In The Afric-American Picture Gallery, Britt Rusert examines a work of periodical fiction by educator and activist William J. Wilson, an episodic series of experimental prose and biting satire that was published in 1859. It tells the tale of a flaneur character who takes readers on a virtual tour through an imagined gallery of Black art, long before any such museum existed in the United States. Rusert uses Wilson’s series as groundwork to formulate a theory and practice of Black aesthetics and politics, considering the construction of autonomous zones of Black expression and vanguardism within the context of the late Antebellum period. Connecting Wilson’s writings to later emergences of the avant-garde and counter-cultural and analyzing ekphrastic methods of vividly describing visual art, Rusert brings a little-circulated piece of writing to the fore as an inflection point in the history of Black publics and imagination.

Britt Rusert is Professor of Afro-American Studies at University of Massachusetts Amherst and Executive Editor of the Massachusetts Review. She is the author of Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture and coeditor of W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America.

Preface  vii
Introduction  1
Picture Number 1. The Slave Ship  27
1. “He Thinks He Will Submit”: The Work of Black Art in the Age of Racial Capitalism  32
2. “Our Essentially Aesthetic or Art-Nature”: Late Antebellum Black Aesthetics  68
3. “Sung Their Praise to Listening Worlds”: Two Ethiops Communing Across Time and Space  93
4. Ethiop in the Black Forest: Cruising, Fantasy, Ambivalence  120
Conclusion  146
Acknowledgments  161
Appendix. Ethiop [William J. Wilson], “Afric-American Picture Gallery,” Anglo-African Magazine, February–October 1859  165
Notes  207
Bibliography  225
Index