, Dickens was ‘a racist of the most “egregious” kind […] who came close to supporting the Confederate side in the American Civil War and on one occasion observed in a letter that “… the old, untidy, incapable, lounging, shambling, serves you as a free man. Free of course he ought to be, but the stupendous absurdity of making him a voter glares out of every role of his eye, stretch of his mouth, bump of his head. I have a strong impression the race must fade out the States very fast.”’42 In the progressive march of civilisation, liberals, like Dickens, were convinced the problem of what to do with such ‘savages; would, quite naturally, take care of itself.’43 If anything, for Dickens, the institution of slavery protected those who could scarcely be charged with looking after themselves nor their own interests. Without benevolent, paternalistic care, these subclasses of humans would quickly perish from the earth. The solution for Dickens and his liberal ilk was to have the African race degraded by slavery, ‘raised’ so that their higher impulses would be awakened and their minds developed in order to conform with the moral standards assigned to the White man. Whilst he could never be said to be his equal, there would be some value to be gleaned yet from a present multitude of slaves, transformed ‘by slow degrees’ [into] a race of free labourers far more efficient than the present gangs, while the yearly increasing surplus of Black population educated into love of freedom would pass over to Liberia and form a nation on the coast of Africa, whereof ‘America might boast for ever.’44 Dickens writes with great enthusiasm about how ‘the eight or ten thousand civilised ‘negroes’ from America exert their influence upon three hundred thousand natives who

88  How the West Was Won are living on Liberian soil, consenting to the laws and customs of their civilised society.’45 These civilised ‘negroes’ have assumed the position of their former White masters and have similarly imposed the English language and Christianity on ‘fifty thousand’ of these savage natives who do the heavy labour for the African American Liberians, by harvesting ‘coffee and cacao, export palm-oil, camwood, ivory, rice, gold-dust, and other things;’ to be exported to wealthy White consumers elsewhere through ‘their port of Monrovia being tolerably familiar with ships.’46 Nothing is said of their intergenerational familiarity with such ships coming as result of being human cargo on them. In now assuming the position of plantation owners, rather than plantation labourers, Dickens acknowledges, ‘there is of course, room for much growth; their farms are at present little more than country gardens, and they are under the disadvantage of not yet having succeeded in the attempt to maintain horses or oxen in their country.’47 When the African American Liberians do so, meaning make Liberia resemble the American South, they will have achieved the brief assigned to them by the intellectually superior White Americans, who, ‘deserve credit for having, in the first instance, established this Liberian outlet for the best class of their free negro population.’48 It would have been understood by Dickens’s contemporary audience that the best of class of ‘negro’ was the ‘mulatto’. Dickens opines that ‘the resources of the two colonies of Liberia, and Maryland in Liberia, have been so limited, that, little as they may have done, they deserve full credit for the achievement of remarkable results.’49 Here he is referring to Douglass’s people, slaves born of a White male master and a female African slave, who had been born in Baltimore or elsewhere in Maryland who came initially to settle the West African colony; some of whom came under conditions of free will, and others of coercion. The philosophy that fostered this endeavour was premised on a belief that freed Black people could never be integrated into White American society. Dickens was convinced that ‘Negro labour will become every year less in demand as the number of Irish and other emigrants increases in America.’50 Liberia was advertised as a place where a free ‘Negro’ finally becomes a ‘man.’ In the case of the enslaved, the situation was much less attractive, insofar as their enslavers freed or manumitted them in their wills on the condition that they emigrate to Liberia. In either case, both groups embraced the prospect of ascending the racial ladder, but becoming the ‘Whites’ of their new colonial society. Dickens’s enthusiasm for colonisation is something that must be contrasted with his growing distaste for anti-slavery literature and the limits of what can be done for ‘the wretched Slave; by pathetic pictures of his sufferings and by the representations in deservedly black colors of his oppressors.’51 As the next decades progressed, and ultimately culminated in Civil War in the United States, Dickens would increasingly view slave narratives such as Douglass’s with derision in league with his growing ambivalence towards anti-slavery positions. Ultimately, his disgust would be towards the hypocritical ways in which the institution of slavery was lamented by White abolitionists in Britain and the United States. Dickens’s formerly liberal position would veer towards conservatism and outright hostility towards Blacks in his later years. This tendency, however, went back much further with Dickens, in regard to his judgement of Douglass in particular, as evidenced by his response to a Dublin edition of Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of his life as a slave printed in 1845 to coincide with his arrival there. Julia Sun-Joo Lee recounts an incident where Dickens sends a copy of the book to his friend the English actor William Macready on the eve his tour of America on March 17, 1847. Macready was generally acknowledged to be the greatest Shakespearian actor of

How the West Was Won 89 the Victorian era, enjoying success both in Britain and in America. Dickens introduces the volume to Macready in an accompanying letter by simply saying ‘here is Frederick Douglass,’ and then sometime later in that same letter abruptly stating, ‘to return to Frederick Douglass. There was such a hideous and abominable portrait of him in the book, that I have torn it out, fearing it might set you, by anticipation, against the narrative.’52 What might have set Dickens on edge was that the Dublin edition displayed an engraving of Douglass in which he appears every inch the bemused gentlemen, well dressed, in the attire of a Victorian man of means. Lee observes a Douglass that is ‘stiffly posed, with an elongated face and nose, prominent cheekbones, stylised hair and truncated bust.’53 In other words, Douglass is made to look ‘White’. This contrasted sharply with the engraving that appeared as the frontispiece of the American edition published that same year, where his hair appears kinked, his nose more bulbous, his lips fuller, his chin softer, and his breast wider. His complexion appears almost dappled in shadow, presenting him with a most uneven skin tone. Douglass is noted to have taken issue with the Dublin portrait in its attempts to whitewash him, making him appear more docile than anyone who had fought their way out of slavery reasonably had a right to be. Lee refers her to Douglass’ ‘writing in the pages of his abolitionist newspaper The North Star,’ where he ‘excoriates the artist for rendering him “a much more kindly and amicable expression than is generally though to characterize the face of a fugitive slave.”’54 This was not a good look for a man whose newspaper was wholly funded by White British abolitionists, set on having for themselves the genuine article in Douglass. The White artist’s choices of ‘high cheek bones, distended nostrils, depressed nose, thick lips and retreating foreheads,’ as a ‘gross exaggeration’ that threatened his credibility and therefore, his livelihood.55 The ‘fanciful’ engravings could not stand the test of ‘reality’, and therefore, the subsequent engravings for his publications would be based on daguerreotypes which would display his physiognomic characteristics in their standard glory (Figure 4.2). The judgement of him made by science, rather than art. This is borne out in the language of the day, where the Cork Examiner of October 15, 1845, describes Douglass as: Evidently, from his colour and conformation, descended from parents of different races, his appearance is singularly pleasing and agreeable. The hue of his face and hands is rather a yellow brown or bronze, while there is little, if anything, in his features of that peculiar prominence of lower face, thickness of lips, and flatness of nose, which peculiarly characterize the true Negro type. The article goes on to assert that: many supposed that he had not been a slave—he was so different from all their notions of what a slave was or could be.56 Dickens’s repulsion towards him would only be heightened by such an assessment because for him, Douglass was nonetheless passing himself off as ‘Negro’ for commercial gain and this, in itself, made the volume of dubious character. Douglass was profiting from cultural appropriation, and this, for Dickens, was what made him little more than an imitator. Macready, therefore, should appreciate him on that level and credit him for little more. Douglass fit the bill of tireless performer, who in the first four months of

90  How the West Was Won

Figure 4.2  Composite of several images of Frederick Douglass, 1840s thorough 1890s.

his stay in Britain has amassed 50 public appearances.57 These lectures were showcases of the performer where the fugitive slave was required to literally act out their ‘escape and “resurrection”’ as freed men before public audiences.58 Their livelihoods depended on such talents. In mid-nineteenth century London, Lee recounts, figures, like Douglass paraded themselves in a crowded field, replete with performers eager to satisfy ‘the public’s appetite for black music, humor and stories.’59 The figure of the ‘Negro’ type was a source of limitless source of fascination and amusement appealing every class of White onlooker. Some of those taking part in the action were in ‘blackface’ and this is the tacit indictment Dickens makes of Douglass as the Britain’s sentimental favourite and leading man of popular slave narrative.60 Lee points to the sensationalism that lends aura to him as a figure whose background is associated with physical and sexual violence, who now presents himself remarkably, thrillingly like a gentlemen; his image traded as a sort of respectable ‘pornography’ and openly coveted by middle-class women. These photographs became their own genre, a prototype to what would become widely recognised as the ‘New Negro’ type in the latter decades of the century following on from the abolition of slavery on both sides of the Atlantic. The popularity of Dickens’s attitudes across the British Isles will become wholly apparent when Frederick Douglass arrives in Ireland first stop on his tour of Britain. He travelled from Liverpool and stayed with White abolitionists across the country, visiting the major cities of Belfast, Dublin, and Limerick, as well as visiting the Giants Causeway

How the West Was Won 91 in the north. Douglass begins his tour by appealing to the idea of himself as an Irishman. But despite his claims linking his plight to what existed there, Douglass held the opinion that there was nothing like American slavery on the soil on which he now stood. The Cork Examiner of October 15, 1845 reported of Douglass’s insistence that he stood before the Irish people as a slave; ‘a slave not in the ordinary sense of the term, but in its real and intrinsic meaning.’61 In order to appreciate this situation, Lee Jenkins maintains that we have refer back to the evolution of understanding the condition of slavery dating back to the 1780s when it became politically expedient to equate Ireland’s the domestic condition with the condition of slavery in the American South. This rhetoric was a product of British radicalism, when ‘almost without exception, radicals linked their own plight to that of slaves.’62 By the 1840s, such rhetoric was no longer meaningful as, many Irish resisted even metaphorical equations between their lot and that of the American slave. Jenkins asserts that Irish working class were ‘apathetic to the antislavery cause and hostile to attempts on the part of abolitionists to make common cause between the American slave and the Irish immigrant.’63 Much of these attitudes fissured amongst religious and class lines, and those same resentments were laid bare during the race riots in America cities during the 1840s that shattered the idea of a semblance of cause or identity between the immigrant Irish and freed African Americans. Abolitionists on both sides of the Atlantic were predominantly Protestant and allied to empire which required the furtherance of racialisation as an ethos for disciplining the global order. Jenkins observes that Douglass, upon entering Ireland, had to be aware of the Anglo-Saxon’s superiority being based on the perception of the Irishman inferiority, as well that the ‘Negro’ and that the two together presented a veritable paragon of debasement according to the science of ethnology, followed quickly on debasement of Darwinism into a social typology that suggested that what the Irishman shared in common with the ‘Negro’ was his biological recourse to a simian ancestry.64 By Victorian standards, there was a common colonial geography linking Ireland to Africa as the world’s source of ridiculed and detested labour. This connection was something that Douglass as every turn he endeavoured to distance himself from and, yet at point, had to strategically embrace throughout his stay. Douglass encountered on his visit two Irelands; one where ‘he dined with upper class gentlemen intrigued to hear his story,’ including ‘the Lord Mayor of Dublin’ and the other a place of dire poverty, where Douglass’s celebrity met with violent resentment.65 Furthermore, ‘on several occasions in Belfast, graffiti covered the advertisements of his speeches, demanding he be sent back to America. This was scarcely written about in Douglass’s writing, for he wanted to create a strong contrast to the United States. The United Kingdom was a land of freedom, the United States was not.’66 Ireland, however, was in no way a country on par with the United States, rather it was ‘an emerging nationstate and a colony of the world’s largest empire.’67 Douglass saw Ireland through the lens of Britain. Once there, Douglass literally has to accede to Whiteness to concede to his audience. Firstly, on the level of his physical expression and, secondly, on the level of his bourgeois manhood. This was the case because on both sides of the Atlantic, racial prejudice, permeated abolitionism. Douglass’s American credentials are activated by principles of class and conduct that mimic those of American liberals at home, so that effectively he can virtue signal in a way that is apparently White. In practice that meant as Fionnghuala Sweeney asserts, ‘as part of his ongoing self-fashioning, Douglass the American ex-slave becomes Douglass the American expatriate American, the voice of civilization, morality and modernity and

92  How the West Was Won policing the discursive perimeter of nativist standards.’68 He effectively adopts British stereotypes of the Irish, which suggest that the Irish are unfit for freedom because they lack discipline themselves. This is, of course, the same argument that will be used against plantation slaves to deny them freedom until they are sufficiently trained by their masters to accept it.69 Sweeny’s take on this adds a racial dimension here to Douglass’s decision to side with a British perspective in judging the Irish. In doing so, she argues Douglass is able to shift focus from the racial scientific paradigm that dealt with ‘shades of skin tone,’ to one ‘that censures forms of moral degeneracy.’70 In order to do this, Douglass must make a virtue of his hybridity as a new breed of transatlantic type, a product of a mongrel White supremacist nation that occasions itself through slavery. It does not stop there but creates a new type of being altogether in the ‘mulatto’ which presents the prospect of an even newer type of racialised body fit for contemplation. ‘There the new, hybrid American nation-subject can summon itself into existence by activating this new technology of the self.’71 This new type’s perfect complement was the photograph. Therefore, it was not coincidental that Douglass elects to make himself the most photographed public figure of the nineteenth century. In Britain, Douglass becomes part of a liberal movement that will progressively overtake conservatism, in jettisoning the racial paradigms that undergird slavery in order to replace them with specific moral and behavioural standards for inclusion in the pantheon of mankind. Blackness, in this way, has a chance to emerge from the geographic, discursive, and ethnic racial margins, into the centre of modernity and to make the cosmopolitan a type that distinguishes itself by being non-native. Thus, Blackness is able to travel the imaginary circuit from exoticism to authenticity as the century progresses, largely due to the fact that Douglass obtains agency from White Britons in order to conceive this identity as fully human. Douglass’s American Perspective Douglass, over the course of two years, manages to make himself synonymous with ‘Americanness’. That, which is ‘cancelled’ by the Irish working class, was of no matter to him, because this was not his preferred audience. If autobiography was the great authenticating device of the first half of the nineteenth century for the African American, in the second half it became photography. For freed slaves acting as cultural influencers, image literally becomes everything. Their image simply had to move from the distress of slavery to the impress of class and morality, overwhelmingly borrowed from White iconography. The outrage for upper class Britons seeing Brady’s collection of Illustrious Americans was the singular omission of Douglass from their midst. As it was, Brady won’t photograph him for another 30 years, by which point he is a grizzled elder. For his part, Douglass in his prime used his photographic body to outclass the Whites who looked upon him with judgement. If we compare daguerreotypes of Douglass taken in 1841 and 1852, her appears far ‘Blacker’ in the former than the latter, his public persona, projecting a continually evolving self towards an appearance of apparent ‘Whiteness’. By doing so, he was defying the static foundations of naturalism, which held that both slavery and racism were predicated on the fact that people of a certain race are somehow immutably burdened by their inferior composition. Douglass’s fluid conception of the self allowed for his portraits to prove his capacity for evolution over the course years versus millennia. From the point of gaining his

How the West Was Won 93 freedom, Douglass becomes a visionary quantity in his own right, wise to the prophetic capacity of the photographic to pronounce the birth of statesmen like Lincoln. The most noticeable visual marker of his continual evolution is his facial hair and hairstyles signally his refinement of American tastes and their likeness abroad as he attained his own trajectory of upward social mobility. Ironically, Ireland affords Douglass the opportunity to first dispossess himself of his paternal Irishness, before going any further on this quest of self-transformation. What he was really seeking was an equivalency with a much older version of nativity found within the White English body. This means that effectively Douglass was aspiring to conform to the raced and gendered formulations of national identity founded within it. However, in a Victorian context, this would have construed ‘“Englishness” as white, masculine, and pure, and “Americanness” as black, feminine, and impure.’72 This presented Douglass with a sales problem. In his own words written in a letter to White American abolitionist grandee Francis Jackson from the Royal Hotel in Dundee, Scotland on January 29, 1846, he complains that he is ‘hardly black enough for British tastes.’73 Douglass begins his letter by thanking Jackson for playing no small part in transforming him from ‘a stranger, rough, unpolished, just from the bellows-handle in Richmond’s brass foundry in New Bedford,’ who was ‘scarce able to write two sentences of the English language correctly’, into someone when Jackson took him into his ‘drawing room, welcomed me to [his] table, put [Douglass] in [his] best bed, and treated [Douglass] in every way as an equal brother at a time when to do so was to expose [Jackson] to the hot displeasure of nearly all your neighbours.’74 What Douglass is describing corresponds to Dickens’s gradualist, paternalistic formulation of how to bring up a Black man towards the rudiments of civilisation. Douglass’s remarks on how in Scotland ‘scarcely a stream but has been poured into song, or a hill that is not associated with some fierce and bloody conflict between liberty and slavery.’75 What he fails to mention explicitly in this comment is England’s contentious colonial relationship with Scotland. Its forced Union with England, infamous Battle of Culloden, and the devastation of the highland clearances as all examples of the brutality it faced at the hands of the English. Scots struggled, to use Douglass’s words, ‘in deadly conflict for supremacy, causing those grand old hills to run blood-warming cold steel in the others heart.’76 By 1846, Douglass exclaims that he is a position from his contemporary perch in Scotland to ‘thank God liberty is no longer to be contended for and gained by instruments of death. A higher, a nobler, a mightier than carnal weapon is placed into our hands—one which hurls defiance at all the improvements of carnal warfare. It is the righteous appeal to the understanding and the heart—with this we can withstand the fieriest of all the darts of perdition itself.’77 Scots as a mid-tier order of Whiteness were now trained in the capacity for reason, over their primal recourse to use of brute force. Douglass argues that America could learn much from Scotland sentimental embrace of Anglicism. These were the values of Sir Walter Scott, the very man whose character allowed Douglass to reinvent his origin story. Scott promoted values of objectivity and moderation in his fictional works. Politically he espoused an end to violence between the English and the Scottish and threw his support, instead behind conservative English politics which sought to mitigate the rising energies of revolution felt elsewhere in Europe at this time. Scott, himself an aristocrat and progeny of the upper class of Scotland, played a pivotal role in bringing King George IV to Scotland in 1822. His visit was intended to inspire a shining image of unity between the two nations, by accentuating the wealth that England had brought to

94  How the West Was Won Scotland through its various imperial projects involving global trade. Less commented upon was its newer involvement in plunder and enslavement on a global scale. Scott was determined to emphasise the positive aspects of the past relationship, while glossing over the age of quasi-medieval blood-letting between the two sides. There was something for everyone here to celebrate, those divested of their lands or displaced in their livelihoods in the clearances went onto obtain wealth elsewhere through the nation’s urban industrialisation and involvement with mercantilism abroad. The empire was the agent bringing Scotland into a new era of lucrative and peaceful coexistence with England. This reordering of attention was crucial at a time when Britain was facing a rivalry elsewhere, and that was with America as a rising imperial power. By the time that Douglass arrives on the scene, America’s wealth and resources have come to rival that any of other nation. Douglass writes, ‘I see that America is boasting of her naval, and military power—let her boast—she may build her walls and her forts making them proof against ball and bomb. But while there is a single voice in her midst to charge home upon her the duty of emancipation, neither her army nor her navy can protect her from the gnawing of a guilty conscience.’78 Incredibly, Douglass makes no mention whatsoever of Scotland’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade as a product of the Union, nor the relationship between Scottish mercantilism and the expansion of plantation slavery in the British Caribbean colonies that generated much of the wealth that Douglass was observing all around him; much if it garnered through enslaved labour. Beyond that, wealth earnt through enslavement played a direct role in the eviction of Highlanders in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Nora McGreevy reports that ‘the majority of these purchases took place between 1790 and 1855, with peak slavery-related sales taking place in the late 1830s. These sales coincide with a period in which the British Parliament paid out roughly £20 million to “reimburse” former enslavers for their financial losses after the British Empire formally abolished slavery in 1833. (According to The Scotsman, this compensation amounts to more than £2 billion, or $2.6 billion USD, today.)’79 McGreevy adds, that ‘Scottish merchants played a key role in the trade of enslaved people, and many Scots owned humans directly, especially in countries along the West African coast and in the West Indies.’80 This does much to contradict the image Douglass is purporting here of the Scots as a nation of enlightened abolitionists and liberal champions of liberty. Much of the substantial wealth he witnessed before came from colonial plantations owned by Scots that continued to yield ample profits even after the abolition of slavery by paying their former slaves nominal wages to do the same work they did as slaves now acting as subsistence workers. The Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 would have been another source of revenue for these plantation owners, positioned by it to claim vast sums for the loss of their property, meaning the bodies of these same would-be workers. Compensation regularly ran into the equivalent of millions when updated to today’s standards. This money was not necessarily reinvested in the plantations themselves, but rather much of it was taken up with the purchase of speculative land deals to acquire and monopolise control of estates across the Highlands, thus ‘ensuring that they and their descendants would become one of the largest landed proprietors in the north of Scotland, largely thanks to the profits of slavery.’81 It is likely the funds being raised by Douglass to in part secure his own release came indirectly from slavery. Yvonne Singh describes how slavery was woven into the Scottish economy at every conceivable level during the eighteenth century and the ‘economic benefits of slavery had a trickle-down effect on every part of the Scottish economy: there was a boom in herring

How the West Was Won 95 fishing in the Highland lochs, as this salted-down fish was a major export to the Caribbean as a protein-rich source of slave nutrition. Similarly, in the Outer Hebrides, many workers were employed in the manufacture of rough linen, known as slave cloth, for export to the colonies.’82 The class system of Britain translated itself over to the Caribbean with plantation owners at the top of the hierarchy, the middle class acting as clerks, bookkeepers, and doctors and the working class as overseers, carpenters, gardeners, and tradesmen. The colour line also travelled over, producing its own ‘mulatto’ classes through the endemic sexual exploitation of the enslaved Black population. When slavery was formally abolished, Highlanders immediately sought ‘a new source of cheap and easily controlled labour’ and found them through the indenture of Indians to the Caribbean.83 At home, the Highland clearances, involving tens of thousands of Highlanders being forcibly evicted from their homes to make way for large-scale sheep farming, bore an uncomfortable likeness to techniques that would be applied simultaneously in the clearance and destruction of tribal life in the American West, insofar as it forced indigenous populations from their ancestral lands, burned their homes, sold survivors into slavery, and forcibly assimilated them into a settler culture. Douglass does not seem to be focused on that history whatsoever in his critique of the present position of the free Church in Scotland, on grounds that it solicited money from churches in the United States that religiously condoned slavery. Douglass, as an American abolitionist, makes it his business to vociferously persuade them to return what amounts to ‘four thousand pounds sterling’ of their ‘ill-gotten gain’ with the idea being that they ‘return it to the Slaveholders.’84 Absent from this is any reference to the fundraising figures such as Douglass are doing within the British Isles, without acknowledging that doing so poses its own prospect of a ‘union with Slaveholders’ and within that their own recourse as free men back to the United States, as one dependent on their own fraught acceptance of ‘the blood-stained money.’85 Douglass observes that, ‘under these rallying cries, old Scotland boils like a pot.’86 At this moment and for his reader, Douglass is more than happy to opine that he ‘half think[s] if the free Church had for a moment supposed that her conduct would have been arraigned before the Scottish people by thorough Garrisonians as H. C. Wright, James N. Buffum and myself, she would never have taken the money. She thought to get the gold and nobody see her. It was a sad mistake. It would indeed be a grand anti-slavery triumph if we could get her to send back the money. It would break upon the confounded Slaveholders and their [allies] like a clap from the sky. We shall continue to deal our blows upon them—crying out disgorge— disgorge—disgorge your horrid plunder and to this cry the great mass of the people have cried Amen, Amen.’87 This begs this question of what would it take for Scotland as a nation to be disgorged from the entire premise of her Union with England being one riddled in plunder and dispossession. Douglass, for his part, takes the money. This is true in sense that since his arrival, he has ‘disposed of nearly all the first Edition of my Narrative and am publishing a second which will be out about the sixteenth of February. I realize enough from it to meet my expenses. I shall probably remain in Scotland till the middle of March. I shall then proceed to England, as I have not yet delivered a single lecture on Slavery in that country. It is quite an advantage to be a n——r here.’88 Such sentiment belies what nature of product Douglass is selling back to British Slaveholders. Douglass writes, ‘by keeping my hair as woolly as possible I make out to pass for at least for half a Negro at any rate. My good friend Buffum finds the tables turned upon him here completely—the people lavish nearly all their attention on the Negro. I can easily understand that such a state of things

96  How the West Was Won would greatly embarrass a person with less sense than he, but he stems the current thus far nobly.’89 In the Cork Examiner article of October 15, 1845, Buffum is referred, to as compared with Douglass, as someone ‘did not come on any mission; he came for the purpose of improving his mind by Foreign contact, and was ready to bear his testimony on the subject of Slavery.’90 Buffum, at the time, the Secretary of the American Anti-Slavery Society, was sent with Douglass to the British Isles to act as his White minder on behalf of William Lloyd Garrison and handle his financial affairs. Buffum was to act as the ‘appointed guardian of the volatile young Douglass’ and as the ‘setup man for Douglass’s performance,’ in order to make sure that it remained loyal to brand in terms of adherence to the Garrisonian agenda.91 Garrison and his White abolitionist circle at the Anti-Slavery Society were determined to surveil Douglass throughout his tour of the British Isles, in order ‘to prevent Douglass from achieving financial independence or asserting an identity outside their organization,’ at a time when the British Anti-Slavery society were expressing growing interest in having Douglass as one of their stable of abolitionist orators and ultimately provided the monetary resources he needed to achieve independence from his own condition as a fugitive slave.92 His tour of the British Isles will culminate in his rejection of the Garrisonian agenda altogether in favour of opportunities for self-authorship and promotion of his own political agenda; included within that was the implication of violent resistance in the cause of achieving abolition, as opposed to a singular reliance on moral suasion. There is much to be said about how Douglass’s attitude may have been shaped by his private experiences in dealing with the leaders of the American AntiSlavery Society. William S. McFeely makes clear that much of Douglass’s distaste for Buffum had to do with his ‘excessive kindliness’ towards him that he took ‘to be condescension.’93 Buffum’s officiousness in controlled Douglass’ travelling expenses whilst touring the British Isles with him ‘rankled’ him further.94 Another element of tension between them that Feeley refers to is a ‘“feminine” element in Buffum’s maleness that “that Douglass does not respect.”’95 This is characteristic is exhibited as ‘an enormous degree of Love, affection,’ to which Douglass as ‘cold man was on guard’ against.96 Reference here is made to ‘his relationship with Thomas Auld, a destroyed friendship with Henry Harris,’ as evidence of Douglass discarded trust in himself to wholly be a man’s friend.’97 The obscurity of these remarks suggests there were multiple sources of tension between the two men due to Buffum’s inappropriately solicitous attentions paid towards Douglass. Nonetheless, the two men were literally paired together on stage in Scotland were on ‘at least two occasions,’ wherein the theatrical delivery of Douglass’s slave narrative ‘concluded with Douglass or Buffum holding up the instruments of torture and restraint they had brought with them: the iron collar, manacles and a whip rattling them before the audience.’98 The Art of Selling One’s Self Teresa Zackodnik’s work on an abolitionist contemporary of Douglass’s is helpful with regard to determining a context for Douglass’s remarks here concerning his reception as compared to Buffum’s. White audiences at mid-century would have been eager to judge these two individuals according to the racial authenticity of their appearance and would have required of them to routinely pass public inspection as part of their performances on the abolition circuit. Their revenues would have been directly dependent on their ability

How the West Was Won 97 to manipulating their performance in ways that highlighted and capitalised on their embodiment. In the case of Sojourner Truth, cartes de visite and cabinet cards featuring her photographic portrait, became articles of accompanying sale to her public appearances in addition to her printed publications. Of the photographs in particular, Truth reportedly said she ‘“used to be sold for other people’s benefit, but now she sold herself for her own,” declaring that she aimed to “sell the shadow in order to support the substance.”’99 How this maxim might apply more broadly to Douglass and Buffum has to do with the fact that, ‘far from being liberated from a racialist typology, Sojourner Truth was often called upon to speak on anti-slavery and woman’s rights platforms as an embodiment of the slave’s or woman’s oppression.’100 That requirement essentially made of her a ‘Negro Exhibit,’ meaning that she was required to publicly display her scars and signs of torture during her lectures to White audiences. Such signs of wounding became part of the act, as the former enslaved person was required to be marked in order to solicit the attentions of White abolitionists as the ‘genuine article’. Her performance, and the performance of many other formerly enslaved African American individuals, of silently disrobing was ostensibly about showing evidence of this reprehensible treatment by other Whites. However, it would have been obvious to all present that what was on offer and indeed, carefully stage managed by their White handlers, was the presentation of an erotic showcase of Blackness itself, where their potential to endure, survive, and escape the brutalities implied by involuntary servitude was the source of sensational interest. White abolitionists capitalised upon this specific activity of inspection to draw crowds to their events. What proceeded this stripping down was the putting on of clothing of the fugitive slave with items furnished to them by them by their new, presumably benevolent White minders. This attire likewise heightened the exhibition feature of their appearance. Whether drawn or photographed, the desired appearance was the same; the former slave transformed through their envelopment in starched shirts, corseted dresses, buttoneddown suits, cravated, and shawled, their hair neatly straightened or cropped, gathered, and plaited so that they could be put forward as models of the ameliorating effects of the White abolitionist’s merciful discipline of these bodies as compared to their former Slaveholders. Any former signs of neglect, such as ‘the pickaninny’s bush or housemaid’s head rag,’ were done away to reveal a figure that was the epitome of self-control and obedience to a more enlightened society found elsewhere in the American North or in the British Isles.101 These, of course, were the primary centres of patronage for these bodies, in order to keep them literally in the style to which they had now become accustomed and from which these former slaves strove diligently to progress their acculturation. Labour was still required and the price paid by figures like Douglass and Truth would have been a continued dependence on the White world to author and racialize the terms of their value tailored their definition of society. Photography was a tool through which to document the resiliency of strict colour line even in abolitionist circles that distinguished Black from White. Bodily features here would be judged according to their degree of likeness to Whiteness, and the fair complexed would be of greatest use to the cause in the cry of innocence of these misused bodies. The Whitest looking young female fugitives of slavery received the most representational attention. The Photographic Maxim of Whiteness Mary Niall Mitchell observes that ‘these white-looking girls, in sweet, innocent form, troubled notions of racial difference and fostered an unease laced with fascination among

98  How the West Was Won white, northern viewers. Indeed, what made [them] […] so beguiling for nineteenth-century audiences was that these lovely white girls were not “white.”’102 This was the explicit source of their fascination as visual material to be inspected, as borne out by the fact, that ‘there are more surviving cartes de visite of them in archives than of the others, suggesting that perhaps more people bought pictures of them.’103 Niall Mitchell observes ‘these photographic portraits […] were spectacles with multiple meanings, inviting a combination of sympathy, speculation, voyeurism, and moral outrage.’104 They presented audiences with a way to dwell on the products of interracial sex ‘that had produced seemingly white non-white progeny’ and imagine for themselves what it would be like to have intimate access to such bodies.105 In this instance, photography opened upon another market for these bodies, presenting them as fanciful souvenirs of exotic encounter that someday might become commonplace where these freed who perhaps looked White but who were not considered to be White were free to come and go as they pleased. When a face fair-of-skin-complexion peered back from the photograph, it put paid to the understanding of a former slave as simply a captive commodity and opened the door to them being perceived as a liberal subject. But this understanding remained wildly superficial insofar as the reality of these subjects in North America and Britain remained profoundly affectively and economically bounded to White interest and patronage. In the case of pairing Douglass on tour with Buffum, Buffum’s White skin served to accentuate Douglass’s paleness. Next to his White-skinned companion, Douglass appeared to audiences as unmistakably ‘White,’ much to Douglass’s frustration. The nature of racialized different required that the pair be judged relationally to one another and assigned value accordingly. Douglass, coming from the United States, would have assumed that his audience would reward him as a man of fairer skin, and therefore, a more obvious gentlemen made companion to White sponsorship. In America, even as a light-skinned ‘Negro,’ he would remain, for all intents as purposes, the accompanying chattel, whereas here in Britain, the tables were turned. Here, Douglass visibly presented his ancestry as a geographical, racial, and perhaps most importantly, sexual matter. Through him, British onlookers could see for themselves the imperial mechanisms that produced him; a situation that would have simultaneously fascinated and tormented them as viewers because both these subjects Douglass and Buffum related to an increasing preoccupation amongst middle class Whites with disciplining their own sexuality. In the case of Douglass, a specific type of sexual politics was aroused when images of him were circulated amongst White women. These items must be admitted into consciousness at the level of risk; meaning an acceptance of the real risks to these former slaves by appearing in these portraits to begin with, and then later in White women’s solicitous, tactile handling of them. The lauded presence of these portraits of Douglass and Truth as a fugitive type was already eliding the rules of White supremacy. Their positions within portrait photography would be compelled to circulate within a larger discourse of sentiment that itself was dependent on an acceptance of prevailing class and racial hierarchies. Figures like Douglass and Truth circulated as ‘types’ in ‘both visual and narrative representations of abolition.’106 Their portraits would have made sense to those in both a theoretical and material position to purchase them, and as such, those persons may well have influenced the way they moved in the world both as accessible bodies and as pleasing representations of slavery. What Douglass’s portraits share in common with Truth’s is their determination to ‘invoke notions of interiority and possessive individualism that were, in fact, racially coded in and through mid-nineteenth-century bourgeois portraiture’ and did so, with the aim to provide evidence to their intended White audience of

How the West Was Won 99 their humanity. Their ideological investment in such a production is deeply conservative and reinforcing of a White bourgeois value system that had seamlessly transposed itself into conventions of photographic portraiture. The visual codes overlaid onto that practice were deeply implicated in the ascent of the racial sciences of physiognomy and phrenology. Douglass is painfully aware that failing to live up to the standards of racial essentialism will cost him with his intended audiences. At the same time, curiosity concerning his Whiteness was a thing to be cultivated, in order to emphasise his potential for self-mastery, as well as his nascent aptitude for class ascension. If Douglass, in his relative Whiteness, is everywhere a gentleman, than Truth, in her relative Blackness, is everywhere a beast. These are, equally, positions of ‘coerced embodiment,’ and yet, what distinguishes them from slavery is that get the opportunity to prove themselves firstly believable through a racialized and then secondarily, real through a visual comparison to White audiences.108 The photograph married the two exposures because it allowed White audiences to saviour the details of difference at their leisure; Douglass’s woolly hair, Truth’s missing finger as intimate souvenirs of difference that reassured them of their own superior form in relation to that which is held. 107

Compromised Couplings Douglas concludes his letter to Francis Jackson in the following manner: I have received letters from America expressing fears that I may be spoiled by the attention which I am receiving—well ‘tis possible—but if I thought it probable, the next steamer should bring me home to encounter again the kicks and cuffs of pro-slavery. Indeed, I shall rejoice in the day that shall see me again by your side battling the enemy, and I should rejoice in it though I were to be subjected to all the regulations of color-phobia with which we used [to] encounter. I glory in the fight as well as in the victory. Make my love to all your family. Gratefully yours, Frederick Douglass109 This is a very cryptic message insofar as one can read into that the nature of Douglass’s spoiling has to do with the conceit of believing himself to be the unqualified equal of a free man. As this trip is sponsored by his White patrons, this would be an unthinkable transgression of the terms of his bargain which imply a condition of his continued subordinancy. Douglass must reassure Jackson that should he ever find himself entertaining the possibility of being otherwise, then he would immediately self-correct, by getting onto the next steamer back ‘to encounter again the kicks and cuffs of pro-slavery’ so as to relieve him of that dangerous delusion.110 The enemy they have in common is the spectral Slaveholder whose presence hangs over this enterprise and in many ways determines its success. It is the specific guise of Whiteness that must be eliminated and allows for allegiances to be maintained between a former slave and a White aristocrat. It becomes obvious, however, that the performance of suffering is what can never be compromised upon in formulating this peculiar double act. It is Douglass alone who ‘should rejoice in it though I were to be subjected to all the regulations of color-phobia with which we used [to] encounter’ that the ‘glory in the fight’ would be rightly his to claim, ‘as well as in the victory.’111

100  How the West Was Won Douglass relents from any further attestations on the matter but closes with the following remark: ‘make my love to all your family.’112 This formation of wording suggests labour of another nature; that Douglass manufactures a quality of intimacy here in order to belong to greater order of wholeness that Whiteness naturally assumes for itself. The nature of Douglass’s gratitude is one burdened in many ways by the debt of that assumption. Douglass recalls how it is Jackson ‘who took him into his drawing room, welcomed him to his table, put him in his best bed, and treated him in every way as an equal brother at a time when to do so was to expose himself to the hot displeasure of nearly all your neighbours.’113 This recollection reveals that it is Jackson who instigates intimacy with Douglass, whereas for Douglass to do so would have been theoretically and materially impossible. It is Jackson who can expose himself to the temper of his neighbours, because there is a limit to how far their ‘hot displeasure’ would go towards him, whereas for Douglass, there is not, and indeed, he could be mutilated or murdered by seeking out such an encounter with Jackson.114 There is something queer happening here, and Douglass remains fully aware of that fact when he writes, ‘these things I still remember, and it affords me great pleasure to speak of them. Pardon me for reminding you of these things now.’115 Again, there is queerness to Douglass’s expression, insofar as it begs the question of who he speaks of these affairs to whom, and why he requires a pardon from Jackson in writing of them to him, and finally the situation of that ‘great pleasure’ as it held up against the ‘hot displeasure’ of the surrounding White community within which Douglass still must tread lightly and receive explicit invitation to entertain. In this most careful way, Douglass makes his love to all Jackson’s family. This geographically discursive making of love to White audiences will become a means of performative intervention for fugitive slaves like Douglass looking to vastly improve upon their domestic situation. The Greatest Form of Exhibition Following on from Douglass’s success in travelling to Britain to secure his freedom following the techniques of intimate refinement he learnt within the Jackson household, in June, 1851, fugitive slaves William Wells Brown and William and Ellen Craft will choose to parade their persons widely before the multitudes of spectators to the world’s showcase, the Great Exhibition, at Crystal Palace in London, in hopes of achieving a similar outcome. It was not lost on the pair that the Crystal Palace was meant to operate ‘like a massive hothouse for rare and exotic flora and fauna’ and that its allure came from its acting as scene ‘for international encounters.’116 Essentially, what was happening here was a type of ‘cruising’ where paying participants could sample ‘the objects displayed’ and moreover, that these objects ‘were perceived (and regarded each other) as visible representations of their particular culture, class, race and/or nation.’117 Brown and the Crafts colluded with White British abolitionists activists to pair them off with Black fugitive slaves currently residing in Britain. They accompanied them carefully into the setting of Crystal as conventional interracial pairings of masters and servants, only for them to be afforded greater than normal intimacy in proximity to their assumed employers, and finally to embrace them arm and arm as they promenaded conspicuously through the vast transparent campus of the Exhibition itself. It was to be its own form of Exhibition, unofficially imported into the space by a group of American abolitionists working in concert with their British peers to literally manipulate the movements of Black people through what was appreciated as international territory.

How the West Was Won 101 The irony of that situation appears to have not been lost on esteemed figures such as the American abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and his British counterpart William Farmer, who contrived this choreography of Blacks performatively strolling through the Exhibition in the company of White friends based on what ‘Frederick Douglass had done on his 1845 visit to Britain, so as to create a particular dramatic spectacle that would implicate those spectators who responded to them.’118 The sought after spectators would not be limited, however, to those within the Crystal Palace but extended to those who would read of this event in newspapers that would span the White Atlantic world. Describing the event for the press, William Farmer, delighted in announcing that ‘fortunately, we have, at the present moment, in the British Metropolis, some specimens of what were once American “chattels personal”, in the persons of William and Ellen Craft and William W. Brown.’119 From there, ‘Farmer claimed that: their friends resolved that they should be exhibited under the world’s huge glass case, in order that the world might form an opinion of the alleged mental inferiority of the African race, and their fitness or unfitness for freedom.’120 The Crafts, of course, were hardly there by happenstance. Rather they were specifically brought into London by a small group of British abolitionists for the express purpose of parading them as fugitives throughout the Exhibition space. What brought particular interest in this couple were the circumstances surrounding their departure to Britain. They were far from an ordinary American couple, albeit an enslaved one. The success of their escape had depended on the feature of the wife’s light skin and androgynous appearance, which enabled her to pass as a young male White Southern plantation aristocrat, directing his slave to accompany him on an urgent medical errand. Her dark-skinned husband imitating her gormless servant managed in his own right to convince onlookers of his utter subservience to this undertaking. Both of them were functionally illiterate, yet they managed to succeed by virtue of the entrée of Whiteness and maleness alone afforded them free passage through the world. This fact is never commented on by their White abolitionist minders. Rather their focus is directed on the injury this couple endured as the hunted prey of their American slaveholders and their allies, whose presumed ease of travel would bring them across oceans in pursuit of their lost property. That ‘property’ was in dire need of liberation, and these were the clever band of counter-Whites to do it. These fugitive slaves were brought into the Exhibition, by men like Garrison, as ‘specimens’ to prove that they could be put to greater industry as freed persons. Lisa Merrill picks up on the fact that ‘it was the resolution of the white abolitionists,’ as opposed to, Brown and the Crafts, ‘to elect to “exhibit”’ them ‘under the world’s huge glass case.’121 The consequence of that decision speaks to the fact that the intelligence called upon was not ever intended to be theirs but rather credited to the likes of Farmer and his select group of White companions. It was they who had chosen Saturday as the day Brown and the Crafts would appear, because it was the day ‘upon which the largest number of the aristocracy and wealthy classes attend the Crystal Palace.’122 They were appealing to the White establishment here strategically, projecting that ‘some fifteen thousand, mostly of the upper classes,’ would congregate there that day.123 Included amongst them, Farmer reported, ‘the Queen, Prince Albert, and the royal children … a large number of peers, peeresses, members of Parliament, merchants and bankers from almost all parts of the world’ of whom would be in attendance that day and would have no choice in their manner of their bombardment with the conspicuous presence of Black bodies within their midst.124 The bodies were compelled to circulate for literally hours on end as a spectacle for Whites to behold. Physically they would touch upon nearly every part of

102  How the West Was Won the vast edifice that was the Crystal Palace and this was meant to send the White spectator into perambulations of mind that would result in unrelenting disturbance. Conveyed through their bodies was a vast register of ‘physiognomy, skin colour, facial expressions, dress, demeanour and gait’ that would serve to sensorily overwhelm the White spectator, because of how close these figures would apparently come to displaying in real time the implications of physical intimacy between Black men and White women or White men and Black women.125 The pretence here was that it would offend White Slaveholders attending this spectacle, but of course, for them this would have presented nothing that was new, as many of them would have produced over the generations shadow families as the direct product of such selective couplings. As such, it could be surmised that spectacle was for those who fantasised about the impropriety in a White gentleman of character exposed in his intercourse with a fugitive Black woman or better still, with an elegant and accomplished young ‘mulatto’ lady or man, passing in the world as White, and thus, became aroused by the potential of becoming the intimate companion of such a situation. For White audiences, the particular horrors of enslavement would not have been the object fascination presented here, but rather the scintillating prospect of those on show, being ‘compelled’ upon their liberation continue to perform in this way. This is borne out by the comments of American abolitionist Henry Clarke Wright who had suggested the Crafts, Brown and other fugitive slaves, attending the Exhibition, play out for all to see ‘representations of American enslaved women being stripped down and “tied up to be whipped, with the slaveholder burying the lash in her flesh and blood trickling upon the ground.”’126 The sexual, as well as sentimentalist, connotations here are obvious. What is less so is that he was asking figures like Ellen Craft who was now routinely clothed, unremarkably, in typical Victorian bourgeois female apparel in orderly to visibly present as lady, to revert to the pose of a beast of burden. The irony here is that had she not posed as her former attacker there would have been no means with which to escape to this new arena of staging, as product not of Virginia’s bondage, but of London’s emancipation. Yet, here she finds herself still of assumed enslaved status, represented as silent presence in service to a projection of need, as it did when she sat on the abolition platform, her almost White appearance offering corporeal testimony of the range of non-White women to endure punishment, and thereby exciting the recognition of White audiences that they were still in control of this scene and how it played out. Robert Nowatzki observes that, ‘like their white American colleagues, many white British abolitionist saw no contradiction between their opposition to slave and their assumption that black people were fundamentally different and inferior to themselves.’127 What was expected of Blacks as narrative performers was to display a subservience and humility worthy of the pity and attention of White audiences. McFeeley writes that ‘Douglass […] and the other black antislavery speakers were always treated as visiting artists in a production of which white Bostonians never dreamed of losing the direction’128 Free Blacks were at once feted and ‘ridiculed for trying to imitate upper-class white people.’129 The visual economy of the mid-nineteenth reflected that contradiction in their understanding that Blackness was essential by critiquing it as though it were performative. Black bodies were the source of White abolitionist fascination, but only to the degree that their physicality and sexuality pliably submitted to White instrumentation. Frederick Douglass’s sexual attractiveness to White audiences extended directly over to his visual representation of him as both a bonded and fugitive form of humanity. The ambivalence of his appearance made him one the clearest examples of White abolitionist’s

How the West Was Won 103 differing aims towards African Americans in complementing both their captivity and their refuge simultaneously in the ways in which they chose to frame them. In this way, Craft served as a prop exhibited to enhance the abolitionists’ tactics of transmuting her identity racially and sexually only to the degree that everyone around her still saw her as a slave to be racialized by their good graces. It was their spectacular ability to make her operational in this rarefied as a species of almost ‘White’ lady. Ironically, making a spectacle of Craft was the very thing that confined her to her formerly gendered, classed, and racialized status crucial to the making of her former fugitive status. It was this condition that registered her differently for other women, and for that matter, men present there at the Crystal Palace as respectable, legitimate attendees. Craft’s dubious appearance served as a striking visual counterpoint to their elevation; her situation one of obvious debasement as compared with theirs. Only the horrors of slavery could produce such a specimen, an almost White woman having been produced from the most abject conditions conceivable and now paraded as though she were a modest, upstanding woman. Her setting of the American department of the Exhibition nevertheless highlighted the fact of what she was; an enslaved Black woman. Once fled from Georgia to Boston, she and her husband relied up on the help of their White abolitionist friends to help settle them into a home, teach them to read and write, and then help them flee to England after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. She remained throughout identified as a Black female slave. Those Whites surrounding her aware at every moment of her race and fugitive status, making of Craft’s a mere appearance one of perpetual servitude, beyond what was skin deep. This attitude served to further a perception of the horrors of slavery that its taint could never be fully erased no matter how much one might have hoped. The Crafts had merely exchanged a life secured for them by the American Southern aristocracy, for one secured for them by the British Southern aristocracy. Their life was reliant on White patronage, and whatever affluence, solitude, and leisure that Whites experienced would never be the purview of these their Black charges. Having born outside of society, they found it difficult if not impossible, to acquire a status apart from as celebrated curiosities. What labour was asked of them accordingly prohibited them from devoting energy to what might have been their personal aspirations. Instead, they were made class adjacent, the other to White British identity. William Craft’s pronounced Black appearance meant that he was much more profoundly yoked to his African identity and enslaved history than his wife; a situation that precluded his entry into White society alongside her. They nonetheless stayed in Britain for 20 as Ellen Craft was further profitably showcased in her appearance by her White friends. William was said to have become something of an entrepreneur, a lecturer, an author, and even a trader in Dahomey which seems dubious given its history as a major site of the slave trade well into the 1860s. They returned to the Southern United States following the end of the Civil War in 1868 and lived out their lives there. The Crafts for a time served as useful objects and would be remembered distinctly for their part in the American Abolitionist Wright’s perverted folly at the Crystal Palace, where he literally puts them on ‘an American slave-auction block [with] Henry Clay, [one of Brady’s Illustrious Americans featured here as a daguerreotype], acting as auctioneer, and the American flag floating above it.’130 Lisa Volpe recounts how ‘Wright recycled the elements of the octoroon’s auction scene: the tragic heroine in the body of Ellen Craft; the darker-skinned William acting as her fellow slave; and the slaveholder as Henry Clay, a disfavored southern congressman and author of the Fugitive Slave Act.

