ABSTRACT
Other persuasive imagery during the colonial slavery and postslavery period included newspaper caricatures that, along with naturalists’ drawings,2 became iconic misrepresentations of the personhood of Africans, African Americans, and other non-whites.3 Numerous other common events and everyday visual aspects of European and U.S. culture also served to remind viewers of the social and human order. While the popularity (and size) of carnival “freak” shows grew in
nineteenth-century Europe and the United States,4 World’s Fairs/Expositions also began to appear, the rst in London in 1851. Purportedly in contrast to the exploitation of the audience by carnival showmen, the World’s Fairs exhibitions were constructed under the pretext of international scientic “education” for the largely white masses.5 Constructed villages of Africans (who were actually from a variety of nations), along with a lucrative souvenir trade in half-nude photographs, especially of African girls and women, created an ongoing, highly objectied idea of “blackness”/Africanness in the dominant European/Euro-American imagination. In U.S. homes, black lawn jockeys and Aunt Jemima pancake syrup bottles likewise portrayed (and continue to portray today) a smiling black serving class whose individual personality and therefore humanity has been made invisible.6
