Putting a provocative new slant on the history of U.S. conservation, Vanishing America reveals how wilderness preservation efforts became entangled with racial anxieties—specifically the fear that forces of modern civilization, unless checked, would sap white America’s vigor and stamina.

Nineteenth-century citizens of European descent widely believed that Native Americans would eventually vanish from the continent. Indian society was thought to be tied to the wilderness, and the manifest destiny of U.S. westward expansion, coupled with industry’s ever-growing hunger for natural resources, presaged the disappearance of Indian peoples. Yet, as the frontier drew to a close, some naturalists chronicling the loss of animal and plant populations began to worry that white Americans might soon share the Indians’ presumed fate.

Miles Powell explores how early conservationists such as George Perkins Marsh, William Temple Hornaday, and Aldo Leopold became convinced that the continued vitality of America’s “Nordic” and “Anglo-Saxon” races depended on preserving the wilderness. Fears over the destiny of white Americans drove some conservationists to embrace scientific racism, eugenics, and restrictive immigration laws. Although these activists laid the groundwork for the modern environmental movement and its many successes, the consequences of their racial anxieties persist.

Visuality of Violence unpacks the way visual documentations and depictions of the practice of racial violence are used in imperialism, capitalism, and neoliberalism in the United States. Ofelia Ortiz Cuevas traces the continuity of racial value through the shifting narratives of race by examining the long-running TV series, COPS, and the museum exhibition, Without Sanctuary, which features photographs of lynching. These case studies provide an innovative holistic mapping of the policing and incarceration of Black and Brown people.  

Addressing the frequently ignored experiences of Asian and Native Americans, among others, in its comparative undertaking, Visuality of Violence exceeds intersectional mapping to uniquely charge the spectacle of racial violence as a foundational practice in its continued presence in contemporary society. Cuevas argues that the visual presentations of the racial body throughout history requires a reckoning and acknowledgement of the material and legal effects of the images, narratives, and practices used to maintain hegemonic racial order and inequality.

In holding a theoretical mirror to history, Visuality of Violence reveals liberal mythical reliance on the ideals of western law and its rationalities as the location of justice and freedom, thereby presenting its readers with a new understanding in the quest for peace and liberation.

In the series Critical Race, Indigeneity, and Relationality