The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880–1930

Autumn Womack's excellent The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880–1930 locates itself in the midst of a “data revolution”: social scientists in the United States, she points out, desperately sought information that would supply answers to the so-called Negro problem following Reconstruction. This period saw the development of various fields dependent upon collecting data, such as sociology and anthropology, as formal disciplines. And, in their analyses of African American life, these disciplines attempted to rein in the “seeming disorder of free black life,” particularly through the use of data technologies or technological advances such as the social survey, the film, the photograph, and so forth (2). The significant intervention of Womack's study lies in its claim, ably demonstrated by extensive archival research and groundbreaking analysis, that Black art of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries animated those social scientific facts that posed as explanations...