Blackface Imagery and Its Answers: Stereotyping from the Early Civil Rights Era to the Obama Era

Writer Thulani Davis will present a lecture on the cycles of call-and-response to generations of repeated, reworked, and "reloaded" visual stereotypes of African Americans from their early days in print, regeneration in movies, and new life on the internet. She will discuss how to read ... Read more

Writer Thulani Davis will present a lecture on the cycles of call-and-response to generations of repeated, reworked, and “reloaded” visual stereotypes of African Americans from their early days in print, regeneration in movies, and new life on the internet. She will discuss how to read the images of objects designed to “serve” the viewer, such as common kitchen items depicting black faces, and show black responses to such imagery and how they in turn are recycled into new blackface. A global phenomenon since the turn of the 20th century, visual stereotypes have been used to promote colonization, immigration, products of all kinds, and the politics of inequality.