Sarah Willie-LeBreton:	I'm Sarah Willie-LeBreton. I'm the Chair of Sociology and Anthropology, and it's my distinct pleasure to introduce today's speaker, Anthony Foy. "How," Dr. Foy asks, "does black self-representation intersect with regimes of race, celebrity, and consumption to shape our political imaginations?" It is a crucial question, for it anticipates and implies others, and those others have implications for how African-descended people today must be represent themselves, ourselves, within the milieu of a governant structure that no longer rules by domination and a culture no longer mediated by overt prejudice, but by coded, subterranean, and implicit forms of degradation and assumptions of inferiority. Sanitized in bureaucracy, obscured by questions of good fit, and undermined by the tropes of family, patriotism, community, and other phrases of "One of us." 
	Assistance Professor of English Literature, Anthony Foy graduated from UCLA and earned his master's and doctoral degrees at Yale University in American Studies. A decidedly literary topic, "The Dark Brotherhood: Autobiography, Ideology, Masculinity, Blackness" for his dissertation, Anthony has been unafraid of using humanist and social scientific tools of analysis to uncover the complexities of representation in the multiple literatures of past and present North America. Professor Foy has won awards from the most vaulted of organizations: the Ford Foundation, Dartmouth College, UCLA, Yale University, the Lindback Foundation; and most recently from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, where he spent last year as a scholar in residence with visits to Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library as a Gallup Fellow in the kind of focused conversations, particularly with young scholars working in African American studies, that such time away allows. 
	Having shared students and conversations about pedagogy with Anthony, and worked with him on Swarthmore's Black Studies steering committee, I have found him to be one of the smartest persons I know. And you know I don't think you're better than anyone else for being smart, which he is ... Regularly introducing me to texts, to scholars and ideas that enlarge my own repertoire, and offer me insights about contemporary culture that were only vague, unformed clouds in my mind before talking with him. But by "smart," I mean that he is WDS, wide, deep, smart, which unlike WMD, weapons of mass destruction, actually exists. 
	Dr. Foy joined the Swarthmore faculty in 2005, coming from the University of Oregon, and with his arrival we gained a careful listener, an attentive and nuanced in his literary analyses, complicated in his cultural interpretations, and willing to push and engage his students and colleagues. The terrain toward which we are pushed and engaged, invited really, is neither expected nor transparent, but once traveled, indispensable for our own intellectual progress. And for Anthony Foy, progress usually has quotation marks around it for the ways in which each historical moment and the cultural contexts that are a part of them invite African Americans in particular into uncomfortable yogic positions of representation. How, in fact, to convey their, our, worthiness, to modify ourselves with the taken-for-granted adjectives of citizenry? 
	In his poem "Dream Variations," Langston Hughes writes,
	"To fling my arms wide
	In some place of the sun,
	To whirl and to dance
	Till the white day is done.
	Then rest at cool evening
	Beneath a tall tree
	While night comes on gently,
	Dark like me-
	That is my dream!"
	It is a deceptively simple stanza that unfolds out of the apartheid bomb shelter of Cold War America. That context, Dr. Foy reminds us, shapes our literature. And today, he will talk to us about ways of seeing and ways of seeming. "Black Autobiography and the Problem of Image," join me in welcoming my WDS colleague.
Dr. Foy:	Well, that's ... I'm speechless, really. And for those of you who have been in my classes, you know that it's hard for me to get speechless. I actually can't decide if Sarah is trying to run me out of the room out of sheer embarrassment or prop me up. I'll assume you're propping me up, and I appreciate that. Thank you for the warm introduction, Sarah. A little too much, but I appreciate it. I'm also indebted to the President's Office and the Provost's Office for generous leave-year support that allowed me to pursue some of the questions I plan to raise today. 
	I want to thank Lisa Smulyan, Associate Provost, for organizing these talks and prodding me to participate. I've also got to thank my colleagues in both Black Studies and English who have all been very supportive, both personally and professionally, in my time here. I certainly need to thank my many students over the past few years who have been responsible ultimately for allowing me the sort of space to work through some of these ideas, even if you didn't necessarily realize it. Finally, I've got to thank my lovely wife, Dr. Monique Scott, for making the long trip to Swarthmore to be with us today.
	For my talk this afternoon, I am drawing from a much larger manuscript for a book entitled "Black Ideography: Autobiography, Ideology, and Image. 1881 to 1945," a project that examines how the exigencies of class formation profoundly shaped the post-slavery development of African American autobiography as a discreet form of cultural production.
