scholarly journals Hurricane Katrina Hair: Rereading Nineteenth-Century Commemorative Hair Forms and Fragments Through the “Mourning Portraits” of Loren Schwerd

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-44
Author(s):  
Esther Berry
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Hurricane Katrina ◽  
American Studies ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
Cultural Theory ◽  
Culture Studies ◽  
Fashion Theory ◽  
Local Residents

This article examines sculptural portraits by artist Loren Schwerd. Fashioned from hairpieces discovered in the 2005 wreckage of Hurricane Katrina, they are memorials to the African American victims and evacuees of the storm. Their title, Mourning Portrait, recalls nineteenth-century traditions of mourning and commemorative hairwork in which the locks of living and dead loved ones were manipulated into intricate fashions and home décor. They also incorporate African American hairstyling techniques to interpret the flood-ravaged homes of local residents. Thus, on one hand, they take inspiration from Victorian hairwork traditions, which channeled the talismanic power of hair fragments to evoke absent bodies and memory. On the other hand, they expand and politicize the meanings of commemorative hair forms and fragments toward evoking collective histories, memories, and larger social issues, bringing new urgency and immediacy to fashion-related material cultures of mourning. Exploring the interlinked narratives of Schwerd’s “mourning portraits” and Victorian hairwork, this article uses cultural theory, material culture studies, archival research, fashion theory, and African American studies to broaden critical insights into state-sanctioned racial and class-based violence, and modes of resistance that take shape through aesthetic and representational forms.

Stone Tools

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rodney Harrison
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Stone Tools ◽  
Stone Tool ◽  
History Of Archaeology ◽  
Culture Studies ◽  
Old World ◽  
Material Culture Studies ◽  
History Of

The focus of this article is stone tools. The history of stone tool research is linked integrally to the history of archaeology and the study of the human past, and many of the early developments in archaeology were connected with the study of stone artefacts. The identification of stone tools as objects of prehistoric human manufacture was central to the development of nineteenth-century models of prehistoric change, and especially the Three Age system for Old World prehistory. This article draws on concepts derived from interdisciplinary material culture studies to consider the role of the artefact after being discarded. It suggests that it is impossible to understand the meaning or efficacy of stone tools without understanding their ‘afterlives’ following abandonment. This article aims to complement contemporary metrical studies of the identification of stone tools and the description of their production. A brief history of the stone tools is explained and this concludes the article.

The Robes of Womanhood: Dress and Authenticity among African American Methodist Women in the Nineteenth Century

2004 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pamela E. Klassen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Semiotic System ◽  
American Women ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Political Messages ◽  
Public Speakers

AbstractScholars of American religion are increasingly attentive to material culture as a rich source for the analysis of religious identity and practice that is especially revealing of the relationships among doctrine, bodily comportment, social structures, and innovation. In line with this focus, this article analyses the ways nineteenth-century African American Methodist women turned to dress as a tool to communicate religious and political messages. Though other nineteenth-century Protestants also made use of the communicative powers of dress, African American women did so with a keen awareness of the ways race trumped clothing in the semiotic system of nineteenth-century America. Especially for women entering into public fora as preachers and public speakers, dress could act as a passport to legitimacy in an often hostile setting, but it was not always enough to establish oneself as a Christian lady. Considering the related traditions of plain dress and respectability within the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church, this essay finds that AME women cultivated respectability and plainness within discourses of authenticity that tried—with some ambivalence—to use dress as a marker of the true soul beneath the fabric. Based primarily on the autobiographical and journalistic writings of women such as Jarena Lee, Amanda Berry Smith, Hallie Q. Brown, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, as well as accounts from AME publications such as the Christian Recorder and the Church Review, and other church documents, the essay also draws on the work of historians of African American women and historians of dress and material culture. For nineteenth-century AME women, discourses of authenticity could be both a burden and a resource, but either way they were discourses that were often remarkably critical, both of selfmotivation and of cultural markers of class, race, and gender in a world that made a fetish of whiteness.

scholarly journals American Art Matters: Rethinking Materiality in American Studies

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-84
Author(s):  
Erika Doss
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Technological Process ◽  
Art History ◽  
American Studies ◽  
American Art ◽  
Keynote Lecture ◽  
Culture Studies ◽  
Material Turn ◽  
American Art History

Abstract The “material” turn has steadily gained currency in cultural studies and the humanities, with scholars increasingly attentive to theorising things and examining their presence, power, and meaning in any number of fields and disciplines. This essay stems from the keynote lecture given at the conference MatteReality: Historical Trajectories and Conceptual Futures for Material Culture Studies, held on March 23, 2017, at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Freiburg. Focused in particular on the meaning of materiality in American art history and American Studies today, it opens with an examination of the factors of monetisation and mobility and segues to a consideration of more efficacious ways to assess, theorise, and critique the material turn. Two areas that are particularly relevant in terms of rethinking, and mediating, materiality in American art and American Studies are those of technological process and affect: how things are made and how things make us feel.

Where Is All My Relation?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael A. Chaney
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
African American ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Literary History ◽  
West African ◽  
The Self ◽  
Poetry And Poetics ◽  
The West ◽  
Culture Studies ◽  
Volume Range

This book provides a critical introduction to David Drake, or Dave the Potter, an enslaved pottery maker and author of inscribed verses and couplets, who lived and worked in Edgefield, South Carolina, from the 1830s until the Civil War period. Various scholars, artists, and historians in the present volume join together to interpret the meaning of a figure who signed the prodigious vessels he made with the single name “Dave.” Topics in the volume range from considerations of the production forces shaping Dave the Potter’s activity to a study of the West African traces of artistry and religion in the vessels. With contributions drawing on disciplines ranging from literary history, poetry and poetics, and African American phenomenology to archaeology and material culture studies, the collection provides an exhaustive assessment of the competing meanings of a range of topics in the multifaceted writing and wares of Dave the Potter: slavery and the self, notions of mastery and the thing, dates and the slave signature, themes of alienation, plenty, creativity, and unintelligibility. In their totality, the essays finally comment on the (in)accessibility of the slave past and the ethics of representing a slave who is also a nameable exception.

Slavery and Class in the American South

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
William L. Andrews
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
American South ◽  
Frederick Douglass ◽  
Harriet Jacobs ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
William Wells Brown ◽  
The American South ◽  
Work Family

In this study of an entire generation of slave narrators, more than sixty mid-nineteenth-century narratives reveal how work, family, skills, and connections made for social and economic differences among the enslaved of the South. Slavery and Class in the American South explains why social and economic distinctions developed and how they functioned among the enslaved. Andrews also reveals how class awareness shaped the views and values of some of the most celebrated African Americans of the nineteenth century. Slave narrators discerned class-based reasons for violence between “impudent,” “gentleman,” and “lady” slaves and their resentful “mean masters.” Status and class played key roles in the lives and liberation of the most celebrated fugitives from US slavery, such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, William Wells Brown, and William and Ellen Craft. By examining the lives of the most- and least-acclaimed heroes and heroines of the African American slave narrative, Andrews shows how the dividing edge of social class cut two ways, sometimes separating upper and lower strata of slaves to their enslavers’ advantage, but at other times fueling convictions among even the most privileged of the enslaved that they deserved nothing less than complete freedom.

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