Making Sense: Race and Modern Vision Sue Shon A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2015 Reading Committee: Alys Weinbaum, Chair Gillian Harkins Stephanie Smallwood Program Authorized to Offer Degree: English © Copyright 2015 Sue Shon University of Washington Abstract Making Sense: Race and Modern Vision Sue Shon Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Associate Professor Alys Weinbaum Department of English “Making Sense: Race and Modern Vision” explores how race as we know it becomes visually recognizable. It does so by historicizing the perceptual knowledge produced by race and vision and by demonstrating how the relationship between race and vision has come to be regarded as common sensical. In particular the dissertation examines how race has been visually structured by the development of writing practices in the modern transatlantic context. Through the analysis of a wide textual field including fiction, philosophy, and visual art, “Making Sense” traces how race has acquired “visuality” via writing that represents race as self-evidently visible. The central argument is that the practice of writing literally makes sense of race because, tautologically, the visuality of race is represented as existent prior to its discursive presentation. While scholars have offered rich critiques of the role scientific vision has played in defining race (and justifying racial subjection), they have tended to explain the relationship between race and vision as overdetermined. “Making Sense” takes a different approach. It asks how the relationship between race and vision has been generated as common sensical in exploring vision through its historically aesthetic, or, sensorial structure. The story that “Making Sense” tells is narrated across four chapters. The chapters analyze a wide and unusual range of literary, visual, scientific, and philosophical texts that engage in racial discourse, including runaway slave advertisements, Kantian aesthetic philosophy, Darwinian evolutionary theory, turn-of-the-century architectural theories, black modernist fiction, and contemporary visual artwork. This collection of texts, produced in the context of national and global discourses of race, aesthetics, and modernity, is regarded as an archive of common sense vision. “Making Sense” examines how this archive demonstrates and exposes the fundamentally discursive structure and the formalist organization of the visual sense. In tracking the universalizing moves of formalist discourses, “Making Sense” utilizes formal methods, including close reading. This dissertation’s innovation on formal analysis reorients what it means to perform historical scholarship and shows how narrow forms of disciplinary study have produced platitudes about race and vision. Table of Contents List of Images ii Acknowledgments iii Introduction Making Sense: Race and Modern Vision 1 Chapter 1 Making Sense: Runaway Slave Portraiture, Aesthetic Judgment, and the Emergence of Racial Visuality 29 Chapter 2 Race, Taste, and Aesthetic Vision in Darwinian Evolutionary Theory 82 Chapter 3 Racial Formalism: The Aesthetics of Form and Function 118 Chapter 4 Modernism’s Taste 175 Conclusion Uncommon Sense 228 Works Cited 242 ii List of Images Figure 1: Life Magazine, “How to Tell Japs from the Chinese” 27 Figure 2: RedEye Magazine, “Turban Primer” 28 Figure 3: Runaways , installation view 79 Figure 4: Runaways , detail 79 Figure 5: Runaways , detail 80 Figure 6: Runaways , detail 81 Figure 7: Home Insurance Building, Chicago, IL 171 Figure 8: Wainwright Building, St. Louis, MO 171 Figure 9: World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, IL 172 Figure 10: Transportation Building, World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, IL 172 Figure 11: Transportation Building, detail 173 Figure 12: Auditorium Building, Chicago, IL 173 Figure 13: Schlesinger and Mayer Store, Chicago, IL 174 Figure 14: Untitled: (I Remember the Very Day That I Became Colored) 225 Figure 15: Untitled (Passing) 226 Figure 16: Viewer at Glenn Ligon: America exhibition 227 Figure 17: Homage to the Square: Sentinel 238 Figure 18: After-image (simultaneous contrast) exercise 238 Figure 19: Synecdoche 239 Figure 20: Black and White 240 Figure 21: The Triumph of American Painting 241 iii Acknowledgements I owe a great deal to my dissertation committee, Alys Weinbaum, Gillian Harkins, and Stephanie Smallwood. Any measure of rigor, clarity, and risk-taking that might be seen in this dissertation is due to their sincere enthusiasm for and engagement with my work. I owe Alys on so many levels. Her scholarship influenced my graduate studies well before I arrived at the University of Washington. Her exemplary pedagogy has not only helped me become a better writer and scholar but also a