	First appearing in the 18th Century, the autobiographies of black people in the New World would precede their novels by nearly 100 years. Essentially, black folks in the New World were writing stories about themselves and their lives about a full century before they actually started publishing their novels. And, such early novels as William Wells Brown's "Clotel; or, the President's Daughter" from 1853, would emerge from the established conventions of the slave narrative. Emerging from the shadows of slavery, autobiography thus occupies an unparalleled place among the origins of both a tradition of black literature and a tradition of black political discourse, critiquing the confluence of modernity and racial slavery.
	After Emancipation, the personal narrative would continue to dominate black literary production, and African Americans would publish more autobiographies ... About 90, actually ... Than novels between 1865 and 1925. So, black autobiography preceded the novel by 100 years, and actually there were more autobiographies produced than novels up until about 1925, which, as many of you know, is considered the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance, of course.
	As I began to look more closely at the narratives produced after Reconstruction, I began to notice a curious pattern. By the end of the 19th Century, black autobiography was determined by the specific class-based subjectivities of educators, missionaries, reformers, public servants, professionals, and other strivers whose ideologies of racial uplift dominated the black public sphere. I just want to add that when I say that "Black autobiography was determined by these discourses," I'm following Raymond Williams's idea that determination is a matter of setting limits, exerting pressures. It's not necessarily a matter of causation. So if I talk about something being determined, then I'm talking in that sense, which is a little looser and a little more flexible. Okay?
	My research has examined this pattern, this dominance of these certain sorts of figures, concluding that autobiography acquired a singular importance for the black middle class seeking itself to imagine itself into being by representing the proper black subject. That is, post-Reconstruction black autobiography emerged to become a cultural practice suited to the ideological expression of a particular segment within black America. Now, the ideologies of racial uplift that would eventually determine the trajectories of black autobiography were varied in their conceptions of both the means and ends of progress, fueling intense debates over accommodation protest, over separation and integration, over education, economics, and politics. Nevertheless, these ideologies tended to conform to certain assumptions about racial representation. For example, even though W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington famously argued with each other over the meaning of black progress, they both held in common certain assumptions about what black or racial representation should do in terms of representing the race in the public sphere.
	These ideologies tended to conform to certain assumptions about racial representation, even as the debates they fueled attested to an ongoing struggle over the meaning of uplift itself. In short, the contestants in this struggle tended to assume, as Kelly Miller once put it, that "The individual is the proof of the race. The first unfoldment of its potency and promise." With their common commitment to the representative self, racial uplift ideologies framed the relationship between the individual and the collective in synecdochic terms, placing grave responsibility for black progress upon the capacity of individuals to embody the potency and promise of the whole. 
	Preoccupied with the ideal representative Negro, racial uplift ideologies assumed a cultural politics of recognition, positing that African-Americans would advance materially, socially, and politically only to the extent that they proved themselves capable of satisfying bourgeois protocols of selfhood. Emphasizing the emblematic individual's responsibility for black progress, these ideologies dictated that the status of the race depended on the self-presentation of its most respectable members. As a result, racial uplift ideologies whetted their cultural politics to the accredited figure of the respectable Negro who was devoted to the virtues of self-help, service, education, industry, thrift, piety, chastity, temperance, plainlyness, the patriarchal family, and racial solidarity.
	While such notions appealed broadly to black people across class lines, they also provided the core vocabulary with which an emergent black middle class began to represent itself, and thereby reproduce itself as a coherent social formation. Given the cultural logic of racial synecdoche, the devotees of uplift sought to challenge prevalent anti-black stereotypes with their own emblematic selves. If the indecent exploits of disreputable Negroes, like Fifty Cent, presumably confirmed essentialist constructions of racial inferiority, then the demonstrated accomplishments of cultivated Negroes presumably contradicted them. In the process of advancing their own authority to be emblematic, however, "elite blacks also devised a moral economy of class privilege, distinction, and even domination within the race," as Kevin Gaines has argued. Anxious over the political implications of racial representation during the Jim Crow era, the middle-class leaders who adhered to uplift ideologies thus sought to fashion the race in their own exceptional images, perpetuating stark differences between themselves and the black working class whom they presumed to manage, even if only at the level of racial representation. 
