Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art [1 ed.] 9780203851241, 9780415871167

Citation preview

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

Routledge Studies on African and Black Diaspora SERIES EDITORS : FASSIL DEMISSIE, DePaul University ; SANDRA JACKSON, DePaul University ; AND ABEBE ZEGEYE, University of South Africa

1. Sex and Race in the Black Atlantic Mulatto Devils and Multiracial Messiahs Daniel McNeil 2. Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art Charmaine A. Nelson

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

Charmaine A. Nelson

New York

London

First published 2010 by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2010. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. © 2010 Taylor & Francis All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nelson, Charmaine. Representing the Black female subject in western art / by Charmaine A. Nelson. p. cm.—(Routledge studies on African and Black diaspora ; 2) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Women, Black, in art. 2. Race in art. I. Title. N7630.N45 2010 704.9'42408996—dc22 2009050487 ISBN 0-203-85124-2 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN13: 978-0-415-87116-7 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-85124-1 (ebk)

To my extraordinary Grandmothers Luzetha Valere Durrant Higgins (1901–1990) and Hilda Maud Nelson (1926–2000)

Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgments Introduction

ix xi 1

PART I From Girls to Women: Locating Black Female Subjects in Western Art 1

2

Through An-Other’s Eyes: White Canadian Artists— Black Female Subjects

19

Racing Childhood: Representations of Black Girls in Canadian Art

37

PART II Slavery and Portraiture: Agency, Resistance and Art as Colonial Discourse 3

4

5

Slavery, Portraiture and the Colonial Limits of Canadian Art History

63

The Fruits of Resistance: Reading Portrait of a Negro Slave on the Sly

76

Tying the Knot: Black Female Slave Dress in Canada

88

PART III The Nude and the Naked: Black Women, White Ideals and the Racialization of Sexuality 6

Coloured Nude: Fetishization, Disguise, Dichotomy

105

viii Contents 7

The “Hottentot Venus” in Canada: Modernism, Censorship and the Racial Limits of Female Sexuality

122

PART IV From White Marble to Coloured Stone: Aesthetics, Materiality and Degrees of Blackness 8

9

White Marble, Black Bodies and the Fear of the Invisible Negro: Signifying Blackness in Mid-NineteenthCentury Neoclassical Sculpture

139

Vénus Africaine: Race, Beauty and African-ness

158

10 Allegory, Race and the Four Continents: Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s Les quatre parties du monde soutenant la sphere céleste Conclusion: Whiteness as Collective Narcissism, Towards a New Vision Notes Bibliography Index

170

179 183 225 237

Figures

1.1

François Malépart de Beaucourt, Portrait of a Negro Slave, or The Negress, 1786.

22

1.2

Prudence Heward, Dark Girl, 1935.

26

2.1

Henrietta Shore, Negro Woman and Two Children, c. 1916.

50

2.2

William Notman, Mrs. Cowan’s Nurse, 1871.

51

2.3

Dorothy Stevens, Amy, c. 1930.

59

3.1

François Malépart de Beaucourt, Madame EustacheIgnace Trottier dit Desrivières, née Marguerite Malhiot, 1793.

73

George H. Craig, Selling Baskets on Market Day, Halifax, c. 1890.

91

5.1 5.2

Caroline Bucknall Estcourt, The Good “Woman of Colour,” 1838–1839.

100

6.1

Dorothy Stevens, Coloured Nude, c. 1933.

108

7.1

Edouard Manet, Olympia, 1863.

123

7.2

Max Weber, Retirement, 1921.

128

8.1

John Gibson, Tinted Venus, c. 1851–1856.

144

8.2

Charles Cordier, Nègre du Soudan ou Nègre en costume algérien or African of the Sudan or African in Algerian Costume, 1856–1857.

146

8.3

Hiram Powers, Greek Slave, 1869.

148

8.4

John Quincy Adams Ward, The Freedman, 1863.

152

x

Figures

8.5

William Wetmore Story, Cleopatra, 1869.

153

8.6

John Tenniel, The Virginian Slave: Intended as a Companion to Power’s “Greek Slave,” c. 1851.

155

9.1

Charles-Henri-Joseph Cordier, African Venus, 1851.

159

10.1

Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Les quatre parties du monde soutenant la sphere céleste or The Four Corners of the World Holding a Celestial Sphere, 1874.

171

Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Les quatre parties du monde soutenant la sphere céleste or The Four Corners of the World Holding a Celestial Sphere, detail, c. 1867.

172

10.2

Acknowledgments

This book has been a labour of love that has spanned almost twenty years of my academic and personal life. And as with any labour, nothing wonderful can ever be achieved without a lot of hard work and the help and support of others. Along the way, I have been assisted by the able and dedicated staff of many libraries, museums and archives across Canada, the United States, Britain, France and the Caribbean who have allowed me to access their artworks, documents, artifacts and books. I have also been allowed to share my work at various conferences in these same locations and I thank the various conference organizers for welcoming me and for allowing me to share my thoughts in the process. Thanks to all of these people for sharing their knowledge, time and resources with me. A part of the pleasure of being an academic is the ability to train the next generations of scholars. I have been assisted in this project by my able research assistants, undergraduate and graduate students in Art History who have contributed countless hours to my research. Thank you to Rachelle Dickenson, Ruth Burns, Samantha Burton and Jolene Pozniak, who assisted with many of the initial publications, and to Katya Isayev, Emma Doubt and Lauren Diez D’Aux, who helped to put this book together in its current form. Earlier versions of some of the chapters in this book were previously published in the following formats: Chapter 1, “Through An-Other’s Eyes: White Canadian Artists—Black Female Subjects,” was originally published as a stand-alone exhibition catalogue. Chapter 3, “Slavery, Portraiture and the Colonial Limits of Canadian Art History,” was published as a shorter version under the same title in Canadian Woman Studies/les cahiers de la femme, Women and the Black Diaspora issue, vol. 23, no. 2 (Winter 2004), 22–29. Chapter 4, “The Fruits of Resistance: Reading Portrait of a Negro Slave on the Sly,” was published under the same title in Public, Eating Things issue, ed. Scott Toguri McFarlane, no. 30 (2004), 12–23.

xii

Acknowledgments

Chapter 6, “Coloured Nude: Fetishization, Disguise, Dichotomy,” was published under the same name in Canadian Art Review/Revue d’art canadienne (RACAR) XXII, no. 1–2 (1995), 97–107. Chapter 7, “The ‘Hottentot Venus’ in Canada: Modernism, Censorship and the Racial Limits of Female Sexuality,” was published under the same name in Racism, Eh? A Critical Inter-Disciplinary Anthology of Race and Racism in Canada, by Camille A. Nelson and Charmaine A. Nelson (Concord, ON: Captus Press Inc., 2004), 366–84. Reprinted with permission of Captus Press Inc. Chapter 8, “White Marble, Black Bodies and the Fear of the Invisible Negro: Signifying Blackness in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Neoclassical Sculpture,” was published under the same name in Canadian Art Review/ Revue d’art canadienne (RACAR) XXVII, no. 1–2 (2000), 87–101. Chapter 9, “Vénus Africaine: Race, Beauty and African-ness,” was published under the same name in Black Victorians: Black People in British Art 1800–1900, edited by Jan Marsh (Aldershot: Lund Humphries, 2005), 46–56. To the Routledge staff, I express my sincere gratitude for your support and for your belief in the project. In particular, I would like to thank Jennifer Morrow, Benjamin Holtzman and Max Novick. I would also like to thank Ryan Kenney and his colleagues at IBT Global. With a project with such a wide geographical span comes significant fieldwork demands. These travel requirements could not have been fulfilled without funding support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada from which I received a Standard Research Grant (2004–07) and from the Fonds québecois de la recherche sur la sociéte et la culture that awarded me a New Researcher Grant (2004–07). I salute the powerful and talented black women whose tireless work, dedication and support have allowed me to become who I am today. To my mother, Barbara Nelson, who is the only one who has ever read everything that I have ever written, I give heartfelt thanks for all of your help and direction throughout my career and life and in particular for your exceptional editorial contributions to this book. Your comments and suggestions were always helpful and insightful. Thanks also to my father, Maxwell Nelson, for his unconditional love and support and for his editorial help. And lastly, I dedicate this book to my grandmothers, Luzetha Valere Durrant Higgins and Hilda Maud Nelson, two extraordinary black Jamaican women who lived interesting, complex and textured lives, who survived in difficult times, who raised brave, intelligent and accomplished children despite many hardships and who made great personal contributions to their societies and families across generations and against great odds. I love and miss you both. Thanks for the inspiration! Charmaine A. Nelson Montreal, August 2009

Introduction

OVERVIEW: RACE AND REPRESENTATION This book brings together a significant body of scholarly work into a collection that focuses critical attention upon the representation of the black female subject in historical western art. All of the chapters, produced between 1995 and 2009, reflect both my engagement with the field of Race and Representation as well as my abiding interest in the study of Trans Atlantic Slavery, Postcolonial Studies and Black Diaspora Studies. But the book is primarily Art Historical, based upon a New Art History approach that emphasizes the relevance of the social context of artistic production and representation as inseparable from issues of artistic identity and the material and aesthetic properties of an art object. As such, this book, like my research generally, has been profoundly influenced by social, black feminist, white feminist, queer and postcolonial Art Histories as well as critical theory and critical race theory, especially engagements with Marxism, psychoanalysis and discourse theory. These interests developed over the course of my Art Historical study and my professional career. As a black female student of Art History in the early 1990s, I quickly noticed the absence of myself within the discipline. This absence was not only in terms of the lack of racial diversity amongst students at my metropolitan Canadian university, but the similar lack of diversity amongst my professors. As I moved from BFA to MA in Montreal, Canada, to a PhD in Manchester, England, and as I travelled to conferences across Canada, the United States, Europe and the Caribbean, the overwhelming absence of black academics in Art History and in the Humanities generally became, sadly, normal. Another early classroom lesson connected to the former issue was about erasure. Throughout countless lectures on western art, it became normal for my white male and female professors to either absent issues of western imperialism, colonialism and racism from culture and art altogether, or to strategically avoid its discussion, even when the artworks they chose to analyze seemed to cry out for such interpretation. How could one rigorously and critically analyze a work like Edouard Manet’s Olympia (1863; see Figure 7.1) without discussing his choice of a demurely clothed black female servant juxtaposed with the naked body of the white female prostitute?

2

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

How could one seriously interpret Canadian Prudence Heward’s Dark Girl (1935; see Figure 1.2), a lone naked and melancholic black female surrounded by tropicalized foliage, without discussing the evocation of Africa as the “dark continent” and without mentioning Heward’s seeming preoccupation with black women and girls as subjects for other paintings like Hester (1937), Clytie (1938), Girl in the Window (1941) and Negress with Flower (n.d.)? These questions percolated in my mind as I consciously raised my hand to pose them in front of my dominantly white classmates. In many cases my professors were sympathetic and even apologetic for their lack of knowledge, entertaining my questions as legitimate as opposed to dismissing them as unimportant and irrelevant. But it became clear to me that their adopted methodologies, our assigned sources and their research knowledge had not prepared them to answer such queries within the context of Art History. That is when I began the process of preparing myself to answer them in earnest. This preparation over the course of what has now been nineteen years has been a search for primary and secondary sources (the artworks, artifacts, correspondence, art reviews, books, etc.), for academic and professional support (the mentors, summer jobs, fellowships, supervisors, etc.) and for a language capable of articulating the questions and answers that had previously been erased or neglected (the theories and methodologies). For me, these questions and answers were ones about race, about blackness and about the representation of the black female subject within the west’s long history of colonial cultural production. Gerald McMaster has argued that the field of art history has been a specifically western and “mainstream” discourse whose epistemological foundation was based in modernism, universalism and imperialism.1 Emerging at least partially in response to this problem, the field of Race and Representation as practiced within Art History has mainly focused upon marginalized racial groups like blacks, critiquing the ways that white artists have represented and indeed regularly misrepresented these peoples.2 However, most of these important contributions have tended to conflate black male and female subjects, a conflation that has erased the specificity of distinctions across gender, sex and sexuality and therefore been incapable of rigorous engagement with and critique of the structures of patriarchy. But another conflation, that of the female body in the west with ideals of beauty, maternity and sexuality—in other words, Nature—and the Eurocentric assumption of true Womanhood as always already white, has resulted in the endemic misrepresentation and strategic abjection of black female subjects who have been visually deployed as what Lorraine O’Grady has called stereotypically not-white and what Willis and Williams have coined as “servant, seraglio, savage or ‘Sarah.’”3 It is this deliberate cultivation of black femaleness as a site of abject sexual and racial difference that underpins the urgent need for us to unbind the corrupt western cultural legacies that have produced and sustained this dual “otherness.”

Introduction 3 This book takes up the black female subject within a postcolonial4 and black feminist5 framework, capable of examining the simultaneity of sex/ gender and race/colour marginalization. My contention is this: all women experience their sex, gender and sexuality (not to mention their class, ethnicity, nationality, etc.) through their racial identification and position and vice versa, and as such, any analysis of one of these categories in exclusion overlooks the profound marginalization of black women, Native women and women of colour under colonial and other intersecting regimes of power. The applicability of intersectionality (the ways that these markers of identity intersect and inform one another) goes beyond black female or even female subjects, extending to anybody, and therefore also concerns the identities and locations of the white artists under consideration, many of who were multiply privileged as whites and as males.

CONTEXTS: TRANS ATLANTIC SLAVERY AND THE BLACK DIASPORA Black people have been in and of the “modern” west for more than four centuries. Although Africans were present in ancient western societies and represented in ancient western arts, the current geographical locations of significant populations of African descended peoples is directly linked to the millions of Africans who were forcibly removed from Africa and scattered, as slaves, throughout the Atlantic world by various European imperial forces. Black populations now seen as or assumed to be indigenous to countries like Jamaica and Brazil are for the most part the ancestors of slaves who survived these Atlantic crossings, the Middle Passage and its genocidal conditions. What has come to be known as the Black Atlantic was constituted through force and tensions between mobility and constraint and fused within the histories of the Middle Passage; the Atlantic routes through which blacks were shipped into slavery and globally dispersed—a vast unmarked grave and site of genocide.6 These Africans, stolen peoples, were destined for lives of oppression, brutality and torture in the “New Worlds.” And their coerced movement was justified by the aggressive European production of colonial ideals of race and whiteness as the incontrovertible racial paradigm. Once Africans had arrived at their destinations, their commodification, which had begun in the slave castles of the West African coast, was solidified through their sale and their legal redefinition as chattel. Built largely on monocrop plantation systems in tropical climates, the riches of this new world of global capital depended upon the ongoing exploitation and marginalization of this African population and their offspring.7 Once a diverse group of people with various ethnicities, languages, religions and cultures, their voyage into slavery, a voyage that created the Black Diaspora, also helped to produce the new colonial order of race that categorized them

4

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

simply as Negro/black and thereby sub-human; a category dichotomously bound to Caucasian/white as always already pure, moral, beautiful, rational and above all civilized. An understanding of how black people became a part of the west and the eventual conflation of the black body with the status of slave is a necessary precursor to an understanding of the significance of the representation of the black female subject in western art. It was through colonization and one of its central mechanisms, slavery, that Africans came to be in and of the west in significant enough numbers to begin to become frequent subjects of western art. It was through slavery and its colonial logic of race that blacks were perceived as “primitive,” a sub-human category of beings desperately in need of European “civilization”; a group who were actively imagined and represented within ever more entrenched stereotypes of visual racial difference. And it is arguably then within western art that one can best locate the processes and practices of how race was generated and sustained as a uniquely visual domain of human categorization, regulation and dominance.

METHODOLOGY: THEORIZING RACE IN VISUAL CULTURE This book considers how art and visual culture and its mechanisms of power are fundamentally invested in the differencing of bodies and the production of marginalization. I am examining western art as a key historical site of colonial discourse, capable of producing Eurocentric ideals of race and, critical for my arguments, normalizing them through a vast global deployment and circulation across highly stratified audiences, thereby stimulating and sustaining imperialist agendas. This project is a black feminist and postcolonial intervention in Art History that questions the colonial structure of western culture and its racial legacies.8 In so doing, my goal has always been to make a contribution to the larger and interdisciplinary scholarly project of understanding race and racism and how and why it is (re)defi ned and (re)mobilized at specific times and places. This is all of course with the aim of participating in the dismantling of racism and racial oppression. Most of the artworks that I discuss, produced between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries, were situated within a period of European imperial expansion, colonization and Trans Atlantic Slavery; a time when race was indisputably one of (if not) the dominant aspect of bodily identification with profound social, cultural, political and psychic ramifications. It is because race has historically been largely articulated as visual corporeal signs with aesthetic and scientific relevance that an understanding of race through visual art and culture is extremely relevant and indeed necessary. With white maleness as the indisputable ideal, western human science

Introduction 5 produced race within hierarchical systems of human value.9 Doubly marginalized by this norm, black female subjects, through the process of abjection, came to stand for the ultimate “other”—not white and not male.10 It is the historical visual logic of race in the west that makes visual art and culture an important source and repository of these colonial ideals and the cultural visualization of black female subjects as marginal. As mentioned earlier, this book is a work of black feminist and postcolonial Art History that takes up race as a colonial construct, a fiction created and deployed through specific events, practices and mechanisms like colonization and Trans Atlantic Slavery. But I also recognize that colonial discursive structures of various disciplines like the human sciences, medicine, law and various cultural practices in the west are interrelated and deeply invested in the production of racial difference and disparity. Race and blackness are taken throughout this book as a construct that, although a western colonial fabrication, on many levels had and continues to have very real material and psychic effects on society and culture, producing specific identities and informing human subjectivity. As such, a full understanding of artistic representations of black female subjects necessitates not only a theorization of the interrelation of race, material culture and artistic and cultural practices, but an understanding of the imaginary, emotive and psychic effects of colonialism and racism and its specific impacts on black female subjects in the west.

THE USEFULNESS OF THEORY For marginalized racial subjects, the body’s visual and external identification and misidentification has the power to subject them to oppressive racial surveillance, scrutiny, abuse and violence.11 The visual arts in the west form an oppressive repository of stereotypical representations of black female subjects that the subjects themselves were forced to consume daily as they saw themselves imaged and imagined through white eyes and white social perceptions, in public and private spaces through elite and populist art practices alike. Vision itself then must be questioned and questionable, and not taken up as a necessarily objective sensory logic of the body, but rather as a mechanism for social experience and perception that is itself biased by the viewer’s identity, location and subjectivity. To what extent did white artists see black female subjects only within the limited and fi xed possibilities of their colonial cultural perspectives and ideologies, in the ways in which they were prepared by the dominant beliefs and politics of their colonial societies? And how did this dominant colonial perception of black women and girls influence the artistic desire for black female subjects? Psychoanalysis is a significant body of theory for its defi nition of identity as simultaneously corporeal/material and psychic, allowing for the analysis of blackness on multiple levels. Its usefulness to visual culture lies in

6

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

its theorization of the body’s materialization as a fundamental product of vision and the subject’s becoming as a product of its separation from a female/maternal body.12 When I use the Freudian and Lacanian privileging of a normative male body (through concepts like the phallus) in their analysis of sex/gender construction, it is not in deference to some corporeal truth, rather I use it strategically as a starting point from which to theorize and critique the colonial privileging of a normative white male body from which any racial and sexual difference has been produced as “other.”13 The language of psychoanalysis has also allowed for an understanding of trauma as not just physical wounds or material events, but as psychic torture, pain and suffering that can be passed down and inherited across generations and geographies. To the extent that many western images of black women were produced in the midst of slavery and therefore either directly represent or reference the abuse, torture and punishment of slaves, psychoanalytical Art History allows for a consideration of the impacts of such images in terms of the material acts that they represent, but also in terms of the circumstances of productions and the tricky question of representational ethics and viewership. In other words, are some bodies, objects and themes off-limits and beyond representation, or rather, should they be due to their sublime nature?14 In this regard, I have been influenced by a diverse group of scholars who have confronted the psychoanalytic limits of identity and identity formation in order to intervene within psychoanalytical notions of the body/identity to cultivate postcolonial and/or black feminist readings that can simultaneously account for both sexual and racial difference.15

OBJECTIVES: SEEING WESTERN ART AS COLONIAL DISCOURSE Scholars of Slavery Studies have noted the unique roles of black female slaves within Trans Atlantic Slavery. The success of European colonization depended upon the free labour of Africans. However, importing slaves from Africa was only one means of filling supply. Another was the sexual violation of black female slaves, an exploitation of their reproductive capacity as “breeders,” through which white slave owners created new slaves, property and wealth that they readily bequeathed as heirlooms to their white offspring. The sexual violation of black females within slavery was endemic and institutionalized and, like other forms of oppression, dependent upon the racialization of sexuality through the production of a socalled black sexuality and its alignment with deviance and pathology. This violation of black women as “breeders” of new slaves hinged upon their constant representation, in “high” and “low” art alike, as sexually excessive, immoral and licentious. As the analyses of the artworks in the following chapters demonstrates, other useful and popular stereotypes, such

Introduction 7 as the black female subject as mammy, were equally embedded in slavery and were informed by the fear/desire that white populations had of black female subjects. For as long as blacks have been accessible to white artists, white artists have taken up black subjects for multiple and often contradictory reasons; as exotic “other,” as “primitive,” as whore, as decoration, as luxury object, as spectacle and as foil against which to measure themselves, always already racially superior. The frequency of representations of black female subjects is not, as one might assume, neatly connected to the geographical proximity of white artists to black subjects. Rather, at times, many white artists have deliberately sought out their black subjects, going to great lengths and with great effort, travel and expense, because of what they perceived the black body to represent for them in their art, culture and society; in this regard Canadian artists like Dorothy Stevens and James Wilson Morrice have as much in common with each other as they do with the French sculptor Charles Cordier. But there are significant differences between the representation of black male and female subjects; differences that force us to confront the specificity not only of race, but gender, sex, sexuality, class and other forms and markers of identity and how they cross and intersect with one another. Whereas there are, within the Art Historical specialization of Race and Representation, many significant publications on the black subject in western art, many of them have not fully differentiated between male and female subjects, nor have they considered how the historical intersection of patriarchy with colonialism has had specific political, material, social, cultural and psychic consequences for black women and girls and, in turn, have impacted the ways in which they came to be represented within western art. This book offers, for the fi rst time, a concentrated look at the historical representation of the black female subject in a variety of locations in the west and across a range of styles, genres and types of “high” and “low” art. I have sought to rigorously examine the simultaneity of race/colour, sex/gender, sexuality and class in order to pose critical questions about the contexts and power dynamics of production, the problems of representation, the trajectories of exhibition and circulation and the possibilities and consequences of consumption. Although I have deliberately chosen to focus upon and to interrogate the cultural access and capital that allowed white artists to access and to represent black female subjects, I do not assume that the viewer and consumer of these art objects was only ever white. Rather, at various moments, I have consciously sought to destabilize the primacy of the white male heterosexual viewer, instead asking how white women sometimes colluded with this optimal and authoritative viewing position in order to distance themselves from racially abject subjects, and how black women would have accessed and understood these same works that purported to represent them.

8

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

Therefore, this book not only asks how, where, why and by whom black female subjects were represented, but what were and are the social, cultural and psychic impacts of the colonial legacy of racialized western representation. I seek to explore and to problematize the issue of the historically privileged white artistic access to black female bodies and the limits of representation for these subjects. In other words, how was the black female subject allowed to be made visible within western art? And if representations failed to replicate normative standards of racial marginalization, at what point were they no longer legible? A part of the historical challenge that must be recognized is that any marginalized social group never has full control of their own bodies and lives, nor full access to self-representation or basic control over their representation by others. The black female has not only been rendered marginal in the west through colonialism, but also we must acknowledge and contend with a twofold and simultaneous marginalization of black females as both not-man and not-white. Therefore, the legacies of patriarchy must equally be challenged. That said, I am conscious of my desire to resist the creation of a victimology or to reinscribe the colonial dichotomy of black and white. There is considerable primary evidence that black people consistently and aggressively resisted enslavement and slavery at every conceivable moment and in extraordinarily creative ways across the Black Diaspora. Black women and girls, although systematically exploited within slavery, were often active and central in revolt, rebellion and resistance. As such, my aim is also to call us to contemplate the ways in which resistance and agency are manifested within the processes and practices of cultural production, representation and viewership. Whereas we are more accustomed to asking such questions of historical and literary events, texts and artifacts, within disciplines like History, Sociology and Economics, it is far more rare to contemplate visual art and its very production as similar sites of resistive potential. Therefore, it is equally pressing, if not more so, to probe the ways in which white artists and black subjects challenged or defied the expected colonial stereotypes of black female identity. What alternative representations were produced and deployed and how were they disseminated and interpreted? In the cases where black women were coerced into posing for white artists—and there are many—are there still ways to read such works against the grain for signs of potential agency and disruption?

THE ART: TYPES, STYLES, GENRES, MEDIA AND PERIODS By western art I mean American, Canadian, British, French, Italian and Caribbean. Of all of these geographic regions, by far the one most shut out of Critical Race Studies is Canada. Canada’s absence from Slavery Studies, Postcolonial Studies and Black Diaspora Studies is both alarming and

Introduction 9 disturbing. And frankly, the immense diversity of Canada’s black populations and the long history of black presence in the country make the scholarly neglect even more troubling and worthy of dissection. My research has always focused upon Canada and my interest has been ongoing. Most compelling for me are the historical questions of a bi-imperial slavery under two European flags (France and Britain) and the lack of a dominant plantation agricultural order, thwarted by the temperate climate and harsh winters. Given these profound breaks with the normative tropical idea of slavery, the questions then about the lives of Canada’s early black (female) slaves, their circumstances, backgrounds and labours, are to me ceaselessly interesting. Understanding how and why they were represented has become one of my deep fascinations. Painting and sculpture are centrally analyzed in this book. However, as a work of New Art History, I have felt compelled to problematize the traditional hierarchies of “high” and “low” by including readings of popular objects like photography and prints. These mass-produced and disseminated works are equally critical to an understanding of how the black female subject was perceived and thus represented at a given moment and within a specific historical and geographical context. In some cases, I would argue that the reach of the circulation and consumption of popular visual culture renders it a more valuable tool of critical analyses than “high” art, which, due to the central properties of rarity, cost, originality and often singularity, has also made such objects almost wholly inaccessible to large audiences and certainly mostly out of reach to economically deprived or lower-class populations mostly because although most lower-class citizens would have been unable to own expensive works of “high” art, some (such as domestics) would surely have been in positions to view them. Across the ten chapters of this volume, the paintings included are from various genres but mainly focus upon the category of the nude and the naked and portraiture. The sculptural works analyzed are focused on human subjects, but are ideal, ethnographical, allegorical, mythological and literary works. The styles of art are also varied as the chapters explore early rococo Canadian portraiture and various forms of modern figure painting as well as neoclassical and polychrome sculpture. Although the works discussed in Chapters 1 and 2 of this volume move across various historical time frames ending with more contemporary art, Chapters 3, 4 and 5 pivot around a specific eighteenth-century portrait, Chapters 6 and 7 deal largely with early twentieth-century works and Chapters 8, 9 and 10 discuss sculptures produced in the nineteenth century. By contemplating a variety of different art objects across distinct styles, locations and periods, I have been able to clearly demonstrate patterns of transnational continuity and exchange as well as moments of distinction and rupture. Besides a consideration of the identities and subjectivities of the black women and girls who are represented in the artworks, this book also seeks to interrogate the status, role and position of the white artists, equally

10

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

acknowledging their race as a colonial construct, a privileged site of cultural access and of access to “other” bodies. As such their whiteness is not taken for granted but explored throughout as a product of cultural and social forces and a site of contestation and negotiation. For many of the artists, their whiteness is precisely what is being consolidated and refi ned through their representation of black female subjects as “other.”

MOVING FORWARD: DISCIPLINARITY, REPOSITORY, REPRESENTATION AND SOCIETY When I came up with the idea for this book, I had several strategic goals in mind. As a woman of the Black Diaspora, my interest in the topic is both abundantly personal and decidedly academic. As an art historian who aims to teach her students visual literacy, I have become painfully aware of the depth and weight of the west’s ever-self-perpetuating colonial visual archive of blackness. This twenty-fi rst-century moment is one of an unmatched technological and daily access to countless historical and dayold images of our black female bodies. Popular images from television, movies, the Internet, billboards, posters, magazines, product packaging, video games, toys, books and mobile phones mix and meld with those from more traditional gallery and museum spaces, blend and morph with others plastered on the doors of bathroom stalls, the walls of restaurants and the floors and shopping carts of grocery stores. We are seeing it all, even if we are not processing it consciously and that, to me, is a paramount danger; what I call the silent power of the visual. How do these images work on me, make me see myself and interfere with how I wish to script my life? How do they influence how my students see me, a black female professor, one of very few at my university and a comparatively small number in the field? How do they impact black women in general in terms of how we are perceived by potential employers, romantic suitors, mortgage lenders, landlords, colleagues and the police? And how did they impact the black women who preceded us, in the moments that these historical works were fi rst created and viewed? In the midst of this saturation, this daily bombardment, it is important that we pause to pose the urgent questions to ourselves about our histories, institutional structures and disciplines. My goals then for this project are academic as well as social, cultural and political. I am and have in all of my work consciously attempted to pose a challenge to the traditional practice of Art History and its historical limits of subject, theme, approach and person. In particular, although many of the art objects under scrutiny are canonical and produced by well-known artists, many have never before or not extensively been critically analyzed in terms of their production and deployment of race; even when the centrality and dominance of the subjects and themes themselves or the titles of the works

Introduction 11 have directly alerted generations of viewers to the critical importance of the black female subject within them. This absence of critical scrutiny is in part owed to the dominance and pervasiveness of traditional methodological approaches within the discipline, approaches that privileged aesthetic contemplation disengaged from social location and questions of formal significance over those of social relevance. This project insists that aesthetics are a product of social, political and material specificity and that they should not be artificially separated. I have also sought to critique the discipline of Art History itself, its colonial disciplinarity that has for years policed what questions could be posed in the face of an art object and ensured that questions of postcolonial or black feminist relevance were deemed too sociological or too ludicrous to contemplate. It is my hope that this book will also demonstrate the extent to which western culture is a largely uncharted repository of a wealth of representations of the black female subject that have been historically undervalued and underestimated. The fact that this collection includes a significant body of work from various North American and European artists, who produced art for over two centuries, is demonstrative of the enduring significance of black women and girls as desirable subjects of western visual art and culture. As some chapters will demonstrate, there are many cases where the black female subject became the personal fi xation of individual artists, or of a dominant theme or style art. Throughout the various chapters of this volume and analysis of various forms of art, it becomes obvious that the black female subject was historically represented within artistic parameters that were unequal to the boundaries established for the white female subject. Significantly, my scrutiny of dominant western genres like the nude and the naked and portraiture clearly reveals that the patriarchal white male concern and care for white women and girls led to the implementation of controls that ensured that “inappropriate” (especially in terms of gender, sex and sexuality) representations of the white female subject were expelled from the category of “high” art and dismissed as “low” and/or pornographic. Much of this cultural policing was conducted through the practice of censorship and designed to support the “cult of white womanhood” in its alignment with racialized ideals of beauty and the “proper” performance of gender and sexuality. This “proper” performance, of course, implied a certain class position. For the black woman whose sexuality was understood to be essentially pathological and a sign of racial degeneration, no similar social or cultural regulations were deemed necessary to ensure her protection within the realm of art. Rather, what this book reveals is that representations of black women as whore or Jezebel, images that represented black women as active participants in their own sexualization and aggressively seeking the assumed male sexual gaze, were deemed instead to be true representations of the essentially deviant nature of this supposedly licentious population. This project explores the ways in which artists, and the processes and practices

12

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

of culture within which they worked, were implicated in the perpetual and endemic dichotomization of black and white women. This book also argues that this body of historical representations, created across various times and locations, has cumulatively had a profound social impact on the lives and experiences of people of all races that extends beyond the boundaries of what we would call culture. Rather, western visual culture must be examined as one of many colonial discourses that not only engaged in the production and dissemination of ideals of racial difference generally, but that worked to produce race and blackness as a social category in opposition to and always below whiteness. These impacts had a direct and immediate effect on the black subjects and white artists who are the subject of these chapters. They impacted how and why white artists sought out black female subjects and in what ways they imagined and thereby represented them in their art; it limited the possibilities of how these white artists allowed their black female subjects to be made visible. But it also impacted how and why black female subjects came to be willing or coerced subjects of representation and how they understood and construed their participation in western culture at these moments. However, the impacts of this body of representation extend far beyond the moment of original production to our own times and the continuing legacy of racial intolerance, prejudice, violence and oppression. As Jackson, Demissie and Goodwin have argued, “These images create fertile ground for social policies designed to discipline and constrain black bodies, both female and male, and serve to perpetuate racism and sustain inequalities based on color.”16 To what extent then, do we still see each other and ourselves through the racialized lens of colonial visual culture and if it is possible to free ourselves from the legacy of this representational history, what is the way forward? These are the pressing questions to which the following chapters are both a redress and a response.

THE CHAPTERS This book is composed of ten chapters, divided across four parts. Some of them have been published previously and the others are here for the fi rst time in print.17 Chapter 1, “Through An-Other’s Eyes: White Canadian Artists—Black Female Subjects” was fi rst published in 1998 as the bilingual exhibition catalogue for an art exhibition of the same name. The exhibition was historic for Black Canadian Studies, marking the fi rst time that historical Canadian representations of black subjects—female or male—were assembled and analyzed on such a scale. This chapter provides historical and conceptual contexts for the examination of black women in western art generally and Canadian art specifically. In it I examine painting, sculpture, photography and prints spanning over two hundred years of production, from 1786 to 1998. Although the show travelled to four

Introduction 13 venues from February 1999 until November 2000, the catalogue has far outlived the exhibition and still stands as the most comprehensive art historical examination of black female subjects in Canadian Art.18 Chapter 2, “Racing Childhood: Representations of Black Girls in Canadian Art,” also provides a foundation for those that follow, this one focusing upon the lives, experiences and representations of black girls in Canadian art. The absence of black children from Childhood Studies generally is troubling, but from its Canadian permutations is even more so. There are almost no secondary sources on black children in Canada with historical foci that deal with the context of slavery. Although some sources mention black Canadian children, it is almost always tangentially and with no deliberate emphasis. Writing this chapter, therefore, was for me a worthy challenge. The revelation of the troubling nature of black girls lives and the consequences of their cultural representation—their extraordinary diversity, travels, labours, challenges, socialization, etc.—have led me to conceptualize a second Middle Passage between the shores of the Caribbean and Canada. It is my hope that this concept will allow us to rethink the plight of these black girls not only once but often twice removed from Africa, to port settlements like Montreal and Halifax. Chapter 3, “Slavery, Portraiture and the Colonial Limits of Canadian Art History,” begins my exploration of the tricky problem of black female subjects and western portraiture. In it I use what is quite arguably one of the most famous portraits in Canadian Art History, François Malépart de Beaucourt’s 1786 Portrait of a Negro Slave (see Figure 1.1), to argue not only that the western practice of portrait painting was elitist and racially exclusive, but that the structure of Canadian Art History has also been historically a form of colonial discourse, designed and practiced to delegitimize certain critical questions. Portrait of a Negro Slave (1786) is not only instantly recognizable because of the overexposure of flesh, but because of the conspicuous tray of tropical fruit with which the artist juxtaposed the black female slave’s bare breast. Chapter 4, “The Fruits of Resistance: Reading Portrait of a Negro Slave on the Sly,” focuses on this little discussed still life within the portrait, arguing that the choice and position of tropical fruit may provide us with a means of reading black female agency into this otherwise starkly objectifying work. Chapter 5, “Tying the Knot: Black Female Slave Dress in Canada,” also pursues this fascinating and decidedly rare portrait, this time exploring the history and specificity of black female slave dress in Canada and its connections to Caribbean and southern American traditions. In particular, I excavate the specificity of the female slave’s red-andwhite headwrap as a part of an African and Black Diasporic continuum, in an attempt to situate—geographically, socially and culturally—the anonymized black female sitter. Chapters 6 and 7 shift from the portrait to the unclothed female body, known in Art History under two dominant names, nude and naked.

