Ernest Cole's House of Bondage, the United States Information Agency, and the Cultural Politics of Race in the Cold War
Citation
Newbury, Darren. “Ernest Cole’s House of Bondage, the United States Information Agency, and the Cultural Politics of Race in the Cold War.” In Thy Phu, Erina Duganne, and Andrea Noble, eds., Cold War Camera, pp. 33–65. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023.
Tier justification
Tier 2: peer-reviewed book chapter in an edited scholarly volume published by Duke University Press, a leading academic press in American studies, photography studies, and postcolonial studies.
Relevance
The most directly relevant existing scholarship found in this round for the intersection of The Family of Man, the USIA, and South African photography in 1958. The chapter has two features that make it directly relevant:
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USIA/FoM nexus explicitly stated: WebSearch results (2026-04-30) returning the Duke University Press abstract page include the following description of the chapter’s argument: it “examines Cole’s interactions with the United States Information Agency (USIA), an arm of US Cold War public diplomacy better known for its sponsorship of Edward Steichen’s Family of Man exhibition, via their offices in Johannesburg in the period immediately prior to his exile.” The USIA Johannesburg office that dispatched The Family of Man to the Government Pavilion in August 1958 is the same institutional presence discussed in this chapter.
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Counter-archive argument: The chapter positions Ernest Cole’s House of Bondage (1967) in relation to The Family of Man’s humanist-universalist visual language. A WebSearch result (2026-04-30) from multiple sources describes the framing as “House of Bondage is an antidote to Steichen’s Family of Man” — this formulation appeared in search result prose from multiple sources and is likely drawn from the chapter’s argument or published reviews of the book. The exact phrase cannot be attributed to a specific page until the text is directly fetched.
Caution on “antidote” formulation: The phrase “House of Bondage is an antidote to Steichen’s Family of Man” was returned multiple times by WebSearch as AI-generated prose. Until the chapter text is directly read, this formulation should be cited as “described in search results as framing Cole’s work as ‘an antidote to Steichen’s Family of Man’” with a verified: false marker.
Key excerpts / pages
- Page range: pp. 33–65 (confirmed by WebSearch result, 2026-04-30, citing the Duke UP abstract page URL with chapter abstract).
- Duke UP abstract (returned by WebSearch, 2026-04-30; abstract page not directly fetched — WebFetch denied): “The chapter positions Ernest Cole’s photographs of apartheid South Africa, published in exile as the book House of Bondage, in relation to the global political forces that shaped their production, movement and interpretation during the Cold War.”
- The chapter “follows two lines of enquiry. First, it examines Cole’s interactions with the United States Information Agency (USIA), an arm of US Cold War public diplomacy better known for its sponsorship of Edward Steichen’s Family of Man exhibition, via their offices in Johannesburg in the period immediately prior to his exile.” (Source: search result prose, 2026-04-30; this phrasing is consistent across multiple results and likely draws from the Duke UP abstract — but it is not directly quoted from a fetched page and should be treated as possibly paraphrased.)
- The chapter also “explores continuities and discontinuities of the global Cold War through the tangled visual histories of apartheid South Africa and the United States.” (Same provenance caveat.)
- The University of Brighton institutional repository confirms this as a Newbury publication: https://research.brighton.ac.uk/en/publications/ernest-coles-ihouse-of-bondagei-the-united-states-information-age (WebSearch result, 2026-04-30; page not fetched).
Notes
- Full text NOT consulted this round. No page-specific quotations confirmed beyond what is noted above with provenance caveats.
- The parent volume, Cold War Camera (Duke UP, 2023), has an H-Net review: Bowman on Phu and Duganne and Noble, “Cold War Camera” (H-Net, 2026 — URL confirmed by WebSearch but page not fetched). The review may summarize the Newbury chapter independently.
- Ernest Cole biographical note: Cole (1940–1990) was a Black South African photographer who worked at Drum magazine in 1958 as a darkroom assistant (per WebSearch results, 2026-04-30). He would have been in Johannesburg during the Government Pavilion showing of The Family of Man (30 August – 13 September 1958). His later exile work, House of Bondage (Random House, 1967), was published in New York after he left South Africa.
- Ridge Press connection: A WebSearch result (2026-04-30) notes that “Ridge Press, which designed House of Bondage, had previously published the catalog of Edward Steichen’s ‘Family of Man.’” This bibliographic connection — the same publisher, Ridge Press / MoMA — has not been verified against a primary source this round and should be checked before being committed to any museum-facing document.
- Cross-reference:
src-newbury-2024-cold-war-photographic-diplomacy(full monograph on USIA in Africa);src-newbury-2024-african-looks-at-america(USIA photographic programmes for Africa, 1956–68);src-enwezor-bester-2013-rise-fall-apartheid(Newbury is also a contributor to this catalog). - Cross-reference to
src-sandeen-1995: Sandeen frames FoM as the flagship of USIA Cold War cultural diplomacy; Newbury’s chapter shows what came after FoM at the same Johannesburg USIA office, through Cole’s case. verified: false: Chapter confirmed to exist (Duke UP URL, Brighton repository, multiple consistent WebSearch results); full text not fetched.