	By the way, it's because black autobiography became so identified with the interest of the black middle class, for example, that no more than a handful of these narratives produced between 1877 and 1945 actually depicted their authors as criminals. Right? So, in fact, there were less than 10 of these narratives where the black narrator was being represented as being involved in any kind of crime during this long period, 1877 to 1945, and most of those were actually defenses. People saying, "Well, I've been criminalized, but I'm innocent." In fact, there were only probably two or three narratives where you actually have black autobiographers who were kind of admitting to this sort of disreputable or illegal activity. Now, what does that mean? Well, I'm suggesting that autobiography is forming as something ... as a certain kind of literally form or cultural form that's tied directly to a certain class. 
	And if we look at what's going on in America as a whole at the end of the 19th century, these sorts of crime tales were incredibly popular. They were proliferating widely. So, in society at large, you have this real hunger for these sorts of tales. But in terms of what black people are producing, they're refusing to tell these sorts of stories. And that seemed to be one of the things that I discovered, one of these patterns that seemed to me provocative, interesting, curious.
	Given this ideological concatenation of racial representation and the struggle for recognition, autobiography, the quintessential form of literary self-presentation, became an ideal form for reproducing the doctrines of an emerging black middle class, which transfigured the black image according to its various interests. The devotees of racial uplift certainly offered up their first-person narratives as both racial publicity and protest, determined to prove to their white readers that black people, or at least some of them, could satisfy the moral qualifications for citizenship. However, and I want to stress this actually, these autobiographers also addressed black readers according to the specific interest of the managerial formation from which they issued. So, a lot of the scholarship depends on suggesting how black writers are trying to prove themselves to white audiences, or trying to undermine what their novels, what their photographs, or pictures, or paintings, or poems, or plays mean in relation to racial stereotypes. And one thing that I want to suggest is that, in fact, these sorts of autobiographies, they're being produced in the Jim Crow era, are also speaking to black readers as well in particular ways.
	So, for example, these middle-class autobiographers sought to model their moral qualifications for a black working class presumed to be in need of elevation. So, they're presenting themselves as role models. They sought to coalesce a better class of Negroes through a narrative enactment of belonging that, in effect, repressed disreputable subjectivities at this moment in the development of black autobiography. They're also doing it for themselves. They're telling the sorts of stories that they share in common, that allow them to bind themselves to each other, that allow them to imagine themselves as a community together with common interests, common concerns, and even a common political agenda, perhaps.
	I rehearse this larger argument of my project here because it is crucial to the problem of image that I plan to discuss this afternoon. Given the anxieties of the race's public image, it characterized racial uplift how his black autobiography engaged the visual regimes of race within which it has been produced. Faced as they were with a demeaning anti-black representations of the Jim Crow era, members of arising black middle class produced life stories that narrated them as emblematic Negroes. At the same time, technological advances such as the half-tone process late in the century made the publication of photographs and other illustrations in books practical, efficient, and inexpensive. And these autobiographers increasingly deployed illustrations in their books: portraitures of themselves, pictures of their families, sketches of their past, and images documenting their present lives. There's even one autobiographer who, I don't think I'll get to him today, but he actually includes images of confederate money in his autobiography. This is published in the 1890s, so it's an incredibly bizarre, bizarre thing.
	Scholars have generally disregarded these sorts of illustrations, but their proliferation requires us, I think, to take these visual paratexts seriously as we read such narratives. Indeed, the interplay between the narrative and visual modes of self-presentation at work in black autobiography, both complements and complicates the political implications of these texts. With the term "ideography," which appears in my book's title, I hope to encapsulate the complex form of self-presentation resulting from this symbiosis between autobiographical practices, ideological discourses, and visual images. 
	Thus, today I invoke the problem of image here with double aims. First, to underscore an existential concern for black autobiographers of the 19th century, many of whom engaged the visual field with specific strategies that accompanied the necessary process of writing a collective history. And second, as a critical concern for scholars of black autobiography today, prompting us to complicate the commonplace that black autobiography humanizes its subjects primarily by evincing their mastery of the ennobling word. That is, given this interaction between narration and vision, black autobiography developed not as a strictly literary proof of its author's humanity, but as a practice engaged directly with a racial surveillance and spectacle that constituted the visual field of race.
	I'd like to suggest, then, three points of departure for considering just how African-American autobiography constitutes an archive of visuality that registers the historical dilemma of black visibility. First, through a visual self-consciousness narrated beyond or any absence of illustrations. Next, through portraits of the authors themselves. And finally, through illustrations in which the autobiographers themselves are absent. 