14

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

“Coloured Nude: Fetishization, Disguise, Dichotomy” takes up Dorothy Stevens’s overtly sexual 1930s painting to problematize the ways in which these key art historical terms have been almost solely defi ned in reference to the white female subject in a way that has displaced and buried the relevance of race, colour and colonialism. As a strategic critique of much white feminist Art History about the nude/naked, that had until that point in 1997 largely refused to take race seriously, I take up psychoanalysis to contest it, arguing that theories of fetishization had to include an understanding of race/colour difference and not solely be focused upon sex/gender as the only or the fi rst site of bodily identification. I also outline certain disguises of the white female subject that allowed them to be mainly represented and protected as the nude within western art traditions. Chapter 7 demonstrates the geographical transportability of a disturbing colonial icon. In “The ‘Hottentot Venus’ in Canada: Modernism, Censorship and the Racial Limits of Female Sexuality” I track the appearance and disappearance of so-called Hottentot bodies within the context of an early twentieth-century Canadian modern art exhibition. The representations of these bodies, painted by Max Weber and Alexandre Archipenko, were abruptly censored from Canada’s fi rst international modernist art exhibition. The problem, I argue, was not the presence of “Hottentot” bodies in this cultural context, but of white ones, an act that destabilized the normative purity of the white female body within Canadian cultural space. Chapter 8 shifts the focus to sculpture, examining the use of white marble in neoclassical sculpture as a racialized aesthetic activity with profound ideological consequences. “White Marble, Black Bodies and the Fear of the Invisible Negro: Signifying Blackness in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Neoclassical Sculpture” examines American, British, French and Italian works, mainly those of enslaved black female subjects. My juxtaposition of polychrome and neoclassical sculpture provokes questions about the ways in which these contemporaneous material and aesthetic traditions signified and suppressed race and blackness. Chapter 9, “Vénus Africaine: Race, Beauty and African-ness,” focuses upon the ethnographic sculpture of the French artist Charles Cordier. Written in 2005 for the Black Victorians: Black People in British Art 1800–1900 exhibition catalogue, the text explores the possibilities and impossibilities of a black Venus within the context of a colonial west where female beauty is always already coded as white. Cordier’s sculpture posed a challenge to the idea of Venus (see Figure 9.1). Similarly, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s Les quatre parties du monde soutenant la sphere céleste (1867–1874; see Figures 10.1 and 10.2) posed a challenge to the traditional racialized order of the theme of the four continents. In Chapter 10, “Allegory, Race and the Four Continents: Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s Les quatre parties du monde soutenant la sphere céleste,” I examine this controversial, modern French public monument, reading the difference of Carpeaux’s drastic departure from the racial hierarchies of the theme that had preceded him. This

Introduction 15 departure was largely a matter of bodies and literally about how he chose to sculpt them, symbolically, compositionally and corporeally. In the end I argue that Carpeaux’s critics rejected the sculpture because they read it as an equalizing gesture in which the black female subject as Africa was on par with her European sister; a defi nite nineteenth-century no-no.

CENTERING THE MARGINS Living and working in Montreal is unlike the experience of many other Canadian cities. Montreal is rare within the Canadian context because it has not surrendered to the modernizing drive to dismantle all of its historical relics. Rather, much of Montreal’s original European settlement is still standing, perched next to the mighty St. Lawrence River in a neighbourhood now known as Old Montreal. Today’s Old Montreal was the Montreal of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In that space, in those streets and in that port, people from disparate parts of the British, French and other empires assembled, exchanged, fought, sold, stole and bartered alongside indigenous populations. Many of them were poor, so-called illiterate, and quite a few were black, better known at the time as Negro or mulatto, words that came to be interchangeable with slave. Stones for walls and houses were shaped and laid by their hands. Countless loaves of bread were kneaded and garments mended. Endless streams of white babies were nursed and diapered. Countless stripes were marked on their backs and they were equated like chattel to barrels of rum and molasses. These slaves, these people, these black people, literally built and sustained the settlement. Their labour, like that of their black sisters and brothers across various locations of the Black Diaspora, was a fundamental part of colonial enterprise and its “progress” through resource extraction and settlement. How then have we forgotten them? How is such a deep amnesia possible? This book seeks to wake us from this pervasive denial. This book calls us to remember, to look anew and to listen. But how does one listen to those who spoke into a void of whiteness? How do we recuperate the words and thoughts of those who were denied not only the rights of speech and audience, but also the rights of personhood? Against the odds and at times, against the grain, I have endeavoured to do just that. In centering the margins, I am attempting to listen to the black female subjects themselves, women and girls whose bodies and labour were actually not marginal at all, but rather absolutely central to European programs of imperialism and colonization. But their strategic marginalization as illegitimate social agents and non-citizens makes the recuperation of their experiences, thoughts, ideas, hopes and aspirations particularly difficult; unlike the elite white households and individuals whom they served, they were largely denied the access to the social tools and leisure time that would have enabled them to produce independent testimonies and traces of

16 Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art their lives. But one of the ways that we can look for black women and girls is in the artworks in which they were represented, not as truthful representations, but as material culture that bares the marks of places, of hands, of thoughts, of ideologies, of power and of resistance. Armed with the artworks and a variety of other visual and material culture, archival sources and secondary texts, the application of critical methodologies results in new questions and provocative new answers. What this process has taught me is that these black women and girls, long silenced, have much to share and much to teach us.

Part I

From Girls to Women Locating Black Female Subjects in Western Art

1

Through An-Other’s Eyes White Canadian Artists— Black Female Subjects

COLONIALISM AND THE LEGACY OF SLAVERY The location of the black female body as a transgressive site has long, complex and persistent roots within western culture. The colonial stereotyping of black peoples was a necessary extension of European imperialism that sought to provide a discursive framework and moral foundation for the horrific trade in African peoples and the colonialization of “other” lands. As the mothers of future slave labour, black women suffered a particularly incessant form of “scientific” scrutiny that, within its various manifestations, sought to locate the black female body as the site of pathological sexual deviance linked to a racial degeneracy.1 It was largely through the evaluation of the black woman’s body that these colonial western “scientists” tried to produce race as an empirical biological marker of identity. The hierarchization of race and colour within a dominantly patriarchal society positioned black woman at the bottom of the “tree of man.”2

FRAMING THE STUDY The title of this chapter enacts a deliberate displacement of the historical primacy of the white male heterosexual artist/viewer. The “other” in Through An-Other’s Eyes does not refer to traditionally marginalized subjects, but to the white artist whose gaze is revealed as subjective and bound to a specific cultural space and social identity. Throughout the history of western cultures, black people have been systematically denied the power of the gaze and excluded from the realm of artistic production. Black bodies have been allowed into the realm of art almost exclusively as subjects of representation, where the power to construct and to name belongs always to an-“other.” The power to name, as the power of the gaze, has historically been a white male heterosexual prerogative. However, the assembled artworks also reveal white women’s participation within and collusion with the colonial and patriarchal precepts of western culture. Traditions of naming blackness and black womanhood have functioned to produce and reinforce colonial stereotypes. The titles of these artworks are ideological texts that reveal the artists’ perceptions of the subjects they

20

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

represented and resonate with the force of colonialism. The colour of black female subjects was often brought to the fore with dated terminology like coloured, high yellow or dark. Similarly, the race of the black subject was referenced through the use of terms like Negress or Negro. The deliberate and repeated identification of the subject’s race/colour in the titles locates the process of representing racial/ethnic/colour “otherness” as an integral part of the artworks.3 This project is indebted to several pioneering texts and exhibitions that have attempted to chronicle the histories of representations of black subjects in western art.4 However, I am interested in creating a more focused space of inquiry through the selection of a racially and sexually specific subject, the black female, within a specific national context, Canada.5 To attempt a study of white artistic representations of black female subjects in Canadian art is a complex and multilayered endeavour that necessitates an exploration of the national, social, cultural and individual artistic identities as they are produced in relation to sex, sexuality, race, class and gender. Within the space where the fabric of these intricate identity markers cross and fissure, colonial representational practices have produced a binary opposition that positioned black6 womanhood as the antithesis of idealized white womanhood. It is precisely the nexus of race/colour (blackness) and sex (femaleness) in the black female body that provides an incomparable basis for an exploration of the production of identity within visual culture. Although European and American culture constitute a significant source of these traditions, racialized representational practices are infused within Canadian culture and must not be viewed as a mere importation from external models. This exhibition is not an attempt to grade representations as positive or negative. Nor is it an exercise in the creation of a definitive canon of such representations. Rather, it is an examination of historically, socially and nationally specific cultural processes as they have informed artistic practice and helped to produce specific representational forms that circulated as natural within a dominantly colonial space.

ABJECTION AND THE PROCESS OF NATION-BUILDING The psychoanalytical concept of abjection is a vivid description of the formative processes of national identity. Nation-building involves large-scale identity construction, a nuanced process that is fraught with social, political, economic and cultural delineations of insider/outsider, self/other. Within this system, that which is defined as external to the nation is marginalized through processes of disavowal that function both internally—through the erasure of specific Native and immigrant groups—and externally through the border constructions that seal off and distinguish other nations from our own. The Canadian narrative is often constructed as the story of two forces, French and British. The marginalization of Native and specific immigrant

Through An-Other’s Eyes

21

populations has served to equate particular forms of whiteness with Canadian citizenship.7 This simplified history of nationhood seeks a homogenous identity, free from the complexities of resistance and heterogeneity. During the early centuries of the colony, patterns of settlement for black and other “ethnic” immigrants were often predetermined by government and immigration policy.8 Due to the underground railroad and other migratory factors, black immigrants settled in significant numbers in distinct regions of certain provinces, often segregated from white citizens of “preferential” citizenship status.9 Urban planning goals and standards, housing codes and the interests of property owners provided a hegemonic framework that dictated where and how black people could live in Canada.10 The racially segregated delineation of many early Canadian cities and social institutions, along with the relatively small numbers of black citizens as compared to the various European groups, led to the white population’s limited experience and contact with the early black populations. In part, it was the white majority’s literal ignorance of the black populations that led to misrepresentations fuelled by colonial notions of blackness and Africans. White Canadian artists who depicted black female subjects had the benefit of access to black communities and/or individuals through close proximity or fi nancial means. Many artists living in metropolitan centers made contact with black female models through urban community centers or art schools. Still other artists were wealthy enough to travel to the Caribbean, Africa or other locations in search of their “exotic” subject matter. The white artist’s choice of black women as subject matter is important. But equally profound are the context and content of such representations as well as the economic, social and psychic distance between the white artist and black subject. The residue of the artist–subject relationship reveals a power deferential that informed both the artistic vision and, inevitably, the viewer’s reading of the represented subjects.

COLONIAL IMAGES FROM COLONIAL CONTEXTS In the majority of cases, the artworks discussed in this exhibition have never, either within their original or subsequent exhibition histories, been analyzed within their colonial contexts of production.11 That it is possible to discuss a variety of representations of black women in Canadian art spanning over two centuries is a testament to the continuum of historical interest expressed by white artists in the black female subject. From François Malépart de Beaucourt’s Portrait of a Negro Slave (1786; Figure 1.1) to Joanne Tod’s In the Bedroom (1998), these artworks locate the persistent fascination with the black female subject as racial and sexual “other” and demonstrate the pervasiveness of colonial ideals of blackness and their specific manifestations within Canadian culture.

22

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

Figure 1.1 François Malépart de Beaucourt, Portrait of a Negro Slave, or The Negress, 1786. Oil on canvas, 72.7 x 58.5 cm. McCord Museum of Canadian History, Montreal, Canada.

Often drawing on the legacy of the slave stereotypes of the aggressive and dangerous, sexual predator Jezebel or the buxom and masculinized mammy, many of these Canadian representations are subtlety nuanced derivations of these colonial myths. However, the persistence of set emotional and sexual types tells more about the displaced racial desires and fears of the white artists than it does about the emotions, experiences and daily lives of the black female subjects.12

Through An-Other’s Eyes

23

The Canadian representations of black women are distinct, inasmuch as the historical, geographical, social and cultural contexts of their productions informed the white artists’ access to, relations with and conceptions of the black women they depicted. However, the white artists’ access to other countries and other black populations must also be considered because national boundaries are also psychic and political, not only material phenomenon.

IN SEARCH OF THE EXOTIC “OTHER” Elizabeth Cadiz Topp’s path-breaking catalogue essay Endless Summer: Canadian Artists in the Caribbean (1988) defi ned Canadian artists’ historical desire for the Caribbean as a practical function of their yearning for a preferable climate.13 However, I would argue that the desire to depict the “exotic” subject was an equally if not considerably more compelling factor in their journeys. The black female subject exemplified for white Canadian artists the opportunity to access “other” subject matter, contexts and modes of representation that could not be performed on the white female body. Perhaps the Canadian artist who best represents this desire is James Wilson Morrice, whose deliberately unspecified, exoticized and mysterious Portrait of Maude (1912–1913) was conceived during one of many trips to destinations like Jamaica, Cuba, Trinidad, Morocco, Tangier, Algeria, Martinique and Guadalupe. These Gauguinesque treks were fashionable throughout the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, which explains the abundance of images from this era.14 The persistence of travel to the Caribbean in particular can be linked to a burgeoning tourist industry that actively advertised West-Indian destinations as accessible tropical havens.15 This combination of tropical excursion and domestic opportunities resulted in artworks that occupy various genres preoccupied with the human subject. Portraits, genre studies and nudes/nakeds are among the categories to be discussed.

BLACK WOMAN, NATURE AND EXCESSIVE FEMALE SEXUALITY François Malépart de Beaucourt’s Portrait of a Negro Slave (1786) depicts a smiling black woman holding a plate of fruit in front of a lush and romanticized landscape. The black woman’s sexuality and reproductive capacities are revealed through her bared breast, which spills from her loosely fitting white blouse, and the deliberate juxtaposition of the breast with a plate of tropical fruit.16 The specificity of the black woman’s clothing, earrings and headwrap, the individuality of her portrait face and the absence of any allegorical or mythological devices situates Malépart de Beaucourt’s slave woman as a “real” woman. As I discuss in greater detail in Chapter 6 of this volume, western traditions of the white female nude have spawned the development of various

24

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

forms of sexual disguise that have enabled the white male heterosexual enjoyment of the white female body while preserving white female innocence, purity and the bourgeois idealization of white womanhood.17 Within colonial discourse, black women, perceived as possessing an excessive and limitless sexuality, were not extended the same proprietary concern.18 Represented as an individual, Malépart de Beaucourt’s black woman is depicted in the process of seemingly consciously offering her body to the gaze of the white master/artist/viewer, an act that speaks to the issue of her agency. As such, she reveals a sexual self-knowledge (something that was decidedly inappropriate at that time for white women) and is therefore guilty of immorality.19 The issues of agency, choice and power arise also in the relationship between artist and subject, a white man and a black woman in eighteenth-century colonial New France. The title of the work names the black woman as a slave and early art historical literature claimed the woman not only as Malépart de Beaucourt’s slave but also as his mistress.20 However, this interpretation of a colonial relationship between two polarized subjects presupposes an equality of interaction that is the foundation of a consensual relationship. Black female slaves in colonial Canada would have had no such rights or privileges within relations with white citizens, especially in such cases where the citizen was a white male and their master.21 Dorothy Stevens’s Coloured Nude (c.1933; Figure 6.1) shares with Malépart de Beaucourt’s Portrait of a Negro Slave (1786) a concealment of the hair of the head as a site of racial “otherness,” the deliberate juxtaposition of the female breast with fruit 22 and a pronounced connection with western representations of slavery.23 Stevens’s interest in the black subject, and the “exoticized” racial/ethnic “other” in general, was evidenced by the significant number of representations of people of colour that she produced throughout her career.24 Perhaps Stevens herself best expressed this desire for the racial/ethnic “other” when sketching at a Simpson’s department store in Toronto during an exhibition in 1950. She complained to the management, “I’m sick and tired of all these dough-faced Aryan kids! Can’t you get me some coloured kids? Negros or Chinese kids? Kids with character and eloquence in their eyes.”25 Coloured Nude (c. 1933), Stevens’s stereotypical and overtly sexualized representation of a black woman was widely praised26 at a time when relatively innocuous depictions of white female nudes were being censored 27 within a conservative cultural environment.28 Stevens produces Black Woman 29 through the construction of pose, gaze, body and environment. The pose has been passed down within western orientalizing traditions to signify the female body as sexual commodity. The raised arms significantly cast a shadow across the black woman’s face, which defeats any sense of individuality, suppresses the black female gaze and highlights the transgressive presence of the underarm hair.30 With deliberately downcast eyes, the black woman is apparently participating in an act of self-denial. The suppression of her gaze yields her

Through An-Other’s Eyes

25

uncontested sexual accessibility to the viewer.31 Stevens’s Coloured Nude (c. 1933) is sexual spectacle played out on a faked tropical landscape that cannot contain her excess.32 Black Woman is not within nature like contemporary examples of white female nudes33 but conspicuously placed upon the landscape—apart from it. The deliberate separation of the black woman’s body from nature marks her with an overdetermined sexuality that cannot be contained within natural limits. Here sexuality becomes race/colour specific and black sexuality is produced as a limitless and unbound entity that exists outside of the parameters of normal white sexuality. John Lyman shared with Dorothy Stevens a particular interest in black female subjects.34 Lyman’s Sun Bathing 1 (1955) depicts a black and a white woman within the same frame. This trope has a long and specific colonial history within western artistic traditions. The vast majority of such images have served to reinforce the idealization of white women and the displacement of black women. 35 Lyman’s sunbathers create one such image. Sun Bathing 1 depicts a white woman seated with her back to the viewer and foregrounds a black woman who, partially clad, has bared her breasts to the voyeuristic sexual gaze. Colour usage is central. Lyman deliberately represented a blond white woman beside a black woman clad in white to heighten their colour difference and evoke the colonial hierarchization of beauty that positioned the “fair”-haired/skinned white woman as the paradigm of feminine beauty and the “dark”-haired/skinned black woman as her antithesis. The fact that the black woman is shown as partially clothed situates her as a naked and not a nude.36 The specificity of clothing marks the represented body as “real” as opposed to the allegorical presence of a Venus or a sea-nymph.37 Whereas allegories are always already unclothed (or, as the case may be, covered by classical drapery), the partial clothing of the black woman describes the process of undressing.38 The social and biological body and the chosen action place her outside of social norms of sexual and moral propriety.

ALTERNATIVE REPRESENTATIONS OF THE BLACK FEMALE BODY Although outwardly quite distinct from Dorothy Stevens’s Coloured Nude (c. 1933), Prudence Heward’s Dark Girl (1935; Figure 1.2) replicates many of the same colonial preconceptions as the other more blatantly stereotypical work.39 It is important to note here that Heward’s interest in the naked female body manifested itself primarily in representations of black female subjects.40 Writing about the reception of Heward’s black female nudes, Natalie Luckyj has argued for Heward’s originality that she sees as being manifested within the vulnerability and unidealized bodies of her black female subjects.41 However, Heward’s repeated representation

26

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

Figure 1.2 Prudence Heward, Dark Girl, 1935. Oil on canvas, 92.0 x 102.0 cm. Hart House Permanent Collection, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada. Purchased by the Art Committee with income from the Harold and Murray Wrong Memorial Trust Fund, 1936.

of vulnerability, and indeed submission, can also be read as the exchange of one colonial fantasy for another. Within Heward’s colonial fantasy the utter servility and uncomfortable surrender of the black subject activates the power and sexual potency of the white artist/viewer. Like Malépart de Beaucourt, Heward’s warm, rich palette in Dark Girl (1935) deliberately evokes a tropical landscape (despite the fact that this work was conceived in Canada).42 Although Heward fi xes the black female body securely within the landscape, the deliberate evocation of a tropical and seemingly impenetrable setting recalls colonial perceptions of Africa as the “dark continent,” a mysterious and threatening place teeming with moral and sexual vice. Heward’s black women are consistently denied ownership of the gaze. Their eyes are downcast as in Girl in the Window (1941) or represented in a sideways glance as in Hester (1937). Even when they meet the viewer’s gaze,

Through An-Other’s Eyes

27

as in Dark Girl (1935), they still seem to defer to the superior authority of the dominant viewer. As such, a caste system is created in which the depicted vulnerability of the black women empowers the white gaze. Heward’s black women are also positioned outside of usual proprietary boundaries because their deliberately unidealized bodies do not function as metaphors of their natural environment. Even Girl in the Window (1941), although within a domestic interior, is inappropriately exposed to the potential public gaze of the street beyond the open window in which she sits. Whereas the unidealized body of the black woman in Dark Girl (1935) thwarts the traditions of Woman as Fantasy for the male heterosexual gaze, the slouching posture, distanced countenance and averted gaze begs questions of the power dynamics between artist and model, white and black, “self” and “other” within the colonial configuration of modern Canadian artistic practice. Although the date of Heward’s work rules out the possibility that the black model was a slave, Dark Girl (1935) can be read as carrying the memory of slavery, of forced submission, sexual exploitation and public consumption of the black female body.43 Lawren Harris Jr.’s Negress (1937) departs from colonial traditions in significant ways. However, although Harris created a studio nude,44 he was still compelled to include the plants as a sign of the Black Woman/Nature stereotype within colonial discourses. But the construction of individuality, a poised posture and dignified countenance allows the black woman depicted in Negress to claim a measure of self-possession uncharacteristic of the usually formulaic conventions of such works. As opposed to the despondency of Prudence Heward’s black women, the black woman in Harris’s Negress is depicted as lost in thought, an act of introspection that presumes cognitive faculties and infers intelligence, characteristics historically denied to black people. Louis Muhlstock’s oeuvre contains many nude and portrait studies of black women.45 However, he differs substantially from the other artists in the exhibition because his source of models was largely (if not solely) domestic.46 Muhlstock’s Pregnant Eva (n.d.) represents a largely invisible subject in Canadian and western art, the pregnant woman. The pregnant nude has been even less visible.47 The representation of pregnancy combined with nudity foregrounds the sexuality of the female body, the sexual act and the consequences (children) of that act. The languid pose conveys the subject’s comfort with her own body and sexuality that, again, was not the standard within the conservative environment of Canadian figure painting. Muhlstock’s Eva, Spring (1947) inhabits the border between the nude/ naked and portraiture. Although clothed, the deliberately eschewed bodice of her dress and the angle afforded the viewer (which effectively allows the viewer to look up her dress) situates this black woman as a sexualized body, whereas the portrait-like face and the rare appearance of the black woman’s name in the title is a recognition of individuality.48 Again, even clothed, the black woman is linked to Nature as excess in a way that is

28

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

deliberately beyond the contemporary proprietary boundaries of representable sexuality within Canadian culture.

BLACK FEMALE PORTRAITS: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF BLACKNESS Perhaps the most profound distinction that separates portraits of black women from their white female counterparts is the difference in the process of production, the relationships between artist and sitter and the lack of relative individuality or diversity in character and emotion afforded the black female subjects. In eighteenth-century Canada, wealthy EuropeanCanadian families who had made fortunes in trading and manufacturing businesses were creating a small but distinct demand for artists who could memorialize their families in portraits.49 Throughout the nineteenth century it was common for white male and female Canadian artists to memorialize their families in paintings. Artists who had established themselves as credible and proficient portraitists would also have garnered portrait contracts from institutions such as banks, schools and churches wishing to commemorate the service of esteemed members. In stark contrast to these rather gentrified cultural processes were the relations that distinguished the representations of black women and girls in portraits. As is revealed in Malépart de Beaucourt’s Portrait of a Negro Slave (1786), prior to the mid-nineteenth century, the dominant relationship between white artist and black sitter would have been that of owner/ free white and slave/property. Throughout the nineteenth century and even into the twentieth, white Canadian artists would have had access to black women with whom they came into contact in their duties as domestics in white households. During the twentieth century, white artists would also have had access to black female models working in art schools and community centers.50 Racial and sexual hierarchies shaped the black woman’s contact with white artists. These were not relations between friends, family members or equals that marked the white artist’s usual processes of artistic production and patronage. Rather, the white artist’s experiences of and with their black female sitters were from the start ideologically charged and imbalanced power relations. The relative sameness of expression, body language and emotion are striking features that run through the portraits of black women. For the most part the black women were represented as overwhelmingly melancholic. Despondency and submission intermingles with introspection and intelligence. The space between these emotions is difficult to measure and is often qualified by the context of the subject and the inference of purpose. However, the representation of specific emotional types becomes integral to the viewer’s reading of a subject as merely withdrawn, depressed or

Through An-Other’s Eyes

29

submissive or one who is represented as thoughtful, cognizant, self-possessed and intelligent.51 Elizabeth Wyn Wood’s sculptural portrait Head of a Negress (1926), Orson Wheeler’s Head of a Girl (1946), Edwin Holgate’s Head of a Woman, (1938) 52 and Lawren P. Harris Jr.’s portrait Elfreda (c. 1937) all adopted the convention of the lowered, deferential gaze. In all four cases the women’s downcast eyes and rather grim faces evoke a melancholic quality. But whereas all of these women were depicted as individuals and not as types, only Harris sustained this individuality in his title, Elfreda (c. 1937), 53 as the name of a specific black female sitter. Described as her fi rst exhibited piece,54 the significance of the choice of a black female subject for Wyn Wood’s Head of a Negress (1926)55 takes on a more substantial meaning.56 Characterized as a haunting portrait, 57 this sculpture was probably conceived after her initial studies at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto, an institution that would have been able to recruit black female models from the large metropolitan center. She studied sculpture with Emmanuel Hahn, who was later to become her husband, 58 and whose own interest in the black female subject was reflected in his “great mask” entitled Negress (c. 1944).59 Whereas the subject of Wyn Wood’s portrait remains unidentified, Orson Wheeler’s Head of a Girl (1946) represents a rare moment when some of the circumstances of artistic conceptions are known. Wheeler’s portrait represented Lucille Vaughan (now Mrs. Lucille Cuevas).60 Wheeler was an art professor at Concordia University in Montreal when he asked Lucille, then a student, to sit for the portrait.61 The exact nature of their relationship and interaction has not been thoroughly documented. Such specific information would shed light on the processes of creation that resulted in this individualized study of a young woman with a distant and introspective countenance. Molly Lamb Bobak’s Private Roy, Canadian Women’s Army Corps (1946) and Prudence Heward’s Negress with Flower (n.d.) reveal a more nuanced introspective and pensive quality in the black women they represented. Molly Lamb Bobak’s Private Roy, Canadian Women’s Army Corps (1946) stands out as a sensitive portrait of a figure we have rarely seen in Canadian military histories.62 Private Roy, Canadian Women’s Army Corps (1946) was conceived during Bobak’s C.W.A.C. service in the Second World War during which time she was temporarily employed for an eight-week period to depict C.W.A.C. activities.63 Bobak captured an acute feeling of alienation, reinforced by Private Roy’s crossed arms and the crowded counter that separates her body from the space of the viewer.64 The relationship between artist and subject comes closer to equality perhaps more than any of the other work discussed in this chapter because both women were military officers and Private Roy was likely under no obligation (fi nancial or otherwise) to sit for Bobak’s portrait.65 The similarly pensive and introspective quality of Prudence Heward’s Negress with Flower (n.d.) accentuated by the “thinker’s” hand on the

30

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

chin, seems at odds with the more blatantly despondent and melancholic images of black women in her Dark Girl (1935), Hester (1937) and Girl in the Window (1941). But again Heward is compelled to inscribe her black female sitter within a dense tropicalized landscape.66 That the artist was able to achieve this subtle distinction in expression, but chose not to in the cases of the unclothed and semi-clothed black women, should not be overlooked as an inconsequential matter. The despondency of the latter three subjects and their unclothed bodies increase their vulnerability and point up the sexual and racial hierarchies of production. Dorothy Stevens’s High Yellow (n.d.), a portrait of a well-dressed and composed young black woman, crystallizes two main issues in its title and in representation of the subject.67 “High yellow,” a term for a light-skinned black person, was not just an indicator of colour, but because of the nexus of racial, social and economic oppression, was also emblematic of the upward shift in the class and social status of the named subject.68 The term also signaled the colonial belief that a proximity to whiteness, here through the process of racial mixing, was equated to beauty; the lighter/whiter, the better. The double meaning of the term fair, synonymous historically with beautiful and with a light complexion, points up the pervasive western conflation of beauty with whiteness. That Stevens felt comfortable with investing her “fair” black sitter with the power of a direct gaze is not coincidental but can be read as a product of the model’s proximity to whiteness and, therefore, her social proximity to Stevens and Stevens’s comfort with her. Whereas most of the aforementioned works are dramatically cropped at the neck, Stevens’s inclusion of the light-skinned sitter’s arms and hands allowed her to represent the wedding band on the left hand, an inscription of the woman’s romantic attachment to an absent male subject. The sitter’s status as wife acts to further shore up her position as reputable and beautiful, an embodiment of the desirable black body in the west that is historically never fully black. The four William Notman photographs in this exhibition constitute the sharpest departure from entrenched modes of representing the black female subject.69 Notman is Canada’s foremost nineteenth-century photographer. These images of carefully dressed, comfortable and poised black women are inscribed with deliberate signs of the middle or upper classes, both within the women’s bodies and the studio settings. The clothing, jewelry, coiffures and accessories of Miss Guilmartin (1870) and (1885) and Mrs. Coburn (1887) are those of ladies, and the décor, drapery, columns, books and furniture position these black women fi rmly within a class of wealth, knowledge, learning and leisure. Whether the dress of these black female sitters was their own or the possessions of the Notman Studios, their desire to be represented as upper-class women within nineteenth-century Canada reveals their knowledge of and investment in a disruption of the colonial conflation of blackness with poverty and economic marginalization. These portraits differ dramatically from their painted and sculpted counterparts

Through An-Other’s Eyes

31

in the comportment and expressions of the black female sitters who now, as paying customers, gained more control over the representation of their likeness. Both images of Miss Guilmartin have captured a strong, direct gaze and an explicit and determined tone of self-possession. Although Mrs. Coburn was represented in a sideways glance, her facial expression and body language does not convey melancholia but introspection, composure and thoughtfulness. As with High Yellow (n.d.) both female sitters also display wedding rings on their left hands. The photograph Mrs. Cowan’s Nurse (1871; Figure 2.2) represents a neat, although less expensively clad young black woman. Her crossed arms do not connote a sense of isolation as in Bobak’s Private Roy, Canadian Women’s Army Corps but rather, combined with the slightly titled head, convey the sense of a deliberate pose. The portrait that foregrounds the employer’s name was probably taken at the request of Mrs. Cowan, most likely white, as a status symbol that reflects the wealth and position necessary for the employment of a private nurse.70

BLACK MOTHERS AND CHILDREN Although motherhood is often portrayed as a “natural,” biological and social state for women, it was a role that was produced in its current form only since the eighteenth century.71 The idealized image of the attentive mother with her happy and healthy babies is a paradigm of white bourgeois society that has often been denied black women within the institution of slavery and beyond.72 Images of black mothers and children in western art are less frequent and considerably distinct from contemporaneous images of white women and children. Henrietta Shore’s Negro Woman and Two Children (c. 1916; Figure 2.1) was most likely executed in 1917 in Los Angeles.73 Seated in front of a hazy and distant cityscape, this black woman’s arms are protectively draped over the two children’s bodies as she fi xes the viewer with a wary and uncertain gaze. Shore’s depiction reveals the everyday anxieties that plagued black women with regards to the care and protection of black children. The prevalence of racism in North America meant that black children were particularly open to physical, emotional and sexual abuses within the context of their everyday social contact with white adults.74 Shore’s painting depicts this black mother/caregiver as cautious and conscientious in the care of these children. In contrast, other such images focused upon black women’s reproductive capacities and sexuality.75 In choosing to concentrate on her mothering capabilities instead of the sexualized black female body, Shore provides a socially conscious image of a black woman as a mother figure. As I will discuss in greater detail in Chapter 2 of this volume, black girls were also depicted independent of parental figures, as in the case of

32

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

Prudence Heward’s Clytie (1938), Dorothy Stevens’s Amy (c. 1930; Figure 2.3), Louis Muhlstock’s Evelyn Pleasant, St. Famille Street (1937) and Yvonne McKague Housser’s Negro Girl with Red Flower (1941). Similar to the portraits of black women, the portraits of black girls often exhibit the same despondent and melancholic qualities that seem antithetical to ideals of twentieth-century childhood. Clytie represents a little girl in her “Sunday best” frozen stoically in front of the superior authority of the white artist’s gaze. If Clytie was indeed the friend of the Heward family cook,76 living in Montreal, then what are we to make of the transposed Bermudian landscape within which she is framed?77 Stevens’s Amy (c. 1930), originally exhibited under the title Piccaninny, depicts an obviously posed little girl, rather ironically clutching a white doll.78 Both paintings serve as symbols of the processes of assimilation that have been used to control, “educate” and westernize black people within slavery and beyond. Louis Muhlstock’s Evelyn Pleasant, St. Famille Street (1937), painted in Montreal, marks a synthesis of his interest in black subjects and issues of poverty, unemployment, marginalization and social oppression. The face of the young black girl is both pensive and sorrowful. Although Muhlstock obscures the interior beyond his subject, the marked and dirty windowframe evokes an image of desolation and want. In contrast to these other artists, Yvonne McKague Housser’s Negro Girl with Red Flower (1941) breaks from this somber mode to represent a smiling young girl framed by vibrant foliage. Housser’s Caribbean travels had included Jamaica in 1946 and Trinidad and Tobago where she wintered with friends in 1956.79 In her own words, Housser described the trip as a source of new and novel material and an exciting opportunity to experience the tropics.80

BLACK WOMEN AND THE SPECTACLE OF LABOUR W.O. Carlisle’s Negress Selling Mayflowers on the Market Place (1872), Yvonne McKague Housser’s Marketplace (n.d.), Will Ogilvie’s Xosa Women Washing (1932), Peleg Franklin Brownell’s The Beach, St. Kitts (1913) and Thomas Harold Beament’s West Indian Washerwomen (c. 1935) all represent groups of labouring black women. The popularity of such themes is a reflection of their exoticism for the white artist—the “strange” visibility of black female labour within the public realm set against the “normal” leisured domesticity of the white female bourgeois. Carlisle’s Negress Selling Mayflowers on the Market Place (1872) situates the disparity between black and white women’s lives in late nineteenth-century Halifax. The stooping black woman in profile (in the lower right portion of the frame) who proffers the bouquet to the elegantly dressed and upright white woman situates the difference in social roles, access, freedoms and

Through An-Other’s Eyes

33

opportunities between black and white women. The black women’s dress, mannerisms (specifically their pipe smoking) and slightly burlesqued facial features also position them as oddly “masculine” to the “refi ned” image of their white bourgeois patrons. Yvonne McKague Housser’s Marketplace (n.d.) is informed by her ideas about “the people” that she recorded in her Jamaican journal. Housser described the market as her “pet spot” where, “the crowds made a happy moving jazz of colour and interlocked compositions.”81 Marketplace (n.d.) depicts black women and children active in the process of bartering, purchasing and exchange. Their faces are obscured by hats and baskets; Housser’s goal seemed a representation of a “festive” scene that focused upon the difference of the Caribbean “lifestyle” and peoples.82 The same desire to capture an “exotic” moment seems to be a significant motivating factor in Ogilvie’s Xosa Women Washing (1932). Born in Johannesburg, South Africa, Ogilvie’s access to black female subjects was primarily through visits back to Africa. A persistent interest in the black female subject emerges through titles of works like Xosa Mother, Xosa Woman and Xosa Women.83 Brownell’s access to black subjects came not from Africa but through a visit to St. Kitts. The Beach, St. Kitts (1913), first exhibited in Canada in the same year, had been worked up from a sketch he executed during a visit to the Caribbean island. Brownell’s year-long stay in the Caribbean was possibly at the encouragement of then National Gallery director Eric Brown,84 whose family owned a farm on the island.85 Brownell’s painting bares marked similarities with Beament’s work in subject, site and context. Thomas Harold Beament’s West Indian Washerwomen (c. 1935) represents black women busily washing laundry by the water in a tropical setting.86 The image of several black women in starched uniforms, heads tied in scarves, performing domestic labour is indicative of the conditions under which black women laboured as domestics mostly for white, Asian or mixed race families in the Caribbean. Beament has noticeably resisted the urge to depict this group of women within the overt slave stereotype of mammy. However, the image of these labouring women is a subtle reminder of this burlesqued and buxom, large and masculinized black female house slave and its many permutations within popular cultural items and advertisements. The white artist’s motivation to represent black women overwhelmingly within public contexts of domestic labour locates a desire to reinscribe the space between black and white experiences and to fi x colonial perceptions of difference as biological and racial instead of social and historical. Coming from the industrialized space of urbanized Canadian cities, these white artists may have envisioned the relatively “undeveloped” Caribbean and African settings as “quaint” and “natural”; an “untouched” environment within which to frame the public spectacle of black woman’s physical labour. When examining the narrow scope of representations, we must

34

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

question the stark absence of images of black female hospital staff, teachers, students, government employees, bank tellers and hotel administrators, especially within the mid-twentieth century.

