Inventing Stereotype

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Inventing Stereotype is written by Martin A. Berger and published by University of Chicago Press. It's available with International Standard Book Number or ISBN identification 0226843688 (ISBN 10) and 9780226843681 (ISBN 13).

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.