Visualizing Equality
African American Rights and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth Century
By Aston Gonzalez
324 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 36 halftones, notes, bibl., index
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Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-5996-1
Published: September 2020 -
E-book PDF ISBN: 979-8-8908-5666-1
Published: July 2020 -
E-book EPUB ISBN: 978-1-4696-5997-8
Published: July 2020
John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture
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Awards & distinctions
Finalist, 2021 Association for the Study of African American Life and History Book Prize
Finalist, 2020 First Book Award, The Library Company of Philadelphia
Understudied artists such as Robert Douglass Jr., Patrick Henry Reason, James Presley Ball, and Augustus Washington produced images to persuade viewers of the necessity for racial equality, black political leadership, and freedom from slavery. Moreover, these activist artists’ networks of transatlantic patronage and travels to Europe, the Caribbean, and Africa reveal their extensive involvement in the most pressing concerns for black people in the Atlantic world. Their work demonstrates how images became central to the ways that people developed ideas about race, citizenship, and politics during the nineteenth century.
About the Author
Aston Gonzalez is assistant professor of history at Salisbury University.
For more information about Aston Gonzalez, visit
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Reviews
"Visualizing Equality illuminates a vital period in the development of African American visual culture."—Black Perspectives
"Successfully demonstrates how early African American visual artists developed ideas and practices of image making linked to politics impacted by their understanding of the intersections of race and images. Meticulously researched, Gonzalez’s text focuses our attention on Black artists empowered by their positions as activists in free Black communities in the North."—caa.reviews
“Gonzalez narrows his lens to offer rich biographies of his leading characters, opens the aperture to reveal the local contexts and activist networks in which they worked, and then widens it further to show the transnational reach of their work.”—North Carolina Historical Review
“Gonzalez’s thorough research sketches out the reticulation of physical, social, and interpretive pathways through which Douglass’s work passed, establishing a groundwork for future scholars.”—Nineteenth Century Art Worldwide
"Visualizing Equality meticulously pieces together archival traces to enliven the stories of Black printmakers, printers, and photographers whose aesthetic practices were inextricable from their political convictions. . . . Gonzalez has modeled a mode of studying US history and visual culture that meaningfully engages with the many nodes of the Black diaspora in the Atlantic world and avoids the US-centrism that frequently hampers scholarly and political discourses."—Imprint, Journal of the American Historical Print Collectors Society
"Many scholars have eagerly awaited a book like this--one that centers nineteenth-century black activism anchored in artwork and visual culture produced by black Americans. Visualizing Equality bridges the fields of African American history, visual culture studies, and material culture studies--a truly unique and impressive contribution for any scholar. Gonzalez has done a masterful job of mining source materials and presenting exciting arguments."--Erica Armstrong Dunbar, Rutgers University