Chris Dingwall

Black Designers in Chicago

Selling Slavery: Race and the Industry of American Culture

This is a book about how and why culture industries invested so much in racism at the turn of the twentieth century and thus transformed how Americans experienced the emergence of mass consumer capitalism. Focusing on the popular icons of the mythic old plantation, each chapter details the labor and planning it took to bring racist ideology to life in a variety of popular cultural commodities: theatrical spectacle, decorated books, photographic postcards, and mechanical toys.

Yet selling slavery did not go uncontested. Essential to reproducing racist ideology on a mass scale, ironically, was the creative work of African American artists and performers, who sought to capitalize on the value of race in mass cultural marketplaces while bending the power of industrial capitalism toward the unfinished work of black emancipation. Their stories offer critical perspectives on the relationship between cultural industry and freedom—perspectives especially valuable in our age of digital media, global capitalism, and resurgent racism.

Selling Slavery is currently under contract at Cambridge University Press for its series, Slaveries Since Emancipation.

The Reconstruction of Culture

My new research project asks simply how the astonishing yet unfinished social revolution of slave emancipation transformed American culture during and following the Civil War. Although Reconstruction has been well-studied as a political, social, and legal history, I approach it as a significant cultural era when Americans sought to realize—and reverse—the nation’s “new birth of freedom.”

Taking the metaphor of “reconstruction” literally, I am conceptualizing Reconstruction as an impulse to remake the world, an impulse that animated cultural practices in the South, the North, and the frontier West, and an impulse expressed in myriad cultural practices. My research is focusing on designed products (toys, furniture, home décor) as well as texts (novels, correspondence, memoirs) to grasp how Americans engaged the futures opened up by emancipation.