Edward W. Kemble’s Representation of Black Subjects and Jews on the Cover of the Life Magazine(1899) and American Cultural Politics

서지정보

· 발행기관 : 사단법인 한국조형디자인협회
· 수록지 정보 : 조형디자인연구 / 24권 / 3호 / 187 ~ 206페이지
· 저자명 : 장선희

초록

This research discusses how cultural politics was expressed through the cover of the leading U.S. magazine Life in 1899 at the end of the nineteenth century. The cover shows a black man and woman and their dialogue created by Edward W. Kemble(1861-1933), who was well known for his illustrations for the novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn(1885). During the post-Reconstruction era, American society proved chaotic due to the rising struggles of disenfranchised African Americans, agitation of women’s rights, and influx of new immigrants. At that time, Anglo-Saxons grasped the core of power in the U.S. and stratified the statuses of African Americans and new immigrants, creating stereotypes and ethnic jokes about people from a diversity of races, ethnicities, and cultures. Hence this research focuses on how African Americans and Jews mimicked American high society or negotiated with the elites from the society in the process of obtaining American citizenship.
The black man and woman in Kemble’s illustration appear to mimic the Gibson Girl culture that represented American progress at that time. But the gesture and dialectics of the two black figures demonstrate their inability to fully embody the white American-centric high culture. Their dialogue also produces a pun by linking the similar pronunciations of the words “Jew” and “jewelry,” with Jews being described as greedy people. Jews found it hard to assimilate into and penetrate the core of American society, though Jewish architecture influenced numerous construction projects in the U.S. Based on these analyses, I argue that the black subjects are camouflaged by the magazine’s white-centric subscribers and further demonstrate how the cover of Life reveals cultural politics of African Americans and Jews in the U.S. at the time.

참고자료

· 없음