104  How the West Was Won Clay’s proposed participation was mere symbol, connoting the institutionalized nature of slavery in the United States. Although the actual performance deviated from Wright’s plan, the departure was only slight.’131 What remained true to form was the larger significance of displaying these bodies in the exhibition space and having two exhibits within one; America’s Fugitive Slaves on display with Mathew Brady’s Illustrious Americans, the contrasts of which were racialized for the purpose not of compromising racialized stereotypes, but of upstaging them. Notes 1 Paul, Gilmore, The Genuine Article: Race, Mass Culture, and American Literary Manhood (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 19. 2 Gilmore, The Genuine Article, 19. 3 Ibid., 19. 4 Ibid., 126. 5 Ibid., 127. 6 Ibid., 143. 7 Footnote 44, 232. 8 C. Edwards Lester, “M. B. Brady and the Photographic Art.” Photographic Art-Journal (New York) 1, no. 1 (January 1851): 36–40 at 39, http://www.daguerreotypearchive.org/texts/ P8510010_BRADY_PAJ_1851-01.pdf. 9 Edwards Lester, “M. B. Brady and the Photographic Art,” 39. 10 Ibid., 39. 11 Ibid., 40. 12 Ines Andrade, “Defining ‘Visuality’s First Domains’: John C. Calhoun’s Photographic Attempts to Modernize the Southern Slaveholding Identity.” American Nineteenth Century History 22, no. 2 (2021): 141–175 at 165. 13 Andrade, “Defining ‘Visuality’s First Domains,’” 165. 14 Ibid., 40. 15 John C. Calhoun. “Slavery a Positive Good.” Teaching American History, Speech, February 06, 1837. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 Ethan, F. Rafuse, “John C. Calhoun: The Man Who Started the Civil War.” Civil War Times, October 2002. 24 Lester, “M. B. Brady and the Photographic Art,” 40. 25 Andrade, “Defining ‘Visuality’s First Domains,’” 143. 26 Ibid., 159. 27 Ibid., 159. 28 Ibid., 159. 29 Ibid., 163. 30 Ibid., 165. 31 George Combe, Notes on the United States of North America during a Phrenological Visit in 1838–39–40 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 254. 32 David W. Blight and Griffin Black, “Black People Aren’t Naturally Vulnerable to Covid-19. That’s Junk Race Science.” The Washington Post, June 25, 2020. 33 Ibid. 34 Vanessa D. Dickerson, Dark Victorians (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 3. 35 Dickerson, Dark Victorians, 3–4. 36 Ibid., 15.

How the West Was Won 105 7 Ibid., 16. 3 38 Alan J. Rice and Martin Crawford, “Triumphant Exile: Frederick Douglass in Britain 1845– 1947.” In Liberating Sojourn: Frederick Douglass & Transatlantic Reform. Edited by Alan J. Rice and Martin Crawford (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999), 8. 39 Ibid., 8. 40 Ibid., 8. 41 Ibid., 13. 42 Peter Ackroyd, Dickens (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1990), 544. 43 Ibid., 544. 44 Charles Dickens, “North American Slavery.” Household Words VI, no. 130 (September 18, 1852): 1–6 at 5. 45 Dickens, “North American Slavery,” 5. 46 Ibid., 5. 47 Ibid., 5. 48 Ibid., 5. 49 Ibid., 5. 50 Ibid., 5. 51 Julia Sun-Joo Lee, The American Slave Narrative and the Victorian Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 114. 52 Lee, The American Slave Narrative and the Victorian Novel, 3. 53 Ibid., 3. 54 Ibid., 5. 55 Ibid., 5. 56 Frederick Douglass, “My Experience and My Mission to Great Britain: An Address Delivered in Cork, Ireland, on October 14, 1845.” Cork Examiner, October 15, 1845. The Frederick Douglass Papers: Series One–Speeches, Debates, and Interviews Volume I. Edited by John Blassingame, et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 36, https://glc.yale.edu/ my-experience-and-my-mission-great-britain. 57 Lee, The American Slave Narrative and the Victorian Novel, 10. 58 Ibid., 11. 59 Ibid., 11. 60 Ibid., 11. 61 Frederick Douglass, “I Am Here to Spread Light on American Slavery: An Address Delivered in Cork, Ireland, on 14 October 1845.” The Frederick Douglass Speeches, 1841–1846, The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, Yale University. 62 Lee Jenkins, “Beyond the Pale: Frederick Douglass in Cork.” The Irish Review (1986-), no. 24 (1999): 80–95 at 83. https://doi.org/10.2307/29735942. 63 Jenkins, “Beyond the Pale: Frederick Douglass in Cork,” 84. 64 Ibid., 88. 65 Fionnghuala Sweeney, Frederick Douglass and the Atlantic World (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007), 167. 66 Hannah Murray, “The “Emerald Isle”—Frederick Douglass in Britain and Ireland.” 2021. http://frederickdouglassinbritain.com/journey/DouglassandtheEmeraldIsle/. 67 Sweeney, Frederick Douglass and the Atlantic World, 167. 68 Ibid., 91. 69 Ibid., 89. 70 Ibid., 91. 71 Ibid., 92. 72 Jennifer DeVere Brody, Impossible Purities: Blackness, Femininity, and Victorian Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), Back matter. 73 Frederick Douglass, “Letter from Frederick Douglass to Francis Jackson, January 29, 1846.” Documenting the American South, University Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 74 Ibid. 75 Ibid. 76 Ibid.

106  How the West Was Won 77 Ibid. 78 Ibid. 79 Nora McGreevy, “How Profits from Slavery Changed the Landscape of the Scottish Highlands.” Smithsonian Magazine, November 17, 2020. 80 McGreevy, “How Profits from Slavery Changed the Landscape of the Scottish Highlands.” 81 Yvonne Singh, “How Scotland Erased Guyana from Its Past.” The Guardian, April 16, 2019. 82 Singh, “How Scotland Erased Guyana from Its past.” 83 Ibid. 84 Douglass, “Letter from Frederick Douglass to Francis Jackson, January 29, 1846.” 85 Ibid. 86 Ibid. 87 Ibid. 88 Ibid. 89 Ibid. 90 Douglass, “My Experience and My Mission to Great Britain,” 36. 91 David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018), 145. 92 Grace Grove, “Frederick Douglass in the British Isles: The Craft of Sailing Away from Garrisonianism.” CLA Journal 8 (2020): 120–139 at 128. 93 William S. McFeely, Frederick Douglass (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017), 131. 94 McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 132. 95 Ibid., 132. 96 Ibid., 132. 97 Ibid., 132. 98 Pettinger, Alasdair. Frederick Douglass and Scotland, 1846: Living an Antislavery Life (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 32. 99 Teresa Zackodnik, “The ‘Green-Backs of Civilization’: Sojourner Truth and Portrait Photography.” American Studies 46, no. 2 (2005): 117–43 at 118. 100 Zackodnik, “The ‘Green-Backs of Civilization,’” 120. 101 Barbara McCaskill, “‘Yours Very Truly’: Ellen Craft—The Fugitive as Text and Artifact.” African American Review 28, no. 4 (1994), 509–529 at 515. 102 Mary Niall Mitchell, “Rosebloom and Pure White, Or So It Seemed.” American Quarterly 54, no. 3 (2002): 369–410 at 273. 103 Mitchell, “Rosebloom and Pure White, Or So It Seemed,” 372. 104 Ibid., 373. 105 Ibid., 373. 106 Zackodnik, “The ‘Green-Backs of Civilization,’” 119. 107 Ibid., 119. 108 Ibid., 120. 109 Douglass, “Letter from Frederick Douglass to Francis Jackson, January 29, 1846.” 110 Ibid. 111 Ibid. 112 Ibid. 113 Ibid. 114 Ibid. 115 Ibid. 116 Lisa Merill, Exhibiting Race ‘under the World’s Huge Glass Case’: William and Ellen Craft and William Wells Brown at the Great Exhibition in Crystal Palace, London, 1851.” Slavery & Abolition 33, no. 2 (2012), 321–336 at 332. 117 Merill, “Exhibiting Race ‘under the World’s Huge Glass Case,’” 332. 118 Ibid., 325. 119 Ibid., 326. 120 Ibid., 326. 121 Ibid., 325. 122 Ibid., 325–326. 123 Ibid., 326. 124 Ibid., 326.

How the West Was Won 107 25 Ibid., 326. 1 126 Ibid., 330. 127 Robert Nowatzki, Representing African Americans in Transatlantic Abolitionism and Blackface Minstrelsy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010), 56. 128 McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 108. 129 Nowatzki, Representing African Americans in Transatlantic Abolitionism and Blackface Minstrelsy, 17. 130 Lisa Volpe, “Embodying the Octoroon: Abolitionist Performance at the London Crystal Palace, 1851,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 15, no. 2 (Summer 2016). http://www. 19thc-artworldwide.org/summer16/volpe-on-abolitionist-performance-at-the-londoncrystal-palace-1851. 131 Ibid.

Bibliography Ackroyd, Peter. Dickens. New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1990. Andrade, Ines. “Defining ‘Visuality’s First Domains’: John C. Calhoun’s Photographic Attempts to Modernize the Southern Slaveholding Identity.” American Nineteenth Century History 22, no. 2 (2021): 141–175. https://doi.org/10.1080/14664658.2021.1965792. Blight, David W. Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018. Blight, David W. and Griffin Black. “Black People Aren’t Naturally Vulnerable to Covid-19. That’s Junk Race Science.” The Washington Post, June 25, 2020. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ outlook/black-people-arent-naturally-vulnerable-to-covid-19-thats-junk-race-science/ 2020/06/25/d04a5f98-b5d2-11ea-a8da-693df3d7674a_story.html. Brody, Jennifer DeVere. Impossible Purities: Blackness, Femininity, and Victorian Culture. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998. Calhoun, John C. “Slavery a Positive Good.” Teaching American History, Speech, February 06, 1837. https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/slavery-a-positive-good/. Combe, George. Notes on the United States of North America during a Phrenological Visit in 1838–39–40. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Dickens, Charles. “North American Slavery.” Household Words VI, no. 130 (September 18, 1852): 1–6, DJO: Dickens Journals Online. https://www.djo.org.uk/media/downloads/articles/1980_ North%20American%20Slavery.pdf. Dickerson, Vanessa D. Dark Victorians. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2008. Douglass, Frederick, “My Experience and My Mission to Great Britain: An Address Delivered in Cork, Ireland, on October 14, 1845.” Cork Examiner, October 15, 1845. The Frederick Douglass Papers: Series One–Speeches, Debates, and Interviews Volume I. Edited by John Blassingame, et al. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. ———. “I Am Here to Spread Light on American Slavery: An address Delivered in Cork, Ireland, on 14 October 1845.” The Frederick Douglass Speeches, 1841–1846, The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, Yale University, n.d., https://glc.yale. edu/i-am-here-spread-light-american-slavery. ———. “Letter from Frederick Douglass to Francis Jackson, January 29, 1846.” Documenting the American South, University Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. https:// docsouth.unc.edu/neh/douglass/support6.html. Gilmore, Paul. The Genuine Article: Race, Mass Culture, and American Literary Manhood. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. Grove, Grace. “Frederick Douglass in the British Isles: The Craft of Sailing Away from Garrisonianism.” CLA Journal 8 (2020): 120–139. Jenkins, Lee. “Beyond the Pale: Frederick Douglass in Cork.” The Irish Review (1986-), no. 24 (1999): 80–95. https://doi.org/10.2307/29735942.

108  How the West Was Won Lee, Julia Sun-Joo. The American Slave Narrative and the Victorian Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Lester, C. Edwards. “M. B. Brady and the Photographic Art.” Photographic Art-Journal 1, no. 1 (1851): 36–40. http://www.daguerreotypearchive.org/texts/P8510010_BRADY_PAJ_1851-01. pdf. McCaskill, Barbara. “‘Yours Very Truly’: Ellen Craft—The Fugitive as Text and Artifact.” African American Review 28, no. 4 (1994): 509–529. https://doi.org/10.2307/3042215. McFeely, William S. Frederick Douglass. New York: W. W. Norton, 2017. McGreevy, Nora. “How Profits from Slavery Changed the Landscape of the Scottish Highlands.” Smithsonian Magazine, November 17, 2020. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/ new-research-investigates-how-enslavement-profits-changed-landscape-scottish-highlands180976311/. Merill, Lisa. “Exhibiting Race ‘under the World’s Huge Glass Case’: William and Ellen Craft and William Wells Brown at the Great Exhibition in Crystal Palace, London, 1851.” Slavery & Abolition 33, no. 2 (2012): 321–336. https://doi.org/10.1080/0144039X.2012.669907. Mitchell, Mary Niall. “Rosebloom and Pure White, Or So It Seemed.” American Quarterly 54, no. 3 (2002): 369–410. https://www.doi.org/10.1353/aq.2002.0027. Murray, Hannah. “The “Emerald Isle” – Frederick Douglass in Britain and Ireland.” 2021. http:// frederickdouglassinbritain.com/journey/DouglassandtheEmeraldIsle/. Nowatzki, Robert. Representing African Americans in Transatlantic Abolitionism and Blackface Minstrelsy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010. Pettinger, Alasdair. Frederick Douglass and Scotland, 1846: Living an Antislavery Life. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018. Rafuse, Ethan, F., “John C. Calhoun: The Man Who Started the Civil War.” Civil War Times, October 2002. https://www.historynet.com/john-c-calhoun-the-man-who-started-the-civil-war. htm Rice, Alan J. and Martin Crawford. “Triumphant Exile: Frederick Douglass in Britain 1845-1947.” In Liberating Sojourn: Frederick Douglass & Transatlantic Reform, 1–15. Edited by Alan J. Rice and Martin Crawford, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999. Singh, Yvonne. “How Scotland Erased Guyana from Its Past.” The Guardian, April 16, 2019. https:// www.theguardian.com/news/2019/apr/16/scotland-guyana-past-abolitionists-slavery-caribbean. Sweeney, Fionnghuala. Frederick Douglass and the Atlantic World. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007. Volpe, Lisa. “Embodying the Octoroon: Abolitionist Performance at the London Crystal Palace, 1851.” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 15, no. 2 (Summer 2016). http://www.19thcartworldwide.org/summer16/volpe-on-abolitionist-performance-at-the-london-crystalpalace-1851. Zackodnik, Teresa. “The ‘Green-Backs of Civilization’: Sojourner Truth and Portrait Photography.” American Studies 46, no. 2 (2005): 117–143. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40643851.

5

The Founding of the Great White World The Arctic Daguerreotypes

Gillian D’Arcy Wood makes the case for a strange confluence of events surrounding the ascent of a young Queen Victoria to the throne in 1837 and the ascent of a young Louis Agassiz to the presidency of the Swiss Natural History society in that same year.1 What unites these fates was a novel interpretation of the line succession of bringing to light an entirely new concept of age itself. The Swiss Agassiz’s taking on a British champion in William Buckland, President of the London Geological Society, mirrored in time (1840), the British Victoria’s taking on a German champion in Albert, Prince of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. By the autumn of that year, a glacial mania had overtaken Britain and was capped off by Agassiz and Buckland’s celebrated tour of Scotland together to find proof that an epoch of extreme cold proceeded the present creation of Europe. On the evening of November 4, 1840, during an initial meeting of the London Geological Society to present their findings, Agassiz and Buckland ‘suggested to the scientific elite of the world’s most powerful nation that they should think of themselves as interglacial beings.’2 Due to Agassiz’s skills of rhetorical persuasion on that particular evening, legions of Britons came to see themselves as ‘self-aware actors in the greater planetary drama of glacial advance and retreat.’3 D’Arcy Wood argues for this acknowledgement to be understood as the starting point for the concept of the Anthropocene, and the intervening 180 years to be understood as an epoch as much of science as society. She predicts the end of that arc to conclude somewhere around 2030, when ‘an “ice-free Arctic” will tragically emerge.’4 The great cities of the world including London will then be plunged quiet literally into a new era of fundamental instability causing in its wake a demographic crisis to rival ‘WWII and the Middle Passage.’5 It is curious that D’Arcy Wood chooses to note these as her poles of history, because in so many ways, they begin and end with a Germany and Britain that bind this planet to an Anthropocenic apparatus that Agassiz and Buckland could scarcely dream of, despite their making ‘the initial breaktaking backwards leap of imagination to think of the Earth’s icebound regions not as evidence of planetary cooling (the accepted theory) but as residual proof of a melted world.’6 Here is where we must begin again, at the site of another melting; the era of Victorian colonialism itself. Agassiz’s publication of his findings, Études sur les glaciers (1840), was accompanied by an atlas of 32 lithographs plates; the images he explained were backed up by five years of research. Caroline Schaumann describes the narrative he created as: matched by the volume’s exquisite illustrations, transporting readers to a faraway yet accessible world of ice, snow and rock […] yet the depicted landscape always remains highly aestheticized, artistically rendered in stark black and white geometrical DOI: 10.4324/9781003274797-6

110  The Founding of the Great White World forms, with a sense of compositional balance […] in this way the illustrations at once rely on established discourses of the sublime but also exhibit an environment that can be measured and assessed by the scientist. The enormous scale of this aweinspiring white world corresponds conveniently with Agassiz vast scientific claims.7 A number of Agassiz’s colleagues in France and Germany at this time recognised that ‘Agassiz had produced not a single major observation or proposal about Glacier Theory that was both original or correct.’8 This did little to dent Agassiz’s growing reputation as one of Europe’s foremost glaciologists and soon after his entry into Britain, he would be celebrated as a world beating one. Once there, Agassiz took on ‘new male-male affection opportunities that remained beyond the pale of those allowed by the ordinary citizenry,’ which Suzanne Schneider claims was part and parcel of a ‘the fraternal society that the scientific community constituted in the early decades of the nineteenth century.’9 Edinburgh and London offered numerous opportunities for Agassiz to engage in a cosmopolitan naturalist lifestyle extracurricular to his first marriage to an aristocratic Cecile Braun left behind in provincial Switzerland. Braun apparently caught onto Agassiz’s lack of regard for her whereabouts when he crossed over to America to establish his scientific reputation amid swirling rumours of his scientific as well as sexual improprieties. Afterwards, Agassiz set up house with a cadre of male associates and assistants in Boston, which bred new rumours of his unseemly affairs—involving both men and women in his employ. Braun died in his absence from Europe in 1848, and shortly thereafter, he cemented an engagement to an aristocratic Bostonian spinster, Elizabeth Cabot Cary, to shore up his public image. At that time, he would have still been most famous in scientific circles for his work concerning this Ice Age. There is something decidedly queer about the idea of the Arctic itself that carries over from Agassiz’s early work that is everywhere coloured by European imperialism and its understanding of geographic and aesthetic orientation. Britain informs the particularly of how the world perceives the Artic as a place of potential exploration, as well as possession that created a distinction between the frozen north and the torrid south along both rhetorically and imaginary lines as though maintaining a barrier from one towards the other. Shane McCorristine observes that the exploration of the Arctic was understood as ‘“pure” in a way that voyages to India, for example, were not. After all, on the face of it, Arctic exploration did not involve the warfare, women, or “weakening” climate associated with Britain’s tropical colonies.’10 It was not a site where the existing blue print of settler colonialism could reasonably be applied, nor a situation where the indigenous population would need to be disciplined or eliminated in order for the territory claimed to be maintained. It was not defined primarily as a space of racial difference, which had been the case with its other prospective holdings and as a result could be cultivated as an imaginary space of something much greater. This spectral or indeed speculative quality is something that animates the dawn of the modern era at something that intersected immediately with English imperialism. The quest for an Arctic passage that would provide a short cut to Asia had its beginnings in the sixteenth century through the likes of Queen Elizabeth I’s privateer Martin Frobisher and her magus Dr John Dee. Their energy was placed in identifying a navigable maritime passage through the Arctic and into the Pacific Ocean and exists as one of the hallmarks of England’s emergence as a formidable naval power on the world stage. For centuries to come this would become a preoccupation of ‘a diverse set of monarchs, traders, naturalists and explorers [who] yearned for a navigable maritime

The Founding of the Great White World 111 passage through the Arctic.’ Its discovery would clearly mark Britain as politically and commercially superior to its European rivals. 11

Franklin’s Fateful Gaze The launch of Franklin’s expedition of 1845 was one laden with massive expectation at a crucial time for Britain’s empire, when not only Canada was vying to become a fully sovereign state, but equally, controversies abounded about failed colonial governance in Ireland, Africa, and India. The reification of the masculinist projects of science and exploration was tied to Sir John Franklin’s fortunes in discovering the North West Passage. When the voyage fails spectacularly with the disappearance and ultimate demise of his crew of 134 men, these concepts are brought into further jeopardy. Franklin’s effort was supported by the British navy’s offering of two large ships, the Erebus and the Terror that were at the time of their sailing state of the art. The vessels had hot-water heating systems, were equipped with provisions for three years, housed libraries of 1200 books, and messes replete with silver cutlery and china to provide creature comforts to all onboard. Perhaps the most surprising inclusion amongst their provision were daguerreotype cameras, given the extreme physical conditions of their surroundings. No daguerreotypes were made during the actual voyage according to efforts to salvage the remains of the two ill-fated ships. Despite this obvious lack of photographic record, Franklin’s expedition spurred on a mania for the Arctic within the Anglo-American imagination. That fascination, to this day, corresponds with the most well-known images of the Franklin expedition; the daguerreotypes made of him and his senior officers just before their sailing in 1845 (Figure 5.1). Franklin’s enduring appearance figures as shorthand for the Whiteness that resides at the centre of the myth of the hero-explorer, whose focus remains steadfast as he makes his way towards what can only be read as the cutting edge of the known world. Franklin, in his daguerreotype, appears serene, his thoughts poised towards greatness; his hand holding a telescope as a prop to both signify and enhance his innate qualities of far-sightedness and self-direction. In reality, the record shows that he was suffering from an apparent case of influenza at the time of departure and was likely delirious and disorientated as he sat for his portrait. The polar scenes characterised by sterile Whiteness written into the Anglo-American imagination by the likes of Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Jules Verne, and Mark Twain all featured a geriatric Franklin at the heart of every one of their stories. On June 11, 1847, Sir John Franklin, aged 61, died suddenly on board HMS Erebus from what is now suspected as a case of pulmonary tuberculosis. ‘Tuberculosis was rampant in the nineteenth century and the conditions on Erebus and Terror would have fostered its spread among the crew.’12 This was an inconvenient truth for the average Victorian Briton to embrace because the Arctic loomed so large in their imaginations as the ultimate space of male virility and self-reliance. It was also a powerful diversion away from another troubling reality; that so much of Britain’s domestic social and economic stability was reliant on slavery and colonial exploitation abroad. The historical flipside of Franklin’s arctic expedition is Britain’s colonial incursion into Africa. Whereas this was a somewhat overdetermined canvas overlaid with concerns regarding class, race, and gender, the Arctic was regarded as a blank canvas, where it was still possible to experience White privilege as a pure and honour-bound occupation. The failure of the Franklin expedition signalled to White audiences at home something they had long suspected; that national hubris had its performative limitations. Arctic purity

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Figure 5.1 Portraits of the senior officers of Sir John Franklin’s Arctic expedition. These sketches, published in the Illustrated London News in 1851, were copied from the daguerreotype photographs made by Richard Beard in Greenhithe in 1845, prior to the expedition’s departure. Note the captions reflect the promotion of some officers during the expedition. The Illustrated London News, 13 September 1851.

The Founding of the Great White World 113 and racialised Whiteness hit hard against the reality of exploitative colonial economics, which after all was the true driver of Franklin’s commercial and strategic mission. It was an ideology horrifically lost and adrift that had representationally collapsed in upon itself when it was discovered that the expedition’s last remaining crewman had eventually resorted to cannibalism in their attempt to survive. This discovery spoke to the fact that the real savagery laid none elsewhere than at the heart of an imperial enterprise, willing to sacrifice many in order to save a few. The troubles, of course, did not begin nor end there but spoke metaphorically of a ‘domestic economy’ and its ‘reliance on slavery and other forms of exploitation’ in order to sustain itself and further underlined the fact that a Great Britain pictured as ‘the ultimate space of self-reliance’ was itself a place vulnerable to disaster and a space bound to the effects of climate change.13 These were not, however, the only sites of spectacular limitation within British culture which involved brutal violence, misogyny, and casual racism. Such features made their way onboard to Franklin’s Arctic ships, as evidenced by several accounts of the voyage. What also was evident was the degree to which Victorian sentimentalism penetrated into that same homosocial space, making it possible for emotion and tenderness to be registered in everyday practices amongst the men as part of their identities as Englishmen. The path for them was marked out in Black and White and pictured monochromatically in ways that complemented the projection of the Arctic itself as something conforming with Victorian standards of representation. Whiteness, as such, was the only thing that fully registered in the era’s photographs and engravings of the features apparent on the horizon line of civilisation itself. It was a space where White settler worlds converged to serve colonial fantasies of a sublime space capable of laying waste to peoples, histories, and culture in ways that empire itself could not achieve. White Time Adriana Craciun makes the case that the absence of indigenous peoples’ accounts dating from early modern period up to and including the eighteen century, consciously ‘unpeople’ the Artic and in so doing function as ‘a projection of “racial whiteness,”’ that will have implication far into the nineteenth century.14 At mid-century, this would have figured as a projection concerning rising anxieties having to do with the stability of a multi-ethnic Britain, as well threats posed to imperial masculinity by the rise in events of colonial resistance. There is something else happening here in terms of the representation of the Arctic that Benjamin Morgan argues compromises both ‘human distinctiveness’ and well as ‘the strictures of historical time’ in terms of an ‘aesthetic experience’ for its Anglo-American Victorian audiences.15 What is sublime about their encounter with the Arctic as a class of image does not seem to be wholly faithful to conceptual frameworks and vocabularies having to with gender, nationalism, and imperialism but rather articulates itself through a different channel altogether of sensory affect. It allows viewers to engage with the Arctic at a visceral level by soliciting them to project upon themselves ‘the numbness induced by Arctic cold; the edginess engendered by endless daylight.’16 The Arctic Body Morgan offers that this is a platform for experience in an ‘expanded sense,’ because these impressions ‘are so intimately linked to a human physiology whose time is in the first

114  The Founding of the Great White World instance biological.’17 What these images do is to put humans into the frame of a much longer span of natural history for which through popular understandings of evolutionary biological they were just beginning to grasp for themselves. Photography becomes a surrogate to pre-existing voyage narratives in reproducing a sense of the truth of these encounters with alien worlds. These narratives had always been carefully drawn depictions of what one had seen. Photography, therefore, became a way to apparently supersede interpretation so that the viewers imagined themselves as the ones who had seen. Accounts of Arctic voyages became a significant subgenre of literature beginning in the 1820s. Their popularity steadily declined after the 1850s. On one level, this decline coincides with the failure of numerous expeditions who unsuccessfully went in search of Franklin. At another, it coincides with the rising popularity of photography as the preferred means of scientific accounting. At this time, photography emerged as technical medium that was thought to be impervious to humanity’s interpretive habits of looking. Photographs, as objects in and of themselves, were believed to exist as literal meaning. This was reinforced by their sheer ubiquity as the second half of the nineteenth century ushered in an era of photographic intensification through the vast expansion of the visual field. That this should encompass representations of the Arctic, in and of itself, is hardly surprising. What is perhaps more significant is the way in which the seeming boundlessness of the visual field conspired with the imagination of the Arctic itself. Vast collections arose dedicated to representations of it not just textually, but also visually through panoramas, lithographs, and paintings that particularly relied on the perception of these items as giving the viewer ‘unmediated’ access to what was being witnessed in a radically different elsewhere. Viewers wanted to be brought as close as possible to the natural world and therefore desired to see these artistic creations as productions of an objective, scientific process, rather than as subjective, cultural ones that were always ‘already highly mediated by existing poetic and artistic traditions.’18 The scenes in question were much more having to do with the thriving scientific cultures of Edinburgh and London the early decades of the nineteenth century, with regard to experientially perilous ‘Arctic fever,’ than they were to do with the queer and ambivalent landscape of the Arctic itself. The scientific work being undertaken was a means of bringing the men themselves, and by extension their publics, into greater self-understanding. The regions themselves were secondary to the action of what was accounted for, hence the catastrophic cultural consequences of the loss and Franklin and his crewmen. If Arctic science was premised on story about heroism, this break within the action literally abandons the vessel of its logic. These narratives are ultimately ones concerned with tests and endurance, conducted amidst practices of scientific observation in the Arctic. They are about the way in which the human body registers the Arctic, and as such, they lend themselves to a deeper exploration of the abjection of the human body as a conduit itself for acknowledging an ambivalence towards the larger aims of scientific endeavour amongst the general public at this time and indeed, the limits of Britain’s colonial project. The centre of what is structured and universal cannot hold, because it is increasingly understood that the human is not only structured by its make-up but equally by the effects of the environment upon persons. There is the risk of being compromised should that relationship become disordered with direct respect to what is being experienced and later recorded. The lag time between the two frames the situation as intolerable and registers the effects of desire, mood, or disposition in ways that compromise assumptions about the motivation of the body and its capacity to be provoked

The Founding of the Great White World 115 or brought to extremity in its reactions when stimulated by conditions deemed wholly other to it. The Arctic is as somatic testing ground of the limits of scientific explorer, in his ability to endure various modes of classification and measurement in the service to the empire. That voyages such as these submit to a sort of tyranny of quantification, numbers, and data reveals that they are structurally and mathematically geared towards other types of illicit voyage taking place at this time that have profit as their means. The distinction, by virtue of it, having never been formally registered haunts these endeavours, because there can be no bodily line drawn that states that portions of these missions that will meet their ends in new commercial endeavour steeped in exploitation. Such imperial history remains obscured in the accompanying tables and appendices that come as the product of these expeditions. That photography should be seen by Franklin and his successors as crucial to the documentation of these voyages as a means of registering scientific information suggests that what is acquired by the photographic apparatus is equally presented as calculable. There are nonetheless going to be human bodies onboard for whom it will be important to understand less as an abstraction than as an artefact of interactions between themselves and the peculiar atmospheric conditions surrounding them, which cannot be easily separated out from one another. Morgan suggests that as a consequence, ‘these scenes of scientific observation can also be read as scenes of aesthetic judgment.’19 For Morgan, the Victorian scientific era brings into being a type of ‘geological agency,’ the acknowledgment of which is crucial to understanding that henceforth, ‘it is no longer possible to see geology, data, science, or climate as apolitical, or to neatly divide human culture from geology and biology.’20 What this suggests is that the dimensions of aesthetic judgment have altered at this juncture to include new understandings of Victorian biology and climate that are in every way political. This geological agency, and indeed its further acquisition, depends on the uniquely British ability to assert its claims to a freedom of movement throughout the planet. Through processes closely linked to their acquisition of freedom, photography takes up temporal residence in the lives of its citizens as a means of doubling down on the truth of that original modern claim. The documentary, the evidentiary, will all come to serve this cause which must itself transcend periodisation in order to endure. The new conception of the history as one that includes nonhuman history, in many ways, underlines the dominance of the human, the dominance of Whiteness over every other part of the equation of life taken to its extreme ends. Imperial Remainder as Reminder In the 1860s, something fundamentally shifts these artefacts into the place of relic in the British cultural imagination. What the public gawks over, to the great dismay of Franklin’s widow, are not the human remains salvaged from the wreckage of the Terror and Erebus, but rather the ship’s nonhuman belongings. Their spectacular distribution through public exhibition and other forms of commercial display closely resembled the anthropological exhibitions of other cultures, enabled them to become distanced from their viewers to the degree that they could be assimilated as a similarly sensational type of entertainment. Rather than being honorific of the men who perished, these images were treated as neither sacred and nor scientific, but rather as catastrophic relics that would stubbornly maintain their unwelcome associations with imperial hubris. Witnessed intimately through the new visual medium of the stereoscope, these objects at once heighten and restricted a view of a

116  The Founding of the Great White World Britain that was at once venerable and vulnerable. This situation made it possible, through secondary viewing, to speculate on its failings—albeit at a safe distance. Photographic access to this material was made possible by the advent of the stereograph, which at the time stood as ‘the most significant nineteenth-century visual form after photography.’21 Stereography was ‘a new entertainment technology peaking in popularity in 1860, when an estimated 100,000 stereocards were in stock at the London Stereoscopic Company, and nearly one million stereoscopic viewers had sold.’22 Lieutenant John Cheyne’s 1859 stereographic photographs of relics retrieved over six years by Sir Francis Leopold McClintock after Sir John Franklin and his crew disappeared into the Arctic in 1848 were available to viewers by subscription. These images fed a wide audience that maintained its fascination with Franklin’s disappearance. As a viewing medium, the stereoscope’s hold over the British imagination was phenomenal, because it provided viewers with experience of being fully immersed within an object-filled space that was virtual. Here the horrific emptiness of loss could be filled in by an uncanny, material sense of abundance. The tangibility of the new medium had the desired effect of compensating for a sense of loss once viewers contemplated the lost crew’s possessions through the objects documented in these stereograph images. These devices functioned as a container within a container for viewers to safely handle their grief blended with the subtle awareness that where they now dwelt was somehow contiguous with that same feature of impending doom. The contained space of the Victorian drawing room allowed for them to be envisaged ‘as fugitive objects into the heart of the Arctic archipelago, returning not with evidence of a primitive exotic past, but of a ruined future, their own.’23 Of possession, that matter was one settled by the repatriation of more than 100 objects salvaged from the Terror and Erebus; but regrettably not a single Englishman amongst them. These relics became a synecdoche for Western modernity itself, the debris of a civilisation already in decline, and the objects themselves speak to a melancholy around the endeavour itself of maintaining an empire built of quotidian adornments. The stereographs produced by those who searched for Franklin and his men showed not a single human body nor the compromised remains thereof. Rather, in their place were pictured scraps of clothing, broken weapons, weather-stained, and rusty nails; failed objects that would have been understood by middle class Victorians as evocative of something far more gruesome and disturbing dwelling past their immediate purview, but nevertheless, somehow intimately connected with their own lives, or rather more specifically, what might remain undiscovered about the fragility of their own lives. If Britain’s finest men could end their lives amidst such ruin more’s the pity. At the same time, there was some pleasure in knowing that the loss was less terrible because the dead had been dead and provided the rest of society the opportunity for a brooding over their material remains. The open-ended nature of this disaster was in fact the draw of it. That miserable deaths became so seductive to the errant thoughts of British spectators, regarding horrors committing by their own countrymen, including cannibalism of one another, nonetheless spoke more loudly to the public that the official narratives of the crew’s unflinching heroism in the face of disaster. The men themselves existed as apparitions at the ready haunting the midst of that story so that these objects came to shade in for their own sacrificial bones. These need not be glimpsed actually in the stereographs being distributed in their droves at this time in order to appreciate what the nature of the spectacle finally was—that Whiteness would one day terrifyingly consume itself.

The Founding of the Great White World 117 The Scene of Impossible Returns That terrible fear was in part realised in the autumn of 1854, when Dr John Rae, who had participated in previous searches for Franklin in 1848 and 1849, finally happened upon the bodies of some 30 of Franklin’s crewmen. In this instance, Rae was acting as an employee of the Hudson’s Bay Company, rather than as member of the British Admiralty, and had set off on an expedition into the Arctic to further map the northern coast of North America. Initially what draws Rae’s attention are accounts from Esquimaux relayed to him via his Inuit translator of the discovery of the bodies of some 30–40 White men who had apparently starved to death. Rae is sceptical of this account, until he himself comes into possession of some objects clearly belonging to Franklin’s expedition, including a fork marked with the initials F R M C (Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier, captain of the Terror) and a silver plate engraved with Sir John Franklin’s name. Upon his return, he immediately conveys his findings at once officially to the Hudson’s Bay Company and the Admiralty. He does so the very day he writes to the editor of the Times and secures a publisher for his book The Melancholy Fate of Sir John Franklin recalling the details of his findings. These items become immediate public sensations and turn the events of the Franklin expedition once again into a site of extraordinary public spectacle manufacturing it into a commercial reality at all levels of society. In the account, it is revealed that both the further particulars and the number of articles recovered in fact purchased from the Esquimaux. It is here that account faces scrutiny, because what was as terrible as the imagination can conceive was a product furnished by what were considered humanly lesser minds. This was further complicated by the fact that Rae admits that neither he nor his Esquimaux informants had seen the ‘whites’ with their own eyes but instead had relied upon information from those who had been there, and who had seen the party when travelling. Some had found dead bodies amongst their belongings. Amongst them, ‘one was supposed to have been an officer, as he had a telescope strapped over his shoulders, and his double-barrelled gun lay underneath him.’24 This detail conformed to an elevated standard of Whiteness, whereas the next detail fundamentally opposed it: ‘from the mutilated state of many of the corpses and the contents of the kettles, it is evident that our wretched countrymen had been driven to the last resource—cannibalism—as a means of prolonging existence.’25 This statement put this account at odds with itself. On one hand, it displayed the artefacts of civilisation White bodies and their cultural implements, and on the other, an article of savagery found within the mutilated and consumed human remains. In terms of how these could simultaneously be received within the British imagination; the though was inconceivable. Franklin’s widow, Lady Jane, who had seen her social status rise considerably from the honourable disappearance narrative surrounding her husband and his crewmen, acted immediately to contest Rae’s popular account. She employed no less than Britain’s most famous author of the time, Charles Dickens, to quite literally enact a fantastical counter narrative to that of Rae’s. This was very much going to be waged as a war of the imagination—fought along explicitly racialised lines. More specifically that meant the while Dickens readily acknowledged the legitimacy if the relics Rae brought home with him and employed them as inspiration for his play The Frozen Deep, where he himself will take up the role of polar explore to the end of creating his own version of the melodrama of Franklin’s fraught voyage to be formed in front of an esteemed audience at Tavistock House on January 6, 1857, including none other than Queen Victoria herself.

118  The Founding of the Great White World Dickens’ embrace for these artefacts was only matched by her ardour in fundamentally disavowing Rae’s account on the basis that it was the Esquimaux were telling the story. Dickens here refers to ‘the very loose and unreliable nature of the Esquimaux representations (on which it would be necessary to receive with great caution, even the commonest and most natural occurrence).’26 Therefore, the accounts they conjectured were in no way sufficient to stand up to against that of the institutional authority of the English Admiralty. Unlike the Esquimaux who were ‘a race of savages,’ the Admiralty were men possessing innately of the trappings of ‘civilisation.’ Such men could only be comprised to the degree that other natural elements preyed upon them such a disease or attack by predatory animals, included within this would be the Esquimaux population. Dickens wrote, ‘No man can, with any show of reason, undertake to affirm that this sad remnant of Franklin’s gallant band were not set upon and slain by the Esquimaux themselves … We believe every savage to be in his heart covetous, treacherous, and cruel.’27 The English Navy were expertly trained to succeed without exception when undertaking their great polar adventures, he argued, and should they run afoul of their mission, they would have chosen to starve to death rather than consume their countrymen. He emphatically concludes, therefore, that ‘the memory of the lost Arctic voyagers is placed, by reason and experience, high above the taint of [the suggestion of cannibalism]; and that the noble conduct and example of such men, and of their own great leader himself … outweighs by the weight of the whole universe the chatter of a gross handful of uncivilised people, with domesticity of blood and blubber.’28 So much for the Esquimaux. What is perhaps more striking is the degree to which Dickens goes to defend the civilisation of Rae himself. Of the whole affair, Dickens writes that he and Lady Jane Franklin concur that We find no fault with Dr. Rae, and that we thoroughly acquit him of any trace of blame. He has himself openly explained, that his duty demanded that he should make a faithful report, to the Hudson’s Bay Company or the Admiralty, of every circumstance stated to him; that he did so, as he was bound to do, without any reservation; and that his report was made public by the Admiralty: not by him. It is quite clear that if it were an ill-considered proceeding to disseminate this painful idea on the worst of evidence, Dr. Rae is not responsible for it. It is not material to the question that Dr. Rae believes in the alleged cannibalism; he does so, merely “on the substance of information obtained at various times and various sources,” which is before us all. At the same time, we will most readily concede that he has all the rights to defend his opinion which his high reputation as a skilful and intrepid traveller of great experience in the Arctic Regions—combined with his manly, conscientious, and modest personal character—can possibly invest him with. Of the propriety of his immediate return to England with the intelligence he had got together, we are fully convinced. As a man of sense and humanity, he perceived that the first and greatest account to which it could be turned, was, the prevention of the useless hazard of valuable lives; and no one could better know in how much hazard all lives are placed that follow Franklin’s track, than he who had made eight visits to the Arctic shores. With these remarks we can release Dr. Rae from this inquiry, proud of him as an Englishman, and happy in his safe return home to well-earned rest.29 So, it is the Esquimaux who are now to be placed on further trial, whereas by simple virtue of his humanity, Rae is dismissed from all manner of culpability. He does this not

The Founding of the Great White World 119 to honour Rae, whom he surely knows has profited handsomely from this experience, but rather Franklin and his crewmen who are surely equal in traits to him, and as such, cannot be reasonably proven to have resorted to cannibalism. The Esquimaux have no common language in which to tell anything, and thus according to Dickens: ‘we believe that few (if any) Esquimaux tribes speak one common dialect; and Franklin’s own experience of his interpreters in his former voyage was, that they and the Esquimaux they encountered understood each other “tolerably.”’30 What Dickens via Rae conjectured is that impression of Inuit people about the presence of Franklin and his crewmen is that these interpreters where equally the victim of theft and violence, ‘in the manner the white people,’ they served, who came solely to do their fellow Esquimaux ‘kindness.’31 Dickens goes onto add chillingly, ‘the white people love the Esquimaux, and wish to show them the same kindness that they bestow upon the Indians. Do not deceive yourselves, and suppose they are afraid of you; I tell you they are not; and that it is entirely owing to their humanity that many of you were not killed to-day; for they have all guns, with which they can destroy you either when near or at a distance. I also have a gun, and can assure you, that if a white man had fallen, I would have been the first to have revenged his death.’32 Dickens here is suggesting is that ‘much like the Indian interpreters who worked with the white man in the lower territories of North America the information which is […] given, at the very best, at second-hand…and he was, in all probability imperfectly acquainted with the language he translated to the white man. We believe that few (if any) Esquimaux tribes speak one common dialect.’33 It is that lack of cohesion within the category of their subjectivity that makes the Esquimaux unreliable, not in his loyalty to the White man, but in his over-zealous attempts to liken himself to him. Therefore, for Dickens, ‘there still remains another consideration, and a grave one, which is, that ninety-nine interpreters out of a hundred, whether savage, half-savage, or wholly civilised, interpreting to a person of superior station and attainments, will be under a strong temptation to exaggerate.’34 What he is given over to exaggerate is ‘an estimate’ of his character’ as anything resembling the ‘innate virtue’ of ‘the white man—lost, houseless, shipless, apparently forgotten by his race, plainly famine-stricken, weak, frozen, helpless, and dying’ does not even then return to the condition of a savage.35 For this to be so, Dickens needs only to relate back to the remarks above about being ‘proud of him as an Englishman,’ for his was anything but that.36 Jen Hill reminds us that Dickens’s readers would have recognised that ‘Rae was a Scot who worked for a commercial monopoly, was not in fact, English, nor was he pledged to the patriotic, empire-building aims of the military’ and thus ‘the shadow of the savage— perhaps even the cannibal’ laid upon his own words.37 Dickens, through his exaggerated misidentification of him, racially implicates him as amongst this band of untrustworthy interpreters. The Esquimaux had been referred to Arctic explorer who came upon them earlier in the century as ‘Arctic Highlanders.’ Rae was known to have ‘gone native’ during the course of his explorations for the Hudson Bay company, by quickly adapting to the techniques used by Esquimaux to survive in the rugged terrain. Unlike his Royal Navy counterparts, he proceeded by assuming native dress, living in igloos, and travelling by snowshoe and dogsled, thus ensuring the success of his expeditions.38 Much like contemporary Britain, in the Victorian era, the Welsh, the Irish, and the Scots were forced to play a diminished role within its nationalist project and confined to racialised stereotypes by virtue of the fact that they were not English. Though indigenous, they were treated as

120  The Founding of the Great White World foreigners, tolerated to the degree that their rough labour and basic resources were necessary, whose voices were rejected as illegitimate within a greater chorus of nationalism and imperialist exhortations. Franklin before Franklin What is often forgotten about Franklin is that his first two Arctic expeditions were also catastrophic failures in their own right. Kerstin Knopf recalls his first overland expedition conducted between 1819, where he was commissioned to chart the coastal area between the river mouth and the north-Western rim of the Hudson Bay, ended in the death of one British officer out of the four assigned to him. They had with them one servant, ‘and twenty Natives, including Métis, translators, and voyagers, who were hired to carry the immense equipment.’39 Franklin’s failure is not registered as such, because of ‘the more than half of the Native crew’ who ‘died of starvation and hypothermia’ were likely not counted amongst the men at that time.40 Rather they would have likely been yoked with the equipment into a category similar to lost property that could be causally written off as such.41 As Knopf notes, by the time, they had reached ‘the last leg of the trek back to their base camp, the men did not eat proper food for two months. They ate putrid meat, bones, marrow, intestines, boiled pieces of leather and blankets, and local lichen, which caused severe stomach illness. Congenial with the workings of British Imperial discourse, this very fact was turned into the heroic myth of Franklin as “the man who survived by eating his boots.”’42 What is significant to note here is not the strength of Franklin’s constitution, but rather his constituency as a man. No mention is made of the ‘fact, Franklin and the rest survived only because their Métis translator Pierre St Germain tracked down the camp of Yellowknife Indians on the vast tundra begging them to bring food to the starving men, who had dragged themselves to a cold and empty Fort Enterprise.’43 This is not a sin of omission on the part of Franklin and his fellow British officers, who fail to relay the true story of how they survived, but rather a virtue of commission that they need never formally acknowledge the fact of that reliance on humans considered lesser than themselves, as would have been obvious to anyone of his similar class background. The boots tell their own story of pseudo-patriotic allegiance in that they too were made of tough British stock. A second overland expedition was granted in the years 1825–1827 because they stuck to the script and did the duty in securing territorial claims for the Empire, which was the only true measure of success required. The third expedition had a similar preoccupational character to the others. Martin W. Sandler describes Franklin, at the time of his first expedition as ‘a man who had never participated in, let alone led, an overland trek through the wilderness. He had absolutely no knowledge of hiking, canoeing or hunting. Moreover, at the age of twenty-three he was overweight and had a circulation problem that affected his fingers and toes in even the warmest weather.’44 Despite these immense practical shortcomings, Franklin was chosen because he ‘was brave, charming, totally committed to whatever orders he was given, and came from a well-known and highly respected family.’45 Accompanying him were men of a similar background and practically, including Dr John Richardson a Scottish naturalist, George Back an artist, and Richard Hood a mapmaker. It was a classic grouping of young British aristocratic men who had no earthly idea what they were facing with their deployment nor how to reasonably fend for themselves from the offing. It all ended miserably enough after two terror-filled years what they had to

The Founding of the Great White World 121 show for their efforts was the death of 11 men; 2 of them murdered. Sanders relays that, ‘although it would never be discussed in Victorian England there had unquestionably been cannibalism. Ironically, Franklin, the architect of many of these disasters, returned home to fame and promotion. His published journal became an instant best-seller.’46 He was a hero because simply put he came away from it all alive and with a tale to tell. His leadership is not questioned because he did so, but rather was something that was never seriously in question, not because of what he had done or not, but simply by virtue of what he was. He was known privately as an abject failure amongst his superiors, and it was only as a last resort that he was given his second Arctic commission. He was not given a third despite being knighted by King George the IV for his accomplishments. Instead, he and his young wife were dispatched from England to furthest Tasmania, then called VanDiemen’s land; it was a notoriously corrupt and cruel prison colony to which he was now the appointed Governor. Franklin failed in this capacity—this time administratively and thus, he was recalled to England in 1843 with scarcely an idea of what would be his fate to come a mere two years later. It was Jane Franklin’s turn to right the course and it was she who politicked for this to be her husband’s final, fateful exploratory commission. He would die as he had lived—a colossal blunderer, whose hapless disappearance was made into an act of spectacular heroism. It was to become an issue of national pride that he continue to be looked long after his death and that he be recovered in whatever material way possible so as to justify his stunning loss as exceptional. As it was, it was an exception that proved the rule. Britannia’s rule was requiring of such self-deception in order to stay afloat as the world’s imperial superpower. So, the photographs were taken a gallery of illustrious Britons, whose bodies would one day requiring such recovering to conceal what laid before them, a wholly predictable loss constructed from their remains as well as that of their nonhuman counterparts; 1200 books, daguerreotype cameras, silver cutlery and china, and polish for the officers’ brass buttons that would be forced to stand scattered as proxy for centuries to come so that the dead could be mercifully honoured and the honoured could be mercifully dead. Franklin’s Last Exit

In the summer of 2017, during the height of tensions between Britain and the European Union regarding Brexit, Britain’s the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich opened their exhibition Death in the Ice: The Shocking Story of Franklin’s Final Expedition. One could argue that the unnamed spectral presence hanging over the whole of such negotiations came from an anxious nostalgia to resurrect a Greater Britain from the remnants of its Empire. Within the space of the exhibition itself were the salvaged relics of the past, as well as sound effects both human (voices) and nonhuman (wind) and cavernous spaces aimed at providing the spectator with a visceral sense of the vastness of the landscape. The spectator was at once meant to be drawn into the eerie events of Franklin’s lost voyage and distanced from the sheer terror in produced Victorian audiences, as compared to their counterparts here in contemporary Britain. It is clear that there is an affective thread that binds one to another in the way these events are laid out, and yet for audiences now inured to the immaterial and virtual as aspects of their ordinary visceral experience, the expedition itself finds itself in many ways peculiarly lacking. This version was conspicuously premised on the idea of indigenous inclusion into the story in a way that would not have been registered in Victorian era accounts of what was taking place at the time of

122  The Founding of the Great White World Franklin’s final expedition. British curators in 2017 would have had the presence of mind to solicit the input of ‘Inuit collaborators.’47 Or so the story goes. Ingrid A. Medby and Jason Dittmer relay that ‘the initial design idea’ called for ‘threatening, white expanses, marked by the absence of vitality and humanity’ to be the centrepiece of the exhibition.48 It was only at Inuit request that this idea was revisited to show this area of the exhibition as a place that isn’t ‘mysterious and dark and dangerous’ but actually a ‘vibrant, inhabited place.’49 Medby and Dittmer, however, soon pick up on the fact that this show of the Arctic, despite the Inuit request for them not to revive ‘the colonial imagination of the North as empty and as a blank slate,’ largely failed to deliver on that request, choosing instead to have ‘flickering across the whole wall were images and film from the Arctic—notably free of people.’50 In place of humans, ‘Arctic flora and fauna were projected onto the walls.’51 The desire to contest these Victorians projections is not what is the object here, but rather the desire recall them for purposes of conjuring something similarly ambivalent, the meaning of Brexit. Brexit was an indeterminacy of bordering that was haunting Britain, holding it suspended between material and immaterial exit, and that was at that time construed as both a real and virtual prospect. This exhibition then in one sense was about a spectral Britain examining a spectral Arctic and finding it wanting. A Britain is, and was long before Franklin’s time, home to illicit bodies it could not wholly claim as its own both human and nonhuman. This initial stage of Brexit, similar to the initial stage of the exhibition, served as a reminder that what British audiences might have imagined as an absence of control, might with different eyes be perceived as the very opposite. That need to take back control is done so through the exhibition space itself, which eventually leads its audience into a space where ‘hard’ evidence is presented to both shore up Franklin’s story and Britain’s seemingly likely recourse to a ‘hard’ Brexit. Evidence comes to audiences ‘—in the shape of life-size photos of three sailors’ bodies found on Beechey Island. Here, ‘the ghosts haunting the exhibit finally came into view.’52 These bodies of evidence are not presented to the audience outright, but rather obliquely. Spectators must, according to Medby and Dittmer’s account, enter into ‘a small room to view the three young men, effectively making the spectral remains an optional part of the visit. The walls here were bright white and well-lit—this time not only to visually echo the ice, but to affectively position us within a medical space rather than a voyeuristic one.’53 Brexit means Brexit. Bodies mean Bodies. Anything else is optional for Britons to know about what their own countrymen have negotiated in their names. The spectral remains of empire as but one option on offer as we resurrect this rather awkward scene of Britain’s previous situation of bodily demise. Here, this gets rather clinical, the scene is literally White washed ahead of any judgement being cast upon it. The echo is part of the attempt to both remove and display what has transpired and that audience can now take in for themselves not the presence these remains but rather the technology with which to absent them from their minds. You saw three young White dead men. You did not see Franklin. Franklin is dead and not dead. This, perhaps, is the most shocking part. But we cannot even let these anonymous bodies rest, because there needs to be an understanding of how and not why they might have perished. ‘The narrative here shifted to the scale of the body, telling of a range of potential causes of death. Perhaps most famously lead poisoning and scurvy have been blamed, but analyses of remains have also shown a range of other ailments.’54 Again, we are in the realm of the undecidable when it comes to determining the significance of what has happened and what will happen as Britain enters into another era of apparently world beating folly.

