As this weeks readings attest to, figuring out how to study
African American material culture first involves deciding what it means to
label a person African American and what forms of material culture historians
are studying. Traditional questions in the field revolve around whether or to
what extent African American material culture is derived from Africa, the
effects of slavery on African American material culture, and the development of
folk crafts outside of Westernized markets.
Theodore Landsmark’s historiographical essay "Comments
on African American Contributions to American Material Life" provides a
decent summary of the scholarship of African American material culture. A point
that Landsmark drives home when discussing future trends is the complexity of
African American culture. Different circumstances and cultures in the north and
south influenced the development of diverse material cultures that can all be
called African American.
Jonathan Prown adapts this nuanced conception of what it
means to be African American and how the influences material culture. In “The
Furniture of Thomas Day” Prown investigate African American furniture maker
Thomas Day. Day’s furniture has much in common with contemporary urban
furniture making traditions, and it is tough for Prown to distinguish a
distinct African American touch. Only with documentary sources Prown is able to
string together a story that involves Day’s African American identity.
In “Suckey’s Looking Glass: African Americans as Consumers,”
Ann Martin analyzed store logs recording African American purchases,
particularly the purchase of ribbon and a mirror by a slave named Suckey.
Martin looks at how slaves interacted with the market, how they paid for their
goods, and the types of things they bought. For Martin, the store is a
particularly important place because it a metaphorical mirror of society. The
things that slaves bought with what little money they had shows how they worked
to foster an identity outside of slavery.
Both Martin and Prown partially based their search for
African American meanings in material culture on the material in question
having some connection with African traditions. For Prown it was if the form of
the furniture had an African source. For Martin it was if the meaning of Suckey’s
mirror had anything to do with African spiritualism. With limited success, both
authors downplay this traditional perspective, instead highlighting how the
material complicates what we think we know about African American culture.
For my forth article, I chose Debra Reid’s "Furniture
Exempt from Seizure: African-American Farm Families and Their Property in Texas,
1880s-1930s." This article focuses on the material life of African
American farmers. One aspect of this article that sets it apart is that it is
from the perspective of agricultural history and considers material culture in
a more expansive light than is typical. The material acquisitions of farm
families included land and livestock in addition to furniture, equipment, and
houses. Reid looks at how the laws and treatment of land-holding African
American farmers affected the way that they acquired property, mostly in areas
with poor soil far from rail lines, and how their material circumstances
changed, such as transitioning from a hearth to cook stoves.
Reid’s article in not as nuanced as Martin’s or Prown’s, but
she does get at an aspect of African American material culture history that I
believe is part of the reason why these studies are so rare outside slavery
studies. Reid discusses how in the 1920s and 1930s, especially with New Deal
photography, the farms in question became symbols of poverty and an absence of
material goods. Additionally, a farmer’s understanding of their property and
material surrounding is specific to their circumstances. Perhaps, when Prown
lamented not having analogous research to cite, what he really needed was
analogous research that considers class and circumstances over ethnicity.
Readings
Landsmark, Theodore C. "Comments on African American
Contributions to American Material Life." Winterthur Portfolio 33, no. 4 (1998): 261-282.
Martin, Ann Smart. “Suckey’s Looking Glass: African
Americans as Consumers,” in Buying into
the World of Goods: Early Consumers in Backcountry Virginia, 173-193. Baltimore:
John Hopkins University Press, 2008.
Prown, Jonathan. "The Furniture of Thomas Day: A
Reevaluation." Winterthur Portfolio
33, no. 4 (1998): 215-229.
Reid, Debra A. "Furniture Exempt from Seizure:
African-American Farm Families and Their Property in Texas, 1880s-1930s." Agricultural History 80, no. 3 (2006):
336-357.
I was between a few articles for African American material
culture. Ultimately I chose the one about agricultural history because it
offers a different perspective of material culture than what we typically see.
The other articles were:
Klassen, Pamela E. "The Robes of Womanhood: Dress and
Authenticity among African American Methodist Women in the Nineteenth
Century." Religion and American
Culture 14, no. 1 (2004): 39-82.
Mullins, Paul R. "Race and the Genteel Consumer: Class
and African-American Consumption, 1850-1930." Historical Archaeology 33, no. 1 (1999): 22-38.