Inventing stereotype: race, representation, and interwar America

Abstract

"How do we know if a painting, play, or novel contains stereotypes? Most of us think we recognize them when we see them, but this book reveals that the matter is far more complex. Inventing Stereotype traces the emergence of our present-day understanding of stereotype to the 1920s, when the American journalist and public intellectual Walter Lippmann took a word coined for an eighteenth-century printing technique and attached it to a vastly more powerful concept. Martin Berger explores how the idea evolved as it gained traction in the interwar period, fueling a scholarly and popular impulse to search for stereotypes in art. Delving into the original reception of Black, Jewish, and white characters in 1920s productions of Eugene O'Neill's All God's Chillun Got Wings and Anne Nichols's Abie's Irish Rose as well as paintings by artists including George Bellows, Thomas Hart Benton, Winslow Homer, Archibald Motley Jr., and Henry O. Tanner, Berger reveals how works we view as stereotyped today might have appeared nonstereotyped to their original audiences-and vice versa. Along the way, we come to a new understanding of what debates over stereotypes in art can and cannot reveal about America's racial values"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents

Introduction: The relativism of stereotypes -- The world outside and the pictures in our heads -- Stereotyping stereotype -- Hunting for stereotypes -- Stereotyped after the fact -- Afterword: Engaging with our past.