DELIBERATE ENGAGEMENT: BLACK WOMEN IN THE ART OF JOANNE TOD Identification/Defacement (1983) is one of a number of works by the contemporary white artist Joanne Tod that directly probes issues of race as they are connected with social perception, representation and identity.87 Tod is distinguished from her historical counterparts because she deliberately and consciously scrutinizes the racial and sexual ramifications of identity construction and engages the viewer within the realm of contemplation. Tod’s Identification/Defacement (1983) focuses on issues of race, sex, gender and class-based identity. In this diptych, Tod represents the same black woman twice in two different bridesmaid gowns. With the subject’s head turned in profile, Tod deliberately neutralizes the black woman’s vision, making her the object of the viewer’s gaze. By painting her own name across the black woman’s face, Tod performs a further erasure through the literal defacement of the black woman’s gaze/face/individuality. Here the power of the artist to position and see the black female subject as she wishes is not cloaked, but rather arguably becomes the central issue of the painting. The bridesmaid dress is a loaded cultural icon with important links to Tod’s oeuvre. Tod has used elaborate gowns, bridesmaid dresses and particularly wedding dresses to symbolize “desirable” forms of socially sanctioned female bondage and, in the case of the bridesmaid dress, the female complicity with and aspiration to this bondage.88 Tod’s black female subject can be read as the visualization of the expression “always a bridesmaid, never the bride.” But in the subject’s implied desire to be that bride, Tod reveals both the “other’s” distance from western paradigms of beauty, femininity and womanhood and their collusion with the very forces of their oppression. Further, Tod locates issues of wealth, class and privilege (associated with the fi nancial means necessary to produce the actual wedding ceremony) and reveals the presence of a largely unrepresented subject group, the black middle class. Whereas Tod’s painting reflects the artist’s genuine attempt to identify with the body of the “other” (Identification), in the end Tod’s name becomes a kind of graffiti that obliterates the specificity of black female subject (Defacement). As a white female artist, Tod implicates herself as a participant within the colonial matrix of power while revealing the historical limitations of the black female subject. But equally important, Tod’s deliberate probing of the processes of identity construction and the racialized power of vision also incriminates the viewer as an active agent within these structures.

Through An-Other’s Eyes

35

In a more recent work, In the Bedroom (1998), Tod revisits the black female subject. A conscious linkage is made with her earlier work In the Kitchen (1975), which is represented within this newer painting. In the Kitchen (1975) depicted an Asian female in sexual bondage and was a decisive work for Tod as it marked the beginning of her engagement with feminist issues.89 In the Bedroom (1998) represents a solitary black female subject comfortable with her unclothed body and her private environment. She is represented on a bed in a reclining pose, propped up on her elbows that support the weight of her upper body as she watches television, convertor in hand. Her abundantly normal sexuality is a sharp departure from traditions of the black woman as excessive sexual spectacle as well as from the representation of a painful-looking bondage fantasy on the wall.90 The bedroom is an obvious space of sexual intimacy and expectation, an inference that is only heightened by Tod’s deliberate use of her own bedroom as a site of the painting. However, in contrast to the erotic possibilities of the setting, the black woman is represented as introspective and contemplative. Her gaze is focused on the television and in this state of absorption she is unaware of and not posed for the viewer. Like Manet’s Olympia (1863), the painting positions the viewer inside of the room. But unlike Manet’s earlier work, the black female subject does not engage us. Unlike Olympia, she is far from being a prostitute; rather, she is a normal woman, absorbed in her own personal activities in the privacy of a room and home that the viewer reads as her own. A viewer with sexual expectations then becomes a voyeur, interloping upon a quiet, personal moment. Tod’s context has subtly evoked sexual expectations that have not been fulfilled. Quite simply, this black woman is neither posed nor naked for us. This deactivation of the white male sexual gaze suggests the possibility of a liberating female gaze across racial and colour lines. In the Bedroom (1998) can be described as a dialogue between women, a contestation of western traditions of the female nude and a project of de-exoticization.91 We have come full circle.

CONCLUSION Spanning over two centuries, the artworks in this chapter demonstrate the white Canadian artist’s persistent historical interest in the black female subject. Taking various forms within the practices of western art, these works vary from direct derivatives of colonial stereotypes to much more subtle and sometimes alternative representations. The catalyst that has fuelled this artistic preoccupation is the black female subject’s perceived deviance from western paradigms of selfhood. Accordingly, the black female subject has existed largely within a separate and antithetical category of representation, fulfilling the role of sexual and racial “other” within Canadian culture.

36

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

The economic, social and psychic power imbalances embedded within colonialism have been revealed within the processes and products of Canadian artistic practice. These representations speak to the historical black presence in Canada, the idealized cultural search for “exotic” subjects and Canadian cultural participation in the western colonial fabrication of blackness and black womanhood. This chapter stands as an attempt to understand and describe artistic processes that have operated within the colonial space of Canadian culture. Canadian cultural participation within colonial discourse must not be seen merely as refl ective, but instead acknowledged as a potent generative force within our society. It is in understanding the ideological weight and social significance of culture that we can begin to reassess the roles and responsibilities of artists, cultural institutions and cultural practitioners in producing, institutionalizing, documenting and contextualizing culture, and indeed identity itself.

2

Racing Childhood Representations of Black Girls in Canadian Art It is commonly said that no girl or woman receives a certain kind of insult unless she invites it. That does not apply to a colored girl and woman in the South. The color of her face alone is sufficient invitation to the Southern white man—these same men who profess horror that a white gentleman can entertain a colored one at his table. Out of sight of their own women they are willing and anxious to entertain colored women in various ways. Few colored girls reach the age of sixteen without receiving advances from them—maybe from a young “upstart,” and often from a man old enough to be their father, a white haired veteran of sin. Yes, and men high in position, whose wives and daughters are leaders of society. (“The Race Problem—An Autobiography, by A Southern Woman,” The Independent 56, no. 2885 [17 March 1904], 587, 589)

As we went out in the morning, I observed several women, who carried their young children in their arms to the field. These mothers laid their children at the side of the fence, or under the shade of the cotton plants, whilst they were at work; and when the rest of us went to get water, they would go to give suck to their children, requesting someone to bring them water in gourds, which they were careful to carry to the field with them. One young woman did not, like the others, leave her child at the end of the row, but had contrived a sort of rude knapsack, made of a piece of coarse linen cloth, in which she fastened her child, which was very young, upon her back; and in this way carried it all day, and performed her task at the hoe with the other people. (Charles Ball, Slavery in the United States: A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball, a Black Man [Lewistown, PA: J.W. Shugert, 1836], 150–51)

The term childhood marks a specific temporal and social designation of assumed human development. For many of us, it evokes images of carefree days, of being lavished with attention, love and affection, of play and learning, of being protected from physical and moral harm by one’s parents and sheltered from social contamination and malaise by one’s society.1 The equation of childhood with a time of innocence and protection is and has been

38

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

an experience of those whose identities have afforded them access to those forms of protection. Childhood is not an essential or universal category, not an automatic benefit of one’s age or time of life, but rather the product of a discursive structure that both empowers and marginalizes subjects on the basis of markers of identity such as class, race, sex and gender. Most scholars trace our current and dominant idea of childhood in the west back to eighteenth-century philosophers who took up the problem of the family in society. However, these early thinkers often forged their ideas through the repeated alienation and othering of subjects who were not white and upper class. To examine race and childhood is to call for a postcolonial reading capable of scrutinizing the ways in which the western scholarship of Childhood Studies has neglected the bodies and subjectivities of Native children and children of colour and centralized the white child as the universal paradigm upon which explorations should be based. To examine race, class, sex and gender simultaneously is to acknowledge the necessity of black/postcolonial feminist practice and to account for distinctions between male and female subjects. But the question emerges, during what ages or period of life is a human a child? The question is a tricky one. If we go by today’s standards, basing it on legal markers like the legal drinking age in Canada, the answer would be prior to the age of eighteen or nineteen, and in the United States, twentyone. But how do things shift if we factor in issues like historical mortality rates as they were specific to racial populations? And should mortality be used as a marker of childhood at all or does it utterly warp the calculations? For instance, if we assume that an historical mortality rate should also be used to determine a life marker like “mid-life” then a population that lived to be twenty would have been middle-aged at ten years old, and if “midlife” cannot be childhood, then the childhood phase of this groups’ development is summarily curtailed. On the other hand, is it better to theorize that phases of life like mid-life are recent historical creations, based upon amazing rises in human mortality? And if so, is it logical or productive to think of people who lived to be only twenty years old as still being children at eighteen? As a kind of compromise and because I am not a developmental psychologist, I am considering childhood to be from infancy into the early to middle teen years, in part because of the socialization and developmental processes that every human must undergo over the course of years and in part because of the standard age of the start of menarche (globally seen as a girl’s right of passage) in black slave girls, which Trussell and Steckel have calculated as fifteen. 2 It is my contention that representations of black children, especially historical representations, in the Canadian context and other locations of diaspora, demand an understanding of the construction of childhood (or perhaps it is better to call this an erasure) within Trans Atlantic Slavery. As an institution that literally changed the world over the course of some four hundred years, slavery is no little consideration. Rather, it should be

Racing Childhood 39 thought of as the very foundational ground upon which notions of personhood and childhood became racialized and black children were effectively marked off in biology, appearance, behaviour and experience from white children. Although this chapter is an attempt to recuperate the social, cultural and psychic contexts of black girl’s lives historically in Canada by examining the ways that they were represented in Canadian art, the task cannot be rigorously accomplished without also examining relevant information about and artworks representing slave populations and free black subjects in other contexts. For one thing, the scant historical scholarship on black children in Canada demands that we look outside of Canada’s national borders for relevant methodological models and data. But besides a way to fill research gaps fundamentally formed through scholarly neglect and academic racism, the need to also look outwards stems from the migratory reality that many black child slaves who ended up in Canada were either born abroad and forcibly migrated to settlements like Montreal and Halifax, or were born to slave parents who themselves were not born in Canada. Therefore, the scholarship on the daily lives, labours and health of black slave women and children in locations like the Caribbean and the American south is directly relevant to black slave children in Canada. Slavery’s context is deeply paradoxical and poignant. Slavery was a profoundly conflicted and grotesque institution of mind-boggling events and practices, which seem today to make impossible bedfellows. It necessitated the constant physical, sexual and biological coerced intimacy between whites and blacks. This perverse intimacy—wherein black bodies were a necessity of white power, society, sexuality, economy and family—did not lead to the liberation of black subjects, but their further marginalization and abuse. Black slave children inhabited this world and their production through visual representation is the necessary foundation for an understanding of later twentieth-century representations in the Canadian context.

PUTTING RACE INTO CHILDHOOD STUDIES Writing in 1904, a woman described as Southern and coloured, lamented her helplessness as a mother, incapable of protecting her children: I dread to see my children grow. I know not their fate. Where the white girl has one temptation, mine will have many. Where the white boy has every opportunity and protection, mine will have few opportunities and no protection. It does not matter how good or wise my children may be, they are colored. When I have said that, all is said.3 This mother’s heartbreak was prompted by a deep understanding of the nature of racism and the ways that it fractured the romantic Eurocentric

40

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

ideal of childhood innocence. This innocence, she understood, was not available to her black children. What is interesting is the multifaceted nature of the problem of the experience of race or blackness for her children. Temptation, opportunity and protection were the means through which she expressed the unequal and potentially disastrous consequences for them. Her painful realizations were: (a) that she was powerless to protect or alter the outcomes of her children’s lives in terms of such prolific and vicious racism and (b) that said racism was indiscriminate and cared not if the black child was good or wise. The overdetermined signifier of black skin in its conflation with colonial stereotypes of pathology, immorality, social deviance, etc., was a burden that would precede her children throughout their lives and allow for their premature condemnation as less than to the normalized and supposedly unracialized state of white childhood. It is crucial then to note how Trans Atlantic Slavery made race a matter of class; the blackness of the black body was seen as a stain that not only placed blacks at the lowest rungs of society, but effectively denied blacks the right to aspire to higher class positions. Whereas scholars focusing on childhood have recently explored the ways in which children were molded—physically, emotionally, mentally and socially—by their parents into appropriate gender roles through explorations of issues like play, education, dress and behaviour, many have assumed a white subject and necessarily focused primarily upon differences between wealthy and impoverished children.4 Such scholarship has focused on issues of child labour as a problem of class structures. However, when often focusing upon these issues in the western metropolises or rural regions of Europe, the usually unstated racial focus (whiteness) overlooks an endemic problem. The problem of which I speak was the naturalization of black child labour and exploitation in the colonial territories of these vast European empires where slavery flourished and from where the obscene wealth and riches, which were shifting the traditionally bimodal class structures of western societies, were originating. Ironically, at the moment when western disciplines began to liken white children to savages or primitives, black people were being infantilized and likened to children—both groups were seen as requiring civilization to be best delivered by socially and economically elite white adults.5

BLACK FEMALE SLAVES, REPRODUCTION AND LABOUR The racial abuses of slavery confounded traditional western notions of gender, sex and age. What were given boundaries and expectations off plantations were perverted and disfigured practices and ideologies on them. Thus, although Marilyn R. Brown has argued, “For, both then and now, childhood has been primarily a cultural invention and site of emotional

Racing Childhood 41 projection by adults,”6 the imaginary potential of this invention for the white subject has far outdistanced that of the black in the colonial west. Therefore, a black/postcolonial feminist analysis of the representations of black girls and the lives that black girls have historically led, under slavery and under prolific colonial regimes of race, serve to rupture the Romantic cult of childhood.7 It is clear that the health of all slaves was compromised by slavery across all locations of the Black Diaspora. From most critical accounts, malnutrition and overwork was commonplace and had immediate and long-lasting detrimental impacts on generations of Africans and their descendants, starting in the womb. Kiple and Kiple have argued that although in the prenatal period a fetus will draw from a mother’s skeletal stores to satisfy its mineral requirements, the maternal deficiencies of slave women combined with high fertility made for a progressive “bankruptcy” of those stores. Accordingly, they claim, “Some slave babies then must have entered the world with serious mineral deficiencies.”8 Steckel has compiled significant data on slave nutrition, health, growth and mortality in the context of the United States.9 Commenting on the small stature of black slave children that the data revealed, Steckel has argued, “The origins of poor health can be traced to difficult periods of fetal and infant growth. Slave newborns probably weighed on average fewer than 5.5 pounds or 2.500 grams compared with modern standards of 3.450 grams.”10 And these slave children were the “lucky” ones in that they were able to survive at all. The problem of infant mortality amongst slaves in the diaspora is largely attributable to the health of the slave mothers and there is a direct link between the nutrition, labour and overall wellbeing of slave women and the survival and biological well-being of their children. Nutritional deficiencies (such as calcium, magnesium and iron) that slave children inherited from their mothers at birth would continue through nursing because the quality of the breast milk was affected by a slave mother’s health. But weaning could be even worse for slave children because a diet composed mainly of hominy, cornbread and fat and deliberately short on lean protein and vegetables was the norm in the southern US.11 This racialized nutritional deferential would, of course, have had severe negative impacts on slave populations over the course of individual’s lives and across generations.12 The ability of slaves to reproduce themselves, or what slave owners called “natural increase,” had much to do with their overall and reproductive health and differed in distinct locations of diaspora. Klein and Engerman debunked the idea that attitudes toward slave treatment and material provisions were the key determining factors in the disproportionate “natural increase” of slaves in the United States when compared to Brazilian and West Indian slave societies.13 Instead they argued that the lower average lengths of lactation in the United States played a key role in the comparably higher fertility of black female slaves.14

42

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

But female labour practices also had much to do with reproductive health and viability. In most tropical locations of diaspora, agricultural commercial interests dominated and dictated the practices and patterns of colonization, settlement and resource extraction. Whereas colonies like Jamaica became prized for the production of sugar,15 Jamaica and other Caribbean islands also produced agricultural exports like indigo, pimento, tobacco and various types of wood.16 Meanwhile, the American south became famous for crops like cotton and rice. The engine of much of tropical plantation slavery then was monocrop agricultural production fuelled by the labour of mainly black male and female slaves. The research of Mair on women fieldworkers in Jamaica has revealed, “In 1832, sugar employed 49.5 per cent of the slave work force. The majority of those workers were women, the ratio being 920 males to 1,000 females.”17 In the case of Jamaica then, the dominance of the sugar industry: dictated a conscious policy of job allocation which concentrated black enslaved women in the fields in the most menial and least versatile areas of cultivation in excess of men, and in excess of all persons, male and female, who were not black.18 What this means is that black slave women did not do “women’s work” as defi ned by white bourgeois standards, but were regularly forced to perform hard labour, in grueling physical, environmental and climactic conditions, mostly with crude and dangerous technology and substandard provision of nutrition, access to medicine or other health and welfare care. The nutrition of slaves in diaspora was not only substandard to that of whites (especially wealthy ones) in terms of the quantity of food, but also in terms of quality and, as Kiple and Kiple have pointed out, with regard to three key bioclimatic factors that affected slaves as West African descendants.19 The arduous field labour of the average plantation slave, male and female, meant that slave children received dramatically different care and attention than the white children. Even before birth, the health and welfare of the pregnant slave was often at odds with the slave owner’s desire for maximum exploitation of their labourers. Shortly after giving birth, female slaves were commanded back to the fields to the obvious detriment of their infant child. Field slaves sometimes took small slave children to the fields with them, carrying them on their backs or leaving them nearby while they laboured. 20 But ultimate control of their ability to take care of their children resided with their enslavers who dictated the amount of attention and even the frequency of the feedings that slave children could receive. 21 Black slave women regularly and for lifetimes did “men’s work”; or rather the lives and labours of black female slaves points out the lie of the Eurocentric ideal of the gendered separation of labour. In the Canadian context, too, the needs of the white owners overrode any normative upper-class gender ideals when it came to black female slaves and labour. In a Halifax

Racing Childhood

43

slave sale ad of January 1779, a Negro woman of twenty-one years was described as “capable of performing both town and country work and an exceedingly good cook.”22 Whereas the mention of town work referenced domestic labour, the country work most likely indicated that this woman knew her way around a farm and was skilled at various agricultural and field tasks. White demands for black labour often had detrimental impacts on slave women and their children alike. A slave woman in Georgia described the labour of nursing black female slaves thus: Women with little babies would have to go to work in de mornings with the rest, come back, nurse their children and go back to the field, stay two or three hours, then go back and eat dinner; after dinner dey would have to go to de field and stay two or three more hours and go and nurse the chillun again, go back to the field and stay till night [sic].23 This grueling schedule would have taken a severe toll on even the most hearty slave woman. But it is equally important to note that because of the consistent absence of the slave mother, and as a consequence the black baby’s only or main source of nourishment, slave children were socialized into deprivation at a very early stage. This deprivation was not only about the inability of their mothers to provide sufficient nutrition 24 through the quantity and quality of their milk or through the amount of feedings.25 Rather, absence and inconsistency must be seen as key modalities of the black mother–child relationship within slavery, modalities with profound psychic as well as physical repercussions for mothers and children alike. A chilling recollection that points out the psychic and psychological dimension of this trauma comes from William Wells Brown, who as a slave child recalled being the “cause of his mother’s whippings.”26 It is hard to fathom the psychic and emotional burden that black slave children would have felt when they reached an age at which they connected their mother’s loving attention to her violent abuse at the hands of white enslavers. As regards black girls and their representation in western art, this socialized deprivation and its various burdens must be seriously considered not just within the immediate context of slavery, but as regards its aftermath in terms of the inherited racial traumas that became its legacy.

SLAVERY, “BREEDING” AND SEXUALIZATION OF BLACK SLAVE GIRLS Taking up the context of Virginia, Deborah Gray White has argued that although slave owners were quick to notice and rely upon the lesser economic value of female slaves in order to supplement more expensive male labour, they were rather slow to exploit the procreative capacities of their female

44

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

slaves. 27 The practice of “breeding” female slaves, in order to replenish the labour on one’s plantation and to increase one’s wealth and property, was not commonplace until the middle of the eighteenth century.28 As a result, all aspects of a female slave’s life came under invasive scrutiny from the slave owners, including her marital status, workload and diet. 29 As I will discuss in great detail in Chapters 3, 4 and 5 of this volume, the exposed breast of the enslaved black female in the Canadian François Malépart de Beaucourt’s Portrait of a Negro Slave (1786; Figure 1.1) indexes her sexual labour and “breeding” potential as active considerations in her value and exchange. White has argued that a pregnant slave woman’s care was at the discretion of the slave owners and was generally poor.30 The benefit, if any, of reproduction for a slave woman was the comfort of being assisted, during pregnancy, delivery and in the postpartum period by a community of caring black females, including a midwife.31 However, the lower standard of care for black slave women was decidedly racialized and linked to the endemic and strategic animalization of blacks in general. It was this view of the black slave as animal/chattel that led to the mistaken belief that “slave women gave birth more easily and quickly than white women.”32 It is a grave irony of slavery that black female slaves performed a tandem maternal duty, that of the care of the white master’s children and the care of their own children. The psychic burden of this coerced responsibility cannot be underestimated for several reasons. First, in various locations of diaspora, the rearing of the white master’s children, which sometimes included the responsibilities of wet nurse, was largely done at the expense of time, attention and resources for their own offspring.33 Since some of these resources were biological (breast milk), this extra-maternal responsibility was obviously to the detriment of their own children.34 Commenting on the nutrition of slave children, Steckel has argued that: breast milk was probably the most important, if not the only, source of nutrition early in infancy. Breast milk is nutritionally ideal, provides some immunity and is clean, but this source is ordinarily insufficient for normal growth by age 4 to 6 months. However, the number of pounds of cotton picked per day attained normal levels within 3 months after delivery, which suggests that supplementation began earlier. The transition away from breast milk and towards solid foods and manual feeding must have been a difficult adjustment accompanied by elevated rates of illness and mortality. Manual feeding introduced unsanitary elements and contaminated food or liquid, and the diet emphasized starchy products such as pap and gruel. This diet lacked sufficient protein and was probably deficient in iron and calcium. It is not surprising that the postneonatal infant mortality rate was as high as 162 per thousand in a sample of plantation records. Moreover, the average rate of loss was nearly 50 percent higher in months 1 through 4 compared with months 5 through 8, which agrees with other evidence that breastfeeding may have been attenuated in early infancy. 35

Racing Childhood

45

How long a slave woman nursed her child was not a matter of her own desires, but driven by the economic motivations and whims of her owner. Second, the rearing of white children was literally tantamount to the rearing of a slave’s future master/mistress/oppressor. The traumas of knowing that you were not only raising the child of the people who daily humiliated, controlled, abused and demeaned you would be painful enough without the added torment of slave women one day living long enough to suffer the same treatment at the hands of their “white children.” And third, a large percentage of the children born to slave women would have been mixed race, the product of coerced sexual relations (sometimes outright rape and other times psychological or economic manipulation). The mental damage suffered by these black slave mothers who were forced to carry, birth and care for the interracial children of their enslavers/rapists is difficult to quantify but must be considered another endemic and catastrophic dimension of the racialized trauma of slavery. There are many examples within the nineteenth-century photographic tradition of black women pictured as the primary caregivers or nurse of their white child charges. Mrs. Wilson’s Nurse (c. 1890s), created by an unknown American photographer, is a compelling example for the ways that it celebrates and seeks to naturalize these problematic cross-racial and cross-class relationships. The image’s proximity to slavery is obvious. In it, a stout black woman who appears to be past middle age wears a stiff white apron and checked, long-sleeve blouse as she lifts aloft a large, naked white infant. The heftiness of the white child speaks to their upper-class status and the ability of their parents to provide abundant nutrition. What is striking is the face of the black nurse and the expression of utter pride and devotion captured in the image. The gaze is one of motherly love and, for all intents and purposes, such black women were indeed the mothers of their white charges. However, the white child does not return the black nurse’s gaze. Instead, the baby looks off to the right, not even towards the camera. Of course a child of this age would not have been in control of their responses and actions. But the implication of another presence in the room, likely that of the white biological mother whose signaling or noise-making has drawn the white child’s attention away from the black mother/nurse, can be read as an ominous prediction of things to come; the allegiance of whiteness eventually usurping the longevity and steadfastness of care. Another example, this time Canadian, of the representation of black women as nurses to white children is William H. Buckley’s Nanny with Children in her Care, Guysborough (c. 1900). Again the black female is anonymized by the absence of her name in the title. Her erasure from the family record is paradoxical to the role that she likely had as primary caregiver to the two white children, one standing at her left and the other being pushed by her in a carriage. The group is posed on a long dirt road that recedes into the distance, providing an open vista where a cluster of houses can be seen in the distance at the right of the road. On the other side of the road and to the left of the grouping, a large body of water takes up much

46

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

of the photograph. The group’s position then evokes the idea of a “Sunday stroll.” The black nanny is standing with her hand perched on the handle of the baby carriage as she stares into the camera. Her vision is likely not in her control as she has most likely been summoned to walk, to pose and to look at the command of William Buckley who may be the father or relative of the white children and not simply the photographer. The two children also look dutifully at the camera. The black woman’s polished clothing, consisting of long skirt, pleated blouse and decorated hat, mark her as being in the employ of an upper-class family. As such, it is very likely that she was a live-in nanny and that her service came at a very high price for her own family, if she was able to create and sustain one. Whether or not white children were raised, loved, nourished and even breast-fed by their black nurses, they were still white and as such, their education into white supremacy was still an integral part of how whites reproduced their social power. Another gross absence in such images is that of black children, who regardless haunt the photo through their very absence. As photographs like Mrs. Wilson’s Nurse (c. 1890s) reveal, black female sexuality and fertility was intimately tied to white power and control both during and after slavery. Although the history of the Americas is arguably the history of black women (enslaved and free) raising white children, the reactions to a recent photograph should alert us to the fact that this legacy is prolifically denied and repressed in the western collective consciousness. The Benetton advertisement, Oliviero Toscani’s Breast Feeding (1989), that showed a white child strategically placed to infer breast-feeding in front of a dark-skinned black woman with breast exposed incited much controversy, largely because it triggered the recall of precisely these same exploitative histories within slavery. In the realm of “high” art, contemporary black American artist Kara Walker’s much celebrated and loathed dreamscapes, which narrate plantation life in the American South, are in part targets of such extreme criticism because of her representation of children, black and enslaved and white and free. In works like The End of Uncle Tom (1995), African’t (1996) and The Means to an End—A Shadow Drama in Five Acts (1995), Walker does not only recount the horrific abuse, sexual and otherwise, of white slavers, male and female, against black children, but empowers her children with agency that they use to humiliate and torture others. In The Battle of Atlanta: Being a Narrative of a Negress in the Flames of Desire—A Reconstruction (1995), the white children, identified by their dress, physiognomy, anatomy, scale and the fact that they are “at play,” sneak up on the black female slave, who, slumped over and tied to a tree by her neck, is perhaps unaware that the young boy intends to penetrate her with his sword. The horrific nature of the phallicized toy prophesies the generations of violent cross-racial abuse that has been visited upon black female bodies by white males. Further, the work reminds us of the speed with which the white children of slave owners turned on their black mothers.

Racing Childhood

47

As White has demonstrated in the American slave context, once black female slaves came to be seen as “breeders” they were economically positioned as possessing, in the biological sense, the potential for an extremely lucrative pay-off for their owners. White has argued, “Young girls, therefore, were valuable for their progeny as well as for the labor they would be expected to do in the field. If handled properly, females made for their masters a ‘mine of wealth’”36 (italics mine). The exploitation was not only, then, about mastering black adult females, but about the strategic sexual surveillance and cultivation of black girls from a very young age. The burden of sexual reproduction as wealth production provided a fundamental distinction between the lives of black girls and white ones, and it was the colonial licentiousness of the white slave owners that was projected onto the bodies of the black female slaves. A slave girl’s socialization into the racialized economy of sexual expectation and abuse would come early in her life. A part of this initiation would be through her contact with her older female family members, especially her mother, grandmother and aunts who would have tried to guard her against the unwanted sexual advances of white and black male sexual predators. But it also would have come from the many moments when these girls were themselves witness to the sexual aggression of males towards other slave women within their environment. Slave owners seemed to have been just as quick to use manipulation as outright aggression in their bid for “natural increase.” White has argued that slave owners made it a point to sexually initiate adolescent female slaves quite quickly because they “practiced a passive, but insidious kind of breeding,” through which they encouraged young slaves to create relationships by granting black males access to their young female slaves.37 Female slaves who were “breeding” were sometimes given additional “pay-offs” by their happy masters, above and beyond the usual incentives of additional food and less arduous labour.38 However, biological data of female slaves demonstrates that they clearly resisted the slave owners’ coercive “breeding” strategies, drawing out the time between menarche (mean age of fi fteen) and their fi rst birth (mean age of 20.6).39 However, due to the extreme social and economic value of reproductively healthy female slaves, to be “barren” was to at once experience a reprieve from potential sexual abuse motivated by “natural increase” but at the same time to suffer marginalization and potential public humiliation linked to infertility.40 Slave owners in the American South, as well as other diasporic locations, celebrated their “breeding wenches” and their capacity for “natural increase” that sustained their colonial economic enterprises. But for the slave woman, her ability to give birth to future slaves had detrimental impacts on her chances to pursue freedom. In particular, studies of fugitive slaves, who were largely between the ages of sixteen and thirty-five, indicate that the vast majority of the runaways were male. The mobility of female slaves within this age bracket was severely hindered by childbearing.41

48

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

BLACK MOTHERHOOD AND BLACK CHILDREN IN WESTERN ART The western visual archive of black children is quite large but unusual in some aspects. Whereas white, black and other races of children can easily be found within portraiture and genre scenes, it is how and when black children appear that is a disturbing reminder of western colonial histories. Whereas black children seem overtly present in some specifically articulated trends, they are almost utterly absent in others. I wish to explore some of these western and specifically Canadian visual art objects with careful attention to the representation of the cross-racial interaction of black and white subjects and the interracial representation of black subjects. Arguably, an understanding of how visual representation helped to produce the category of black children hinges not only upon images of that discrete group but also upon their parents, masters, mistresses and fellow children who were both black and non-black. Strategically deployed for their ability to cite exotic locations and to mobilize references to the white bodies’ colonial reach, wealth and privilege, black children were often present only as the slave or servant within white family portraits produced in the various locations including the United States, Europe and the Caribbean.42 Although black children were often depicted with white children, their representation in service visualized the concrete relations of servant and master. American Robert Street’s Children of Commodore John Daniel Daniels (c. 1826) is a rare example of a portrait in which the black boy at play with the white children can be read as an equalizing gesture. However, most often the black slave children’s labour and service is what ensured the white subject’s childhood. A black child’s subservient status was generally noted both compositionally and directly on their bodies. In placement and activity, they were often shown as being below the white family in terms of what they were doing (which was labour) and in terms of how they were dressed and positioned (usually on a lower compositional register and at the outskirts of the central action). Due to their “exotic” potential as slave bodies, personal property with literal monetary value, slaves were often dressed up in exoticizing (often orientalizing) garb to further point up their possession as “foreign” luxury objects. Equally, however, slave children are pictured in tattered, worn and substandard clothing that more aptly captured the impoverished state of most black slaves. But as for the common use of exoticizing dress, of course black slave children who were represented in such ways were not always foreign. Rather many, especially within the nineteenth century, would have been born in the west and would even have had parents who were similarly removed by generations from their African heritage. I should also point out the obvious here, too, that some of the slave children’s parents were white Europeans. Such portraits then and their treatment of black slave children were a means for white Europeans, white Creoles and white Euro-Americans (and here I use the word America in the broadest “New

Racing Childhood

49

World” sense) to erase the ever-increasing “European-ness” of their black slaves, even as their continuing investments in imperialism produced it. As the histories of slavery and the mistreatment of black women and children have revealed, black girls were likely to have serious illnesses, to suffer from malnutrition, to be the victim of sexual and racial abuse and to bear the weight of consistent social surveillance and manipulation at the hands of whites. All this, however horrific, was simply normal. Given the histories of slave labour, sexuality and motherhood across various locations of diaspora, certain trends in the historical representation of black subjects are not surprising. One such trend is that there is a general absence of representations of black mothers with their own black children, especially works whose focus is the romanticized view of a mother–child bond. Second, related images of pregnant black women or black women giving birth or nursing are also extremely rare. Of course, a part of the reason for this second absence is social taboos that positioned the topic of women’s fertility and reproduction as outside of appropriate social decorum. However, the stereotypical view of black women as sexually licentious and excessive should have allowed for greater representation of these otherwise off-limit subjects than for white females. The casual nature of the sale and enslavement of black bodies worked against the black family and black female maternal rights. An American bill of sale from Abraham Van Vleek detailed his purchases for 28 October 1811. Listed alongside a red face cow, yearling calf, plough, fancy chairs and various kitchenwares were a “wench named Eve and child.”43 Canadian Henrietta Shore’s Negro Woman and Two Children (c. 1916; Figure 2.1), although it does not name the black female adult as mother, is a rare example of a black woman in a maternal role in reference to black children. The woman gazes directly and warily out at the viewers, her arms draped protectively down around the seated children. Her body language connotes an awareness of white antagonism to the black family and the various abuses, psychic, emotional, sexual and physical, that this implies. Although not explicitly named as a mother, her body language marks her as a protector. All three figures are dressed rather fi nely in good, clean and pretty-looking garments. The infant, seated in the woman’s lap, wears a white dress, white bonnet with blue ribbon, white socks and black shoes. Her dress along with the rattle that she absently grips seem further to indicate the attentiveness, love and care of her black mother. The little girl seated in the immediate left foreground meets the viewers’ gaze directly with her own, a bright smile indicating that her childhood innocence might not yet have been stolen. Black child subjects, as black adult subjects, rarely appear in finished individual historical portraits. Therefore, portraits like Canadian Orson Shorey Wheeler’s bronze sculpture Head of a Girl (1946) are more the exception than the rule. Although the work has circulated under the anonymizing title, it represents an introspective Lucille Vaughan and was initiated by Wheeler, then art professor at Concordia University, Montreal. The elitist and historically inaccessible nature of portraiture, which I discuss more

50

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

Figure 2.1 Henrietta Shore, Negro Woman and Two Children, c. 1916. Oil on canvas, 137.8 x 113.6 cm. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Canada. Photo copyright National Gallery of Canada.

fully in Chapter 3 of this volume, made independent access for blacks virtually impossible. Throughout the time of slavery, when oil-painted or marblesculpted portraits were the norm for the wealthy and privileged and prior to the invention of photography, blacks, many of whom were slaves, simply did not have the money or the requisite social independence or cultural knowledge to commission portraits of themselves or their loved ones. Rather, black subjects have been a frequent presence in the portraits of aristocratic

Racing Childhood

51

and bourgeois white families, and on rare occasions when they were the sole sitter, the works were often problematically commissioned by the subject’s owner or employer and the women have remained unnamed, as in Canadian William Notman’s Mrs. Cowan’s Nurse (1871; Figure 2.2).

Figure 2.2 William Notman, Mrs. Cowan’s Nurse, 1871. Silver salts on paper mounted on paper, albumen process. Notman Photographic Archives, McCord Museum of Canadian History, Montreal, Canada.

52

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

Mrs. Cowan’s Nurse (1871), Mrs. Wilson’s Nurse (c. 1890s) and Nanny with the Children in her Care, Guysborough (c. 1900) all remind us that black women continued to raise white children and care for white adults well after the end of slavery. This domestic servitude was in part due to the lack of educational opportunity fostered by racial segregation that ensured a lack of access to other employment, exacerbated by other forms of social exclusion and strategic institutional racism. Although in William Notman’s Mrs. Cowan’s Nurse (1871) the young black female’s white charge is absent, white power and authority is mapped onto the image through the process of naming that displaced the black nurse’s name and replaced it with that of her white female employer. As such, although a century removed from François Malépart de Beaucourt’s Portrait of a Negro Slave (1786; Figure 1.1), these photographs are similarly structured by the same racialized power imbalances of the much earlier oil portrait; that of white owner/master/mistress/employer as the initiator of the commissioned portrait, and the black female slave/nurse as a considerably restricted agent in her own representation.