better teacher. I thank her most for her generous, attentive, and creative advising. This dissertation would not have been completed without the support of the Alvord Fellowship in the Humanities and the Allan and Mary Kollar Endowed Fellowship from the College of Arts and Sciences. The Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities has supported the project throughout my graduation studies with the Joseph and Yetta Blau Award for Excellence in Research, the Society of Scholars, the American Studies Dissertation Prospectus Fellowship, and the Public Scholarship program. Thanks especially to Kathleen Woodward at the Simpson Center for her encouragement. I am tremendously grateful for the multiple kinds of support that Kathy Mork at the English Graduate Studies office has provided over the years, from the practical to the emotional. This dissertation has developed out of art projects I have been working on for over nearly fifteen years. Thanks to Ruth Benjamin, Nour Jallad, and Emily Schiffer for supporting this project since its inception in multiple forms and media. As I was writing the dissertation, I often recalled Nour’s architectural project that explored nonvisual spaces. I thank Anda Dubinskis, Joshua Mosely, and the late Terry Adkins for their influence on me regarding art making as iv meaning making. I thank Herman Beavers, David Kazanjian, Kymberly Pinder, and James Elkins for helping me develop a language for thinking about art production as knowledge production. I am extremely grateful for the friends who have been with me through the stages of this dissertation and have greatly enriched it. Elizabeth Brown, Gianna Craig, Sunao Fukunaga, Curtis Hisayasu, Elloise Soh Yeun Kim, Caleb Knapp, Matthew Nicdao, Samantha Simon, and Balbir Singh have been my intellectual interlocutors and support system. I am grateful to Megan Hyde for helping me expand and rethink the questions of the dissertation into more experimental modes, especially through our Octavia Butler drawing project, Xenology . I am grateful to Mildred Halbert, Thien-y Le, Jon Cook, John Janda, William McDaniel, Kathryn Kelly, and Jada King for being my greatest advocates. I am most indebted to my parents, Sung H. and Hoe S. Shon, and my sisters, Jean and Lynn. I am thankful that Jean has always happily accompanied and helped me with my various and seemingly random research processes and assignments. Any achievement I have made in my scholarship is due to courage, passion, and sense of curiosity and adventure that my father and mother have instilled in me. Any achievement I have made in life in general is due to their sacrifice and support. 1 Introduction Making Sense: Race and Modern Vision In 2012 seventeen-year-old high school student Trayvon Martin was shot and killed walking home from a neighborhood convenience store. While unarmed, Martin was visually perceived and described by the community watchman who killed him as “a real suspicious” “black male” wearing “a dark hoodie.” 1 It was significant to me that Martin’s death and the conversations and protests that followed were happening concurrently during a stage of my dissertation research in which I was reading hundreds of 18 th and 19 th century North American runaway slave advertisements. These advertisements contain intense descriptions of the visual appearance of runaways, composed for the purpose of capturing them. In these ads I saw the historical emergence of the visual logic of blackness that still makes sense today and explains why Martin was murdered: the presumption that seeing visual appearance is self-evident. From bodily characteristics such as skin color to clothing such as hoodies, visual appearance functions as racial self-evidence. 2 The logic of “visual” self-evidence that the 18 th and 19 th century advertisers used to describe their runaway property is part of a similar logic at work in contemporary racial profiling 1 According to the recording of the call made to the Sanford police by George Zimmerman, Zimmerman reports Martin as a “real suspicious guy” and describes his appearance by describing his clothing, including the “dark hoodie, a gray hoodie.” Zimmerman describes Trayvon as a “black male” after the police asked Zimmerman to identify the race of the suspect. Audio file of Zimmernan’s call posted on “Shooting of Trayvon Martin.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia . Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 19 April 2015. Web. 19 April 2015. 2 Conservative talk show host Geraldo Rivera unwittingly broached the problem of racial visual perception in urging “parents of black and Latino youngsters particularly to not let their children go out wearing hoodies.” While Rivera’s comment was probably made to distinguish and uphold black and Latino