Inventing StereotypeMartin A. BergerLabel: University of Chicago PressDescription: 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.