REPRESENTING BLACK CHILDREN IN SLAVERY The equation of black child bodies with property is driven home by the brutal efficiency with which one Mrs. B.L. Blankenship related her desire for the purchase of a slave child to Mr. E.H. Stokes: I am anxious to buy a small healthy negro girl—ten or twelve years old, and would like to know if you could let me have one—I will pay you cash in State money—and you allowing the per centage on it—I will take her on trial of a few weeks—please let me hear from you as soon as possible (—I would like a dark Mulatto).44 As with any other commodity, Mrs. Blankenship lays out her desires for her purchase, citing the condition, age, sex and even the complexion and race mixture of the child slave that she seeks to purchase.45 Most alarming is the fact that this black child is commodified as an object for which one could request a trial period. This white female potential buyer’s blasé attitude towards the “trial of a few weeks” demonstrates the extent to which whites felt little compassion for the suffering of black children who were regularly separated from their parents and loved ones due to white participation in and reliance upon slavery. That Blankenship requested a healthy girl of ten or twelve years of age should also alert us to her potential interest in “breeding” her new slave when the time came. European slavers did not spare children when purchasing their human cargo.46 African children were a part of the horrific practices of the Middle Passage and suffered the same physical, emotional and psychic assaults from

Racing Childhood 53 the traumatic voyages to the so-called New World. Children could be sold into slavery or born into it because within most colonial regimes, any child born to a slave woman became the property of her master and mistress, regardless of the race or social status of the father. As I have discussed in detail earlier, this colonial logic supported the endemic sexual exploitation and abuse of black female slaves, who, stereotyped as excessively sexual, had no direct recourse under the law to protect themselves from this specifically sexual oppression. To a large extent, the ability of male and female slaves to form and protect their own family units was inherently contradictory to slave practices; or at least to their owners’ overriding economic interests. But, once again, slavery in the Canadian context was largely not agriculturally driven because the temperate climate, which made for harsh winters, was not conducive to a monocrop plantation society. Instead slaves in Canada, panis (Native) and black, worked in industries such as mining, fisheries, lumber and fur trading or as domestics for wealthy or well-to-do whites. William Renwick Riddell’s early landmark research on slavery in Canada provides significant insights into the variation of whites that were able to and desired to own slaves. Amongst the usual suspects like colonial administrators and lawyers, we also fi nd military of all ranks, clergy, lawyers, hairdressers and merchants (goldsmiths, butchers, etc.) regularly listed. As yet there are few publicly owned artworks that represent black slave girls in Canada; or at least few that have been thoroughly catalogued in a way that would allow them to come into public or even scholarly consciousness.47 However, enslaved black girls are represented in significant number in another archive that is primarily textual although abundantly visual. The archive to which I refer is that of slave sale and fugitive slave advertisements that were posted in newspapers and produced as broadsheets. Slave sales were also documented in the legislation of Upper and Lower Canada and the Maritimes and witnessed by notaries or colonial administrators. As Marcus Wood has argued: For the slave-owner the presentation of the runaway through advertising was outwardly straightforward, and constituted the announcement, within the terms of an established legal code, of an act of theft, albeit a paradoxical self-theft.48 According to Wood, runaway slave ads became a staple of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century print culture in locations like Brazil, the Caribbean, the Southern United States and, I would add, Canada.49 Whereas some ads included text that was accompanied by a typecast or woodcut image, many others relied solely on the textual description of the slave’s supposed physical characteristic and behaviours. But we must be cautious in using such ads and documents as authoritative descriptions of what a slave “really looked like.” Instead, this archive is best used to study what

54

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

white slave owners and the whites who conspired with them to preserve the status quo of the slave system thought black slaves looked like; the corporeal and behavioural codes, mainly visual, that they constituted and circulated in order to reinforce and protect their ownership and trade in African and African descended peoples. In part then, the visual language of description was meant to reinforce the status of blacks as property; to conflate blackness with the status of slave or commodity. These representations are not only about the power of white vision to script black bodies, but to script them as property, as chattel to be bought and sold. Slavery in Canada was not only about whites needing or desiring labour, it was also about the profits that could be made in the exchange of human beings. As advertised in the Halifax Gazette on 15 May 1752, a group of six Negro slaves were “just imported and to be sold” at Major Lockman’s store in Halifax.50 The rapid turnaround implied by the word “just” signaled that the owner, Joshua Mauger, was intent on the quick disposal of his “property” for profit. Whether accompanied by images or not, such ads relied heavily upon the reader’s ability to become a viewer and to visualize the slave through the description provided. As such, the ads relied largely upon, and helped to produce, a communal language of racial identification, specifically of blackness. Whereas the standard male image became a man in mid-stride, running with a bundle attached to a stick slung over his shoulder, the female slave was more often shown seated and resting with a bundle held at her side. These images became iconic and quickly and clearly conveyed a message of fugitive to any reader of the time. But whereas the images were standardized, the descriptions were less so. Canadian slave advertisements, whether regarding sales or runaways, have enormous commonalities with their American (continental South and North) and Caribbean counterparts. The logic was clear. How best did an owner convey the physical description of his or her property in order to protect their purse, either through the recapture of a fleeing slave or through the sale of one in their possession? As such, the entire description centered on the body and sought to describe not only how it looked but also what behaviours and actions an observer would be likely to witness. The bulk of any such description then was corporeal and hinged upon the anatomical and physiognomical specificity of the slave detailing specific or extraordinary facial or bodily features. Not surprisingly, many of these descriptions, especially in slave sale ads, were devised to convey an idea of the good health and strength of a slave’s body; for who would want to buy a slave that was sickly or infi rm? As such, slave sale ads often featured descriptions like “well-made,” “well built,” “strong,” “stout” and, despite the normality of malnutrition and premature mortality rates across the Black Diaspora, “healthy.” But whites were equally interested in the personalities, character and attitudes of a potential slave. As such, descriptions like “industrious,” “obedient,” “orderly,” “sober” and “honest” were also common features of slave sale advertisements.

Racing Childhood 55 In the case of the group sale in Halifax mentioned earlier, the two younger Negro boys (aged twelve and thirteen) were described as “likely, healthy, and well-shaped” an indication, most probably of their muscle tone, that would be read as a sign of their physical strength and endurance. Meanwhile, the eighteen-year-olds were described as being “healthy” and as possessing “agreeable tempers.”51 Another sale at Halifax in 1769 was advertised as “two hogsheads of rum, three of sugar and two well-grown negro girls aged 14 and 12” to be sold to the highest bidder, clearly, noted Riddell, “a consignment from the West Indies”52 (italics mine). “Wellgrown” here likely indicated both their physical strength and, tragically, their future reproductive capacity as “breeders.” But slave ads also featured other descriptors including physical anomalies, details about a slave’s temperament or a slave’s special skills or talents. These descriptions also shed light on the daily lives and experiences of slaves in Canada, what they suffered and survived. For instance, in 1773, Jacob Hurd of Halifax offered a five-pound reward for the apprehension of a fugitive slave, a Negro man named Cromwell. According to Riddell, Hurd described him as a “‘short thick set strong fellow’ clearly pock marked ‘especially on the nose’ and wearing a green cloth jacket and a cocked hat.”53 Hurd’s description not only conveyed the strength and power of the black man’s body, but also recalled a past illness, the smallpox that Cromwell must have survived although it had scarred his face. Besides enlightening us about the value of slaves in these Canadian sites, details on skills also help to debunk the retroactive lie that slaves were uneducated and helpless, needing slavery as a “civilizing mission.” Canadian ads frequently described the race of the slave, a facet of identification that was extremely important given that blacks and Natives (panis/ panise) were enslaved. Whereas the Native slaves seem to be given no other racial indicator but were commonly listed merely as panis (male) or panise (female), black slaves were regularly subdivided yet further through descriptions of their complexion and specific racial heritage/mixture. Such descriptions normally appeared as terms like mulatto or quadroon and indicate that Euro-Canadians were well versed in this colonial language of race and well aware of the interracial status of many slaves and the “miscegenating sex” that had created this population. A case in point was the sale in Halifax by Charles Proctor of a “Mulatta girl” to Mary Wood of Annapolis.54 As regards black female slaves, these texts also reveal other disturbing information about the standard treatment of enslaved girls in Canada. First, enslaved black girls were regularly sold separate and apart from their parents or any older relatives. In two such cases in 1802, a three-year-old boy named Simon and a five-year-old girl named Catherine, both named as mulatto, were sold in Prince Edward Island.55 Second, there is evidence that enslaved black girls experienced an accelerated “childhood,” being considered women in their mid to late teens, whereas comparably aged black male slaves were still listed as boys. Of

56

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

course these two issues were related because it was in part the forced separation of slave girls from their mothers that would have accelerated their development into womanhood, if not biologically, then at least socially. 56 Riddell documented a thirty-five-year-old Negro woman who was said, by her seller, to be skilled at “needle-work of all sorts and in the best manner; also washing, ironing, cooking, and every other thing that can be expected from such a slave.”57 With skills like these, many enslaved black girls in their teen years would have been running the households of their white owners, solely or with the help of other slaves. Louison and Isabella were two black slave girls who were very likely in just such a position and each was sold alone. Louison was described as “a negro woman” of about seventeen years and Isabella or Bell as a “mulatto slave” of about fifteen years.58 Both were sold to male buyers. Louison to a captain in the navy in the Montreal garrison on 6 June 1749 and Isabella to the lieutenant governor of Québec, Hectore-Théophile Cramahé on 14 November 1778.59 Isabella’s case also highlights the normality of upheaval in a slave girl’s life. In the course of several years, she was sold at least four times.60 The prospect of having four different male owners was extraordinarily destabilizing for any slave in terms of relocation, separation from loved ones and familiar environment, climate, food sources, etc., and created potentially dramatic changes in lifestyle.61 But it was especially dangerous for female slaves for whom sexual exploitation and abuse was a daily reality. That danger would have been heightened for the girl of eleven who was advertised for sale along with a boy of the same age by public auction at Halifax on 3 November 1760. The blasé nature of Negro slavery in Canada was expressed in the fact that the two were listed for sale along with “a puncheon of choice cherry brandy with sundry other articles,” merely two commodities amongst others; much the same as the two negro girls discussed earlier who were sold with puncheons of rum and sugar.62 As already mentioned briefly, black slave girls seemed to be codified differently than their black male counterparts of the same age, being constituted as women in their teens when many males of the same ages were being identified as boys. In three such cases of the sale of black males in Lower Canada, a fi fteen-year-old Negro named Kitts, a sixteen-year-old Negro named Tanno and a sixteen-year-old mulatto named Pierre, were all described as boys, not men.63 But the naming practice also existed in other parts of the country. On 27 March 1775, the Nova Scotia Gazette and Weekly Chronicle advertised the sale of a “negro boy about 16 year old.”64 In contrast, a black female slave like Louison, discussed earlier, was described as a woman although just seventeen years old. The issue of childhood and naming is also, of course, racialized because the practice of whites calling grown black men boys was institutionalized through slavery as a form of public humiliation and psychic castration. To call a black man, slave or free, boy was to attempt to deny him his manhood and to create a category or cult of “true manhood” solely around the

Racing Childhood

57

bodies of white men. To disenfranchise adult black males in this way obviously served a strategic purpose in terms of white control and power over black male labour and action. It was also a means to psychologically strip black males of their role as protectors (fathers, uncles, brothers, etc.) of black females, by “breaking” them. Within this context, whites were motivated to infantilize male slaves at the same time as they accelerated the maturation of their female ones. The frequent international movement of slaves into Lower Canada and other parts of the country also indexes the extraordinary diversity of black Canadian slave populations.65 Obviously, then, in our discussion of enslaved black girls in Canada (and of enslaved blacks in general) we are dealing with African, African-Canadian, African-American, African-Caribbean and possibly even other (African-South/Central-American, etc.) slaves. And indeed this heterogeneity within blackness may actually be one key mark of the distinctiveness of black slaves and the practice of Trans Atlantic Slavery in Canada when compared to other locations of the Black Diaspora.66 As such, and given the dominant trade in black slaves between the islands of the Caribbean and Canada’s internationally networked port settlements like Halifax and Montreal, I would like to propose that it would be both a worthy historical and theoretical endeavour to conceptualize a second Middle Passage between the shores of the Caribbean (and other parts of the Black Diaspora) and Canada; secondary only in historical context and no less tumultuous a journey across perilous waters, only this time between two “New World” ports.67

BLACK GIRLS IN CANADIAN ART As Lalonde, Jones and Stroink have argued regarding black Canadians in the twenty-fi rst century: Blacks in Canada still deal with considerable discrimination. They continue to have higher rates of unemployment and lower average salaries than do other Canadian immigrants. Black Canadians are also subjected to racial profiling by the police, and continue to be targeted for deportation at a higher rate than other groups.68 The trio studied a heterogeneous group of black parents (African, AfricanCanadian, Caribbean, etc.) to understand their racial socialization strategies for their black children; in other words, how black parents prepare their black children to deal with and live through the daily nature of racial abuse, intolerance and assault and still manage to stay “sane.” Their study originated from their concern that black Canadian parents faced additional “child rearing challenges” based on how their daily lives and experiences were structured by race and racism.69 My rhetorical question is this, if this

58

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

study was still painfully relevant in 2008, how much more so would it have been throughout the time of slavery and even into the twentieth century? The legacy of vulnerability of black children to racialized poverty and abuse is evident in the works of Canadian painters Prudence Heward and Louis Muhlstock, both based at Montreal. Although Heward’s Clytie (1938) shows a little black girl in her “Sunday best,” her frozen pose and inscrutable expression seem at odds with twentieth-century ideals of childhood. Clytie stands erect in her pretty pink dress with blue bow tied above her waist, her hair neatly coiled and held in place by a pink accessory. Her white-gloved hands, white stockings and clean white shoes also signal that she is “dressed up” for a special occasion. Behind her a high stone wall only partially conceals a large pinkish house in the distance, as plants peak out from the edges of the painting and purple flowers frame her left shoulder. But the where, why and for whom of this portrait haunts its deliberate prettiness. Precisely who is Clytie, why is she alone in this street and for whom does she pose? Prudence Heward’s own identity as a white female artist provides one layer of initial viewership that allows us to recall the actual act of her creating the portrait. Clytie was likely a friend of the Heward family cook and therefore, racial and age power imbalances were both at play in the painting of the work.70 Meanwhile, the pensive and sorrowful expression of the black girl in Muhlstock’s Evelyn Pleasant, St. Famille Street (1937) marks a convergence of his interest in black subjects, poverty and social oppression. The young Evelyn stands alone; peering through the dirty window of what we may assume is her home. The interior behind her is impenetrable, an ominous darkness enveloping her like a heavy gloom that we are not allowed to penetrate. The painting then, does not allow us to enter Evelyn’s world, which, unlike that of the representations of her white contemporaries, does not appear too childlike. The smudge to her right on the window pane has taken on the distinctive outline of her four small fi ngers and thumb; she has been pressing her hand against the window, evocative of her bid to escape or at least to see beyond her gloomy room. Canadian Dorothy Stevens’s painting Amy (c. 1930; Figure 2.3) represents a little black girl who is as stoic and melancholy as the aforementioned pair. Pictured in a circumscribed interior space, her hold on the white doll that she cradles in her lap is disturbing on at least two levels: fi rstly, it calls up the infamous American social science studies of black children and black and white dolls that revealed the process of play as racial socialization and the early stages at which black children were brainwashed into racial self-loathing and DuBoisian double consciousness. And secondly, it foreshadowed this girl’s likely later station in life as yet another caregiver to white children.71 The representation of black women mothering white children helped to produce a hierarchy of family, parental duty, childhood and care in which the black family and black children were forever at the bottom; the preciousness of the white child enabled the abuse and neglect of

Racing Childhood 59

Figure 2.3 Dorothy Stevens, Amy, c. 1930. Oil on canvas, 86.8 x 76.4 cm. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Canada. Photo copyright National Gallery of Canada.

the black. This configuration was also emasculating for black male slaves who were effectively barred access to the patriarchal authority and legitimacy that would have enabled them to protect and provide for their loved ones, wives and children.72 As with Clytie earlier and perhaps even more so, Amy has been posed. The awkwardness of the chair, turned to the child’s right, and the child’s body in that chair (also facing her right as her head is turned back to her left, towards the viewer/artist) convey a staged look. Perhaps unconsciously, then, all three of these white Canadian artists have produced paintings in

60

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

which black girls are decidedly unchildlike in demeanour. It is odd that none of the three girls, even Amy with her doll in hand, is actually in the act of play. Rather, each portrait in its own way is melancholy, again perhaps unconsciously capturing the malaise of childhood for black girls in the fi rst half of the twentieth century.

CONCLUSION As I have discussed in detail here, black girls were particularly vulnerable to all manner of abuse and exploitation throughout Trans Atlantic Slavery and well beyond it. As slave children, they were disadvantaged from the womb. Even when the slaves were little girls, whites sought through force and manipulation to accelerate their progress into adulthood in order to both shape and exploit their sexuality and reproductive capacity. This prolific sexual exploitation of black girls and women of course did not die out with abolition, but was maintained through institutional racism and patriarchal social obstacles that continue, even today, to align black femaleness with a lower class status. For example, as black women transitioned historically from the fields into domestic and other blue-collar labour, the legal sexual exploitation of the plantation was replaced by their illegal exploitation within the white home or workplace; but it was nevertheless invisibilized behind the white picket fences of the suburbs and the hard factory walls of cities. Due to the prolific nature of black female exploitation and the cross-generational trauma of slavery, we must interrogate not only the artworks and who and what they represent, but pose questions about how such representations of black girls came into being. To ask how is to be attentive to the process of cultural production and the extreme differential in power between white adult artists and their young black and vulnerable female sitters/subjects. The history of the representation of black children and girls in western art is in many ways a parallel trajectory to that of black adults and women. However, in other ways, the roles and function of the black girl have prophesied the racialized and gendered identifications and status of the black female adult subject. Whereas there are examples of black children experiencing the modern ideals of a protected, beloved western childhood, many artworks represent the exact opposite, that is, the social, cultural and psychic displacement of black girls as “other” to the paradigmatic ideal of white girls. The colonial discourses that enabled Tran Atlantic Slavery to flourish for four hundred years are crucial to an understanding of the disparate experiences and representations of childhood that are always racialized. I hope that I have demonstrated that our attention to race in the field of Childhood Studies should not be an afterthought, but a primary and urgent consideration.

Part II

Slavery and Portraiture Agency, Resistance and Art as Colonial Discourse

3

Slavery, Portraiture and the Colonial Limits of Canadian Art History

Portrait of a Negro Slave (1786; Figure 1.1), painted by François Malépart de Beaucourt, is a rare, early oil painting of a black female slave. Its significance is multifold: (a) it represents an historic individual as opposed to an idealized type; (b) it is possibly the only preserved and almost undoubtedly the most thorough and professionally rendered representation of a black slave in Canada at this historical juncture; (c) it offers an unparalleled opportunity to explore the specific colonial context of slavery in eighteenthcentury North America (New France); and (d) it confi rms the visibility and legibility of the racialized body as the means of identifying a slave. The traditional disciplinarity of Art History has actively denied the relevance of issues of race and racial identity, and as such has foreclosed crucial considerations about the nature, context and function of art. Informed by a postcolonial feminist methodology, this chapter will discuss Portrait of a Negro Slave (1786) and other western (European and American) representations of black female slaves as sites where racial and sexual identification were produced and where the black slave body as commodity was confi rmed and deployed.

INTRODUCTION: THE DEMOCRATIZATION OF PORTRAITURE Writing in 1796, the English Earl of Fife remarked of portraiture: before this century, very few people presented themselves to a painter, except those who were of great families, or remarkable for their actions in service to the country, or some other extraordinary circumstance . . . as lately . . . every body [sic] almost who can afford twenty pounds, has the portraits of himself, wife and children painted.1 (italics mine) The earl’s analysis, tinged with elitism and regret, is useful in its revelation of the remarkable shifts in the production of portraiture in late eighteenth-century England. In noting the usual subjects of portraiture as people of great families or considerable action, Fife knowledgably conveyed

64

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

the historical function of portraiture as an aristocratic and bourgeois cultural tool of social distinction, which itself was largely inaccessible to the masses through the function of its cost. His concern locates an anxiety over the democratization of the genre that points up the dismantling of its traditionally exclusive class and racial affiliations. The everybody whom Fife lamented were the lower classes, previously barred from such cultural participation and aspiration, who now threatened to pollute the previously exclusive art form with their supposedly unworthy subjects. Fife’s distress locates a particular social anxiety over the reordering of a prestigious visual practice that had for centuries relied upon the hierarchization of human subjects through class and racial identifications. Up until the latter part of the eighteenth century, the practice of portraiture (especially that of oil painting) in England and across Europe had remained the secure cultural domain of the considerably wealthy, the genealogically privileged, the noteworthy or the notorious. In all cases, however, the portrait subjects or the commissioning body needed the economic resources to be able to contract the portraitist. Whereas those who patronized portraitists in England were generally of the aristocratic and bourgeois classes, in Canada, still a young settler colony, the clientele of what few portraitists existed in the period were dominantly of the bourgeois mercantile classes, often French, English, Scottish or otherwise European by birth, whose cultural traditions and aspirations were very much tied to the ideals of their homelands. England is a particularly relevant and rich resource for a study in the (im)possibilities of race and class identity in eighteenth-century Canadian portraiture for several reasons. Firstly, Canada’s earliest immigrants were dominantly Europeans of French and English origins, fulfilling the colonial government’s mandate for the racial ideal of desirable populations. As Eva Mackey has described, Canada’s nation-building project depended upon the management of diverse populations and specifically the regulation of racial identity within a contest of competing desires that often posed contradictory claims of tolerance, equality and opportunity.2 Secondly, and culturally speaking, Canadian art practices of this period were directly borrowed from established European models, mainly English and French. The extent of this cultural debt extended for decades into the nineteenth century when Canadian art was dominated by European immigrants or by Canadianborn white artists who nevertheless knew training in London and Paris to be essential to their education and professional futures. Accordingly, not only did Canadian portraitists become familiarized with the discursive structure of eighteenth-century English portraiture through tradition, but also often through direct contact and engagement. And lastly, the eighteenth-century English democratization of portraiture, which was unequivocally a key aspect of its decided dominance over other more traditionally revered genres of history and landscape painting, was a cultural shift that could not have failed to impact the developing art practices in Canada.3

The Colonial Limits of Canadian Art History 65 CANONICAL EXCLUSIONS: CANADIAN ART HISTORY, PORTRAITURE AND RACE Little scholarly attention has been paid to the historical practice of portraiture in Canadian art and even less to a social consideration of the obvious implications of race and class identity within such a traditionally exclusive and inaccessible art form. The absence of scholarship is in part due to a general slowness of an application of the ideologies and strategies of New Art History to historical Canadian subjects. But it is also clearly an outcome of the Eurocentric disciplinarity of Art History itself. Art historical discourse has traditionally suppressed race as a valid topic of scholarly inquiry through the exclusionary deployment of methodologies that privileged biographical, connoisseurship and formalistic inquiries. These socially detached and/or culturally exclusive, predominantly aesthetic histories supported the (re)constitution of materially and ideologically exclusive canons and successions of white male masters. This colonial bias has impacted every aspect of the discipline, from what cultural objects are deemed significant enough to be researched or written about, the accessibility or preservation of a cultural object (which is directly connected to its canonical value and acquisition by an institutional collection), the access to documentation to facilitate research (the archives and libraries are not neutral), how one frames one’s research, which questions are validated and therefore posed in the face of an art object and last but surely not least, the very identities—the sex, race, etc.—of the art historians themselves. A poignant example of the art historical devaluation and suppression of issues of race exists in the Canadian historiography of a celebrated eighteenth-century portrait painting of a black female slave. Within the annals of Canadian Art History, François Malépart de Beaucourt’s Portrait of a Negro Slave (1786), a rare visual document of a slave in early New France, has traditionally been discussed almost entirely in terms of its stylistic and tonal properties, the location represented in the portrait and the status and oeuvre of the painter. For example, Dennis Reid, author of the canonical text A Concise History of Canadian Painting (1988), described it as an object that François Malépart de Beaucourt painted possibly “while sojourning in Guadeloupe.”4 But I would argue that the speculation on a tropical location, although legitimately triggered by the lush mountainous landscape, the tropical fruit still life and the quality of light captured in the landscape vignette beyond the black woman’s bare right shoulder, also serves to expel Trans Atlantic Slavery and the presence of black slaves from Canadian territory and narratives. 5 Disavowing not only Canadian slavery, but Trans Atlantic Slavery generally, Major-Frégeau argued that the black female sitter could be a perfectly free young West Indian.6 And through this expulsion, slavery can be always elsewhere. As Lord has astutely argued:

66

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art Why is this foreign setting necessary? Along with the imported fruit and the colourful costume, it helps to make the subject exotic, unfamiliar, yet appealing. To imperialists and to their comprador allies . . . the working people of the colonies always appear as exotic, and it is one of the artist’s services to them to picture colonial people in this way.7

The extraordinary rarity of fully fi nished oil portraits of black slaves in western art generally can hardly be overstated. As such, a critical analysis of this painting holds the tremendous potential to shed light on the experiences of black female slaves in Canada, but more generally on the conditions and practices of slavery in New France. The prolific disavowal of the racial implications of this unique portrait has occurred despite the artist’s obvious desire to foreground the slave’s sexual and reproductive utility through the exposed breast over the plate of tropical fruit, despite the known historical documents that record the slave as the legal property of the artist and despite the circulating title of the work that indexes both the significance of the race (Negro) and the subordinate legal status of the sitter (slave) and even despite the obvious opportunities to address the circumstances of production, the function and circulation of a unique portrait whose commission was likely (and unusually) not instigated by its sitter herself (for how many slaves had the agency or the wealth to commission portraits?). Instead, François Malépart de Beaucourt has been regularly and problematically lauded as Canada’s fi rst native artist and the inherently coercive nature of his (potential) sexual relationship with this female slave diffused through the deployment of the term “mistress” to describe what would have been a polarized, “miscegenating,” colonial “union.”8 Whereas Morisset used the term mistress, Webster made similar implications about the sexual intimacy of Malépart de Beaucourt and his black female sitter when he described her as his slave and servant “and perhaps more.”9 This chapter seeks a postcolonial feminist intervention into the Eurocentric art historiography of this portrait. The reassessment of this portrait is informed by the practice and function of portraiture in European traditions, the social and historical relevance of its position within Canadian art, the history of slavery and the specificity of black female enslavement within Trans Atlantic Slavery generally and colonial New France (Quebec) in particular. Positioned within the predominant patriarchal ideologies of sexual difference, the femaleness of this black slave must be acknowledged as the source of a particularly prolific and incessant vulnerability to sexual and physical violence, abuse and exploitation. Most significantly, this examination of the representation of the female slave subject considers the western tradition of portraiture as a colonial site of visual commodification that enacted the transformation of the black body into the slave body—a shift from human to property and commodity.

The Colonial Limits of Canadian Art History 67 SLAVERY IN NEW FRANCE Despite the fact that slavery was an inherent part of the earliest colonizing process in Canada, scholars have often erased its memory altogether, participating in the national myth of racial tolerance, or performed strategic sanitizations, wherein Canadian slavery is somehow defined as less oppressive than its American and Caribbean counterparts.10 In the early sixteenth century the Portuguese initially targeted the Native populations for slave labour and by the beginning of the seventeenth the French followed suit. Olivier Le Jeune, as he was renamed, was the fi rst documented black slave in the part of New France that would come to be known as the province of Quebec.11 But more importantly, his passage directly from Africa and his sale in New France locates the institution of slavery as an accepted part of the reality of the new settlement.12 However, as the colony’s role shifted from extraction to settlement in the early eighteenth century, successive colonial administrators petitioned the French crown for the right to import slaves.13 It was not until control of New France shifted from company (Compagnie des Cent-Associés) to royal control in 1663 that slavery was seen as a means of increasing manpower within an aggressive new strategy of colonybuilding. With the simultaneous exploitation of trade, mining, fisheries and agriculture, there was more labour than labourers and in 1688 the colonial administrator Jean-Baptiste de Lagny (Sieur des Bringandières) petitioned the governor, Jacques-Réné de Brisay (Marquis de Denonville), to appeal to France for slaves. The petition explicitly cited the extraordinary expense of labour in the colony as a hindrance to enterprise that could be remedied through slave labour. The already established trade routes between New France and the French holdings in the Caribbean were cited as evidence of the feasibility of transportation. Although the need for large numbers of slaves was again disrupted by the dramatic reversal in France’s designation of colonies as mere service posts for the “mother land,” by the early eighteenth century, slavery continued to grow slowly to service the demand for domestics and field-hands of the wealthier classes.14 The legal regulation of slavery that emerged in this period demonstrated the need to formally distinguish free from enslaved, which was a consequence of the growth of the slave population.15 Although slavery in New France appears to have been at least officially regulated under a series of French laws entitled Le Code Noir, the extent to which the code was actually adhered to is unclear.16 Initially instituted in March 1685 to police the traffic in slaves between French African and Caribbean holdings, it became applicable to Louisiana and to an undetermined extent to New France in March 1724.17 The code established laws that regulated the lives and bodies of slaves. Many of the allowances for punishments were acts that scarred, marked or otherwise mutilated slave’s bodies, creating highly visible corporeal signs of possession.18 Under Le Code Noir, slaves were meubles,

68

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

movable personal property, holding no legal autonomy and being governed by laws of personal property. Slaves could not sue or be sued but could be criminally prosecuted. Their testimony in court was only used to aid the judge in the comprehension of other testimony. In New France, this chattel status was secured through the process of sale when slaves were publically sold alongside livestock and other commodities as discussed in Chapter 2 of this volume. Whereas Winks cites the largest sale as five slaves in 1743, the conditions of the purchase of the female slave who Malépart de Beaucourt painted were likely much different because she was most probably purchased in the French Caribbean where many more slaves were needed to maintain the plantation economy. As another part of the psychological and social transformation of Africans into French property, the code made provisions for the necessary Catholicization of slaves who were prohibited from labour on the Sabbath and holy days.19 But the code also policed mainly female slave sexuality, discouraging cross-racial and cross-class reproduction by regulating relations between slave women and free men. 20 My interpretation of the code’s ability to discourage “miscegenation” between black women and white men hinges on the fact that most free men accessible to black female slaves would most likely, in French colonies, have been white. Specifically, if a free man had children with a slave, both he and the owner were each fi ned two thousand pounds of sugar. If the free man and master were one in the same, the children born of the union were to be confiscated and doomed to perpetual slavery. The absence of any mention of race in the code seems to imply the possibility of same or interracial relations and to prioritize social status or class over race in these interactions. The only way such a cross-status relationship could go unpunished was for the free man to marry the slave, an act that required the permission of the Church. If permitted, both the slave and her children would become free. Because this clause effectively allowed for the manumission of slaves, it is not unreasonable to assume that slave owners may have taken steps to block such unions and prohibit the contact that led to them. For the free man, who was not necessarily a rich man, the sugar fi ne may have been enough of a deterrent to make him wary of contact with female slaves. And whereas sugar was a suitable fi ne for a plantation economy, it is unclear what substitute, if any, might have been made in the context of the more temperate climates of parts of New France. However, as I have discussed in Chapter 2 of this volume, the commonality in Canada of black slaves arriving as parts of larger Caribbean cargoes of molasses, sugar and rum makes these tropical plantation crops look rather ubiquitous, even in this temperate climate, and opens the possibility that a direct application of the code’s penalties was enforced. Officially at least, the only way that a slave master’s holdings could be legally increased under the code was through the purchase of new slaves or the reproduction of two slaves, whose children became the property of

The Colonial Limits of Canadian Art History 69 the woman’s master. In cases of children born of unions between free and slave, the child’s status followed that of the mother. It is interesting to note, however, that the incidents of interracial marriage between French settlers and their slaves in New France fracture across race and sex lines. Marcel Trudel has noted that whereas the majority of such unions were between white men and panise, 21 when it came to black slaves, the couples were more frequently white women and black men. 22 However, as Winks has noted, the majority of children born to slaves were born outside of marriage and I would speculate further that this would have applied whether the child was of two black parents or interracial. The code also rewarded masters with the ownership of their female slave’s children if another slave fathered them. Although the code seemed to discourage miscegenation and interracial marriage, the prolific normalization of miscegenation and its evidence (interracial children) within colonial societies of this period generally raises questions about its effectiveness and enforcement. Whereas the code was sometimes antagonistic to the accumulation of wealth by the slave holders through breeding, it was most certainly concerned with the exploitation of female slave fertility. Although Elgersman, citing Winks, has argued that the code allowed black female slaves to use marriage to European males as a means of manumission, her conclusion may be based upon a misreading of the code. Whereas the original code as outlined by Riddell claims that female slaves could be manumitted if married to a free man, the code did not specify the race. Further, the new code issued in March 1724 held that whites of either sex were not to intermarry with blacks and that priests were not to marry them. Winks clearly concurs with the illegality of intermarriage under the new code. Finally, an additional provision of the new code punished white masters for fathering a child with their female slaves through the loss of both slave and child. Manumission became possible for the female slave and the interracial child only if she was married to a freeborn or freed black male. This may have been rare, however, because it meant that the black man would have been willing to overlook the parentage of the child. What is missing from the code is a concern for the purely sexual exploitation of black women; all of the safeguards problematically hinged solely upon pregnancy. Under the code, it would appear that to impregnate a black female slave was often sanctionable, whereas to rape, sexually assault or even have consensual sex with one was not. The pioneering research of Marcel Trudel has determined that by 1759, 3,604 slaves of both Native (panis) and black origin lived in New France, with 52.3 per cent residing in or near Montreal. 23 Of the almost 4,000 slaves, 1,132 were classified as Negroes. 24 The merchant class owned more than a quarter (1,068), however, the gentry, governors, notaries, doctors, military and clergy also held slaves. 25 Differences between the population, labour and value of the colony’s panis and the black slaves becomes important to a knowledgeable reading of the significance of the black female

70

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

subject in Portrait of a Negro Slave (1786). Whereas Wink’s observation that the French preferred panis and the English, particularly after the British conquest of the colony in 1760, preferred blacks suggests a connection between the desirability of slaves and the ethnicity of their owner, 26 Maureen G. Elgersman has suggested that the split was more economically driven. Elgersman argues, “Blacks constituted the slave minority, and, as ‘object de luxe,’ they served as symbols of wealth more than generators of wealth or stabilizers of wealth as were the Panis.”27 The wealthy colonists’ preference for black slaves seems to be supported in the price disparities between the two groups. Whereas black slaves could cost as much as 900 livres, the price ceiling for panis was 400. 28 Blacks and panis also seemed to have been distinguished by labour. Whereas slaves were generally sought after for agriculture, mining and fi nishing, most black slaves in New France appear to have served primarily as domestics. 29 Of the almost four thousand slaves, reportedly 22.8 per cent performed field labour, only 192 of whom were Negroes. This may partially account for differences in life expectancy between the panis at 17.7 years and blacks at 25.2.30 Yet another important distinction is the male to female ratio of slaves within the black population. Primary records indicate a likely imbalance of considerably more black men than women.31 This imbalance, combined with the already existing equation of the black slave with luxury, likely made black female slaves particularly fashionable and noteworthy possessions.

