Contact us on (02) 8445 2300
For all customer service and order enquiries

Woodslane Online Catalogues

9781478039075 Academic Inspection Copy

The Afric-American Picture Gallery

William J. Wilson's Speculative Museum of Black Art
Description
Author
Biography
Google
Preview
In The Afric-American Picture Gallery, Britt Rusert examines a work of periodical fiction by educator and activist William J. Wilson called, "Afric-American Picture Gallery," an episodic series of experimental prose and biting satire that was published in 1859. It tells the tale of a flaneur character who takes readers on a virtual tour through an imagined gallery of Black art, long before any such museum existed in the United States. Rusert uses Wilson's series as groundwork to formulate a theory and practice of Black aesthetics and politics, considering the construction of autonomous zones of Black expression and vanguardism within the context of the late Antebellum period. Connecting Wilson's writings to later emergences of the avant-garde and counter-cultural and analyzing ekphrastic methods of vividly describing visual art, Rusert brings a little-circulated piece of writing to the fore as an inflection point in the history of Black publics and imagination.
Britt Rusert is Professor of Afro-American Studies at University of Massachusetts Amherst and Executive Editor of the Massachusetts Review. She is the author of Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture and coeditor of W. E. B. Du Bois's Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America.
Google Preview content