Kirjahaku

Berger excavates the lineage of stereotype as a concept, illustrating how perception of stereotypes in works of literature and fine art shifts relative to representational norms. Upending a century of scholarly and popular thinking about stereotype, Martin A. Berger traces our current understanding of it to the 1920s, when American journalist and public intellectual Walter Lippmann borrowed the term from printmaking techniques and defined it as a shared mental picture that simplified a person, event, group, or thing so it could be easily grasped. Berger uncovers stereotype’s intellectual debts to philosophy, psychology, political science, and, in particular, art history and interwar racial theories. Inventing Stereotype analyzes a series of plays, novels, and paintings from the 1920s and 1930s that sparked fierce debate about whether they employed racial stereotypes in the depiction of Black, Jewish, and other characters. Through careful attention to audience responses—parsed by race, political leanings, religion, and class—the book illustrates how artistic depictions are categorized as either stereotyped or not, relative to current representational norms, rather than to their success in conveying the authentic identities of individuals or racial groups.

Photographers shot millions of pictures of the black civil rights struggle between the close of World War II and the early 1970s, yet most Americans today can recall just a handful of images that look remarkably similar. In the popular imagination, the civil rights movement is remembered in dramatic photographs of protestors attacked with police dogs and fire hoses, firebombs and shotguns, tear gas and billy clubs. The most famous images of the era show black activists victimized by violent Southern whites. But there are other stories to be told. Blacks changed America through their action, not their suffering. In this groundbreaking catalogue, Martin Berger presents a collection of forgotten photographs that illustrate the action, heroism, and strength of black activists in driving social and legislative change. Freedom Now! highlights the power wielded by black men, women, and children in courthouses, community centers, department stores, political conventions, schools, and streets. Freedom Now! reveals that we have inherited a photographic canon—and a picture of history—shaped by whites’ comfort with unthreatening images of victimized blacks. And it illustrates how and why particular people, events, and issues have been edited out of the photographic story we tell about our past. By considering the different values promoted in the forgotten photographs, readers will gain an understanding of African Americans’ role in rewriting U.S. history and the high stakes involved in selecting images with which to narrate our collective past.

"Seeing through Race" is a boldly original reinterpretation of the iconic photographs of the black civil rights struggle. Martin A. Berger's provocative and groundbreaking study shows how the very pictures credited with arousing white sympathy, and thereby paving the way for civil rights legislation, actually limited the scope of racial reform in the 1960s. Berger analyzes many of these famous images - dogs and fire hoses turned against peaceful black marchers in Birmingham, tear gas and clubs wielded against voting-rights marchers in Selma - and argues that because white sympathy was dependent on photographs of powerless blacks, these unforgettable pictures undermined efforts to enact - or even imagine - reforms that threatened to upend the racial balance of power.