MARIE-THÉRÈSE-ZÉMIRE? Whereas the artist François Malépart de Beaucourt (son of a French soldier and amateur painter) was a part of the early colony’s bourgeois class, the black woman he portrayed was a part of its slave class.32 Detailed records compiled by Trudel reveal the likely sitter as Marie-Thérèse-Zémire, one of two slaves documented as the property of the artist’s wife, Benoite Gaétant.33 Marie may have been purchased by the couple in Guadeloupe or another Caribbean colony between their time in Europe (from at least 1773 to 1784)34 and their sojourn in Philadelphia in 1792.35 In any event, François’s access to his model was likely through his wife and the portrait seems to have been painted outside of Canada because it dates from 1786 and an announcement in the Montreal Gazette advertising François’s artistic services did not appear until June 1792.36 Without a doubt, Portrait of a Negro Slave (1786) is the most reproduced work by Malépart de Beaucourt and also his most revered. As noted earlier, the artist’s special place in the Canadian art canon is due in the most part to his problematic reputation as the fi rst native-born painter of European descent to achieve significant professional status. However, the art historical record of his most famous portrait has done much to obfuscate

The Colonial Limits of Canadian Art History 71 the centrality of slavery and to erase the particular social relevance of the unique sitter. By focusing upon issues of style, location and influence under the authority of the historically dominant methodologies of biography, formalism and connoisseurship, art historical writings have effectively ignored the portrait’s obvious participation in the contemporaneous colonial discourses of racial identity and slavery.37 It can hardly be overstated that portraits of slaves, servants or generally lower-class sitters were a decided rarity within eighteenth-century western painting. Because portraiture functioned dominantly as a genre through which patrons commissioned representations of their likeness or that of family members or institutional colleagues as commemorations and declarations of wealth, privilege and status, it was also the almost exclusive domain of aristocratic and the bourgeois classes who alone could afford them. In the context of early Québec art, Barry Lord has noted: The people who actually did the productive work in Québec were obviously not in a position to pay the rates of $100 to $200 . . . Scratching out a living as habitants, or cutting trees and hauling lumber to Britishowned ships for transport to factories in England, they were lucky if they could meet the basic cost of living at the best of times.38 Rare portraits of servants were also usually commissioned and paid for by the masters or mistresses who used the portraits as a further indication of their own status and the hanging of such portraits, often in less grand areas of the family estates and houses, echoed the diminished significance of the sitter.39 A servant, and more so a slave, would not have been paid like any professional artist’s model and would have had no true agency in the commission process with the artist and, particularly, in rare cases like Malépart de Beaucourt’s, when artist and patron were one. The origins of Malépart de Beaucourt’s portrait of Marie likely correspond to the same tradition because, as a slave, she was most likely without the economic means and cultural knowledge to commission such a work and would have had no private residence of her own in which to install it. The lack of autonomy in her case makes the exposure of her breast even more problematic. Barry Lord concurs with this conclusion, adding that the visual exploitation of the female slave in this portrait was likely intended as an advertisement of the artist’s European-honed talents for prospective Canadian clients. And, furthermore, the Malépart de Beaucourts’ possession of such fashionable and exotic help would have symbolized their own class status, which would have established the rightness of the suitably bourgeois prices for paying sitters. According to Lord: De Beaucourt’s slave is certainly exploited to the full in his picture of her . . . We can picture a patron of de Beaucourt, such as the card-playing comprador Trottier dit Desriviéres, ogling the young girl’s body as he

72

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art waited to arrange for his own portrait. The ageing seigneur might reflect that he was evidently dealing with an artist who could afford such fashionable and attractive help.40

Lord’s point about the function of Portrait of a Negro Slave (1786) as a colonial calling card is very significant for the ways in which it points up vast discrepancies in artistic intention and audience consumption. As for the female Trottier dit Desriviéres, I will discuss her equally bourgeois portrait—the twin of her husband’s card-playing image—next. The examination of this other of Malépart de Beaucourt’s portraits of the same period sheds light on the oddity of his rendering of MarieThérèse-Zémire. Madame Eustache-Ignace Trottier dit Desrivières, née Marguerite Malhiot (1793; Figure 3.1) represents the decidedly upper-class white female sitter, elegantly posed in rather sumptuous-looking surroundings. Seated as if welcoming the viewer into her personal salon, her graceful white hands hold a delicate gold box and an elaborate tea-set is visible just beyond her right elbow. The staging of the scene implies that she is welcoming us for tea and conversation, a decidedly upper-class female activity, surely the domain of ladies who had the luxury of leisure time. The most striking break from his earlier work is the distinction in the stark difference in the handling of the dress between the two portraits. Or as Lord has put it, Malépart de Beaucourt “has also bared her breast, as he wouldn’t have done with a white woman.”41 Whereas Marie-Thérèse-Zémire’s portrait is characterized by the strategic exposure of flesh, the juxtaposition of her bared breast with the tray of “exotic” fruits, in dramatic contrast the portrait of Marguerite is characterized by the absence of fl esh. The stiff-looking ruffled blue dress, white fringed bonnet, accompanying white shawl, wedding ring and dangling locket complete with portrait miniature all announce her social station as a wealthy woman of leisure, not to mention her marital status as the wife of a prominent and wealthy citizen. Unlike Marie-Thérèse-Zémire, the white woman is indeed the one for whom this portrait has been made and as such the portrait remembers her cultural capital and her claim to legitimate viewership as much as any supposed likeness. The only flesh visible in this later work is the exposed face, the carefully placed hands and the tiny triangle of white skin visible below the sitter’s chin. The innocuous and concealing nature of the later work makes the staged and spectacular exposure of skin in the earlier even more revealing—pun intended. What this juxtaposition of the two portraits points up is the extent to which the later work participates in the idealization and indeed protection of white female identity, the very creation of the cult of white womanhood that needed an underbelly, an antithesis, an “other” through which to sustain its dominance. By the eighteenth century, black slaves and non-white servants from Europe’s colonial territories regularly appeared in upper-class family

The Colonial Limits of Canadian Art History 73

Figure 3.1 François Malépart de Beaucourt, Madame Eustache-Ignace Trottier dit Desrivières, née Marguerite Malhiot, 1793. Oil on canvas, 79.5 x 63.5 cm. Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Québec, Canada. Accession no.: 56.298. Photo: Patrick Altman.

portraits.42 But their racial, class and social difference was clearly conveyed through their actions and attitudes and the compositional strategies that placed them on a lower visual register than the ones they served. Slaves and servants often assumed postures of genuflection in the act of servicing their masters and mistresses desires. Visually they acted as appendages or trophies whose exoticism (to white viewers), often measured in their racial

74

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

difference and costume, connected their owners to the colonial exploitation of the “New World” that the servant/slave bodies recalled. Different from what is known in art historical discourse as genre painting, portraits were visual documentation of a precise, historically specific individual as opposed to an idealized or allegorical representation of a generic person. This distinction is critical because for the upper classes the point of portraiture was to capture a flattering likeness that would assume a familial and possibly social value precisely due to the intended audience’s knowledge of the sitters and their exploits. Portraits relied upon recognition and legibility. The paradox of portraits of supposedly lesser subjects is that, unlike their upper-class counterparts, the individuality and historical evidence of the subject represented by a name was often unrecorded in the title. In Canadian portraits and figure painting, like western art generally, black subjects were often refused the specificity of the individual’s name within the titles. Long after François Malépart de Beaucourt painted the portrait of his wife’s black female slave, race would continue to dominate the titles and play significant roles in the colonial racial discourses of other white-produced paintings of black female subjects like: Dorothy Stevens’s Coloured Nude (1933; Figure 6.1) and High Yellow (n.d.); Prudence Heward’s Dark Girl (1935; Figure 1.2); Lawren Harris’s Negress (1937); and John Lyman’s Negress (1945), discussed in Chapter 1 of this volume.

NEW QUESTIONS OR WHAT POSTCOLONIAL/ BLACK FEMINISM CAN DO FOR ART HISTORY The impact of a postcolonial/black feminist approach extends beyond questions of representation to a consideration of the contexts of production and the implications for cultural dissemination and consumption. Did Marie have any agency or choice in posing for this portrait? And if so, how much and where if anywhere are its signs visible? Did François intend for his slave portrait to have a specific audience and role in his professionalization? Where was it hung and for whose gaze was it available? What was the nature of the relationship between Marie and François and how specifically did it impact the negotiation over the production of the portrait? What was Benoite Gaétant’s opinion of her husband’s portrait of her own black female slave? Did Marie have access to her likeness? In what capacity and in the context of her service of her owners and their social circle was she forced to negotiate the gap between her sexualized image, likely accessible to many of them, and her own experience of her identity? New questions have become possible, among them questions about the identity and subjectivity of the sitter and her role in the production of the portrait; questions that no longer hinge exclusively upon issues of formalism, biography or connoisseurship.

The Colonial Limits of Canadian Art History 75 Portraits of slaves and servants are rare within the annals of western art and even more so in historical Canadian art. The tension that occurs in such portraits is that between the visual specificity of a particularized human subject and the erasure of that specificity that occurred with the traditional excision or suppression of the sitter’s name. Likewise, the central paradox of this painting is that a slave, owned by the portraitist, was refused her individual identity within the title.43 Although this erasure is indicative of the genre itself and locates the diminished class and racial status of the sitter, the title of this portrait is distinct for its insistence upon the race (Negro) and status (slave) of the sitter. Although property under Code Noir, the historical evidence of slavery in New France indicates that Marie was particularly valuable property that undeniably added to the status, esteem and distinction of her owners. Considering the disparities in the panis to black and male to female ratios of slaves, as a black woman Marie would have been hyper-visible in eighteenth-century New France. The nexus of her race and sex made her the most rare and potentially fashionable type of slave in the colony, properties that added to her value as a luxury object— properties that detracted from her value as a human being. A reading of this black female sitter—Marie-Thérèse-Zémire—that is attentive to her blackness and femaleness and able to assess her representation within the dominantly white and Eurocentric cultural practice of eighteenth-century western portraiture has been possible through a postcolonial feminist methodology that has accommodated the simultaneous analysis of race/colour and sex/gender. Class, too, is a critical factor that cannot be overlooked within the historical analysis of western portraiture; a genre, arguably more than others, created by and through class privilege. This embedded exclusion stands as the testament to the historical colonial function of portraiture as a bastion of the rich, wealthy, elite and mainly white subjects on whose behalf the Earl of Fife lamented the “demise” of its inaccessibility. As a largely inaccessible genre, historical examples of western portraiture are not the obvious place to look for representations of black female subjects. But because portraits are by defi nition specific historical representations of real subjects, when the rare black subject has been represented, portraits are a potentially rich resource for an understanding of the identifications and subjectivities of this marginalized group. The nexus of racial, sexual and class oppression in western colonial societies has effectively removed black women from the social and political positions through which access to portraiture was a normalized cultural ritual. However, it is the very rarity of a portrait of a slave and the (in)visibility of black female sitters generally that makes this portrait so compelling and worthy of serious scholarly contemplation. The practice of Canadian Art History should at least in part be capable of addressing the sitter as a black woman, a female slave, whose blackness and femaleness did not solely predate the portrait, but instead can be seen as a part of what was produced through the process of creating it.

4

The Fruits of Resistance Reading Portrait of a Negro Slave on the Sly

INTRODUCTION: CONTESTING A COLONIAL ART HISTORIOGRAPHY François Malépart de Beaucourt’s Portrait of a Negro Slave (1786; Figure 1.1), a rare visual document of a slave in early New France, has a special place in the Canadian art canon. As the artist’s most cited and reproduced work, it is often discussed in terms of the artist’s professionalization, his travels to “exotic” locations or his potential sexual relationship with the anonymous sitter. However, within the politics of a socially engaged New Art History, solely biographical and formal analysis becomes problematic in its inability to address the critical issues of race, sex and social status in eighteenth-century New France and early Canadian portraiture. As I argued in Chapter 3 of this volume, the colonial limits of Art History and its inability to include and legitimize issues of race and colonialism have hampered the possibility of alternative readings of this portrait. In particular, postcolonial or black feminist readings of the work, ones that could accommodate queries into the formulation and deployment of racial and sexual identity as simultaneous and indeed inextricable, have been invalidated by traditional Art Histories, which have insisted upon the singular validity of formalistic, biographical and connoisseurship concerns above other social and cultural issues. This disciplinary tradition does not only restrict one’s ability to recuperate and analyze the identity and subjectivity of the black female sitter, but also that of the white male artist. Such methodologies, practiced in isolation, effectively prohibit the recognition of either sitter or artist as raced, sexed or gendered in any capacity; and subsequently interfere with an understanding of the ways in which access to culture and cultural production in the west has been largely determined by one’s identity. Instead, the producer, Malépart de Beaucourt, is just the artist, the assumption being that he is of course male and white—things, then, that need not be named, because of their obvious nature, ironically produced precisely through that repeated absence of naming. Furthermore, such methodologies have retroactively dehumanized the black female slave in their failure to address her as the central subject of the artwork, a practice that ironically is at the very heart of the traditional Art Historical treatment of the portrait genre.1

The Fruits of Resistance 77 On the other hand, when scholars have recognized the difference, here racial and sexual of this unique sitter, they have done so, incomprehensibly, almost entirely without any focused attempt at a political and social analysis of the implications of that identity. And yet, to do anything different would be to refute the dominant myth of Canadian racial tolerance and the singularity of a white Canadian past and citizenship. As such, the sitter’s blackness and femaleness, along with her obvious slave status, have become a mere background unworthy of serious contemplation, even within the heightened colonial context of production: the slave-holding settler colony of eighteenth-century New France. My reading of this portrait has sought to assert a postcolonial/black feminist methodology, capable of bringing the sitter’s and the artist’s polarized racial and sexual identities and social positions to the forefront of the analysis. It is my contention that the uniqueness of this portrait and its power to disclose information about race, sex, class and gender in New France have much to do with the social and psychic distance between sitter and artist and the rare circumstances of production. But whereas my previous writings on this artwork focused upon the portrait as a site of identity construction within the context of slavery in New France, I would here like to discuss a more easily overlooked aspect of the portrait, an element that is indeed not portrait—human—at all; the still life of the tray of fruits. I contend that these fruits were employed by Malépart de Beaucourt to signal the racialized sexualization of the black female sitter and yet also, paradoxically and likely beyond his will, knowledge and control, may be a site of an expression of agency on the part of the anonymized black female sitter. The female slave’s sexual utility was cautiously alluded to in a catalogue on Georgian Canada that concluded, “The sitter was de Beaucourt’s own slave and servant, and perhaps more.”2 The more, as mentioned in Chapter 3 of this volume, was an allusion to her relationship to François, which has most often been mischaracterized with the term mistress.3 To the extent that the term mistress implies a willing sexual and potentially romantic relationship between consenting individuals, it retroactively affords Marie an agency that, as a slave, she most certainly would not have possessed with regard to François or his white wife. Rather, black women, stereotyped as sexually ready, aggressive, licentious, animalistic and excessive, were, within colonial regimes of race, the epitome of pathological sexuality and a primary site upon which western human scientists mapped their empirical defi nitions of race-specific sexuality.4 The dichotomization of black and white women was secured through the sexual stereotyping of black women, their extreme public visibility and social accessibility. For black female slaves in New France, the question of their accessibility to white male masters and white men generally was a problem of the invisibility of cross-racial and cross-gender interaction within domestic employment. Martha J. Bailey has argued, “Whether

78

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

sexual relations between enslaved girls and masters were overtly forced or not, even seemingly consensual relations would have been abusive given the power imbalance between the parties.”5 The stereotyping of black female sexuality rendered black females particularly oppositional to the presumed virtuosity of white women of the bourgeois classes. Through a postcolonial/black feminist analysis, the fruit in this portrait can be read not as mere random stage props or a contrivance to fill space, but arguably they become carefully orchestrated and precisely chosen ingredients that open up questions about the contemporaneous western still life genre, the specific marriage between portraiture and still life, the historical understanding of black women’s sexual and reproductive exploitation and resistance and the possibility for agency on the part of the black female sitter. By recuperating the meanings of the represented fruit, both within their native soils and within the part of New France that would come to be known as Canada, and placing them within the context of contemporaneous still life and portraiture traditions, new readings of this well-worn and much-reproduced portrait emerge: ones that challenge the limitations of traditional Canadian Art Historical practice and seek to humanize and activate the subject of representation—a black woman.

THE WESTERN STILL LIFE GENRE AND COLONIALISM Pierre-Marie Deparis has argued that it was not until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe that a distinctive genre of still life began to be codified: Ce n’est que vers 1650, dans les ateliers des Pay-Bas, qu’on se met à parler de ‘Still-Leven’, c’est-à-dire ‘modèle inanimé’. Au XVIIIe siècle, en France, on emploie le terme de ‘nature reposée’, c’est-à-dire: immobile. Diderot utilise l’expression: nature inaimée.6 As Sam Segal has noted in the case of seventeenth-century Dutch still life painting, the use of fruits and flowers in various combinations or separate from each other often evoked themes of Creation, cycles of Nature and the idea of the transience of life.7 The artists’ facility in capturing the material shift of stages of growth and ripeness made still life a means through which to demonstrate their aesthetic mastery. This ability to render the very fabric of nature also implicated the social position and class status of the absent yet implied owners of the often bountiful spreads that the artist rendered. For who possessed the vases of rare and expensive flowers or the platters spilling over with exotic fruit? In whose homes were such tables adorned? Fruit still lifes, although similar to flowers in their use within the concept of Vanitas—which Segal defi nes as relating to “the transiency of earthly possessions and of man’s life on earth”8 —are different because

The Fruits of Resistance 79 they presume the possibility of oral consumption that, for the most part, flowers do not. As such, they hold the potential of activating other senses beyond vision, like taste, smell and touch, in the imaginary anticipation of eating. In this regard, too, they offered an imaginary pleasure that is also potentially more visceral in the activation of multiple bodily sensations that precede ingestion and digestion. According to Segal, Dutch fruit still life flourished after what he terms the “debacle of the tulip trade around 1649.” 9 A brief survey of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century fruit still life quickly reveals that many of the fruits represented were indigenous neither to the country of origin of the work nor to Europe generally. So-called exotic, mainly tropical fruits were often included by themselves, juxtaposed with other indigenous fruit, or with other objects or vegetation like flowers, meat, nuts, breads, seafood, insects, beverages, musical instruments, expensive materials and seashells. Artists like Van der Ast often included other foreign objects and wildlife, such as Ming vases and a parrot, in his works.10 As Segal has noted, the parrot, as the vase, would have signaled for contemporaneous audiences great luxury.11 However, these examples, as with those of foreign or tropical fruits, animals or objects generally, would not merely have been indicative of wealth and privilege, but also of the colonial reach of multiple European nations, their simultaneous, ongoing and expanding programs of colonization and the extraordinary and vast shifts in the trade, exchange and outright theft of goods, natural resources and people from the colonized territories. If we consider that it was a white French-Canadian man who depicted foreign, decidedly tropical fruits held by a black female slave whose breast, arguably offered to the viewer, is exposed above them, the urgency of a postcolonial feminist reading of this painting becomes apparent. By identifying these fruits, their origins and uses, we can attempt to retrieve their contemporaneous significance and explore potential meanings for their presence within the portrait and their relevance for the black female slave who carried them.

STILL LIFE IN PORTRAIT OF A NEGRO SLAVE As I have already argued in Chapter 3 of this volume, the anonymity of the sitter in this portrait is paradoxical to the genre itself. Because a portrait is a representation of an historically specific human being who lived at a particular time and place, the title of a portrait is usually the name of the individual in question, who, significantly, would have traditionally “sat” for the portraitist in order for the work to be completed.12 Such sittings could take hours over the period of days, weeks, months or even longer, depending upon variables such as the complexity of the work, the availability and schedule of both parties and the demands on the artist. During the

80

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

process, the artist and sitter would inevitably dialogue about the details of the commission as well as current events and other banter designed to put the sitter at ease. Although the portrait is most recently known as Portrait of a Negro Slave (1786), it is as yet undetermined whether or not it once circulated under the name of the sitter. However, the anonymity of the current title, coupled with the obviously low social status of the woman (given the patriarchal and colonial context of production) and her potentially compromised position as a sitter for whom the painting was most likely not produced, begs questions about the meanings of the work and the context of production. Detailed records compiled by Marcel Trudel reveal the likely sitter as Marie-Thérèse-Zémire, one of two slaves documented as the property of the artist’s wife, Benoite Gaétant.13 As I have also discussed earlier, we as yet have no defi nitive documentation that confi rms the birthplace or place of purchase of Marie. So although the Caribbean is a likely place, the specific trajectory of Marie to Canada and how she came to be in the possession of the artist and his wife remains a mystery. Marie may have been purchased by the couple in Guadeloupe or another Caribbean colony between their time in Europe (from at least 1773 to 1784) and their sojourn in Philadelphia in 1792.14 In any event, as argued in Chapter 3 of this volume, François’s access to his model was likely through his wife and the portrait seems to have been painted outside of Canada because its precedes his 1792 announcement in the Montreal Gazette advertising his artistic services.15 In Chapters 2 and 3 of this volume, I argued that the colonial institutional role of black female slaves as “breeders” of new property made them particularly vulnerable to physical and sexual exploitation and abuse at the hands of their white owners. Deborah Gray White has argued, “Once slaveholders realized that the reproductive function of the female slave could yield a profit, the manipulation of procreative sexual relations became an integral part of the sexual exploitation of female slaves.”16 Thus, as Londa Schiebinger contends, female slaves previously regarded as “work units” or potential prostitutes came instead to be overwhelmingly prized as potential “breeders.”17 Young female slaves were particularly valuable, in some cases doubly valuable as men, because their progeny, which became the property of the slave owners, made them heirlooms.18 Jennifer L. Morgan’s summary drives to the heart of the matter: When planters looked to “increase”, they crafted real and imagined legacies. In the absence of living slave children, their own children still inherited the promise of future wealth. Slaveowners whose prospects might have seemed somewhat bleak looked to black women’s bodies in search of a promising future for their own progeny. With such demographic expectations also came an articulation of the longevity of the slaveowners’ enterprises and a great certainty of a future in and for the colony. Though there was certainly no guarantee, a planter could

The Fruits of Resistance 81 imagine that a handful of fertile African women might turn his modest holdings into a substantial legacy.19 The legal and economic exploitation of black women’s bodies for profit was justified through colonial stereotypes, which compulsively represented black females as sexually licentious predators of white men. This sexual excess was thought to carry over into childbirth, where black women were assumed to “breed at an astonishing rate and with remarkable ease.”20 Within this portrait, the sexual utility of the black female sitter, as both object of sexual attention and gratification and “breeder” of new slaves, is concretized in her exposed breast, accentuated by the device that juxtaposed the bare breast with the plate of fruit in a symbolic offering of the slave’s body to the implied male heterosexual gaze of the artist/audience. Because fruit, like flowers, have been an highly exploited domain of visual iconography in western art for centuries, the specific choice of individual fruits was likely, as detailed earlier, more than decorative. Madeleine Major-Frégeau has described the fruit as: ananas (pineapple), pomme-cannelle (sugar apple) on the marble slab and noix de cajou (cashew nut) in front of the pineapple and oranges.21 All of the fruits were foreign to the temperate climate of the part of New France where the artist was based, Montreal, and impossible to cultivate naturally (that is, outside of a greenhouse) in the region. Because Marie was likely from a region to which the fruit was indigenized, it is not a stretch to conclude that she was likely far more familiar with their nutritional and medicinal uses than the artist. Although the dominantly white mercantile and bourgeois classes who would have made up the art-viewing and art-collecting public for such a portrait may not have been thoroughly knowledgeable about the tropical fruits in the portrait, many may have had a passing familiarity spawned by their more likely contact with candied or preserved versions of the foreign delicacies. A.G. Reid has argued for the accessibility of such delicacies as almost commonplace, given the established colonial trade: In return for these Canadian products, there was sent back to New France a variety of semi-luxuries which made life distinctly more pleasant, for Martinique and Guadeloupe were among the great sugar-producing areas of the world and were able to export to Quebec large quantities of sugar, molasses, syrup and rum as well as various delicacies to titillate the French palates of Quebec gourmands. Tiny lemons preserved in spirits, sugared almonds, candied fruits and all the innumerable types of preserves which were so popular at Quebec feasts must have owed their existence to trade with the West Indies. 22 However, as this list implies, their accessibility was altered given the necessity of the fruits to be in a stable, preserved form in order to remain consumable after the long journeys from the Caribbean to New France.

82

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

Eating bits of sugared pineapple from a jar is a much different experience than holding, slicing, smelling and eating the fresh, juicy fruit. Arguably, then, it remains to be seen how many even upper-class white residents of New France with the money to afford such luxuries would have ever had the privilege of consuming whole fresh tropical fruit in their diets. Thus, whereas a potentially significant number of the population may have been familiar with preserved tropical fruit, most would never have consumed fresh examples and, arguably, could not have been well apprised of their nutritional or medicinal properties.

THE MEANINGS OF FRUITS Of tropical fruit generally, the pineapple, coveted by European aristocracy from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, was possibly the most sought after, expensive, prestigious and difficult to acquire. 23 Indigenous to Brazil and Paraguay, the pineapple became a favourite of the Native Caribs through trade. Disembarking at Guadeloupe in 1493, Christopher Columbus detailed his delight in a delicious fruit that he called nana. 24 By the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it was imported to Europe and became a coveted extravagance of aristocracy. Rare, expensive and visually striking, it became the ultimate symbol of exoticism. Due to spoilage common in early ship travel, it was often imported to North America chunked and glazed, candied or packed in sugar. Because it was both costly and difficult to acquire a whole fruit, they became centerpieces and status symbols at dinner parties and feasts and were even rented out solely for visual effect. Hoag Levins adds that they became synonymous with hospitality and were integrated by architects and craftspeople into exterior and interior home decor. 25 Rohrbach, Leal and d’Eeckenbrugge have contended that the European fascination with the pineapple, traced to as early as the 1500s, resulted in greenhouse cultivation in the eighteenth century and the importation of more diverse varieties throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 26 However, in line with A.G. Reid’s contentions cited earlier, Rohrbach and colleagues have argued that “the relatively short shelf-life of fresh pineapple fruit limited early commercial trade to relatively short transportation routes or some form of preservation.”27 Both the cashew nut and sugar apple were used as food and medicinally. The cashew, made of a pseudo-fruit and a nut that grow in a kidney-shaped shell, is indigenous to the Amazon. Indigenous peoples and Europeans used the juice and fruit to treat fever, sweeten the breath and to “conserve the stomach.” The Europeans of New France may have been particularly aware of its anti-scurvy benefits due to high vitamin C content. 28 The sugar apple grows in tropical or semi-tropical weather and was originally known to South America, Central America, Southern Mexico, the West Indies and dry regions of North Queensland, Australia. Its exclusion from the platter

The Fruits of Resistance 83 held by the slave may be instructive because, although the sweet flesh of the small pale-yellowish pods inside of the green skin are sucked clean of their seeds, the seeds themselves are acrid and poisonous.

ABORTION, “BREEDING” AND FEMALE REPRODUCTIVE RESISTANCE IN SLAVERY As John M. Riddle has argued, “The evidence for the concept and existence of contraceptives and abortifacients that were deliberately used is clearly and abundantly in the records. Moreover, classical and medieval peoples believed that they worked.”29 Centuries later, in the American South, slave owners, overseers and doctors all recognized the female slave practice of abortion as resistance. In particular, Dr. John H. Morgan listed various herbal, fruit, seed and plants as abortifacients.30 These practices of reproductive resistance were, according to Londa Schiebinger, widespread throughout the European colonies amongst women of African descent in the eighteenth century.31 The practice of what was commonly called “folk medicine” by the white colonizers and slave holders was, in practical terms, the knowledgeable use of local vegetation, herbs and fruit in quantities significant enough to prohibit impregnation or induce an abortion thereafter. As Jennifer L. Morgan has written: Among the African plants transported to the Caribbean were okra and aloe, both of which were used as abortifacients. Knowledge about using snakeroot and cotton roots as emmenagogues survived the Middle Passage; plants from European and Native American pharmacopoeias joined these West African plants in the New World to help women control reproduction.32 It is important to note, however, that reproductive control was not only mobilized as a form of resistance to subvert the birth of mixed race children of rape, but also with the knowledge of the inhumanity of slave labour conditions that were, as discussed in Chapter 2 of this volume, largely undifferentiated by sex/gender. As such, Morgan stresses that disease and overwork, as well as the psychic and psychological toll of having children over whom you would have no social control, were equally urgent factors in the fertility rates of black female slaves.33 As mentioned earlier, a paste made from the seeds of the sugar apple was one such known poison. The paste was reportedly used as insecticide and to kill head lice. But if placed in the eyes or applied to the uterus, it caused blindness and induced abortion. I would speculate that the seed’s poisonous elements would appear to be a natural option of slave resistance to abort children of rape.34 The position of this fruit, the sole one left outside of the platter, carried by the female slave, may also be indicative of more

84

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

than random arrangement. If indeed the female sitter, who was more than likely born and raised in the French Antilles, had indigenous knowledge of the fruits, plants and vegetation of her native land, is it not a fair assumption that a part of her knowledge might entail the medicinal, or so-called folk knowledge of the sugar apple as an abortifacient? Many historical European fruit or food still life paintings do not include human beings, and they also differ in other ways from this portrait.35 Often bountiful spreads of food are deposited upon tables laden with opulent materials and containers of metal, glass or ceramic. The images can be classified, in large part, as opulent, decadent and excessive. This excess is also often in a state of disarray with fruit, heavily laden and tumbling over each other, with containers tipped over and objects hanging from the tables. Often, the disarray implies that the feasters have come and gone, leaving a mess for the servants to tend to. In a very simple way, these images are about the possessions that wealth ensures, the privilege of access and the exclusivity of gluttony and overindulgence. The immediacy of consumption is often indicated by the presence of peeled citrus or variously opened fruit ready for eating. Quite apart from this tradition, the fruit that the black female slave carries has not yet been readied for consumption. Her status as a slave and her social position at this historical moment as a black woman likely indicate her role as a servant—one who is preparing this fruit not for herself but for the enjoyment of others. The ones who will eat are absent yet implied. But the fruit on her tray has not yet been prepared; the pineapple is not carved, the oranges are unpeeled and the cashew nut lies whole on its side. Even further, the sugar apple is fully removed from the tray. Whereas traditional fruit still life commonly implied that the servant/slave had already laid the table for the indulgence of the masters, this black woman appears to be pausing prior to that moment of preparation. Her hands and left forearm seem to be braced against the marble surface for support. We might speculate that she is on her way to prepare the table of “exotic” delicacies for her master and mistress. But for some reason, perhaps the weight of her tray, which she supports firmly with a two-handed grip, her momentary pause on the way to the kitchen has resulted in the dislodgement of the sugar apple. Whereas the traditional context of portraiture—when the sitter and the commissioner were one in the same—afforded much agency for the subject and cooperation between them and the portraitist, the paradoxical context of production for this slave portrait would have afforded no such customary agency to this black female sitter. Quite simply, she would neither have had the money nor likely the exclusive cultural knowledge to commission such a portrait, nor would she have had a separate home in which to install it. We have then, the rare instance of a portrait, commissioned by and for someone other than the sitter, their family or relations. Unlike photography, the time involved in the completion of a portrait of this nature also ensured that the countenance, pose and expression of the sitter has less to do with what they

The Fruits of Resistance 85 actually looked like or wanted to look like than the way the artist posed them and desired to represent them. Critically then, the slight smile or willingness we may read in the slave’s face has less to do with her emotion or feeling at the time of the portrait than with the white male artist’s perception of her and his desire to represent her in a certain arguably racially and sexually stereotypical fashion—gladly offering her exposed body. However, while not wishing to glamorize the potential for this woman’s resistance in the face of the entrenched and interlocking regimes of race, sex and class, I also feel that it is important to examine such a work for signs of her possible opportunities for agency, especially where such evidence would have resided outside of the knowledge of the artist. I would like to suggest that in a portrait where there is undoubtedly an extraordinary degree of power imbalance if not outright coercion in its conceptualization and production, one area in which the sitter may have exerted some degree of significant, if during the moment of production undetectable, control, was in the selection and staging of the fruit still life. Used primarily as domestics in this location of New France in part because of their high value and prestige appeal, black female slaves would have likely been made to go to the market for the white households they served.36 They, more than their mistresses, would have been familiar with the various vendors, prices, locations and uses of the food they were made to purchase and prepare. In the case of this sitter, likely from the French Antilles, the sight of various tropical fruit native to her home may have reminded her of their culinary and medicinal uses. Without archival sources, we can never know for certain if it was François Malépart de Beaucourt, Marie or some third party who determined the specific selection and arrangement of fruits. It is not unreasonable to assume, however, that it was Marie who did the purchasing and very likely would have had an opportunity during the creation of the portrait to affect the end result of its presentation. I would argue then that the sugar apple’s location on the marble slab as opposed to in the platter with the other fruit can be read not summarily as random occurrence, but perhaps as a deliberate placement or even removal—an action that, if attributed to the black female sitter, may indicate her knowledge of the foreign fruits, her specific knowledge of the sugar apple as a symbol of black female slave resistance in diaspora and her defiant attempt to register her unwillingness to be represented in a portrait by her master and represented in this way. This possibility would indicate her knowledge of the use of abortifacients and the endemic sexual exploitation of black women within slave societies.

CONCLUSION: HUMANIZING A SLAVE The inaccessibility of the tropical fruit made them exotic, expensive to import and, like Marie herself, luxury objects within the context of New

86

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

France. François’s early use of the bare breast juxtaposed with the fruit precedes the latter adoption of this sexualizing device by artists like Paul Gauguin, who similarly employed the maneuver in representations of racially “other” women.37 Although I have been discussing this portrait as it intersects mainly with the genre of still life, other compelling intersections can be made. European colonization of Africa, the Americas and all other corners of the globe went hand in hand with the demand for so-called scientific textual and visual documentation of the people, plant life and animals that the white colonizers encountered. The disciplinary impulse towards socalled authentic records of contact spawned shifts in the field of scientific writing and image-making in the forms of botanical, anthropological and ethnographic representations of the new and “exotic” forms with which Europeans were coming into contact. Ships bound for colonial territories often included amongst their crews professional artists, naturalists and scientists whose job it was to produce detailed documentation of the distinctive life forms of the territories. Whereas partial motivation was surely Eurocentric notions of knowledge and curiosity, another was certainly the ability to understand the resources of a territory in order to best capitalize economically and socially upon its exploitation at a later date. However, the point at which the burgeoning fields of the human sciences merge with the natural sciences marks a fraught colonial nexus where human populations were often encountered, misrepresented and mistreated as merely other forms of naturally occurring specimens for western scientific scrutiny and exploitation. The mode of the material and aesthetic practice of natural science representations of humans and vegetation was productive of a dehumanization that objectified and anonymized individuals as stand-ins for a tribe, a people or a race and their assumed uncivilized and homogenized behaviours. A poignant example is an image from Peter Kolb’s The Present State of the Cape of Good Hope (1731) in which a marijuana plant rendered far beyond actual scale towers above a frontally seated, bare-chested “Hottentot” woman shown breast-feeding her baby (who is on her back), over her shoulder.38 The exposure of the black female body in “scientific” images mirrors that of the black female slave in so-called high art. It is not only important that Marie’s body was exposed but how and to what end it was exposed. I have sought to demonstrate that a socially engaged reading of this portrait demands a methodological approach capable of articulating the meanings of race, sex, gender and class at the moment of production, a means through which the life, status, location, possibilities, limitations and agency of the represented black female slave can be assessed both within and outside of the boundaries of this work. As such, in this instance, the portrait as a human-focused artistic representation does not exclusively hold all of the relevant information with which to analyze the meanings of this painting. Whereas we are taught to look for meaning in art on the surface of the art—in the objects represented, their relationships, colour, composition,

The Fruits of Resistance 87 materiality—we must also remember that which is most difficult, arguably impossible to see clearly, or at all; the context of production. It is in exploring those relationships, encounters and interactions that make up the process of production, how the art was conceived and why, the decisions of selection, arrangements, location and dress that were made and why, that other layers are exposed; layers that, as in this case, may humanize sitters whose humanity was lost or stolen by anonymity, enforced or carelessly overlooked, by the very people who created the artworks. To this end, I think it our duty to responsibly speculate about the fruit that remained outside of the platter and the person who might have made it so.

5

Tying the Knot Black Female Slave Dress in Canada They dread rain upon their bare heads almost as much as the native Africans . . . They are fond of covering this part of their bodies at all times, twisting one or two handkerchiefs round it, in the turban form which they say keeps them cool in the hottest sunshine. (Edward Long, The History of Jamaica or General Survey of the Ancient and Modern State of the Island: With Refl ections on its Situation, Settlements, Inhabitants, Climate, Products, Commerce Laws and Government, vol. 3 [London: T. Lowndes, 1774], 413)

Canadian history, insofar as its Black history is concerned, is a drama punctuated with disappearing acts . . . Black history is treated as a marginal subject. In truth it has been bulldozed and ploughed over, slavery in particular. Slavery has disappeared from Canada’s historical chronicles, erased from its memory and banished to the dungeons of its past. This in a country where the enslavement of Black people was institutionalized and practiced for the better part of centuries. (Afua Cooper, The Hanging of Angelique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montreal [Toronto: Harper Perennial, 2006], 7)

As Long’s quote reveals, Europeans have been fascinated by the material cultural practices of African and African-descended peoples for centuries. But as Cooper aptly points out, this historical fascination and its oppressive repercussions have often been retroactively erased and suppressed, frequently in rather systematic ways as in the case of Canada. This chapter is an attempt to explore the aspects of black female slave dress in relation to the broader social, historical, political and cultural context of the experiences of enslaved black women within Trans Atlantic Slavery, especially in Montreal. I will do so through a careful reading of the black female slave in François Malépart de Beaucourt’s Portrait of a Negro Slave (1786; Figure 1.1). In Chapters 3 and 4 of this volume I have attempted to provide interpretations both of the representation of the black female sitter’s body and the fruit still life that she holds; in both cases, making material and symbolic links between the way that Malépart de Beaucourt represented these aspects of the portrait and the sitter’s interconnected sexualization and racialization. Following Nettleford’s idea of dress as a site of identity and masking,1 I would like to ask here, what if anything can we learn from the representation of the dress of the black female slave in this work?

