Inventing Stereotype: Race, Representation, and Interwar America

Berger excavates the lineage of stereotype as a concept, illustrating how perception of stereotypes in works of literature and fine art shifts relative to representational norms. Upending a century of scholarly and popular thinking about stereotype, Martin A. Berger traces our current understanding of it to the 1920s, when American journalist and public intellectual Walter Lippmann borrowed the term from printmaking techniques and defined it as a shared mental picture that simplified a person, event, group, or thing so it could be easily grasped. Berger uncovers stereotype's intellectual debts to philosophy, psychology, political science, and, in particular, art history and interwar racial theories. Inventing Stereotype analyzes a series of plays, novels, and paintings from the 1920s and 1930s that sparked fierce debate about whether they employed racial stereotypes in the depiction of Black, Jewish, and other characters. Through careful attention to audience responses—parsed by race, political leanings, religion, and class—the book illustrates how artistic depictions are categorized as either stereotyped or not, relative to current representational norms, rather than to their success in conveying the authentic identities of individuals or racial groups.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: The Relativism of Stereotypes 1. The World Outside and the Pictures in Our Heads 2. Stereotyping Stereotype 3. Hunting for Stereotypes 4. Stereotyped After the Fact Afterword: Engaging with Our Past Acknowledgments Notes Index

About the Author :
Martin A. Berger is provost and senior vice president of academic affairs at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Berger is the author of Man Made: Thomas Eakins and the Construction of Gilded Age Manhood, Sight Unseen: Whiteness and American Visual Culture, Seeing through Race: A Reinterpretation of Civil Rights Photography, and the exhibition catalog Freedom Now! Forgotten Photographs of the Civil Rights Struggle.  

Review :
“A remarkable feat of clarity and nuance on a topic made for simplicity. There’s so much here to like (e.g., on Eugene O’Neill and Archibald Motley), but I especially appreciate Berger on the crucial role of historical context.” “Through a careful, refreshing, and compelling historicized analysis, Berger’s Inventing Stereotype demonstrates that there is no simple ‘seeing’ of stereotypes in the history of American art. Berger shows us how and when the stereotype became a problem for artists and art critics and why the concept reveals more about the historically situated viewer than the artwork itself. Inventing Stereotype offers a much-needed corrective to our misunderstanding of stereotype, and in a fine and poignant final chapter on the painter Archibald Motley, Berger proves himself masterful in helping us see artworks through and beyond our preconceptions.” “Berger’s immensely readable account of how stereotypes—of Jews, of African Americans, indeed of virtually everyone else in the early twentieth century—shift as they become more or less useful to the groups portrayed, is a tour de force. Simultaneously funny and sad, Inventing Stereotype reveals how caricatures are still used as hammers on both sides of the political spectrum: nothing new here, folks. What is new is the brilliance of Berger’s consideration not only of the functions of such stereotypes but of the very category of the stereotype, which was coined by an American Jewish thinker and shaped by antisemitic stereotypes.” “Berger’s Inventing Stereotype offers a clear, concise, and accessible contribution to the literature on arts and racial representation."