The Founding of the Great White World 123 Here Britain appears to cower in on itself. Madbey and Dittmer refer to ‘a small note stuck to the wall asked visitors to get in contact if they might be descendants of the crew; their DNA may today help identify remains or traces. As such, the DNA of those who died in the ice may still flow through veins in the present.’55 The line of Whiteness is what connects all three bodies to Franklin and finally provides once and for all the evidence we have been searching for amidst all the sounds and projects that first started the quest. These men live on not as biological remains, but as biological resources from which the empire might once again draw from, in order for it to perpetuate itself into the future along suitably racial lines. This was never going to be a story about the Inuit’s land, but rather Britain’s prevailing claim to it, as the literal genes of its ancestors remain there to act as agents critical to the process of reproducing and evolving the story of an enduring natural greatness. The search for the sailors continues more than a century after these tragic enfolded, because the lives and bodies of them contribute in some way to a culture of consumption established in the mid-nineteenth century that could never be satisfied to have past. Stereoscopy, as a close relation of photography, is born at this moment to serve a similar purpose, to pair two separate images of the same scene, so as to construct a single three-dimensional image that folds in on itself and through such means is able to make time replete in the face of loss. Notes 1 Gillen D’Arcy Wood, “Afterword Interglacial Victorians.” In Victorian Sustainability in Literature and Culture. Edited by Wendy Parkins (London: Taylor & Francis, 2017), 220. 2 Wood, “Afterword Interglacial Victorians,” 223. 3 Ibid., 223. 4 Ibid., 223. 5 Ibid., 224. 6 Ibid., 224. 7 Caroline Schaumann, “5. Icecapades: James David Forbes and Louis Agassiz.” In Peak Pursuits: The Emergence of Mountaineering in the Nineteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020), 129–130. 8 Schaumann, “Icecapades,” 133. 9 Suzanne Schneider, “Seven. Louis Agassiz and the American School of Ethnoeroticism: Polygenesis, Pornography, and Other “Perfidious Influences”.” In Pictures and Progress (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 227. 10 Shane McCorristine, The Spectral Arctic: A History of Dreams and Ghosts in Polar Exploration (London: UCL Press, 2018), 8. 11 McCorristine, The Spectral Arctic, 19. 12 Richard Bayliss, “Sir John Franklin’s Last Arctic Expedition: A Medical Disaster.” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 95.3 (2002): 151–153. doi:10.1258/jrsm.95.3.151. 13 Jen Hill, White Horizon: The Arctic in the Nineteenth-Century British Imagination (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009), 6. 14 Adriana Craciun, Writing Arctic Disaster: Authorship and Exploration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 30. 15 Benjamin Morgan, “After the Arctic Sublime.” New Literary History 47, no. 1 (2016): 1–26 at 4. 16 Morgan, “After the Arctic Sublime,” 4. 17 Ibid., 4. 18 Ibid., 6. 19 Ibid., 14. 20 Ibid., 17–18. 21 Adriana Craciun, “The Franklin Relics in the Arctic archive.” Victorian Literature and Culture 42, no. 1 (2014): 1–31 at 3. 22 Craciun, “The Franklin Relics in the Arctic Archive,” 3.

124  The Founding of the Great White World 3 Ibid., 4. 2 24 Charles Dickens, “The Lost Arctic Voyagers (I).” Household Words X, (1854): 361–365 at 361. 25 Dickens, “The Lost Arctic Voyagers (I),” 362. 26 Ibid., 361. 27 Ibid., 362–363. 28 Charles Dickens, “The Lost Arctic Voyagers (II).” Household Words X, (1854) 385–393 at 392. 29 Dickens, “The Lost Arctic Voyagers (I),” 361. 30 Ibid., 361. 31 Charles Dickens and John Rae, “The Lost Arctic Voyagers (III).” Household Words X (1854) 433–437 at 436. 32 Dickens & Rae, “The Lost Arctic Voyagers (III),” 436. 33 Dickens, “The Lost Arctic Voyagers (I),” 362, 34 Ibid., 362. 35 Ibid., 362. 36 Ibid., 362. 37 Hill, White Horizon, 123. 38 Ibid., 123. 39 Kerstin Knopf, “Exploring for the Empire: Franklin, Rae, Dickens, and the Natives in Canadian and Australian Historiography and Literature.” In Post-Empire Imaginaries? Anglophone Literature, History, and the Demise of Empires (Amsterdam: Brill, 2015), 73. 40 Knopf, “Exploring for the Empire,” 73. 41 Ibid., 73. 42 Ibid., 73. 43 Ibid., 73. 44 Martin W. Sandler, Resolute: The Epic Search for the Northwest Passage and John Franklin, and the Discovery of the Queen’s Ghost Ship (New York: Sterling Publishing Company, 2006), 32. 45 Sandler, Resolute, 32. 46 Ibid., 44. 47 Ingrid A. Medby, and Jason Dittmer, “From Death in the Ice to Life in the Museum: Absence, Affect and Mystery in the Arctic.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 39, no. 1 (February 2021): 176–193 at 186. 48 Medby and Dittmer, “From Death in the Ice to Life in the Museum,” 186. 49 Ibid., 186. 50 Ibid., 186. 51 Ibid., 186. 52 Ibid., 187. 53 Ibid., 187. 54 Ibid., 187. 55 Ibid., 187.

Bibliography Bayliss, Richard. “Sir John Franklin’s Last Arctic Expedition: A Medical Disaster.” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 95.3 (2002): 151–153. doi:10.1258/jrsm.95.3.151. Craciun, Adriana. Writing Arctic Disaster: Authorship and Exploration. Cambridge: Cambridge. https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.josephsmithpapers.org% 2Fperson%2Fjohn-caldwell-calhoun&psig=AOvVaw21Z6CjOkybSKv1bW1Mqdhm&ust=164 2895160928000&source=images&cd=vfe&ved=0CAwQjhxqFwoTCLiU4MSDxPUCFQAAA AAdAAAAABAMUniversityPress, 2016. ———. “The Franklin Relics in the Arctic Archive.” Victorian Literature and Culture 42, no. 1 (2014): 1–31. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150313000235. Dickens, Charles. “The Lost Arctic Voyagers (i).” Household Words X (1854): 361–365. http:// www.djo.org.uk/household-words/volume-x/page-361.html

The Founding of the Great White World 125 ———. “The Lost Arctic Voyagers (II).” Household Words X, (1854) 385–393. http://www.djo. org.uk/household-words/volume-x/page-385.html Dickens, Charles and John Rae. “The Lost Arctic Voyagers (III).” Household Words X (1854) 433–437. http://www.djo.org.uk/household-words/volume-x/page-433.html Hill, Jen. White Horizon: The Arctic in the Nineteenth-Century British Imagination. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009. Knopf, Kerstin. “Exploring for the Empire: Franklin, Rae, Dickens, and the Natives in Canadian and Australian Historiography and Literature.” In Post-Empire Imaginaries? Anglophone Literature, History, and the Demise of Empires, 69–100. Amsterdam: Brill, 2015. McCorristine, Shane. The Spectral Arctic: A History of Dreams and Ghosts in Polar Exploration. London: UCL Press, 2018. Medby, Ingrid A and Jason Dittmer. “From Death in the Ice to Life in the Museum: Absence, Affect and Mystery in the Arctic.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 39, no. 1 (February 2021): 176–193. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775820953859. Morgan, Benjamin. “After the Arctic sublime.” New Literary History 47, no. 1 (2016): 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2016.0000. Sandler, Martin W. Resolute: The Epic Search for the Northwest Passage and John Franklin, and the Discovery of the Queen’s Ghost Ship. New York: Sterling Publishing Company, 2006. Schaumann, Caroline. “5. Icecapades: James David Forbes and Louis Agassiz.” In Peak Pursuits: The Emergence of Mountaineering in the Nineteenth Century, 116–148. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020. Schneider, Suzanne. “Seven. Louis Agassiz and the American School of Ethnoeroticism: Polygenesis, Pornography, and Other ‘Perfidious Influences.’” In Pictures and Progress, 211–243. Duke University Press, 2012. Wood, Gillen D’Arcy. “Afterword Interglacial Victorians.” In Victorian Sustainability in Literature and Culture, 220–226. Edited by Wendy Parkins, London: Taylor & Francis, 2017.

6

White Aesthetics Daguerreotypes in the Consolidation of Colonial Empires in West Africa

Daguerreotypes from West Africa circulated internationally from the time of the medium’s inception. The veracity assigned to photographic images aided the imperial forces in their determination to craft imaginaries of Africa as the world’s benighted continent. Africa was cast as in desperate need of enlightenment through exposure to the technological advancements offered by the Western world. To that end, daguerreotypes played out outsized role in promoting Western colonisation and missionary efforts through Africa and in establishing the channels through which they could demonstrate ‘science and art taking hold’ and the arrival of ‘civilization’ as ‘ennobling’ to native peoples.1 Copied engravings of these daguerreotypes made their way to Europe and the United States very early on, supported by a burgeoning global print culture. The American Colonial Society was one amongst a considerable number of philanthropic and missionary societies that had ideological interests in Africa. Such organisations ‘used photography as a means of communication with their respective publics and stakeholders.’2 Augustus Washington was brought to Liberia by the America Colonial Society, according to Marcy J. Dinius for the express purpose of ‘providing irrefutable proof of the justice and progress of the[ir] colonial project.’3 So crucial was Washington to these endeavours that his services were advertised in Liberia in advance of his furnished arrival to Monrovia, as endorsed by many prominent supporters of colonisation whose portraits he had taken back home in Hartford Connecticut in the early 1850s. Upon his arrival, he was immediately commissioned to make daguerreotypes of Liberia’s President, First Lady, and Vice President. These were later described as ‘excellent likenesses’ that ‘as works of art, will favourably compare with specimens of American skill, chemical knowledge and artist arrangement.’4 They compare rather than are specimens of American skill, because as African American ‘mulatto,’ Washington could not publicly be judged as having an equivalent skill to Whites, nor could his ‘mulatto’ sitters, whatever the ostensible rank, be considered fully verifiable subjects and therefore the best that could be said of his daguerreotypes is that they ‘purport to be the faces’ of Liberia’s ruling class.5 This conspicuous arrangement reflects the dubious nature underpinning a series of images produced by Washington, which were subsequently used by the American Colonisation Society in their publications. Jürg Schneider observes, ‘the same is true for colonial administrations which also called on photographic images to document the achievements made and also, in some instances, to justify their costly presence on-the-spot.’6 In the case of Washington, there was the need for a minor retraction in their efforts, after Washington encouraged African Americans come to Liberia only if they like he had some degree of personal capital backing them. In Washington’s case that ‘capital would have consisted on the supplies remaining from his closed Hartford galleries.’7 To the contrary, the American Colonial Society said that DOI: 10.4324/9781003274797-7

White Aesthetics 127 it ‘would not discourage any person from emigrating simply because he might not have money is his pocket or goods to sell.’8 At all costs, Liberia would be pictured as a success story. Washington’s own story had to be the mirror of that goal, and in that, he made it his duty to make views of Liberia appear visibility equivalent in abundance to any known in the United States. Orders for such portraits were conceived from the offing to send abroad and such was the character of Washington’s own journey that he was wholly aware of the concessions he was making. Washington’s Crossing Augustus Washington’s story of emigration to Liberia stands out because he arrived there expressly as a famed daguerreotypist operating amongst circles of both New England abolitionism and the American Colonial Society. Washington started his life as a freeborn Black person in Trenton, New Jersey in 1820, as the son of a South Asian immigrant mother and a former Virginia slave father. Washington’s education began at a private school for White children. He was forced to leave at age 12 or 13 for reasons unknown although it might have something to do with his family’s financial situation, as much as his growing interest in antislavery literature. The two themes would characterise his education right up to the point of his departure from the United States as a young man. Prior to that, Washington cultivated the attention of White abolitionists to support his progress. At age 16, with their financial support, he was to set up a school to instruct African American children in Trenton, where he would act as a teacher. Noting his success, they encouraged him to attend the Oneida Institute, which was a highly influential school that was explicitly designed to be an abolition college and formed expressly to be part of the emerging abolitionism movement in New England. Students would be taught Greek, Hebrew, arithmetic, bookkeeping, algebra, anatomy, physiology, geometry, natural philosophy, natural theology, Christianity, political economy, science of government, and to partake in exercises in declamation and composition. The student body was to be a model of multiracial and multiclass democracy, run by Whites prominent in the antislavery within the northeast of the United States. He then went on to attend Kimball Union Academy at Meriden, New Hampshire, that stood out at the time as one of the wealthiest preparatory institutions in New England, where students were shepherded on to Ivy League higher education. Washington’s appearance there was an exception, as he was the only ‘mulatto’ student present in his year, 1843. At 22, Washington, would have been one of the eldest students. In 1846, three years after his graduation from KUA, The Charter Oak, an abolitionist newspaper in Hartford, Connecticut, printed the following letter from Washington, in which he described his Kimball Union journey: A month or two elapsed before we could hear of an Academy where they would receive and prepare for College, a colored student, without distinction on account of color. An application was made to Kimball Union Academy, at Meriden, N.H., one of the most wealthy and flourishing preparatory institutions in New-England, where several teachers are the advocates of sound learning, and would be an ornament to any enlightened community. In reply, the Principal stated that, “after considerable deliberation and consultation with the teachers and Trustees, they had decided to receive me; but would not commit themselves in regard to party questions regarding abolitionism.” But, said he, “we receive him simply as we would

128  White Aesthetics receive any gentleman of like character and purposes, without regard to any public questions or excitements.” He also expressed the opinion, that if there was a difference of treatment, it would probably be in my favor. This proved to be true, for I could not have been better treated in London or Paris, than I was during the two years spent at that Institution. I mention these facts because they tend to confirm what I have always believed and maintained, almost alone—that no class of men in the world have fewer prejudices themselves, than the professors of our Colleges and teachers of Academies—But, in most cases, they yield to a corrupt public sentiment. I completed my course of preparation, reading nine Orations in Cicero, Sallust, Virgil, Xenophon’s Anabasis, two books of Homer, and some Mathematics. For my standing as a scholar, and character as a gentleman while there, I must appeal to the teachers and my classmates, who are now in Yale, Amherst, Burlington, Middlebury, Dartmouth and other Colleges. Besides in these studies, and those of my College terms, I am willing to submit to an examination at any time, by any person. In 1843, I received from the Academy my recommendation, sustained my examination by the Faculty of the College [Dartmouth], and entered it with a good number of my former classmates.9 Washington would go on to matriculate to Dartmouth in 1843, as its only Black student. What set Washington apart from them was not simply his race, but his class status. He was simply too poor to maintain his fees at Dartmouth. Although he had desired all his life to become an educator, out of necessity, Washington turned his hand to daguerreotype as a means of income. Despite patronage from faculty members and White abolitionists from the surrounding Hanover community, monies from his daguerreotype enterprise proved insufficient to sustain him at Dartmouth for more than a year. He left Hanover and moved to Hartford, Connecticut in 1844, to run Talcott Street Congregational Church’s North African School, one of two schools in Hartford for Black students. Although he was never able to return to Dartmouth as he had intended through earnings, he was able to repay the $150 he owed the college.10 One must wonder why no White abolitionist donors came to Washington’s aid regarding his fees, nor rallied to the cause of keeping him in higher education. Whilst working at the North African School for two years, Washington continued to supplement his income by taking daguerreotypes. From that success, he came upon the idea of setting up his daguerreotype studio in Hartford in 1846–1848, and then resuming his business in 1850, the year of The Fugitive Slave Act. During these years following on from it, Washington drew sitters from the ‘members of Hartford’s elite, such as poet Lydia Sigourney, jurist and insurance company executive Eliphalet Adams Bulkeley, and the abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and John Brown.’11 What was notable about his clientele was not just their power and prestige, but that they were drawn from figures with some of the strongest opinions on the issue how to resolve the dilemma of slavery in the United States. Philanthropic figures such as Eliphalet Adams Bulkeley and Lydia Sigourney were at the time, firmly of the belief that Blacks were inherently inferior to Whites and that emancipated slaves would never be able to fully integrate into White American society. They threw their support and resources behind the American Colonization Society, in aid of returning freed African Americans back to Africa so they could gradually assimilate to democracy amongst those of their own race. White abolitionist figures like William Lloyd Garrison and John Brown, by contrast, were of the firm belief that Blacks and Whites should live and work

White Aesthetics 129 together in full equality, and thus the only solution would be for slavery to be abolished with immediate effect. We know that Washington, who held strong abolitionist views throughout his youth, initially rejected the views of the American Colonization Society whose proposed solution to the growing number of freed slaves was to send them to other countries, rather than having them assume equal status to White Americans. Washington was someone who would have devoted his early life to improving conditions for free-born African Americans like himself and, therefore, would have initially abhorred the prospect of emigration for himself. Nonetheless, as conditions of safety rapidly deteriorated for educated ‘mulattos’ even in Northern cities of the United States in the early 1850s, Washington was compelled to face the reality that his appearance and education would offer him no protection whatsoever against the growing tide of violence. Thus, it was in his interest to make concerted plans to leave the country. Initially, Washington was concerned that Africa may not be the best place for American Blacks to live for ideological reasons. Shawn Michelle Smith makes the important point that Washington ‘abhorred the racist contingent of the American Colonization Society (ACS), that sought to purge African Americans from American soil by sending them to Liberia’ and that he essentially joined forces with them only ‘when he could not find an alternative sanctuary,’ for himself and his family in the years subsequent to the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law.12 As opposed to Africa, Washington had hoped to emigrate to either to Canada, the West Indies, British Guinea, of the part of Mexico which had been annexed by Texas, and had even considered at one point departing to South America. Washington writes, …I have been looking in vain for some home for Afric-Americans more congenial for their feelings and prejudice than Liberia. The Canadas, the West Indies, Mexico, British Guiana, and other parts of South America, have all been brought under review. And yet I have been unable to get rid of a conviction long since entertained and often expressed, that if the colored people of this country ever find a home on earth for the development of their manhood and intellect, it will first be in Liberia or some other part of Africa.13 Washington takes as his inspiration the English colonists who ‘came from the land of their birth, and forsook their homes, their firesides, their former altars, and the graves of their fathers, to seek civil and religious liberty among the wild beasts and Indians on a foreign, bleak, and desolate shore.’14 In this situation, Liberia’s indigenous tribes will play wild beast and Indians to the African Americans, and it is their land that will be imagined as bleak and desolate, and in dire need of superior types of cultivation; both moral and commercial. Washington was not only under ideological pressure to choose a route out of the United States but also equally under financial pressure and saw the opportunity to turn his prospects in this direction, because he viewed Africa as ‘a continent larger than North America is lying waste for want of the hand of science and industry. A land whose bowels are filled with mineral and agricultural wealth, and on whose bosom reposes in exuberance and wild extravagance all the fruits and productions of a tropical clime. The providence of God will not permit a land so rich in all the elements of wealth and greatness to remain much longer without civilized inhabitants.’15 What Washington is pointing to is an appreciation of his future livelihood in Liberia as one routed in the plantation, as opposed to the parlour.

130  White Aesthetics Smith also provides evidence that his daguerreotype business in Hartford was fledgling: ‘in an advertisement of 1851,’ he noted that ‘in some instances, watches, jewellery, and country produce will be exchanged for likenesses.’16 Similarly, clothing could be hired by the sitter to present a more affluent version of themselves proper for the camera. The following year, Washington offered daguerreotypes of different sizes and price ranged from ‘fifty cents to ten dollars,’ with Washington describing them in another advertisement, as ‘uncommonly cheap.’17 What is also notable about this same advertisement was that it features a drawing of a White male photographer pointing his camera at a White male sitter whose body is depicted in the shape of a globe. The writing was literally on the wall with this posting; Washington required the patronage of the Colonialists and that his skill in photography would be utilised as his ticket out of the United States. He was given a $200 grant by the Connecticut chapter of the American Colonization Society to resettle in Liberia, under the proviso that he would apply his well-admired photographic talents to promote the colony through their publication, as well as having them circulate in the wider press.18 In addition to his photographic commitments to the American Colonial Society, he would agree to publish a series of pro-colonisation editorials in the New York Tribute and Colored American. Proceeding Views On July 3, 1851, some two years prior to embarking on his own voyage to Liberia, Washington writes a public letter to the Hartford American Colonization Society, regarding the work he expects to undertake within his prospective homeland: ‘everyone who has traced the history of missions in Africa, and watched the progress of that little Republic of Afric-Americans on the western coast, must be convinced that the colored men are more peculiarly adapted, and must eventually be the means of civilizing, redeeming, and saving that continent, if ever it is done at all. Encouraged and supported by American benevolence and philanthropy, I know no people better suited to this great work-none whose duty more it is.’19 In that same letter, Washington will go so far as to condemn the African race as ‘cowardly enough to allow themselves to be brought manacled and fettered as slaves, rather than die on their native shores resisting their oppressors.’20 Here, Washington is referring to the White abolitionist Reverend John Todd whose home in Tabor, Iowa, served as a ‘station’ on the Underground Railroad, a refuge for fugitive slaves, a storehouse for weapons, ammunition, and other supplies for slave rebellions, including a cache of weapons that were eventually used by the radical abolitionist John Brown’s raid on the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. ‘In the language of Dr. Todd: “If the marks of humanity are not blotted out from this race of miserable men, it is not because oppression has not been sufficiently legalized, and avarice been allowed to pursue its victims till the grave became a sweet asylum.”’21 It is that remainder of humanity that Washington is convinced can be made whole again in joining forces with the American Colonization Society, who has offered from its inception an alternative form of ‘asylum for the free colored people and manumitted slaves of the United States; and by this mean also to send the blessings of civilization and religion to the benighted sons of that continent.’22 Whites have been able to reason in favour of the utility of the scheme, whereas ‘the free colored people, have acted as a body […] resolved not to leave this country; while those who have gone to that colony, from a state of slavery, as the condition of freedom, have been least able to contribute to the knowledge and greatness

White Aesthetics 131 of a new country, and impart civilization and the arts and sciences to its heathen inhabitants.’23 What is most remarkable about this passage of the letter is how it claims both a humanity and civilisation as precursor to an African American arrival in Liberia that seldom would have been assumed by an African American living in the antebellum United States, and most especially under the terms of The Fugitive Slave Act. Subtending this comment is Washington’s acknowledgement that the American Colonization Society was in many ways in league with the American South with its planter class and its ambition to rid the country of freed peoples. Washington observes plainly that ‘they erected a platform so broad, that the worst enemies of the race could stand upon it with the same grace, and undistinguished from the honest and true philanthropist.’24 The appearance of such a broad church meant that ‘it could at the same time appeal for support to the piety and benevolence of the North, and to the prejudices and sordid interest of the South.’25 It did not matter to Washington that this was the case, because unlike the abolitionist of the North, he had grown up with, this group had a plan for African American people however ‘faulty.’26 His abolitionist contemporaries they seized the opportunity to radically change the makeup of American civilisation, by effectively using African Americans to as their agents to become a greater global power. In this, Washington finds much to admire. He asserts that African Americans in the United States were ‘shut out from all the offices of profit and honor, and from the most honorable and lucrative pursuits of industry, and confined as a class to the most menial and servile positions in society. And, what is worse than all, they are so educated from infancy, and become so accustomed to this degraded condition, that many of them seem to love it.’27 The only way out of this conundrum was for African Americans to find their own ways to compete with ‘Christian Saxons,’28 and that was the change their present state to mirror theirs, and to demonstrate their ability through their superior intellect and energy to build a parallel civilisation elsewhere. Here, Washington presciently gives away the premise of their plan, which was to ‘gratify national prejudices,’ as opposed to dismantle them. Like hundreds of Saxons that had gone before them in exploring uncultivated regions of Africa, the African American was determined to benefit. Arrival and Appropriation Washington wrote a letter to the Reverend John Orcutt, the Travelling Agent of the American Colonial Society, in February of 1854, documenting his first six weeks in Liberia, and the progress he had made there with aid from the Society and the necessity of his working as a photographer to keep up with the costs of living. He writes: ‘I cannot encourage any man to come here that has not something of his own to depend on, aside from the aid of the Society. Because everything is very dear here for poor people.’29 In it, he makes specific reference to Lydia Sigourney and other gentlemen as his sponsors in coming here and expresses his thanks for their support, although reading between the lines one can ascertain that Washington remains in a state of financial precarity. At that time, his photography business was just about keeping him to middle class standard of life. Amongst the marvels that Washington notes as he sets his eyes upon Monrovia for the first time are crops transplanted to Africa as a direct result of the transatlantic slave trade. Smith observes, ‘this new Eden is suffused with the history and legacy of slavery, and its fruits, literally and metaphorically, are the products of the slave trade. And, of course, are most of its formerly American inhabitants.’30 What set Washington apart from his contemporaries in this regard in that he was born free and from the North, whereas

132  White Aesthetics most of them were freed within their lifetimes and from the South, a portion of which were manumitted following the death of their owners with the legal stipulation that they should be immediately transported to Liberia and only freed upon their arrival. Unlike many of them, Washington arrived with an established trade and political reputation in hand. He carried with him ‘$500 worth of Daguerrean materials, cases, lockets etc.’ and took photographs in the dry season between January and June.31 In the wet season, he planned to sustain himself as ‘a merchant’ selling goods from ‘English and American trading vessels.’32 It is clear that work done on behalf of the American Colony Society will not alone sustain him. In his letter, Washington apologises to Orcutt for not writing articles earlier to highlight the colony, but a combination of malarial fever and financial considerations has forestalled his efforts. It is simply the case, ‘that whenever I am able to work, I can make so much more money by my time in taking miniatures the temptation is work when I can.’33 Washington recounts that he immediately put up his ‘price down to what people consider cheap, $3 for the cheapest picture, and when I am about to work in my room, and take some 20, 30 and 40 dollars of pictures in day.’34 However, as compared to the 50 cents, he was charging for miniatures in Hartford, this would have been construed by Orcutt as a step-up, reflecting the greater affluence of his aspirational migrant clientele.35 The style of his portraiture, however, remained exactly the same as he had been in Hartford. It was not just American fashion that Washington translated literally into this colonial context, but equally a faithful approximation of the White American middle class in its appearance. Every detail of grooming, dressing, and posing was accounted for to appropriate before the camera the formal principles of a White American nation. By posing his subjects in these ways he was not making of them Liberians, but rather Americans for the first time, and as such, Washington’s daguerreotypes were literally modelling the feature of self-possession for the African American settler class in Liberia. Washington’s sitters wear wigs styled to approximate Victorian White hairstyles, their bodies sporting tailored dark morning coats and pleated dresses, atop their heads are bowler and flowered hats, completed with a flourish of starched collar or gloved hands. These newcomers were eager to set themselves apart from the local population and therefore tried to emphasise their differences in racial type by establishing themselves as superior in other ways. One way they did so was through possession of the daguerreotype itself as an object of class distinction. These daguerreotypes as objects were very much like the commodities that surrounded them, cultivated for export. As Shawn Michelle Smith observes, they were made expressly ‘to be held and viewed in the United States’ and indeed were made as presents to be held ‘in the American Colonization Society’s collections.’36 One copy might be kept by sitter, but the reality was that the copy that mattered most was the one framed by the context of its possibility, meaning that these daguerreotypes still remained on some tangible level products of the slave trade. The Americo-Liberians were performing for the nation in these images, and that nation was the United States. There was certain type of literacy on display here, one that understood the arguments at home about off-loading such types to Africa in an experiment about their capacity for ‘civilisation.’ Theirs was therefore a ritual re-enactment of mastering the founding principles of Whiteness; Washington had established his livelihood to begin with. Ann Shumard remarks that ‘of the fewer than one hundred Washington daguerreotypes that have been documented to date, none represented an African American sitter from Hartford has been found.’37

White Aesthetics 133 This finding may have a product not been of omission, but rather might have been a condition of commercial reality. By that I mean that the liberal humanistic possibilities of the photographic portrait remain forestalled in the realities of racialised capitalism and violence made everywhere evident by their mid-nineteenth-century context. The figures that Washington gained access to in Hartford were quite literally those he depended on for his survival. Lydia Sigourney’s interest in him specifically furnished the conditions for him to arrive in Liberia. Sigourney was not only one of the nineteenth century’s most popular and prolific poets, but she was also equally famous in her time for turning her proceeds towards the cause of African colonisation. She also just so happened to play an active role in the Hartford Chapter of the American Colonisation society. Shawn Michelle intimates that through her efforts, the American Colonisation society took a particular interest in Washington.38 He would have taken a daguerreotype of her in his Hartford studio, the year prior to his departure. Ann Shumard notes that ‘Augustus Washington not only daguerreotyped Sigourney but corresponded with her after immigrating to Liberia. When she wrote to him in 1859 requesting “some produce” from his farm, Washington obliged by shipping her 110 pounds of sugar produced from his latest crop of sugarcane.’39 Another Washington’s Hartford subject, Eliphalet Bulkeley, was also an active financial contributor to the American Colonization Society. The Bulkeleys were one of America’s first families arriving from England to the New World colony of Boston in mid-summer of 1635. The family soon settled in Concord, Massachusetts, a town they help found. Eliphalet Bulkeley’s personal fortune was made the founder of the Aetna Life Insurance Company. The company prospered at the time of its founding in 1853, by issuing life insurance policies ‘that reimbursed slave owners for financial losses when those they enslaved died.’40 These policies were issued to the African American slaves, themselves, while naming their owners as beneficiaries; a situation that was particularly egregious because these individuals were barred from being able to read and write, control their own life arrangements, let alone settle into contracts of their own accord. In 1853, Bulkeley, as well as several members of his family would sit for Washington just months before his departure. Washington’s daguerreotype business would eventually expand to include travel to the surrounding territories of Sierra Leone, the Gambia, and Senegal.41 Ann M. Shumard recounts that on ‘on 29th June 1857, he put an advertisement in the newspaper New Era (Freetown, Sierra Leone), which closed with the following words: “Mrs. Washington will be in attendance to receive ladies, and assist in arranging their toilet.”’42 This wording suggests that Washington served a similar class of middle and upper class émigré in these other parts as he had done in Liberia. Ultimately, photography would not become a lifetime career for him, and by 1858, it appears that Washington abandoned the dying art of daguerreotypy in favour of applying his energies to growing his sugar plantation, and subsequently to the business of Liberian governance; a privilege afforded to him by as a wealthy planter. The great irony of Washington’s situation was that his initial pro-settlement arguments pointed to the fact that the United States was originally colonised by White people who hoped to escape persecution and to be free and yet these people went on to enslave Africans, only for Americo-Liberians to go onto the replicate that situation in Liberia through enslavement of the colony’s indigenous peoples. This situation was based on the Americo-Liberians constant need for labourers for their plantation within was designed from the offing to be an agricultural society. Since their numbers were so tiny as

134  White Aesthetics compared to the native population a settler community, compromising no more than 1% of the population, it was imperative that they started using slaves on their farms and in their businesses from the time of the colony’s declared independence in 1847 in order to sustain its economic model. Slaves were also sold abroad in a trade that dated back well before the American Colonial Society sought out its settlement and continued until the late 1920s, when an international scandal revealed the persistence of this trade into the twentieth century as officiated by the Liberian government itself. The paradox is that Liberia was intended as experimental territory, as was Sierra Leone, to model a post-slavery world where African governance would be administered by the world’s great imperial powers through proxy leadership. Liberia has started as a privately funded American settlement in 1818, and when the American Colonial Society no long wished to administrate it, there was because of the internal struggles within it, the British applied an external pressure on the United States to allow it to become a British protectorate as was its neighbour Sierra Leone. The US government and American Colonisation society collaborated to have the Liberian constitution drafted at Harvard University that mirrored the American constitution and then had a flag created inspired by the American flag to become the nation’s sovereign symbol. However, at the time of its independence, it was more a paradigmatic precursor to a Confederate American post slavery, than a Union one. A Nation of Mixed Origin Thomas E. Keefe makes the case that through the efforts of the American Colonial Society, ‘the Southern White aristocracy was literally colonizing Liberia with their own children and grandchildren, brothers and sisters, cousins.’43 Those who would go onto become the ruling elites of Liberia, from the time power was formally relinquished from White colonial administrators, all came from backgrounds that reflected and reinforced the racialised hierarchies of the United States born of the institution of both unionisation and slavery. Liberia’s first President, Joseph Jenkins Roberts, was born in Norfolk, Virginia, the son of a very light-skinned ‘mulatto’ slave called Amelia, and an unnamed Welsh slaveowner. The details are very murky, but what is purported to be known is that she had seven children with this same slaveowner and that eventually she freed by him. All of these children were estimated to be of seven-eighths European ancestry. There has been recent speculation that Roberts was the illegitimate son of Thomas Jefferson and Sally ‘Amelia’ Hemings. Subsequent to gaining her freedom, Amelia married another very light-skinned ‘mulatto’ called James Roberts, who raises her children as freed people. Roberts had achieved a middle class status through his work as a merchant boatman in Virginia, so the family would have been both educated and financially secure. Despite his ostensibly White appearance and commercial backing through his step-father, Joseph Roberts was still technically classed as Black under Virginia law and therefore his prospects in the Southern United States remained extremely limited. Liberia represented the opportunity for greater freedom and success. Already a merchant by the time he and his family emigrated in 1829, Roberts, aged 20, became an unofficial aide to the White governor of the colony, Thomas H. Buchanan, and thus starts the trajectory of his political career culminating in the presidency of an independent Liberia on 1848. John Brown Russwurm’s Liberian story continues from a similar basis. John Brown Russwurm was born on October 1, 1799, in Port Antonia, Jamaica, to wealthy White Virginian American planter named John Russwurm and an enslaved Creole Jamaican

White Aesthetics 135 whose name is not mentioned in surviving records. Amos J. Beyan observes that ‘it could be assumed that Russwurm was born a slave, since the slave laws of Jamaica stipulated that the status of a child was the same as that of his or her mother.’44 In American racial parlance, Russwurm Jr. would have likely been racially classified as seven-eighths European in ancestry. That being said, ‘the ignominy associated with being the father of an interracial child in Jamaica was probably among the many reasons why Russwurm’s father decided to send him to Quebec, Canada in 1807 when he was approximately seven years of age.’45 Russwurm Jr. would be recalled to the United States on the occasion of his father’s ‘resettlement to Maine (then part of Massachusetts), on a 75-acre saltwater farm in Back Cove in 1812, his new bride, Susanna Blanchard of Yarmouth.’46 As it turned out, ‘Blanchard –a widow half his age who already had three children of her own–insisted that her husband’s mulatto son join them in Portland as a full member of their new family.’47 Even after John Russwurm Sr. died in 1815, Susanna sees to it that he remains integral to the family and circulates amongst the best society in Portland, the young Russwurm managing to attend both Hebron Academy and Bowdoin College, on both occasions as its only ‘Black’ student in residence. Russwurm sailed for Liberia in 1829 under the auspices of the American Colonization Society, to serve as a superintendent of schools, colonial secretary, and vice-agent in Monrovia. Through his connections with White Northern elites established while he was at Bowdoin, Russwurm eventually became Governor of the Maryland Colony in 1836, becoming the first ‘Black’ high official appointed by the all-White organisation. He held this post until his death. The tenth president of Liberia, Alfred Russell, who would achieve his wealth in Liberia as a prominent member of the planter class before going on to a political career, was born into slavery in 1817 in Lexington, Kentucky. His mother was described at the time of his birth as octoroon, meaning that she was racially classified as seven-eighths European in ancestry. Alfred Russell’s father was rumoured to be John Russell and that during a summer visit with his grandmother in Kentucky, Russell, then a student at Princeton University, raped the enslaved octoroon Milly Crawford.48 This was an incredibly common occurrence in the South, but what noteworthy about it, according to Notable Kentucky African Americans Database, was their son, Alfred Francis Russell was referred to ‘to as a white slave’ and that overwhelmingly attention paid to him was due to the fact that John Russell was ‘the son of Mary Owen Todd Russell Wickliffe, the richest woman in Kentucky.’49 This would have meant that Russell was born from some of the finest European bloodlines in terms of ancestry and appearance in the South. As it was, ‘he was only 1⁄16 African. In many states at the time he would have been considered legally white although born into slavery.’50 In 1833, Mary Wickliffe manumitted 15-year-old Alfred (her grandson by blood) alongside his mother Milly, his cousin Lucretia (Lucy) Russell, and her four children: Sinthia, Gilbert, George, and Henry, on condition that they emigrate to Liberia under auspices of the American Colonization Society. All of this group would have been of majority White ancestry and no doubt their continued appearance in Kentucky invited further speculation as to their origins. When Mary Owen Todd Russell remarried her second following the death of her son John Russell’s father, her pro-slavery husband Robert Wickliffe immediately claimed ownership of her property, including her slaves, since her only child from a previous marriage, John Russell, had died in 1822 without marrying. ‘But in fact, Mary Owen Todd Wickliffe had a grandson, Alfred Francis Russell—the illicit offspring of her son and a mulatto slave. Mary Owen Todd had freed Russell and his mother, but Wickliffe refused to acknowledge their existence, and it became Robert

136  White Aesthetics Todd’s burden to ride to the rescue of her estate (and her mixed-race grandson’s title to it). When Todd died, management of the suit fell to his son-in-law, Lincoln.’51 As in Abraham Lincoln, arguing on behalf of his wife Mary Todd, Lincoln’s family who contest the will by attacking the marriage agreement by which Mrs. Russell had transferred all her wealth to Wickliffe, only to abandon the case when it becomes event that the law would not side with their claims. As for Alfred, due to his upbringing being not that of typical slave meaning that ‘his bondage was nominal,’ he was instead treated ‘as the child of a friend,’ and given a good education; it is that exceptional consideration by White elites that will become his entryway into social and political leadership in Liberia.52 As it turned out, ‘Robert Wickcliffe was one of the organizers of the Kentucky Colonization Society […] and the travel arrangements for Alfred and his relations were ‘presumably were made by him’ as well as the initial funds for their passage and arrival.’53 What essentially this all boiled down were these families protecting their own interests and how closely these prominent African American individuals within Liberia political life were related to some of White America’s most prominent political leaders. Intertwined with the racial advantages that these men enjoyed socially, was their higher socioeconomic status as compared to most African Americans of that era. Once in Liberia, it allowed them to perpetuate a society largely modelled on the racial caste system of the Americas they had left behind. Keefe asserts, ‘while the emigration of these educated and socioeconomic elites from America was a reverse “brain-drain” which deprived Black America of leaders and voices it was also the exportation of the Antebellum South to Africa.’54 Carl Patrick Burrowes points to the fact that ‘by 1847, African-Americans from southern states were demographically and politically dominant, constituting 4,963 out of 5,602 immigrants to Liberia and providing 11 out of 12 delegates to the Liberian Constitutional Convention.’55 Under the Liberian Constitution, the indigenous peoples of Liberia could only become citizens if they adopted the culture and Christian beliefs of the predominantly Southern American settlers. Because citizenship in Liberia could not be founded solely on race as was the case in the United States, it was instead, founded upon the attainment of ‘civilisation,’ as judged by those who had already achieved such distinction, mirroring the emancipationist logic popular throughout the Southern United States. Such thinking held that African Americans needed to be gradually educated about their civility, before being sent off to colonial Africa to live out the bulk of their lives. Those free-born African Americans arriving in the 1820s found that they were able to obtain status based on their ‘greater capital both in terms of money and educational resources that they could transform into government positions with regular salaries.’56 Included, in the bargain was the capacity to acquire the cheap and unfree labour of the indigenous population to further elevate their situation. Gross inequality from the very beginning undergirded Liberia society and emulated the economic system of the American South inasmuch as it promoted the idea of slavery as a means through which domesticated Black bodies could be trained with a view to their gradual assimilation to wider society. This arrival would be deferred often by generations such that African labour in Liberia found itself still working under conditions of slavery well into the twentieth century at the behest of its planter class. Those like Washington, who were from free-states, found themselves quickly at odds in their views of with those emigrants from slave-states who were, more often than not, former slaves themselves. Robert Paul Murray asserts that the divisions between them were not merely geographical, or even ideological, so much as racial in their orientation, as Liberia society

White Aesthetics 137 enacted its own means with which to rank an order of Black settlement, ‘especially amongst the multitudinous mixed-race categorizations,’ they had imported with them from the American South.57 Black identity was cleaved to Liberia society through the vacuum left open by the very concept of universal freedom amongst its émigré inhabitants. The African colonial setting afforded a type of agency to the freeborn ‘mulatto’ unrivalled elsewhere in the Atlantic world that would perversely pair with a new type of subordination applied to native Africans. Indigenous tribes were neatly divided into 16 ethnographic categories and violently suppressed with an idea of limiting their potential for uprising. A common resentment and revilement of these bodies would be employed as ‘the glue to cement’ the disparate elements of Americo-Liberian society together.58 As the settler population grew, ‘the colony enveloped itself in a masculine mission to tame savagery, effectively distinguishing settler from savage.’59 Much as it had been in the American South, the central preoccupation with dividing and controlling Black labour was paramount to Liberia’s understanding of itself. Painting a Picture Washington’s daguerreotypes fulfilled a story Americo-Liberians wanted to tell about themselves as aspirational society capable of replicating the same privileges Whites in the United States had enjoyed for themselves in Africa. Fulfilling that ambition required the legal exclusion of indigenous peoples from owning the territory of Liberia, but also the freedoms of their own bodies. The control of their mobility became synonymous with the privileges the freed African American associated with Whiteness. The American colony in Liberia was modelled after the British colony in Sierra Leone. From its inception in 1822, American Colonisation Society leadership had devoted much of its attention to transporting African Americans who were already freed onto the shores of its colony. In this way, it created a minority within a minority that was in actuality far more devoted to the preservation of America’s racialised power structures, than it was to the freedom of Blacks, per se. Liberia, therefore, from the offing was a territorial experiment galvanised by racism and a reactionary interpretation of the emigrant population as agents of White imperialism, and as such the African American flight towards independence within Africa, constitutes a serious undermining of ambitions towards racial equality. Brandon Mills argues that from the very beginning, African Americans would be construed by the American Colonial Society, ‘as unequal partners in overseas expansion,’ and that their paradigm of ‘racial republicanism’ would ‘help Americans to envision new forms of U.S. global power while reinforcing white political supremacy and black disenfranchisement at home.’60 It always the ambition for colonies like Liberia ‘to remain racially distinct while ascending to nominal equality as independent nation-states.’61 Colonisation was the brainchild of those who were becoming increasingly alarmed by the prospects of slave rebellion and the growth of the freed slave population, in particular, in Virginia. Following on from the American War of Independence, the situation of this population was becoming an increasing pre-occupation of Virginia’s planter class. Thomas Jefferson becomes the founding father not just of the American experiment, but equally of experiments through the organ of the American Colonization Society to design a state apparatus through which slaves can be gradually emancipated to colonies in Africa. The Haitian revolution of 1804 added further urgency to the cause of liberating enslaved peoples of African descent so that they would not cause social destruction within the

138  White Aesthetics United States. Their cause was counterrevolutionary. Britain’s colony of Sierra Leone created a tangible example of how such a racialised extraterritorial colony could be administered. America, however, would not be contented to send this population to what was now emerging as their imperial rival for dominance of the Western hemisphere. Instead, they would create their own Black colony to be properly integrated with their own growing sphere of influence. It was thought that African Americans would aggressively venture into indigenous territory in much the same way as their European American counterparts, and that in much the same way, the affordance of freedom and rights would become the by-products of seizing territory and exploiting it for commercial value. Mills asserts that ‘the white architects of the African colonisation movement had always prefigured Liberia’s eventual sovereignty,’ and did so, by ensuring that the emigrants it had imported from the United States would establish through their constitution, many of the same discriminatory views and practices that they had fled.62 The success of that ambition was made obvious to Augustus Washington within six months of his arrival. In one of the letters from Liberia he published in June of 1854 in the New-York Daily Tribune under the title ‘Liberia as It Is,’ Washington reports his concerns for the Black ‘Southern emigrants’ here from the United States who have woefully inadequate access to medical care within the colony.63 By then, of course, Liberia is technically an independent nation. However, it is clear from his letter how profoundly it depends on the American Colonization Society to ‘contribute their money to the cause with the best and most benevolent motives, men who wish to elevate, Christianize and bless Africa, and make free and happy her unfortunate descendants-men who have their hearts in the right place and always sympathize with crushed humanity, whether in Greece, Turkey, Hungary, or Africa, and have no desire to send men to this happy shores, only for them to sicken and die for want of suitable food and medical attendance, while, if the promise of the society were truthfully filled, not thirty, forty, fifty and sixty, not more than six per cent of the emigrants would die.’64 While, these numbers of emigrants dying in Liberia do appear enormous, what is critical in Washington’s letter is the identification of the value of their lives being on par with European human beings. As Washington’s letter makes clear, they are suffering as latecomers to party here, insofar as those free African Americans who came a generation ago are taking an unfair share of Liberia’s riches. They have installed themselves in positions of power that exclude the newcomers. Washington complains, ‘for in every town and county there is a one-man power, for that county; a man may hold all the offices of government and besides be a lawyer, merchant, judge, and agent for the Society, and, if he so choose it is not difficult to turn the money and the offices of these people into his own coffers. But if I have health and the same amount of brains, I can become wealthy if that be the virtue without aid from the Colonial Society, this feeble government or the men who see their daguerreotypes in the group I have pictured. For every mouthful of beer we get, we are equally dependent on the natives.’65 The irony here is that Washington would have been the very man that made these daguerreotypes and, therefore, have earnings enough to purchase goods with Liberia that are ultimately supplied to him at the behest of the natives. Washington complains that ‘nobody works’ and they only depend on trade with the natives for their subsistence, while a select few ‘with capital grow rich.’66 Meanwhile, the natives are allowed to remain just that, and without recourse to education and Christianisation, the rich nonetheless are happy to ‘sell muskets and powder to them,’ rather than incorporate them ‘into the community.’67 Washington has no love of these tribespeople but reserves his compassion for those poor emigrants like himself living ‘hand to mouth,’ who are the

