Black Visual Cultures of the Midwest

Recentering black creativity and resistance in the history of the Midwest

African American creators have unsettled and upended racism in the Midwest region since as far back as 1787, and Black Visual Cultures of the Midwest examines the work of many such innovators, presenting an unruly, transgressive, and defiant vision of queer blackness that complicates fundamental American ideals of liberty, progress, life, and property.

Spanning the nineteenth century to the present, Freda L. Fair draws from a broad array of sources, including film, visual art, and even arrest records to examine concepts of freedom and resistance grounded in black cultural production in the Midwest. Through such subjects as Joshua Glover, who escaped slavery in Missouri and relocated to Wisconsin; sex workers in the Twin Cities; Ruth Ellis, a black lesbian elder in Detroit; and Nick Cave, who created Soundsuits in response to the police beating of Rodney King, Fair challenges monolithic formulations of blackness and black culture. Fair also queers Midwest history, engaging an LGBTQ lens to reexamine Wisconsin's 1854 decision to declare the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 unconstitutional, the Springfield Race Riot of 1908, and other historic moments.

Revealing how black visual cultures in the Midwest both illuminate black gendered and sexual difference and actively resist antiblackness, Fair shows that the region is a site that can advance freedom and social change.

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