Tying the Knot 89 The potential answers extend far beyond an understanding of this black woman’s identity to insights into Trans Atlantic Slavery and its Canadian permutations (especially in Montreal and Lower Canada) and into the daily lives, labours, possibilities and limitations placed upon black female slaves generally. This line of questioning is particularly important given that it was black women within slavery who most commonly produced items of dress (especially clothing) for themselves and others and who therefore were responsible for the cross-generational transmission of the knowledge of selfcare. To the extent that dress encompasses headwear like the red-and-white headwrap that the sitter wears, it also intersects powerfully with the topic of haircare, a decidedly communal practice in many parts of Africa that continued to be so within the Black Diaspora.2 So this concern for dress is not solely about individuality, but about communities and the interrelation of women through dress across time and space, generations and oceans. But these questions of dress can also be posed to expose the social and cultural investments of this particular slave’s owners (which were, of course, grounded within colonial ideals of race), the white male artist who painted her and his white female wife who owned her; not visible, but certainly present in the portrait’s highly sexual subtext.

THE MEANINGS OF DRESS One utterly overlooked aspect of Portrait of a Negro Slave is the presence of the female sitter’s headwrap. As I argued in Chapter 3 of this volume, a black feminist analysis of this extremely rare, professional portrait opens up possibilities to explore the specificity of slavery as it was practiced in this part of North American (New France) in the eighteenth century. More specifically, it is a vehicle to attempt to understand the unique positioning, experience and identification of the black female slave population in Montreal and Lower Canada (later Quebec) at this time. The idea of a portrait as confi rmation of the visibility and legibility of a racialized body has multiple dimensions. It does not merely speak to the anatomical and physiognomical composition of a body; the dominant and much referenced markers like complexion, hair texture, nose width and shape, etc., that come to be aligned symbolically with blackness. Rather, an analysis of the added dimension of dress can allow for the reading of the material culture represented within the painting itself (as opposed to merely reading the painting as material culture). As Steeve O. Buckridge has argued, “Material culture is especially important for studying individuals who left no written records” because it is able to “fill the gaps in our own knowledge of slaves’ lives.”3 Buckridge has distinguished the defi nition of dress from that of apparel or costume: We can, then, assert that dress includes many forms of adornment: hairstyles; coloured, dyed or bleached skin; pierced ears; scented breath

90

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art as well as garments; jewellery; accessories; and other modifications of and items added to the body.4

There are several types of dress worth analyzing in this portrait, among them the rather opulent-looking gold hoop and pendant earrings, the long strand of dark beads, stones or jewels that make up the necklace that falls across the black woman’s partially bared chest (grazing one breast), the deliberately fallen white blouse and the barely visible skirt. Perhaps, the two most provocative items of dress, in terms of the questions they trigger with regard to slaves’ access to wealth, capital and luxury objects, are the earrings and the necklace, both of which appear, at fi rst glance, to be too expensive and precious to be the normal possessions of a slave woman.

COUNTERING STRATEGIC DEPRIVATION: HUCKSTERING AS ECONOMIC POSSIBILITY Although slaves in various locations of diaspora variously accumulated valuable material culture objects or possessions (either openly or in clandestine ways), the prohibitions of the white ruling classes enforced through surveillance, abuse and torture often successfully blocked slaves from accruing objects of such extreme commercial value, especially luxury objects. According to Beckles, who has researched the often neglected issue of slaves’ economic experiences in the Caribbean context: Much evidence exists to illustrate that slaves, like free persons, sought to increase their share of colonial wealth by participating in the market economy as commodity producers and distributors, with and without their owners’ permission. Although they were undoubtedly the primary victims of colonial economies, in which they were defi ned and used as property, generations of slaves managed, nonetheless, to identify and pursue their own material interests. 5 Whereas in the case of the Caribbean, Beckles discusses the practice of huckstering6 as largely related to slaves’ extra-agricultural cultivation of provision grounds7 in locations like Jamaica, the Montreal context with its temperate climate and urban landscape (at least within the walled settlement) would have left far less room for slaves to constitute and sustain economic independence solely through seasonal agriculture labour. Furthermore, what Elgersman has revealed through cost analysis as the preciousness of black slaves as objets de luxe would seem to have prohibited them from full access to the fishery, mining or forestry labour dominated by the Native slaves, panis/panise.8 Rather, this black female sitter’s work life was most likely composed dominantly of direct domestic tasks like

Tying the Knot 91 laundering, cleaning, sewing and cooking or indirect but related public tasks like purchasing produce at market. Although any extra-domestic independent labour that she would have been able to perform in order to accumulate the wealth sufficient to purchase and take control of her dress could have originated from domestic skills, which she could perform year-round,9 there did exist a tradition of huckstering amongst black women in Canada that the temperate seasonal climate could not contain. William O. Carlisle’s print, Negresses Selling Mayflowers on the Market Place (1872), set in Halifax represents several black female hucksters in the foreground actively selling their produce to the white women whose erect posture and expensive-looking dress indicate their upper-class status. Notably, the labouring black women that Carlisle represented are wearing headwraps, a clear example that the dress practice represented in Malépart de Beaucourt’s portrait was not contained within Lower Canada. Furthermore, the date of Carlisle’s print, 1872, makes it clear that Canada, as a location of Black Diaspora, is a part of a long continuum of the African practice of headwrapping. George H. Craig’s photograph, Selling Baskets on Market Day, Halifax (c. 1890; Figure 5.1), also provides visual evidence of black female participation in huckstering in Canada. The image captured a significant group of adults, mainly women, and children of various races, including Mi’kmaq and black ancestry. Their wares, which include a variety of baskets of different sizes, shapes and patterns, are splayed out on the ground in front

Figure 5.1 George H. Craig, Selling Baskets on Market Day, Halifax, c. 1890. Photograph. Nova Scotia Archives and Records Management, Dartmouth Heritage Museum, Dartmouth, Canada.

92

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

of the mostly seated vendors. The majority of the baskets appear to have handles and are reminiscent of the one carried by the free black woman Rose Fortune in the watercolour that I shall discuss more fully below. Most of those assembled face the camera, demonstrating awareness that they were being photographed. At the right side, two adult black females are clearly visible. Closer to the center of the image, a black woman sporting what appears to be a straw hat with fabric wrapped about it is seated with an infant in her lap, her strong gaze fi xed on the viewer. To her left, another seated adult black female also looks directly into the camera. Her dress is composed of a dark-coloured coat and skirt. But also, significantly, a dark-coloured headwrap is clearly visible on her head. The style of wrapping is unlike Malépart de Beaucourt’s sitter, but very similar, indeed possibly identical, to that of the black woman represented in Caroline Bucknall Estcourt’s The Good “Woman of Colour” (1838–1839; Figure 5.2) that I discuss further later. In particular there are distinctions on where and how the fabric is positioned on the head as well as how much hair is allowed to show. In Craig’s photograph, it is obvious that the part of the wrap that is used to secure the layer fi rst used to cover the head has also been twisted tightly, creating a thicker cylindrical coil, which secures the fabric in place.10 In general, it is important to note, however, that slave women’s participation in huckstering was a means to counter strategic deprivation and did not only involve agricultural products. According to Beckles, in Bridgetown, Barbados, hucksters carried wooden trays on their heads laden with “eatables, wearables, jewelry and dry goods,” some even retailing exotic and imported items like “pickles, preserves, oil, noyau, anisette, eau-decologne, toys, ribbons, handkerchiefs, and other little nick-knacks.”11 This strategic insertion in the white-dominated and white-controlled economy, a highly racialized one, demonstrates a widespread and persistent entrepreneurial spirit that even the violent abuses of slavery could not destroy. But for the purpose of the analysis of dress, the link between the huckstering of black female slaves and wearables, jewelry and handkerchiefs, is very significant.

PURCHASER, RECIPIENT OR BORROWER: ANALYZING THE JEWELRY Knowledge of the histories of material deprivation and bodily regulation within Trans Atlantic Slavery effectively prohibits a viewer from an easy reading of the jewelry that adorns the slave woman’s body as hers. Of course her ownership of them is not an utter impossibility, but more likely these expensive objects may have been loaned to her or bestowed upon her by the white male artist himself, as a type of “payment” for her modeling. But before we utterly rule out this possibility of her ownership, it is important

Tying the Knot 93 to separate the question across distinct locations of diaspora. Buckridge has demonstrated that black slave women in Jamaica were known to wear an assortment of beads, coral, glass, seeds, animal bone/cartilage and gold jewelry, including rings, necklaces and earrings.12 However, the abundance of natural possibilities for jewelry-making in a land without winters far outshone the similar possibilities in the Montreal context. Similarly, the commonality of smuggling and piracy that would have brought confiscated gold and jewels into white and even black Caribbean hands was also not the norm in Montreal’s waters. As I have argued earlier, it cannot be overstressed that this portrait of a female slave (and any such image of a slave in general) turned the normal custom, and indeed decorum, of portrait-making on its pretty elitist head. Because a slave, property by defi nition, was dominantly socialized into economic deprivation, in this case the possibility of the sitter’s outright ownership and purchase of the jewelry is a small one. Much more plausible is the idea that the earrings and necklace represent some kind of gift from: (a) a husband, romantic relation, suitor/sexual aggressor, (b) a wealthy female like her other and primary owner, the artist’s white wife, (c) a white, free black or otherwise more socially liberated relative, friend or acquaintance of the sitter or (d) from the artist himself. In the fi rst scenario, it is disturbing but necessary to contemplate the conflation of the suitor/sexual aggressor, and the married, white male artist himself. As I have argued in Chapter 3 of this volume, whether or not the artist had sexual contact with the sitter, it is absolutely necessary to separate any such potential contact from the idea of a romantic, reciprocal and equitable relationship. Indeed, any such relationship would have been structured by the intersecting colonial and patriarchal logics of the time, which dichotomized white male and black female subjects as polar opposites. When one person, the black female sitter, was deemed legal property and literally owned by the other (the white male artist), it is difficult to configure a situation in which she, either privately or publically, would have had equal access to the agency necessary to make an unhindered or coercion-free decision to enter into a sexual relationship freely.

“A TOTALITY OF TERROR AND TYRANNY” Trans Atlantic Slavery relied upon the institutionalized rape of black women and therefore had deep investments, political, cultural, psychic and social, in the fabrication of an imaginary black woman as ever sexually licentious, excessive, animalistic and deviant. This medical and cultural pathologization served to normalize the black female slave’s essential role as “breeder” of new slaves, property of the white masters and mistresses. The practice of encouraging or coercing “breeding” took various forms in different contexts, with some slave societies, according to Morrissey, “encouraging

94

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

nuclear family formation and the reproduction of children,”13 and others, according to Beckles, claiming the “right to extract a wide range of non-pecuniary socio-sexual benefits from slaves as a legitimate stream of returns on capital, and an important part of the meaning of colonial mastery.”14 On this point of the ideological and legal stakes of black female sexual exploitation within slavery, Beckles is well worth quoting at length: Neither colonial statutes nor slave codes, then, invested slaves with any rights over their own bodies, but rather transferred and consolidated such rights within the legal person of slaveowners. This direct translation of legal entitlement into social power and authority meant that white men especially were located at the convergence where the racial, sexual, and class domination of slave women provided a totality of terror and tyranny.15 The exposed breast of the black female sitter points up her sexual and reproductive utility; her literal value for her owners is an embodied value that is economic, physical and symbolic. This choice for deliberate sexualization in what could have very easily been, instead, a much more innocuous representation (recall Malépart de Beaucourt’s contemporaneous portrait of Madame Eustache-Ignace Trottier dit Desrivières, née Marguerite Malhiot, 1793, Figure 3.1) also begs questions of the location of black female slaves as domestic labourers within the households of their white owners. In the Canadian context, these questions take on increased urgency due to the temperate climate, which made plantation slavery and its attendant monocrop agricultural practices veritably impossible. Instead, black female slaves seem to have been predominantly used as domestic labourers, their invisibility in the homes of their white owners rendering them even more susceptible to unchecked sexual abuse and exploitation. As Beckles has argued: With respect to slave women, then, household work, which ordinarily meant manual labour, also included the supply of socio-sexual services and the (re)production of children as a measurable marginal product that enhanced the domestic capitalization process.16 Because the semi-clothed body of the black female sitter infers, within the process of execution, the contact and proximity between artist and sitter, it is hard to believe that the jewelry belonged to the artist’s wife, Benoite, as hypothesized in the second scenario given earlier; or perhaps it is better to say that the nature of the portrait and the sexual gaze that it engenders make the wife’s full complicity or approval seem rather implausible. The third scenario speaks to the other individuals and communities with which the sitter would have come into contact. The walled settlement of Montreal where the sitter would have resided, most likely in the

Tying the Knot 95 residence of the artist and his wife, would have had more slaves, black and panis/panise (Native).17 She also would have come into contact with and regularly served the white friends and acquaintances of her upper-class owners. Furthermore, Montreal was a transnational site of empire, indelibly linked through colonial trade and commerce to other sites of empire. A myriad of travellers, colonial administrators, sailors, soldiers, missionaries, labourers and immigrants of various races, ethnicities and nationalities would have passed through its gates. To this end, it is interesting to consider what types of relationships and friendships this black woman would have been able to initiate and maintain, with or without the approval of her owners. I speculate on the race of any potential familial gift-giver because we know that many slaves who were identified as black were indeed fundamentally mixed race, in part because of the endemic sexual abuse discussed earlier.18 The normality of mixed race, black and white, slaves was regularly visualized in “high” and popular art genres alike and arguably came to constitute a theme in and of itself. Often entitled mulatto, quadroon and octoroon, these nudes/ nakeds, genre and portraits (many discussed in this book) were named for the degree of blackness of their miscegenated subjects. It is, therefore, quite plausible that the woman in Portrait of a Negro Slave (1786) may have had not only friends and acquaintances of different racial backgrounds, but quite possibly family members.

TYING THE KNOT: HEADWRAPS AS SOCIAL, CULTURAL AND POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT Following Buckridge, dress must be analyzed in relation to the bodies that produce and wear it: Clothing and unclothing the body, as well as the process and act of dressing up or down, are activities that transform, manipulate and reveal ideologies of both body and dress. We cannot treat dress as independent from the body because the two are inextricably tied.19 Arguably, the aspect of the sitter’s dress most capable of locating her geographically and indeed identifying her within the Trans Atlantic context of the Black Diaspora is her colourful white-and-red striped headwrap.20 Trans Atlantic Slavery was nothing if not the systemic, institutionalized, forced acculturation of Africans into the fictional racial category of blackness and their further strategic juxtaposition with the equally fictional racial and cultural state of white European-ness and eventually white Creoleness. Even so, a system as violent and radically marginalizing as slavery was still not able to contain all modes and practices of resistance. The fact that slavery became a site for such extreme and inventive practices and technologies

96

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

of torture and abuse was in part attributable to the randomness of the violence of the white colonizing mind/body, but also attributable to the constant and relentless resistance of the enslaved peoples themselves. 21 The archives have clearly revealed that the “crimes” for which slaves would have been punished, often brutally, were the most mundane of acts, oftentimes simply normal behaviours of a person with thoughts, feelings and emotions. As White and White have argued: Slaveholders’ intervention in the bodily appearance of their slaves could even extend to expectation about gesture, movement, and general demeanor—how slaves reacted when spoken to, how they walked, where they directed their gaze, whether they appeared content.22 Although most enslaved Africans would have made the gruesome journey of the Middle Passage with no dress or material objects, the absence of possessions and adornment did not prevent them from bringing with them the cultural, religious, social and spiritual knowledge, memories and practices of their homelands, inheritances that were reconfigured under the weight of the slave system and within the context of their new environments. As property, Africans and their later diasporic descendants were largely forced to surrender or adapt the normal rituals and practices of their daily care of self. Due to the violent surveillance of the white ruling classes and their overriding preoccupation with profit and the maintenance of white supremacy, the physical and spiritual care and comfort of black slaves for themselves and each other was given little to no consideration. Therefore, things like the most basic grooming or adornment of bodies, hair combing, skin care, perfuming, clothing, etc., were not prioritized by the white ruling classes but became a way to break slaves away from their cultural roots and to strip them of their ties to their African homelands. As Buckridge has ably argued, in the midst of white cultural annihilation, cultural expression became a survival strategy for slaves. 23 Thus, even in the midst or at the mercy of such endemic oppression, it is a testament to the continuity of slave resistance that enslaved blacks were able to preserve and adapt some aspects of African dress. Buckridge positions dress amongst black Jamaica women, pre- and post-emancipation, as symbolic forms of accommodation and resistance that were interwoven. 24 This continuum of African dress allowed Buckridge to argue that: African slave women and their descendants . . . had some control over their clothing, and that they were able to maintain and nurture expressive African cultural characteristics in their dress as a means of survival. 25 Although Buckridge’s focus was Jamaica (and to a lesser extent, other parts of the Caribbean), arguably this statement applies readily to slave

Tying the Knot 97 women across various locations of the Black Diaspora because they obviously shared similar experiences of forced acculturation, although under different European flags and with varying levels of contact with indigenous populations.

HEADWRAPPING IN THE CANADIAN CONTEXT: EXAMINING DIASPORIC CONTINUITY To this end, the brightly coloured, neat and precisely tied headwrap that adorns the black female sitter’s head in Malépart de Beaucourt’s portrait is, in and of itself, a sign of African cultural preservation and resistance in the face of white oppression; material evidence of the continuation of African dress heritage, and its evolution, across the Atlantic and across centuries. Buckridge positions the headwrap or tie-head as a pervasive symbol of resistance with immense communicative power that took on many coded forms across a range of diasporic locations. 26 Over the course of millennia, African women have created elaborate and intricate hair-styles and head adornment that constituted a material language of the body, capable of communicating facets of a person’s identity (status, ethnicity, class, etc.) or marking a certain event in one’s life (childbirth, marriage, etc.).27 According to Buckridge, headwraps were historically popular amongst West African women for their functional and aesthetic properties; allowing women to protect their heads while balancing loads or to guard them from inclement weather, to accentuate female beauty, to disguise unkempt hair, scalp conditions or lice infestations, to guard against the hot sun and to absorb sweat.28 White and White have also pointed out that bandanas were used to keep hair clean, to hide scars or marks, to protect a new hair-style and as a tool in hair-styling. 29 Although slavery sought to homogenize Africans, in part through the creation of the colonial ideal of blackness or, to be more precise, Negroness, there did exist a significant amount of stratification within practices of slave dress within the Black Diaspora. Buckridge has noted distinctions in slave women’s dress across location (urban or rural), labour (field or house slave) and site (different plantations). These distinctions were in part maintained through the ability of slaves to create their own clothing through their considerable needlework skills and the limits upon their ability to gain access to the materials they desired. Such access could come by way of purchase, but also normally through cast-offs from white mistresses, from bartering or through self-production.30 Considering that material skills like sewing and dying were passed down from woman to woman within families and communities, it is interesting to consider whether or not the sitter in the portrait created her own headwrap or if it was a purchase or gift. Although Montreal had a temperate climate where the sitter would have been removed from many of the tropical plants and vegetation with which

98

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

she may have been familiar from birth (the plants like laghetto, 31 from which fabric were derived), Montreal of the late eighteenth century was an internationally networked harbour into which ships travelled, laden with tropical produce, much of which had been cultivated on slave plantations.32 As such, it is possible that the sitter may have been pictured in a headwrap that was produced in Montreal from local or imported materials. Headwraps, worn alone (as seen in the portrait) or under hats, were a common part of the dress of black female slaves. Despite the strategic appropriation and misrepresentation of headwraps by whites, largely within the stereotype of the mammy, headwraps for black women in diaspora were a proud source of beautification, identification, cultural continuity and communication.33 Across different locations of diaspora like Jamaica, Martinique, Guadeloupe and Suriname, black slave women preserved and developed distinct ways of wrapping, tying and knotting their headwraps with precise and complex variations between religious and secular dress. Besides choices in fabric, dying and pattern, women actively manipulated the position, arrangement and style of the headwrap through decisions about the way they tied and secured the fabric according to what they wished to achieve, functionally or symbolically. For example, Buckridge has documented that in Martinique and Guadeloupe a headwrap conveyed a woman’s occupation (cane-cutter, laundress, house servant, fieldworker), in St. Lucia it signaled a woman’s marital status, in Suriname it could announce one’s birthday, be playfully erotic or advise one’s critics to mind their own business and in parts of the French West Indies, it was an active tool of fl irtation, signaling a woman’s romantic availability.34 The headwrap adorning the black female slave in the portrait appears to have more symbolic and beautifying functions rather than practical or labour ones, although the latter is certainly still possible. This is conveyed in part by the brilliantly coloured, eye-catching fabric and its seeming refi nement (the quality of the fabric), as well as the way that the garment is positioned and tied. It reads more as a prized possession than a means of merely disguising or camouflaging the head. Dress for slaves, especially that outside of rations or the basic and commonly inferior grade material provided by their owners, could become treasured possessions, especially when they were produced and designed by the slave themselves. Within the context of Lower Canada, Riddell’s accounts of a Native slave woman (panise) who was sold in 1753 for 700 livres “with her clothes and linen as they all are” and of the “mulatto slave called Isabella” who was sold on 20 April 1779 (also with her clothes and linens) may be a contemporaneous indication of slave women’s attachment to their dress and their refusal to be sold without these possessions.35 Unlike headwraps that covered the wearer’s forehead, this wrap does not even completely cover the woman’s dark brown hair, but is set back from her face. As such, it provides a vibrant frame that makes for a striking

Tying the Knot 99 contrast against the exposed brown skin of her face, neck, shoulder and chest. The headwrap has a distinctive style, with a roll of additional fabric being formed in the front of the temple that appears to have been brought down and around the base of the neck, then back up again and secured atop the sitter’s head on her right side. The manner of tying creates a type of pouch into which her hair apparently unfolds, indicated by the bulging of the fabric that we see over her left shoulder. A fold of material escapes from the base of the headwrap, covering the back of her neck and two distinct points emerge from the tie at the right, directed up and away from her head. Both of these stylistic properties likely carried symbolic and possibly functional meanings. As the act of covering one’s head, especially in a tropical or merely sunny context, is a means of sun protection, the fabric covering the back of her neck may also simply function as a form of sun protection. But in contrast, the protruding tongs at right seem to be purely decorative and expressive, a part of the communicative order that Buckridge has documented. However unlike the Surinamese “wacht me op de hoek” style of wrapping that produced a decidedly phallic protrusion at the back of the wearer’s head, these two ends of fabric at the right side of the sitter’s head are much less dominant and seem not to be deliberately erotic.36 Two other nineteenth-century Canadian paintings also clearly indicate the survival and indeed flourishing of the headwrap practices amongst black women in various parts of Canada. The watercolour of Rose Fortune (c. 1830) represents the sturdy-looking black woman in profile. The unpolished nature of the work combined with her profi le position and lack of direct gaze contributes to the amateur ethnographic feeling of the work, which focuses largely on her physiognomy and the distinctiveness of her dress. Rose, who is thought to be the daughter of Fortune, “a free Negro” and Loyalist who settled in Nova Scotia after the American War of Independence, became a trucker at Annapolis Royal, carrying baggage and assisting travellers with various aspects of their journeys. Her arduous occupation (she was known to carry baggage in a heavy wheelbarrow for passengers on the Saint John-Digby-Annapolis ferry) is conveyed in the painting by her strong anatomy, which her rough-hewn clothing does not hide. She is shown in mid-stride, walking purposefully in rough-looking black shoes with a basket hung over her left arm. Her bicep is curled to support the weight of its unseen contents. Rose’s head-dress is a combination of fabric and a hat, familiar also amongst certain black women in the Caribbean.37 It has been recorded as a “white cap with the strings tied under the chin, mounted by a man’s hat.”38 Caroline Bucknall Estcourt’s The Good “Woman of Colour” (1838– 1839; Figure 5.2) has a similarly significant ethnographic importance.39 The unfi nished watercolour and pencil sketch shows a gracefully seated black female, who, unlike Rose, is positioned square to the viewer. Her gaze is level and her expression is soft as her head tilts slightly to the left.

100 Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

Figure 5.2 Caroline Bucknall Estcourt, The Good “Woman of Colour,” 1838– 1839. Watercolour and pencil on wove paper, 27.0 x 21.9 cm. Portrait Gallery of Canada, Library and Archives of Canada, Ottawa.

Unlike her bodice, arms and skirts, which are unfi nished and mainly outlined in pencil with little paint, the woman’s face is more fully realized with the waterolours being used to evoke her medium brown complexion, dark hair and patterned headwrap. The headwrap is similar to the sitter in Malépart de Beaucourt’s portrait, only in relation to its striped or checked pattern and the obvious skill of the wearer who tied it. However, instead

Tying the Knot 101 of the red-and-white fabric of the earlier work, this headwrap consists of a contrast between white and another dark colour (blue, black or something else) and an altogether different placement. Whereas the sitter in Portrait of a Negro Slave (1786) wears her headwrap set back from her forehead, exposing some hair at the front and at the temples, the “good woman of colour” has a headwrap secured lower on the face, so that the hairline at the top of the forehead is covered, but hair at the sides above her ears is visible. The image gives the sense of the fabric being wrapped around the head, across the front and around to the back, giving the effect of a crown perched upon the head, as opposed to the earlier work in which the wrapping seems to have been performed on an angle from the nape of the neck and up around the front of the head. Due to the frontal pose of the latter work, we are unable to see the back of the headwrap and therefore cannot tell with certainty if the woman created expressive folds or protrusions with any remaining fabric or merely tucked and hid them within the existing folds. However, it is fair to say that the widening folds at the back of the red-and-white striped headwrap that are visible in the oil portrait are not to be found here because they would be visible about the neck of the “good woman of colour” even at this angle.

CONCLUSION: ART HISTORY WITH SLAVERY STUDIES, BEYOND AESTHETICS It is important to note that as yet we have no information on the geographical origins of the black female sitter in Portrait of a Negro Slave (1786). The utter neglect of the study of Canadian slavery within the scholarly practices of Canadian History, Canadian Studies, Slavery Studies and Black Diaspora Studies and the requisite shortage of sound secondary sources means that any research in this field must often: (a) draw directly from primary sources and (b) draw more than is desirable from sources on slavery in other locations (i.e., usually the Caribbean and the American South). To this end, some of the sources and archives that might help us to situate this sitter have yet to be written and/or located. Although there is a possibility that the sitter was born in Lower Canada, even Montreal, it is more likely that she was of Caribbean origin as opposed to Africa or from the United States. The artist’s absence from Montreal (in the years before the portrait was made) for study and his marriage to his white French wife makes it plausible also that she was forcibly migrated by the couple to Montreal. The plausibility of this last migration is confi rmed by Riddell, who documented a sale that took place in Halifax on 30 May 1752 of: a very likely negro wench, of about thirty-five years of age, a Creole born, has been brought up in a gentleman’s family, and capable of doing all sorts of work belonging thereto, as needle-work of all sorts and

102

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art in the best manner; also washing, ironing, cooking, and every other thing that can be expected from such a slave.40 (italics mine)

Creole here is an indication of Caribbean birth and this sale provides evidence that there were black slaves in Montreal being brought to the settlement from the Caribbean.41 More archeological, ethnographic and other cultural evidence is needed to pinpoint the sitter’s ethnic, national and regional origins through her dress. Being able to identify her place of birth, and her subsequent travels, would obviously shed more light on all aspects of her life and experiences, including her dress, but also on the lives of black female slaves in Canada generally. Relying largely on the pioneering work of Riddell, Beckles and Buckridge, I have attempted to put Art History to the use of Slavery Studies and Black Diaspora Studies by asking: of what use can the combined visual, cultural, aesthetic and historical skills of this discipline be in the deciphering of this very enigmatic and racially and sexually fraught portrait? I hope that I have proven Buckridge’s initial (and historically well-founded) contention wrong, that Art History can indeed be more than aesthetics and that the ability to examine not only the artwork, but the objects and dress that it represents, seriously as material culture, is a matter of methodology and the willingness to pose critical questions.

Part III

The Nude and the Naked Black Women, White Ideals and the Racialization of Sexuality

6

Coloured Nude Fetishization, Disguise, Dichotomy

Constructed as the nude or the naked within art historical discourse,1 the represented female body has been the historical manifestation of patriarchal and Eurocentric ideals of woman, womanhood, beauty, femininity and female sexuality within western society. The nude has been the more conservative and palatable of the two categories and the naked, the more historically offensive. Although the nude and the naked have coexisted within a dichotomous relationship, it is only within the modern era that the naked has emerged from the arbitrary confi nes of pornography. Its historical association with pornography has situated the naked within the realm of the sublime within which obscenity and violence could be aesthetically enjoyed within the confi nes of “high” art. Defi ned by a socio-historical specificity and “uncontained” sexuality, the naked disturbs socially sanctioned norms of sexual propriety. In opposition to this defi nition, the female nude has evolved as a disguised generalization of a patriarchally and Eurocentrically defi ned femininity and beauty: a fantasy constructed for the male heterosexual gaze. Disguise mediated the female body’s extrication from reality and entrenchment within the realm of desire. Although disguise has taken several forms, the purpose has remained the removal or distancing of the represented body from the “real” in an attempt to alleviate the danger associated with the male experience of the female body. The visual embodiment of idealized feminine beauty, the female nude functions, as Marcia Pointon has written: not as a category with clear parameters but as a form of rhetoric. It is the way the body functions in the grammar of representation, invoking ideologies of the body and its economy, that is significant rather than its erotic power as estimated by any particular viewer, or its pose, or the extent of its covering. 2 In psychoanalytical terms, the female nude is a fetishized female body, disguising the Freudian lack of the phallus in order to placate the male sexual gaze. This fetishization is necessitated by the male subject’s reaction of fear/

106 Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art desire to the supposed sexual “otherness” of the female body. Woman’s imagined sexual lack is perceived as a threat of castration—the splitting of the centered male subject. The defi nitions of the nude within art historical discourse, based upon sexual fetishization, Eurocentric norms of beauty and the construction of the man–woman, culture–nature dichotomy, have foreclosed discussions of race. Similarly, the naked, defi ned by the social contextualization of the white female body, privileges issues of class and gender above race and colour. 3

RACE, BLACKNESS AND THE FEMALE BODY The art historical discipline has a traditional disregard for the centrality of race within colonial systems of representation. Within western art practice, race has mediated the representation of male and female bodies, mapping oppositional territories and marking imaginary boundaries between black and white.4 Whereas colonial discourse has linked blackness to animalism, sexual deviance and evolutionary inferiority, whiteness has been associated with humanity, civilization and an essential superiority. Accordingly then, the categories of the nude and the naked, defi ned solely in terms of the white female body, are vacuous in addressing the complexity of the black woman’s experience as colonial subject. The intersection of race and sex in the black female body is the juncture where renewed discussions of the nude and the naked must begin. Black women are neither simply women nor are they simply black, rather their sex and race are inextricably bound together, combining to situate them as the ultimate “other” to the centered white male heterosexual subject within colonial discourse. A black feminist methodology is necessary to a revisiting of these Eurocentric concepts because, as Valerie Smith articulates, they: proceed from the assumption that black women experience a unique form of oppression in discursive and nondiscursive practices alike because they are victims at once of sexism, racism and by extension classism [to attempt a separation of race from sex] . . . erases the specificity of the black woman’s experience, constituting her as the point of intersection between black men’s and white women’s experience. 5 Homi K. Bhabha similarly locates the importance of race and sex within a Eurocentric dynamic of colonial power. According to Bhabha, “the construction of the colonial subject in discourse, and the exercise of colonial power through discourse demands an articulation of forms of difference— racial and sexual.”6

Coloured Nude 107 The Freudian concept of the fetish is projected into postcolonial discourse through Bhabha’s theorization of the colonial stereotype as fetish. He posits that the anxiety associated with the male subject’s fear/desire of the female’s perceived sexual lack is replicated in the white subject by a lack of similarity in skin/race/culture. Mediated by a white lens, “Black Woman” is the result of a double fetishization that seeks a reformulation of sexual and racial otherness. Bhabha has written: The fetish or stereotype gives access to an “identity” which is predicated as much on mastery and pleasure as it is on anxiety and defense, for it is a form of multiple and contradictory belief in its recognition of difference and disavowal of it.7

“BLACK WOMAN” This chapter seeks to address the represented black female body as doubly fetishized and historically removed from the paternalistic cultural practices that have historically protected white female sexuality. It is my position that black women, strategically situated as both racial and sexual “other” within colonial discourse, have undergone a unique cultural re-presentation that has positioned them within a dialectical relationship with white women. The nexus of blackness and female sex within the black female body has resulted in a complex identity that cannot be contained by the narrow Eurocentric defi nitions of the nude and the naked within art historical discourse. Beyond the scope of either category, representations of “Black Woman” produce a slippage that reveals simultaneity of the nude and the naked within the same body.8 The dialectical construction of “Black Woman” is apparent within modern Canadian art practice as a continuation of the western colonial legacy. Toronto-based figure painter Dorothy Stevens’s Coloured Nude (c. 1933; Figure 6.1) is an example of the simultaneous presence of the nude and the naked within the represented black female body: a presence that locates the conflation of blackness and sexual pathology. The Evening Telegram of Toronto was among several newspapers to give glowing praise to Dorothy Stevens’s Coloured Nude (c. 1933): “Dorothy Stevens has a certain perfection of style which makes her work interesting . . . the artist has taken the exquisitely lithe, graceful figure of a coloured girl—nude.”9 But while Dorothy Stevens’s overtly sexualized representation of “Black Woman” in Coloured Nude (c. 1933) was being praised as an outstanding achievement in figure painting, the most innocuous contemporaneous white female nudes were being censored from exhibitions across Canada. This oppositional behaviour turned on the race of the female subject. Dorothy Stevens’s Coloured Nude (c.

108

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

Figure 6.1 Dorothy Stevens, Coloured Nude, c. 1933. Oil on canvas, 86.4 x 76.2 cm. Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada. Purchase 1933.

1933) is a noteworthy example of western artists’ deliberate construction of black women outside of carefully delineated social and cultural codes. Although Coloured Nude (c. 1933) is a modern Canadian painting, its roots can be traced back to Trans Atlantic Slavery and colonial perceptions of blackness. An examination of Coloured Nude (c. 1933) will reveal the sexual and racial displacement of black women within colonial systems of representation, the marginalization of black women as dichotomous to the paradigm of an idealized white womanhood and the inevitable inadequacy and inequity of Eurocentrically defi ned categories of representation, like the nude or the naked.

Coloured Nude 109 PRUDERY, CENSORSHIP AND FIGURE PAINTING IN CANADA Early twentieth-century Canadian figure painters emulated established European models to validate their art within the youthful art community. This strict adherence to nineteenth-century western prototypes created a regressive artistic climate, often described as prudish.10 Throughout the twentieth century, female nudes were targeted for censorship across Canada. But this protective action was directed solely towards representations of white female bodies. As female nudes participated in the construction of notions of gender and sexuality, paintings of white women were cautiously monitored: a policing of the arbitrary divide between art and pornography to protect idealized white womanhood. Displayed at the Art Gallery of Toronto during the fifty-third annual exhibition of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts (4–30 November 1932), Coloured Nude (c. 1933) was widely praised as an outstanding achievement in figure painting. It was largely agreed that: The skillful handling of the pose, the high quality of draughtsmanship, the rich chocolate color and its varying tones in light and shadow, combine to elevate this work to a position of fi rst importance.11 Receiving wide acclaim, Dorothy Stevens was proclaimed “fairly wicked in her coloured nude,”12 whereas the painting itself was lauded as “excellently done”13 and “a brilliant thing, infi nitely pleasing in color synthesis and composition.”14 That this overtly sexualized representation of the female body was praised rather than censored was due to the nude’s blackness.

