| Focusing on the period stretching from the post-Depression era of the 1930s to the postwar culture of the 1950s, this project traces how the impulse to collect and display became a key element in the creation of new social formations, political movements, and aesthetic forms. The first half of this project deals with the political implications of an array of visual exhibitions; the second half examines how the acquisitive motive animates a range of literary representations that thematize the politics of collection and display. The eclectic body of works assembled here include the collaborative phototexts of Erskine Caldwell/Margaret Bourke-White, James Agee/Walker Evans, and Richard Wright/Edwin Rosskam; the depictions of the black body in the public imagery of Emmett Till's funeral and Edward Steichen's exhibition of photographs, "The Family of Man"; Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison's "underground" collectors who seek to establish a sense of self and home in a hostile world; and Vladimir Nabokov and William Gaddis's examinations of how reproduction and reproduced objects function as conduits through which to explore the problem of history and inauthenticity. These works respond to the anxieties and desires generated by the epoch's dramatic cultural transformations by focusing on the tactile and textual as well as the poetic and political aspects of evocative objects and images, and by linking the logic of private phenomenological experience to the logics of collective and social life. As American society recovered from the Great Depression, established itself as a hegemonic force in the emergent cold war, and grappled with the political implications of the coalescent civil rights movement, these texts seek to transform material and visual commodities into ritual objects embodying unexpected, non-commercial meanings as they circulate between private and public, personal and political, and national and international contexts. Drawing on Emile Durkheim's conceptualization of ritual and Hannah Arendt's understanding of the aesthetics of political judgment, this project asserts that these works reflect the rising significance of private relationships to the matter of material culture in establishing a sense of spatial order, social connection, and temporal continuity in an increasingly chaotic and entropic world. |
