Cultures of Emancipation: Photography, Race, and Modern American Literature

Emancipation, both in aesthetic and political terms, was the declared aim of modernist US authors. 'Cultures of Emancipation' investigates how writers from the 1860s to 1945 (Frederick Douglass, Harold Frederic, Henry James, Gertrude Stein, Jean Toomer, Charles Chesnutt) enlisted photography to set themselves free, politically and artistically. In the face of decisive personal and historical crises such as Abolitionism and the Great Migration, they turned to photography to abolish slavery, obtain equal rights, and refashion themselves as writers of an era that would become dominated by images. Acknowledging that interdisciplinary modernism reaches across the color line, this is the first study to place photography at the center of both black and white modernist literature. Situated at the intersection of literary and visual studies, race studies, and cultural history, it shows how vital photography was to the rise and development of literary modernism - serving as its thematic, structural, and conceptual fulcrum.