OF OBJECTS AND ANIMALS The historical dichotomization of black and white women has positioned white woman as object/nature and black woman as animal/Nature to the centrality of the white male subject.15 Patricia Hill Collins writes: As objects, white women become creations of culture—in this case, the mind of white men—using the materials of nature—in this case, uncontrolled female sexuality. In contrast as animals Black women receive no such redeeming dose of culture and remain open to the type of exploitation visited on nature overall. Race becomes the distinguishing feature in determining the type of objectification women will encounter. Whiteness as symbolic of civilization and culture is used to separate objects from animals.16 The white female body, once submitted to the “civilizing” effects of culture, became a visualization of idealized white womanhood. Black female

110

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

bodies required no such mediation; black skin, as the ultimate sign of sexual deviance, allowed overtly sexualized images to remain in the realm of art. Accordingly, the represented black female body stands at the border between art and pornography, breeching the arbitrary boundaries of sociosexual propriety. Within colonial discourse, blackness has afforded artists the license to invest an overdetermined sexuality in the represented body; what is offensive or pornographic for the white body being deemed natural and essential to the black. If a painting is recognized to be an organization of signs that not merely reflect but produce meaning when read by a viewer,17 then the represented black female body in western art is a construction whose goal has been to de-womanize, and dehumanize, the black woman in order to facilitate her violation within imperialist regimes of power. The use of allegory, nature and other forms of disguise has been central to the construction of the white female body within artistic traditions. The absence of disguise from the black female body points to the colonial conflation of blackness and sexual pathology. The notion of disguise enters this discussion in more than one way: through the manipulation of the represented female body, as well as the presence of the imagined artist as the “self” that constructs and positions the representation of the “other.” According to Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock: Woman is present as an image but with the specific connotations of body and nature, that is passive, available, possessable, powerless. Man is absent from the image but it is his speech, his view, his position of dominance which the images signify.18 White male artists have traditionally situated themselves within their representations of woman as “other.” But this practice has not been exclusive to white men. In the same way that artists like Paul Gauguin projected an active, masculine artistic and sexual identity onto his depictions of Tahitian women, Dorothy Stevens projected an idealized white womanhood onto her representation of the black woman in Coloured Nude (c. 1933). Inasmuch as Coloured Nude (c. 1933) locates a stereotypical black female identity, it also points to an idealized white womanhood because, ultimately, representations of the “other” always seek to locate the self.

DIFFERENCE AND REPRESENTATION: THE NUDE AND THE NAKED Historically, men have represented “Woman” in terms of her difference, her not-man, not-phallus, located within the perception of lack and otherness.19 However, the represented black female body not only suffers a not-man and not-phallus construction, but also a not-woman and not-white displacement.

Coloured Nude 111 Although white women have been represented as sexual objects for the white male heterosexual gaze within western art, this construction traditionally strove to contain the white body within the realm of the beautiful. The beauty of the nude was measured by the artist’s control over the female body. Lynda Nead writes that: one of the principle goals . . . has been the containment and regulation of the female sexual body . . . to seal orifices and to prevent marginal matter from transgressing the boundary dividing the inside of the body and the outside, the self from the space of the other.20 Thus, the white female nude, securely positioned within the realm of the beautiful, was defi ned by the control and limitedness of the woman as contained matter, civilized nature and restricted sexuality. The female body became the female nude through the power of the artist to discipline the eye of the viewer. Oppositionally, representations of black women’s sexuality, perceived as pathological, existed within the realm of the sublime. The Kantian notion of the sublime is characterized by the unbound, uncontrolled and limitless nature of the represented subject. Within western artistic traditions, obscenity and violence, otherwise defi ned as pornographic or unaesthetic, were made palatable and could be enjoyed as a valid form of cultural expression within the realm of the sublime. In this way, the sublime was marked by a powerful and violent kinetic viewing experience. Positioned within this realm, the representations of the black female body as beyond containment and limitless resulted in deliberately exoticized, sexualized and animalized images.

OLYMPIA This is not to say that representations of white women as naked were not also experienced as sublime. Manet’s Olympia (1863; Figure 7.1) is a fitting example of the white female naked and its negative reception. Olympia’s notoriously negative reception was in part due to the public perception of her social specificity as offensive. The woman represented was to be read as an individual, her class and context (read through her bracelet, choker, flower, dangling slipper, black maid and cat) positioned her as a “real” woman. Her contextualization, then, is what made her naked and thus unpalatable. She was seen as uncontainable, dirty and diseased, pushing beyond her bodily boundaries. To the viewing public of nineteenth-century Paris, she was not beautiful. A courtesan removed from her allegorical disguise, she walked the tightrope between art and pornography. Adding to the unsettling nature of Olympia (1863) is the presence of the black female servant. Within western art, the representation of black and

112

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

white women in the same frame has historically denoted the transference of a sinister “black” sexuality onto the assumed purity of the white woman. Manet’s black maid is a marker of the carnality and filth of the white prostitute with which she is juxtaposed. As such, Olympia (1863) played upon the racist belief in the sexual deviance of all black women. 21 However, I would argue that part of the rejection of the provocative painting hinged upon Manet’s refusal to take up the standard redeployment of the Eurocentric racial hierarchy of blacks and whites embraced by his contemporaries and predecessors. Rather, instead of rendering the black female subject as the highly sexualized, exposed and sexually knowledgeable body, he cloaked her rather demurely in a softly coloured dress and stripped the white woman, investing her with a carnality usually reserved for racial “others.” In nineteenth-century France, still steeped in colonialism, this was a defi nite cultural trigger. But the rigorous objections to Olympia (1863) were also an acknowledgment of “her unashamed awareness of the spectator’s desire.”22 Quite simply, Olympia’s gaze, direct and outward to the viewer both inside and outside of the frame, thwarted the tradition of the voyeuristic male viewer. The naked white female prostitute then contained a double look, inside to the implied John who waited inside the room, the one who had brought the bouquet that the black maid holds, and outside to the painting’s viewer who consumes the work. Equally disruptive was Manet’s representation of a woman as actively aware of, and in control of (hand over vagina), her own sexuality. The sting of the painting then, was the collapse of the two tiers of viewer that implied that the dominant white male heterosexual audience could perhaps for once, not have full, unimpeded access to the female body. Instead Olympia (1863) redirects the viewer’s gaze outward; at once the watcher and watched. Her power of her gaze severs any possibility of voyeuristic pleasure for she knows that we watch her and she is unflinching in her self-control. Revealing knowledge of her sexuality, Olympia was a prostitute consciously controlling the economic value and exchange of her sexuality. Although her body is for sale, she would decide when and if the exchange took place. By controlling this knowledge, and by extension her body, Olympia shattered the elaborately constructed artifice of the courtesan as Desire. 23

COLOURED NUDE Dorothy Stevens’s Coloured Nude (c. 1933) displays the unbound quality of the sublime, but not in the same way as Olympia (Figure 7.1). Whereas Olympia is sublime in her ugliness—her “look was a provocation and her body [was] laid out for inspection at the morgue”24 —the represented black female body in Coloured Nude (c.1933) was sublime as it embodied a limitless sense of Nature through an overt sexualization. It is in this way that the

Coloured Nude 113 represented black female body, experienced as the sublime, is equated with pornography. According to Patricia Hill Collins: The treatment of Black women’s bodies . . . may be the foundation upon which contemporary pornography as the representation of women’s objectification, domination and control is based.25 The female body within western art has traditionally been constructed through an orchestration of historically bound signs that arbitrarily position that body as art or pornography. It is this careful play of presence and absence that has located the female body as beautiful or sublime. Western artists have used several tropes to represent the female body, among them: (a) the manipulation of body hair, (b) the positioning of the body within its environment and (c) the construction and activity of the body, face and gaze. But in all these cases these tropes have been applied oppositionally to black and white female bodies. The selective presence and absence of hair in Coloured Nude (c. 1933) is a reflection of the black woman’s positioning within the realm of the sublime in western art, as it is in direct opposition to the traditional representation of white female bodies. Well into the twentieth century, Canadian artists still excluded pubic hair from representations of white female bodies, although many European modernists had relinquished the practice. However, whereas the black woman in Coloured Nude (c. 1933) is represented with pubic hair, contemporaneous white female nudes were depicted without, or carefully positioned to delete this presence. 26 According to Charles Bernheimer: The convention of omitting female body hair from the painted image . . . contributes to the representation of female submission by eliminating the hint of animal passion and physical desire suggested by hairy growth. 27 In this way, the presence of body hair on the black woman signifies an animal sexuality and carnal desire. The hair also serves to disqualify black women from the Eurocentric category of Woman because, according to Clark, “pubic hair . . . may hide the lack of the phallus but is somehow too close to being that lack, which is why it cannot be shown.”28 Fittingly, the type of hair that has been historically present for its compliance with the fetishizing gaze is absent from Coloured Nude (c. 1933): the hair of the head, conspicuously bound within a red scarf. White female nudes have traditionally been painted with a profusion of long, flowing tresses that envelope the body. This phallic device has been used to calm the male fear of castration invoked by the perception of female sexual lack. Absent from the black woman, this lack declares her “otherness” through a concealment of black woman’s difference to the idealized state of white female beauty.

114 Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art Furthermore, the phallic nature of white female hair is something that cannot be naturally duplicated by many black women. The tightly curled texture of black hair, historically derogatively described by whites as “kinky” or “nappy,” is not naturally conducive to free-flowing movement. The racism of this fetishistic site is revealed as it maps the boundaries of Eurocentric beauty that, outside of artistic license (or the science of inventions like hair relaxers or hot combs), remains unattainable to the black woman. 29

RACE, WOMEN AND NATURE In Coloured Nude (c. 1933) the black woman’s positioning on, as opposed to within, the landscape is also indicative of her uncontrolled, sublime nature. White female nudes have been historically represented harmoniously within the landscape as Woman in nature. Constructed as metaphors for nature, white women were often modeled by the artist with the same stylistic method as the rocks, water or trees that surrounded them. This practice emphasized the patriarchal notion of white women as natural beings, matter to be formed by male cultural activity. Historically, western thought has feminized nature, constituting it as dichotomous to a masculinized culture. According to Nicholas Green, “In the process, both masculinity and femininity were worked up and fi xed through a series of parallel identifications and oppositions.”30 White women were believed to be physiologically closer to nature, the implication being that they were pure, instinctive and irrational. White men, on the other hand, were perceived as rational and intellectual. Within this discourse, culture, as the masculine realm, controlled nature, the feminine realm. Just as men were capable of civilizing and regulating nature, women were perceived as yet another natural bastion for men to conquer, mould and govern. The artistic motif of the white woman in nature locates Woman as a sexualized extension of the natural world, situating white female sexuality as natural, pure and, above all, within the control of civilizing influence of white men. In this way, nature or Woman is inscribed and defi ned by the masculine “genius” operating within the cultural realm. Within Canadian painting, artists like Edwin Holgate continued the western tradition of representing white women as harmonious with nature. In his Nude in a Landscape (c. 1930), the monumentalized white female subject becomes a metaphor for the land, symbolizing male dominance over the natural realm. Modeled with the same techniques as the landscape, the inscription of her body echoes the delineation of the land she inhabits. She is represented as peaceful and comfortable within her environment. Dorothy Stevens’s Coloured Nude (c. 1933) participates in the oppositional positioning of black female sexuality as uncontained Nature.

Coloured Nude 115 In contrast to the tradition of white female nudes, the body in Stevens’s Coloured Nude (c. 1933) is sharply positioned as woman beyond nature. The represented black female body is not within the landscape and does not act as a complimentary extension of the landscape. Rather, the stage-like placement of the black woman’s body on this “faked tropical landscape” plays up the colonial perception of black female sexuality as beyond “natural” limits. This backdrop, complete with lush palms and bananas, is flat and lacking in depth. The lack of perspectival depth prevents the viewer from “entering” the land behind the posed woman. Instead we are abruptly stopped, with nowhere to go (into the image) and redirected back to her body. The represented black body is not within nature but separated from it, in front of and removed from it. “Black Woman” is constructed as sexual spectacle for the white viewer.

EMBODYING BLACK WOMAN In terms of its construction, the body of the represented black woman in Coloured Nude (c. 1933) also deviates from artistic tradition. In pose, the black woman in Coloured Nude (c. 1933) opens up her body to the sexual gaze by lifting her clasped hands above her head and resting her left inner arm against her forehead; an act that strategically reveals her breasts as it simultaneously creates the seductive curved contour that runs from head to ankle down the right side of her body. This gesture defies gravity so that, paradoxically, the viewer may “feel” the weight of the enlarged, pendant breasts. Deliberately sexual, the pose highlights the rounded contours of the female form. Similar to Jean-Léon Gêrome’s Slave Sale at Rome (c. 1884), and the reverse of his Roman Slave Market (c. 1884), this pose has been handed down through western artistic discourse within the realm of the female nude as a symbol of the availability of saleable flesh. 31 Quite simply, it is the pose of a female slave. In this way, the body positioning of the black woman invites the sexual gaze as it simultaneously evokes the historical power dynamics of master–slave, owner–commodity within Trans Atlantic slave practice. This gaze transcends mere vision, registering physicality, as the viewer is positioned to sample and handle the represented body as though provided with tactile evidence of the black female body as property. 32 This pose also creates a centered, safe, distant and privileged space for the viewer from which to observe the “other.” Kenneth Little explains that: Having an experience of the erotic other . . . is a matter of controlling the otherwise heterogeneous world “out there” by gaining a vantage point and forming a perspective in order to make sense of what one sees. It . . . is a matter of “standing back” to take a look and to extend

116

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art and control the length of the gaze that today produces a technical kind of certainty as reliable already-made spectacle.33

This authoritative vantage point, provided by Stevens, is also constructed through a manipulation of the gaze and face of the represented black woman. The black woman in Coloured Nude (c. 1933) invites a voyeuristic gaze: her closed eyes, cast in shadow, allowing the viewer the freedom to examine her body without fear of confrontation. Unlike Manet’s Olympia (1863), she is only the watched, not the watcher. Because the black female is depicted in a standing pose, the closed eyes do not connote sleep as a state of unconsciousness and thus guiltlessness. Rather, this deliberate selfblinding yields the privilege of undisturbed sexual pleasure to the viewer. In this way, the black female is made culpable in her solicitation and facilitation of the sexual gaze both through sexualized pose and a self-inflicted “blinding.” The shadow cast across the face of the woman in Coloured Nude (c. 1933) dismisses the possibility of specificity. The woman depicted is not an individual but stands for “Black Woman.” In this way, the generality of the face connotes a nude because “[i]n art, the face . . . determines whether the body portrayed is perceived in universal terms, or as that of a specific individual.”34 The black female in art was nude because she was constructed as a generalized vision to represent all black women in a way that “transcends historical and social existence, and is a kind of cultural disguise.”35 The construction of “Black Woman” situates the iconic potential of visual representation through which, according to Sander Gilman, individuality is dissolved by “the use of a model which synthesizes our perception of the uniformity of the groups into a convincing homogenous image.”36 The represented black woman in Coloured Nude (c. 1933) is an icon, the individual realities of black women being overridden by an incessant mythologization through the negative associations with gender, sex and race. She represents “Black Woman” as she is, according to Gilman, “composed of fragments of the real world, perceived through the ideological bias of the observer [artist].”37

THE WHITE FEMALE NUDE Contrary to the construction of the black female body, the western tradition of the white female nude has historically developed many devices to locate the source of the sexual gaze within the male viewer. In this way, the white female, although read as sexual object, is released from all responsibility for the origination of the sexual gaze. In particular, there are three deliberate devices that have been employed to depict the white female nude as sexually innocent: (a) sleep/death, (b) environmental distraction and (c) allegory.

Coloured Nude 117 Within early modernism, woman has been historically constructed as passive, an act that invites voyeurism by allowing an unimpeded access to the female body. Gill Saunders notes: Consequently a common device in representations of the nude female is to show her sleeping . . . Alternatively, she may avert her gaze or hide her eyes or turn away from the viewer so that her face is not seen.38 This device preserves the “innocence” of the female by externalizing the origin of the sexual gaze. Randolph Hewton’s Sleeping Woman (c. 1929) is representative of the modern Canadian figure painter’s attachment to these traditional devices. A sleeping woman, unaware of her bodily appearance and the viewer’s presence, cannot be purposefully seductive or flirtatious. She is not controlling an active sexuality and is therefore not guilty of immorality. This motif is linked to the late nineteenth-century romanticized vision of white woman as invalid within bourgeois culture. A sickly woman was fashionable, as she epitomized feminine passivity and inactivity. But she also represented virtuous self-sacrifice for love because, according to Bram Dijkstra, a woman’s death served as “a validation of the warm life of masculine achievement.”39 Because women who displayed healthy vigour or activity were deemed improper and masculine, many white women deliberately cultivated an appropriately sickly and “feminine” appearance. Upperclass white women shunned the outdoors to avoid activity and sunshine, refraining from participating in athletic activities or exhibiting attributes that were coded as masculine. Meanwhile, starvation was employed to achieve the appropriately frail disposition. This “cult of invalidism” positioned frailty and sickness as signs of femininity, delicacy and breeding. Of course, the ability to decide not to eat, not because one could not afford to purchase food but as a sign of self-restraint, was a practice only the upper classes, free from the reality of hunger and poverty, could invent. It is not surprising that the fairy-tale of Sleeping Beauty was popular within this climate as it represents white woman, preserved in a virginal state, within a prison of sleep/death. The cultivation of invalidism also held benefits for men. Socially, a man with an invalid wife was recognized as being able to support “helpless elegance.” According to Dijkstra: death as the ideal state of submissive womanhood had become such a staple of the later nineteenth-century imagination that many males would barely look upon a sleeping woman without imagining her to be virtuously dead.40 The proliferation of paintings of sick, dead and sleeping white women locate an economic and racial privilege. In the nineteenth century, only

118

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

women of a certain class and race had the luxury of choosing not to eat or labour for purely aesthetic and ideological purposes. This indulgence was not extended to black women, still trapped within slavery or bound by colonial ideals of race. Thus, white bourgeois women represented passive sensuality that enabled the male gaze as it preserved female virtue and innocence for the white woman. The meanings produced served to perpetuate stereotypes of women as submissive and inactive in order to enforce control over women’s sexuality and thereby her value within kinship exchange and as reproducer. As Gill Saunders writes: [u]ncontrolled female sexuality is seen as bad because it threatens the foundation of male dominance (male ownership of women is even now enshrined in many of our laws and judicial attitudes), and so women have been consistently presented, in words and images, as innately passive.41 But at the same time, women’s passivity makes them susceptible to the male displacement of sexual guilt back onto female bodies because “their nakedness is regarded as a culpable incitement to male lust . . . ‘the woman tempted me.’”42 Thus, the sleeping motif serves three main purposes: the enabling of the voyeuristic male gaze, the preservation of white female sexuality as “innocent” and the displacement of male sexual guilt to the female source. Edgar Degas is famous for his use of environmental distractions, frequently used to frame his images of women within the domestic sphere. Degas’s women, busy at their toilette with bent heads and hair in face, are not responsible for the viewer’s gaze as they are unaware of its existence. This aversion, minimization or exclusion of the female face makes individuality impossible and thereby creates a generality that protects white female identity. It is in this way that the white woman could appear chaste, pure and devoid of sexual knowledge and intention while still allowing the male viewer sexual enjoyment of her body. Though Degas’s nudes depart from the traditional construction of contrived sexuality, debunking the academic nude, they actually reinforce the tradition of voyeurism. According to Saunders, Degas’ nudes: resist display, turn their backs, seem unaware of the possibility of observation, unlike the traditional nude who may close her eyes or turn her head but yet manage to display her body to advantage for the viewer to enjoy.43 The poses seem unposed, active and imperfect, often deleting breasts and genitalia as the traditional focus of the female nude. But this absorbed activity enables the voyeuristic gaze, making the viewer a spy privy to a woman’s private and personal acts. This elimination of traditional sites of female sexuality creates a feeling of detachment and invasiveness. The gaze is that of a viewer who cannot

Coloured Nude 119 quite gain total enjoyment from what is being seen. After all, a voyeur does not get the best seat in the house. The limited and distorting perspectives, created by the abridged access, performs an erasure or minimization of the white female sexuality represented. The traditional signs of female sexual availability are deleted, thereby preserving the sanctity and autonomy of the represented figure. The practice of depicting the white female nude as asleep or unaware has historically been coupled with allegory. The white female nude’s raison d’être within the realm of the beautiful was allegorical or mythological. Parker and Pollock demonstrate how: [i]n nineteenth-century Salon art the white female nude appeared in many guises, as nymph asleep in woodland glades, as Venus raised upon the waves, as shipwrecked and unconscious queen.44 (italics mine) These disguises kept representations of white women contained within the realm of art, releasing them from all sexual responsibility for the scopophiliac gaze of the male viewer. For it was not the specificity of a “real” woman that allowed the sexual gaze but Venus, a sea-nymph or another otherworldly creature deliberately removed from reality. Historically, women have been perceived as empty vessels to be fi lled up with male thought and fantasy in order to create what Warner has described as “iconic representations for veneration or emulation.”45 The female body, perceived as malleable, was to be invested with male desires. Because these images were iconic, their investment with sexually charged attributes was not problematic because an allegory is not a real woman but the embodiment of male fantasy. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, as one of the pioneers of the sexualized white female nude, used allegory to provide the male viewer of the early nineteenth century with the opportunity to indulge in the voyeuristic pleasure of the uncontested male sexual gaze. This was carefully constructed imagery that, according to Beatrice Farwell, remained strictly within the boundaries of propriety because: Ingres’ nude seems to somehow have submitted, in her defenseless nudity, to a superior will. The sin involved is not that of the maiden, but rather that of the fantasizing mind that stripped her.46

CONCLUSION: THE BLACK FEMALE BODY AS FETISH The black woman, already deemed sexually insatiable and pathologically deviant, needed no disguise to mediate her sexualization within the realm of the nude. Her disguise was the colour of her skin. “Blackness” as a marker of difference and inferiority released western artists from all obligations

120

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

to contain the sexuality, the Nature, of the black female in representation. Because black women were positioned within colonial discourse as the source of sexual pathology,47 it was not improper for the western artist to portray the undisguised black female body as soliciting the sexual gaze of the male viewer. Contrarily, any such image of the white female would have crossed out of fi ne arts and into the realm of pornography.48 The social contextualization of the subject determined what was considered obscene and for whom. For the black woman, highly sexualized representations in art were accepted as “truthful” depictions of an essential inferiority. The black female body in western art has been represented with a fetishizing vision. If the fetishized nude is “an extreme example of the female body distorted for male fantasy and gratification,”49 then the black female body in art is the ultimate example. The black female body defies the white male subject’s desire for a singular subject of “pure” origin in two ways: firstly, through a sexual “otherness” as woman, and, secondly, through a racial and colour “otherness” as black. It is the combined power of these two markers of social location that has enabled western artists to represent black women at the margins of societal boundaries of propriety. Thus, Canadian artist Dorothy Stevens’s Coloured Nude (c. 1933) is indicative of the simultaneous historical representation of black women as both nude and the naked: nude in its stereotypical generalization and naked in its unbound sublime sexualization. As has been demonstrated, there are some central differences in the construction of Dorothy Stevens’s Coloured Nude (c. 1933) that would, in the white female body, have been unacceptable. The entire body of the black woman has become a fetish; the represented black female body is not merely fetishized but fetish. In her double lack of male sex and white skin, the black woman is the quintessential “other.” Irremediably removed from the paradigm of white manhood or even the secondary categories of white womanhood or black manhood, her entire bodily presence is a constant reminder of her perceived lack and as such was manipulated to remove the supposed threat of her difference. It is in this way that the fetish can be perceived in the traditional Freudian sense as a lack of the phallus but also in the sense of a lack of similar skin/race/culture, within the concept of the colonial stereotype as fetish proposed by Homi K. Bhabha. The black woman in Coloured Nude (c. 1933) is a fetish, in that: [t]he fetish or stereotype gives access to an “identity” which is predicated . . . on mastery and defense, for it is a form of multiple and contradictory belief in its recognition of difference and disavowal of it . . . The scene of fetishism is also the scene of reaction and repetition of primal fantasy—the subject’s desire for a pure origin that is always threatened by its division.50

Coloured Nude 121 Representations of black women’s bodies in western art have produced and perpetuated the colonial ideals historically embodying the dichotomous standards created for white and black women. Although colonial stereotypes were developed simultaneously across all disciplinary boundaries in western thought and culture, it is art that has left what is perhaps the most naturalized evidence of the west’s deliberate construction of black people as essentially inferior. This naturalization has been effected through the “silence” of visual language, which within western art historical discourse has been romanticized as objective and universal. The nude and the naked, posited as universal art historical categories, are specific to class, race, sex, gender, age, sexual orientation and all other markers of social specificity. The black woman’s identity, deliberately represented as inferior within racist paradigms by white artists, cannot simply be read within the confi nes of an exclusive language developed by white scholars for the white female body. Rather, the legacy of the oppression and violation of black women due to the intersection of race and sex must be central in our reading. It is in this way, as Homi K. Bhabha argues, that: the point of intervention [will] shift from the identification of images as positive or negative, to an understanding of the process of subjectification made possible [and plausible] through stereotypical discourse.51 Art is a powerful social tool that conditions our vision of others and ourselves. Historically, western artists have used oppositional representations of black and white people to establish boundaries, mapping out territories for the self and the “other.” This chapter is an attempt to situate the manifestation of colonial discourse within visual processes as they were, and are to this day, active in the representation of black women.

7

The “Hottentot Venus” in Canada Modernism, Censorship and the Racial Limits of Female Sexuality

There is an indelible mark in my memories of my undergraduate education as a student of western Art History in Canada. If I had been given a penny for every time a professor had lectured on Edouard Manet’s Olympia (1863; Figure 7.1) only to refuse to discuss the conspicuous presence of the black maid, I would be quite a wealthy woman today. Noting the historical compulsion to erase her presence, Lorraine O’Grady has argued that: She is chaos that must be excised, and it is her excision that stabilizes the West’s construct of the female body, for the “femininity” of the white female body is ensured by assigning the not-white to a chaos safely removed from sight.1 My claim may seem like an extraordinary exaggeration, when art historical discursivity, especially its modernist permutations, 2 is scrutinized for its ability or willingness to accommodate race; however, my point as a comment on the dominating Eurocentrism of art historical disciplinarity becomes painfully clear. Modernism refers to a cultural movement and an historical moment but, more important for Art History, to a specific artistic practice generally designated by a dominating, often formalistic interest in issues of style and aesthetic concerns. Modernism, however, must be acknowledged as a specific art historical discourse that dictates the limits of art production and interpretation. Historically, western modernism has privileged painting above all other media and has further privileged aesthetic practices that reinforced and celebrated the two-dimensionality of painting. This explicit focus upon materiality has often elided social, historical and political issues from the discourse. The modernism of visual culture has also historically been the exclusive domain of white-male artistic production centered around notions of urbanity, voyeurism and bohemianism. Ironically, modernism’s obvious dependence upon the bodies of transgressive female subjects (often prostitutes or courtesans) and the appropriation of African, Native and Oceanic arts has only recently been given critical attention.

The “Hottentot Venus” in Canada

123

Figure 7.1 Edouard Manet, Olympia, 1863. Oil on canvas, 130 .5 x 190.0 cm. Photo: Hervé Lewandowski. Photo Credit: Réunion des Musée Nationaux, Paris/Art Resource, New York, USA. Musée D’Orsay, Paris, France.

Manet’s Olympia (1863) is not an arbitrary choice on my part.The utter disavowal of race as a valid issue of art historical inquiry is evidenced in T.J. Clark’s otherwise archivally exhaustive chapter on this painting, “Olympia’s Choice.”3 Clark’s social art historical analysis of the painting is fundamentally based upon class identity. Griselda Pollock has noted his unwillingness to deal with the obvious gender and sex issues that are latent within the painting.4 However, my concern is with his almost complete disregard for the racially “other” subject of the painting—the black maid who is clearly visible. For a student of Art History or the uninitiated, the uncontested value of this painting is indexed by the extent to which scholars of Art History need not identify it for their canonically indoctrinated audiences. As Pollock has warned: Canonical art history may be defi ned as a kind of border police, monitoring the visibility of which links, which borrowings, which genealogies are to be acknowledged, while others become aberrant, ignorant, incorrect or plain invisible.5 Although Manet’s name and the basic formalistic and stylistic concerns of the art object as a seminal painting that marked the celebrated

124

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

beginnings of western modernism need not be restated, I would argue that what has been consistently disavowed, and what needs now to be urgently examined and retrieved, is the body of the black female maid, her colonial context and the psycho-social constraints that have facilitated the erasure of her obvious presence and significance in the fi rst instance. Elaborating upon the focus of her book Negrophilia: Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s (2000) and its decidedly postcolonial methodology, Petrine Archer-Straw has written: I was aware that although art historians discussed black culture’s influence on the Parisian avant-garde there was no text that looked at the avant-garde’s motivations outside of artistic imperatives. Redressing this imbalance called for an examination of rarely considered tropes within European art history that reinforced negative stereotypes of blacks, especially in respect to primitivism. (italics mine)6 We need to ask what art historical discourse, especially its modernist permutations, makes possible and suppresses and through what logic and apparatus its borders are policed.7 In other words, we need to examine the historical suppression of issues of race, colour and colonialism within art historical discursivity, and create a space for postcolonial interventions within cultural practice and analysis. Just as feminist interventions have made it possible to discuss gender and sex issues within the context of patriarchy, a postcolonial intervention within Art History would privilege discussions of race, colour and culture within a colonial context. A postcolonial Art History also creates a space for the discussion of the production of Native, black, Asian and other traditionally marginalized artists. This intervention would also fundamentally take up representation as a process of identification and, therefore, position visual culture as colonial discourse, a site where racial identities are produced and deployed. Critical theory, especially feminist interventions, has provided clear and effective strategies for cultural transformation of the traditionally patriarchal disciplinarity of Art History.8 However, recent criticisms of white feminist practice have contested the extent to which the deployment of an essentializing category of Woman, coupled with the silence around race/ colour, have re-entrenched the colonial privilege of the white female body. Postcolonial scholarship, particularly its manifestations within Cultural Studies, is helping to provide theoretical and material structure for a racial intervention within Art History, one that acknowledges culture as a site of colonial discourse and, thus, a generative source of racialized identities and racism.9 Postcolonial scholarship has also informed the recent racial interventions within the overwhelmingly colonial discourses of anthropology,

The “Hottentot Venus” in Canada

125

ethnography and museology. Recent critical contributions to the study of culture have interrogated western colonial histories of exhibition and human display.10 Within the institutionalized museum practices of ethnographic display, human anatomical and skeletal remains often served as “primitivizing” markers of the racial identification of colonial subjects: evidence of the supposed evolutionary inferiority of colonized populations. Exceeding museum practices in their mass appeal to broad middleand lower-class populations, the more socially accessible spectacles of fairs, circuses and open-air exhibitions often replaced skeletal remains with the living bodies of colonized subjects.11 As Rosemary Wiss has argued, “European discourse on the perception of difference was partially informed by exhibits of indigenous people brought back to Europe by colonial scientists and entrepreneurs during the eighteenth and especially nineteenth centuries.”12 Colonial subjects framed within the Eurocentrically biased and artificially imposed boundaries of reconstructed and anthropologically “authentic,” “primitive” villages were made to perform their cultures and also, significantly, their races, for the entertainment of white audiences. The colonial practice of human display distanced the white observer, both literally and figuratively, from the primitivized bodies of colonial subjects. Safely behind the carefully demarcated boundaries of the exhibitions and fairgrounds, the space of the colonial “other” was clearly separated from the privileged space of the white viewer/“self.” The deliberately cultivated material and psychic distance was a part of the colonial apparatus that visually objectified the exhibited human subjects and racialized the bodies of the exhibited and spectators alike within colonial binaries.

COLONIAL EXHIBITION PRACTICES It is within the colonial space of the west that the “Hottentot Venus” emerged, an iconic sexual and racial identity that resulted from the transatlantic imperialist regimes of global colonization.The term Hottentot is present within nineteenth-century western human sciences as a name for a group of people or tribe and, sometimes, even for a distinct race. Whereas “Hottentots” were often considered a subcategory of the Negro/Negroid race, the nineteenth-century human scientist James Cowles Prichard went so far as to distinguish them as a separate and inferior race to Negroes.13 To append Venus to this term has both general implications in its referencing of ancient mythology and more specific implications in its referencing of nineteenth-century cultural and social ideals of female sexuality and beauty. Because Venus, who has most frequently in western art been represented as a white female subject, has widely been read as an idealization of female beauty, to affi x the term “Hottentot” is an ironic or cruelly “humorous”

126

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

gesture that substitutes a racially “othered” body—the grotesque—for the expected beautiful white female body. Saat-Jee/Saartje/Saartjie, or Sarah Baartman, as she was named by her Dutch owner/agent, was one of several South African women who were displayed naked throughout Europe for the sexual titillation of white audiences.14 It is important to note that although the legal status of these women as slaves is in dispute, the nature of their interaction and relationships as African women with European men during a colonial period where slavery and scientific racism were prolific makes it easy to assume at the very least a fundamentally inequitable and exploitative engagement based upon dominant ideals of racial and sex/gender difference. Taken from South Africa in 1810 by Hendrick Cezar (the brother of her Dutch “master”) and the Englishman Alexander Dunlop (a ship’s surgeon and trader in “museum specimens”)15 Saat-Jee was exhibited in London, toured throughout England and, fi nally, taken to Paris.16 The colonial regime that transfigured Saat-Jee into the “Hottentot Venus” relied upon the dissolution not only of her individuality, but also of her humanity because, as part of an animal act, Saat-Jee’s humanness was fundamentally questioned through her constant juxtaposition with animals.17 The “Hottentot Venus” was a colonial stereotype that attempted to homogenize representations of black female sexuality as “primitive” and pathological. Within the practices of colonial ethnographic exhibition, the living Saat-Jee was publicly displayed to curiosity seekers who were “amazed and affrighted by the sight of her naked body with its enlarged buttocks and elongated genital flap.”18 It is critically important to note that it was these corporeal signs, the buttocks and the flap, that were seized upon and reified as intrinsic signs of a deviant sexuality. As such, these signs of corporeal excess became fundamentally connected not only with blackness but also with the pornographic. It is the visibility of these signs and their legibility as racially specific that provoked the cultural censorship that I will discuss in detail below. Other “Hottentot” women suffered fates similar to that of Saat-Jee. As the entertainment at dinner parties of the social elite, their naked bodies became a sexual spectacle for the titillation and curiosity of white viewers. The sexual exploitation of black women within western exhibition practices worked to dichotomize the “Hottentot” body with the ideals of white bourgeois womanhood. This coerced public performance was an integral part of the racial and sexual othering of the black female body within the cultural imagination of the modern west. The sexual and racial objectification of “Hottentot” women was a matter of life and death. Besides being exhibited as scientific specimens, subhuman examples of racial and sexual difference, “Hottentot” women had autopsies performed on them by western scientists in a deliberate search for a source of pathology that would confi rm colonial theories of sexual and racial identity as biologically based and, thereby, fi xed and essential.19

The “Hottentot Venus” in Canada

127

Saat-Jee died in 1815 of an inflammation. Her body was subsequently autopsied by the revered comparative anatomist Cuvier and, post-dissection, ceded to the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, where its scientific efficacy as a racial and sexual specimen became institutionally sanctioned. The museum displayed her skeleton, genitalia and brain until 1974. Saat-Jee’s remains were fi nally repatriated 186 years after her death in Paris. Indigenous leaders of the Khoisan people, or “Bushmen” (widely believed to be the original inhabitants of the southern tip of Africa), heralded her repatriation as a symbolic act in the reclamation of Khoisan identity.

THE “HOTTENTOT VENUS” IN CANADA Although “Hottentot” women were never (to my knowledge) imported to Canada, the “Hottentot Venus” did make a significant appearance within early twentieth-century Canadian culture—an appearance that, despite the vast geographical distance between Canada and Europe, clearly indexes the prolific circulation and normalcy of colonial ideals of blackness and their saturation of western consciousness. The “Hottentot’s” representation and legibility in Canada is significant not only for the way this identifiably iconic anatomical type indexed racialized and sexualized conceptions of the body, but also for the way it speaks to the social and psychic constitution of difference within the colonial politics of identity. It is the hierarchization of racialized bodies and their cultural policing that must be interrogated if modernism’s investment in coloniality and, indeed, blackness is to be understood. Within a conservative cultural milieu, Canadians embraced censorship as a means of enforcing the arbitrary social boundaries of artistic production. However, this censorship was not universally applied. Rather, it was practiced within historically Eurocentric hierarchies that helped to racialize concepts of beauty and sexuality. In April 1927, Max Weber’s Contemplation (c. 1923) and Retirement (c. 1921; Figure 7.2) and Alexandre Archipenko’s The Bather (date unknown) were secretly removed from the walls of the International Exhibition of Modern Art hosted by the Art Gallery of Toronto. 20 To acknowledge this censorship as a racially motivated action within a colonial cultural framework calls for an understanding of the conservatism of early twentieth-century Canadian figure painting, the simultaneous politics of representation and censorship and the historical pathologization of blackness and black female sexuality. But because colonial stereotypes are not only polarized but also parasitic, we must hold these factors in tension with the white female body and its liminality—its proximity to the so-called primitiveness of the black body and the subsequent threat to white male identity. It is within this colonial matrix that the “Hottentot Venus” made an appearance within the Canadian cultural landscape.