	Although my research has focused specifically on the significance of photographic illustrations to the narratives produced after Reconstruction, I'll begin today with a few comments on the racial field of antebellum visuality, tracing through the work of Frederick Douglass, the roots of black autobiographers' self-consciousness as objects of scrutiny in the eyes of others. Next, I will discuss briefly the status of the author's portrait in postbellum narratives, which implicitly or explicitly reconfigures the transition from slavery to freedom as a conversion from abjection to respectability. Finally, I will consider my most nettling concern. The greatest challenge we face, I think, if we are to account for the problem of image in black autobiography, namely, the autobiographical status of those visual paratexts that do not directly represent their black authors. That is, if images of buildings, places, things, and other people appear in personal narratives in the service of black presentation, can they be little more than documents, if they do not directly represent their authors? Or, can they expand our understanding of black autobiography as a cultural practice? Put differently, must these source of images be autobiographical simply because they appear in autobiographies?
	So, essentially, one thing that I'd like to do today, is think about three ways of approaching the visual in black autobiography. So, the first has to do with the ways in which a kind of visual self-consciousness is narrated. And there could be photographs, there may not be photographs. But, at the level of narrative, how do we see the problem of black visibility appearing? In then the other approach has to do with the portraits that appear in these texts of the authors themselves. And then the last problem, and this is the most difficult problem that I've struggled with in the course of this research, is how exactly do we read autobiographically those photos where you don't see Booker T. Washington, or you don't see Louis Hughes. What do you do with the confederate money? What do you do with the new barn ... the shack that's falling apart. So, hopefully I'll have some suggestions. We'll get there.
	During the long 19th century, the autobiographical production of African-Americans was bound to the dilemma of black visibility resulting from a complex of gazes that structured their racialization across a range of social, cultural, and institutional practices. In general, this dilemma of visibility burdened black people with lives suspended in the visual field between surveillance and spectacle. On the one hand then, we might recall the observational tools of scientific racism: Thomas Jefferson's optical glasses or Louis Agassiz's slave daguerreotypes, for example, with which naturalists presumed to record, document, and classify the so-called truth of blackness. Or we might recalled the dogged strategies of surveillance and control developed by the Southern slavocracy, such as circumscribing the assembly and movement of black people, mobilizing militias and patrols to regulate and enforce such limits, prohibiting manumissions and expelling free people, inventing hardware to prevent slaves from absconding, like the iron horns detailed in Moses Roper's 1838 narrative. 
	While these strategies of control were not strictly visual, they did structure what it meant, both conceptually and consequentially, for black people to be seen. Furthermore, these controls affected all black people, slaves and non-slaves alike, and they would stretch even further out of the South as slaveholders expanded their collective power to apprehend runaways, culminating with the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. On the other hand, we might also recall the spectacle of black bodies on auction blocks in the South and abolitionists' platforms in the North, upon which the values of these bodies fell and rose with the salience of their scars. We might recall antebellum rituals of public torture that would survive slavery in the form of lynching, and we might recall the spectacles of blackface minstrelsy, which would also survive slavery well into the 20th century. 
	I sketched this visual field in order to suggest how a society grappling with the antebellum institution of racial slavery and its postbellum legacies constructed the meanings of black visibility in the 19th century. And in this respect, I must stress that the social, cultural, and institutional practices of both slaveholders and abolitionists interacted to determine these meanings of black visibility. So, even though abolitionists and slaveholders were contestants over the institution of slavery, their relations to slaves, fugitive slaves, free slaves, slave narrators, constituted the whole visual field that developed these meanings for what it meant to be seen as a black person in the 19th century.
	Against this dilemma of black visibility, the slave narrative might be read as an attempt to evade the meaning of the black body as an object of speculation. Consider then, Frederick Douglass's 1845 narrative, the most canonical of slave narratives and the basis upon which influential scholar Robert Stepto has posited the fundamental relation between literacy and freedom in African-American literature. More recently, Jeannine DeLombard has argued persuasively that Douglass's narrative, culminating as it does with the former slaves' first anti-slavery speech in Nantucket in 1841, seeks to evade the tyranny of racialized vision by elevating his voice. So, there is this, the way that you escape, what it means to be seen, is to elevate the voice. And this is essentially what you get at the end of Douglass's narrative, some of these scholars have argued.
	While I generally agree with such readings, I like to stress here just how much Douglass's self-consciousness depends on the dilemma of black visibility structured by both surveillance and spectacle. To this end, I begin with his account of his year working with the notorious slave-breaker Edward Covey, not to reiterate the pivotal man-making flash between them, but to underscore Douglass's description of the coercive techniques by which Covey succeeded, he writes, "in breaking me."
