"Our Essentially Aesthetic or Art-Nature": William J. Wilson and the Origins of Afro-Bohemia

• In Event: Black Creation: Lessons for Living under the Shadow of Slavery and Empire

Abstract

William J. Wilson may very well have been New York’s first Black culture critic. A self-stylized flâneur, cultural aesthete, and frequent contributor to African American periodicals in the 1850s, he wrote under the name “Ethiop” and as “Brooklyn Correspondent” for Frederick Douglass’ Paper. In these columns, he provided readers across the nation with on-the-ground reports of New York’s people, places, and happenings based on his frequent ramblings around the city. Wilson was particularly interested in the sights and sounds of Broadway as it emerged as a hub of culture, entertainment, and conspicuous consumption in the middle of the century. Wilson would make his own contribution to the city’s cultural scene in 1859 with his publication of the Afric-American Picture Gallery, an experimental text that imagines the first museum of Black Art in the United States. Throughout this deeply ekphrastic text, Wilson also theorizes the changing role of art in a society structured by slavery and racial capitalism. This paper focuses on Wilson’s theorizations of the status of the work of art in an industrializing, slaveholding United States on the cusp of civil war. More broadly, I’m interested in how Wilson’s life and work give us a glimpse into a vibrant network of black bohemian creatives who were experimenting with radical forms of creativity and freedom of expression in late antebellum New York.

Author

• Britt Rusert, University of Massachusetts, Amherst