Jacob Riis's Sentimental Negotiations
This project, as a whole, examines the work of American photo-journalist Jacob Riis through the lens of sentimentality, racial ethics, and turn-of-the-century n
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Description
While Riis’s use of sentimental appeals—and more broadly tropes of the domestic novel—are often unacknowledged or dismissed by critics, these tactics reveal essential aspects of his reform project. Riis, it is argued, is heir to mid-nineteenth century sentimentality, as well as accompanying theories of racial evolution that liberally blended Lamarckism and Darwinism, figuring personal and racial evolution as a process that could take place through environmental influence.
In this paper, Christa Holm Vogelius reads Riis’s classic text of tenement reform, How the Other Half Lives (1890) in the light of much more critically overlooked works such as the auto-biographical The Making of an American (1901) to argue that Riis’s national nostalgia deeply influences his ideas about integration within the multi-national and multi-racial setting of New York’s Lower East Side. She shows how both texts veer between sentimental and rationalist/realist modes, using both as methods of persuasion, but ultimately structuring their arguments in the sentimental mode. This sentimentality, though, is remarkable in framing the home as distinctly transnational, opening up a reading of Riis’s reform texts wherein the immigrant is also an (unhyphenated) American.
Speaker Bios
Christa Holm Vogelius is an assistant professor of American Studies at the University of Copenhagen, where she works on nineteenth and twentieth century American literature and visual culture. She has recent work out or forthcoming in ESQ, Legacy, and Poe Studies, and is completing a monograph on nineteenth-century literary conceptions of femininity and originality.