In the Looking Glass

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Description

What did it mean, Rebecca K. Shrum asks, for people—long-conversant in associating reflective surfaces with ritual and magic—to became as conversant in how they looked as they were with the appearance of other people? Fragmentary histories tantalize us with how early Americans—people of Native, European, and African descent—interacted with mirrors.

Shrum argues that mirrors became objects through which white men asserted their claims to modernity, emphasizing mirrors as fulcrums of truth that enabled them to know and master themselves and their world. In claiming that mirrors revealed and substantiated their own enlightenment and rationality, white men sought to differentiate how they used mirrors from not only white women but also from Native Americans and African Americans, who had long claimed ownership of and the right to resolve the meaning of mirrors for themselves. Mirrors thus played a very powerful role in the construction of early American racial and gender hierarchies.

Drawing from archival research, in addition to archaeological studies, probate inventories, trade records, and visual sources, Shrum also assesses extant mirrors in museum collections through a material culture lens. That specialize in how mirrors were acquired in The us and by whom, in addition to the profound influence mirrors had, both for my part and collectively, at the groups that embraced them, In the Taking a look Glass is a piece of innovative textual and visual scholarship.

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