White Aesthetics 139 real hard workers willing to turn their hands to civilising and cultivating this country.68 Failure to do so will mean that a ‘European power’ will swoop in and claim land ownership. The natives have yet to be subdued and are any moment poised to rise up and attack: ‘the hundreds of tribes at our rear have only to unite, and they can at any time drive us into the ocean.’69 The unfortunate newcomers from Baltimore have no clue what they are walking to here and will soon be forced to live like savages in ‘leaky huts’ in a forsaken country that ‘is the last refuge of the coloured man.’70 Washington quickly omits himself from such a status, by reminding his readers that as a ‘northern’ emigrant he ‘has fared well enough’ and has ‘no very special public complaint.’71 In fact, ‘having some means of our own, and all residing on the Cape of Monrovia, where we could easily obtain medical assistance, comfortable houses, and tolerably good food,’ has meant that effectively suggesting that this someone’s else problem.72 The offense here is that African Americans are forced to live like this, without any acknowledgement whatsoever that this caste is drawn from those given to dwell previously in the degraded condition of slavery in the Southern United States and for whom the shack and the hut, as well as opportunistic communal illness surely have much in common. For Washington, this remains Society’s burden, the White man’s burden to sort out. As for Blacks, if anything, other African Americans who have elevated themselves in the States like himself should be sent over to Liberate ameliorate conditions, rather than fight at home for conditions of betterment. Here, there is actually a future for the African American race. Less so perhaps, the natives, who according to the Reverend of Samuel Williams, an émigré of a similar Northern Black Abolitionist background to Washington, come into ‘town in vast numbers’ and ‘have nothing in the world about them but a cloth about their loins. Men and women go about in nearly the same style. This custom must be stopped, for all the colonists have the law-making in their hands, and they could easily pass a law making it unlawful for them to come into town without a covering upon them … once this country is filled up with people from the Northern States, they will surely have an eye to this matter.’73 Williams’ solution is for Northerner Blacks to come to Liberia and sort the country out, because as it stands, ‘the majority of the colonists are from the South, and having adopted Southern habits,’ the state of the society ‘is more Southern that anything else,’ and therefore, ‘all love having a servant wait upon them, where it is a gentleman or a lady.’74 As it goes, they have the natives to serve them, rather than the newcomer poor Southern Blacks, and it is that attitude Williams simply cannot suffer. It is not their lassitude but their preference for servant that disturbed him because they aren’t giving preferential treatment to members of their own race, the African America race, for employment. Washington further suggests that these people could be put to work on plantations as field hands, and to not do so ‘is depriving the soil of so many tillers.’75 Williams does not seem to be aware of how closely this situation might replicate that of Southern slavery, a condition in which many questions would have recently departed. The majority of them would have been house slaves, and thus uninjured to the conditions of intensive farming. The desire above all was to attract ‘more educated free blacks’ from the United States to emigrate, as it was thought by many that the American Colonization Society was sending a disproportion of improper immigrants that would retard, instead of enhancing Liberia’s ‘national interests’ with the ‘proper class’ being drawn from those who were already in socially respectable positions prior to emigration.76 Washington had a modicum more sympathy for the native Africans, who he describes ‘humble, subdued and servile creatures.’77 He recounts how ‘they are employed in all

140  White Aesthetics families as domestic drudges.’78 Essentially they fulfilled the role of houseslaves and were on the whole not paid for their services, although ‘some few families allow them wages, and thus their servants are decently clothed.’79 Echoing Williams, sentiment, Washington observes that ‘nearly all’ natives ‘wear nothing but a filthy rag the size of a common cotton handkerchief, about their loins, or occasionally a dirty, greasy shirt; and in this state they perform all duties about houses.’80 Their conditions of keep varying; ‘in some families they are allowed per day a quart of rice, some palm oil, and otherwise well fed. In other families they are poorly fed from mere scraps of rice and cassada [sic]. In others again they are not only worked nearly naked, but half starved. And in nearly all families it is customary to keep a rawhide or cat-o’-nine-tails handy, to flogt hem when they please. And this flogging, kicking and cuffing is done to a shameful extent by upstart boys, scolding, brainless women, and gentlemen of rank and standing, calling themselves Christians.’81 These accounts of life in Liberia for the indigenous population as objects of denigration and exploitation could easily apply to the worst conditions of Southern American slavery in Virginia. Ryszard Kapuscinski described a situation in Liberia in the mid-twentieth century dating back to its independence period, which in many respects anticipated the apartheid system instituted in southern Africa by the Afrikaners.82 He credits Liberia with apartheid’s initial invention by its Americo-Liberian rulers, who had situated themselves within its capital city of Monrovia and used it as a seat of power to forbid ‘close contacts with the local population, particularly intermarriage.’83 The ordinance made to achieve this end coincided with the allocation to each of the 16 indigenous tribes ‘a territory where they were allowed to live—not unlike the typical “homelands” created for Africans decades later by the white racists from Pretoria.’84 The creation of ‘homelands’ were equally reminiscent to Western clearance strategies employed by White American settlers in their dealings with Native Americans. In the case of Liberia, the chiefs of unsubmissive tribes were eliminated on the spot, the rebellious population murdered or imprisoned, its villages destroyed, its crops set afire. These expeditions and local wars had a single overriding goal: to capture slaves. The Americo-Liberians needed labourers.85 Slavery would be crucial to sustaining Liberia’s plantation economy and fuelling its commercial sovereignty. As such, the Liberian government from its very inception depended not only upon slavery to produce their local commodities, but also equally for slaves themselves to remain amongst their commodities for international trade well beyond independence. Kapuscinski describes how ‘in the late 1920s, the world press disclosed the existence of this trade, plied officially by the Liberian government. The League of Nations intervened. The then president, Charles King, was forced to resign. But the practice continued by stealth’ into the 1980s, when a new constitution was drafted.86 The Liberian Daguerreotypes that Washington produced as his first assignment for the American Colonization Society reflected these efforts to discriminate an appearance of respectability to an outside audience from what was taking place within the interior of the country. Washington would have made his seven initial daguerreotypes of Liberia’s great and good keenly aware that these portraits were for a White American, as well as White European audience. Both France and England had diplomatically recognised Liberia’s independence for some years at that point, and there was great consternation that the United States had failed to do the same. Marie Tyler-McGraw observes that ‘Liberia,

White Aesthetics 141 hoped, at least that their independence would encourage emigration’ and maintained the ‘the perennial hope that more educated free blacks would emigrate’87; everything that it presented to the world through the lens of Americo-Liberians wealth, ease, and respectability. The images themselves functioned as objects well beyond mere diplomacy. They were carefully manufactured as evidence of the humanity of their subjects. Washington would have been intensely aware of such a racialised physiognomic architecture within portrait photography and therefore would have chosen to have Liberia’s first president, Joseph Jenkins Roberts’ ‘intense gaze beam out’ from beneath a ‘slightly lowered brow’ and display his ‘closed fists’ not entirely relaxed resting on his lap, signify both his natural foresight and temperamental determination to lead this new nation. (Figure 6.1)88 As his wife, ‘first Lady Jane Roberts’ features in ‘a more plaintive pose’; her ‘languid gaze matched with sloping shoulders and slightly hunched back.’89 Her hands, in lace gloves, rest on her lap while gently curled fingers cradle a fan.’ (Figure 6.2)90 All of these details are meant to signify a modest being in a gentile repose, enveloped within a subtle grace worthy of her position. Washington posed both Roberts in three-quarter view, in order to display themselves as human subjects, rather than ethnographic objects. Audiences globally would appreciate that had to be members of the proper class in order to assimilate these features into their appearance, meaning that they were equivalent in value to any other bourgeois sitter. In their capacity to compose themselves according to the criteria of contemporary portraiture, they were suggesting to their audience that what was being taken measure here was a quality of Blackness ‘absent of racist distortion.’91 Dalila Scruggs maintains that ‘by presenting themselves as respectable middle-class subjects, the Robertses refuted negative stereotypes that pervaded the portrayal of African-Americans in nineteenth century visual culture.’92 Scruggs refers here to the fact that ‘clothes were a particularly loaded way of signaling one’s place in Liberian society,’ but the bitter irony here is that the clothes that Jane Roberts adopts in taking ‘her seat before Washington’s camera dressed in fashionable clothes distinctive to women’s attire in the United States in the 1850’s: a

Figure 6.1 Daguerreotype of Joseph Jenkins Roberts by Augustus Washington, 1851, Library of Congress.

142  White Aesthetics

Figure 6.2  Daguerreotype of Mary Jenkins by Augustus Washington 1844, Library of Congress.

front-fastening jacket bodice with v-neck, long sleeves with ruffle embellishment, underlying chemisette and full skirt,’ is one totally out of synchronisation with her West African environment.93 Similarly, Joseph Roberts’ ‘dapper haberdashery’ has no place where she has placed herself and in doing so she has placed herself under Western, or indeed, White duress, for reasons having to with an American Society that excludes her.94 In the Americo-Liberian world, ‘as anthropologist Svend Holsoe writes, “for official functions, top hats and tails were de rigueur, no matter that they were hardly appropriate in ninety-degree weather with an equally high humidity.”’95 What this comment fails to reflect is that her ‘wardrobe choices’ were not there simply ‘to differentiate the upper class from the underlings in Liberian society, poor African-Americans and the native

White Aesthetics 143 African population,’ but rather as prototypical elements designed to signal to the world that a new class of humanity had arrived in the African American.96 This was an exercise in presenting the ‘New Negro’ as an aristocratic outlier, who nevertheless maintained claim to their European ancestral inheritance. Arrivals into Liberia from this rarefied class were not ‘shocked by what they viewed as some natives’ lack of dress, but rather reviled that they had ever been subject to comparison with them as had been the case in imperial Europe for centuries now.97 Liberia was an opportunity to literally show contrast between themselves and indigenous Africans, and in turn, regard themselves as American settlers and in this be perceived on the world stage as ‘white.’ White in this instance is not a stable racial marker per se, but rather than stand in for civilisation and Christianisation, Scruggs asserts, ‘for them, whiteness was not about skin color but custom, such as clothing, writing, and religion’ underlines this point.98 Civilisation at this time in history becomes imbued with materialisation, and cultural difference plays itself out according to the rules of acquisition. The African American identity is measured through the markers of external attainment. Classified former as commodities themselves, at whatever stage of history, meant that these individuals struggled all the more to reinforce their identification as settlers. Rather than discard hierarchies of race imposed upon them by the West, they sought instead to reify the value of these existing social structures by inserting themselves within that at a literally a different place. Indigeneity was a powerful mover here, insofar as it provided a foil to their own aspirational appearance as a developing race in its own right, which over time had the potential to establish and promote its own set of racial hierarchies within the greater continent of Africa itself. Washington’s work as a photographer in this context is complex, because of his desire to make photographs within Africa, which referred to a larger project of social equality for Blacks worldwide. However, this project was from its very beginnings compromised by the fact that photography itself was being utilised the world over to classify human value as something fundamentally differential in origin. For Washington’s work to register in that economy he was forced to play into the economy and to conform to whatever markers of subversion were made available to him within a shared cultural framework still dictated by the Anglo-American racial sciences of that time. The plantation becomes the default setting for every type of arrangement of proof of likeness to civilisation with the Liberian tableau that Washington is compelled to create. Depictions of Americo-Liberians, their landscape, and society all must line up with America in terms of their placement, and also within an African context suggestive of their greater marginalisation as Blacks within the Atlantic world. The trick of it is to make American audiences spatial and socially orientated in such a way that those distinctions become less apparent in their juxtaposition to one another. The cultural assimilation of African American settlers in Liberia to Euro-Americans values in the United States depends on the appearance of the native as a figure of radical alterity to both. The photographic highlights of Liberian culture as presented by the American Colonization Society would adhere to these racialised codes. The documents were there to provide verification to investors that Liberia could be made contemporary to the White West, through a discourse of photography that suggests the Liberico-American settler as a subject authentically accultured into Whiteness. These individuals would become the public faces of the new nation, and in so doing, their observations were required to actualise the formation of the state itself as a legitimate body. The move away from colonisation to sovereign required such pictures to act as primary documents of state that furthered

144  White Aesthetics White American’s understanding of how Liberia figured into debates over race and slavery in antebellum Southern America. Windward Capture Christina Spicer writer about how, ‘a year before Liberian independence, the first president of Liberia, Joseph Jenkins Roberts, stated in a speech that “the people of these colonies … left their native land to seek on these shores a residence for civil and political freedom … and established a government, with executive, legislative, and judicial powers, in the distant and inhospitable wilds of Africa.”’99 Even at that moment it’s clear that Africa will not be met on neutral terms, but as a hostile territory requiring belonging of another order to make of its population a citizenry, and that the population in question is not intended to be comprised of native people, but rather those delivered to its shores as ‘an inheritance from their forefathers.’100 Spicer remarks on ‘the absurdity’ that continues in the second paragraph of the Liberian Declaration of Independence which proclaims that ‘the people of the Republic … expatriate[d] themselves from the land of their nativity to form a settlement on this barbarous coast.’101 In the years following the realities of The Fugitive Slave Act in America, such agency would have been grossly inconceivable for figures such as Washington, let alone those who were of lesser liberty to him. This delusion is further underscored by George Boley, a Liberian government official, contention that it was ‘Africa, not America which denied the colonists every imaginable claim to human dignity’ and therefore ‘was regarded as barbarous’ by its émigré community.102 Spicer notes ‘this distorted and abnormal perspective of identity “[was] passed down through the family structure and w[as] reinforced with each new arrival from overseas.”’103 As a consequence, Spicer argues, ‘slavery has not only “stripped Africans of their cultural heritage,” but also indoctrinated Liberia’s AfricanAmerican colonial settlers to idolize America’s corrupt past of racial and social injustices.’104 Beyond that, it set in motion a categorical representational style that would be adhered to for generations to come, freezing Liberico-Americans in time, and in many ways impeding their own distinct cultural development. The education of Liberian children would continue to adhere to the mid-Victorian values represented by these likenesses for generations to come in a dereliction of duty to acknowledge the country’s compromised circumstances. Notes 1 Marcy J. Dinius, The Camera and the Press: American Visual and Print Culture in the Age of the Daguerreotype (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 165. 2 Jürg Schneider, “African Photography Has Always Been International.” Africa In Words 3, November 11, 2013. https://africainwords.com/2013/11/11/african-photography-series-africanphotography-has-always-been-international/. 3 Dinius, The Camera and the Press, 165. 4 Ibid., 166. 5 Ibid., 166. 6 Schneider, “African Photography Has Always Been International.” 7 Dinius, The Camera and the Press, 165. 8 Ibid., 165. 9 “Augustus Washington, Class of 1843.” Kimball Union Academy ~ From The Archives, January 22, 2019. 10 Ibid.

White Aesthetics 145 11 Cowan’s. “205 African American Artist Augustus Washington, Rare Sixth Plate Daguerreotype.” American History: Live Salesroom Auction, November 15, 2013. 12 Shawn Michelle Smith, “Snapshot 1 Unredeemed Realities: Augustus Wilson.” In Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity. Edited by Maurice O. Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 103. 13 Wilson Jeremiah Moses and Augustus Washington, “Five Letters on Liberian Colonization, Including an Original Biographical Sketch of Augustus Washington.” In Liberian Dreams: Backto-Africa Narratives from The 1850s. Edited by Wilson Jeremiah Moses (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), 214. 14 Washington, “Five Letters on Liberian Colonization,” 188. 15 Ibid., 190. 16 Smith, “Snapshot 1 Unredeemed Realities,” 103. 17 Ibid., 103. 18 African-American Exploration in West Africa: Four Nineteenth-Century Diaries. Edited by James Fairhead, Melissa Leach, Svend E. Holsoe and Tim Geysbeek (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003), 43. 19 Washington, “Five Letters on Liberian Colonization,”185. 20 Ibid., 185. 21 Ibid., 189. 22 Ibid., 189. 23 Ibid., 189. 24 Ibid., 189. 25 Ibid., 189. 26 Ibid., 189. 27 Ibid., 192. 28 Ibid., 192. 29 Ibid., 200. 30 Shawn Michelle Smith, At the Edge of Sight: Photography and the Unseen (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 184. 31 Smith, At the Edge of Sight, 184. 32 Washington, “Five Letters on Liberian Colonization,” 200. 33 Ibid., 200. 34 Ibid., 200. 35 Smith, At the Edge of Sight, 184. 36 Ibid., 184. 37 Ann Shumard, “Augustus Washington, African American Daguerreotypes.” Exposure 35, no. 2 (2002): 5–16 at 11. 38 Smith, At the Edge of Sight, footnote 13, 251. 39 Shumard, “Augustus Washington, African American Daguerreotypes,” 9. 40 “Aetna Apologizes for Slave Insurance.” Los Angeles Times, March 11, 2000. 41 African-American Exploration in West Africa, 43. 42 Ann M. Shumard, A Durable Memento: Portraits by Augustus Washington, African American Daguerreotypist (Washington: National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 1999), 22 footnote 14. 43 Thomas E. Keefe, “The Fall of the Southern Antebellum American in Africa,” n.p., 2002. 44 Amos. J. Beyan, “John B. Russwurm and His Early Years in America.” In African American Settlements in West Africa (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 4. 45 Beyan, “John B. Russwurm and His Early Years in America,” 4. 46 “Voice of America.” Portland Monthly Magazine, February/March 2014. 47 “Voice of America.” 48 James Wesley Smith, “Introduction: Four Letters from Kentucky to Liberia.” In Sojourners in Search of Freedom: The Settlement of Liberia by Black Americans (Lanham: University Press of America, Inc., 1987), 122. 49 “Russell, Alfred Francis.” Notable Kentucky African Americans Database. 50 Ibid. 51 Allen C. Guelzo, “Lincoln’s Forgotten Middle Years.” Washington Monthly, June 11, 2017.

146  White Aesthetics 52 Randolph Paul Runyon, The Mentelles: Mary Todd Lincoln, Henry Clay, and the Immigrant Family Who Educated Antebellum Kentucky (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2018), 208. 53 Betty Boles Ellison, The True Mary Todd Lincoln: A Biography (Jefferson: McFarland, Incorporated, Publishers, 2014), 42–43. 54 Thomas E. Keefe, “The Fall of the Southern Antebellum American in Africa.” 55 Carl Patrick Burrowes, “Black Christian Republicanism: A Southern Ideology in Early Liberia, 1822 to 1847.” The Journal of Negro History 86, no. 1 (2001): 30–44 at 30. https://link.gale. com/apps/doc/A97723410/LitRC?u=anon˜6d8f6141&sid=googleScholar&xid=e2317ce9. 56 Robert Paul Murray, Whiteness in Africa: Americo-Liberians and the Transformative Geographies of Race (Louisville: University of Kentucky Libraries, 2013), 266 57 Murray, Whiteness in Africa, 266. 58 Ibid., 237. 59 Ibid., 237. 60 Brandon Mills, The World Colonization Made: The Racial Geography of Early American Empire (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), 6. 61 Mills, The World Colonization Made, 6. 62 Ibid., 6. 63 Washington, “Five Letters on Liberian Colonization,” 202. 64 Ibid., 202–203. 65 Ibid., 203–204. 66 Ibid., 204. 67 Ibid., 204. 68 Ibid., 204. 69 Ibid., 204. 70 Ibid., 204. 71 Ibid., 205. 72 Ibid., 205. 73 Samuel Williams, “Four Years in Liberia: A Sketch of the Life of Rev. Samuel Williams, with Remarks on the Missions, Manners, and Customs of the Natives of Western Africa; Together with an Answer to Nesbit’s Book.” In Liberian Dreams: Back-to-Africa Narratives from The 1850s. Edited by Wilson Jeremiah Moses (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), 138. 74 Williams, “Four Years in Liberia,” 139. 75 Ibid., 139. 76 Ibid., 138. 77 Augustus Washington quoted in Marcy J. Dinius, ““I Go to Liberia”: Following Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Africa.” In Uncle Tom’s Cabins: The Transnational History of America’s Most Mutable Book. Edited by Stefka Mihaylova and Tracy C Davis (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018), 70. 78 Dinius, “I Go to Liberia,” 70. 79 Ibid., 70. 80 Ibid., 70. 81 Ibid., 70. 82 Ryszard Kapuscinski, The Shadow of the Sun (New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2001), 240. 83 Kapuscinski, The Shadow of the Sun, 240. 84 Ibid., 240. 85 Ibid., 240. 86 Ibid; 240. 87 Marie Tyler-McGraw, An African Republic: Black and White Virginians in the Making of Liberia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 168. 88 Dalila Scruggs, “Colonization Pictures as Primary Documents: Virginians’ Contributions.” Virginia Emigrants to Liberia. http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/liberia/pages/scruggs.html. 89 Scruggs, “Colonization Pictures as Primary Documents.” 90 Ibid. 91 Ibid.

White Aesthetics 147 92 Ibid. 93 Ibid. 94 Ibid. 95 Ibid. 96 Ibid. 97 Ibid. 98 Ibid. 99 Christina Spicer, “The Perpetual Paradox: A Look into Liberian Colonization.” The Ascendant Historian 3, no. 2 (2016): 36–52 at 47. 100 Spicer, “The Perpetual Paradox,” 47. 101 Ibid., 47. 102 Ibid., 47. 103 Ibid., 47. 104 Ibid., 47–48.

Bibliography “Aetna Apologizes for Slave Insurance.” Los Angeles Times, March 11, 2000. https://www. latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-mar-11-fi-7637-story.html. “Augustus Washington, Class of 1843.” Kimball Union Academy ~ From The Archives, January 22, 2019. https://kimballunionarchives.wordpress.com/2019/01/22/augustus-washingtonclass-of-1843/. Beyan, Amos J. “John B. Russwurm and His Early Years in America.” In African American Settlements in West Africa, 4–25. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Black, Griffin. “The Whitewashing of Black Genius.” Scientific American, October 12, 2020. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-whitewashing-of-black-genius/. Burrowes, Carl Patrick. “Black Christian Republicanism: A Southern Ideology in Early Liberia, 1822 to 1847.” The Journal of Negro History 86, no. 1 (2001): 30–44. https://doi. org/10.2307/1350177. Cowan’s. “205 African American Artist Augustus Washington, Rare Sixth Plate Daguerreotype.” American History: Live Salesroom Auction, November 15, 2013. https://www.cowanauctions. com/lot/african-american-artist-augustus-washington-rare-sixth-plate-daguerreotype-134942. Dinius, Marcy J. ““I Go to Liberia”: Following Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Africa.” In Uncle Tom’s Cabins: The Transnational History of America’s Most Mutable Book. Edited by Stefka Mihaylova and Tracy C Davis, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018. ———. The Camera and the Press: American Visual and Print Culture in the Age of the Daguerreotype. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. Ellison, Betty Boles. The True Mary Todd Lincoln: A Biography. Jefferson: McFarland, Incorporated, Publishers, 2014. Fairhead, James, Melissa Leach, Svend E. Holsoe and Tim Geysbeek. African-American Exploration in West Africa: Four Nineteenth-Century Diaries. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003. Guelzo, Allen C. “Lincoln’s Forgotten Middle Years.” Washington Monthly, June 11, 2017. https:// washingtonmonthly.com/2017/06/11/lincolns-forgotten-middle-years/. Kapuscinski, Ryszard. The Shadow of the Sun. New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2001. Keefe, Thomas E. “The Fall of the Southern Antebellum American in Africa.” https://www.researchgate.net/publication/340953027_The_Fall_of_the_Southern_Antebellum_American_in_Africa. Mills, Brandon. The World Colonization Made: The Racial Geography of Early American Empire. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. Moses, Wilson Jeremiah and Augustus Washington. “Five Letters on Liberian Colonization, Including an Original Biographical Sketch of Augustus Washington.” In Liberian Dreams: Backto-Africa Narratives from The 1850s. Edited by Wilson Jeremiah Moses, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010.

148  White Aesthetics Murray, Robert Paul. Whiteness in Africa: Americo-Liberians and the Transformative Geographies of Race. Louisville: University of Kentucky Libraries, 2013. Runyon, Randolph Paul. The Mentelles: Mary Todd Lincoln, Henry Clay, and the Immigrant Family Who Educated Antebellum Kentucky. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2018. “Russell, Alfred Francis.” Notable Kentucky African Americans Database. https://nkaa.uky.edu/ nkaa/items/show/748. Schneider, Jürg. “African Photography Has Always Been International.” Africa In Words 3, November 11, 2013. https://africainwords.com/2013/11/11/african-photography-series-africanphotography-has-always-been-international/. Scruggs, Dalila. “Colonization Pictures as Primary Documents: Virginians’ Contributions.” Virginia Emigrants to Liberia. http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/liberia/pages/scruggs.html. Smith, James Wesley. “Introduction: Four Letters from Kentucky to Liberia.” In Sojourners in Search of Freedom: The Settlement of Liberia by Black Americans. Lanham: University Press of America, Inc., 1987. Smith, Shawn Michelle. At the Edge of Sight: Photography and the Unseen. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013. ———. “Snapshot 1 Unredeemed Realities: Augustus Wilson.” In Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity. Edited by Maurice O. Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith, Durham: Duke University Press, 2012. Shumard, Ann M. “Augustus Washington, African American Daguerreotypes.” Exposure 35, no. 2 (2002): 5–16. ———. A Durable Memento: Portraits by Augustus Washington, African American Daguerreotypist. Washington: National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 1999. Spicer, Christina. “The Perpetual Paradox: A Look into Liberian Colonization.” The Ascendant Historian 3, no. 2 (2016): 36–52. Tyler-McGraw, Marie. An African Republic: Black and White Virginians in the Making of Liberia. Chapel Hil: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. “Voice of America.” Portland Monthly Magazine, February/March 2014. https://www.portlandmonthly.com/portmag/2014/02/voice-of-america/. Williams, Samuel. “Four Years in Liberia: A Sketch of the Life of Rev. Samuel Williams, with Remarks on the Missions, Manners, and Customs of the Natives of Western Africa; Together with an Answer to Nesbit’s Book.” In Liberian Dreams: Back-to-Africa Narratives from The 1850s, 127–178. Edited by Wilson Jeremiah Moses, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010.

7

Lewis Carroll and the Imperial Eroticisation of White Childhood

In January 1860, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson wrote the poem, ‘Faces in the Fire.’ In three short years, he would become known the world over as the famed child author Lewis Carroll. In 1860, Dodgson was only 28 years of age and ‘had made just 159 photographs.’1 A number of them would have been of his ‘child-friend’ Alice Liddell. Dodgson seems to have made friends with the whole of the Liddell family sometime in 1856. Alexander L. Taylor surmises that ‘in any case he was bound to see a good deal of them since the deanery is part of the great Christ Church group of buildings in which he himself lived.’2 Dodgson ingratiates himself into the Liddell family through the use of his camera to photograph the budding family comprising the classical scholar Henry George Liddell, his wife Lorina, and his three young girls, Lorina, Edith, and Alice Liddell, all of whom will figure enormously in his life—and his photography. Alice would have been four-year old at the time. He was immediately drawn to her, specifically amongst the Liddell children. Their relationship was allowed to grow closer, because her father, ‘the Dean was absent for health reasons in the island of Madeira during much of the winters of 1856-57 and 1857-58.’3 The famous photograph of Alice ‘mounted on the last page of the first draft of Alice’s Adventures, the “Under Ground” version, was taken in 1859,’ when Alice would have been just seven-year old.4 Dodgson was then making his way in professional circles as a mathematician giving his first presentation at the Ashmolean Society in 1860. That same year, he would write the following poem: Tis now a little childish form Red lips for kisses pouted warm And elf-locks tangled in the storm, Tis now a grave and gentle maid, At her own beauty half afraid, Shrinking and willing to be stayed. Oh, Time was young and Life was warm, When first I saw that fairy-form, Her dark hair tossing in the storm. And fast and free these pulses played When last I met that gentle maid When last her hand in mine was laid. Those locks of jet are turned to grey, And she is strange and far away, That might have been mine own today. DOI: 10.4324/9781003274797-8

150  Lewis Carroll and the Imperial Eroticisation of White Childhood That might have been mine own, my dear, Through many and many a happy year That might have sat beside me here. The race is o’er I might have run: The deeds are past I might have done; And seer the wreath I might have won. Sunk is the last faint flickering blaze: This vision of departed days Is vanished even as I gaze. The pictures with their ruddy light Are changed to dust and ashes white, And I am left alone with night.5 This poem appears to correspond with Alice Liddell, as she is pictured in an 1858 photograph Dodgson took of her entitled ‘The Beggar Maid.’ Dodgson’s peculiar intimacy with Alice Liddell had become the subject of intense Oxford gossip, with suggestions that the strange young Christ Church don had even proposed marriage and been rebuffed by the girl’s parents. By 1863, Dodgson had shunned intimate contact with the Liddell family following an ambiguous incident with Alice, then aged 13. Throughout his life, Dodgson would go on to cultivate many ‘child-friends,’ but in ‘1860, there was only one, Alice Liddell, and the facts speak louder than any opinion that she and she alone was his lost love, the withered rose in his filing-cabinet, the little ghost that was to come crying in the night to the windows of his bachelor-rooms in Tom Quad.’6 She was indeed a beautiful child, dark, vivacious, ‘loving as a dog,’ as he put it long afterwards.7 Dodgson was more than 20 years senior to Alice during the course of this ill-fated attachment, with no prospect whatever of it being made real, and yet he was able to support this relationship through fantasy for the whole of his adult life, proposing in his mind this daughter as an imaginary wife, and the muse of his aristocratic leanings towards becoming ‘Lewis Carroll.’ What is most remarkable in accounts of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson’s attachment to children is the insistence that his contact with them was purely emotional, rather than sexual in nature. Nonetheless, everything in his photographic cannon points to an interest in their nascent sexual development. He goes to excessive lengths, moreover, to catalogue each one of his subjects, with the conspicuous emphasis being on the capturing of young girls prior to the age of legal sexual consent, which at the time of their taking would have been aged 12. This legal precedent, however, was a tenuous one at best because, for girls of working class background, sexual availability would have coincided with their being put into service. Thus, work coincided closely with the idea of sexualised labour positioning. Equally, racialisation figured into this equation in terms of passing judgement on the natural ‘ripeness’ of girls for sexual encounters (Figure 7.1). The Act of Looking In 1870, Dodgson photographs 18-year-old Alice Liddell one last time. In the photograph, she appears sullen and refuses to meet the gaze of the camera. Every inch of her is covered up in a nod to late Victorian prudery, her hair tightly coiffed. There is no apparent affection, nor familiarity between her and the man for whom she poses, despite

Lewis Carroll and the Imperial Eroticisation of White Childhood 151

Figure 7.1 Alice Liddell as a beggar child/from a photograph by Lewis Carroll. Photograph. Library of Congress.

having spent virtually all her formative life in his company (Figure 7.2). This heartbreaking ending apparently did not deter Dodgson from his ardour for young female companionship. Rather, he had continued to seek out further intense friendships with little girls. Dodgson was so obsessed with meeting young girls that he began to introduce himself to families in railway carriages and at the seaside, for purposes of making their

152  Lewis Carroll and the Imperial Eroticisation of White Childhood

Figure 7.2 Alice Pleasance Liddell, Liddell photographed by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), 25 June 1870.

acquittance to later gain permission from their families to photograph them. After he had attained wild success as a children’s author, he used his fame to gain the attentions of young female child-actors at the theatre. Dodgson would regularly ‘send inscribed copies of Alice to admired child-actors.’8 Diane Waggoner recounts how as he aged, Dodgson increasingly, he also sought the companionship of young women in their teens and twenties, including actresses. By his later years, young women had come to dominate his emotional life. He invited many of them to call in his Christ Church sitting rooms during the academic year or at his rooms in the seaside town of Eastbourne, where he spent his later summers. He always had photographs and photograph albums at hand to entertain these visitors.9 Perhaps this was the tactic he used to get Alice Liddell back into his sitting room for this final photographic encounter between the two of them. The same year that Dodgson is shunned by the Liddells, 1863, then 31-year-old Dodgson makes the acquaintance of the children’s writer George MacDonald and his young family. This encounter takes place in July of that year at the MacDonald home

Lewis Carroll and the Imperial Eroticisation of White Childhood 153 in Hampstead. A group portrait is taken by Dodgson to mark their acquittance, featuring Dodgson with MacDonald’s wife, Louisa, and four of their children, all but one of whom is female, with the two youngest girls perched on Dodgson’s legs as he reclines. George MacDonald is absent from the photograph, and it is Dodgson who sits in his place surrounded, as it were, by MacDonald’s brood. This portrait is unusual in another way, because Dodgson seldom appears before the camera, or within arrangements such as this. Waggoner recounts that ‘at the time, he was paying an extended visit to London, staying in a hotel, and had spent several days visiting at Elm Lodge, Mrs. MacDonald’s father’s home in Hampstead.’10 One wonders if this had anything to do with the incident with Alice Liddell, which Dodgson sought cover elsewhere in the bosom of a remarkably similar family in terms of make-up. Waggoner comments on the fact that in the final decades of his life, in the 1880s and 1890s, Dodgson stopped taking photographs altogether and, instead, utilised his photographs and albums to lure girls and young women into his rooms at Christ Church and at Eastbourne where he engineered these tea time visits to be one on one.11 She acknowledges that ‘the act of looking at an album was designed as a diversion’ but does not indicate a diversion from or into what.12 Here, I would offer that what takes place in the intimate space of the home is very much the product of ‘a social exchange’ that was dependent about the willingness of friends and family to bring young girls into an association with Dodgson.13 The photographs and later the albums helped achieve his goal of receiving his young female visitors alone in his rooms and to essentially be in the position of denuding them to whatever degree satisfied his pleasure.14 Waggoner contends that ‘the special, almost secret privilege of viewing Dodgson’s photographs and albums remained a vivid memory for several of his child-friends.’15 Her example comes from the experiences of another young friend, Beatrice Hatch, who ‘wrote at Dodgson’s death that she remembered looking at “packets of photographs of other children who had also enjoyed these mornings of bliss.”’16 Hatch is famously known as one of the children that Dodgson photographed nude from the age of five-year old. Again, she was from a family consisting of three daughters. Her sisters Ethel and Evelyn also posed for Dodgson. Apparently, these nude photographic sessions with the Hatch girls were undertaken with the permission from Mrs. Hatch, who was in full knowledge of the activities. It is significant here to note that the Hatch family moved in ‘“stimulating circles”, including friendships with Edward Burne-Jones, Algernon Charles Swinburne and William Morris.’17 These men were known to have very unconventional attitudes to sex and ‘aesthetic’ interest in children.18 In a similar way, Dodgson’s reputation as an ‘Oxford don,’ portrait ‘photographer,’ ‘family man,’ ‘mathematician,’ and ‘surrogate uncle,’ ‘socialite,’ and ‘entertainer’ may well have given aesthetic cover to such questionable activities.19 Amongst Dodgson’s recognised titles, of course, was not pornographer. And yet, Dodgson’s one-on-one staging of these photographic sessions, his obsessive arrangement of them into elaborate photograph albums, and the secretive circumstances of sharing them suggest that these photographs were a way for him to create and memorialise his encounters with young girls. His insistence on keeping them for his ‘own perusal and for the perusal of his friends in comfort,’ thus, was crucial to informing ‘his intimate relationships with the society in which he lived.’20 Far from being the sexually innocent, that he is often portrayed, Dodgson, in fact, ran in circles that included figures like the explorer Richard Burton, artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti, poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, former clergyman Edward

154  Lewis Carroll and the Imperial Eroticisation of White Childhood Carpenter, socialist William Morris, and the writer John Ruskin, all of whom were advocates of sexual liberation, experimented with their sexuality, and had relationships that evoked scandal within their lifetimes. This class of men would have been no strangers to the ‘vice, sin and depravity was widespread in 1860s London. Pleasure seekers could get buzzed on laudanum or opium, go to parties where bisexual or same-sex people frolicked, or went for one-on-one couplings in rooms reserved for that purpose. While cunnilingus, fellatio and sodomy were forbidden except in these secret quarters, “fallen unfortunates,” of both sexes lined the streets, experienced to satisfy every whim or fancy, and such young sexual apprentices were highly regarded.’21 Dodgson’s friends certainly would have been the types to participate in sexual countercultures, and therefore, it is highly likely that Dodgson, far from being a celibate, had his own active sexual life. As one of the Victorian era’s famous freethinkers, his erotic proclivities towards girls influenced not only his photography and literature, but that of subjects similar to himself in class background. Shari L. Savage observes that while the majority of literature of the time ‘points to Victorian morality and the belief that children were without sin, love for children was pure, and that capturing fleeting innocence through photography was popular’ amongst a certain aristocratic set, this code of morality applies solely to well-born children.22 In direct opposition to this, ‘poor children were sold into sexual slavery and used and abused with regularity under “the façade of middle-class Victorian morality.”’23 The fact that Dodgson insists on clothing his young female subjects in rags or denuding them entirely speaks to his desire to literally declassify them in terms of the moral taxonomy of childhood and, therein, place them in a subset where their innocence can similarly be degraded. Dodgson skates dangerously close to the edge of morality at all times. Savage refers to a journal entry by Dodgson, where ‘he writes of being granted permission to photograph a 6-year-old girl nude, but is flatly denied the chance to photograph an 11-year-old sister, as she “is too close to the age of consent.”’24 Dodgson immediately responds to argue his case further ‘that he should be allowed to do so’ and ‘the mother to trust his intentions.’25 He seems to have no idea that he might have crossed a line here with the first, he then dare to cross it fully in his second appeal. We are not told which child this concerns, only that ‘the family friendship ended over this request and the session did not materialize,’ although ‘he did manage to photograph other young girls in the nude after gaining the trust of their parents.’26 Whilst this in itself should be concerning that what is more so are ‘Dodgson’s desperate pleas to spend time photographing young girls nude and without adult supervision’ and how these manifest on several occasions in the course of making his photographic portraits.27 Savage proceeds cautiously here, noting that ‘Carroll’s journals speak of love for little girls, their kisses and fondlings, and, when read today, seem predatory in manner. In addition, after Carroll’s death, his family mutilated and censored many parts of his journals, destroying letters and lists of girls he photographed.’28 One wonders about the logic of hesitation Savage displays here to cast Carroll aka Dodgson as a sexual ‘deviant,’ given that he himself seems to share none of her compunction around the subject, so much so that he is continuously censored by the adults around him tasked, indeed, with his supervision. Christine Ann Roth paints an entirely different picture of Dodgson, one who by the 1880s became don of a certain sexual countercultural scene in Oxford. Roth describes Oxford as a place where ‘the popular culture of London com mingled with a rarefied space devoted to religious, intellectual, and artistic ideals’ and where ‘the twin poles of sanctity and sin in little girls’ characters held equal charm and intrigue.’29 Here, Dodgson

Lewis Carroll and the Imperial Eroticisation of White Childhood 155 was in good company with other ‘university men’ who ‘“courted” and “worshipped” the middle-class little girls whose families lived in the colleges.’30 In this, Dodgson was something of a forerunner as a student come professor who spent his attentions on little girls, treating ‘the daughters of middle-class dons in ways that made the cultish fascination with little girls as carnally fixating as it was abstractly idealizing.’31 Dodgson had competition from John Ruskin for the attention of Alice Liddell. Ruskin directly competed with Charles Dodgson for ‘tea parties’ with her and was also summarily dismissed by the Liddell family after they discovered an inappropriate ‘dalliance’ between them.32 Roth contends that these types of ‘girls were celebrated as ideals, but they were also pursued and adored as physically alluring bodies. They were both angels and paramours, knowing young women as well as innocent children.’33 What these men would have dreamt of doing with these little girls ‘during the week’ as ‘students and professors’ who would idolize the dons’ daughters, they were much more likely to act on at ‘the weekend’ where they encountered ‘working-class girls in London music halls and restaurants during frequent trips to the city’s West End.’34 Clearly something far more lurid was also happening off campus: Often, as in the case of Dodgson, Ruskin, and Dowson, the Oxford child-pets were physically incorporated into a liminal duality by accompanying their admirers to music halls. At the halls, the men could watch as middle-class daughters watched working-class girls (in middle-class costume) make sexual innuendo to an adoring audience. It required only the most modest voyeuristic transposition to have the middle-class girl create an effect equivalent to the one produced by streetwise music hall girls dressed as nursery children. The girl herself—whether a professor’s daughter or a music hall child actress—existed somewhere between two.’35 Photography, in the form of pornography, was a natural offshoot of this appetite for seeing little girls take pleasure in their sexuality as it was perceived by these men. In the 1860s pornography became the purview of conservative forces catering to the tastes of the cultured, educated, and moneyed. These sexually suggestive images were not made for mass market consumption, but rather remained primarily a form of elite consumption. The majority of the photographs taken in this genre were concentrated on portraying the lower classes and races as objects of erotic consumption. Given his social situation in Oxford, it would be highly likely that Dodgson would not have been familiar with such images. Indeed, much of his photography of children appears to reference the categories of race and class reinforced by such imagery and shared their ultimate preoccupation with denudement accordingly. Late Victorian pornography concentrated its attention on young women, children, and people of other races as erotic objects. In doing so, these bodies were reinforced as commodities to be consumed for the pleasure of an elite class of White men. Pornography unsurprisingly reproduced social inequalities. Perhaps more surprising, to the contemporary reader is that ‘pornographers trawled for customers on the society pages.’36 Lisa Z. Sigel describes a situation where photographic pornography comes into fashion in the 1860s at a time when ‘the combination of imperialism, sadism, and sexism signaled the emergence of a new relationship between sexuality and society […].’37 Algernon Charles Swinburne, a close friend of Dodgson’s, was a member of the London Anthropological Society’s ‘Cannibal Club’ that comprised a group of upper middle class men claimed to study pornography as a way to uncover scientific empiricist truths. The

156  Lewis Carroll and the Imperial Eroticisation of White Childhood Cannibals (cannibalism being a euphemistic reference to homosexuality), were representative types of the British ruling class that on the whole had their erotic preferences honed by academic exposure to anthropology, science, and empire, and developed their tastes in pornography as a project of class liberation. However, personal and private these encounters were with their subjects of fascination, each image served a function to reinforce their sense of social and educational superiority as compared to the objects they consumed. Their sexual freedoms were purchased by both their pre-existing social and imperial privileges, and as such. what they chose to eroticise were forms of relationship that underlined their abilities to either racially or sexually prevail over others according to a natural order of things. Erotic domination over their ‘child-pets’ represented one of the biggest thrills for men of this ilk. Sally Shuttleworth refers to a cultural scenario, ‘following on from the publication of Drawin’s Origin of the Species (1859)’ where ‘there were marked shifts in the construction of childhood as forms of evolutionary psychology and psychiatry began to emerge.’38 Shuttleworth asserts that ‘the long-standing popular notion that the child is like the animal or savage was given apparent scientific validation in theories of recapitulation, in which the child was seen to mirror the in its early years the form of the species, both human and animal. Similarly, with the emerging field of anthropology, women, children and savages were repeatedly linked together as figures who stood outside the unstated norms of white middle-class masculinity.’39 Why this is so significant is that figures in the Cannibal Club, broken with Darwin at this time and followed a path the reaffirmed notions of polygenism as opposed to monogenism, because they wanted to preserve the idea that that there were distinct racial branches of humankind. Nevertheless, the figure of the child, served even their purposes, insofar as its discourses of gender, race and selfhood, held the child to be ‘a figure who is by turns animal, savage, and female, but who is not located in the distant colonies, nor the mists of evolutionary time, but at the very centre of English domestic life.’40 The child, in other words, is classed as a different species to man. Whereas at the time, the evolutionist argument maintained that Black people were “savages” or “primitives” and thought to be “living fossils”—relics of an earlier evolutionary stage, the Cannibal Club was much more interested in ‘examining the sexual and moral behaviour of contemporary “savages,”’ and as anthropologists, to having ‘access to the behaviour of the “savage” ancestors of whites.’41 Lucy Bland refers to the fact in mid-nineteenth century scientific discourse, ‘there was much talk about “primitive promiscuity.”’42 Although the term was used to refer to an early stage of human development, it was also used as a description for ‘contemporary primitives.’43 As scientific discourse progressed into a later Victorian period, ‘white girls would have been classified as a most dangerous type, as opposed to white boys, because, the sciences of craniology and anthropometry had “discovered” that women shared with the negroes a narrow, child-like skull and head as compared with the well rounded-head small-jawed males of the “higher races.”’44 Bland maintains that, ‘knowledge of these differences required photography to be “realised” so that white females of any age, could be classed as atavistic specimens of humankind.’45 Moreover, photographs of ‘primitives’ in various stages of undress, according to Bland, ‘provided a surrogate pornography for European middle-class males.’46 Why this is so important because this situation has direct crossover with imperial discourses of this same era. Bill Ashcroft argues that ‘the child becomes important to the discourse of Empire, because the invention of childhood itself in European society was coterminous with the invention of that other notion of supreme importance to

Lewis Carroll and the Imperial Eroticisation of White Childhood 157 imperialism, race.’47 Photography becomes an important instrument here through which to inscribe appearances with the object being the control of representation itself. As such, the child figures into this economy as a way of signifying the menace of primitivism as the very heart of darkness within the colonial project. ‘The concomitant growth of the Victorian idealization of the child and the brutalization of the children of the working class is a contradiction suppressed within the discourse of childhood.’48 This goes much of the way towards explaining Dodgson’s desire to portray his upper middle class girl subjects as working class maids and waifs, because it then gave him permission, in this way, to menace their bodies by figurative degrading them before the act of photographically capturing them. Their direct gaze into the camera speaks further of the savage impudence, which suggest the requirement of discipline. Dodgson’s photographs seems to suggest a devolution on to themselves, what Carol Mavor refers to as a ‘slippage between child, primitive and other’ and where the ‘ultimate “primitive dress” is nudity.’49 By costuming these upper middle class White girls as ‘Turks or Chinamen’ queered them up a bit to make it acceptable for Dodgson to pray upon them.50 Such posing would overlap with popular conceits regarding the sexual submissiveness of Asian peoples during this era. In the case of the sisters Beatrice and Evelyn Hatch, it was clear that Dodgson has access to being alone with them. That their bodies are furnished to him by one ‘Mrs. L.’ and that both were ‘at ease with what Carroll referred to as “primitive dress” a term that for him was interchangeable with “sans habilement.”’51 John Wallen refers to the attitudes and beliefs of the Cannibal Club as ‘ardently racist.’52 In addition to being that ‘most of the cannibals were enthusiastic hedonists, dedicated to the perusal and collection of pornography and particularly to a fascination with the intimate sexual practices of the colonial people they ruled over. Essentially, this group of imperialists looked down from the Olympian heights of their own racial and class position onto a metaphorical stage where the colonial peoples could be carefully examined and labeled while providing sexual titillation for the imperial masters.’53 The Cannibal club are very much concerned with forging ahead with ethnographic and phrenological practices that support an understanding of mankind as the product of multiple geneses. The Ethnological Society formed in London in 1843 would have been dedicated to works of racial science such as craniotomy and other practices of anatomical measurement. Were it not for Darwin, they would have continued to be unified in this racialist agenda. Darwin’s argument that mankind was a single species, led to a split within the Society in 1863, and the rise of a rival organisation made of polygenesis diehards; The Anthropological Society of London, that dedicated itself to ‘the minute collection of data as a means of proving the differences between races.’54 Wallen offers, that ‘during the American Civil War, the Anthropological Society was a strong supporter of the Confederacy and its pro-slavery policies.’55 This grow was highly influential and was compromised by members of the establishment, including with its ranks were MPs, diplomats, lawyers, academics, and the members of the armed forces and in fact used these government and scientific channels to procure some of their most coveted materials. The Perversities of Mind Dodgson had access to a different though not unrelated sort of material through his uncle, Robert Wilfred Skeffington Lutwidge. Dodgson’s library included works ‘on phrenology and homeopathy’; however, the bulk of it ‘suggested that he had a particular interest in mental health and the science of the mind.’56 That interest may well have been piqued

158  Lewis Carroll and the Imperial Eroticisation of White Childhood by Dodgson’s close relation to Skeffington Lutwidge, who was an important and wellconnected figure in Victorian psychiatry. ‘He was a barrister and worked first as secretary for the Metropolitan Commission, and then for the Commission in Lunacy after the Lunacy Act in 1845, a state-supervised body headed by Lord Shaftesbury for the inspection of lunatic asylums in Britain and Ireland. He became Commissioner in 1853 and remained in this position until his death in 1873,’ when he was brutally murdered by an asylum patient.57 Franziska E. Kohlt discovers through her scrutiny of Dodgson’s diaries the development of ‘a close relationship with his uncle from the start of his undergraduate studies at Christ Church in 1850, which grew even more intimate after the death of Dodgson’s father in 1868. Carroll stayed at his uncle’s house in London almost every vacation, and they appear, strikingly, as kindred spirits.’58 Jenny Woolf describes ‘striking similarities between the two men […] and despite the 30-year age difference, the socialised together, going to concerts and plays.’59 Amongst their shared passions was photography. In this, they were on the cutting edge of a new practice promising to surpass the daguerreotype and calotype; the wet-plate collodion process. Simon Winchester explains, that ‘this extension of each of the first two methods was also developed in the 1850s, just as Dodgson was going up to Oxford.’60 Winchester refers to photography as something that ‘hooked’ Dodgson and that it ‘he recognized a curious harmony between the new art and the anecdotes of his uncle brought him from the madhouse.’61 Photography becomes a way for Dodgson to channel his interests in scientific, artistic, and social currents of his day. With regard to his interest in psychiatry, some of which might have been personal, a ‘rigid, boring, isolated and solitary Charles Dodgson’ is able through amateur photography to be regarded as a fashionable young gentleman. Through photography, Dodgson eventually is able to invent the schizoid persona of Lewis Carroll, as an ‘indispensable counterpart that allows Charles Dodgson an ordinary existence.’62 Antonio Carlos Trigo de Bettencourt maintains that ‘everything we know about Dodgson’s life points to schizoid behavior that is nonetheless overcome by the precarious balance provided by Lewis Carroll’s existence, which protected Dodgson from his own schizophrenia. Dodgson is Carroll’s Victorian guardian or, as we might say, the super-ego of his own instinctive and creative activity, controlling him by mathematical abstraction and precision.’63 Photography becomes a way for Dodgson to negotiate adulthood through his split identification as himself as a bachelor uncle figure, much in the mould of Skeffington, while at the same time experimenting with a childlike, girl like persona closely aligned with Alice Liddell’s. There is no Lewis Carroll without Alice Liddell. Their ‘friendship’ defines him and is only made possible through photographic experimentation. The Origin of the Photographer Through photographic experimentation Dodgson is able to develop another crucial ‘friendship,’ in this instance with Reginald Southey, the son of Lunacy Commissioner Henry Herbert Southey. The friendship was likely orchestrated by Skeffington, as Henry Southey was his close colleague. Reginald Southey was also the nephew of the poet Laureate Robert Southey. Therefore, Southey would have entered Oxford with an immense amount of privilege backing his identity. Dodgson’s friendship with Southey opened the doors to him socially that would have otherwise been impossible, because of his acute shyness and distinct stammer. In 1857, the pair obtained a commission to make

Lewis Carroll and the Imperial Eroticisation of White Childhood 159 photographs by their Christ Church colleague Henry Wentworth Acland, of ‘anatomical specimens before their transfer to the new University Museum that was being built.’64 A photograph of Southey taken during this commission shows him in the Christ Church Anatomical Museum juxtaposed with a human skeleton and that of a monkey (Figure 7.3). Southey has his arm around the skeleton implying a kinship between himself with that form. This pair fixes their gaze past the monkey, which feebly attempts to

Figure 7.3 Reginald Southey (1835–1899) with skeletons of human and monkey. Albumen print 16.7 × 13.7 cm. Image number assigned by Dodgson: 0219. June 1857.