	According to Douglass, "I was somewhat unmanageable when I first went there, but a few months of his discipline tamed me." To be sure, Covey's slave-breaking discipline relies on the fiercest brutality to enforce his regime of work, work, work. But, it also involves crude methods of surveillance to which Douglass draws our attention. Notable for his "power to deceive," Covey routinely employs subterfuges that allow him to surprise his slaves as they work in the field, thereby, Douglass writes, "making as feel that he was ever-present with us. He seldom approached the spot where we were at work openly if he could do it secretly." Douglass likens his panoptic technique to "a mode of attack." As a result of these deceptions, Covey's slaves learn that "It was never safe to stop a single minute. He appeared to us as being ever at hand. He was under every tree, behind every stump, in every bush, and at every window on the plantation."
	At this point in the narrative, Douglass's self-consciousness as a surveilled black body is clearly in effect of those coercive techniques that distinguish Covey from all other slaveholders and overseers in his text. However, even after Douglass's oft-discussed battle with the slave-breaker results in "a glorious resurrection from the tomb of slavery," he writes, such self-consciousness as a scrutinized body remains a sign of his unfreedom. More importantly, perhaps, the surveillance responsible for his self-consciousness has been internalized by Douglass as a diffused panoptic technique that characterizes slavery as an institution, describing the perils he and his con-conspirators imagine they will face during their ill-fated attempt to escape from Mr. Freeland. Douglass echoes his earlier anxiety that Covey might be behind every tree, every stump, every bush, and every window. He writes, "The case sometimes stood thus: at every gate through which we were to pass, we saw a watchman. At every ferry, a guard. On a bridge, a sentinel. And in every wood, a patrol. We were hemmed in upon every side. There stood slavery, a stern reality glaring frightfully upon us." So, the institution itself has eyes, glares down upon them. 
	Douglass's reference here to the gate he imagines passing through is particularly instructive, since it resonates with what he terms "the blood-stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery" that appears at the end of his first chapter. As a young boy, the innocent Frederick witnesses the ... he calls it "the most terrible spectacle of his aunt Hester's vicious beating." And his complicated identification with her, he writes, "I expected it would be my turn next," reveals to him the full meaning of his vulnerability as a slave, subject to such bloody transactions. As Douglass later imagines escaping to freedom, however, he and his fellow slaves must contend with the restraining power of surveillance as the specters of slavery haunt them at every gate. The disciplinary techniques of slavery produced then a structure in which black people's visibility jeopardizes their freedom. As Douglass notes, "Anyone having a white face, and being so disposed, could stop us and subject us to examination." 
	Insofar as Douglass represents unfreedom in part as the intersection of white power and black visibility, he offers two resolutions to the looking relations of slavery that I'd like to underscore here. First, he introduces his own panoptic threat to his narrative as he resists one of the most compelling conventions of the slave narrative, the breathless account of the fugitives' escape. Rather than describe his eventual escape to freedom, Douglass justifies his refusal to do so in two long paragraphs that events for Stepto his full authorial control. That is, his mastery of his narrative and thus of himself. With this omission, Douglass hopes to weaken the slavocracy's surveillance by preventing greater vigilance. 
	He writes, "Greater vigilance on the part of slaveholders, then, has existed heretofore among them. Furthermore," he writes, and this paragraph, or this passage always fascinates me, as those of you who have taken some of my classes know. "I would keep the merciless slaveholder profoundly ignorant of the means of flight adopted by the slave. I would leave him to imagine himself surrounded by myriads of invisible tormentors, ever ready to snatch from his infernal grasp his trembling prey. Let him be left to feel his way in the dark. Let darkness, commensurate with this crime, hover over him. And let him feel that at every step he takes in pursuit of the flying bondmen, he is running the frightful risk of having his hot brains dashed out by an invisible agency." If Douglass's refusal to detail his escape from slavery enacts paradoxically his freedom, he also conjoins his freedom with an attempt to inflict upon the slaveholders the dread and fear of an invisible power that Douglass himself has come to understand poignantly.
	Douglass offers a second resolution to the looking relations of slavery at the conclusion of his 1845 narrative. As he prepares his first anti-slavery speech in Nantucket, he hesitates, Douglass writes, "Because I felt myself a slave, and the idea of speaking to white people weighed me down." And we can understand his reluctance, I think, in terms of his lingering self-consciousness as a surveilled Negro. "Nevertheless," Douglass writes, "I spoke but a few moments when I felt a degree of freedom, and said what I desired with considerable ease." 
