This week we read a book called The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum by James Cook. As the title suggests, PT Barnum is the main focus but the book is more about the market revolution and the middle class in the antebellum north. The book uses specific Barnum exhibits as windows into antebellum culture in New York City, and one such chapter deals with an incredible (and at the time, wildly popular) exhibit called What Is It?
The exhibit claimed that the person/creature (described by Barnum and in advertising as "the nondescript") was a potential "missing link", and left it up to the audience to make their own conclusions. Cook argues that a big part of what made Barnum so successful was that he could take anxieties and ambiguities people were feeling, meld an exhibit around them, and thus challenge people to come face to face with issues of culture, race, and the emerging capitalist order.
At face value What Is It? certainly seems to be a blatantly racist caricature, but I couldn't help wonder if that was the point. That is, since Barnum so often attempted to force the audience to consider ambiguity, was this exhibit actually meant to call into questions preconceived notions of race? I left that class not sure if Barnum was an incredible racist or a subversive, and perhaps brilliant, opponent of racial prejudice.
I'm also curious to hear what you all feel about these images (as follows), the topic as a whole, and especially the issue of race and biology. We finished class last night being asked about the culturalists and their opinion of biology in regards to race, and these exhibits might give an early historical look at how American felt on the issue. Also, bear in mind the historical context of What Is It? Two major things to consider: 1) This exhibit came out less than a year after Darwin published The Origin of Species, and 2) This is the year Abraham Lincoln was elected President.
Enough from me, here are the images. The first two are advertisements. On the left is an advertisement put out by Barnum, and on the right one from Currier and Ives.
The next two are photographs taken by Matthew Brady in the early 1860's.
Love to hear what you guys think.
1 comment:
I know Barnum was a pro-Union Republican during the Civil War, though whether that indicates he was anti-racist is unclear. Eric Lott's Love and Theft briefly discusses, I believe, Barnum's blackface productions and the extent to which the showman used satirization of racism in his shows, but still leaves a lot in the dark as far as his own racial attitudes.
He was clearly adept at targeting his audiences "anxieties and ambiguities," as it were, but I'm compelled to argue that he utilized race as an avenue towards profit. Can someone who parades around Native Americans and African American dwarves for a viewing fee really be called an opponent of racial prejudice? Even if in his personal philosophy he was an advocate for racial justice, the fact that he depicted indigenous and black people as "curiosities" for income was just a new method of exploiting people of color.
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