“Britt Rusert’s focus on the overlooked significance of William J. Wilson’s speculative museum of Black art is a singular, significant contribution to the development of the study of Black aesthetics in the antebellum and postbellum periods. The Afric-American Picture Gallery fundamentally reshapes our understanding of the power of vision and visual culture for American democracy. Rusert’s work is a triumph.”—Sarah Lewis, author of, The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America

“In this deeply original study, Britt Rusert animates William J. Wilson’s radical innovations in 19th-century experimental fiction and visual culture, reminding us how Black literary practice houses radical epistemologies for reordering the social world. As Rusert traces Wilson’s trajectory, she crafts a compelling and devastatingly urgent account of the transformative capacities of Black art at moments when looking, creating, and living are under threat.”—Autumn Womack, author of, The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880-1930