160  Lewis Carroll and the Imperial Eroticisation of White Childhood connect with the human skeleton by laying its bony paw on it. On a table near a gorilla skull sits behind a human one, their difference clearly laid out in both size and dimension. This is clearly a comment on the controversies surrounding human evolution taking place at Oxford at mid-century, but it is also more than that, in that it references craniotomy and theories of polygenesis that have dominated that debate prior to Darwin’s publication of Origin of the Species in 1859. The skulls, in particular, are there to indicate human development and mental capacity, with Southey clearly appearing at the top of the chain for both characteristics, as his physiognomic profile and proper attire both suggest. Acland was a close friend of John Ruskin. It is likely that through that social connection, Dodgson met and befriended the sculptor Alexander Munro and the family of George MacDonald. This is an extremely tight circle of associations as evidenced by that fact, ‘Acland was not only Regius Professor in Medicine at the University of Oxford, but also Visiting Physician at the Pauper Lunatic Asylum at Littlemore and thus another of Carroll’s links to Victorian psychiatry.’65 Kohlt asserts that Dodgson’s ‘interest in photography also facilitated his first direct recorded contact with the psychiatric profession, in which, as a device of optic enhancement, it served a scientific role comparable to that of microscopes and telescopes.’66 She points to a diary entry of January 18, 1856, that refers to a vacation visit to his uncle Skeffington, involving his friend Southey, who came over to spend the day in photography, but instead ending up accompanying him on a visit to a ‘Dr. Diamond of the Surrey Lunatic Asylum: he gave me two [photographs] he has done lately, an excellent full length of Uncle Skeffington and a boy of King’s College, Frank Foster.’67 Dr Diamond was, in fact, the renowned photographer Hugh Welch Diamond, who took photographs documenting the facial expressions of patients suffering from mental disorders at the Surrey County Lunatic Asylum where he was Superintendent of the Female Department during the years 1848–1858. Diamond himself was not simply an avid amateur photographer, but one of its pioneering practitioners within Britain, having ‘made he made his first photograph just three months after William Henry Fox Talbot introduced his invention of photography in 1839.’68 Diamond’s career in the art spanned the arts and sciences. The gathering that he held weekly with artistic friends at his home, including his friend Skeffington, eventually ‘developed into the Photographic Society of London. Diamond was a founding member, Secretary, and editor of the Society’s Photographic Journal for ten years.’69 Diamond was such a giant in the fields of both photography and psychiatry that his works, alongside that of Guillaume-Benjamin-Amand Duchenne de Boulogne, acted as a foundation for Darwin’s work on The Expression of Emotion (1872). His photographic studio was located within the Surrey County Asylum, allowing him direct access to his female patients ‘in order to classify and catalogue types of insanity’ and then exhibit these at the Royal Academy’s Photographic Exhibition in 1855–56, to great public acclaim and professional honour, ‘in artistic as well as scientific circles.’70 Essentially, by the time, Dodgson’s is granted an audience with Diamond, his already famous for these types of works. Dodgson would have ‘visited the display with Skeffington in January 1856, shortly before meeting Diamond.’71 Diamond’s innovation in the field was to make the physiognomy mobile through the photographic capture of facial expressions, corresponding to a person’s emotions and state of mind. Portraiture could become a function of treatment versus mere detection of mental illness, by displaying both its progress and evolution within the lifetime of a patient; similarly, cures could be demonstrated through before and after shots that demonstrated their transformation from distraught and dishevelled

Lewis Carroll and the Imperial Eroticisation of White Childhood 161 hospital inmates into well-dressed and well-groomed individuals who were able to assume their freedom after their clinical cure. The photographic portraits he made exaggerate the ragged, desperate appearance of the people he treated for insanity. Diamond’s aim was to categorise their external appearance using photography as a diagnostic tool. His work lent a dynamic quality heretofore denied in physiognomic science, by applying its principles to the mobile physiognomy of facial expressions, corresponding to a person’s emotions and states of mind so that the psychopathology affliction became the subject of enquiry, as opposed to the patient themselves. In other words, Diamond sought to create a systematic taxonomy of mental illnesses based on their external appearances; one in which it was not the person who was categorised and stereotyped, but rather the illness. This was extremely significant insofar as it assumed for the first time scientifically that mental illness is a transient state, and thus, cures could be devised to restore a formerly mentally ill patient to an innately healthy status. Photographs would be used for comparative students amongst subjects, but not of them per se. Instead, treatment would be determined by comparative identification. What is perhaps most fascinating about Diamond’s portraiture is that his patients were encouraged to look at their own photographs so they could recognise within themselves their current condition of madness and in so doing, could also be used as treatment or therapy by encouraging patients to reflect upon themselves and work towards incremental improvements in their hygiene and dress suggestive of their progress. Related to this practice, would be using psychiatric photography to identify cases of recidivism, where a decline in appearance would sanctify the need for patients to be readmitted and be subject to further treatment to restore their previously functional likeness. These psychiatric photographs would also be used as well as to help police apprehend criminal lunatics who had escaped from the asylum. Here it is significant to note Diamond was in charge of the Female Department of the Surrey County Lunatic Asylum and, hence, he exclusively photographed female patients. What is fascinating about Diamond’s photographs is that his female patients are not photographed with an artificial sense of their domestic surroundings, as would the case with traditional portrait photography of the era, but rather were pictorially isolated, seated, and posed in front of a neutral cloth backdrop so as to emphasise the medical use of these photographs. As they progressed into their treatment, occasionally props like books or a basket would be added to suggest they were progressing forwards into civilisation. Diamond’s portraits pay particular attention to hand placement and gesture in his patient’s poses, whether clenched or resting in their laps, hidden, or holding an object to signify poverty, idleness, or melancholy, and, accordingly, class status becomes very much a part in determining this diagnostic undertaking. The studied formality of asylum photography stood in dialogue with popular imagery of insanity, as well as race and gender-informed ideas of physiognomy and their diagnostic application in the late Victorian era that would eventually cross over into the emerging field of Darwinian evolutionary science. Documenting the Turn Although Dodgson was generally considered anti-Darwinist in his scientific outlook as a Christian conservative, his interests peaked when Darwin published the book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals in 1872. It was Darwin’s first use of photographs to suggest evidence for his theories of evolution. The photographs for the volume were taken by Oscar Gustave Rejlander, who had been Dodgson’s photography instructor. Rejlander started his career as an artist photographer, but through his association

162  Lewis Carroll and the Imperial Eroticisation of White Childhood with Darwin established himself as a renowned figure in Victorian behavioural science and psychiatry. ‘Scientifically, Expression pushed evolution to its limits suggesting that human thoughts and feelings, like fingers and toes, are the result of evolutionary pressures.’72 ‘Photography enabled Darwin to illustrate his book with expressions performed by real individuals of his day.’73 After its publication, Dodgson reached out to Darwin to offer support with his future investigations. What was clearly the draw here for him was not Darwin’s scientific arguments per se, but their use of photographs of girls to illustrate them. Whilst the initial correspondence Dodgson sent to Darwin has been lost, it is clear that he wishes to share with him some of the photographs he had previously made of girls. This is evident from his diary entry on the subject from 26 December, 1872, where records the following: ‘Mr. C. Darwin whose book on The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals I am reading…I have given a print of “No Lessons today”.’74 Laura White observes that ‘the photograph “No Lessons today,” depicts a young girl, Flora, grinning at the camera in a manner that seems to contradicted Darwin’s belief that strong facial expression had no place in art because they harkened to the primitive past of humans. Sending this photograph to Darwin seems to have been Carroll’s comical attempt to provide evidence to the contrary.’75 It might equally have been his attempt to suggest that a young Flora Rankin grinning delightedly into the camera suggests that her primitive nature is—almost wickedly—alive and well within her as she gazes at the camera. It is clear from Darwin’s reply that he doesn’t quite know how to classify such an offering from Dodgson. He replies: ‘If you can quite spare an unmounted photo., I shd. very much like to possess it, although I doubtful whether I shall ever make any actual use of it. I half scruple accepting your very kind offer…’76 The photograph in question was made on July 31, 1863, at Elm Lodge. This would have been the very same at Elm Lodge as was Mrs. MacDonald’s father’s home in Hampstead and would have been taken in the same month as he resides there with the MacDonald family in self-exile from Oxford after the incident with Alice Liddell. Flora was a close childhood friend of Irene and Mary MacDonald, though they were significantly younger than her. The companion photograph to No Lessons Today is an image of Flora Rankin posed with Irene and Mary MacDonald flanking her on either side. The wild flowers that adore Flora’s head ‘alludes to the figure of Flora in Botticelli’s Spring and to the mythologizing work of his Pre-Raphaelite painter friends Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Arthur Hughes.’77 Within the context of that reference, it also points to her budding fertility, as well as this being, the scene of a suitor’s pursuit—both of these point to the idea of a coming of age. In the photograph, ‘the figure of Flo Rankin may be adorned as a child, but it is a young woman sure of her appeal who locks gazes with the viewer, on her lips the ironic flutter of a smile.’78 That smile is fully and luridly revealed in the image of her alone in No Lessons Today where Flora’s contorted smile reveals the liminal, creaturely qualities of her body, exhibited here as almost animalistic quality and behaviour, as though she were an animal taking on human characteristics, and not the other way around. Hers is the grin of Cheshire Cat, clever beyond her years. It is clear from his diary, that whilst staying at the MacDonald’s, Dodgson implored them to round up further girl subjects for him to photograph, beyond the immediate family. It is clear from his diary entry, that he wasn’t interested in photographing little girls per se, but rather, that amongst a group compromising, Flora and Mary Rankin and Margaret Campbell, ‘Flora was the only one of the three particularly worth taking.’79

Lewis Carroll and the Imperial Eroticisation of White Childhood 163 Dodgson was deeply influenced by Rejlander, and his photograph of Alice Liddell as The Beggar Maid in 1858, was made to imitate the series of photographs Rejlander had taken of English street urchins. At that time, Rejlander was making photographs of nude and semi-nude little girls, and thus could be construed as a kind of forerunner for Dodgson’s preoccupations. All of the girls in these highly staged portrayals are posed as though they are both wise beyond their years and possessing of a natural sexual preciousness. Dodgson in many ways is selecting for this, and judging his subjects for their ability to act out his fantasies regarding class and racial alterity. Anne Marsh argues that Dodgson produced ‘a photographic opus of children play-acting in costume, children to sleep or kiss, and array of damsels to a stuttering but engaging adult who invented fantasies for children’ as a way to convince the adults in the room that this was not about sex.80 In order to conceal his desires, he told everyone what these girls were doing was merely engaging in a playful form of dress up. The emphasis that moral conceptualization of his work, Dodgson often relied on borrowed costumes from Ashmolean Museum and Drury Lane pantomime to stage these encounters. The girls were often Orientalised in Dodgson’s elaborate stagings to further the effects of their eroticization as objects before the lens. Anne Witchard observes that ‘Victorian sexual fantasies of oriental possibility were fed by girls arrayed as Eastern beauties: “Tartan maidens in amber silk and furs, girls from Cochin China in creamy robes, and feathered headdresses, Lapps in white furs, Japanese in embroidered purple, girls from China in terracotta and gold robes”.’81 Lorina and Alice Liddell, Xie Kitchin, Helen Saunders, Daisy Whiteside, Rose Laurie, and Ethel Hatch, all have their moment to appear before the camera in elaborate drag as male Chinese merchants. Except of course for the fact that every detail of the custom is made for the figure of a girl aged 11, in other words, a girl on the cusp of coming of age. Dodgson compulsively returns to this scene for over a decade, featuring a variety of girls he is anxious to appropriate into these erotic tableaux. Witchard makes the point that ‘some historians have suggested that the costumes were borrowed from Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum. If this was the case, it was a very regular borrowing and one that in the end was not returned.’82 There is an indication that Dodgson was grooming these girls through the lure of these costumes being made ready for them. In the case, of Xie Kitchin, Dodgson ‘fabricated the “arrival” of the “Chinese dress, as a ploy, a means of obtaining Xie’s mother cooperation.’83 Xie’s given name was Alexandra, such as the degree of Dodgson’s Orientalisation of the child that she was never referred to by that name. A younger Xie of five years old ‘appears half naked’ and ‘as though she were asleep with a cloth or chemise partially covering her, a heap of clothes or other cloths haphazardly thrown onto the settee next to her.’84 Dodgson describes such a situation of minimal dress as being in ‘savage fashion.’85 The idea of these girls pictured ‘with nothing but a cloth around her’ clearly excited Dodgson, as to their being pictured ‘as asleep.’86 The artefacts around them do little to cover over the fact that they who are the objects of Dodgson’s fascination. Dodgson used his reputation as a famed children’s author ‘to present himself to others as an innocent’ and yet it was clear from his numerous fallings out with families that these relationships with his childhood friends were, in reality, sexually charged.87 The conflation of gender and ethnicity, in Dodgson’s make-believe space, uses these rich White girl’s bodies to figuratively gain access to ‘the erotic social world of the urban poor, the exoticized Orient, and a terrain of childhood agency,’ that is most certainly racialised. (Figure 7.4)88 The implications of this are of child prostitution, and however much that is deflected from by Dodgson’s various theatrics, there remains a politic of racial, cultural and sexual difference that determines how far this fantasy can go.

164  Lewis Carroll and the Imperial Eroticisation of White Childhood

Figure 7.4 Xie Kitchin in ‘Tea merchant (off duty)’: by Lewis Carroll aka. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson 1873.

Lewis Carroll and the Imperial Eroticisation of White Childhood 165 For a figure like Dodgson, there may be danger everywhere in losing these associations, but the consequences for him are minimal, because of his position with regard to his chosen subjects. Notes 1 Alexander L. Taylor, The White Knight: A Study of CL Dodgson (Lewis Carroll). Diss. University of Glasgow (United Kingdom, 1952), 50. 2 Taylor, The White Knight, 54. 3 Ibid., 59. 4 Ibid., 54. 5 Ibid., 52. 6 Ibid., 54. 7 Ibid., 55. 8 Diane Waggoner, “Seeing Photographs in Comfort: The Social Uses of Lewis Carroll’s Photograph Albums.” The Princeton University Library Chronicle 62, no. 3 (2001): 403–433 at 404. 9 Waggoner, “Seeing Photographs in Comfort,” 404. 10 Ibid., 406. 11 Ibid., 408. 12 Ibid., 408. 13 Ibid., 408. 14 Ibid., 408. 15 Ibid., 429. 16 Ibid., 432. 17 Ibid., 432. 18 Ibid., 434. 19 Ibid., 434. 20 Ibid., 434. 21 Cole Riley, “Deborah Lutz Dishes the Dirt on Victorian Sex Rebels.” Sexis Social, February 11, 2011. 22 Shari L. Savage, “Through the Looking Glass: Sally Mann and Wonderland.” Visual Arts Research 43, no. 2 (2017): 5–20 at 13. 23 Savage “Through the Looking Glass,” 13. 24 Ibid., 13. 25 Ibid., 13. 26 Ibid., 13. 27 Ibid., 13. 28 Ibid., 18, footnote 2. 29 Christine Ann Roth, Cherry Ripe: “Cult of the Little Girls” Narratives in Late-Victorian Britain. Diss. University of Florida, 2000, 14. 30 Roth, Cherry Ripe, 14. 31 Ibid., 14. 32 Ibid., 14. 33 Ibid., 14. 34 Ibid., 15. 35 Ibid., 15. 36 Anna Clark, “Lisa Z. Sigel. Governing Pleasures: Pornography and Social Change in England, 1815–1914. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. 2002. Pp. ix, 227. Cloth $60.00, paper $24.00.” The American Historical Review 108, no. 1 (February 2003): 256–257 at 256. 37 Lisa Z. Sigel, Governing Pleasures: Pornography and Social Change in England, 1815–1914 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. 2002), 50. 38 Sally Shuttleworth, The Mind of the Child: Child Development in Literature, Science, and Medicine 1840–1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 4. 39 Shuttleworth, The Mind of the Child, 4. 40 Ibid., 4. 41 Lucy Bland, Banishing the Beast: English Feminism and Sexual Morality, 1885–1914 (New York: Penguin, 1995), 57.

166  Lewis Carroll and the Imperial Eroticisation of White Childhood 2 Bland, Banishing the Beast, 57. 4 43 Ibid., 57. 44 Ibid., 73. 45 Ibid., 76. 46 Ibid., 76. 47 Bill Ashcroft, On Post-Colonial Futures: Transformations of a Colonial Culture (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2001), 37. 48 Ashcroft, On Post-Colonial Futures, 41. 49 Carol Mavor, “Dreams Rushes: Lewis Carroll’s Photographs of the Little Girl.” In The Girl’s Own: Cultural Histories of the Anglo-American Girl, 1830–1915. Edited by Claudia Nelson (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010), 162. 50 Mavor, “Dreams Rushes,” 162. 51 Ibid., 159. 52 John Wallen, “The Cannibal Club and the Origins of 19th Century Racism and Pornography.” The Victorian 1, no. 1 (2013): 1–13 at 3. 53 Dalila Scruggs, “Colonization Pictures as Primary Documents: Virginians’ Contributions.” Virginia Emigrants to Liberia. http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/liberia/pages/scruggs.html. 54 Wallen, “The Cannibal Club and the Origins of 19th Century Racism and Pornography,” 3. 55 Ibid., 3. 56 Stephanie L. Schatz, “Lewis Carroll’s Dream-Child and Victorian Child Psychopathology.” Journal of the History of Ideas 76, no. 1 (2015): 93–114 at 94. 57 Franziska E. Kohlt, “‘The Stupidest Tea-Party in All My Life’: Lewis Carroll and Victorian Psychiatric Practice.” Journal of Victorian Culture 21, no. 2, 1 (2016): 147–167 at 148, https:// doi.org/10.1080/13555502.2016.1167767. 58 Kohlt, “The Stupidest Tea-Party in All My Life,” 148. 59 Jenny Woolf, The Mystery of Lewis Carroll: Discovering the Whimsical, Thoughtful, and Sometimes Lonely Man Who Created “Alice in Wonderland” (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2010), 26. 60 Simon Winchester, The Alice Behind Wonderland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 43. 61 Winchester, The Alice Behind Wonderland, 43. 62 António Carlos Trigo de Bettencourt, “Lobo Antunes, the Psychiatrist.” Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies (2011): 261–266 at 262. 63 de Bettencourt, “Lobo Antunes, the Psychiatrist,” 262. 64 Roger Taylor and Edward Wakeling, Lewis Carroll Photographer: The Princeton University Library Albums (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 35–36. 65 Kohlt, “The Stupidest Tea-Party in All My Life,” 149. 66 Ibid., 149. 67 Ibid., 149. 68 “Hugh Welch Diamond (1808–1886), Photographer.” National Portrait Gallery. 69 Ibid. 70 Kohlt, “The Stupidest Tea-Party in All My Life,” 149. 71 Ibid., 149. 72 Phillip Prodger, Darwin’s Camera: Art and Photography in the Theory of Evolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 205. 73 Prodger, Darwin’s Camera, 206. 74 Mariam Hanna, “‘Muddled Mice, Clever Caterpillars, and Frog-Footmen’: A Darwinian Lens in g Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.” Prandium: The Journal of Historical Studies 7, no. 1 (2018): n.p. 75 Laura White, The Alice Books and the Contested Ground of the Natural World (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2017), 64. 76 Prodger, Darwin’s Camera, 208. 77 Lewis Carroll, “Flora Rankin, Irene MacDonald, and Mary Josephine MacDonald at Elm Lodge July 1863.” The Metropolitan Museum. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/ search/283094. 78 Ibid. 79 Edward Wakeling, Lewis Carroll: The Man and His Circle (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014), 164.

Lewis Carroll and the Imperial Eroticisation of White Childhood 167 80 Anne Marsh, The Darkroom: Photography and the Theatre of Desire (Adelaide: Macmillan, 2003), 139. 81 Anne Witchard, “Chinoiseries Wonderlands of the Fin de Siècle Twinkletoes in Chinatown.” In Alice Beyond Wonderland: Essays for the Twenty-first Century (Des Moines: University of Iowa Press, 2009), 159. 82 Witchard, “Chinoiseries Wonderlands of the Fin de Siècle Twinkletoes in Chinatown,” 163. 83 Ibid., 163. 84 Diane Waggoner, Lewis Carroll’s Photography and Modern Childhood (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), 201. 85 Waggoner, Lewis Carroll’s Photography and Modern Childhood, 201. 86 Ibid., 201. 87 Ibid., 210. 88 Witchard, “Chinoiseries Wonderlands of the Fin de Siècle Twinkletoes in Chinatown,” 164.

Bibilography Ashcroft, Bill. On Post-Colonial Futures: Transformations of a Colonial Culture. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2001. Bland, Lucy. Banishing the Beast: English Feminism and Sexual Morality, 1885-1914. New York: Penguin, 1995. Carroll, Lewis. “Flora Rankin, Irene MacDonald, and Mary Josephine MacDonald at Elm Lodge July 1863.” The Metropolitan Museum. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/ 283094. Clark, Anna. “Lisa Z. Sigel. Governing Pleasures: Pornography and Social Change in England, 1815–1914. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. 2002. Pp. ix, 227. Cloth $60.00, paper $24.00.” The American Historical Review 108, no. 1 (February 2003): 256–257. https://doi. org/10.1086/ahr/108.1.256. De Bettencourt, António Carlos Trigo. “Lobo Antunes, the Psychiatrist.” Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies (2011): 261–266. Hanna, Mariam. “‘Muddled Mice, Clever Caterpillars, and Frog-Footmen’: A Darwinian Lens in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.” Prandium: The Journal of Historical Studies 7, no. 1 (2018). http://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/prandium/article/view/16211/. “Hugh Welch Diamond (1808-1886), Photographer.” National Portrait Gallery. https://www.npg. org.uk/collections/search/person/mp07880/hugh-welch-diamond. Kohlt, Franziska E. “‘The Stupidest Tea-Party in All My Life’: Lewis Carroll and Victorian Psychiatric Practice.” Journal of Victorian Culture 21, no. 2, 1 June (2016): 147–167. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/13555502.2016.1167767. Marsh, Anne. The Darkroom: Photography and the Theatre of Desire. Adelaide: Macmillan, 2003. Mavor, Carol. “Dreams Rushes: Lewis Carroll’s Photographs of the Little Girl.” In The Girl’s Own: Cultural Histories of the Anglo-American Girl, 1830–1915, 156–193. Edited by Claudia Nelson, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010. Prodger, Phillip. Darwin’s Camera: Art and Photography in the Theory of Evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Riley, Cole. “Deborah Lutz Dishes the Dirt on Victorian Sex Rebels.” Sexis Social, February 11, 2011. https://www.edenfantasys.com/sexis/sex-and-society/deborah-lutz-pleasure-bound-0211111/ ?pnid=101734593. Roth, Christine Ann. Cherry Ripe: “Cult of the Little Girls” Narratives in Late-Victorian Britain. Diss. University of Florida, 2000. Savage, Shari L. “Through the Looking Glass: Sally Mann and Wonderland.” Visual Arts Research 43, no. 2 (2017): 5–20. https://doi.org/10.5406/visuartsrese.43.2.0005. Schatz, Stephanie L. “Lewis Carroll’s Dream-Child and Victorian Child Psychopathology.” Journal of the History of Ideas 76, no. 1 (2015): 93–114. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43948726.

168  Lewis Carroll and the Imperial Eroticisation of White Childhood Scruggs, Dalila. “Colonization Pictures as Primary Documents: Virginians’ Contributions.” Virginia Emigrants to Liberia. http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/liberia/pages/scruggs.html. Shuttleworth, Sally. The Mind of the Child: Child Development in Literature, Science, and Medicine 1840-1900. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Sigel, Lisa Z. Governing Pleasures: Pornography and Social Change in England, 1815–1914. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002. Taylor, Alexander L. The White Knight: A Study of CL Dodgson (Lewis Carroll). Diss. University of Glasgow (United Kingdom), 1952. Taylor, Roger and Edward Wakeling. Lewis Carroll Photographer: The Princeton University Library Albums. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. Waggoner, Diane. Lewis Carroll’s Photography and Modern Childhood. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020. ———. “Seeing Photographs in Comfort: The Social Uses of Lewis Carroll’s Photograph Albums.” The Princeton University Library Chronicle 62, no. 3 (2001): 403–433. https://doi.org/10.25290/ prinunivlibrchro.62.3.0403. Wakeling, Edward. Lewis Carroll: The Man and His Circle. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014. Wallen, John. “The Cannibal Club and the Origins of 19th Century Racism and Pornography.” The Victorian 1, no. 1 (2013): 1–13. White, Laura. The Alice Books and the Contested Ground of the Natural World. New York: Taylor & Francis, 2017. Winchester, Simon. The Alice Behind Wonderland. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Witchard, Anne. “Chinoiseries Wonderlands of the Fin de Siècle Twinkletoes in Chinatown.” In Alice Beyond Wonderland: Essays for the Twenty-First Century, 155–175. Des Moines: University of Iowa Press, 2009. Woolf, Jenny. The Mystery of Lewis Carroll: Discovering the Whimsical, Thoughtful, and Sometimes Lonely Man Who Created “Alice in Wonderland”. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2010.

8

Material Agency The Eames Office, Race, and US Cold War Photographic Aesthetics

Charles Eames may have been a man ahead of his time. As a child, he ‘had taught himself wet-plate photography,’ and, in later life, was in the habit of documenting his life and work obsessively and encouraged his studio employees to do the same: ‘I’ll do anything to give an excuse to take photographs.’1 Charles met his wife Ray as a student at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. The couple married in 1941 and moved to California in the same year. It also happened to be the year the United States entered World War II. The urban wartime environment of Los Angeles gestated what would become the mid-century modern aesthetic, eventually permeating every aspect of American life. As a young newlywed, ‘Charles got a job in the art department at MGM, where he made friends with Billy Wilder and took countless photographs of Hollywood stage sets.’2 Ray and Charles would go on to create an entirely new version of cinema by making films that were not based on representation, but rather the visualisation of information. By working with the notion of photographs as prototypes for, or experiments in reality, they were able to shift the perception of audience to focus on the image as a form in its right, rather than as an index of reality. By doing so, the Eames, as filmmakers, were wholly concerned with the electronic transfer of information. Through the sheer profusion of photographs and other forms of sensory stimuli, the Eames had attempted to remake the contemporary world in the image of information technology itself. ‘The films looked and spoke as if this new world were elegantly explicable, but they were structured so as to encourage doubt and difficulty.’3 Why this might be so, can in part be answered by whom the Eames themselves were, commercial agents within a new post-war era where private capital becomes synonymous with global governance, who were determined to use photography as a coercive tool to reinvent humanity’s social world. Photography as a means of mass communication opened up the potential for a parallel world of images to pervade upon life itself. In their ability to occupy consciousness, photographs generated a set of manners within humanity that were far from benign, and yet in their ubiquity, their dynamic power became wholly enveloping, leading directly to an environment that would initially be referred to as the worldwide web, and later the internet. Envelopment would become development, and the Eames were at the forefront of that mechanism of logic. The world that the Eames were building was based on relentless communication, and the acceptance of such a world was premised on the idea that it would bring humanity greater happiness. A world in which everyone was immersed within technology was one of purportedly greater satisfaction. Justus Nieland observes that in the world the Eames helped bring to life, ‘the political is subsumed into consumption, personalization, and the commodification of lifestyles, which we display and DOI: 10.4324/9781003274797-9

170  Material Agency perform through the circulation of messages in a nonstop data stream. So much depends upon what it means to domesticate media, to make it a lifestyle.’4 The photograph itself was to function as a sort of prosthetic for the post-war White human, who would come to rely upon it as means through which to temper the increasingly complex world of postcolonial global relationships. Photography was promoted as means of participating in a networked information society in a way that would ideally signal to belong. In the Eames’ world, connections with other human beings are built upon sharing not of experiences so much as the documentation, thereafter, of them. Photographic images were there to train the attention of human beings and to develop powers of discernment that could then be said to be universal. For instance, it is not enough for Americans to believe that they share the same sky with the Soviets; they must be convinced that they share the same image of what a night sky is. The domestic setting is as a consequence not a place for dwelling, but of locating, and it can only be truly and completely realised when it has been aerially photographed. It can then act as a node within the broader framework of a communicative universe, ironically, at a time of increasing personal alienation. There was an alternative reality, where the domestic setting lends itself to a sort of casual voyeurism. Sebastian Ignacio Aedo Jury asserts that during the Cold War era, a new form of ‘domesticity expands its field of influence to a territorial scale, beyond the suburbs and the urban, towards other nations where it was used to tame western countries under the U.S. political agenda. Domesticity is not at home anymore; it has been projected like an image on a screen toward other spheres; to the political, economic and military terrain.’5 Materially, this takes place through the staging of multiple exhibitions in European nations that were used to advertise American values through domesticity, as a soft power promoting American corporate capitalism against the communist system of Soviet nations. America At Home (West Berlin, 1950) for example, placed a pre-fabricated house where German visitors could watch female students vacuuming, preparing toast and using diverse types of appliances that make the life of the homemaker easier. Similarly in Berlin, We are Building a Better Life (1952), a typical American suburban house was displayed with diverse types of domestic items labelled with the amount of working hours needed to purchase them instead of producing them. Other exhibitions like Peoples’ Capitalism (Poland, 1956), Supermarket USA (Zagreb, 1956) or The American National Exhibition (Moscow, 1959), all circulate around the idea of the suburban house—together with the display of consumer goods and the family values they promote—as symbols of American hegemony. In this sense, the domestic became the new battlefield.6 A Vision for a New Universal The Eames’ film Glimpses of the USA (1959) was, in many respects, clearly a part of this lineage. It turned the ordinary domestic setting into a sophisticated war room, meaning a place where information is correlated to invite each member of the family group can try out plans to satisfy their own changing needs. That atomisation created a consumer who views aspects of their surroundings as though they were looking at a film, where they are not so much part of the domestic environment but rather have themselves turned into elements of a production—their very presence within the home producing its own image, idea, value, and lifestyle. Here, the subject is poised to act and construe its place within domesticity as one of constant expectation and readiness. Kate A. Baldwin argues that the Eames’ film Glimpses of the USA was a project dedicated to facilitating the

Material Agency 171 ‘emotional convergence between Americans and Soviets’ and as such, ‘its emotional circuitry’ relied upon a ‘display of diversity as exemplary of US ideals and principles’ and yet, ‘at the same time it curtailed those very principles through the tightly orchestrated management of the visitor experience.’7 Photography, and by extension film, was crucial to the Eames’ enterprise of having ‘stages, objects and images’ populate a reality wherein it was possible to convince Soviet audiences, that ‘the American way of life’ was essentially ‘a way of being and feeling, a mandate of happiness through conspicuous consumption so staunch as to be aggressive. The exhibition spoke clearly: we have stuff and it makes us happy.’8 This narrative everywhere is haunted by the spectre of the Black American body, which for the nation’s near bicentenary continues to represent itself as part of that stuff, the 3/5 of a human being whose counting makes possible life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for White consumers. Theirs is a very specific kind of American experience, and it is one that is at odds with what designers in Los Angeles had hoped to convey to their audience in Moscow. The issue of race, nevertheless, threatens always to eclipse the staging of American relations abroad as having an equitable basis in truth. America was a place of a deep paradox when it came to the truths subtending its union. The further these truths were placed outside of the parameter of its national borders, the more evident it became that America’s great experiment in democracy could not withstand the test of universal application, because nowhere had democracy been universally applied. The American psyche roiled against such admission and redoubled on insistence that it, nevertheless, must be so. America’s institutions rested on a suspension of disbelief when it came to race itself. This was so because to be American, was to be White, and to be otherwise, seemed impossible to picture. At the same time, the Soviets brought their own associative vocabularies to the table; equating slavery with class rather than race and capitalism with democracy. Few, if any of the desire audience associated freedom with racial superiority, in the way Americans might when formulating the basis of their national identity. The Eames’ technique to overcome this schism was to bombard the Soviet’s perception at multiple levels through the multiple projections of images simultaneously that would make the story of America’s diversity seem credible, even as it subtly undermined the idea of racial equivalency in terms of value. Seven hours of footage was whittled down to a 12-minute montage of 22,000 images; only some of which were moving. Soviet audiences were made to view this spectacle en masse, as it was literally projected above their heads, on a screen the dimensions of an American football field. The images themselves were not new but rather carefully culled from sources as diverse as Hollywood film, Broadway stage productions, and borrowed imagery from America’s leading mid-century photographic publications, including Time, Life, The Saturday Evening Post, and Sports Illustrated magazines, advertising campaigns, and popular photography. The Eames did not invent so much as recycle this catalogue of American life and, in so doing, created a new digital ecology for representing what they conceived of as ‘the best of American life.’ In many respects, Glimpses of the USA can be said to be one of the first major films of the information age, making a portrait of American life out of photographs that act as data points. In that same vein, what it is to be human was being re-mapped by this approach to the vastness of American life, compressed as it were to the framework of a single citizen as a relational consumer of reality. That consumer is implied to be White or a Black version of a White ideal of universalism when it came to work, life, play, and education. Baldwin describes, the notable exclusions of the film having to do with poverty, urban ghettoes, or dissent of any kind, as a means of stripping the presentation

172  Material Agency of ‘any grittiness or depictions of hardship’ that might interfere with the ‘streamlined environments’ representative of ‘the simple pleasures’ of American life.9 The film itself is racially encoded throughout to discriminate for data that reinforces a notion of America, a place where gender, sexual difference, and race do not have the power to disrupt the flow of democratic life, insofar as diversity and dissent function as separate facilities for the promotion of capitalist aesthetics and little more when it comes to the mainstream consensus about how consumer life ought to be lived. The message is clear: American life is lived in colour and not limited to Black and White. Here plurality becomes a state of mind synonymous with endless choice and variation. Diversity subsumes into sameness through the potential of a universal capitalistic agency. In Baldwin’s reading of Glimpses, ‘racial terror, the sexual division of labor, and class divisions’ are the noise that must but tuned out from the reception of what America is, and in its place, what must be filtered in are a coherence of objects readying themselves to take the place of subjects, so that the objects may in time become better articulated versions of themselves.10 Whiteness is ultimately what is being modulated here, and the fact that ‘white goods’ are the medium of such an accomplishment was not lost on audiences, who need not see a White body or a face to know that images of cities and suburbs, pools and apartment buildings, homes and neighbourhoods, replete with close-ups of milk bottles and morning newspapers position the viewer to assume a White perspective as a shared space of collective being. The voice-over by Charles Eames himself invites the Soviets into this world as though it were a place to which they might already belong. That belonging is racial in nature, and therefore, it is possible for Eames to appeal here to a notion of a universal White humanity at the core of interest and attention here. What is spellbinding, in this sense, is that the Soviets recognise what is being projected here is a narrative of racial kinship. Fundamentally, this is a film about sameness on the level of racialised biology, rather than ideological outlook. There is a more fundamental cord here that is being played out to resonate with Soviet viewers, and that is a specificity of identification as human beings. By contrast, Glimpses literally pans over the faces and bodies of coloured migrant workers and African Americans, as though they were passive scenery or machinery, passed over on the way to fulfilling consumer lives elsewhere. Soviet audiences would have been well aware of America’s racial hierarchies and ethnically segregated lifestyles, but in this instance, that is significant only to the extent that it subtly reinforces the idea that these groups exist as foreigners within American life. America is a place where culture dominates in forms of art, music, and sport within a greater landscape of consumer abundance built literally off the back of racial differentiation. Participation becomes, therefore, a matter of degree where Whites are entitled to pass time, whereas their Black counterparts are there to make it. The Soviets here would relate to an understanding of racial entitlement where Whiteness becomes the marker of both remembering and forgetting one’s place in the global order. The Eames’ use of White forget-no-not-flowers encourages this visceral association of having fought to war to preserve the racialised logics of Western civilisation and European domain over the planet. There was now another war on the heels of that one to consider: the information war. With the increased importance of computing in daily life, it was becoming obvious to the Eames that span of the Cold War was going to run the gamut from ‘problem-solving in the home’ ‘to complex engineering and aerospace/defense demands’ and that the average citizen would be required to conduct their reality at multiple scales, and increasingly from the home in order to better manage their personal security.11 The human being who would be

Material Agency 173 tasked with surviving this era of war, as compared to the last one, had to able to interpret and communicate through the exchange of large amounts of information and enter into a speculative economy where information acted as currency. The atmosphere of ‘nuclear dread’ heightened the urgency of such adaptation skills and the desire of individuals to function within a techno-utopia, in which it was possible to rehabilitate a compromised physical world through the assimilation of ‘planetary-scaled universal computation.’12 The work of the Eames Office was to stage productions of reality that corresponded to a world view where humanity lived divided along the axes of two nuclear superpowers who controlled reality ‘through increasingly powerful tele-technologies that helped establish real-time surveillance of the entire planet at all times.’13 Ryan Bishop argues that ‘in this new Cold War scenario, all places mattered’ because nowhere could claim to be outside this occupation zone of ‘mutually assured destruction.’14 This was, in many respects, a global environmental crisis, insofar as the Cold War arms race signalled to the world that it had entered into an era where all of humankind could be swept off the face of the earth by the catastrophic actions of two world leaders. This image of destruction had imprinted humanity with any image of their imminent demise that would come to shape generations. The flip side of this terror arrived in the shape of ‘multimedia infotainments’ generated by the Eames Office to as it were soften the blow of this existential threat but promise a future in which innovation would bring with it progress and above all peace and security, so long as one were able to succeed in integrating the formula of democracy into capitalism.15 This was achieved by the Eames Office based on its ability to agilely negotiate the worlds of art, architecture, cinema, military, and industrial production, and to generate a new type of immateriality through image projection that could provide new types of platforming through which the military-industrial-university-entertainment complex might potentially maintain itself. Theirs was a huge gamble at a time when multiscreen technology was in its infancy, and yet, it was their strategy that would build the foundation for how projected images came to be used to both immerse and disorientate the viewer into adopting certain manners that correspond with an understanding of the world itself as a projection. The Eames’ film Glimpses was projected onto several 20 × 30-foot screens and suspended inside one of Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes in order to deliver exactly that impression; that images were there to provide information and instruction. Beatriz Colomina argues that Glimpses presented audiences with an entirely new spatial system that altered their states of consciousness to the degree that an ‘intimate domesticity becomes entirely suspended in favour of and understanding of reality itself as a product of esoteric scientific military research that had entered the everyday public imagination with the launching of Sputnik in 1957.’16 If that were true, then, as Ryan Bishop maintains, ‘emergent from the Eameses’ multimedia events’ was nothing short of a ‘new visual and spatial norm, one in which the vast scales of micro and macro viewing found in Cold War teletechnologies become the basis of ubiquitous screen culture as the source of information and control.’17 The goal though was to domesticate defence and make defence a matter of personal responsibility. The ability to assimilate information was ultimately presented as a prophylactic function. From capitalism’s beginnings corresponding with the maturation of European colonialism that made of the world ‘a geometrical projection,’ can the ending of that late Victorian world view paired with the ending of the World War II.18 That moment marked the collapse of time-space relationships ‘through tele-technologies of circulation, surveillance and control’ that would come to dominate at mid-century bringing the world exclusively into a spatial age.19

174  Material Agency Orit Halpern describes the Eameses work as ‘landmark in creating infrastructures for post-war American life (and perhaps empire)—both attentive and physical’ and adds that it is through Eames’s project that ‘we can trace the reimagining of the observer as isolated but ecologically networked. This observer was linked to a new aesthetics of visualization and management.’20 This observer would go on to become the primary subject of the new information economy and recast his position within society according to ‘an aesthetic of information inundation’ and the compromise of his position within such an economy ‘as a virtue.’21 His environment and psychology landscape was from the beginning construed as White, and this came to take precedent over other formal arrangements of his being. Similarly, solutions were devised for his being as the nexus of a new form of society, fuelled by the values of attention and emergence, as both solutions to and engines for social change. The limitation to that was defined by racial segregation and a post-industrial economy dependent on the furtherance of racial differentiation to discipline market growth. The aim was to create a total environment. Within that environment stood a universal idea of mankind. US government agencies heavily promoted this idea and the conceptualisation of this figure as White and it is this feature that pertains when looking at the Cold War in relation to the Civil Rights era that followed it. The sort of people who make good Americans are White and popular photography was used through the Cold War era to emphasise just such a belief. Moreover, measures to combat Soviet expansion were aimed primarily at a nuclear family unit always already presumed to be White. The progression of the White body is everywhere present within the span of Glimpses’ 12-minute span. The camera’s perspective is one of belonging to this domestic sphere in which newspapers and milk bottles sitting at front doors, stand in for their consumer owners, lending evidence of a human existence synonymous with nuclear family life. These White families have breakfast at home, while their White men leave for work. These White men kiss their wives and babies, get into vehicles, and wave goodbye to White children who then leave for school on yellow buses. Glimpses’ progress depends on White mankind to move its actions forward, with the White male breadwinner of the family positioned at the forefront of the narrative witnessed driving in his car across the vast highways and byways of the American interstate system. It is only God who remains above him gazing down at his creation, the vast American landscape, a pulsing organism in its own right composed of traffic, bridges, and on-ramps that speak to a notion of endless potential movement. God here is just another White father at work, whereas his chosen people are framed in their respective workplaces, schools, and playgrounds. Their development here is figured through the appearance of American colleges and universities educating White America’s youth so that their own forms of progress can be imagined to naturally and ultimately come into view. These are the class of individuals that will soon go on to rule through private industry. The workers beneath them are presumed to be proud of their place in the scientific laboratories and mass industries they serve and are rewarded for their allegiance to their employers with abundant consumer rewards. The factory exists and this is the place in which minorities are finally shown to dwell. Mexicans and African Americans have their place and that place within American society has long endured as the plantation. Soviet audiences would recognise that these were America’s colonially subordinated peoples. American shopping centres, department stores, and supermarkets are the logical end points pictured to signify the end products of this labouring class made both invisible and indispensable for their ideal White consumer whose privilege it is to take such items back

Material Agency 175 into their homes for the purpose of preparing them for further consumption. Their ritualistic patterns of consumption themselves act as a means of claiming what was always already rightfully theirs to take. Blackness comes roaring back into consumptive patterns when night falls and their children are safely tucked away. The pleasurable consumption of Black performance is everywhere made spectacle amongst the urban din and throng of the city. When the sun rises again, we are back in the safety of the suburbs, where the gentle rhythms of domestic life once again prevail and racial categories adhere to rituals limited to their own kind. Photographs of synagogues, mosques, and Mormon and Buddhist temples are included not so much to present a well-rounded image of American faith but rather to reinforce the idea that in private life, racial and ethnic categories find their natural orders with Christianity presented as the norm against which these others faiths are tolerated—not as alternatives, but rather as deviations. Americans at leisure are segregated not just in terms of belief but in outlook and geography. Again, the city becomes a container for White visitors to cruise culture by walking through art galleries and museums like MoMA in New York City, where paintings by White male masters from Picasso, Leger, and Kline are exhibited, but not necessarily to commit to the value of these other types. The outdoor space of the public park mimics that of the suburban lawn in its safety for White children to play overseen by their White parents at rest. Activity comes in the form of sporting events like skiing, golf, football, tennis, and sailing that all have their moment of racial encoding. The greatest amongst the America’s pastime baseball is not represented by its players, but rather by its spectators as though the meaning of the game itself can best be represented by its consumers. The Ringling Brothers Circus acts as the culmination of this belief system and nods towards its beginnings as a travelling human zoo displaying various peoples of colour for the delight of American and European audiences. There is a disturbing moment where the past meets the present when the film reaches its crescendo, in the display of the Black performers Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong who are garishly exhibited singing and playing before the screens explode with firework displays. Like Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz, the viewer finds themselves thrust abruptly back to the safety of a childhood bedroom. In this case, they are not waking up in Kansas anymore, but rather in a new post-war segregated suburban development where feted children brush their teeth, read bedtime stories, and then hugged and kissed goodnight. Surely another threat is coming from the skies, but the Eames dodge that sense of foreboding by introducing their own grandchildren onto the screen to make an appearance, framed as a young boy embraced by his older sister. Dorothy is not the big sister figure here watching over all, as various husbands and wives also embrace before the ending scene, knowing somehow their offspring will prevail in this world. It is Ray Eames who chooses the ending to be one of universal memorialisation in the now famous parting image of the forget-me-nots. What cannot be forgotten remains implied that fundamentally the Russians love their children too and believe them to be the natural born inheritors of this world. What makes all this possible is the choreography of Whiteness throughout the film as something that is housed and framed by its orderly affinity with its surroundings. Dianne Harris makes the case for the house itself to act as a synecdoche for White power. She argues that ‘between 1945 and 1960, a pervasive iconography of white, middle class domesticity circulated widely amongst various media and became instantiated in millions of homes across the United States.’22 Whiteness itself readapted its sense of ownership

