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9780271083858 Add to Cart Academic Inspection Copy

Contraband Guides:

Race, Transatlantic Culture, and the Arts in the Civil War Era
  • ISBN-13: 9780271083858
  • Publisher: PENN STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
    Imprint: PENN STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
  • By Paul H. D. Kaplan
  • Price: AUD $206.00
  • Stock: 0 in stock
  • Availability: This book is temporarily out of stock, order will be despatched as soon as fresh stock is received.
  • Local release date: 14/08/2020
  • Format: Hardback 312 pages Weight: 0g
  • Categories: Photography & photographs [AJ]
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In his best-selling travel memoir, The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain punningly refers to the black man who introduces him to Venetian Renaissance painting as a “contraband guide, a term coined to describe fugitive slaves who assisted Union armies during the Civil War. By means of this and similar case studies, Paul H. D. Kaplan documents the ways in which American cultural encounters with Europe and its venerable artistic traditions influenced nineteenth-century concepts of race in the United States.
 
Americans of the Civil War era were struck by the presence of people of color in European art and society, and American artists and authors, both black and white, adapted and transformed European visual material to respond to the particular struggles over the identity of African Americans. Taking up the work of both well- and lesser-known artists and writers—such as the travel writings of Mark Twain and William Dean Howells, the paintings of German American Emanuel Leutze, the epistolary exchange between John Ruskin and Charles Eliot Norton, newspaper essays written by Frederick Douglass and William J. Wilson, and the sculpture of freed slave Eugène Warburg—Kaplan lays bare how racial attitudes expressed in mid-nineteenth-century American art were deeply inflected by European traditions.
 
By highlighting the contributions people of black African descent made to the fine arts in the United States during this period, along with the ways in which they were represented, Contraband Guides provides a fresh perspective on the theme of race in Civil War–era American art. It will appeal to art historians, African American and American studies scholars, and to general readers interested in American art and African American history.

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Representations of People of Color in Nineteenth-Century American Accounts of Italian Travel

2. “A Mulatto Sculptor from New Orleans”: Eugène Warburg in Europe, 1853–1859

3. “The Black Man To-day Means Liberty”: African American Figures in the Work of Emanuel Leutze

4. “Something American”: Art and Slavery in the Correspondence of John Ruskin and Charles Eliot Norton

5. Old Masters: The Western Tradition of the Visual Arts in African American Culture in the Civil War Era

6. Contraband Guide: Mark Twain on Race and the Renaissance 207

Notes 225

Bibliography 257

Index



“Both a creative and fastidious scholar, Paul Kaplan aims to shed fresh light on the dialogue concerning race, nationalism, and representation. In this well-argued volume, he deftly weaves together travel writing by Americans abroad becoming aware of Africans in Europe; racial representations by the talented mixed-race Louisiana sculptor Eugene Warburg, and the German American painter Emanuel Leutze; a dialogue on racial matters between two major intellectuals, Charles Norton and John Ruskin; and the relevance of the Old European Masters whose racial representations made an impact on African Americans.”

—Patricia Hills, author of Painting Harlem Modern: The Art of Jacob Lawrence

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