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Podcast: New Books in Communications
Episode: Autumn Womack, "The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880-1930" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
Description: As the nineteenth century came to a close and questions concerning the future of African American life reached a fever pitch, many social scientists and reformers approached post-emancipation Black life as an empirical problem that could be systematically solved with the help of new technologies like the social survey, photography, and film. What ensued was nothing other than a "racial data revolution," one which rendered African American life an inanimate object of inquiry in the name of social order and racial regulation. At the very same time, African American cultural producers and intellectuals such as W. E. B. Du...