176  Material Agency and citizen at mid-century to correspond with what amounted to a fantasy of ‘permanent stability’ when it came to imagine the proportions of the American empire.23 The Colour of the Eames House The Eames’ home appropriated the materials of the recent war era: moulded fibreglass, plywood, synthetic glues, and plastics into stylish and affordable furnishings that bridged the divide between work and play mimicking the very structure of the home’s design in industrial steel and glass plate. Here, everything would be fluid and transparent, partnering industrial warfare with domestic tranquillity. The juxtaposition should have been jarring to the spectator for which the house was built, as complemented by its soaring views of the Pacific Palisades, suggestive of a world in which time and distance could themselves render neutrality. The Eames home in many ways could be referred to as a stage set that was carefully curated to allow a viewing audience to appreciate Charles and Ray as archetypical figures of a new era of a distinctly American postcolonial White hegemonic power. The famous photograph of their house taken by Julius Shuman for Life Magazine in 1958 shows the couple surrounded by their belongings, rugs, throws, plants, toys, and objects collected during their many travels around the world. This image created a certain type of consumer demand for objects from ‘exotic’ cultures to be displayed this time around in average middle class and working class American homes. Through the Eameses, it become desirable for a new generation of consumers to engage in the activity of pseudo-ethnographic collecting, whether it be Hopi kachina dolls, seashells, craft objects, silk textiles from Nepal and Thailand, and elaborately patterned rugs from Mexico. A few years prior to the photograph being taken, the Eames made a film about their lifestyle within this home entitled Home: After Five Years of Living (1955). The film was assembled using thousands of slides that they took while living in their house that was later assembled together throw a technique known as fast cutting that was a precursor to digital editing. The house itself functioned as a photographic project and was officially known as Case Study #8; it was part of a programme of experimental, post-war housing. The interior of the home was approached as though it were a laboratory space, where investigation was woven into the fabric of the home’s design conceit and for which exploitation of new manufacturing technology and materials was its guiding principle. The crafted objects from other cultures around the world are there to function as a contrast to the modern, mass-produced technologies that surround the couple at a greater scale and, in so doing, bring craft into a higher echelon of civilisation. The cultural objects readily appropriated by the Eameses simply cannot compete against the uniquely crafted projects they themselves have devised in terms of apparent sophistication (Figure 8.1). The Eames house evolved because of changes to its built-in elements, including the furnishings, interior partitions, and object display. Despite the fact that those elements changed regularly, at a deeper level to the basic spatial configuration as defined by the structure was worked out in advance to construction in 1949 and, therefore, cannot be fundamentally altered. Why this is significant because an overarching vision for it acts as a stage set and frame for reality prevails here. What is decorative here serves a function and that function is to communicate universalised values that are capable of overcoming political, economic, temporal, racial, or intellectual disparities. This practice suggests that objects made largely devoid of their original cultural significance allow such significations themselves to conveniently disappear and, therefore, can

Material Agency 177

Figure 8.1  Eames House Interior.

be construed as acts of postcolonial aggression to the extent that they insist upon the personal and educational function of objects to activate knowledge rather than serve a more sacred function. The consistency in form and colour was to be highlighted, as were the utilitarian quality of materials, rather than any appreciation that a design came from specific traditions or particular cultural contexts. Meaning, therefore, was purely in the domain of the person who was immediately interacting with an object. As Ann Gibson argues, ‘what distinguished the signs of ethnicities and sexualities that were not Caucasian and not heterosexual and male was precisely the binary it established between their “modern” abstraction and that of other cultures and genders and the position of control in which it placed the modern. To incorporate what was not self was to master it and at the same time claim its attributes.’24 The Eames’s use of non-Western indigenous artefacts as accessories portends an understanding on their part of how design functions as a tool of control and reinforces existing social hierarchies built around race at mid-century. Midcentury modernism itself, and indeed, its reliance not just on design, but photographic documentation of it, demands that the binary between mind and body remain encoded as White and Black. Within such a scheme, Whiteness is coded as functional and clean, and the equality of purchasing power will be the marker for how we must understand the achievement of racial equality. Separate but equal and discreet from one another in terms of social autonomy. Krista Wilson goes so far as the assertion that ‘Modernism is fundamentally a style of Whiteness’ and that style acts as a ‘colonizing force’ enforcing a planetary whiteness

178  Material Agency with a post-war context where non-Whites are requiring discipline through institutions such as red-lining so that the filth stays out of the neighbourhood and by extension the home itself. The predilection in architecture of the time for developments and projects speaks to an imperative to concentrate people in differential aspects of shelter attendant to their presumed racial characteristics.25 The Appliance of Colour Certain peoples require ‘physical correction,’ meaning that their bodies are not clean nor efficient but rather are plagued ‘with dirtiness and congestion’ such that racial integration must be prevented at all costs so that it is not allowed to compromise the fixture of racial Whiteness within American society.26 The mid-century obsession with cleanliness in the suburban home is in any sense a metaphor for fighting the Cold War, insofar as we understand the White population of the world to be at risk at all times, because of potential racial contaminants are lurking everywhere within a rapidly decolonising world. Beatriz Colomina describes situation of race for President Nixon’s ‘American superiority rested on the ideal of the suburban home, complete with modern appliances and distinct gender roles. He proclaimed that this ‘model’ suburban home represented nothing less than American freedom: To us, diversity, the right to choose, is the most important thing …. We don’t have one decision made at the top by one government official …. We have many different manufacturers and many different kinds of washing machines so that the housewife has a choice.’27 Presumably, this implies her Black help does not. A Show of Whiteness Diversity, in this instance, does not extend beyond gendered consumer differences to include racial differences. What captivated the national and international media when it came to the American exhibition in Moscow was a story precisely about differentiations within the category of Whiteness. The Life magazine cover that privileges the wives over the politicians on its cover is a portrait of something much greater than Pat Nixon’s appearance, ‘as the prototype of the American woman depicted in advertisements of the 1950s: slim, well groomed, fashionable, happy.’28 In her Whiteness, she is not so much ‘contrasted,’ as Colomina would argue, with her Soviet counterparts who admittedly ‘appear stocky and dowdy’ when situated next to her but as situated according to certain trajectory concerning the progress of Whiteness as an enviable form. In the framing of this grouping of women, ‘two of them, Mrs. Khrushchev and Mrs. Mikoyan, look proudly toward the camera’, and ‘the third one, Mrs. Kozlov… can’t keep her eyes off Pat Nixon’s dress,’—what is apparent is that all four women occupy a relational degree of power.29 In the case of Mrs. Kozlov, she asserts an even greater influence insofar as it is her gaze has the ability to literally make Pat Nixon an object of envy in the eyes of an international audience. Everyone wants to be her, everyone wants to get close enough to her to be regarded within themselves. Djurdja Bartlett professes that ‘the Life magazine cover was a visual testament to the Soviet diplomats’ wives’ inability to match the sophisticated, worldly style of Pat Nixon in her silk, flower-printed dress, a string of pearls, and carefully applied makeup, as well as her svelte figure.’30 That may be true, but what Bartlett’s analysis lacks in a sophisticated reading of Pat Nixon’s style as it itself a work of artifice. Preparations made the week before to curate her look was reported on in Newsweek, which highlights the fact

Material Agency 179 ‘most of her clothes were bought at Henry Bendel’s in New York where Pat spent an hour—and several hundred dollars.’31 The purchases were comprised of ‘one suit of natural raw silk, a brown silk taffeta cocktail dress, a silk and cotton flowered print dress with jacket and two other dresses.’ Pat Nixon referred to these items as ‘costumes.’ She explained to the report, that, ‘mostly full-skirted dresses with matching accessories to make a “picture.” They are not high fashion and they’re the sort of thing I like, and which I think looks best on me.’32 The figure she was portraying was that of an upper middle class White American housewife. Pat Nixon herself was anything but. She was born in a small mining town and her nickname ‘Pat’ was given to her because she was born on the day before Saint Patrick’s Day. Pat Nixon lived in New York City as a young woman, but she was hardly a cosmopolitan type and spent her time there working as a secretary and also as a radiographer. She left New York for Southern California to pursue a degree in merchandising at the University of Southern California and during her studies worked as a sales clerk in Bullock’s-Wilshire department store and as an extra and bit player in the film industry. It could be argued, she put that knowledge to use well before she entered Moscow. Pat Nixon was named Outstanding Homemaker of the Year (1953), Mother of the Year (1955), and the Nation’s Ideal Housewife (1957). She was a model explicitly honed to play a part in an exhibition built to include her within an elaborate stage set: ‘a full-scale ranch-style suburban house, put up by a Long Island builder and furnished by Macy’s.’33 Russian spectators were provided additional exegetical material to this performance in the form of captioning the wardrobe of an average American woman as follows: ‘Winter coat, spring coat, raincoat, five house dresses, four afternoon ‘dressy’ dresses, three suits, three skirts, six blouses, two petticoats, five nightgowns, eight panties, five brassières, two corsets, two robes, six pairs of nylon stockings, two pairs of sports socks, three pairs of dress gloves, three pairs of play shorts, one pair of slacks, one play suit, and accessories.’34 This figure owning such as assortment of objects would have been a suburban housewife whose acquisitions clearly reflected the wealth of her husband, not her own. Everyone in her family supported this arrangement from her parents to her spouse to her children, and in the parade of goods here none was higher than her claim to that pedigree. Colouring in the Interstellar Experience Colomina credits the Eames with being ‘self-consciously architects of a new kind of space.’35 That space was self-consciously focused on the domestication of nature itself. While the film may begin in outer space, there is no hint of technology intruding upon that setting of stars dotted across the sky, the situation of constellations and star clusters, and nebulae. All is well there as is a congress of lights that illuminate the dark urban landscape as the early morning comes into view with aerial views of landscapes from different parts of the country: deserts, mountains, hills, seas, farms, suburban developments, and finally, urban neighbourhoods bringing the arch of reality full circle. What lends order here are the movements of men: men having breakfast at home with their families, kissing their wives and children before leaving for work, being given lunch boxes by these wives, before getting into cars, and driving off from children who too are leaving behind their mothers for school, being given lunch boxes by them, saying goodbye to a dog who likes the mother will seldom get to leave their domain and will only do so when piling other members of the family into station wagons and cars, and attending to babies crying as they are hurriedly transported into this same routine of normality.

180  Material Agency The nuclear family recognises itself from a thousand perspectives that unite the intimate with a quality of esoteric scientific-military research, concentrating them down to a functional unit that can then be exploited to fulfil the fantasies of a technocratic establishment that desired to witness their ascension as a tangible item in their right, to be envied the world over as the evolutionary model of White development on planet Earth. The underside of the fantasy was replete with images of Blackness as synonymous with ghettos, poverty, domestic violence, or economic depression. Within American society, Whiteness was the arbiter of self-expression, whereas Blackness was the arbiter of discipline. Racial encoding and spatial discrimination had acted in American life as a form of crisis control. Within the Cold War context, the screen provided a new means of regulating such boundaries. Whiteness had to be portrayed constantly as the epitome of pleasure on the screen, whereas Blackness had to be portrayed as a state of constant precarity. The Sexual Design of White Space Whiteness is an event that offers a multiplicity of simultaneous experiences that cannot be accessed by Blackness. Taken in their entirety, it becomes obvious that Eames’ model for their design of multimedia exhibitions and the fast-cutting technique of their films and slideshows, all possessed a singular objective: to saturate audiences with the maximum amount of information regarding the enduring racialised hierarchies of American life in a way that appeared effortless and natural. That material was to be both reassuring and gratifying to the White audiences for which they were predominantly aimed. Their films in this way can be construed as an extension of the racial sciences of the nineteenth century, insofar as they relied on the latest scientific techniques and devices available to reinforce an appreciation of the constant need for human classification. As Colomina observes, the Eames’ films ‘provide a framework in which objects can be placed and replaced.’36 The American house that becomes the fulcrum of the exhibition in Moscow is literally divided against itself and can only stand if onlookers accept that such a device is nonetheless ‘real’ for being so. There is a sexual as well as racial structuring being reinforced here. Charles Eames was a known womaniser and, to the public of his time, this had no negative bearing on his relationship with his wife Ray. Eames’ extra-curricular activities outside of the marriage and indeed their ostensibly architectural practice garnered the attentions of none other than Hugh Hefner, the founder of Playboy magazine. From its inception in 1953, Playboy, according to Colomina, ‘glamorized modern architecture and made it palatable to a wide audience.’37 Playboy had featured interviews with such greats of architecture, as Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies Van der Rohe, and Buckminster Fuller, as well as designers such as Eero Saarinen, and George Nelson, and indeed, Charles Eames. Colomina hints at a symbiotic relationship between their stardom and the publication itself: ‘Playboy did not simply feature architects. They advised the reader on architecture and design. And they used architecture as prop for their sexual fantasies. Indeed, Playboy could not exist without architecture. With its massive readership—7 million copies were published at the peak in 1972—the magazine did more for promoting modern architecture and design than any architectural magazines or any institution, like the Museum of Modern Art.’38 Colomina adds that ‘it is important to realize that Playboy’s features on architecture, especially its extended series of Playboy Pads, were more popular with the readers than the Playmates, as if the spaces for seduction were actually more erotic than the woman supposedly being seduced.’39 If we take this proposition seriously, we must

Material Agency 181 question where women figure into the hierarchy here and why it is that what qualifies as a sophisticated interpretation of space here is homosocial in nature. If we understand the human as White and male, and by extension the material ambition of architecture, at this time in history, these Pads serve as part of larger cybernetic projects to redesign the human. This ambition figures into the biological economy where sexuality is being divorced from reproduction. In part, this concern dates back to the Great Exhibition of 1851 when industrial design becomes the focal point of interest at a time when the origin of the modern human as a species is becoming agreed upon through the ascension of Darwinism into both the scientific and popular imagination. The Eames exponentially expand that mode of understanding from the end of World War II onwards to include an understanding of the human species as developed to the point of having the ability to organize its own finitude, meaning that man now has the power to essentially design its own exit from material reality. As part of the design community, Charles and Ray Eames expound on their White heterosexual pairing to domesticate the nuclear programme in California, so that it amplifies what is taking place in London in the 1830s, at the very beginning of mass industrialisation and globalisation, and redirects a notion that good design would provide a sort of prophylactic to the ecological destruction being generated at the same time to the concept of the planet as a finite living space. The safest place to be is at home. Hugh Hefner writes in his first ever editorial for Playboy: ‘We like our apartment. We enjoy mixing cocktails and an hors d’oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph, and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.’40 The question is who is this ‘we’ he cohabitates with? His text would imply that the female acquaintance in question is a visitor to this space. That she is in some way alien to it. As for the playboy, who invites her in temporarily, he ‘is a different kind of animal. He is also a hunter but the metropolitan apartment is his natural habitat. He knows everything about it and keeps adjusting it to better catch his prey. In fact, he cares more about the lure than the catch.’41 The colonial overtones of this description are wholly apparent; what is less so is the implication that Hefner is the one who is trapped. It is ‘the figure of Hefner himself, who famously almost never left his bed, let alone his house.’42 It is he who runs his global empire as though a convalescent from his bed, wearing his silk pyjamas and dressing gown, in lieu of standard business attire. This man himself is incredibly fragile it would seem Even when Hefner went out, he was not really out, but wrapped in a succession of bubbles, all designed to extend his interior: the specially outfitted vehicles; the Big Bunny jet, a stretched DC­9 designed by Ron Dirsmith, the architect of the mansion, with a gourmet kitchen, a dancing floor, a living room/conference space, discotheque, a wet bar, state-of-the-art cinemascope projectors, sleeping quarters for sixteen guests, and Hefner’s suite with shower and an elliptical bed covered with Tasmanian opossum skins; the home away from home of the Playboy clubs, starting with the Chicago club in 1960 and rapidly growing from seven Playboy clubs in 1963 to seventeen by 1965 and ultimately thirty-three around the world. Playboy is produced in a radical interior and is devoted to the interior, devoted like a lover.43 Or a nurse, or bodyguard as the case may be. The White males’ last stage of development will be to feature as an invalid, depending on the hi-fi, telephone, microphone, Dictaphone, video camera, headphone, and television to both materially and virtually conduct

182  Material Agency him and to insure his productivity into the future. Hefner is the man of interviews, phone calls, selected images, adjoining layouts, edited texts, and consultations. His relation with playmates is all about architecture, and choreography; it is an extension of interior to Earth in all of its finality, it the end it is all about the bed; the preservation mode being that of posterity. As Paula V. Álvarez cannily deduces, ‘the playboy interior finally swallows everything, even its own future.’44 White Mythology In order to understand what unites this world with the one that produced the likes of Ray and Charles Eames, you have to in any way go back to the very beginnings of America as a cultural hegemon for the world. Max Underwood references Ray Kaiser as a girl born in Sacramento, California, on December 15, 1912, to ‘a family immersed in the theatrical tradition. Her father, Alexander, managed the local Vaudeville theater and Ray fondly recalled wonderful evenings at the theatre and the dinners that followed with many international stars, including Al Jolson and the ballerina Anna Pavlova. As the years progressed, Alexander’s theater would be among the first to introduce the new art form of motion pictures to Ray and his northern Californian audiences.’45 Charles Eames came from a similarly storied background. Charles was born on ‘June 17, 1907 in St. Louis, Missouri, the gateway to the American frontier and western expansion. His father, Charles Sr. fought in the Union army during the American Civil War, became a Pinkerton detective after the war and then a special agent for the Missouri Pacific Railroad.’ Charles Sr. would meet his untimely in 1921’ when he was ‘shot by train robbers.’46 In 1941, Charles married Ray Kaiser and moved to Los Angeles and ‘went to work designing and building sets for the MGM film studios, while Ray continued to paint and do freelance commercial graphic design.’47 This was the year of the attack on Pearl Harbor and America’s entry into World War II, and for Charles and Ray it was a year of great financial precarity, so much so that they ‘at one point even contemplated joining the Ringling Brothers and Barnum Bailey circus as clowns.’48 Instead, they began their long association the American military industrial complex by turning their attention to the design of splints for wounded soldiers. ‘By war’s end in 1945, Charles and Ray, with 15 staff members in their Venice, California office, had manufactured over 150,000 splints and stretchers.’49 They turned their attentions to the furniture design and the mastery of still photography and film as a way to extending the impact of their designs into the business of perception itself. As Paul Preciado observes, ‘a portrait of an architect is a portray of white masculinity.’50 What Eames had in common with Hefner was a desire to have ‘the private burst onto the public sphere’ and, in so doing, produce ‘mechanically reproducible visual information capable of arousing bodily effects’ that would be transformational to its intended audiences.51 Preciado asserts that what ‘Playboy was really doing was inventing new modes for the production of public domesticity and male subjectivity that were to characterize American culture in the late twentieth century.’52 What Eames and Hefner had in common was a project ‘to design a new body’ appropriate to the task of a defensive interiority.53 Whereas the city has been represented as prime targets for urban attack, Playboy suggested the city an alternative universe, where the exploits of young heterosexual White men keen on urbane entertainments and sexual exploration, could be safely kept apart from what was happening in white middle class homes dominated by young heterosexual White women.

Material Agency 183 The urban economy became the fantasy site of ‘pleasure and fulfilment, achieved through the acquisition of material goods or in the form of sexual experience,’ and these themselves became class markers for a generation coming of age in the 1960s and 1970s.54 These values did not run counter to the conservatism of the 1950s, but rather Elizabeth Fraterrigo argues, very much an extension of those values into the realm of a consumer culture that was increasingly concerned with the trappings of ‘singlehood and personal consumption, which prized individualism and fostered an ethos of pleasure-seeking and self-gratification.’55 That ethos was very much about locating material enhancements for white heterosexual males, while females remained economically dependent on men to furnish them with material wealth, either as their domestic partners or their sexual ones, as the case may be. Gender inequality as well as racial inequality persisted within the model of an alternative version of American domesticity because it was economically out of reach for both white men and Black men. It was only at an imagistic level that it could be imagined through advertising, motion pictures, and popular entertainment. Hugh Hefner may have given space for African Americans to be represented in his publication, but at the end of the day, he stood at the helm of the Playboy empire, and ultimately it was his own image that profited from their appearance. In the material world, ‘African Americans faced segregation and discrimination that kept them from breaking into the ranks of the middle class,’ and the good life remains tantalisingly out of reach.56 The revolution would not be televised, after all, because it in many ways never happened in America. This is borne out in the last multimedia work made by Charles and Ray Eames, The World of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. This work was situated amidst a culture reckoning with the failure of the American experiment to deliver equality for all as the nation approached its bicentenary. It was increasingly understood by the public that American independence and liberty, came at the cost of dependence on and servitude to others. What had been the Atlantic world during the Age of Enlightenment and beyond was the product of despair for its many minority populations, whose contribution to American life had to now be vastly rethought. This period would mark the twilight of the careers of the Eames. As a couple and as a partnership, they had devoted their lives to the cause of American exceptionalism, and to confidently display in the United States as a nation consistently at the frontier of modern man’s existence. To the Eameses’ way of thinking, figures like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were architects who approached the American project with a design sensibility and applied their polymath ability to achieve nothing short of the creation of a new world. It was one that no one had ever dreamed could materially come to pass. And yet, as their documents attest to this was as much a world of action as it was of thought. From it came the fabrication of a universal democratic subject, fashioned out of the remnants of political, philosophical, military and social thought in Europe. From these democracies, original designers had made something or rather someone entirely novel: a European man transformed through the process of transplanting his cosmopolitan to the physical limits of the frontier to emerge as a new American type. For the Eameses, it was now it was time to reverse the course of that transformation to that such a figure could reconnect with his continental routes. By staging a vast touring exhibition devoted to Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, the Eames would effectively erase the narrative of political revolution and replace it with one of racial evolution, enticing audiences in Europe to embrace the message that the world of Franklin and Jefferson was one entirely contiguous with British political thought and that beyond that situation ‘the roots of the American republic lie deep in the soil of Britain.’57 By

184  Material Agency identifying both figures, Franklin and Jefferson as ‘direct product[s] of English civil libertarianism,’ the Eames were able to argue that there was nothing inconsistent about America’s development.58 Rather, it was clearly the product of a distinctive heritage whose superior characteristics were reason and justice. Thomas Cryer observes how specifically ‘for the British, Eames offered an olive branch: “when a daughter leaves the family to start a new life, the trauma of that separation can be like a battle, or a war. But nobody thinks of it as the daughter’s victory, or the mother’s defeat. Four, six, ten years go by, and everyone comes together to celebrate the setting up of the new household.”’59 The idea that America was sort of a ‘playgirl’ journey where eventually the petulant youth comes to her senses and concedes to domestic tranquillity is peculiar enough a metaphor, but what is perhaps more peculiar still is the idea that America’s modern version of the good life remained one premised on bucolic idyll. Nonetheless, when visiting the Eames’ multisensory exhibition The World of Franklin and Jefferson, it was noted by the press at the time that ‘Queen Elizabeth II was apparently “fascinated by the farm implements used by Jefferson at Monticello and by his plans for the garden.”’60 From London, the exhibition travelled eastwards to Paris, and then behind the iron curtain to Warsaw. The exhibition presented audiences again with a barrage of glossy colour photographs of an alternative universe where the forging of democracy was both bloodless and seamless and that it ushered forth a world that was both comforting and spectacular. The prospect of Western expansion that animated the lively thought of Jefferson, in particular, is in no way tied to the realpolitik of enslavement and genocide and what is made of America’s great wilderness is something populated by errant animal life, as opposed to concentrated human settlement. Throughout the exhibition conspicuous absence of a great many native peoples is represented through various wholly decontextualised indigenous artefacts. ‘Here, the brochure suggested that Jefferson “was fascinated by the western wilderness, its unspoiled fertility and the societies that populated it.”’61 Little is said of the fact that Jefferson’s fascination came from a plan to interbreed with Native Americans as a way of obliterating their racial distinction and thus making of them ‘Americans.’ When this plan failed to take hold consensually with these various societies, Jefferson chose a different path towards their obliteration through a combination of land seizure and mass murder. Through these tactics, he did indeed make incursions into this populated ‘wilderness.’ The Eameses would have you believe otherwise that ‘Jefferson fought for “fair constraints on the use of the land” which protected “an expanding society of society of responsible freeholders.”’62 They can do so because for them America is a place of responsible freeholders to the degree that it was assumed those persons were to be White and European. The exhibition concludes in 1826, the year of Jefferson’s death, ‘by arguing that at this point “the expansion and the individualism that were part of the Jeffersonian vision had brought America to the edge of a new wilderness—a new complexity of commerce and production, that would alter the conditions of the American experiment almost beyond recognition.”’63 In this scenario, The World of Franklin and Jefferson is one epitomised by commercial imperatives that were in their own way visionary. It was not so much that the Eameses wholeheartedly ‘eschewed mentioning colonial wars or those enslaved by Jefferson,’ so much as they did not see those aspects as nullifying the righteousness of the American experiment.64 Rather, they implied that these situations themselves might have been useful to America, and that such division made on the whole the comity of mankind and solidified the collective national will around the premise of a manifestation of whiteness that was equal to the essential values of the Enlightenment, and to that end,

Material Agency 185 the national purpose, was inspired by attempts to excavate that founding revolutionary ethos of participation in a greater natural order and responsibility to make profit of one’s experiences, as Jefferson had done. That this exhibition was outsourced to IBM, demonstrates the degree to which participation in genocide in Europe can be overlooked in the American business community, insofar as it is possible to aesthetically reframe it simply as part of the business of life. Notes 1 Brian Dillon, “The Cosmic Space Odyssey of Charles and Ray Eames,” The Guardian, October 16, 2015. 2 Dillon, “The Cosmic Space Odyssey of Charles and Ray Eames.” 3 Ibid. 4 Justus Nieland, “Happy Furniture,” Places Journal, January 2020. May 27, 2022. 5 Sebastian Ignacio Aedo Jury, “Screening domesticity.” University of Edinburgh (diss.2020), 100. 6 Jury, “Screening domesticity,” 100. 7 Kate A. Baldwin, “Envy and other Warm Guns: Ray and Charles Eames at the American National Exhibition on Moscow.” In The Racial Imaginary of the Cold War Kitchen: From Sokol’niki Park to Chicago’s South Side (Lebanon, New Hampshire: Dartmouth College Press, 2015), 20. 8 Baldwin, “Envy and other Warm Guns,” 21. 9 Ibid., 24. 10 Ibid., 28. 11 Bishop, Ryan. “The Eames Office, the Cold War and the Avant-Garde: Making the Lab of Tomorrow.” Theory, Culture & Society 37, no. 7–8 (December 2020): 71–94 at 73. 12 Bishop, “The Eames Office, the Cold War and the Avant-Garde,” 75. 13 Ibid., 75. 14 Ibid., 75. 15 Ibid., 75. 16 Beatriz Colomina, “Enclosed by Images: The Eameses’ Multimedia Architecture.” Grey Room, no. 2 (2001): 7–29 at 12. 17 Bishop, “The Eames Office, the Cold War and the Avant-Garde,” 86. 18 Ibid., 89. 19 Ibid., 89. 20 Orit Halpern, Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 28. 21 Halpern, Beautiful Data, 28. 22 Harris, Dianne. “Introduction.” In Little White Houses: How the Postwar Home Constructed Race in America (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 1. 23 Harris, “Introduction,” 1. 24 Ann Eden Gibson, “Introduction.” In Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics. Edited by Ann Eden Gibson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). 25 Kristina Wilson, Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Power in Design (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021), 104. 26 Wilson, Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body, 100. 27 Colomina, “Enclosed by Images,” 8–9. 28 Ibid., 9. 29 Ibid., 9. 30 Djurdja Bartlett, “The Cold War Fashion Showdown.” The MIT Press Reader, https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-cold-war-fashion-showdown/. 31 Bartlett, “The Cold War Fashion Showdown.” 32 Ibid. 33 Colomina, “Enclosed by Images,” 10. 34 Bartlett, “The Cold War Fashion Showdown.” 35 Colomina, “Enclosed by Images,” 11.

186  Material Agency 6 Ibid., 22. 3 37 Amelia Taylor-Hochberg, “Beatriz Colomina on ‘Playboy Architecture’ and the masculine fantasy.” Archinect, May 11, 2016. https://archinect.com/features/article/149942986/ beatriz-colomina-on-playboy-architecture-and-the-masculine-fantasy. 38 Taylor-Hochberg, “Beatriz Colomina on ‘Playboy Architecture.’” 39 Ibid. 40 Paula V. Álvarez, “Beatriz Colomina – Radical Interiority: Playboy Architecture 1953–1979.” Archis 33, November 10, 2015. https://archis.org/volume/volume-33-beatriz-colomina-radicalinteriority-playboy-architecture-1953-1979/ 41 Álvarez, “Beatriz Colomina.” 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid. 45 Max Underwood, “Inside the Office of Charles and Ray Eames,” ptah 2 (2005): 47. 46 Underwood, “Inside the Office of Charles and Ray Eames,” 47. 47 Ibid., 47. 48 Ibid., 49. 49 Ibid., 49. 50 Paul Preciado, Pornotopia: An Essay on Playboy’s Architecture and Biopolitics (New York: Zone Books, 2014), 22. 51 Preciado, Pornotopia, 26. 52 Ibid., 27. 53 Ibid., 27. 54 Elizabeth Fraterrigo, Playboy and the Making of the Good Life in Modern America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 5. 55 Fraterrigo, Playboy and the Making of the Good Life in Modern America, 6. 56 Ibid., 166. 57 Thomas Cryer, “‘Brilliantly Devised, Grossly Packaged Confusion’: Eames’s ‘World of Franklin & Jefferson’ Exhibition and Reclaiming Revolution during America’s Post-Traumatic Decade.” January 24, 2022. 58 Cryer, “‘Brilliantly Devised, Grossly Packaged Confusion.” 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid. 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid. 63 Ibid. 64 Ibid.

Bibliography Álvarez, Paula V. “Beatriz Colomina – Radical Interiority: Playboy Architecture 1953-1979.” Archis 33, November 10, 2015. https://archis.org/volume/volume-33-beatriz-colomina-radicalinteriority-playboy-architecture-1953-1979/ Baldwin, Kate A. “Envy and Other Warm Guns: Ray and Charles Eames at the American National Exhibition on Moscow.” In The Racial Imaginary of the Cold War Kitchen: From Sokol’niki Park to Chicago’s South Side. Lebanon, New Hampshire: Dartmouth College Press, 2015. Bartlett, Djurdja. “The Cold War Fashion Showdown.” The MIT Press Reader, July 23, 2021. https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-cold-war-fashion-showdown/. Bishop, Ryan. “The Eames Office, the Cold War and the Avant-Garde: Making the Lab of Tomorrow.” Theory, Culture & Society 37, no. 7–8 (December 2020): 71–94 at 73. https://doi. org/10.1177/0263276420958041. Colomina, Beatriz. “Enclosed by Images: The Eameses’ Multimedia Architecture.” Grey Room, no. 2 (2001): 7–29. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1262540. Cryer, Thomas. “‘Brilliantly Devised, Grossly Packaged Confusion’: Eames’s ‘World of Franklin & Jefferson’ Exhibition and Reclaiming Revolution during America’s Post-Traumatic Decade.”

Material Agency 187 January 24, 2022. https://jhiblog.org/2022/01/24/brilliantly-devised-grossly-packaged-confusion-eamess-world-of-franklin-jefferson-exhibition-and-reclaiming-revolution-during-americaspost-tr/. Dillon, Brian. “The Cosmic Space Odyssey of Charles and Ray Eames,” The Guardian, October 16, 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/oct/16/cosmic-space-odyssey-charles-rayeames. Fraterrigo, Elizabeth. Playboy and the Making of the Good Life in Modern America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Gibson, Ann Eden. “Introduction.” In Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics. Edited by Ann Eden Gibson, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. Accessed May 15, 2022. https://www. aaeportal.com/?id=-14794. Halpern, Orit. Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015. Harris, Dianne. “Introduction.” In Little White Houses: How the Postwar Home Constructed Race in America, 1–25. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Jury, Sebastian Ignacio Aedo. “Screening domesticity.” University of Edinburgh (diss.2020), http:// dx.doi.org/10.7488/era/883 Nieland, Justus. “Happy Furniture,” Places Journal, January 2020. May 27, 2022, https://doi. org/10.22269/200130. Preciado, Paul. Pornotopia: An Essay on Playboy’s Architecture and Biopolitics, 22. New York: Zone Books, 2014. Taylor-Hochberg, Amelia. “Beatriz Colomina on ‘Playboy Architecture’ and the masculine fantasy.” Archinect, May 11, 2016. https://archinect.com/features/article/149942986/beatrizcolomina-on-playboy-architecture-and-the-masculine-fantasy. Underwood, Max. “Inside the Office of Charles and Ray Eames.” ptah 2 (2005): 46–62. Wilson, Kristina. Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Power in Design. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021.

9

The Apple and the Anthropocene The Whiteness of Silicon Valley’s Digital Ecologies

The Anthropocene as a popular concept coincides with the rise of the ponderance digital photography at the turn of the millennium. There was a sense that through technology the images we create could outlast us to the extent that we convinced ourselves of their capacity to dematerialise before us, the human species. The situation is far from universal insofar as it assumes that what is required by way of a remedy to our new consciousness of finitude is not a new image of the world, but rather several billion as a means through which to insulate ourselves from the prospect that a radical change in the conditions of capitalism and its relationship to the nature it is now seemingly bent on expiring. What is being obsessively thought out is the calamitous course of nature, but rather the nature of visuality, and the subsequent transformation of the world into images as a progressive fantasy. That way of thinking goes that if we can no longer participate exclusively on this planet in the formation of worlds, at the very least, images can persist in constituting a new kind of knowledge for us. Acting as our proxy, images can assume a consciousness of their own and act as optical emissaries on our behalf, bridging the way towards new forms of colonisation in other worlds beyond this one through a guiding principle that anything that can be seen should be seen. In this way, the world is denuded once more—only this time exponentially. As the new century matures, so does the belief that reality itself must be augmented, and perception stretched the limit of the technology which cultivates it towards ever greater levels of enhancement. Of vision itself, we expect that it brings about the aesthetic fulfilment of a limitlessness view from precisely nowhere and by extension allows humans to see everything as though were from nowhere culminating in the spreading of assumption everywhere. The disease that plagues humanity may in the end be one of contemplation that finally brings man down in a fit of ultimate narcissism. This pathetic figure of course points to back the legacy racial science, and it’s the exhaustive representational campaign to promote visualisation as the consummate tool of intelligence above all other forms of sensory apprehension. More specifically one could argue that its valorisation of Whiteness, the endless documentation of other types races, and the cataloguing of wildlife have all ironically conspired to rendering life’s ongoing extinction as a categorical preoccupation par excellence. What has been invisible all this time is that photography use in this practice has functioned not as a barer of reality, but rather as a defence against it. What we call the world appears awash in a flood of imagery. What is often missed out is what lies beneath it; a deluge of connected forms governance so intricate that we as humans remain barely aware of how directly that has influenced our capacity to see and act at almost every level of what we commonly refer to as our being. It is as though the images, themselves, have direct capacity to manipulate and coordinate behaviour on almost DOI: 10.4324/9781003274797-10

The Apple and the Anthropocene 189 every level and, yet, is not they who are annihilating that which makes us human, but rather, the persistent nagging sense that the price we would pay for having humanity reconcile its relationship to ecology would be to relinquish the idea that the world itself is a blank canvas and that the blankness that has long been imposed upon our imaginations as ‘Whiteness’ itself. For example, to see the most beautiful landscape in the world requires the ‘blacking out’ of so much of the rest of it. It requires that the rest of being act as though it cast no shadows, lest it ‘blight’ the purity of this spectacle, and in this sense ‘populate’ it with the appearance of what we might never be able to bare, lying just beyond the frame. Photography throughout its long and storied history has been about marking the absence of a relationship between White and Black. Here we are all these years later assuming colour has remedied all that, as though the dialectal grammar of thought isn’t there still to be reconciled synthetically absorbed, and neutralised back into its original concept. There can, therefore, never be a post-anthropocentric ‘other,’ because to assume its presence is to forget the whole way of progress that has gone before it—the science and mythical narratives that conspired themselves into images of the world through the epistemological commons not of technology assuming race, but of race assuming humanity, and finally, of humanity assuming nature. What can be assumed now is that ‘Whiteness’ is showing itself an image of itself as something losing capital, expiring its parameters, in order to assume something multitudinous. Erik Swyngedouw is right to assume that ‘the death of nature signals instead the demise of particular imaginings of nature, of a set of symbolic inscriptions that inferred a singular nature, at once external and internal to humans and human life.’1 Where he falters is in assuming depoliticised environments are positing their inhabitants towards neutrality through the facile contemplation of their own demise. Something far more active is taking place and it becomes the story of this chapter to understand how the duration between the years 1980 and 2000 generated a critical arc through which the measure of man will be fundamentally altered and abstracted from person to product, product to produce. Thomas Malthus would be contented to dwell beneath such an offering, and 200 years later, he will happily join there by those who are also fearful of what happens when you attempt to bite off more than can chew and find yourself ultimately starving as a consequence of what happens when White settler colonialism has its day in the sun of new worlds. These versions of reality position the human being at the centre of social action. What is perhaps most significant is that the majority expression of that being is currently paused at the level of surviving. The tempo of their movement is led by the same unscrupulous and homogeneous demographic of privileged White men as had been the case in the ages of mercantilism and imperialism. It is these same colonial economic formations that have spirited into being every technological mania and rushed towards exploitation of a natural resource since the era of the Colombian exchange. Yet today, we witness something of an exception, insofar, as they have an unprecedented level of incursion into connectivity on a global scale that suggests an occupation that never ends, a consciousness that never sleeps, and an audience that is habituated to forget the boundary between platform and setting, ignoring the existence of any technical ‘backstage’ keeping up the appearance of connectedness as the ‘always-on’ of post-digital reality. Neocons and Protowebs As we approach the second decade of the twenty-first century, much emphasis is placed on the idea of the internet as domain without borders, appropriating much of the same

190  The Apple and the Anthropocene language as was used in the nineteenth century to generate a logic for the colonisation of terrestrial space, in order to promote an imagination for a new technological imperial era. This model to commercial success in this century is built on a recasting of race as a figuration that glorifies the nomadic, whilst at the same time reifying an understanding of boundaries such that capturing what is most intimate to human being becomes the stuff of neoliberal desires and dreams of the internet as a source of endless feeding from these bodies. Those hoping to transgress such limits find themselves with few opportunities as space itself becomes more unified and ontology increasingly witnessed as the purview of the machine. In order to better understand the genealogy of such an interest, we might begin with the title of Microsoft’s first global image advertising campaign, ‘Where do you want to go today?’ that was its broadcast, print, and outdoor advertising campaign launched in November of 1994. Replete with an upper middle class female English voice-over, it proclaims, ‘the stuff we make, it’s powerful, vulnerable. It makes you powerful. Take it. Gather up your ideas, make mistakes and good things will happen. Listen, listen, listen,’ before speeding up to a repetitive loop of sound, before suggesting, ‘do something amazing, where would you like to go today?’ and finally ‘we’re in your corner and we can’t wait to see what you’re going to do, to do with this stuff,’ ending with a chorus of children ‘harmonising to one expression: this world will never be the same again, the world will never be.’2 Though there is a rapid montage of European and American urban architecture, facial portraits of Black, Asian, and White peoples from around the globe, various computer hard- and software, a plane instrument panel appearing to be heading tower the Twin Towers, ending on the curious expressions of two White boys. The worldwide web become here the ultimate extra-terrestrial being, leading us to imagine, not where we want to go, but equally how to solve the dilemma of a finite planet (‘Solutions for a Small Planet,’ IBM), and naming this millennial edge as a great time to be alive (‘Is this a great time or what?’ MCI-World Com). Equally spatial relations are being skewed to accommodate a new definition of terrain of visualisation and survey to emerge as it digitally plotted. Lisa Nakamura defines this display as something is deeply rooted in older notions of White supremacist tourism and transnationality that have also sounds to commodify race through its photographic representation, and moreover, that these interspersed images of exotic faces presumably situated within ‘the “third world,” and “primitive” places’ feature in Microsoft’s advertising as ‘part of a persistent pattern of Signification that reinforces the notion of the Western computer and network user as a tourist in cyberspace.’3 The people are there to function as a catalogue of ‘cybertypes’ made available for perusal in mainstream and academic publications, for Nakamura, are ‘symptomatic’ of the ways that corporate discourse uses ‘race as a visual commodity for the user.’4 These visual tropes are reminiscent of ‘earlier colonial discourses that privilege the Western gaze and the sense of freedom, expansiveness, and mastery engendered by its deployment are directly referenced in the quasi-anthropological visual language of these ads, which often evoke images from National Geographic magazines of days gone by.’5 The first IBM advertisement in the series ‘Solutions for a Small Planet’ aired in 1995 featuring women applying their make-up in preparation for a performance of kabuki theatre. The women do not face one another to speak but instead address each other through their mirrored reflections to one another; their faces heavily masked in stage make-up. One complains to the other, ‘Last night my PC froze.’6 The other scolds her, ‘did you check your config-sys file?’ The first woman complains, ‘I called their “help” line … they were anything but.’ The second rolls her eyes and then offers some further

The Apple and the Anthropocene 191 advice, ‘You know I just read something about IBM. They can look inside your PC and fix it … over the phone.’ The first marvels, ‘Over the phone line neat!’ before panning to shot of the performers assembled on stage and the IBM logo superimposed over them, ‘Solutions for a Small Planet.’ Japan is cast here as a backward looking culture; one slower to innovate that a culture like the United States. The women performing in kabuki theatre versus the tradition of men-only performers here signifies that the younger generation is interested in not only having a foothold in tradition, but also breaking with it in favour of what the greater connected world at large offers them. IBM can look in ways not available to them locally, and they are eager to welcome its intrusion, so long as it keeps the flow of information going to entertain them. The seamless mirror of one in the other is set in terms of the advancement of overall performance. Another IBM advertisement following in the line of ‘Solutions for a Small Planet’ aired in 1996, featuring two Tibetan monks dressed in their orange robes against a brown desert, their ‘silent’ thoughts subtitled in English. The master says to his disciple, ‘Boy I can hardly sit still,’ to which the disciple silently replies, ‘tell me about it.’7 It then pans to an image of multiple monks all assembled to receive the latest version of Lotus Notes. The disciple asks his master, ‘no more telepathy?’ To which he replies, ‘Notes are better. It allows you to collaborate securely with anyone. Even on the Web.’ Another monk chimes in, ‘I am always the last to know.’ Traditional ‘Oriental’ music plays out as the advertisement concludes with the slogan, ‘Solutions for a Small Planet.’ The idea here is that the world desires to join us meaning the United States and the only barrier to entry is one’s desire to just plug in to the idea that something mystifying is happening here allows our planet to become smaller and subject to proprietary ownership down to the detail of the individual user and his choice to belong to a larger order. Those who don’t do so are cast as societal threats, bent on stopping the rest of us from making this planet integrate for the reward of all. In that same year, IBM will release another commercial; this one set in a Moroccan souk. One businessman dressed smartly in Western business suit complains to the other similarly dressed businessmen around him at an adjacent meeting over tea, ‘I can’t stand this noise. Hey, keep it down over there!’ Sorry … Senior Vice Presidents. Last week … it was the bravest thing I have ever done!’8 The male colleague serving him the tea asks, ‘What did you do put your head in the mouth of a lion?’ The man replies with a troubled expression on his face, ‘Oh, no! Something much more terrifying than that! I trusted a guy from another IBM division!’ The other man sighs with exasperation, ‘Ahmed, you’ve gotta be crazy! What if he screwed up! What about your career?’ Ahmed replies, ‘No, it actually worked out!’ The other man replies, ‘One small step for Ahmed, one giant step for IBM.’ The IBM tag line then is altered to read, ‘Evolutions for a small planet,’ while panning out to the souk, and the image of a much older bearded and turbaned man in a kaftan walking towards the camera as traditional ‘Islamic’ music is played at high volume in the background. The theme that unites these videos is one of inferior cultures realising that in order to get ahead they would do well to put their faith in IBM, and by extension, the United States, as the world’s technological hegemon, despite their fears about the security of doing so. The reference to the Apollo space mission is not simply a quip here but suggests on a much deeper level that IBM is evolving as a company towards its own series of not just planetary solutions, but perhaps something greater that requires brave minds to think alike and take risks in order to be perceived as rational actors on the world stage. Those who are putting their heads in the lion’s mouth are those who refuse for the sake of tradition to conform to global standards of operation, and instead, move

192  The Apple and the Anthropocene too slowly towards the inevitable arc of progress. The enemy of a cybernetically organised march towards globalisation is always the persistent threat posed by random noise that must over time be eliminated or managed at as low a level as possible. Finally, two years later in 1998, the scene moves to a hotel room in Paris, where a White male American executive is awoken from his slumber, only to find out from his junior White male colleague that his company has been hacked, and that they broke in over the web, breaking into the R&D server. The older man pleads, ‘Who?’ to which he is told, ‘we don’t know.’9 He exclaims, ‘No!.’ The colleagues apologize, ‘on geez it must be 4 in the morning there, you really can’t do anything from there, just go back to sleep,’ and abruptly disconnects. The old man appears baffled as the tone plays out. Suspenseful ‘Western’ music plays as the words ‘Keep evil at bay. IBM Web Security. @-Business Solutions. IBM Solutions for a Small Planet.’ Scroll across the screen. This isn’t so friendly or benign as it used towards this old imperial style of business visitor. Two years later, in the year 2000 IBM’s Silicon Valley rival Google will emerge from the dust of the dot. com crash famously declaring its ideological distinction to IBM with the motto ‘Don’t Be Evil.’ The Desolution of Big Blue By the time Naomi Klein writes her groundbreaking book No Logo, in 2009, she is able to observe that even by then that ‘it hasn’t taken long for the excitement inspired by these manic renditions of globalization to wear thin, revealing the cracks and fissures beneath its high gloss facade. More and more over the past four years we have been catching glimpses of another global village, where the economic divide is widening and cultural choices narrowing.’10 Klein at the time of writing could not realise how prescient her observation was nor how, starting ‘the process of mining the planet’s poorest back country for unimaginable profits,’ would in a matter of a decade shift to place where ‘tribes people in a remote rain forest tap way on computers, Sicilian grandmothers conducting E-Business, and “global teens” … share “a world-wide style culture”’ simply wouldn’t be enough to satisfy the post-national appetites of what Shoshana Zuboff would a decade later refer to as surveillance capitalism.11 IBM’s promise of ‘Solutions for a Small Planet’ in no way insures the levelling of the planetary field to accommodate greater amounts of racial and ethnic equality and happiness in the sense America’s founders intended it to mean in terms of property ownership, but rather its intentions were to make a small colony of multinationals prosper off the familiar forced labour patterns of yesteryear. They had always been the power sources that drove the machines that manufactured the wealth and so, and yet there was one small twice in the plot here in that everyone was now in some way the subject of a racial disfiguration, meaning that humanity as a whole was now simply fair game to pursue for purposes of resource extraction. The anticorporatism that Klein so much believed she was seeing in 2009, by 2019 has disappeared absorbed into the complex world of neoliberal self-branding that was co-immersive with the rise of Web 2.0, and subsequently, social media. In her argument concerning the rise of surveillance capitalism concomitant to the rise of Web 2.0, Shoshana Zuboff resorts to metaphors of colonial gamesmanship when describing the circumstances around such acts of brazen ruination to describe how smart machines now act as a stand-in for the bodies of masters looming over us as they poach ‘our behaviour for surplus’ and ‘leave[s] behind all meaning lodged in our bodies, our

The Apple and the Anthropocene 193 brains, our beating hearts, not unlike the monstrous slaughter of elephants for ivory.’12 Neither they nor you get to occupy the clichéd position of being a product of the market. Rather it is better to appreciate this scene of carnage if you recognise yourself as ‘the abandoned carcass’ with your naturally defensive apparatus brutally cut away from you, effectively ‘ripped from your life’ so that ultimately this raw material will be refined into ‘the “product”’ of behavioural data.13 Such conduct fundamentally violates what we recognise as a protected common of humanity making of us a species like any other, who can be tracked simultaneously as both individuals and populations, vastly outnumbered by those bent on pursuing us and open to movement within the confines of an invisible reserve set to their subtle coordinates. It is they who render us, dictating labour that transcends the limits of the body to compel it to give up its value as value by attempting to now universally decouple property from personhood. Paul James recognises this malign potential of ‘globalism’ as far back as 1997, when he observes that Western mass-cultural representations of the Third World be found through popular images are now seemingly found ‘everywhere: from the ridiculous— for example IBM’s current postmodern advertising campaign “Solution planet™” which depicts Buddhist monks in saffron robes on the side of a mountain and telepathically anticipating the joy of being able to communicate globally—to the commodified sublime, including the marketing of World Music and the conferencing of novels by Salman Rushdie.’14 For James, the gross superficially of such cultural productions that purport to represent a world without borders is exemplified through an issue of Studio Bambini entitled ‘Out of Africa’ that features ‘102 pages of vibrant winter fashion photographed in Zambia and the new South Africa.’ Its front-cover images bring Black and White together, as an African boy dressed in safari leather-gear protectively embraces a European girl wearing a ‘delicate, turtle-neck knit.’15 The distorted juxtaposition between aggressor and aggressed, civil and defence, here reflects such distortions found throughout global electronic media, which promote a ‘subjectivity [that is] is totalized’ to the point of perversion, wherein ‘layers of categorical meaning are read off in terms of the dominant level, [and] the ontological complexity of peoples and individuals is reduced to a psychology of common personality traits.’16 The consequence of this is the post-digital culture of the 1990s produces a projected global South, through ‘two major forms: first, as an aestheticized theatre of horror in which only a few can be rescued from among the mass of unredeemables; and second, as a romanticized location of Otherness.’17 How History Ends

