Discovering The Civil War Lecture: "We Look Like Men': Early Photography, War and the Double Bind of Black Manhood, 1862-1877"

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Speaker: Maurice Wallace, Duke University

Between 1862, when African-American men were afforded the first opportunity to enlist, and 1865, the Civil War’s end, photography itself participated in nothing short of the discursive genesis of black manhood in the U.S. imaginary. While military images clearly contributed to the earliest production of a politically consequential discourse on African-American manhood, read another way, the promise of black male assimilability reflected by these images also misleads as they betray an attendant will to check and contain free black bodies. From this angle, the Civil War photographs of black men by professional white operators are an assurance, seen by all, that the worst possible scenario for the economic future of either North or South in the war’s aftermath, black men’s hostile takeover of the ownership of their bodies and labor, is already — so to speak — under control.