Ellison, photography, and the origins of invisibility

Blair, Sara

doi:10.1017/ccol0521827817.004

Cited by 2 publications

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“…As visual and literary scholar Sara Blair notes, 'the years from the New Deal to the World War II era [were] a historical moment when the aesthetics of public life were deeply indebted to [these] photographic canons.' 20 Although the photographs appeared to 'document' the 'truth' of the effects of the Great Depression, recovery and the Great Migration, they instead staged and 'churned out images of dispossessed sharecroppers, despairing inner city tenement dwellers, and black dispossession from modernity', making racial and economic 'inferiority' appear 'natural' and biological in the 'reductive typology of the New Deal documentary gaze'. 21 Social and psychological diagnostics and plans for therapeutics emerged from these photographic practices, yet, as scholars of visual studies and race have noted, the imagined transparency of the photograph on which they depended actually invented and trained the US's particular racial gaze, teaching viewers to 'recognise' race and associate it with particular behaviours, modes of dress or living conditions, thus inventing and concretising racial types and stereotypes.…”

Section: Machinic Images: Exteriorising the Racial Interiormentioning

confidence: 99%

Reading the Image of Race: Neurocriminology, Medical Imaging Technologies and Literary Intervention

Andrews¹,

Metzl²

2018

Edinburgh University Press

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On 26 April 2013, the Wall Street Journal published an essay by neurocriminologist Adrian Raine promoting his newest book, The Anatomy of Violence: The Biological Roots of Crime. On the newspaper’s website, an image of a black-and-white brain scan overlaid with handcuffs headed the essay. Clicking ‘play’ turned the image into a video filled with three-dimensional brain illustrations and Raine’s claims that some brains are simply more biologically prone to violence than others. Rejecting what he describes as ‘the dominant model for understanding criminal behaviour in the twentieth century’ – a model based ‘almost exclusively on social and sociological’ explanations – Raine wrote that ‘the genetic basis of criminal behaviour is now well established’ through molecular and behavioural genetics.

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Section: Machinic Images: Exteriorising the Racial Interiormentioning

confidence: 99%

Reading the Image of Race: Neurocriminology, Medical Imaging Technologies and Literary Intervention

Andrews¹,

Metzl²

2018

Edinburgh University Press

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Film in Ralph Ellison’s Three Days Before the Shooting . . .

Yukins¹

2020

Twentieth-Century Literature

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In the posthumously published Three Days before the Shooting . . . (2010), Ralph Ellison’s protagonist spends years as a film actor and filmmaker, and cinematographic effects appear throughout the narrative. Sharply aware of what he called the “enormous myth-making potential of the film form,” Ellison sought in this second novel both to explore the artistic possibilities of film and to expose the dangers of this potent medium. This essay examines three interrelated ways that movies matter to Ellison’s literary experiments. First, it argues that Ellison’s ambivalence about the American movie industry correlates with both his technological savvy and his sociopolitical conservativism in the latter half of his writing career. Second, it shows how Ellison’s fascinations with cinematic effects shape the aesthetics and themes of his unfinished second novel. Finally, the article demonstrates how Ellison’s specific techniques in representing cinematic experience exemplify, ironically, his primary allegiance to literary narrative.

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Ellison, photography, and the origins of invisibility

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

Reading the Image of Race: Neurocriminology, Medical Imaging Technologies and Literary Intervention

Reading the Image of Race: Neurocriminology, Medical Imaging Technologies and Literary Intervention

Film in Ralph Ellison’s Three Days Before the Shooting . . .

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