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Editorial: On Curing Color Narrow‐Sightedness

Visual Resources congratulates guest editor Maria Gindhart for gathering an outstanding collection of essays about race and ethnicity in the long nineteenth century—a time frame that begins at the close of the eighteenth century and ends in the first decades of the twentieth. Professor Gindhart’s proposal, vetted and enthusiastically approved by VR’s Editorial Advisory Board, was initially inspired by a conference dedicated to this topic at Susquehanna University, Selingsgrove, Pennsylvania, organized by the Nineteenth Century Studies Association in March 2007. The impetus for the conference was to find connections between race and ethnicity with social identity or social control, as conditioned by the wealth of racial and ethnic history in Pennsylvania’s Central Susquehanna Valley. The articles presented here take us well outside Pennsylvania’s valley and its conference and far beyond the United States’ boundaries and, as you will find, these articles are about more than the color black. Indeed the subject of race and ethnicity, blackness versus whiteness, and skin color as a measure of inclusion or exclusion in culture and society, even if limited to the long nineteenth century, deserves more than a cursory overview of complicated and charged stereotypes. How does one do justice to a topic whose protagonists include a Zulu king, the infamous ‘‘Hottentot Venus,’’ African slaves in America, colonial Algerians and even the prehistoric Aurignacian ‘‘Negroid’’? At best, one hopes to provoke new readings and scholarship as well as an appreciation for the rich visual documentation augmenting these studies. Yet there is more. Rounding out the special issue is a review of a book on Chinese medicine and how diseases and medications, like race, are frequently misread and misinterpreted outside of their culture. We have much to gain from other systems that appear to be competing, but which actually are complementary. This special issue of VR also coincides with the exhibition, ‘‘Black Womanhood: Images, Icons and Ideologies of the African Body,’’ organized by the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire. A study on gender and blackness is absent in our collection of essays. This exhibition and its catalog (ISBN 978-0-295-98771-2), edited by Barbara Thompson, curator of the Hood Museum’s African, Oceanic and Native American collections, thus complement our efforts. The exhibition and catalog offer insights into the role of black women in an African cultural perspective, through the eyes of Westerners and from the experiences of black women past and present. The exhibition at Dartmouth closed on 10 August 2008, only to reopen at Wellesley College in Massachusetts and finally at the San Diego Museum of Art where it runs through April 2009. ‘‘Imaging Blackness in the Long Nineteenth Century’’ is a topic that could and should be studied with new eyes or newly corrected lenses. Our history includes controversial and puzzling layers around race and ethnicity. Looking deeper and seeing what exists beyond skin color, beyond bigotry, ignorance, socially conditioned