Afric-American Picture Gallery

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.

“Britt Rusert’s focus on the overlooked significance of William J. Wilson’s speculative museum of Black art is a singular, significant contribution to the development of the study of Black aesthetics in the antebellum and postbellum periods. The Afric-American Picture Gallery fundamentally reshapes our understanding of the power of vision and visual culture for American democracy. Rusert’s work is a triumph.”—Sarah Lewis, author of The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America“In this deeply original study, Britt Russert animates William J. Wilson’s radical innovations in 19th-century experimental fiction and visual culture, reminding us how Black literary practice houses radical epistemologies for reordering the social world. As Russert traces Wilson’s trajectory, she crafts a compelling and devastatingly urgent account of the transformative capacities of Black art at moments when looking, creating, and living are under threat.”—Autumn Womack, author of The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880-1930

• Preface viiIntroduction 1Picture Number 1. The Slave Ship 271. “He Thinks He Will Submit”: The Work of Black Art in the Age of Racial Capitalism 322. “Our Essentially Aesthetic or Art-Nature”: Late Antebellum Black Aesthetics 683. “Sung Their Praise to Listening Worlds”: Two Ethiops Communing Across Time and Space 934. Ethiop in the Black Forest: Cruising, Fantasy, Ambivalence 120Conclusion 146Acknowledgments 161Appendix. Ethiop [William J. Wilson], “Afric-American Picture Gallery,” Anglo-African Magazine, February–October 1859 165Notes 207Bibliography 225Index 229