The latter will anticipate the contours of a post-historical view of the world that has its ideological beginnings with Francis Fukuyama’s pronouncement that history ends with the victory of market-oriented liberal democracy over all other lesser ideological competitors, whilst the former covers over the lingers problems of the dispossession of half of the planet’s population through that same mode.18 Fukuyama writes of ‘the progressive conquest of nature made possible with the development of the scientific method in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,’ as the defining moment of when ‘modern natural science establishes a uniform horizon for economic productions possibilities’ that are essentially backed up by the ‘military advantages’ technology alone confers to nationstates.19 This trifecta of elements, science, technology, and weaponry conspire furnish humanity with ‘the limitless accumulation of wealth,’ but at the price of ‘the continued homogenization of all human societies.’20 Fukuyama adds that ‘all countries undergoing

194  The Apple and the Anthropocene economic modernization must increasingly resemble one another; the must unify nationally on the basis of a centralized state, urbanize, replace traditional forms of social organization like tribe, sect, and family, with economically rational ones based on function and efficiency, and provide for the universal education of their citizens. Such societies have become increasingly linked with one another through global markets and the spread of a universal consumer culture. Moreover, the logic of natural science, would seem to dictate a natural evolution towards capitalism’21 Countries that involved themselves in socialist model of governance, such as the Soviet Union, China, and others globally presumably in other places in Africa and Asian, have suffered because their planned economies simply stalled historically around 1950 and failed be able to move past their industrial phase, to their ‘post-industrial phase,’ and therefore, by dint of this inability to further evolve, have found themselves unable to adapt to ‘information and technology’ as the next phase of growth.22 What is significant about Fukuyama’s argument is that he insists that it is the laws of nature and not man who is driving this evolution, and that even liberal democracy itself will become in time an archaic form such that capitalism might well evolve towards ‘authoritarianism’ in order to achieve ‘rates of growth seldom unachievable in democratic societies.’23 What previous authoritarian societies have failed to calculate to be truly successful is the liberal democracy’s focus on identity and recognition.24 The shadow side of such principles however requires some degree of exclusion and rejection, and Fukuyama readily admits that this is a crucial aspect of the function of ‘imperialism and world empire.’25 This would suggest that some version of that will come into the formulation of what happens when history ‘ends’ and is forced to spatially, rather than chronologically, exert itself within a greater imaginary space of ‘human’ planetary dominance. The question becomes how the distribution of capital and authority will make itself known through information and technology as neocolonial formats based on what was emerging at this time as the coordinates of a neoliberal democratic world order. One aspect of this was that the Third World was being conveniently recast as the ‘developing world,’ during this pivotal decade of the 1990s. As the past property of formalise empire, its most dire features were being airbrushed out of history to make way for an aestheticised version to be logged into the post-digital world’s short-term memory. Empire was now being reconfigured as the wistful stuff of honourable virtue and bold enterprise throughout countless mass media productions, including photography, films, videos, literature, advertising, and fashion. Such selective recall was being technologically administered to the richer regions of the world, under the pretence that these poorer regions exist simply as sources of curious pleasure and unspoilt interest for them. With regard to the threats to the environment, they were the stuff of a far-off dismal elsewhere; the poverty and anguish of these places themselves add to the voyeuristic satisfaction of knowing that at some level it is they and not us who are the poachers of endangered species, the producers of rainforest timber, and so on. As such they are the new guilty parties and their perceived wrongdoing does the work essentially of now of absolving us of past destructive incursions in their worlds. Former colonial plantations that had historically worked their local populations to death, for example, can now be commercially repurposed to become popular tourist destinations. Here the same local populations toil to provide sanitised versions of that same economy of harsh service; now only to the visible degree that they can be presented without fear of too much guilt to White guests by their proprietors in the form of sumptuous full-colour displays of their surroundings. Such acts serve to uncomplicate the past making it on par with the present and future so that

The Apple and the Anthropocene 195 they appear to be familiar with one another such that they form spontaneous connections whose comingling constitutes a subset of reality made purely in relation to capital. Within this visual economy, the Earth itself becomes a claimable domain and humanity its universal shorthand for intangible life itself, the longing that causes made to wish himself to belong and affectively connect to others that share its likeness. It is that criteria of similarity upon which it is possible both presume universality and find reasons that make the plurality of that category of being impossible and finally functions to naturalise the gendered and racialised exclusions of others based on a privilege embedded in such globalised conceptions of ‘humanity’ that necessarily forces it to subtract from the common, the particular. Representation fulfils its purpose when it primes the imagination towards sharper modes distinction. Technology fulfils its purpose when it primes the population to imagine that planetary togetherness comes from the dispossession of certain types classed as other-worldly, and thus alienated from the privilege of dwelling here, and suggests the manner through which to clean up their cultural remains through technological means. Each one of these means however is haunted by the twin spectres of mass industrialisation and genocidal warfare. These shadows of modernity prevent a total investment in the postmodern fantasy of a fully globalised evolved to the point that is now beyond strategies of colonial warfare, and no longer animated by the imperial preoccupations of conquest and extraction. Such preoccupations however stubbornly persist and find themselves translated into the establishment of a visual omnipresence of the West within the globalised world’s burgeoning urban centres. The White West’s dogmatic principles of aesthetics and discipline inform, at multiple levels, the visual design of such cities that are subsequently engineered to communicate with its population through mediated environments that are saturated with visual representations of Whiteness. White Stock Through the widespread use of digital stock photography, it is now possible to generate environments where, despite that the fact that the majority population are people of colour, the media atmosphere, nevertheless, interpolates them as though they were White appearing subjects. This oppositional reality has created a problematic and oppressive visual atmosphere where Whiteness is effectively imposed on people of colour as the visual standard of recognition. That condition has deleterious corporeal effects in the Global South. It displaces local self-recognition through the imposition of a representational ecosystem that conforms to a taxonomic hierarchy based on racialised categorisation and therefore, acts as a form of interiorised violence. In turn, visual communication acting as a form of digital colonialism functions as a psychic infrastructure that builds upon long-held assumptions of Whiteness as a standard of both beauty and authority. Such images are engineered to impose a sense of cultural and economic superiority that is elsewhere to the present environment; one that is given the message again and again that it currently only has the potential to emulate such achievements. Patterns of consumption premised on race act as a barrier to access and an impediment to development. The racialised infrastructure of the internet is similarly tethered to a virtual reality that merges with these material conceits. Under the supervision of global capitalism amplifies categorical racial differentiation and further generates visual environments that conform to the hegemonic standards of racial recognition, and conventionalise its depiction within a greater order of information acquisition. Social media

196  The Apple and the Anthropocene platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter rely on mass-produced photography to churn content and this practice ultimately functions to reinforce racial stereotyping as well as for diversity to remain marginal in the space it occupies as compared to the centrality of Whiteness in the composition of its forms. Given the sheer vastness of visual material originating from Western sources, the confluence of the depiction of reality and visual content production underline the lack of localised economic control to envisage a discreet present for itself. The production of massified photographic content made possible by the digital turn in photography contributes to the rise of much greater structural form of domination through the advent of a what Michael Kwet refers to ‘as a digital ecosystem’ whose prevalence takes forms through ‘software, hardware, and network connectivity’ whose powers exercised in tandem with one and concentrated through the centralised ownership by ‘GAFAM (Google/Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft) and other corporate giants, as well as state intelligence agencies like the National Security Agency (NSA)’ in the United States portend a new era of ‘immense political, economic, and social power’ wielded through private-public partnerships operating together to expand their imperial reach well beyond even this world.26 As such, their interests represent something far greater than any international community, but rather aim for the larger aim of establishing interstellar domination. Kwet argues that, ‘assimilation into the tech products, models, and ideologies of foreign powers—led by the United States—constitutes a twenty-first century form of colonisation.’27 As proof of this concept, Kwet cites the following functions as one that ‘are all dominated by a handful of US multinationals: search engines (Google); web browsers (Google Chrome); smartphone and tablet operating systems (Google Android, Apple iOS); desktop and laptop operating systems (Microsoft Windows); office software (Microsoft Office, Google G Suite); cloud infrastructure and services (Amazon, Microsoft, Google, IBM); social net- working platforms (Facebook, twitter); transportation (Uber, Lyft); business net- working (Microsoft LinkedIn); streaming video (Google Youtube, Netflix, hulu); and online advertising (Google, Facebook)—among others’ as the source not only of unrivalled wealth for the Silicon Valley and by extension the United States.28 Such a vast monopoly allows these corporate entities to obtain enormous power over the economies of the Global South ‘and create technological dependencies that will lead to perpetual resource extraction.’29 Kwet maintains that ‘under digital colonialism, foreign powers, led by the US, are planting infrastructure in the Global South engineered for their own needs, enabling economic and cultural domination while imposing privatised forms of governance. To accomplish this task, major corporations design digital technology to ensure their own dominance over critical functions in the tech ecosystem. This allows them to accumulate profits from revenues derived from rent (in the form of intellectual property or access to infrastructure) and surveillance (in the form of Big Data). It also empowers them to exercise control over the flow of information (such as the distribution of news and streaming services), social activities (like social networking and cultural exchange), and a plethora of other political, social, economic and military functions mediated by their technologies.’30 Where the purpose shifts from extraction to implantation is precisely at this juncture where infrastructure combines with form and racial phenotypes get distributed into this space through the receipt and distribution of digital photographic images that enable the viewer to ‘infer traits about people (such as their sexuality, religion, political affiliations

The Apple and the Anthropocene 197 and behavioural tendencies)’ through a visual register ‘that individuals do not disclose themselves,’ but nonetheless, consent as their bodies become part of a vast ecology of content.31 Photography, as technological tool for mass surveillance was used from its inception to subdue the appearance of groups that might pose resistance to the dominant order of White supremacy. Blue Planet, White Marble The role of digital photography, by extension, must serve the aim of the perpetuation of Whiteness as the dominant form of imperial representation. The Earth becomes just an object in the post-war context of America’s cultural supremacy as space itself emerges as the great White hope for its Whiteness’s salvage as a founding logic of global enterprise. The famed Blue Marble’s origin in America’s visual culture was as Thomas M. Lekan refers to it, ‘a “dazzling offshoot” of the twentieth century’s most destructive militarist impulses.’32 From this perspective, the ‘Blue Planet’ emerged as much as trophy as it was an ‘eco-object’ signifying ‘America’s heralded its triumph over the Soviet Union in the space race.’33 Only later was it reconceived as both an icon of ‘environmental diplomacy’ as well as ‘a consumer icon appropriated by cyber-optimistic hippies and reproduced on countless t-shirts, coffee mugs, tote bags, and corporate logos,’ and so on.34 In retrospect, the ‘Apollo mission symbolized America’s One World, post-nationalist imperium, an ideology that rested upon anti-communism, international free trade, and enlightened civic virtue as opposed to the violence and coercion of both old European and new Soviet empires.’35 There was no plan to photographically document the Earth by Apollo’s crew members. As commander Frank Borman noted, ‘I happened to glance out of one of the stillclear windows just at the moment the Earth appeared over the lunar horizon. It was the most beautiful, heart-catching sight of my life, one that sent a torrent of … sheer homesickness surging through me …. Raging nationalistic interests, famines, wars, pestilences don’t show from that distance,’ he commented later, ‘We are one hunk of ground, water, air, clouds, floating around in space. From out there it really is “one world.”’36 Raging nationalistic interests, famines, wars, pestilences regrettably are as much symbols of Christendom and Empire since the fourth century as the lavishly decorated globes, atlases, and world maps from European Baroque courts on which such terrestrial affairs of man where chartered and captured through the human eye, ‘making gazing upon the globe a distinct form of symbolic mastery over space’ the final frontier.37 The late 1960s did not so much mark the completion of the frontier mission, but the rearrangement of it to accommodate a redefinition of wilderness, not a formidable but fragile in the way so much of American culture way, was reckoning with the failure of its own racially inflected project of environmental determinism, which led to fears that it was now entering a new destructive phase where an ‘urbanized, feminized, and physically degenerate society’ was now becoming poised to suicidally wipe itself out in a moral fit of identification with alterity.38 Suddenly it was all there, in a nostalgia for the toxic masculinity of figures like Theodore Roosevelt and others who ‘called for the development of national parks as a social hygienic tonic for the ills of civilization.’39 Environmental protection was a racially reactionary impulse and in the 1960s, that fact emerged, in the reconceptualisation of the whole planet as a newly limited and thus imperilled object that required once more the behaviour of its alienated others to be objectified, concentrated, and controlled in their movements so as to make sure that Earth would be the

198  The Apple and the Anthropocene

Figure 9.1 ‘The Blue Marble’ is a famous photograph of the Earth taken on December 7, 1972, by the crew of the Apollo 17 spacecraft en route to the Moon at a distance of about 29,000 kilometres (18,000 miles). It shows Africa, Antarctica, and the Arabian Peninsula.

distinct preserve of Whiteness, just as it had always been. White nature-seeking urban tourists would come in their droves, oblivious to the fact their eager footsteps fell on soil subjected to atomic testing, nor that ‘the space race produce toxic wastelands in Utah, Nevada, and New Mexico in which Native Americans were disproportionately poisoned and dispossessed.’40 There was simply no time for that; there was only space to be conquered and photographed in all its pristine beauty. Similarly, Lekan maintains, the Blue Marble emerged as a perfect pure object of contemplation in the year 1972 that witnessed ‘the protracted conflict in Vietnam, stagnating economic growth, and the increasing violence of civil rights and global anti-imperialist struggles led many young people on the New Left to detect the militarism that underlay the U.S. space mission and its One World free-trade imperialism’ (Figure 9.1).41 They too would forget that all this was being realised as the Apollo 17 retired in to the space of legend. As it was,

The Apple and the Anthropocene 199 it would be NASA’s last manned lunar spaceflight, as political attentions turned inward towards mitigating the social, cultural, and political damage caused by Vietnam, rather than examining the ideology of White supremacy that had caused it, nor the technological innovation, specifically aerial warfare that made conceptually possible. There is no Anthropocene without that visual perspective on the destruction of the Earth and perhaps more importantly the epistemological shift ushered in during the post-war 1950s to control the awareness of humankind through a closed system of mass media and communication technologies. Spaceship Earth was designed in this manner as a cybernetic instrument, capable of enveloping the whole organisation of society. A Malthusian Africa Such fantasies of envelopment always arc back to the significance of ‘humans’ read as White as the ‘ecological dominant on the planet’ who must distance themselves wherever possible for the ‘heteroglossia of … Africa,’ aerial photography of which draws upon trope of lesser developed systems of organisation and communication, that ‘also shaped wildlife documentaries, where nostalgia for the imagined last frontier tended to occlude imperialist legacies and ongoing struggles for independence in favor of Edenic narratives structured around neo-Malthusian fears about the threat of indigenous peoples to fragile rain forests and savannas.’42 Whereas nature made sure that animals’ numbers were kept in check, the primitive human was an exception to this rule from time immemorial, and from the time of the fall of Adam and Eve, this species reproduction was both a blessing and a curse upon this Earth. During this post-war period, it widely held amongst those producing popular nature documentaries for distribution to global audiences that man’s ability to manipulate his surroundings through the acquisition of technology had been the means of his progress, but these means were racially staggered against a course of development and so not all could participate equally in the spoils of this world at the same time. African independence would be difficult because that had simply do not have the material advances afforded by biological progress to succeed on their own. It was never considered that the punishing mechanisms of colonial rule had been the true impeding factor ‘that might have caused or perpetuated the asymmetries and inequalities depicted’ again and again in photographic representations of Africa such as those exemplified through the issue of Studio Bambini entitled ‘Out of Africa,’ shoot in the late 1990s. In the context of space and resources, it is assumed visually that the White girl requires greater care than her Black boy counterpart, that he remains in service to her comforts, and indeed, that where there was increasingly no room for nature given the course of civilisational development, for human (read White) children, other types of (read Black) children are tolerated to the degree that they are useful. Should they trespass the rules of that contact zone and the actions that are permitted of them within it, they will be banished from their terrestrial Eden and forced to grapple with the encroachment of Western modernity. Of course, this has already happened and has happened now for centuries and yet this moment of intimate encounter between (White) paradise and (Black) fall mediated over and over and again by my media sequences depicting indigenous peoples as though another species and encountering civilisation as though for the first time. Their attempts to adapt and mimic what they see before them are depicted again and again as a formula for tragic outcomes as they simply cannot grasp the subtle features of modernisation that would allow them to succeed in making their own progress. The blunt imperial

200  The Apple and the Anthropocene instruments of land grabs, rape, and genocide are never touched upon in the framework of these pairings, and instead, Africa’s continental deficiency is portrayed as a product of land scarcity and overpopulation. Malthus himself would have recognised the irony of this analysis as the colonial geography of own life time and the emergence of new imperial orders between the old world and the new in his writing of Principles of Population (1798). In fact, he defined his population principle according to the features of White British settler colonialism in North America and the Pacific, not Europe as it commonly believed. Joyce E. Chaplin and Alison Bashford contend that as with Africa, ‘to the European eye, many parts of the Americas seemed underpopulated, with land and other resources consequently underutilised, and this would remain a central prejudice about them. English descriptions of North America as wilderness transformed that term’s original connotation of “wild,” as populated by wild things (plants, animals, people) to mean also deserted, desert, waste.’43 They argue that much of this transformation from one condition to the other was brought into being invidious settler practices once they were in these ‘new’ worlds, to strip them of their ‘thin’ inhabitants, ‘as it was often put—but hinted at the desirability of separating indigenous persons from their acres, and hypothesized their eventual demise in any case.’44 Chaplin and Bashford maintain that indigenous peoples were analytically essential within editions of the Essay from 1803 onwards. ‘Malthus argued that population numbers were always kept within the limits of resources (the “principle of population”) by epidemics, starvation, and human violence, and by deliberate measures to control births. And yet Malthus used his principle of population to conclude—against prevailing opinion—that for settler populations to extirpate or subsume indigenous ones was unjust.’45As such they determine that, ‘in this regard, the Reverend T. R. Malthus, long decried as scourge of the English poor, has an unexpected, if intermittent, persona: defender of native peoples.’46 Why he is later case as a defender of Britain’s institutional imperialism might have much to do with his lifelong involvement as a scholar housed within the East India Company. Not just his income but the very roof over the Malthus family head was provided through his long-standing position as a professor of ‘general history, politics, commerce, and finance at the East India Company College, Haileybury.’47 This situation would have surely had a role in dissuading him from direct engagement with topics having to with Britain’s West Indian colonies as well as its greater involvement with new world slavery, versus its patterns of colonial White settlement. Even then Malthus’ opinions on such matters would have been of limited use to his employers as his main job duty was to ‘train generations of young men to be company clerks and sent them to India. In this way, Malthus participated in the British sanitization of imperial activity, away from the slave-trading and land-grabbing model of new worlds and toward an exploitation that, in contrast, parasitically attached itself to existing populations.’48 What indeed was notable about Malthus’ appearance at the company at this time in history is that he was an indirect participant in facilitating the rise of a new style of imperialism, in ‘what has become known as the Second British Empire’ where there was a distinctive move away towards outright land grabs, towards an idea of control nonEuropean peoples through technological mediations that would bring the forces of civilisation to bear upon them not only through the importation of White administrative populations, but equally an array of commercial products—the train, the telegraph, the camera, the gun, and later the airplane to order and subdue these local populations. Africa and Asia would become over time replete with dance halls, cars, photography

The Apple and the Anthropocene 201 studios and cinemas, and modernist architecture. So the thinking went that the local population need not be eliminated so much as seduced by the charms of modernisation to comply with their outside rule as the twentieth century dawned. Sadly, as it progressed, imperial administrators increasingly concluded that such a project was doomed because a ‘developed’ colonial world was increasingly unwilling to accept unlimited imperial governance. Civilisation had a corrupting influence on local populations such that they could no longer be trusted to husband the natural world and its resources that surrounded them. Again it would be up to Britain to preserve Africa’s terrestrial integrity and its innocent wildlife, a task far beyond the wants or capabilities of their ‘primitive’ minders who only saw their commercial value. The irony of this position is born out in countless nature documentaries that would come to profit off the visual coupling of the movement African native, with the migration of wildebeest, with the riotous spread of orchids bringing colour across the desert plain. Only the aerial view could capture to sheer scale of all of this and contain it in such a way that a fallen Eden could be forgiven for its diminution and made whole again in the imagination of a distant viewer who always already imagined it so. Again and again and again, wide-angle shots of the treeless Serengeti Plains figured these under the auspices of science as the preserves of the British colonial government. Africa, for its part, was a presented as ‘natural zoo,’ designed by hand of God to hold and display its relic peoples and animals together; the British were simply his chosen minders on Earth. As these ‘relic’ peoples rebelled against this conception of their lives, the wild animals of Africa became the subject of intense focus. A British colonial conservationist view now held fast to a concept of an African wilderness that could only survive if it were completely cleansed of a wild human presence. African deterritorialisation was the only solution possible to create reverses for the remaining life on other continents to continue to live out the privileges of modernity. As for the animals, they would no longer be hunted to extinction, but shot in perpetuity by camera, so it was that the concept of safari was parked as an artefact of mass territorial dehumanisation, and the wild animals alone cast as robust evidence of the success of cultivated bio-cultural landscape under White Western control. Here biopolitics conspires at the highest levels to limit and discipline space. The Anthropocene in its relationship to photography is to make such force aesthetically pleasing and for this decline of the planet to be appreciated in its own right as highly cultivated undertaking aided by technology to signal a possible route to resurgence of the Blue Planet through the mindful use of technology. It also invites participation to the degree that one is encouraged to imagine the restoration of a world that has past, and a world to come that will surpass even that miracle if conducted according to a multitude of scales, views, tracking and networking possibilities in this new conceptualisation of Earth as at once more democratic and more elitist depending on your capability to communicate through technology to access, debate, and augment representations of the world. The Colonised Earth The Blue Marble of the 1970s has now become the Google Earth of the 2010s, and we are still going, refining a pattern of conception that awkwardly expresses yearning for a sixteenth-century world that was able to behold the world in its hands at a certain level of rarefied privilege. The Blue Planet in our contemporary popular media has become not a floating ball in space, but instead a screened manipulatable object, through participatory

202  The Apple and the Anthropocene geographical constructions reliant on a background geospatial infrastructure of data compiled from military satellites, aerial photographs, government censuses, and corporate advertisers that together assume the qualities of a consumer good. It is but one in a pageant of formations that have led since the late nineteenth century to a sense of propriety status over ‘non-human life’ and the evolving sense of a relationship to the categories of being that inhabit such a term. Nicholas Mirzoeff reminds us that nature itself becomes the subject of ‘institutionalization’ in the height of the Victorian era on both sides of the Atlantic.49 The ‘nature’ we have become accustomed to the understanding as such was constructed ‘through museums, zoos, wildlife refuges, national parks, and the definition of wilderness marked the peak of empire’s exterminations.’50 Mirzoeff explains that, ‘by consigning the other-thanhuman world to this status as an attraction to be looked at, empire claimed full dominion over life.’51 More disturbingly, he maintains, ‘the dead animals displayed in the dioramas of the American Museum of Natural History teach children both that the role of nonhuman life is to die and that they are to be its killers. Its opening in 1877 was the corollary to the creation of anthropological museums in Europe, formed from the loot taken by colonial expeditions.’52 That looting is of course accompanied by the cataloguing of such illicit wears through photography. Photography represents a very particular sort of objectification that was part and parcel of an ascendant Atlantic world that invested heavily in the power of the imperial state to, as Michel Foucault observes, ‘make live and let die’ through a series of tactics that involve violent displacement.53 If as Dan Hicks argues, the contents of such institutions themselves are ‘wholly dependent on anti-black violence and dispossession,’ one is compelled to witness the anthropological museum not merely as an ‘implement of imperialism,’ manufactured in the final third of the nineteenth century, but equally itself an article of it.54 Mirzoeff argues in that spirit of understanding, ‘so too were museums of natural history, game reserves, and national parks tools of enshrining settler colonial dominion over all nature and making it permanent.’55 The location of this project surpasses the distinction made between the enclosed spaces of the United States and Europe and the colonised space and environment of the continent of Africa, as Hicks comes to define it as the era spanning from 1884 to 1914, when British colonialism entered into a period of ultraviolence, before its ultimate collapse as the world’s hegemon. Hicks reference to the time as one in which colonial and militarism converged upon one another to launch what he calls ‘World War Zero.’56 The war is of course on one level about the seizure of royal and sacred objects from Africans kingdoms, but those grotesque acts were not enough in themselves to satisfy military objectives. A cadre of administrators had to be brought in to take ‘photographs, developing multiple copies for inclusion in soldier’s diaries and albums just as artefacts were negatives for future histories. These parallel acts of taking began a dislocation of time as well as space.’57 The consequence of this is that the photographers themselves became agents of destruction, as much as soldiers, they played a crucial part in the tearing away ‘at the fabric of time itself, to create a timeless past in the present as a weapon that generates alterityappropriations not in the form of property as unspecified rights, interests, privileges, and claims, including the rights of mimesis and parody.’58 Hicks argues by photographing these objects the British military was able to transform them into relics and in so doing cast the cultures from which they were drawn as fundamentally dead, turning the enemy figuratively into the past, and practically into oblivion to the degree that it is possible for the museum to confine him to history through the twinned force of taking both object and image from him.

The Apple and the Anthropocene 203 Hicks asserts, ‘as a technology, Archaeology emerged hand-in-hand with both photography and 19th century colonialism.’59 There is something greater still that emerges beyond the confluence of all three, and beyond their ability to dispossess. It is their ability to govern reality itself that makes them truly threating as a tool of colonial administration, because unlike the gun, the camera has the ability to make destruction last and last. Disaster itself becomes a state of consciousness within them, and the consequence of this is the logic of White supremacy never truly fades from their borders. Everything we think we know about history traces itself back to the initial purpose of this weapon; to administrate our understanding of the shape of the world itself. Violence in this sense becomes a relational project to how we understand mankind itself and its origins in a racial science that allowed for this living body of photography to enter in and make itself known as both a witness and a trace of the past generating whole environments through which such systems of knowledge could and did endure to our present moment. If race has always been about assigning mattering to life, then the inhuman raises the spectre of another sort of traffic in bodies altogether—that of the nonhuman life as something that finds itself resident to processes of extraction for there can be little narrative accountability. This situation calls for a rethinking of imagery as something intimately related to the modern material economy of the New World. It requires the positing of the image as something that emerges through the libidinal economy of conquest. The early thinking of imagery’s value has much to do with property, possession, and land use but has little to say about the imagistic formulation of the landscape as a type of inert material that is in many ways only enlivened in the imagination of the White settler class through their desire to frame its acquisition. The very concept of a reserve space on Earth is deeply rooted in British colonial enterprise and with the concept of containment of ‘wildlife’ suggests the dispossession of indigenous, and what passes for their claims to land, resources, and means of subsistence, peoples as a class of non-human being specifically identified as being a threat to control of the environment. The uneven distribution of rights is no more evident that in the colonial example of game laws prohibiting subsistence hunting of small game by poor local tribespeople, whilst at the same promoting trophy hunting for affluent White Americans and Europeans. That such practices continue to this day suggests that it is not the wildlife that are the protected class of life here. Current policy arcs towards the new territorial land grabs through recent calls for a dramatic expansion of protected planetary areas for the sake of preserving biodiversity, such as those embedded in the post-2020 Global Biodiversity perpetuate ‘these exclusionary conservation approaches rooted in colonialism.’60 Their calls for at least 30% of the planet to be ‘protected’ in this way by 2030 echoes the environmental footprint Britain sought to have upon the world at the peak of its imperial ambitions prior to World War I. We are not however at a stage of planetary capitalism where the terra nullius approach that underpinned settler colonialism is going to be simply repeated. At this stage, a new formation is coming into the being that will be the product not of governmental design and influence, but rather the ‘product of a powerful coalition of donors, research institutions, and advocacy groups tied to multilateral institutions that have lent their political and economic weight to protected area based exclusionary conservation’ model that draws on the rhetoric of community, whilst pursuing extremely atomise solutions to climatic crisis that ultimately protect Western interests.61 The widely known incidents of torture, rape, and murder that have gone on under the proviso of being conservation initiatives have been funded, equipped, and directly staffed by organisations

204  The Apple and the Anthropocene such as the World Wildlife Fund and the Wildlife Conservation Society, not as the exception to their practices, but as a rule that very much corresponds with earlier colonial practices of terrorising local indigenous populations as a means instituting conflict and abuse to break down the cohesion and stability of local populations as a means of seizing social and political control of those desirable areas. In the context of the dominance of market-based environmentalism within global conservation movement, governments have increasingly little involvement in the conduct of political and economic affairs carried out internationally in their name. This is reminiscent of the company model of British colonialism; however, there are important features to recognise in a neoliberal atmosphere of the enactment of the clearance of indigenous populations from one-half of the Earth’s surface to create a ‘human free zone’ presumably to protect the human interests of the other half. Within this scenario, the Global South will be contrived as a sacrificial zone, where through superior Northern bioengineering practices, a pristine wilderness on Earth will be restored. Those humans left to dwell within the region will do so because they conform with an enduring imperial imaginary of indigeneity of territorial ‘natives’ as being so closely aligned to nature, they are therefore of ‘it.’ These bodies alongside all other representative types of nature will be governed from without. The role of photography in such campaigns to reconceive an imperial order fit for the twenty-first century cannot be underestimated. Figures like David Attenborough have been crucial to the post-digital visual reconfiguration of a fragile planet that requires it be overseen by expert management, lest it be resource allowed to go to waste. In many respects, Attenborough himself has functioned for decades at the BBC as his own commodity form. The Man Who Sold the World Framed as a knowledgeable on-screen presenter, Attenborough is able extrapolate and universalise the basic tenants of evolutionary biology projecting them onto the minds planetary viewing audience eager to his perspective on the natural world. The title sequence for his famed series Life on Earth opens with one of the Apollo photographs of the 1960s, digitally advanced so that now the Earth is floating in deep space and illuminated by the sun, is now accompanied by a triumphant orchestral score, through which is it emphasised that the show to follow is none other than ‘A Natural History by David Attenborough.’ In this way, Attenborough is about to insert his presence amongst that enormity and in so doing, have audiences recognise that in its entirety, the BBC has Attenborough to credit for its authority to communicate the complexity of nature itself to television audiences around the world. The initial air date for the Life on Earth series was 1979 and that it is have carried on seemingly from that point onwards indefinitely suggests the need to wildlife itself to be packaged and branded to ensure audiences were at some level aware of the BBC exclusive rights to claim as core component of its identity as a public broadcasting service. By 2009, this identity had vastly changed; a global brand called BBC Earth was conceived with the aim of trademarking the very Earth that the programming sat upon such that it could generate tens of millions of pounds for BBC worldwide and allowed it to enter into a joint operation between the BBC and private international media entities such as Netflix, Discovery, Disney and Apple. Attenborough in many ways has surpassed his value as a property of the BBC. In recent years Attenborough has appeared at Davos speaking to the world’s elites about how ‘we’ are wrecking the planet. That ‘we’ are not those select audience members,

The Apple and the Anthropocene 205 but rather such threats are apparently emanating from Africans or Asians who insist on pursuing lifestyles that endangered natural habitats, promote overpopulation, and of course there is their rapacious activity of ‘poaching’ endangered species. Conservation has to happen on their continents, so that there is a world left to inhabit on ours and so that a pristine wilderness is available for the viewing pleasure of generations to come. What is never mentioned is that ‘the grass plains of the Serengeti, the Amazon rainforest and so on, were all formed by vigorous human intervention over thousands of years.’62 These are in their own way, therefore, ‘artificial landscaping’ and ‘the importing animals’ into so called-conservation areas, ‘are just two aspects of what has become partly a film set: Protected areas are often home to mining (such as the Central Kalahari Game Reserve in Botswana), logging, destructive monoculture, such as teak and oil palm, and trophy hunting (such as around Lobeke National Park, Cameroon). Much of this happens in government-approved concessions and some of the companies involved work in close partnership with conservation NGOs.’63 There is no paradise lost, despite what Attenborough is saying to these enthralled audiences. The pressure often being exerted as a result of this framing of nature are that animals are being used as means of justifying the eviction of humans from land that essentially allows for it enter into the commercial domain. On April 5, 2019, the international, Swiss-based NGO World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) released the web video How to Save Our Planet narrated by none other than Attenborough.64 The video was published at the same time and with explicit connection to the Netflix release of Attenborough’s documentary Our Planet. The narrative account Attenborough gives points to the same African and Asian populations are held responsible for overpopulation and environmental denigration, but their actual physical bodies are not featured. Tobias Gralke, observes, ‘that part from a few exceptions, the video relies on a spectacular, environmental documentary style with awe-inspiring wide shots of landscapes and close-ups of detailed animals. Even in the depicted green-utopian future, in which humankind and nature are supposed to co-exist peacefully, the focus lies on images of nature, while humankind is mostly represented through infrastructural elements.’65 Furthermore, ‘although Attenborough speaks of “several billion” people, “living long healthy lives on a stable planet” the impression remains that the depicted future is first and foremost a tidier version of the present, implicitly suggesting that people of colour live separately in a dark, foggy, and crowded place and being on the move, whilst white people are enjoying a bright day in the café or the park.’66 We might be above the peak of what portion of humanity this planet can contain, but it would seem that what is at issue here is not changing that situation of populations living in different parallel reality to once, but rather conveniently involves the labour not of humans but of those counted as other to this category of being to clean up their activity for the sake of us all. Attenborough and WWF’s web video poises a particular choice for the future by featuring as their parting shot a photograph of ‘Singapore’s “Gardens by the Bay” theme park, which cost over (U.S.) $700 million to build and $20 million a year to run, in the world’s third richest country (per capita) as the perfect environment in which to cultivate a post-racial future where the colour line of whiteness opens itself to access by the world’s richest inhabitants such as it did in the heyday of Britain’s colonial empire.’67 Those denied recognition and indeed migratory access to the futuristic ‘gardens’ are none other than those who built them; the migrant labourers from India who make up the ranks of the many low-paid construction workers in Singapore ‘who face prison and beating if they overstay.’68 Images of them are, of course, not featured, but implied as the source

206  The Apple and the Anthropocene non-European overbreeding that invisibility threatens our world. In the end, we are left to contemplate what amounts to another type of themed ‘park’ reserved for the pleasure of those best able to afford access to it, Europe. The web video’s parting image of who is permitted to remain human in this world is that of a young White man cycling the canals of Amsterdam as its ideal inhabitant thriving in his perfect environment—at least for now. If we consider that in 1900 Europe held 25% of the global population, triple that of Africa. Yet by 2050, Europe is on track to hold a mere 7% of the global population (one-third that of Africa), we can more clearly see that how this poses a threat to White supremacy as a foundational structure of planetary governance. The solution to such a threat does not come by way of addressing ecological concerns or alleviating poverty, but rather through the use of technology to recolonise Africa, not through direct rule of its citizens, but through the assimilation in an understanding of themselves as technologically dependent subjects on the White West, wherein total population is not the issue, but rather its strategic concentration. In a mere ten years, by ‘2030, it is expected that one in five people will be African.’69 John McKenna writing on behalf of the World Economic Forum that figure combined with ‘the continent’s soaring population with technology, improvements in infrastructure, health and education,’ means that ‘Africa could be the next century’s economic growth powerhouse.’70 The Pew Research Center estimates that ‘half of babies born worldwide are expected to be born in Africa by 2100, up from three-in-ten today.’71 These infants and the orchestration of the imagination of themselves will become crucial to the viability of tech companies such as Facebook who are making vast investments on the continent to keep this population in place rather than migrating towards Europe and America. They are joined with the globe’s largest telecom corporations, including the United Kingdom’s Vodafone Group, France’s Orange SA, China’s Mobile, stc (Saudi Telecom), Europe’s GlobalConnect, and Africa’s West Indian Ocean Cable Company (WIOCC). The two African wireless carriers involved in the project are MTN Group (Johannesburg) and Telecom Egypt. Nokia Oyj’s Alcatel Submarine Networks has been contracted to build the cable.72 This represents at one level neocolonial scramble for territorial control of Africa, and at another underscores the point that such companies remain dedicated to the concept of controlling the trajectory of the imagination, growth, movement of such populations through the implantation of data surveillance into this perceived to be ‘pristine’ media landscape. Notes 1 Erik Swyngedouw, “Depoliticized Environments and the Promises of the Anthropocene.” In The International Handbook of Political Ecology (Northampton: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2015), 133. 2 “Microsoft – Where Do You Want to Go Today?” November 24, 2014. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=Zwf0EZ50KUY. 3 Lisa Nakamura, Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet (London: Routledge, 2013), xvii. 4 Nakamura, Cybertypes, xvii. 5 Ibid., xvii. 6 “IBM Solutions for a Small Planet Commercial 1995.” April 28, 2017. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=uCHOPwQwv7Q. 7 “IBM – Solutions for a Small Planet (1996).” February 16, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=zlluFzYUGIk. 8 “IBM Small Planet Videos.” Randolph Hobler, at 2.21. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= JhRM9AiHE0Y.

The Apple and the Anthropocene 207 9 “IBM (1998) Television Commercial – Solutions for a Small Planet.” May 9, 2020. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=kk6zpoRVOXU. 10 Naomi Klein, No Logo: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs (New York: Picador, 2009), xix. 11 Klein, No Logo, xix. 12 Zuboff Soshana, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (New York: Public Affairs, 2019), 377. 13 Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 377. 14 Paul James, “Postdependency? The Third World in an Era of Globalism and Late-Capitalism.” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 22, no. 2 (1997): 205. 15 James, Postdependency, 206. 16 Ibid., 222. 17 Ibid., 205. 18 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 2006). 19 Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, vix. 20 Ibid., xiv. 21 Ibid., xiv–xv. 22 Ibid., xv. 23 Ibid., xv. 24 Ibid., xx. 25 Ibid., xx. 26 Michael Kwet, “Digital Colonialism: US Empire and the New Imperialism in the Global South.” Race & Class 60, no. 4 (April 2019): 4. 27 Kwet, “Digital Colonialism,” 4. 28 Ibid., 6. 29 Ibid., 6. 30 Ibid., 7–8. 31 Ibid., 13. 32 Thomas M. Lekan, “Fractal Eaarth: Visualizing the Global Environment in the Anthropocene.” Environmental Humanities 5, no. 1 (2014): 176. 33 Lekan, “Fractal Eaarth,” 176. 34 Ibid., 176. 35 Ibid., 181. 36 Ibid., 181. 37 Ibid., 181. 38 Ibid., 181. 39 Ibid., 181. 40 Ibid., 182. 41 Ibid., 182. 42 Ibid., 179. 43 Joyce E. Chaplin and Alison Bashford, The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus: Rereading the Principle of Population (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 2–3. 44 Chaplin and Bashford, The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus, 3. 45 Ibid., 4. 46 Ibid., 4. 47 Ibid., 10. 48 Ibid., 10. 49 Nicholas Mirzoeff, “The Whiteness of Birds.” liquid blackness 6, no. 1 (1 April 2022): 120– 137 at 129, https://doi.org/10.1215/26923874-9546592. 50 Mirzoeff, “The Whiteness of Birds,” 129. 51 Ibid., 129. 52 Ibid., 129. 53 Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976 (New York: St. Martins Press, 2003), 241. 54 Dan Hicks, The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution (London: Pluto Press, 2021), xiii. 55 Mirzoeff, “The Whiteness of Birds,”129. 56 Hicks, The Brutish Museums, xiii. 57 Ibid., 12.

208  The Apple and the Anthropocene 58 Ibid., 12. 59 Ibid., 13. 60 Prakash Kashwan, Rosaleen V. Duffy, Francis Massé, Adeniyi P. Asiyanbi and Esther Marijnen, “From Racialized Neocolonial Global Conservation to an Inclusive and Regenerative Conservation.” Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development 63, no. 4 (2021): 4–19. 61 Kashwan et al., “From Racialized Neocolonial Global Conservation to an Inclusive and Regenerative Conservation,” 7. 62 Stephen Corry, “An Inconvenient Truth: Pristine Wildernesses and Other Myths Peddled by the BBC.” Survival. https://www.survivalinternational.org/articles/3626-an-inconvenienttruth-pristine-wildernesses-and-other-myths-peddled-by-the-bbc. 63 Corry, “An Inconvenient Truth.” 64 “How to Save Our Planet”. WWF International, YouTube (April 4, 2019). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Puv0Pss33M (January 31, 2022). 65 Tobias Gralke, “Another World Is Depictable! Imaginal Climate Justice and the Affective Rhetoric of Visible Futures.” ffk Journal 6, no. 7 (2022): 117. 66 Gralke, “Another World Is Depictable!”, 117. 67 “The Big Green Lie.” n.d.. https://www.survivalinternational.org/articles/biggreenlie. 68 Ibid. 69 John McKenna, “6 Numbers That Prove the Future Is African.” World Economic Forum, May 2, 2017. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/05/africa-is-rising-and-here-are-thenumbers-to-prove-it/. 70 Ibid. 71 Anthony Cilluffo and Neil G. Ruiz, “World’s Population Is Projected to Nearly Stop Growing by the End of the Century.” Pew Research Trust, June 17, 2019. https://www.pewresearch.org/ fact-tank/2019/06/17/worlds-population-is-projected-to-nearly-stop-growing-by-the-end-ofthe-century/. 72 “New Subsea Cable to Connect 23 African Countries, Courtesy of Collaboration.” Fibre Systems, May 15, 2020. https://www.fibre-systems.com/news/new-subsea-cable-connect-23african-countries-courtesy-collaboration.

Bibliography Chaplin, Joyce E. and Alison. Bashford. The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus: Rereading the Principle of Population. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016. Cilluffo, Anthony and Neil G. Ruiz. “World’s Population Is Projected to Nearly Stop Growing by the End of the Century.” Pew Research Trust, June 17, 2019. https://www.pewresearch. org/fact-tank/2019/06/17/worlds-population-is-projected-to-nearly-stop-growing-by-the-endof-the-century/. Corry, Stephen. “An Inconvenient Truth: Pristine Wildernesses and Other Myths Peddled by the BBC.” Survival. https://www.survivalinternational.org/articles/3626-an-inconvenient-truthpristine-wildernesses-and-other-myths-peddled-by-the-bbc. Foucault, Michel. “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976. New York: St Martins Press, 2003. Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press, 2006. Gralke, Tobias. “Another World Is Depictable! Imaginal Climate Justice and the Affective Rhetoric of Visible Futures.” ffk Journal 6, no. 7 (2022): 108–124. Hicks, Dan. The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution. London: Pluto Press, 2021. “IBM (1998) Television Commercial – Solutions for a Small Planet.” May 9, 2020. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=kk6zpoRVOXU. “IBM – Solutions for a Small Planet (1996).” February 16, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=zlluFzYUGIk. “IBM Solutions for a Small Planet Commercial 1995,” April 28, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=uCHOPwQwv7Q.

The Apple and the Anthropocene 209 “IBM Small Planet Videos.” Randolph Hobler, at 2.21. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= JhRM9AiHE0Y Kashwan, Prakash, Rosaleen V. Duffy, Francis Massé, Adeniyi P. Asiyanbi and Esther Marijnen. “From Racialized Neocolonial Global Conservation to an Inclusive and Regenerative Conservation.” Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development 63, no. 4 (2021): 4–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/00139157.2021.1924574. Klein, Naomi. No Logo: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs. New York: Picador, 2009. Kwet, Michael. “Digital Colonialism: US Empire and the New Imperialism in the Global South.” Race & Class 60, no. 4 (2019): 3–26. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306396818823172. James, Paul. “Postdependency? The Third World in an Era of Globalism and Late-Capitalism.” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 22, no. 2 (1997): 205–226. http://www.jstor.org/ stable/40644888. Lekan, Thomas M. “Fractal Eaarth: Visualizing the Global Environment in the Anthropocene.” Environmental Humanities 5, no. 1 (2014): 171–201. https://doi.org/10.1215/220119193615469. McKenna, John. “6 Numbers that Prove the Future is African.” World Economic Forum, May 2, 2017. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/05/africa-is-rising-and-here-are-thenumbers-to-prove-it/. “Microsoft – Where Do You Want to Go Today?” November 24, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Zwf0EZ50KUY. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. “The Whiteness of Birds.” liquid blackness 6, no. 1 (2022): 120–137. https:// doi.org/10.1215/26923874-9546592. Nakamura, Lisa. Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet. London: Routledge, 2013. “New Subsea Cable to Connect 23 African Countries, Courtesy of Collaboration.” Fibre Systems, May 15, 2020. https://www.fibre-systems.com/news/new-subsea-cable-connect-23-africancountries-courtesy-collaboration. Swyngedouw, Erik. “Depoliticized Environments and the Promises of the Anthropocene.” In The International Handbook of Political Ecology, 131–146. Northampton: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2015. “The Big Green Lie.” n.d. https://www.survivalinternational.org/articles/biggreenlie. Zuboff, Soshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. New York: Public Affairs, 2019.

