Visualizing Race in the USA

(3-5 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

Using still photographs, this module will explore how representations of race are produced and circulate in the USA. While our focus will be on Indigenous Americans, African Americans and other racialized groups, we will juxtapose our explorations with assessments of images of Whites and representations of whiteness. The module aims to introduce students to strategies and techniques for exploring and analysing photographs and, more specifically, using the visual record to study and illuminate the racial history of the USA. Viewed here as sites of historical evidence, photographic portraits, family albums, anthropological illustrations, lynching postcards, advertisements, food packaging, and news images, are just some of the photographic images that we will "read" and evaluate to illuminate the history of the USA. We will explore how visual texts can contribute to our understanding of race (often inseparable from nationhood, class, sexuality, identity) in the USA. The invention of photography changed ways of looking and seeing, from the nineteenth century up to the present day. Opening sessions will focus on ways of "reading" visual texts. Students will gain skills and techniques to enable them to recruit photographs as evidence to support work in this as well as future modules. We will start with the birth of photography in the mid-nineteenth century, and end our enquiry in the present day, analysing how images constantly reflect and contribute to constructions of race in American culture. Students will be encouraged to pursue and research their own interests, for both classwork and written assignments. [No previous experience of working with images is necessary. A grounding in American history would be beneficial].