	Douglass's incorporation into the anti-slavery movement marks a triumph in his struggle for selfhood, because at this climax, he completes the quest for freedom and literacy, as Stepto puts it. Likewise, DeLombard argues, that Douglass finally seems to make the transition from the embodied subjectivity of the eyewitness to the immaterial voice testifying against slavery in the court of public opinion. However, we must remember that within the field of antebellum visuality, the abolitionist stage is not an untroubled site of transcendence, since the former slave rises as a sight, and not merely as a voice. Douglass's 1855 narrative "My Bondage and My Freedom" reveals as much, describing his initial involvement with the anti-slavery movement in the North. Douglass writes, "That I was made to forget that my skin was dark and my hair crisped." But the abolitionists' public sphere attempted to stage him as a "brand-new fact" to be interpreted by Garrison and others, thereby limiting the liberatory potential of Douglass's own voice.
	According to his account, the abolitionists present him as both a black body, "with my diploma written on my back," he writes, and as a black voice. Better have a little of the plantation manner of speech than not, he's told. The result is a performance consistent with the dictates of abolitionist strategies that nonetheless continues to objectify the former slave. According to DeLombard, the white abolitionists with whom Douglass worked on the anti-slavery lecture circuit "would nevertheless persist in seeing him as an emphatically corporeal eyewitness to the cruelty of slavery who could perhaps escape slavery in the South, but not the embodied subjectivity entailed by his first-hand experience with southern violence."
	Finally, Douglass does not only struggle among the abolitionists who resist his racialization in the service of the anti-slavery cause, but he must still contend with the slave master's restraining eye. Indeed, throughout his 1855 account, he describes the danger that resulted from his anti-slavery activity. According to Douglass he was reluctant to become an agent of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society because "publicity exposed me to discovery and arrest by my master." And, he writes, "Anyone cherishing the design to betray me could easily do so by simply tracing my whereabouts through the anti-slavery journals." Furthermore, he writes, "Though I had reached a free state and had attained a position for public usefulness, I was still tormented with the liability of losing my liberty." Given the abolitionist construction of Douglass as a type of sight, an object of scrutiny, the mere coincidence here between the audience that looks at him and the slave master who looks for him, might be sufficiently notable.
	But in this instance, these two dimensions of antebellum visibility interact, insofar as the performance dictated by the abolitionists' public sphere erases the specter of slavocracy's surveillance. For this reason, I take Douglass's first two autobiographies with their interweaving of southern surveillance and northern publicity as a provocation, a starting point for reconsidering first the dangerous stakes in black people's visibility, and next, its profound effect on the visual self-consciousness informing black self-presentation throughout the 19th century. 
	Douglass's 1845 and 1855 narratives are useful here for considering the degrees to which the historical dilemma of black visibility could shape black autobiography in the relative absence of illustrations, though each of these texts also incorporate a different engraved portrait of the author. According to Michael Chaney, Douglass's different "frontispieces display a consistent strategy of coding the ex fugitive as having undergone class aggrandizement." Again, the commodity surrounding the daguerreotyped, painted, or drawn subject, as well as the fact that the subject is depicted at all, are responsible for such visual coding. All are part of an emergent discourse saliently conveyed through pictures that help to define the middle class during the period. 
	In this respect, Douglass's narratives present us with another major response to the problem image that became increasingly common by the end of the 19th century, while retaining the class logic of portraiture. By representing the author directly, such portraits most often appearing as frontispieces provide an authenticating document of the narrative's veracity and counters the images of black degradation that circulated in U.S. society. Following Henry Louis Gates's influential article on "The Trope of a New Negro," scholars have focused their attention on the author's portrait as an analogous act of self-fashioning designed to contest a wider visual archive by offering up anti-racist images of respectable, uplifted Negroes, making visible those figures who presumably embodied the highest accomplishment and potential of black America.
	In both antebellum and postbellum slave narratives, these portraits introduced their texts by implying a sort of conversion, a visual chiasmus, magically promising, as Maurice Wallace writes, "promising through affect what the nation's formal apparatus is not inclined to deliver." According to Wallace, such images as civil-war era daguerreotypes of uniformed black soldiers were necessary to the legislative incorporation of black men as citizens following emancipation. And the before and after images of black men out of, then in their uniforms would anticipate the industrial reconstruction of the Negro. As we shall see, these same before-after conventions would be central to the ideography of Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute. In the absence of blackness within a pictorial aesthetic, the photograph played a necessary role in the construction of black citizenship where the image precedes the political. Thus, the photographic portraits of black autobiographers sought to address the limits to black citizenship by shaping the race's public image, not simply as proof, but also as promise.
