FRAMED PRINT: Frank Leslie's Illust News Cover c1891 CHINESE American Divide VGC

Description: ABSOLUTELY FASCINATING Antique FRAMED PRINT: Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper Cover August 15, 1891. Issue #1874, Price $.10. Entitled "A Street in Chinatown, San Francisco". Matted with a tan matte within a brown wood frame. Under Glass. DESCRIPTION: The illustration is a print from an Wood Engraving taken from the picture by Miss (!!) G. A. Davis. (Georgina A. Davis 1852-1901) Miss Davis was a Staff Artist for the newspaper. At the time, Miss Davis was the only female artist on staff. (Another reason to make this print notable!!) The print visually represents the CHINESE American Divide that existed at the time (read more in Background below). DIMENSIONS: Frame: 22" Tall x 15" Wide x 0.5" Deep. Print: 15.25" Tall x 9 5/8" Wide. BACKGROUND: This picture is highly suggestive of the historical relationship between the Chinese and white Americans in the United States. In the picture, two well-dressed upper-class Euro-American women pass by Chinatown and occupy the center of the scene. They are followed by a white American man and surrounded by Chinese peddlers and passers-by, who cast curious looks at the two ladies. To their left side is a Chinese father with his daughter, a four-or five-year-old Chinese girl. The little Chinese girl quietly lowers her head and stands submissively in front of the two Euro-American ladies, enduring the piercing gaze of the two ladies. While the two white women scrutinize the Chinese girl, the girl cannot return the gaze. Meanwhile, the father stands somewhat nervously aside. The little girl being looked at represents the Chinese immigrants whose existence in America in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was being constantly inspected and judged by white Americans. The gaze of the two Euro-American ladies is inquisitive and patronizing, as if they were examining an object on display or looking at their inferiors. In the nineteenth-century, an era of Western colonial expansion, artistic representations and visual techniques usually served the imperial goals of Western powers to order the world and represent-eventually control-the subjects of their colonial rule. Edward Said concluded that "The Western artistic and scholarly portrayal of the non-West... is not merely an ideological distortion to the emergent global political order, but a densely imbricated arrangement of imagery and expertise that organizes and produces political reality." Indeed, artistic imaginary oftentimes not simply reflects the world, but participates in the making of the world and shaping human consciousness about the world, especially when Western colonial power and technological advancement dictated the representations of the racial and cultural "others". Chinatown and Chinese immigrants in the U.S. were represented by the artistic gazes of nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century American photography and mass media. Simultaneously fantasied as an exotic and mysterious people and condemned for inspiring moral corruptions, the Chinese occupied a special place in Americas national and racial imagination, embodying the nation's anxiety of coming to terms with a culturally distinctive racial minority. Above taken from http://sre.stanford.edu VGC please see the attached pictures and item specifications.

Price: 75 USD

Location: Falling Waters, West Virginia

End Time: 2024-09-25T22:52:49.000Z

Shipping Cost: N/A USD