| Contents |
Introduction: Data and the matter of Black life. Undisciplining data ; The social life of racial data ; Racial data, visual revolutions ; The aesthetics of data ; Undisciplining as method ; Overview -- The social survey : the survey spirit. "The survey spirit" : origins, evolution, and the radical operations of the social survey ; "Ugly facts" and (anti)social data : Kelly Miller, the American Negro Academy, and the call for the social survey ; A book to do some good : Kelly Miller, Sutton Griggs, and the emergence of social document fiction ; Faulty surfaces, unruly eyes ; Everywhere and nowhere : the social survey's nongeography -- Photography : looking out. Seeing survival ; Deep black mourning : lynching's (anti)photographic logic ; "Let them see" : photography, performance, and reform ; Looking out : toward a new visual epistemology of survival ; Photographically hesitant : the visual politics of W. E. B. Du Bois's "Jesus Christ in Georgia" -- Film: overexposure. Beyond the frame : overexposure and Zora Hurston's Filmic Practice ; "Drenched in light" ; Recording racial feeling ; Contraband flesh ; Cinematics of Negro expression -- Coda: Racial data's afterlives. |
| Abstract |
"What did the "Negro problem," as it was called at the turn of the twentieth century, look like? Autumn Womack's study examines efforts to visualize Black social life through new technologies and disciplines-from photography and film to statistics-in the decades between 1880 and 1930. Womack describes nothing less than a "racial data revolution," one in which social scientists, reformers, and theorists rendered Black life an inanimate object of inquiry. At the very same time, Black cultural producers staged their own kind of revolution, undisciplining racial data in ways that challenged normative visual regimes and capturing the dynamism of Black social life. Womack focuses on figures like W.E.B DuBois, Kelly Miller, Sutton Griggs, and Zora Neale Hurston, as well as lesser-known editors, social reformers, and performers. She shows how they harnessed media as diverse as the social survey, the novel, the stage, and early motion pictures to reform visual practices and recalibrate the relationship between data and black life"-- Provided by publisher. |
| Bibliography note | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| Genre/form | Criticism, interpretation, etc. |
| Genre/form | History. |
| LCCN | 2021030560 |
| ISBN | 9780226806747 hardcover |
| ISBN | 022680674X hardcover |
| ISBN | 9780226806914 paperback |
| ISBN | 022680691X paperback |
| ISBN | electronic book |
