The Practice of Citizenship by Spires Derrick R.;

Author:Spires, Derrick R.; [Неизв.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2019-02-13T21:00:00+00:00

The Critic and His Discontents: Washington’s Bones and the Corpus of U.S. Citizenship

William J. Wilson’s “Afric-American Picture Gallery” series provides a useful case study of reading Anglo-African-wise as a critical citizenship practice that exposes and revises white citizenship’s aesthetic, historiographic, and physical landscapes. I am concerned in this section with the critical attunement that Wilson models in his sketches and how Wilson uses Ethiop’s intellectual development to model the critical citizen at work, both individually and as part of variously constructed collectives. The series ran in the Anglo-African in seven installments, from February 1859 through October 1859, in which Ethiop writes sketched descriptions of at least twenty-seven “pictures.”67 The series blends Afrofuturist meditations, cultural criticism, and the wit that readers of Douglass’s Paper had come to expect from Ethiop. The series, as is often the case for the sketch genre, is difficult to pin down in terms of “plot.” Unlike Wilson’s city sketches for Frederick Douglass’s Paper, where “Ethiop’s” ideas seem directly connected to Wilson’s, Ethiop in the Anglo-African functions increasingly as a dynamic character distinct from the author. For most of the series, Ethiop claims the gallery as a space of solitary contemplation; however, as the series progresses, Wilson introduces a cast of characters who visit the gallery, often intruding on Ethiop. These figures include a fugitive slave, black and white professionals, a white reader questioning the need for an “Anglo-African” magazine or “Afric-American” picture gallery, and “Thomas Onward,” the gallery’s attendant. Tom, who I will discuss in more detail below, consistently refuses to allow the gallery to become a site accessible only to a privileged few or to allow its visitors to use history and debate to retreat from the material world. In addition to these interlocutors, Ethiop leaves the gallery in a two-installment narrative arc that takes him to the Black Forest, home to “Bernice,” an artistic genius, who has captured and imprisoned his former master for murdering Bernice’s son.

The series moves readers and its narrator through spaces of alternate ordering, from an imagined picture gallery to sites of marronage, that disrupt utopian projections of a beautiful white republic and the closures of citizenship such projections enable. This movement has led Ernest to identify the series with an “aesthetics of liberation” capable of “accounting for the dynamic relations among artistry, history, and community.” The sketches, he notes, “seem both testaments to and examples of” this aesthetic.68 The installments mix Wilson’s previous project of guiding readers through Brooklyn’s cultural geographies with the conventions of catalogues from galleries such as New York’s Düsseldorf Gallery, the moralism of John Ruskin’s Modern Painter, and articles about the state of “American Art” and art audiences in The Illustrated Magazine of Art and The Gentleman’s Magazine. Installments typically featured Ethiop’s descriptions or “sketches” of several images, though at times his thoughts about writing the sketches leave little room for the actual sketching. The task of writing these descriptions for his Anglo-African readers instead often serves as an inciting incident for Ethiop’s thinking about history and politics.

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