Reading Response: African American Material Culture

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.