	For obvious reasons, scholarship accounting for the interplay of narration and vision in black autobiography has focused most often on such portraiture. But for my purposes, the traces of conversion and class, indeed class conversion, that characterized the form during the 19th century, make it a significant effect resolution to the problem of image. And before moving on, I just want to give you some examples, some odd examples perhaps. 
	Are you familiar with this image? Have you ever seen this image before? Anybody? Shocking! This is the ... iconic image of the black cowboy. So, there was a time when the line of jeans that used this image. You can go to Harlem, the street vendors often have t-shirts with this image. For some reason, this image is incredibly compelling. It's actually taken from an autobiography by a man named Nat Love, called "The Life and Adventures of Nat Love" that he published himself in Los Angeles in 1907. This is the before shot. This is one of the after shots. The caption reads, "This is where I shine. Now I'm out for the money." Nat Love left the frontier once the frontier closed in the 1890s and became a Pullman porter and had a succession of all sorts of jobs. There's also a frontispiece portrait of him with his family. And we get ultimately in this autobiography is the frontispiece portrait of the respectable black patriarch. And then we have another image of Nat Love at the very end in one of his uniforms when he was working for the General Securities Company. And in between, you've got sketches of his wild life on the range, and you have those cowboy images, which, it's important to keep in mind, were images taken in a studio. Those images were staged, and you know, he's very self-consciously putting together all the accoutrements of cowboys, that he thought cowboys should have. 
	What I think is interesting here is that Nat Love, at least by some folks, is remembered as a cowboy. But the story we get from his visual images is of the modernization of a former cowboy being incorporated into a newer economic order. What's also interesting is that his narrative itself, once we get to the end, begins to express a certain amount of nostalgia for that cowboy past. In part because his incorporation into this modern order is, in fact, degrading. You can imagine going from being a cowboy to a Pullman porter where you have to serve folks, and you have bosses. That wasn't a lot of fun for him. The other thing that's very interesting about Nat Love's autobiography is he actually writes about his anxiety of being surveilled by the Pullman company. So, he writes about having to worry about his bosses creeping up on him like Covey ... Of having to look over shoulder constantly, because he's worried that his bosses are keeping their eyes on him. And so he has this incredible self-consciousness that gets narrated in very interesting ways.
	The reason that I find Nat Love so interesting is that the story we get from the visual arc is actually competing with a much more ambivalent story that he's narrating about his life. And so, in terms of my research, this is one of the key texts that allowed me to really kind of think about those tensions between what gets represented visually and what gets narrated in the presentation of the black self.
	Have you ever heard of Matthew Henson? Every February usually his name comes up again. This is the cover of his autobiography published in 1912, "A Negro Explorer at the North Pole." It's mostly an account of his trip to the North Pole with Robert Peary, that final trip that they claimed got them to the North Pole. There's a great deal of controversy. I'm gonna plead the Fifth in terms of controversy. I don't wanna get involved in that. This is his frontispiece, and so he's looking quite dapper and dashing. Again, this is a salon ... I'm sorry, a studio portrait of Matthew Henson. 
	I'm interested in Henson for a number of reasons. But for our purposes, quickly today ... There are these images of Henson in his furs, and then there are the images of him at the studio. The thing that I find incredibly fascinating about these original images, which aren't always reprinted in his autobiography ... the caption here reads, "Matthew A. Henson immediately after the sledge journey to the Pole and back." And then in parentheses, "Showing the effect of the excessive strain." And then we get directions. "Compare with frontispiece and with portrait-facing page 139." So, again, here's the frontispiece. There's the image on 139. Now, I don't know what we're expected to see in terms of this juxtaposition. I do know that Henson is incredibly anxious about his status as belonging to civilization. And he has a really interesting relationship with the Inuit that work with him on these journeys. He's trying to establish both a kind of affiliation with them, some kind of identification with them, and he's also trying to establish his difference from them. So, there is a whole discourse around civilization that becomes crucial to his narrative. 