Conclusion Entrepreneurs, Clients, and Images: How Photography Inserted Whiteness into a Global Visual Economy

It is easy to overlook the daguerreotype in what has now become the longue durée of photography. In just two short decades and on both sides of the Atlantic, it had brought the practice of commercial photography into being that fixed the image onto the popular imagination in a way that no other previous form of representation had. It did so by creating an understanding of the visual world that corresponded perfectly with the planetary dominance of Whiteness, as the premier category of understanding both history and duration. The history of photography can, therefore, be said to be a kind of record and reckoning of White history as captured through the imperial gaze of White Western photographers. However, it is also something much more than that. While on the one hand, it was a means through which predatory voyeurism was enacted upon variously gendered, raced, and aged bodies. On the other, it is about generating part-documentary, part-staged photographs of any number of wealthy, educated Americans or Europeans who form an elite class of individuals, whose appearance speaks to the pride of their success and reifies the history of Whiteness itself as a moral principle. United, as it were, into this perfect family of Whiteness, Europeans at home and their White settler kin abroad could maintain a sense of likeness to one another and therein picture themselves sympathetically towards one another in ways that contain Whiteness and allow for it to be extended through the world as a universal register of privilege. The daguerreotype’s initial popularity can be explained not just in the striking fidelity of its capture of a sitter’s likeness, but perhaps of even greater importance in its ability to capture the detail of any number of signifiers of social ascendency including but not limited to furnishings, hearths, rugs, drawings and books, fashions and fabrics that tacitly refer back to a European cultural heritage as the standard of human propriety. Humanity itself is hidden in the detail that reflects back to the camera what can only be construed as the standard of Whiteness, as it comes to be associated with beauty and desirability, and equally the complexities of privilege that are judged in negative relationship to Whiteness elsewhere from beyond these tight frameworks. Whiteness as a category is only ever able to maintain sovereignty so long as viewers continue to be enthralled by its institutional stability. What is seldom explicitly recognised is the way the invention and continuous development of photography have been integral to the verisimilitude of Whiteness as a racialised category, and that scientific reification of race into the present day. Racism is not just a political, social, and legal phenomenon, it is also a profoundly representational practice. While those who are racialised by the camera as objects of fascination, curiosity, or concern remain so well into the post-digital era, much of commercial photography remains critically disengaged with contemporary discussions of race and racism. Similarly, the neoliberal artwork whilst DOI: 10.4324/9781003274797-11

Conclusion 211 virtue signalling the inclusion of work by artists of colour, seldom if ever considers its complicity with the perpetuation of White cultural hegemony as its normative mode of commercial viability. More often than not, it is White photographers who are making conceptual-political works that speak ‘about’ race, and in so doing asserting their privilege to speak on behalf of the racialised Other, rather than with or to them, while at the same time remaining silent on the conditions of their own racialisation. A proper critical notion of Whiteness in the making of the photographic artwork itself remains a subject practically untouched. Photography as a practice remains a field of vision populated with White people observing others, from the safe space of technological mediation. It is that strategic distance that for centuries secured the foundations of White bourgeois culture, making bodies of colour objects in need of understanding, and at home more in the space of conflict and trauma than in the place of freedom and homecoming that has been largely the preserve of Whiteness. As a consequence, Whiteness has become itself a camera: a device prone to absorb the techniques of capitalist production in furtherance of a way of looking that normalises Whiteness so that audiences all over the world have become subtly habituated to it to the degree that its appearance has become largely invisible and unremarkable. Nonetheless, photography as a technology of Whiteness has trained humanity to believe that civil society can constitute itself through the lens of racial classification and differentiation. If we accept that film chemistry, photo lab procedures, video screen colour balancing practices, and digital cameras, in general, were originally developed with a global assumption of Whiteness, we must also accept that our faith in the technology itself is an issue worthy of questioning. As is how the photographic record of the last 200 years has overwhelmingly excluded people of colour in their particularity as subjects and by extension human beings. By contrast, photography has been consistently used to burnish the self-image of Whites in the conceptualisation of their mattering. Therefore, it is not enough to recognise the limitations of the photographic medium and its historical links with racist and colonialist structures and regimes. Rather we must interrogate the contemporary frameworks of visuality that perpetuate Whiteness as a universal standard now and into the future, not by expanding the parameters of visual storytelling, but by questioning the veracity of the stories themselves, whilst at the same time, being prepared to divest from the logic of their very making. Photography represents not only a very particular sort of objectification of what has passed before it but also a type of cultural dispossession that in many ways is ongoing because of its propensity to be grasped as ‘universal matter’ or as something that is an article of ‘plain sight.’ Nothing could be further from the truth and yet it is accepted that when a photograph is taken that you move it out of context and that this shift of its presence into memoriam is a laudatory act of creative extractivism. The colonial rooting of such an activity is seldom touched upon, nor its indebtedness to a logic of forced inertia of certain types of being in the world. It is part and parcel of an ascendant Atlantic world that invests heavily in the power of the imperial state to as Foucault observes ‘make live and let die’ through a series of tactics that involve violent displacement.1 In this sense, photography plays a unique role insofar as it centres its focus on the violent displacement of people from their contexts simultaneous to the violent displacement of objects from their contexts. Photography manages to create a subtle choreography between the two by focusing on bodies as though they have already passed. The objects stand in as cyphers for the nonhuman or dehumanising practices of photographic capture we have come to

212  Conclusion routinely associate with public knowledge. It was, therefore, not so much a case of designating colonised populations, so much as designing them aesthetically so that they fit in a material sense of belonging to an order greater than themselves. All of these subjects and objects faced a task of scrutiny and as Tony Bennett, Ben Dibley, and Rodney Harrison argue, ‘to directive forms of rule in which they were’ progressively ‘denied …the attributes deemed necessary for liberal subject-hood: the capacity to practice a responsibilized freedom.’2 Moreover, the colonisers ‘through similar logics to which their colonial counterparts were subject to’ … ‘the thresholds required for freedom’s rule to be applied.’3 The Purchase of Whiteness From the late nineteenth century to World War I, such governmental initiatives hardened into a form we continue to recognise today. Randal Rogers gives the 1904 example of some 2000 human beings being brought to the Louisiana Purchase Exhibition as human exhibits as evidence of these persons’ use in the demarcation of the line dividing the modern and primitive types of human being thought at this time in history to exist in simultaneity to one another across the globe, but equally how it was commonly accepted that one existed for the visual pleasure and erotic intrigue of the other. The construction of the identity of primitive people in question was arranged not solely as live anthropological displays but perhaps more significantly before the lens as photographic objects. Photography for them marked something of a crossover from enlivened to deaden material, whilst remaining forever performative for the purposes of examination so as to determine matter from manner, the stuff that both held together and discriminated colonial relationships. Cultural translations were organised to move in but one direction of subject towards object. There could only be imitation as the highest form of flattering as the relationship of one sort of being reflected in another’s sorts of doing. Time always lags when arranging this type of regard and this fact is reflected perfectly in the conceptualisation of the 100th anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase by the United States from France in 1803 taking place as ‘universal’ exhibition in 1904, rather than 1903. Why this is so because the exhibition itself was concerned with spatial monopoly as opposed to chronological accuracy. Rogers describes the exhibition as one was built on an unprecedented scale involving was built on an unprecedented scale encompassing ‘1240 acres’ of local land in St. Louis, Missouri and involving the participation of ‘fifty foreign countries… alongside forty-three individual US states, and conducted competitions in 807 separate categories while giving over 33 000 awards of merit.’4 All of that involvement was drawn out over the course of half a year. The twin formations of live performance and technological representation appeared throughout every facet of the exhibition’s design from the centralised Festival Hall, which served as ‘a performance venue that could seat 3000 people under a dome larger than St Peter’s in Rome,’ to the ‘much-touted and only permanent building on site, the Art Palace, containing 135 rooms and displays from twenty nations’ the emphasis was on testing the very limits of display. Every aspect of the event was poised to convey the arrival of an American century where the nation could be said to have presently excelled: ‘Agriculture, Education and Social Economy, Electricity, Forestry, Fish and Game, Horticulture, Liberal Arts, Machinery, Manufactures, Mines and Metallurgy, Transportation and Varied Industries.’5 Rogers notes, ‘significantly, the first Olympic Games to occur in North America took place simultaneously on the grounds of the newly erected Washington University, a site

Conclusion 213 directly adjacent to the fairgrounds which was used extensively as facilities for the expo,’ demonstrating the excellence of the White American body as counterpart to these developments.6 In photography, his achievements had found at ideal legitimating tool, that could ensure that message projected itself outward far and beyond the spatial capacity of the West towards imagining the world as source of boundless productivity complemented by unbridled technology. Photography produced not only documentary evidence of such an understanding, it also determined it through training audiences at the Expo 1904 to engage in colonial practices themselves through encouraging their rental of Brownie cameras from the Kodak pavilion so that each one could make for themselves a work of anthropological spectacle to take home with them for their own private consumption later on. Rogers notes that ‘50,000 rentals’ took place during the course of the ‘Expo,’ the majority to unofficial photographers whose attraction to the new format literally did the work of racializing the bodies they captured, but equally of racializing themselves in the act of representationally manufacturing such objects before them.7 Every frame it could be argued was about reinforcing the new imperial order of the world with America at its head and eyes. Rogers is correct in his observation that ‘many visitors would have seen a photograph for the first time at the universal exposition of 1904’ and that for many this would also become the first opportunity to take a photograph themselves and as such events like this became a sort of training ground for visitors to appreciate their role reinforcing expectations of an order of mankind.8 Here I diverge from Rogers’ argument that the apparent performativity of the ‘primitives’ they delight in photographing is undermined by this this being ‘entirely simulated experience,’ but instead that this actually reifies the ‘normative expectations of documentary and portraiture’ to the degree that White audiences already would have been aware that existing ‘narratives of quiet passivity and totalizing power’ were bogus.9 As such, what undermines their ‘representational purity in scientific and aesthetic terms’ is not the primitive body, but rather the imperial one.10 This is to say that it these people that grasp most acutely that power itself is this entirely simulated experience and, therefore, can only be maintained on the basis of theft and falsification of evidence. Photography, as a technology, performs that role brilliantly, because its commitment is not the photographer’s intention but to the limits of that intention to penetrate meaning. Photography is an expressive form, but that expression is one premised on make-believe. Photographic staging is never a secret from the time of the medium’s inception; what is secreted over time, however, is an acknowledgement of the labour involved in formulating these positions of progress and degeneration and how these narratives much be reproduced again and again not for the sake of knowledge or truth, but rather of mutually reinforcing gratification of a known order. Photography emerges in this period as its own asset class capable of establishing a sense of a world culture and in this sense allowing the world itself to engage with ‘what Foucault has termed a “transactional reality”, mediating the interface between the governed and the governing.’11 As it matures as an aesthetic and scientific form, photography plays a critical role in setting the foundations for the emergence of ‘different sociomaterial networks: those connecting them to the public spheres of the major metropolitan powers, those linking them to the institutions and practices of colonial administration, and those comprising the relations between museum, field and university.’12 Photography acts midwife to ‘the contemporary disposition toward foreignness, the fascination and repulsion that drive the colonial apparatus.’13 The apparatus itself would shift from ‘the murderous wars that marked the third quarter of the nineteenth century domestically

214  Conclusion and those that continued internationally into the beginning of the twentieth century’ towards a governmental policy of ‘benevolent assimilation’ that ‘was viewed as a means to accomplish the subjugation of Native peoples on American soil and its protectorates by transforming “primitive” into “civilized” people through education and labour.’14 Individuals and groups at this time would have been scouted for display as people’s exotic and primitive for the purposes of spectacle. They would produce as well as perform forms of human alterity, functioning as experimental subjects on which the rationale of the new anthropology laboratories was based. Illustrating the taxonomical system as living entity allowed Whiteness to be apprehended as the penultimate form of human being from which the others might theoretically progress. Exhibition Practice Dan Hicks makes a compelling case for how colonial ‘expeditions’ of the eighteenth century made their way into colonial ‘exhibitions’ in the mid-to-late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. That translation from one to the other traces a direct path ‘from the late 18th-century ideology of racial slavery to the early 20th-century militarist practice of state racism. By the outbreak of World War I, the sheer scale of slaughter across three decades of punitive expeditions had been given an afterlife in the form of exhibitions in every anthropological museum in Europe – an afterlife to the particular form of violent race thinking that accompanied the nascent global capitalism.’15 What Hicks is proposing here essentially is that what we accept today as a ‘universal,’ ‘global,’ or ‘world culture’ has its roots in the transition from formally administered state-sponsored colonialism to corporate colonialism reinforced by private militias bent on extracting cultural objects and peoples as a means of commercial rule. The idea that this becomes a source of entertainment is part of what Ann Laura Stoler calls not the ‘ruins’ of empire, but ongoing structures of ‘ruination.’ Stoler cautions us to assume that the current climate of imperial politics is one that afford ‘compassion and humanitarianism’ to its chosen populations, in some formation that would ‘make for “empire-lite”’compared with their predecessors.16 This development should rather acknowledge that all along such novel formations of colonialism have without exception ‘tracked the emergence of the U.S. “surveillance state” as one forged on the experimental terrain of counterinsurgency projects in the early-twentieth- century colonial Philippines; they have demonstrated that “empires of intelligence” have provided the architecture of British imperial pursuits throughout the Middle East and French empire’s “structural imperative” for militarized terror in North Africa,’ and for this reason, we have no evidence that they represent anything like a wide divergence from past practices.17 That being said, Stoler’s argument that we should privilege ‘the concept of imperial formation rather than empire’ so as to better recognise these as ‘relations of force’ makes it difficult to grapple with the way a notion of fixed sovereignty reckons itself within photographic practices. On one level it is evident that allocations and appropriations change the way we perceive racialised images over time. However, at another level, their fixity legislates against such revisionism. They are not there to equal the plain of opportunity, install commensurate dignities, or confer equal rights. Rather, their labour and the value afforded to it derives from their ability to function as scalable technologies of imperial rule that can act as both universal properties and function at the most intimate levels of assimilation. In this way, it becomes a very tangible form of tracking strategies of domination.

Conclusion 215 What is so fascinating about Stoler’s privileging of formation over form is that it corresponds to an understanding about the brittleness and fragility of power without compromising an acceptance of its agility and suppleness to figure into the past as well as the future in our accounting of the weight it applies to the subtle implementation of ordinary life. The force of destruction may in fact be most potent at the moment it compromises our sensibilities and makes us believe in photographic imagery as something that wholly supersedes ‘dead matter’ and as something that has the capability to enforce ‘appropriations, neglect, and strategic and active positioning within the politics of the present.’18 The dematerialisation of photography has consequences for the future, precisely because as such it takes on the capacity to invert the multiple legacies of empire, causing them to re-enliven former sites of ruination so that they can once again be harvested for economic value and capitalize based on the allure of ‘restored people, things, and their ostensibly uniting essences.’19 This is amongst the worst sort of revivalist activity of racialised classification, and yet it is hardly recognised as such because it is valorised in terms of being a means of restoring authenticity to the categories of being. Such activity insists on distinguishing ‘Culture from cultures’ and, therefore, should be looked upon as contributing forces to the preponderance of neocolonial formations, we are witnessing proliferate in this second decade of the twenty-first century as post-digital visual technology advances into territories of virtual, extended, mixed, and augmented realities.20 Such enterprises, according to Stoler, replay ‘the “salvage” rescue operation that European empires claimed as their expert knowledge and benevolent task. Napoleon took with him to Egypt more archaeologists and “rubble seekers” than surgeons and surveyors. Nineteenth-century colonials in the Netherlands Indies participated in Europe’s obsession with visiting Hindu ruins, in pursuit of cultural capital on their days off.’21 Oculus Quest does all this and more as a proxy for participant observation and, at the same time, depoliticises displacement via technological disembodiment. The idea that anyone can conceivably use this technology perpetuates ‘an erasure of differential exposure to colonial and racial regimes of im/ mobility.’22 Virtual Coloniality Moe Suzuki maintains that their overriding ‘logic of inclusion ultimately affirms the colonial and racial hierarchy of humanity as they leave unquestioned the already colonial and racial nature of “the human.”’23 The viewer, in this case, is assumed to be White, or rather it is assumed that in using this technology, they are temporarily becoming White to the extent that their vision is trained on seeing Black people as curious or suspect within a world view that maintains itself on a colonial, racial classification. Here, the assumption of mobility becomes synonymous with this assumption of Whiteness. Capitalism for its part must exceed the former limits of colonialism, and the nation-state system, in order to subsequently produce unequally mobile subjects fit for the contours of an increasingly mixed project of reality in our times. The prevailing colonial logic presently founds itself on the condition of mobility; thus, ‘where’ do you want to go today has received an upgrade to ‘how’ do you want to go today, shifting from a focus on location to one of access. Access becomes the most powerful passport in a world where borders are increasingly virtual, and the limits of humanity itself become subject to versions and upgrades according to status. The neoliberal commons, like its predecessor liberal formation, has assumed a project of building a world of exclusions, designed according to space and relationality where by

216  Conclusion implication one can either seek pleasure in the histories presented as features of likeness to themselves or displeasure in the structures of violence presented as features of dissimilarity to others. Both are experiences affected and inflected by imperial nostalgia and the ways in which it ‘plays through and sells sojourns among colonial ruins’ as though imperial debris deposits in the disabled, racialized spaces of colonial histories past and present, also haunt our future projections of them.24 Here, the imperial nexus can absorb not only formations but also representations of them and, in turn, gives us an understanding about how certain lives are wasted in the sense of an activity; being ruined and transformed into ruins before the path of humanity opens itself broadly to us. It narrows, similarly, to the point at which we forget that the creation of reality platforms relies heavily on element and aesthetic characteristics of former colonial formations and takes their reference points from older forms of colonial architecture. The nature of that architecture shares in common with its post-digital counterpart a certain characteristic of dematerialisation. As Nicholas Mizroeff notes, ‘visualizing is a task first defined by eighteenth-century military theorists. Once the battlefield became too extensive and complex for any one person to physically see, the general’s task was to visualize it by means of his imagination, supplied with ideas, images, and intuition from his staff and troops.’25A visualising imagination was the organising principle of ‘first, the Empire of nineteenth-century … then the West of the Cold War, and now the Market. These visualisings were, of course, Western. They implicated and involved those regions of the world, the majority, that were affected by Western imperialism and plantation slavery. The technologies of visuality are, then, only understood from the place of the “South” where they are practiced, looking back, as it were, at the global North from whence they came.’26 Mirzoeff reflects back upon himself here from his earlier work, The Right to Look, where he suggests that the slave in his bondage becomes the obverse of the map in its freedom and that the order of things thus far hasn’t changed.27 ‘For if the Anthropocene cannot visualize itself, no more can the market or empire, and yet the “authority” of both can be felt across the world.’28 The observe of this statement is that for if the slave cannot help but be visualised, more so can the human and the land imagine themselves, and thus, ‘the superiority’ of both can be felt across the world. The slave, in this way, is imagined as being a part of natural history, with the clear understanding that nature is a thing to be subdued, drawn over and cultivated according to needs that exceed it. Similar to the ways lines are drawn on a map, ‘the chains of slavery had become an electrifying means of liberation’ whose taking up or laying down overlaid an elaborate the framework of ‘corporal and political power’ that allows the West to have a monopoly on what is perceived as reality as compared its competitors on Earth.29 Simply put it is because the West witnesses itself as the map and its relationship to others measured by distance; first from the ship, then from the aeroplane, and finally from the satellite. In each of these derivations what remains a single constant is that this perspective is always maintained spatially as a practical means of domination and surveillance. The constancy of space held between the metropole and the periphery is fatally comprised in World War I when colonial war comes into the territory of Europe. Distance, ‘far from being abandoned, … was intensified by bringing colonial techniques to bear on the metropole and the aestheticization of war, a merger of formerly distinct operations of visuality under the pressure of intensification.’30 War became a civilian occupation and as such it was impossible to maintain the distance between colonizer and colonised and, thus, racialisation between the primary source of distanciation in everyday life.

Conclusion 217 New Hegemonies The idea that African Blackness itself acts as a peripheral cypher to the centrality of the Whiteness of the European metropole is compromised by the new geographies of modernism and then subsequently postmodernism. In the current era of neoliberalism, this takes on an even more ambiguous sense of confluence as the human considers its next iteration as a post-human extra-terrestrial entity capable of something beyond even global reach its orientation beyond the duality of Black and White, east and west, inner and outer space. This version of humanity no longer insists upon an engagement with historical specificity and geographic coordination, but rather in its contemporary form concerns itself with the power to shift material realities in ways that ultimately compromise the value of other previous forms of domination to include within itself a sense of timelessness. In a previous instance, such a lack of temporality was associated with primitive societies. In-line with this change, Blackness, once exclusively the purview of denigration, is now rising to the level of national recognition, as though Africa is a country whose counterpart nation is Europe. In a world where knowing whose tribe one belongs to is increasingly relevant for the purposes of extractive capitalism, the profound complexity of history gives way to the apparent simplicity of identity. Knowing where it is you come from can help to better implicate you within the globe’s novel forms of homogeneity. Visual culture, at the outset of the century, concerns itself not with the engagement of individuals but rather audiences, who will be happy to collectively project their vision of the future onto others. The politics of belonging that emerge at the same moment of the late 1990s and early 2000s forced a globally rapt audience to desire to see themselves as “Friends”. All of these friends, however, appear to be White or at least representative of the institutionalised values of Whiteness. And so it will begin again in that through the commercial practices of global media synergy meaning is reinforced by the desire to project universal values upon those who fall outside of that virtuous circle of representation. In the past decade, that approach has fundamentally changed and the population of the world that exists both in and outside of the confines of Europe’s former colonies were increasingly represented through global media outputs. In these same years, it was also demonstrated to them that there is no platform of representation that lies beyond the confines of contemporary late-capitalism that is not ultimately subject to appropriation, and therefore, within the global system of neoliberal capital, it is fundamental to their survival to gain recognition and inclusion within it. Neoliberal politics is propagated not only by means of state-sanctioned violence, as was its liberal iteration. In its current formation, it achieves its supremacy through more subtle means that involve the pledge to secure others their modicum of civilisation in exchange for the capitulation to certain understandings of reality. Those who can find ways to co-operate with White settlercolonialism in its new remote post-digital guise are given roles of leadership within new schemes of global governance. Whilst these are ostensibly constructed by the United States, their deployment globally accepts no national boundaries. They are constituted this way not merely to obscure the violent racialised geopolitical relationships held between Europe and Africa in centuries past and in the present but at a more profound level are there to reinforce the current global regime adherence to a neoliberal capitalist structure that no longer recognises the sovereignty of nations but rather is committed to an ideological projection of them that joins them all as one. Within such an apparatus what matters most is to be respected by settler-colonial institutions as an equal partner in world governance, rather

218  Conclusion than challenging the imperialistic structures that assume their consequence. Here is what replaces the mere recognition of racialised difference, with a mandate of inclusion for ‘all species’ amongst these projections of a ‘one world’ alliance. In this we find ourselves once more in the territory of exceptionalism, isolation, and individualism that brings together the White ‘man’ of the settler colonialism with the Black ‘spectre’ of the slave whose triangulated form through a covalent material and mythological Middle Passage proves to generations to come that a desire for another world outside of the coordinates of Whiteness is impossible to reasonably plot. The connection to Western corporations in this most recognisable of passages continues to make it so. People of colour are there to complete a picture of civilisation that continues to rely on corruption and exploitation as the proof of further work to needing to be done by White elites to bring everyone up to speed. Within such ‘develop’ initiatives Africans may feature, but they do not figure in and of themselves as makers of meaning beyond the scope of appropriation into Western systems of value. Science and technology are products brought into the continent in exchange for the bodies brought out from it, or so the logic goes that reinforces the marginalisation of the consciousness and communication of whole classes of people. Africa resides in a White(end) imagination as a violent and contentious continent that had made no progress as a civilisation before being ‘discovered’ by White men clever enough to exploit its abundant mineral resources. As a continent, it is perceived to be run by hereditary feudalist elites battling one another for dominance through glorified tribal structures that over all these centuries have developed no more sophisticated means of transferring power than through paramilitary combat or coup d’etat. It is believed that Africa’s people lack the fundamental ability to innovate for themselves and, therefore, must rely on others to step in and take over the business of advancement. Africa, when it is portrayed, is pictured place of disease, famine, death and war, or by contrast as nature in its Edenic state with wild animals roaming freely within this last bastion of paradise on Earth. In both instances, ‘it is this Africa—or, rather, “Africa”—[that] is a creation of a white world and the literary, academic, cinematic, and political mechanisms that it used to give mythology the credibility of truth,’ that in the map of the world, there is one single continent that is “black” and one single race of “black” people tracing their origin back to it.31 It was the cradle of civilisation implying a place of infancy versus majority, which resided elsewhere. This fantasy of Africa as a place bereft of development was politically useful in situating Europe as the elder of civilisation. This schematic arrangement of advancement ‘found expression in the highest echelons of Western thought, and took on the contours of truth. In 1753, the Scottish philosopher David Hume wrote, “I am apt to suspect the Negroes, and all other species of men . . . to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was any civilized nation of any complexion other than white.”’32 This suggests the imperial drive towards imaginary advancement was not only a militaristic phenomenon but equally also a taxonomic one. ‘Two centuries later, the British historian Hugh TrevorRoper wrote, “Perhaps, in the future, there will be some African history to teach. But at present there is none, or very little: there is only the history of the Europeans in Africa.”’33 Race is a problem similarly of classificatory exclusion; there are simply no examples, no evidence to draw from. And so it is that we return to the problem of daguerreotype as a ‘documentary’ technology that at once helps to reproduce African Blackness and White Englishness as mutually exclusive. At the same time, it allows Blackness to be associated with a deviancy from Whiteness via representations of White people wearing black

Conclusion 219 clothing and Black people wearing animal skins. That the categories of human, animal, and savage conclude towards the encoding of Blackness as fundamentally exceptional before the camera lens helps explain why the visual technology related to it apparently fails. Whilst much has been made of the fact photographic film was engineered by White technicians and optimised for the imagistic rendering of White skin. More so, it was also processing standards that resulted in images that left dark-skinned subjects distorted or rendered them invisible, shadowed, or darkened against light contrasting backgrounds. And yet, little has been said about the intentionality of such work to normative Whiteness and suggest a superior adaptivity to the camera for White subjects as compared to Black ones. The charge that ‘we’ need ‘“teach the camera” to see black skin’ cannot account for photography’s liminal status nor admit that the racialised associations are built within it at every level, are comprised from elements of European culture, that rely on ‘consuming the exotic,’ and thus by extension, interiorising Blackness again and again and again in such a way as to obliterate its accurate recognition.34 The objective of photography is fundamentally arranged not to portray Black lives, nor to provide them with a narrative backing so they too can entire into the index of history in a way equivalent to Whites, but rather into reinforce a sense distortion into the frame so that their ‘visualisation’ is always in some way referential to Whiteness. Ironically, the specific work of ‘color correction’ functions ‘as an integral yet disaggregated part of the process’ to settle the issue of racialised Blackness as though it were a problem.35 Magazines, newspapers, and exhibitions organised the modern colonial movement of Europe into the Africa continent much as any political or military bodies existing at the time, and thus, photography’s appearance there did not take place in cultural a vacuum but rather was imbued with the character of imperialistic projection from its inception as form. Robert Heynens speaks to the fact that from the very beginning, ‘photography played a dual role; on the one hand teaching [European] audiences and inducting them into the colonial project, and on the other serving as an invitation to those audiences to occupy [one’s] own subject position as colonial master, one guaranteed in turn by photography’s scientific objectivity’ couched as also playing the part of the ‘helpful servant’ to the advancement of Western civilisation.36 In light of the movement to make Black Lives Matter through the rapid increase in Black representation in areas of culture such as photography, film, fashion, and advertising following on from the public murder of George Floyd in America in 2020, it is imperative to appreciate that so much of that work came out of an American colonial context but was scarcely recognised as the time as a social justice movement that had to understood primarily in these domestic political terms, most notably in shaping the classed, gendered, and racialised dynamics of degeneration, regeneration, and the failure of America to imagine of itself as a White minority, multi-ethnic democracy.37 There indeed is no America without a colonial visual culture that is organised around an admission of African slavery as its foundation, alongside Native American genocide. It is one, therefore, rooted in White supremacy as a source of postcolonial national identity with the haunting spectre of racial degeneration creating its shadow self from which it achieves definition. Mass commercial culture becomes the remedy as it promises to neutralise the threat of a broader degenerative trend within society through the pretence that it now understands and embraces ‘diversity’ as economic value that will allow America to remain the world’s cultural hegemon through its limited endorsement. All of this is steeped in narratives of American ‘benevolence and civilisational progress’ in understanding difference wherein these media play a crucial role in ‘catalogue and interpret bodily meaning’ through photographic practices, ‘rooted in heavily masculinised and racialised

220  Conclusion scientific and civilisational discourses,’ that continue to promote an appreciation of Blackness as synonymous with exoticism in exhibitions and publications put out by these neoliberal commercial enterprises.38 In so many of these photographic productions, ‘we find attempts to appropriate, discipline, and mobilise’ messaging having to do with racial equality that in their own ways provided the medium for the visualisation of neocolonial space.39 The malady that is Black life can be redressed through the benevolent interests of Whites willing to include the latter in their signifying practices. What is not touched upon are the degenerative aspects of such apparent benevolence because the conditions for such ill-treatment were socially constituted, under capitalism and imperialism that enabled new forms of exploitation and ideological production that led directly to this specific instance of police violence. The endlessly repeated images of George Floyd as African American man curled up, virtually lifeless dying before us, do not join up with post-mortem images the same man is photographed standing erect and healthy, a good father, and an upstanding member of his community, simply because the regeneration of his public image is orchestrated at the hands of ‘interested’ Whites who profess to believe that Black Lives Matter, making the movement itself seem for a brief period to be socially as well commercial viable. The African American body here is a space of inflection, but one subject to the concentration span of White attention. The regeneration of this man thus stands in for a broader regeneration of a White American society, which now desires once again to witness the comprised African American body as source material for its neocolonial redemption, not just of the nation, but the wider world that will seek to emulate what it has done to be more accepting of difference and to elevate the representation of misunderstood others ‘like’ George Floyd that had been previously overlooked for in their heroic value. Such is the structure of neocolonial cultures, that is easy to forget that Whiteness is ubiquitous, evident in everything and yet seldom figured; we all recall the body of George Floyd, but not the physical appearance of the White man who murdered him, Derek Chauvin. By being put on display as a daddy and a hero, George Floyd is domesticated and made intelligible to White audiences. In the many works focused on recollecting, photographing, exhibiting, and recreating the scene of the murder of George Floyd, neocolonial cultures work through the medium of photography to re-appropriate the body and lifestyle of these individuals in ways that reinforce rather than compromise long existing ideas of primitivity and civilisation as well as the excitement and anxiety surrounding their potential joining. The current emergence of an Afro-European imaginary as a neocolonial formation functions not as a break with this lineage, but as an extension of it built to showcase the cosmopolitanism not of Black diasporic bodies, but of the White elites’ ‘emerging’ interest in absorbing them into existing categories of value within the neocolonial consumerist culture of the global exhibition market. The very idea that this identity is presented as a representational novelty again repeats the formation of African history and culture as demonstrated from a European and presumably White perspective that ultimately valorises it in curious likeness to itself.

Notes 1 Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976 (New York: St Martins Press, 2003), 241. 2 Tony Bennett, Ben Dibley, and Rodney Harrison. “Introduction: Anthropology, Collecting and Colonial Governmentalities.” History and Anthropology 25, no. 2 (2014): 137–149 at 140.

Conclusion 221 3 Bennett et al, “Introduction: Anthropology, Collecting and Colonial Governmentalities,” 140. 4 Randal Rogers, “Colonial Imitation and Racial Insubordination: Photography at the Louisiana Purchase Exhibition of 1904.” History of Photography 32, no. 4 (2008): 347–367 at 349. 5 Rogers, “Colonial Imitation and Racial Insubordination,” 349. 6 Ibid., 349. 7 Ibid., 356. 8 Ibid., 358. 9 Ibid., 358. 10 Ibid., 359. 11 Bennett et al, “Introduction: Anthropology, Collecting and Colonial Governmentalities,” 141. 12 Ibid., 142. 13 Ibid., 347. 14 Ibid., 352. 15 Dan Hicks, The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution (London: Pluto Press, 2021), 50. 16 Ann Laura Stoler, “Introduction: ‘The Rot Remains’: From Ruins to Ruination.” In Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 4. 17 Stoler, “Introduction: ‘The Rot Remains,’” 4. 18 Ibid. 14. 19 Ibid., 14. 20 Ibid., 15. 21 Ibid., 15. 22 Moe Suzuki, “The Limits of Humanisation: ‘ideal’ Figures of the Refugee and Depoliticisation of Displacement in Virtual Reality Film Clouds Over Sidra.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 25, no. 5 (2022): 1267. 23 Suzuki, “The limits of humanisation,” 1267. 24 Stoler, “Introduction,” 15–16. 25 Nicholas Mirzoeff, “Visualizing the Anthropocene.” Public Culture 26, no. 2 (April 2014): 216. 26 Mirzoeff, “Visualizing the Anthropocene,” 216–217. 27 Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 49. 28 Mirzoeff, “Visualizing the Anthropocene,” 218. 29 Mirzoeff, The Right to Look, 106. 30 Ibid., 17. 31 Jelani Cobb, “Black Panther” and the Invention of “Africa,” The New Yorker, February 18, 2018. 32 Cobb, “Black Panther”. 33 Ibid. 34 Lily Cho, “Darkroom Material: Race and the Chromogenic Print Process.” Postmodern Culture 28, no. 2.1 (2018), n.p. 35 Cho, “Darkroom Material.” 36 Robert Heynen, “From Science to Fashion: Photography and the Production of a Surrogate Colony in Weimar Germany.” History of Photography 40, no. 2 (2016): 168. 37 Heynen, “From Science to Fashion,” 169. 38 Ibid, 170. 39 Ibid., 170.

Bibliography Cho, Lily. “Darkroom Material: Race and the Chromogenic Print Process.” Postmodern Culture 28, no. 2.1 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1353/pmc.2018.0010. https://link.ezproxy.neu.edu/login? url=https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/darkroom-material-race-chromogenic-printprocess/docview/2557803329/se-2. Cobb, Jelani. “Black Panther” and the Invention of “Africa,” The New Yorker, February 18, 2018. https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/black-panther-and-the-invention-of-africa.

222  Conclusion Bennett, Tony, Ben Dibley and Rodney Harrison. “Introduction: Anthropology, Collecting and Colonial Governmentalities.” History and Anthropology 25, no. 2 (2014): 137–149. https://doi. org/10.1080/02757206.2014.882838. Foucault, Michel. “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976. New York: St Martins Press, 2003. Heynen, Robert. “From Science to Fashion: Photography and the Production of a Surrogate Colony in Weimar Germany.” History of Photography 40, no. 2 (2016): 167–192. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/03087298.2016.1159395. Hicks, Dan. The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution. London: Pluto Press, 2021. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. Duke University Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/northeastern-ebooks/ detail.action?docID=1172318. ———. “Visualizing the Anthropocene.” Public Culture 26, no. 2 (2014): 213–232. https://doi. org//10.1215/08992363-2392039 Rogers, Randal. “Colonial Imitation and Racial Insubordination: Photography at the Louisiana Purchase Exhibition of 1904.” History of Photography 32, no. 4 (2008): 347–367. https://doi. org/10.1080/03087290802316239. Stoler, Ann Laura. “Introduction: ‘The Rot Remains’: From Ruins to Ruination.” In Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination, 1–36. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013. Accessed October 5, 2022. ProQuest Ebook Central. Suzuki, Moe. “The Limits of Humanisation: ‘ideal’ Figures of the Refugee and Depoliticisation of Displacement in Virtual Reality Film Clouds Over Sidra.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 25, no. 5 (2022): 1266–1285, https://doi.org/10.1177/13675494221076542.

Index

Page numbers in italics refer to figures. abolitionists: fugitive slaves and 100–104; see also Douglass, Frederick; Jackson, Francis; Washington, Augustus, in Liberia Ackroyd, Peter 87 Acland, Henry Wentworth 159, 160 Adams, Chanelle 2 Africa: Brazil: newly arrived slaves from 75–6, 77; colonialism 134, 137, 138, 199– 201, 202–4; polygenism debate 66, 67; population 200, 206; repatriation of freed slaves 56, 66–7, 75, 87–8 (see also Washington, Augustus, in Liberia) African Americans see Black/African Americans; Civil War; slavery and White scientific voyeurism African Blackness 217, 218–19 Agassiz, Louis 62–3, 65–8, 71–2, 74–8, 109–10 Álvarez, Paula V. 182 American Colonial/Colonization Society, 126–39, 143 American Indians see Native Americans Andrade, Ines 84 Anthropocene and digital ecologies: Blue planet, White marble 197–9, 204; colonised Earth 201–4; desolution of Big Blue 192–5; end of history 193–5; Malthusian Africa 199–201; neocons and protowebs 189–92; White digital stock photography 195–7 Apollo mission: image of Earth 197–9, 204 architecture and interior design: Eameses house 176–8, 180–81 Arctic exploration 109–11; Arctic body 113– 15; White time 113; see also Franklin, Sir John (Arctic expedition) Arrivé, Mathilde 35, 36 artefactual contrivance: Native Americans 26–30, 32

artificial intelligence (AI) 3 Ashcroft, Bill 156–7 Attenborough, David 204–5 Azoulay, Ariella 5 Baldwin, Kate A. 170–72 Baldwin, Kristilyn 49 Bartlett, Djurdja 178–9 Battle of Bull Run 50 BBC: Life on Earth series 204 Bennett, T. et al. 212 Benton, Thomas Hart 83 Beyan, Amos J. 135 Bieder, Robert E. 64 The Birth of a Nation (Griffiths) 55–6, 58–9 Bishop, Ryan 173 Black/African Americans: Black Lives Matter movement 219, 220; and US ideal of universalism 171–2, 174–5, 180, 183; see also Civil War; slavery and White scientific voyeurism Bland, Lucy 156 Brady, Mathew 42, 45–8, 49, 50, 53–5, 58, 81, 83–4, 85; Illustrious Americans 45, 47, 82, 92, 103, 104 Brazil 74–7 Britain/British colonialism: Africa 134, 137, 138, 199–201, 202–4; Arctic see Arctic exploration; Franklin, Sir John (Arctic expedition); Brexit 121, 122; Civil War and emancipation of slaves 43, 45, 56, 57; Frederick Douglass in 85–100, 101, 102–3; Great Exhibition (1851) 45, 58, 81, 100–104, 181; origin of Boston elite 63, 67, 133; Sierra Leone 134, 137, 138; The World of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson (multimedia touring exhibition) 183–4; see also Carroll, Lewis (Charles Dodgson) and imperial eroticisation of childhood

224 Index Brown, John 128–9, 130 Brown, William W. 101–3 Buckland, William 109 Buffum, James N. 95–7, 98 Bulkeley, Eliphalet A. 128, 133 Burrowes, Carl P. 136 cabinet cards 21, 97 Calhoun, John C. 82–4 ‘Cannibal Club’, London Anthropological Society 155–6, 157 cannibalism: Franklin expedition 113, 117, 118, 119, 121 Carlisle Indian School (Indian boarding school system) 20–23, 24, 25, 27, 28, 31 Carroll, Lewis (Charles Dodgson) and imperial eroticisation of childhood 149–50; act of looking 150–57; documenting the turn 161–5; origin of photographer 158–61; perversities of mind 157–8 cartes de visites 51, 53, 97 Cary, Thomas G. 62, 63 Cary (Agassiz), Elizabeth C. 63, 75, 76, 110 Cave, S. and Dihal, K. 3 Chaplin, J. E. and Bashford, A. 200 The Charter Oak (newspaper) 127–8 childhood see Carroll, Lewis (Charles Dodgson) and imperial eroticisation of childhood Choate, John N. 21, 22, 25 Christ Church Anatomical Museum 159–60 Christianity: American Colonization Society 138; Church of Scotland 95; US norm 175 Civil War 42–7; African American soldiers 50–52, 56; The Birth of a Nation and birth of mythical Whiteness 55–6; and Brazil 74–5; documentation of suffering 52–5; imperial settlement 57–9; London Anthropological Society 157; measurement and classification of soldiers 76; racialisation of battle line 48–55; staging ground 47–8 Clay, Henry 45, 46, 103–4 coercive salvage: Native American 30–37 Cold War: Apollo mission: image of Earth 197–9, 204; see also material agency and Cold War aesthetics Collins, John 63–4 Colomina, Beatriz 173, 178, 179, 180 colonialism see Anthropocene and digital ecologies; Britain/British colonialism; imperialism; Washington, Augustus, in Liberia; Whiteness and photography Combe, George 85–6

commercial exploitation 210–11, 214, 217, 220–21; freed slaves 96–7; Native Americans 21–2, 23, 32, 33–5, 36–7 Conn, Steven 17, 18 consumer capitalism see material agency and Cold War aesthetics Cork Examiner 89, 91, 96 Craciun, Adriana 113 Craft, William and Ellen 100, 101–4 Curtis, Edward S. 17–20, 23, 24, 26–7, 29–31, 32–7 D’arcy Wood, Gillian 109 Darwin, Charles/Darwinism 2, 156, 157, 160, 161–2, 181 de Bettencourt, Antonio C. T. 158 The Dead of Antietam (Brady) exhibition 48, 49 Diamond, Dr. Hugh W. 160–61 Dickens, Charles 87–9, 90, 93, 117–19 Dickerson, Vanessa D. 86, 87 Dinius, Marcy J. 69–70, 126 documentation of suffering 52–5 Dodgson, Charles see Carroll, Lewis Dom Pedro II, Emperor of Brazil 74–5, 77 Douglass, Frederick 68–71, 98–9; American perspective 92–6; in Britain 85–100, 101, 102–3 dress: Americo-Liberian middle class 141–3; Liberian natives 139, 140, 143; middle class girls 157, 163; middle class housewife 178–9; military 21, 24, 25; Native Crow 26, 27, 28, 30, 31, 32; Native to ‘modern’ 22, 24, 33; Orientalised 163, 164 Dyer, Richard 1, 2, 3 Eames, Charles and Ray see material agency and Cold War aesthetics Eames Office 173 emotional expression 160–62 end of history 193–5 ethnographic photography 17–18; and scientific racism 19 evolutionary/Darwinian perspective 2–3; childhood and discourse of Empire 156–7; emotional expression 160–62; human and monkey skeletons 159–60 exhibition practice 214–15 facial expressions 160–2 Farmer, William 101 Ferreira Gomes, Maria G. 50, 51–2 Floyd, George 219, 220 Foucault, Michel 202, 211, 213 Franke, Anselm 3

Index  225 Franklin, Benjamin 3–4, 183–4 Franklin, Lady Jane 117, 118, 121 Franklin, Sir John (Arctic expedition) 111–13; exhibition at National Maritime Museum 121–3; imperial remainder as reminder 115–16; previous history 120–1; scene of impossible returns 117–20 Fraterrigo, Elizabeth 183 Fugitive Slave Act (1850) 45, 103–4, 128, 129, 131 fugitive slaves 100–4 Fukuyama, Francis 193–4 Galton, Francis 2, 3 Garrison, William L. 96, 101, 128–9 Gascoigne, Ellie 20 Gates, Henry L. 70 gender: and racial inequality 183; and urban economy 182–3; US and Soviet women 178–9 Gibbes, Dr. Robert W. 67 Gibson, Ann 177 Gidley, Mike 32 Gilmore, Paul 81, 82 Glimpses of the USA (film) 170–6 Global South 74–8 Gonzales-Day, Ken 24 Google 192 Google Earth 201–2 Gralke, Tobias 205 Great Exhibition (1851) 45, 58, 81, 100–4, 181 Griffiths, D. W. 55–6, 58–9 Hall, Rachel 42, 43 Halttunen, Karen 71 Harris, Dianne 175 Hatch, Beatice and Ethel (and family) 153, 157 Hatt, Michael 44 Hefner, Hugh 180, 181–2 Heynen, Robert 219 Hicks, Dan 202, 214 Hume, David 218 IBM 185, 190–2, 193 Illustrious Americans (Brady) 45, 47, 82, 92, 103, 104 imagery as projection: Native Americans 17–19 imperialism: Civil War settlement 57–9; technologies of 43–4, 200–1 information in Cold War era 172–4 Inuit (Esquimaux/Métis) 117, 118–19, 120, 122, 123 Ireland, Douglass in 89, 90–92, 93

Jackson, Francis 93, 99–100 James, Paul 193 Jefferson, Thomas 134, 137, 183–5 Jenkins, Lee 91 Jesionowski, Joyce E. 58 Jury, Sebastian I. A. 170 Kaplan, Amy 55 Kapuscinski, Ryszard 140 Keefe, Thomas E. 134, 136 Kimball Union Academy, New Hampshire 127–8 King, Charles (President of Liberia) 140 Kitchin, Alexandra (Xie) 163, 164 Klein, Naomi 192–3 Kohlt, Franziska E. 158, 160 Lee, Julia S-J. 88–9, 90 Lekan, Thomas M. 197–8 Lester, C. Edwards 82 Liberia see Washington, Augustus, in Liberia Liberian Constitution 134, 136, 140 Liberian Declaration of Independence 144 Liddell, Alice (and family) 149–51, 152, 153, 155, 158, 163 Lincoln, Abraham 50, 56, 57–8, 75, 84, 136 London Anthropological Society’s ‘Cannibal Club’ 155–6, 157 London Geological Society 109 Louisiana Purchase exhibition 212 MacDonald, George (and family) 152–3, 160, 162 MacDuffie, Alan 3 McFeely, William S. 96, 102 McGreevy, Nora 94 McKenna, John 206 Macready, William 88–9 Magness, P.W. and Page, S.N. 57 Marez, Curtis 19–20 Marsh, Ann 163 material agency and Cold War aesthetics 169– 70; appliance of colour 178; colour of Eames house 176–8; colouring in interstellar experience 179–80; sexual design of White space 180–2; show of Whiteness 178–9; vision for New Universal 170–6; white mythology 182–5 Mauro, Hayes P. 20 Medby, I. A. and Dittmer, J. 122, 123 Merrill, Lisa 101 Microsoft 190 militarism 202 military-industrial complex 182 military-industrial-university-entertainment complex 173

226 Index Mills, Brandon 137, 138 Mills, Charles W. 4 Mirzoeff, Nicholas 202, 216 Mitchell, Mary N. 97–8 mixed race individuals (‘mulattoes’): Brazil 74, 75; see also Douglass, Frederick; Washington, Augustus, in Liberia mobile darkrooms 47–8 Moore, Jason W. 36–7 Moran, Michael G. 15 Morgan, Benjamin 113–14, 115 Morgan, James P. 34–5 Morton, Samuel G. 63–6, 69, 85 Moses, A. Dirk 4–5 Murray, Robert P. 136–7 Nakamura, Lisa 190 Native Americans 15–17; artefactual contrivance 26–30, 32; coercive salvage 30–7; imagery as projection 17–19; and indigenous Liberian tribes 140; and Thomas Jefferson 184; skulls 64, 65; virtualising the native subject 19–24 nature conservation 203–6 neocons and protowebs 189–92 new hegemonies 217–20 New York Draft Riots 52–3 Nieland, Justus 169–70 Nixon, Pat 178–9 Nixon, Richard 178 Nowatzki, Robert 102 Nudelman, Franny 51 nudes see pornography/nudes Orcutt, Rev. John 131, 132 Pen d’Orielle, ‘Crazy’ 27–8 Pew Research Center 206 phrenology see skulls/phrenology Playboy 180–2 polygenism debate 66, 67, 156, 157, 160 Poole, Deborah 19 pornography/nudes: slaves 67–8, 71–4; Victorian 155–6; Victorian children 153, 154, 157, 163 power relations: photographer and subject 28–9, 35, 36–7 Pratt, Richard H. 20–1, 23, 30, 31 Preciado, Paul 182 psychiatry 157–8, 160–2 Pullyap, John L. 22–3, 31 racial classification and hierarchy 2–5, 215–16, 218–19; Douglass in Ireland 91–2; digital stock photography 195–7; Liberia 143; Native Americans 35–6;

slavery 43, 44–5; Soviet awareness of US 172, 174–5; see also slavery and White scientific voyeurism Rae, Dr. John 117, 118–19 Rankin, Flora 162 Rejlander, Oscar G. 161–2, 163 Rice, A. J. and Crawford, M. 87 Rico, Monica 16–17 Roberts, Brian 16 Roberts, Joseph J. (President of Liberia) 134, 141, 142, 144 Roberts, Lady Jane 141–2 Rodríguez Balanta, Beatriz E. 76 Rogers, Randall 212–13 Roosevelt, Theodor 32–4, 36 Roth, Christine A. 154–5 Ruskin, John 155, 160 Russell, Alfred (President of Liberia) 135–6 Russwurm, John B. 134–5 Sandler, Martin W. 120–1 Savage, Shari L. 154 Schaumann, Caroline 109–10 Schneider, Jürg 126 Schneider, Suzanne 110 scientific perspective: Arctic 109–10, 113–15; psychiatry 157–8, 160–2; see also Anthropocene and digital ecologies scientific racism 19; see also evolutionary/ Darwinian perspective; racial classification and hierarchy; slavery and White scientific voyeurism Scotland, Douglass in 85–6, 93–5 Scott, Sir Walter 93–4 ‘The Scourged Back’ 53–5 Scruggs, Dalila 141–3 Sekula, Allan 42 sexuality: design of White space 180–2; freed and fugitive slaves 87, 90, 97–9, 102–3; see also Carroll, Lewis (Charles Dodgeson) and imperial eroticisation of childhood; pornography/nudes Shuman, Julius 176 Shumard, Ann M. 132, 133 Shuttleworth, Sally 156 Sierra Leone 134, 137, 138 Sigel, Lisa Z. 155 Sigourney, Lydia 128, 131, 133 Singh, Nikhil P. 3–4 Singh, Yvonne 94–5 Skeffington Lutwidge, Robert W. 157–8, 160 skin color 97–9, 101, 102–3 skulls/phrenology 62–5, 69; examination of Frederick Douglass 85–6; and physiognomy 65–8, 84, 99, 157 Slavery Abolition Act (1833) 94

Index  227 slavery and White scientific voyeurism 62–3; Agassiz’s Global South 74–8; Agassiz’s photographic specimens 65–8; Douglass in likeness 70–1; Douglass’ photographic counteriteration 68–70; Morton’s skulls 63–5, 85; taking pleasure in painful regard of others 71–4 Smith, Shawn M. 129, 130, 131, 132 social media 192–3, 195–6 Solnit, Rebecca 43 Southey, Reginal 158–60 Spicer, Christina 144 Standing Bear, Luther 23–4 Stephens, Gregory 69 stereoscope/stereography 115–16 stock photography 195–7 Stoler, Ann Laura 214–15 Strick, Simon 42 Studio Bambini: ‘Out of Africa’ 193, 199 Supp-Montgomerie, Jenna 44 surveillance capitalism 192–3 Suzuki, Moe 215 Sweeney, Fionnghuala 91–2 Swinburne, Charles 155–6 Swyngedouw, Erik 189 Taylor, Alexander L. 149 technologies: artificial intelligence (AI) 3; Cold War 173; of imperialism 43–4, 200–1; see also Anthropocene and digital ecologies Todd, Rev. John 130 Trachtenberg, Alan 47 Trevor-Roper, Hugh 218 Trodd, Zoe 74 Truth, Sojourner 97, 98–9 Tyler-McGraw, Marie 140–1

Upshaw, Alexander B. 20, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26–30, 31–4 Volpe, Lisa 47, 103–4 Waggoner, Diane 152, 153 Wallen, John 157 Wallis, Brian 66, 67, 68 Washington, Augustus, in Liberia 126–7; arrival and appropriation 131–4; background and crossing 127–30; nation of mixed origin 134–7; proceeding views 130–1; replication of White American society 137–44 wet-plate collodion process 158, 169 White, Laura 162 White House, invitations to 32–4, 57 White Man Runs Him (Crow scout) 31, 32 Whiteness and photography 2–5, 210–14; exhibition practice 214–15; new hegemonies 217–20; virtual coloniality 215–16 Williams, Rev. Samuel 139 Wilson, Krista 177–8 Wilson, Robert 50 Winchester, Simon 158 Witchard, Anne 163 Woolf, Jenny 158 World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) 205–6 The World of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson (multimedia touring exhibition) 183–5 Wright, Henry C. 102, 103–4 Zackodnik, Teresa 96–7 Zamir, Shamoon 27, 28–30, 31 Zealy, Joseph T. 67–8, 70, 71, 74 Zuboff, Shoshana 192