{"title":"The popular","authors":"E. Clay, Sarah N. Roth","doi":"10.5040/9781501359675.ch-006","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"In New York City in 1839, refi ned, alabaster women glided across crowded dance fl oors in the arms of apelike, jet-black men. Or soon would, according to artist Edward W. Clay ’s alarmist predictions about the end results of the growing abolitionist movement. Dancing was not the worst that Clay envisioned in the series of prints he entitled Practical Amalgamation ( Figure I.1 ). In the new society brought on by abolitionism, Clay warned, white women and black men would openly court, marry, and produce interracial children. The mixing of the races that resulted would inevitably lead to the end of white female purity and white male supremacy in the United States. Such was the future that Clay and others portended as they sought to discredit abolitionists, whose calls for immediate emancipation and racial equality were growing louder and more insistent by the late 1830s. In visual and written texts, antebellum artists and authors on all sides of the slavery issue, from abolitionists to proslavery advocates, regularly placed white women alongside enslaved men, occupying the same physical space. Yet unlike Clay’s prints, which unambiguously represented this proximity as romantic intimacy, most antebellum texts eschewed any overtly sexual element when they portrayed white girls and women in the company of African American men. The creators of these texts also eliminated the negative connotations that Clay had invoked in his engravings. Rather than depicting associations between black men and white women as taboo and scandalous, most antebellum authors portrayed them as nonthreatening, or even desirable. The frequency with which antebellum authors and artists juxtaposed dark-skinned males with lightskinned females, and the positive tone of these scenes, indicate a popular","PeriodicalId":263654,"journal":{"name":"DIY Music and the Politics of Social Media","volume":"124 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"5","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"DIY Music and the Politics of Social Media","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.5040/9781501359675.ch-006","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 5
Abstract
In New York City in 1839, refi ned, alabaster women glided across crowded dance fl oors in the arms of apelike, jet-black men. Or soon would, according to artist Edward W. Clay ’s alarmist predictions about the end results of the growing abolitionist movement. Dancing was not the worst that Clay envisioned in the series of prints he entitled Practical Amalgamation ( Figure I.1 ). In the new society brought on by abolitionism, Clay warned, white women and black men would openly court, marry, and produce interracial children. The mixing of the races that resulted would inevitably lead to the end of white female purity and white male supremacy in the United States. Such was the future that Clay and others portended as they sought to discredit abolitionists, whose calls for immediate emancipation and racial equality were growing louder and more insistent by the late 1830s. In visual and written texts, antebellum artists and authors on all sides of the slavery issue, from abolitionists to proslavery advocates, regularly placed white women alongside enslaved men, occupying the same physical space. Yet unlike Clay’s prints, which unambiguously represented this proximity as romantic intimacy, most antebellum texts eschewed any overtly sexual element when they portrayed white girls and women in the company of African American men. The creators of these texts also eliminated the negative connotations that Clay had invoked in his engravings. Rather than depicting associations between black men and white women as taboo and scandalous, most antebellum authors portrayed them as nonthreatening, or even desirable. The frequency with which antebellum authors and artists juxtaposed dark-skinned males with lightskinned females, and the positive tone of these scenes, indicate a popular
在1839年的纽约市,优雅的雪花石膏女人在像猿猴一样的黑人男人的怀抱中滑过拥挤的舞池。根据艺术家爱德华·w·克莱(Edward W. Clay)对日益壮大的废奴运动的最终结果的危言耸听的预测,或者很快就会出现这种情况。跳舞并不是克莱在一系列版画中所设想的最糟糕的,他称之为“实用的融合”(图1)。克莱警告说,在废奴主义带来的新社会里,白人妇女和黑人男子会公开求爱、结婚,并生下不同种族的孩子。由此产生的种族混合将不可避免地导致美国白人女性纯洁和白人男性至上的终结。这就是克莱和其他人在试图诋毁废奴主义者时所预示的未来。到19世纪30年代末,废奴主义者要求立即解放奴隶和种族平等的呼声越来越高,越来越坚定。在视觉和书面文本中,内战前的艺术家和作家,从废奴主义者到支持奴隶制的倡导者,在奴隶制问题的各个方面,经常把白人妇女和被奴役的男人放在一起,占据相同的物理空间。克莱的版画毫不含糊地将这种接近表现为浪漫的亲密关系,但与之不同的是,大多数内战前的文本在描绘白人女孩和女性与非裔美国男性在一起时,都避开了任何明显的性元素。这些文本的创造者也消除了克莱在他的版画中所引用的负面含义。大多数内战前的作家并没有把黑人男性和白人女性之间的联系描述为禁忌和丑闻,而是把它们描述为无害的,甚至是可取的。南北战争前的作家和艺术家经常将深色皮肤的男性和浅色皮肤的女性放在一起,这些场景的积极基调表明了一种流行