	One of the things that he does is he actually civilizes an orphan Inuit boy. And he makes a great deal of kind of washing him and bathing him, putting him in a little suit, and turning him into a little American while he's up in ... I think it's when they're up in Greenland. And he also has some other references to these sorts of bathing rituals when he returns from being in the wild; returning to civilization, returning to the Roosevelt on the way back to New York after the final expedition. So, there is some ... One thing that's going on in Henson's narrative is it's drawing our attention directly to the visual and calling attention to this juxtaposition between the civilized Henson and the rugged. He's not quite uncivilized, but he's part of something other, beyond civilization, outside of civilization.
	I .... Keep going? I'm running out of time; I hope you'll bear with me. I have some other images that will just knock your socks off. The good stuff is coming. Assuming an equation between self-presentation and collective recognition, black culture producers, and autobiographers in particular, thus contested the wider field of racial representation with narrative strategies that posited their humanity beyond the tyranny of visuality as we see in Douglass. They also fashioned portraits that directly countered the anti-black images that proliferated in Jim Crow America. Given the visual field within which black people produced their autobiographies, how, then, can we account for other photographs of homes, buildings, places, things, and other people that also appear in the narrative produced after Reconstruction? Is it possible to move beyond portraiture to analyze these other sorts of images for their autobiographical implications?
	So there's a way in which we can look at these sorts of images as they're included in Booker T. Washington's autobiography and just think, oh, they're documentary, they're just kind of representing something, it's something important. Another conversion from abject to respectable, but it's not autobiographical. It doesn't tell us anything about Washington. It doesn't represent him attempting to represent himself in a particular way. And this is the problem that I would like to end with.
	This image is taken from Booker T. Washington's third autobiography "My Larger Education." Do you know of Booker T. Washington? So, you do know Booker T. Washington! Okay, so I don't have to give you the whole background. One of the things that I argue in my book is that Booker T. Washington promoted what I'm calling a culture of autobiography at Tuskegee Institute, which he led from 1881 to 1915. One of the reasons I want to suggest this is because there's a way in which Booker T. Washington is seen as a philistine, as one who does not like books, does not really like to read, isn't interested in culture. But in fact, at Tuskegee, as part of his project of racial uplift, he was incredibly attuned to the power of visual images, and he was incredibly attuned to the power of personal narrative, of autobiography. So, he promoted all sorts of autobiographical practices at Tuskegee. He published his own autobiographies, three of them, in fact. He published a slew of autobiographical books that were his own. He promoted, kind of autobiographical, kind of testimonials of all sorts of events. He encouraged his own students to write their own autobiographies. He was really actually very invested in autobiography as a particular kind of discreet form of culture.
	So, what do we do, then, with an image like this? What do we do with an image like this? Throughout his writings, one of Washington's favorite tropes for racial uplift was race building. In addition, he frequently appealed to the object lesson of the house. In his famous second autobiography, "Up From Slavery," he argues that "It is the visible, the tangible, that goes a long ways in softening prejudices. The actual sight of a first-class house that a Negro hast built is ten times more potent than pages of discussion about a house that he ought to build, or perhaps could build."
	Many of the images in Washington's third and final memoir, "My Larger Education" published in 1911, represent his conviction according to Marlon Ross, "That the best proof of black people's progress and growing acceptance as American citizens will be the evidence of the census, the external display of respectability through material commodities, bodily cleanliness, and transparent self-discipline." Furthermore, these images replicate the concise economical distinctions between then and now that structured the autobiographical act that he consistently promoted. In fact, these images effectively displace his interpolating discourse of personal conversion, that is, up from slavery by the bootstraps, on to actual buildings. These images represent racial progress in a series of contrast between old and new buildings, presumably before and after the transfigurative power of Washington's institution. Indeed, one of these modern schoolhouses actually carries his name, the Washington Model School, Alabama. Even as these sorts of images insist that viewers infer essences from exteriors, they also remove Washington himself from direct consideration. In this sense, these strategies of invisibility resonate with the effective lessons of his own autobiographical narratives. 
	While manual labor at Tuskegee served a disciplinary function central to Washington's brand of uplift, he himself graduated from handwork to headwork in the course of his life. Rather than become a respectable laborer himself, he rose from slavery to become a formidable manager of black workers. Thus, if Washington promoted a collective commitment to race building by managing the bodies of other black people, he also drew attention away from his own in the process of becoming a representative Negro. Beyond his frontispiece portrait, the illustrations of Washington's "My Larger Education" produce him autobiographically as an archivist of such sights for others, fully consistent with his self-fashioning as the preeminent manager of the working black masses. Thank you.