Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World

by Lugo-Ortiz, Agnes; Rosenthal, Angela

• ISBN13: 9781107004399
• ISBN10: 110700439X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2013-09-30
• Publisher: Cambridge Univ Pr

Summary

Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World is the first book to focus on the individualized portrayal of enslaved people from the time of Europe's full engagement with plantation slavery in the late sixteenth century to its final official abolition in Brazil in 1888. While this period saw the emergence of portraiture as a major field of representation in Western art, 'slave' and 'portraiture' as categories appear to be mutually exclusive. On the one hand, the logic of chattel slavery sought to render the slave's body as an instrument for production, as the site of a non-subject. Portraiture, on the contrary, privileged the face as the primary visual matrix for the representation of a distinct individuality. Essays address this apparent paradox of 'slave portraits' from a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives, probing the historical conditions that made the creation of such rare and enigmatic objects possible and exploring their implications for a more complex understanding of power relations under slavery.

Table of Contents

Introduction: envisioning slave portraiture

Visibility and Invisibility

Slavery and the possibilities of portraiture

Subjectivity and slavery in portraiture: from courtly to commercial societies

Looking for Scipio Moorhead: on the portrayal of an 'African painter' in revolutionary North America

Slave Portraiture, Colonialism, and Modern Imperial Culture

Three gentlemen from Esmeralda: a portrait fit for a king

Metamorphoses of the self: slave portraiture and the case of Juan de Pareja in imperial Spain

Of sailors and slaves: portraiture, property, and the trials of circum-Atlantic subjectivities, c.1750-1830

Between violence and redemption: slave portraiture in early plantation Cuba

Subjects to Scientific and Ethnographic Knowledge

Albert Eckhout's African Woman and Child (1641): ethnographic portraiture, slavery, and the New World subject

Embodying African knowledge in colonial Surinam: two William Blake engravings in Stedman's 1796 narrative

Exquisite empty shells: sculpted slave portraits and the French ethnographic turn

Facing Abolition

Who is the subject? Marie-Guilhelmine Benoist's Portrait d'une Négresse

The many faces of Toussaint Loverture

Cinqué: a heroic portrait for the abolitionist cause

The Intrepid Mariner Simão: visual histories of blackness in the Luso-Atlantic at the end of the slave trade

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