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Techniques of Justice: W. E. B. Du Bois's Data Portraits and the Problem of Visualizing the Race

Heralded by the 2014 special issue of MELUS on race and visual culture, African American literary studies have pivoted toward this subject, and for good reason, as practices of looking are fundamental to the construction of race. Shawn Michelle Smith, the editor of this special issue, argues for a shift from studies of representation, customary to literary scholars, to studies of the gaze and other visual practices. She challenges scholars of multi-ethnic studies to “not ask what does race look like but how are racialized subjects produced through practices of looking” (“Guest” 8). In other words, Smith argues for treating race not as a static object that needs to be seen more clearly but rather as a mode of seeing. While this shift in focus is critical for all authors and eras, it is particularly fruitful for those that have thus far been treated primarily from literary or historical angles. Few authors are riper for this kind of reanalysis than W. E. B. Du Bois, whose data visualizations have recently been released in a volume edited by Whitney Battle-Baptiste and Brit Rusert and who, as Smith points out, was very astute on the subject of race and the gaze. Smith argues that Du Bois’s famous conception of racial “double-consciousness” rested on an explicitly visual practice: “For Du Bois, learning to see oneself refracted through the lens of a dominant white gaze also enabled one to unsettle the authority of that gaze and to learn to see differently with what he called ‘second-sight’” (3). Accordingly, scholars have begun work on Du Bois’s contributions to the visual arts, particularly his editorial work on the covers of The Crisis and the photographic portraits from the 1900 Paris Exposition. However, as Smith points out, many studies have focused more on representations of race than racialization