128 Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

Figure 7.2 Max Weber, Retirement, 1921. Oil on canvas, 32 ¼ x 40 1/8 inches. Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts, USA. Acc. #1966.48. Gift of Mrs. Weber and her children, Maynard and Joy, Great Neck, New York, in memory of Max Weber.

ADHERENCE TO TRADITIONS In 1931 the Canadian artist and critic Bertram Brooker called the Canadian art community puritanical, and over fi fteen years later, the Montrealbased painter Louis Muhlstock deemed the lack of artistic freedom to be the result of an “excess of prudery.”21 Although these established Canadian artists were more directly concerned with the state of figure painting in Canada, their opinions appropriately surmised the conservative climate of Canadian artistic production in general. Early Canadian artists commonly emulated European models to validate their art within the youthful colony. However, this emulation did not extend itself to modern European trends. Rather, twentieth-century Canadian artists embraced established historical styles of recognized European artistic schools. This colonial dependence was fostered by art patronage and art education that celebrated and rewarded artists who patterned their work after canonized western art. The resulting lack of innovation was evidenced, to varying degrees, within the different genres of painting.22 This

The “Hottentot Venus” in Canada

129

traditionalism was partially maintained through the practice of museum censorship that was used to eliminate potentially offensive representations of the human (particularly female) body. Within this realm, the “offensive” paintings were usually those that broke from such traditional and idealized visions of the white female body as the nude. 23 The nude and the naked are two specific art historical terms that have most often been applied to representations of the female body in western art. The nude, which dominated French nineteenth-century academic tradition, has historically needed a raison d’être. Generally pandering to a heterosexual male gaze, it has been the more conventional of the two categories, and is associated with the Beautiful and “high art.” The naked is aligned with limitlessness, sexuality and impropriety, whereas the nude is often allegorical, or a body that is always already unclothed. The naked often points up the process of undressing, the social and biological body and, therefore, is generally aligned with the sublime and the pornographic. Lack of allegory, of contrived womanly innocence or of a natural landscape to encompass the body generally provoked controversy and, inevitably, censorship. As I have discussed in detail in Chapter 6 of this volume, paintings that represented naked, as opposed to nude, women were said to pose moral threats to the viewing public. Censorship was used in an effort to monitor and carefully delimit the boundaries of female sexuality. However, this practice was not arbitrary but directed specifically at representations of the white female body in an effort to protect the idealization of white womanhood through a policing of the arbitrary divide between art and pornography. Representations of the black female body in Canadian culture have historically received no such paternalistic concern. Overtly sexualized images of black women were condoned, even praised, whereas comparatively innocuous paintings of white women were actively censored. Within this colonial practice, the Canadian museum community was enforcing deterministic ideals of race and sexuality by participating in the construction and perpetuation of a Eurocentric womanhood. As such, black women were constituted as “other” by the white artistic community at the center. The Canadian museum community, whether sanctioning or censoring female nudes, participated in the construction of whiteness. As Ruth Frankenberg has illustrated: “whiteness refers to a set of locations that are historically, socially, politically, and culturally produced and, moreover, are intrinsically linked to unfolding relations of domination.”24 The paradigmatic nature of whiteness within colonial discourse provided, and continues to provide, a protection to white women not historically extended to black women. But within any dichotomous relationship there is an interdependence, and therefore, the identity of the white woman is constructed not only in her presence but in her absence; her “other”—that is, Black Woman. It is crucial, then, to examine not only what was representable at any given moment, but also what was beyond representation.

130 Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art CONTROVERSY, CENSORSHIP AND WHITE FEMALE NUDES IN CANADIAN PAINTINGS During the late 1920s and early 1930s, white female nudes regularly incited controversy and provoked censorship within the Canadian art milieu. Censorship was generally enacted under the guise of a “public service” imposed by museum officials, who, as the purveyors of an authoritarian knowledge, acted for the greater benefit and protection of the community. Serving two main agendas, the censorship of white female nudes functioned simultaneously to protect the museum audience from the social threat of pornography and to preserve the ideals of white womanhood and the defi nitions of femininity and sexuality at its core. Yet, censorship was not limited solely to Canadian artworks, but extended to artworks exhibited in Canada. Non-Canadian artists were targeted by censors during the fi rst Canadian exhibition of international modern art at the AGT. Three paintings of female nudes were removed from the International Exhibition of Modern Art: Max Weber’s Contemplation (c. 1923) and Retirement (c. 1921) and Alexandre Archipenko’s The Bather. The Société Anonyme, largely owing to the efforts of Katherine Dreier, assembled the exhibition, also known as the Brooklyn Exhibition, for its original site. As president of the society, Dreier was a vigorous supporter of modern art and had earlier founded the society with the assistance of Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray. According to Ruth Bohan: “[t]he Brooklyn Exhibition was both the largest and most comprehensive exhibition of modern art shown in this country [United States of America] in the 1920s and the Société Anonyme’s grandest achievement.”25 American audiences had been better prepared than their Canadian neighbours to consume these modern artworks. As Bohan has noted, the occurrence of several other exhibitions of modern art had laid the foundation for the International Exhibition. The Armory Show, the Forum Exhibition and several other smaller exhibitions of modern art held at Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue had injected modernism into the consciousness of the American audiences, even if those audiences had not yet been ready to embrace it. 26 Contrarily, the International Exhibition of Modern Art marked the fi rst direct exposure of Canadian audiences to the international modernism of twentieth-century artists. To all but those intimately acquainted with current European artistic trends, these modernist artworks, many of which had begun to embrace abstracting principles, would have seemed “alien” to the conservative Canadian audience. That the exhibition opened in Canada at all is due in large part to the diligent individual efforts of a Canadian familiar with artistic developments in the international art arena, Lawren Harris Sr. 27 After much determined negotiation with officials at the AGT, Lawren Harris’s relentless efforts resulted in the exhibition’s showing in Toronto. A successful Canadian artist and patron,

The “Hottentot Venus” in Canada

131

Lawren Harris’s nationalist ideology embraced modernist art as a vehicle for the articulation of a uniquely Canadian cultural identity. As a member of the Canadian Group of Seven, Harris’s painting, although considerably more conservative than that of his counterparts in the International Exhibition, reflected his belief in the need for Canadian artists to embrace the possibilities of modernism. Toronto was the fi nal venue for the International Exhibition. The show had opened at the Brooklyn Museum on 18 November 1926. From there, it had travelled to the Anderson Galleries, New York, and the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, before concluding its journey in Toronto. 28 The presence of the Weber and Archipenko nudes in the original AGT catalogue is evidence of the original intention to include the pieces and the hastiness of their withdrawal once in Toronto. According to a fi rst-hand account, the exhibition organizer, Dreier, had overseen the hanging of the exhibition, but upon returning to the gallery the same evening for the private opening, she found that works by Weber and Archipenko had been removed in the interim. 29 Although a local report noted that “the exclusion of these nudes may not be an instance of prudery,”30 another explanation located the nexus of sexual and racial motivations that had provoked their censorship. The report stated: “These that the censor has consigned to the coal regions are physical . . . They are readily identifiable as women . . . One of Weber’s nudes, ‘Contemplation’ might win a prize in a Hottentot beauty contest.”31 The reference to the Hottentot bodies as the catalyst for censorship situated the network of racialized anatomical codes that governed the representational practices of the body at this historical moment.

NEGROPHILIA AND MODERNISM: BLACK WOMAN AS SUBJECT Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, both Weber’s and Archipenko’s female nudes possessed the so-called fleshy, excessive, spectacular “Hottentot” anatomy described by this Canadian newspaper reporter. Both artists were active within European modernism, the undisputed capital of which was Paris, at a moment when les choses africaines dominated the consciousness of western cultural production. The colonial origins of modernism must be examined within the context of negrophilia, the social and cultural phenomenon of white fear/desire for the black body. Beyond recognizing negrophilia as a phenomenon through which blackness, as supposedly primitive, was revealed and celebrated, we must scrutinize it as a generative force and interrogate it as the very process through which African-ness and blackness were othered, and the white body/self located as “civilized,” beautiful, rational and intelligent. As Petrine Archer-Straw has commented upon the avant-garde cultural scene of 1920s Paris: “The negrophiles who fraternized with blacks

132

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

cultivated a shadowy world of nightclubs and bohemianism; their interests were in conflict with mainstream, ‘traditional’ values. ‘Blackness’ was a sign of their modernity.”32 James Clifford situates this modernist preoccupation with African art and peoples within a different framework of the colonial power structure that facilitated the appropriation and fetishization of the colonial subject as “other”: Picasso, Leger, Appollinaire, and many others came to recognize the elemental, “magical” power of African sculptures in a period of growing negrophilie, a context that would see the irruption onto the European scene of other evocative black figures: the jazzman, the boxer (Al Brown), the sauvage Josephine Baker. To tell the history of modernism’s recognition of African “art” in this broader context would raise ambiguous and disturbing questions about aesthetic appropriation and non-Western others, issues of race, gender, and power.33 Modernist practice, then, was as much about the west’s colonial fascination with African cultural production as it was the racist surveillance, representation and consumption of African bodies as “primitive” objects themselves. Early in his career, Max Weber spent three formative years in Paris, then the center of western artistic productivity. While studying at the Academie Julian, Weber became active in Parisienne contemporary life, socializing with other avant-garde artists, among them Henri Matisse, Robert Delaunay, Henri Rousseau and Pablo Picasso.34 The artistic community within which Weber circulated was full of young, white, male modernists who actively appropriated so-called primitive art forms, African and otherwise. It was within this context that Weber, as William Gerdts has noted, “[a]lso became acquainted with African Negro sculpture, then newly discovered and highly popular with young moderns in Paris.”35 Alexandre Archipenko’s experience with the “primitive” art of Africa parallels that of Max Weber’s. Arriving in Paris from Russia in 1908, Archipenko quickly became associated with the Parisienne artistic vanguard.36 By 1910 Archipenko was exhibiting with the Cubist painters at the Salon des Independents. Although Archipenko did not embrace all of the Cubist idioms, a kinship was forged through a mutual fascination with African art. The following year, Archipenko’s debt to the “primitive” was directly revealed in the title of his bronze sculpture Negro Dancer.37 The preoccupation of modern European artists with African art has been historically rationalized as a purely superficial interest based mainly upon formal aesthetic concerns. This narrow assessment has been perpetuated throughout art historical discourse, attributing the overwhelming influence of African art on twentieth-century western culture to a mere formal reactionism to dominant artistic styles. It is the Eurocentric exclusivity of art historical discourse and its inability to accommodate questions of race, colour and colonialism that have effectively suppressed the

The “Hottentot Venus” in Canada

133

colonial context of western modernism within the discipline. Contemporary art historians have continued to replicate these beliefs. According to Katherine Janszky Michaelson: In their search for alternatives to impressionism, painters and sculptors alike employed these “primitive” sources to arrive at the new vocabulary of clear massive forms that became the point of departure for cubism. With a new emphasis on formal and structural problems . . . subject matter began to lose the importance it had in the nineteenth century, as is demonstrated by the many generically titled works by Archipenko and others.38 This statement not only frames modernism as a superficial search for a new aesthetic vocabulary, it blatantly refuses the obvious colonial context of modernism’s preoccupation, appropriation and exploitation of African cultures and peoples. Weber, Archipenko and their contemporaries shared not only a fascination with African art and objects, but with African-ness and blackness as they had been defi ned in terms of white contact with “primitive” peoples of African descent. This fascination, fuelled by white male artists’ interaction with African art and their experiences with the “primitive” presence of black people (primarily as artistic performers in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Paris) was largely played out through representations of black women. That Weber and Archipenko were participants within this negrophilia reveals itself in their construction of the female body as “Hottentot.” Both Weber’s Contemplation (c. 1923) and Retirement (c. 1921) are compositions that incorporate several female forms represented with thick limbs, rounded stomachs, wide hips, heavy, circular breasts and large buttocks. Similarly, Archipenko’s female bathers of this period exhibit sturdy proportions and fleshy bodies that were categorically opposed to more traditional western notions of white female beauty. Weber clearly represented the “Hottentot” bodies of his women as white. Whereas the presence of the four nude male figures in Weber’s Retirement (c. 1921) may also be located as a source for the disturbing reception of this painting, the “Hottentot” anatomy of the women must be understood as a device that could mediate this otherwise unacceptable presence. The bodies of Weber’s women mark them as possessing a “primitive” black sexuality and, through this inscription, normalized the otherwise problematic presence of the men. Weber’s painting recalls Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863), whose representation of a naked white woman with two fully clothed white men can be read as a commentary on the role of class in the social construction of female sexuality within the social structures of nineteenth-century Paris. When Manet painted Déjeuner sur l’herbe, Paris was erupting with controversial debates about prostitution and the human “sciences” were actively engaged in a search for a visual vocabulary of the

134

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

body that would identify and fi x the body of the white prostitute as an essential site of sexual deviance. Class, then, as race, would be revealed as a predetermined physical marker of sexual behaviour and deviance. Manet’s juxtaposition of the black body of the maid with the white body of the prostitute in Olympia (1863) located the conflation of race and sexual deviance within the nineteenth-century discourses of female sexuality. As two separate bodies, the maid and the prostitute reflect two different sides of the same coin. They were both viewed as sexually deviant in an essential way that implicated their very biology. But whereas the white woman’s sexual deviance allowed for the possibility (however slim) of transcendence or redemption, the black woman, physically marked by the stain/colour (and other anatomical and physiognomical signs) of her racial difference, could never transcend her “primitive” sexuality. Part of the problem of Olympia’s reception was her elusiveness to class categorization, a commentary by Manet on the increased social confusion of prostitutes and “proper” women by men in Paris. The hysteria around the (in) visibility of the prostitute indexed concern for the spread of syphilis and its problematic and sexist alignment with the female bodies of prostitutes as opposed to the male bodies of their clients. But the cool reception of this painting must also be examined in terms of Manet’s rupturing the fantasy of the prostitute as Desire for a heterosexual male gaze. As I have discussed in Chapter 6, this was a fantasy dependent upon the subsumption of the economic exchange of money for sex, a fact revealed by the placement of Olympia’s hand securely over her genitals and the fi xing of her ambiguous gaze outward to the implied John whose position we (the viewer) now occupy. Through the proximity of the two bodies, Manet clearly referred to a significant trope within the annals of western figure painting through which a “black sexuality” was transferred onto the body of a white female subject, or the black female subject acted as a surface to reinforce the unquestioned beauty and racial superiority of the white female subject.39 As Deborah Willis and Carla Williams have described: Exotic but rarely exalted, the black female image frequently functioned as an iconographic device to illustrate some subject believed to be worthier of depiction, often a white female. When she appeared at all, she was a servant in the seraglio, a savage in the landscape, “Sarah” on the display stage, but always merely an adjunct.40 However, as I have mentioned in Chapter 6 of this volume, I would argue that part of the overwhelming critical rejection to Manet’s Olympia (1863) was based precisely upon its refusal to reinforce this colonial dichotomization of black and white female identity and sexuality. It was the white female body within Olympia (1863) that was read as naked, dirty, dead and sexually uncontrollable.41 Juxtaposed with the fully clothed demure

The “Hottentot Venus” in Canada

135

presence of the black maid, Manet effectively reversed and problematized the stereotypical racial positions to which these two bodies were generally assigned. The rejection of Weber and Archipenko at the AGT in Canada was based on a similar refusal—the destabilization of a presumed colonial racing of female sexuality. For Picasso, the bodies of the black woman and the white prostitute became conflated into a single iconic “Hottentot” anatomy in his drawing Olympia (1901), after the earlier painting.42 Unclothed on a bed, she is ready to service not one (as Manet’s Olympia implied) but two white men (one of them, arguably, Picasso himself). Black Woman, always already sexually promiscuous, uncontrollable and feral, is represented as a prostitute.43 The grave irony here is, of course, that within the colonial history of slavery, black women did not have the privilege of exchanging their sexuality for personal economic benefit because such an exchange was premised upon the legal and material ownership and control of one’s body. Disenfranchised by colonial legal discourse, black female slaves were property, and the rights to economic benefit from their labour and procreative capacities were invested with their white owners. The iconic stature of the “Hottentot” body as a marker of black sexual deviance and availability was evidenced in Matisse’s Blue Nude (Souvenir of Biskra) (1907), a work whose inspiration Archer-Straw traces to the artist’s North African trip the previous year.44 Although the artist chose non-flesh colours to represent the body of the female subject, the arbitrary nature of this selection is undermined by the geometric and Africanized mask-like face that refutes the otherwise indiscriminate palette by signifying a black body. The thick limbs and full circular breasts are accompanied by deliberately enlarged, overemphasized buttocks that manage to reveal themselves to the viewer despite the fact that this blue woman is positioned with her body frontally aligned with the viewer in a reclining pose. This is the same point at which Weber’s and Archipenko’s representations of women are inserted into the modernist dialogue. Unlike Manet’s Olympia (1863), with the separate bodies of the black and white women, or Picasso’s Olympia (1901), which still constitutes the represented female body as black, the works of Matisse, Weber and Archipenko share a moment in which the signification of race at the level of skin colour was unnecessary to establish the race of the represented body. The woman could be white, as in the images of Weber, or even blue, as with Matisse’s Blue Nude (Souvenir of Biskra), yet the viewer was able to read race into these bodies despite the ambivalence of skin. It is clear, then, that anatomical and physiognomical signs of the body were as important as colour in the identification of race. It is also clear that race was not only visual but also, crucially, what was visible when taken as a sign of what was beyond vision—because, regardless of skin colour, the “Hottentot” anatomy signaled that deep down within the body, in the biology and the “essence” of these women, they were all black. And blackness was not just a racial position, but also a sexual one.

136

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

CONCLUSION Weber’s and Archipenko’s representations of the “Hottentot” body locate the colonial fascination of western artists with blackness and Africanness, particularly as it has been manifested within representations of black women. By the twentieth century, the “Hottentot” body type was intimately connected with a western artistic consciousness that perceived black women as sexual “primitives.” The iconic nature of the Hottentot body provided a concrete visual language for this perception, which could then be constituted in a specific, representable, physical body. The censorship of Max Weber’s and Alexandre Archipenko’s female nudes from the International Exhibition of Modern Art at the AGT was a reaction that perpetuated the dichotomous perception of black and white female sexuality within colonial discourse. The representation of the “Hottentot” body type of itself was not enough to seal the fate of Weber’s and Archipenko’s fi nal subjects. The represented female bodies were offensive not because they depicted the so-called anatomical irregularity of the “Hottentot” anatomy but because they dared to construct this body for women who were not defi nitively identifiable as black. This ambiguity recalled the Freudian preoccupation with white women as the “weak evolutionary link” and their constant danger of backsliding into the “primitive” state of black sexuality, a threat that a patriarchal logic registered mainly in terms of the inevitable danger to the white male body. Although idealized as the paradigm of beauty and sexual purity, within the phallocentric west, the impossibility of female sexual difference as anything but lack led to white women’s precarious and liminal position, which was further destabilized by associations with the “primitive.” Within Freudian psychoanalysis, white female sexuality has been located as a site of “primitive” fear/desire. The inscription of female sexuality as danger has aligned white female sexuality with colonial representations of blackness. Accordingly, white women were seen as the most immediate threat to the imagined “purity” of white men and the heterosocial sanctity of western civilization. It is the liminality of the female body that Weber and Archipenko works recalled, breaching the racialized standards of social propriety as they marked the tenuous boundaries between art and pornography. The Weber and Archipenko works, in representing the iconic “Hottentot” body, recalled the “primitive” site of black sexuality. But also, as white or racially unfi xed bodies, they recalled the instability of white female sexuality and threatened the idealization of white womanhood. Whereas the marks and assigned meanings of the “Hottentot” body seemed essentially appropriate for the representation of “black sexuality,” when applied to the white female subject they became foreign, offensive, potentially pornographic and worthy of cultural policing.

Part IV

From White Marble to Coloured Stone Aesthetics, Materiality and Degrees of Blackness

8

White Marble, Black Bodies and the Fear of the Invisible Negro Signifying Blackness in Mid-NineteenthCentury Neoclassical Sculpture

Writing in 1945 about nineteenth-century neoclassical themes, the American art historian Albert Gardner observed: There was certainly a discernable preoccupation with chains, shackles, and slaves which found expression in American sculpture . . . In any case this concern with chains amounted to almost a national mania.1 Although uncritical and devoid of context, what Gardner had aptly recognized was the significance and indeed centrality of the slave as a subject of representation within the thematic and narrative possibilities of an art form contextualized by coloniality: Trans Atlantic Slavery, the American Civil War and American Reconstruction. The and in Gardner’s “chains, shackles and slaves” is, however, slightly misleading because it connotes three distinct categories. Rather, the preoccupation he described was with the shackling and chaining of the slave body—a slave body that was partially legible due to the very same implements of torture and restraint. Shackles and chains were readily identifiable as the social and symbolic markers of the slave subject and as such did not merely represent the physical restraint, containment and oppression of the commodified body, but were themselves legible signs of a slave status and a part of the process of commodification. In citing the slave body as a popular subject of representation, Gardner was locating race as a critical term of identification within the colonial west of the nineteenth century. 2 Yet, whereas Gardner left the slave body unsexed, I would argue that the slave subjects with whom nineteenth-century neoclassicists were most preoccupied were female. Within the colonial logic of the nineteenth century exemplified by Trans Atlantic Slavery, race was a critical and unavoidable term of identification. The discursive and material practices of the “peculiar institution” reveal the signification of blackness as an inextricable component of the identification of the slave body.3 In my examination of black female subjectivity, I am seeking to retrieve the specificity of racial identifications and their inseparability from the signification of sex/gender within the context of nineteenth-century neoclassical sculpture. In so doing I am interrogating

140

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

the material and aesthetic processes by which race was represented within visual culture and the symbolic positions to which racialized bodies were assigned. The material and aesthetic specificity that I will consider are neoclassicism’s essential deference to white marble and the representational and narrative limits of the black female subject within the colonial practice of nineteenth-century visual culture in the west. When a sculptural medium is fundamentally white, how is blackness signified within a colonial visual register historically reliant upon the legibility of skin colour? And what was the purpose and function of this aesthetic disavowal, the suppression of black skin and inevitably the black body?

BECOMING SUBJECT: THE BODY, REPRESENTATION AND IDENTITY The idea of becoming describes the process of the body’s materializations and identifications that are unstable and unfixed. Becoming as a concept that indicates a transformation necessarily implicates time that has the power of invisibility while simultaneously rendering that which it encompasses visible.4 Judith Butler has argued that “identifications are never simply or definitely made or achieved; they are constituted, contested, and negotiated.”5 Rather than a theory of the body that locates an a priori identity, I am defining representation as the very ground in which identities are fabricated and made possible, the place where identity occurs and the subject becomes. The cultural term of representation is not merely a means of reproducing in visual language a body that is always already locked into a particular network of identifications. Rather, representation is a visual process that must be confronted as part of the body’s materialization, a cultural field wherein the process of differentiation takes place, signification occurs and symbolic identifications are assigned and maintained. The visual processes of representing the body are acts of differentiation that delineate the surfaces and boundaries of the body through acts of selective inclusion and exclusion. Often ambivalent, they create hegemonic identifications within dialectical relationships. Butler again guides me in her questioning: “What is excluded from the body for the body’s boundary to form? And how does that exclusion haunt that boundary as an internal ghost of sorts . . . To what extent is the body surface the dissimulated effect of loss?”6 It is these moments of ambivalence, when the represented body cannot be fully reconciled with its assigned symbolic position, that the political, social and cultural investments of identity are revealed. My project is the location of these absences and ghosts, or what Stuart Hall has called “what is left outside,” following the traces of what is disavowed and what is strenuously affirmed.7 It is the excavation of these sites of rupture or slippage, caused by ceaseless movement and negotiations, wherein such conflations cannot sustain themselves but reveal their discursivity and the structures of their materialization.8

White Marble, Black Bodies and the Fear of the Invisible Negro

141

RACE AND NEOCLASSICAL SCULPTURE The significance of a discussion of the politics of racial identification within nineteenth-century neoclassical sculpture must be understood in terms of an overwhelming narrative intention that Joy Kasson has defi ned as “art for morality’s sake.”9 But it must also be reconciled with the prolific influence of scientific racism. The material and aesthetic processes of sculpture and its investment in the notion of the ideal body were inherently well suited to the colonial practices of the human sciences, providing representational validation (in three-dimensional solidity) of stereotypes of racial difference.10 The nineteenth century’s stylistic dependence upon classical sculpture, broadly termed neoclassicism, located the privileging of the white body as the aesthetic paradigm of beauty. Quite simply, the term classical was not neutral, but a racialized term that activated the marginalization of blackness as its antithesis. The currency of abolitionist and pro-slavery discourses within nineteenth-century popular culture contributed to the growing visibility of the black female subject. However, the parallel inclusion of the black subject into the exclusive canon of western sculpture was not, in itself, democratizing. I contend that the specificities of aesthetic and material practice, as well as thematic, narrative, compositional and expressive choices, allowed for the continual deployment of an abject black subject. In short, not just the field of sculpture, but the practice of western art generally was colonial— this shift in the visibility of the black female subject could not, of itself, constitute a change in ideology. I wish to explore the racial identifications of the black female subject within nineteenth-century neoclassical sculpture informed by the specificity of material and aesthetic practices that disavowed racial difference through the privileging of whiteness. Within a nineteenth-century colonial order that privileged a white male viewing and producing body, white racial anxiety over the potential contact with the “other” body of the black subject—an anxiety that was visualized within sculptures that refused to signify blackness—recalled instead a miscegenated, white-Negro body that both alleviated and embodied the fears of interracial contact.

WHY WHITE MARBLE? Neoclassical sculpture is often readily identifiable not only for its obvious appropriation of a classical visual vocabulary, but also for its adherence to the stark whiteness of its marble medium. Therefore, with neoclassical sculpture, we must contend with a style that is not only identifiable through a distinct visual language, but that is also determined by a decided preference for a certain type and colour of material. This is not merely a case of the refusal of colour but the deliberate preference for and validation of

142

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

whiteness as the aesthetic choice that would result in a desired symbolic result, which had everything to do with contemporary racialized ideals of beauty and the body. Noting the neoclassical preference for white marble, Edward E. Hale contemplated the logic behind this aesthetic choice and its alternatives: The real question, then, is this: If next week, in some new quarry at Seravezza or in Rutland, a vein of marble more flesh-like in color should be found than any used to-day, would not every artist gladly use it in his busts of living men and women? If not, why do we not work in black marble or green? We work in white, because that is the nearest approach we have to the color of the human flesh.11 It is critical to note that Hale used “human flesh” interchangeably with white flesh, effectively disavowing racial difference and a spectrum of skincolour possibilities. When human flesh is white flesh, is not a pinkish- or yellowish-hued marble naturally more desirable? Not necessarily. The answer to Hale’s question was not as straightforward as one might have assumed. Frankly, it was not at all obvious to the neoclassical sculptor that a more “flesh-tinged” marble would have been preferable to their canonical stark white medium. And further, Hale’s comments demonstrated his ignorance of polychromy, the contemporaneous material practice that employed the green and black marble he assumed useless. Unlike other forms of sculpture or types of art, the medium of white marble was itself inherent to the practice of nineteenth-century neoclassical sculpture. The deliberate whiteness of the marble medium was not of arbitrary significance. Rather, it functioned to mediate the representation of the racialized body in ways that preserved a moral imperative. During the midnineteenth century, notable neoclassical sculptors, their patrons and critics openly rejected the aesthetic possibilities of applied and material polychromy as an overly sensual and decorative distraction that detracted from the “true” intention and purpose of sculpture—purity and form. As I will discuss in further detail later, neoclassicists were particularly wary of polychromy’s usefulness for female subjects and its efficacy for representing skin, which, alive and fleshly instead of abstracted and white, was often cited for its supposed provocation of inappropriate visceral and sexual reactions from male viewers. The exclusivity of marble indexed the desire to reclaim the ancient aesthetic forms and materials of the Greeks and it also located the deliberate appropriation of ancient knowledge and culture that were mapped onto modern nations seeking to manifest political and cultural cohesion. Marble’s symbolic value incorporated material and commercial attributes yet superseded any mere monetary value that could be assigned to the stone. Rather, the symbolic imperative of marble was also sexual and racial. White marble guarded against the threat of flesh, and flesh must be recognized not only as sexual or sexualized, but as the locus of colour/complexion and a fundamental means of racial identification. White marble held a distinct

White Marble, Black Bodies and the Fear of the Invisible Negro

143

regulatory function. In psychoanalytical terms, marble was not incidental but critical to the process of representation because it facilitated the fetishization of the body, representing it in a moral guise legible as art. But as Parveen Adams has stated, fetishization is not merely a regulation of the body, it is the regulation of difference.12

THE CASE OF COLOUR: JOHN GIBSON’S TINTED VENUS Although the knowledge was suppressed by Winckelmann and rejected by other eighteenth-century scholars, nineteenth-century neoclassical sculptors were certainly aware that the marble prototypes of their ancient predecessors were at one time suffused with coloured pigment.13 Therefore, their rigid deployment of marble, which was almost exclusively faithful to the original whiteness of the medium, located a conscious ideological choice.14 Neoclassical anxiety about colour is evident in documentation about applied and material polychromy.15 I shall discuss both in the following. Writing from Rome in December 1868, Anne Brewster commented on neoclassicism’s restrictions upon the pigmentation of marble: Painted statues are repulsive to the modern eye and taste. Gibson’s tinted one in the Philadelphia Academy is a ghastly thing, and it seems impossible for us moderns to accept this practice of the ancients.16 The ghastly thing to which Brewster refers is John Gibson’s Tinted Venus (c. 1851–1856; Figure 8.1), which was exhibited at the International Exhibition at London (1862) and again at the Crystal Palace at Sydenham (1862) in a coloured pavilion designed by the architect Owen Jones.17 Gibson’s subtle tinting of his marble Venus, achieved through the combination of hot wax and paint, recalled the flesh colour of the white body, enacting a sexualization in its palpable shift towards a “real” female body that disturbed many viewers.18 An anonymous critic writing in the Art Journal (1862) commented, “This attempt at too palpable fl esh not only destroys the very essence of the sculptor’s art, but violates the delicacy that attaches to pure material.”19 Similarly, after viewing Gibson’s nude in his studio, the American tourist Samuel Young Jr. commented matter-of-factly, “Coloring has been used on and about the Venus, which is a blemish.”20 The neoclassical desire for whiteness became a method for purging sensualism (associated with all other colours) from the marble and assuring a morally sound object—the representation of the nude as opposed to the naked body. 21 But it was also a means of achieving a level of abstraction of form that denied the specificity of biological or social detail. Although Gibson’s Tinted Venus (c. 1851–1856) was problematic for many nineteenth-century viewers, he did receive some support. Writing in 1861, Edward E. Hale provided, although hesitantly, an alternative viewpoint when he described Gibson’s tinting of marble as a process that

144

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

Figure 8.1 John Gibson, Tinted Venus, c. 1851–1856. Polychromed marble, 175 cm. © National Museums Liverpool (Walker Art Gallery), United Kingdom.

White Marble, Black Bodies and the Fear of the Invisible Negro

145

achieved “a glow as from a warm sunset . . . making the marble seem warm instead of cold.”22 He further explained the difference in sensorial experience in the face of the uncoloured and the tinted marble: You have seen “Venus” in plaster: you see her now in marble, uncolored. The figure is exquisite, and you think you are satisfied; when a curtain is drawn, and you see her sister, alive and not dead, triumphant with her gold apple, instead of shivering in affected triumph; because she is ruddy and warm and not cold and blue.23 Significantly, the term “ruddy” was often deployed in the nineteenth century to describe the complexion of interracial bodies (the children of black and white sexual unions), a point to which I will return later. In Hale’s observation, the ruddiness of the marble provided the representation of skin colour and the illusion of life, which he saw as the triumph not the shame of the sculptural representation. In his Art-Hints (1855), 24 the American art critic James Jackson Jarves wrote explicitly about the use of colour in nude sculpture: Much doubt exists as to the propriety of rendering the nude figure . . . its chief claim is upon the intellect; add color, however, and upon the universal principle of nature in its use, feeling is at once touched . . . A gilt or a bronze statue arouses no emotion beyond intellectual admiration; any artificial employment of color such as tinting marble, strikes the mind disagreeably as falsification of the material without any adequate motive . . . I believe for sculpture itself, as confi ned to the human figure, that the intellectual pleasure diminishes in the degree that pure white is departed from as its material. Does any one fi nd other pleasure in the artistic freaks of the classical ages, and the imitations of the Renaissance in the shape of blackamoors, draperies, and occasionally separate features, rendered by the natural colors of their stone-material, than in the ingenuity of these combinations?25 Jarves’s statement is worth dissection. First and again whiteness is not accorded the value of a colour but is situated as a universal category—the absence of colour. Whereas Edward Hale had assumed that the neoclassical dominance of white marble was a matter of material availability rather than ideological choice, Jarves’s championing of neoclassical whiteness was not based upon similar misinformation. Jarves’s knowledge of material polychromy was likely gained through contemporaneous works like the French sculptor Charles-Henri-Joseph Cordier’s Nègre du Soudan ou Nègre en costume algérien (1856–1857; Figure 8.2).26 Also perfectly aware of the classical and Renaissance traditions of polychromy that he labeled “artistic freaks,” Jarves’s use of the term “blackamoors” at once registered and marginalized the expanded possibilities for racial signification that polychromy provided. In the end, his insistence upon the whiteness of marble in

146

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

Figure 8.2 Charles Cordier, Nègre du Soudan ou Nègre en costume algérien or African of the Sudan or African in Algerian Costume, 1856–1857. Marble, onyx, bronze and Vosges prophyry. 76 x 66 x 36 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France. Photo: Arnaudet. Photo Credit: Réunion des Musée Nationaux, Paris/Art Resource, New York, USA.

White Marble, Black Bodies and the Fear of the Invisible Negro

147

sculptural practice is also a Eurocentric insistence upon the universality of the white body as the aesthetic paradigm of beauty. Just as the privileged signifier of the phallus is not the penis and is therefore irrevocably bound to the penis, whiteness, the privileged signifier of race/colour, is not wholly interchangeable with white skin but is dependent upon and bound to the racialization of whiteness. The whiteness of the marble, as deployed within nineteenth-century neoclassical canons, did not directly represent Caucasian skin colour but stood in for that which could not be signified, the too palpable fl esh of Gibson’s Venus. But in as much as it signified that which it displaced—flesh—it privileged the European race/ colour as the source of the signification and disavowed the possibility of “other” race/colour significations at the level of skin. Just as the Freudian concept of castration masks the reality of sexual difference, the symbolic privilege of neoclassical whiteness masks the possibility of racial difference. 27 Gibson’s illusion of flesh had dislodged the strident whiteness of the marble and toppled its disavowal of racial difference, for in producing the effect of the white body/skin, the “other” body/skin of the black subject was also obviously possible.

THE CASE OF SUBJECT MATTER: DISAVOWAL AND HIRAM POWERS’S GREEK SLAVE Neoclassicism’s loyalty to white marble undoubtedly registered the colonial disavowal of racial difference, which points up critical tensions around the persistence of American slavery in the face of international abolitionist activism and the so-called problem of miscegenation. But racial disavowal was also performed at the level of subject and narrative. The American Hiram Powers’s tremendously successful Greek Slave (1869; Figure 8.3) indexed the prolific disavowal of the bodies of black female slaves. Between the summer of 1842 and the fall of 1869, Hiram Powers completed at least six known versions of the sculpture entitled Greek Slave (1869). 28 Inverting the racial identifications of colonizer– colonized, slave–master, the success of Powers’s sculpture hinged upon the narration of a chaste white female sexuality under imminent threat of violation by a black (Arab) sexuality. 29 Although Powers’s sculpture was co-opted by abolitionists as a clear anti-slavery statement, in choosing to represent a Greek woman enslaved by the Turkish during the Greek War of Independence (1821–1830), Powers effectively disavowed the specificity and immediacy of American slavery and the black female slaves on which it depended. 30 When talk of the Greek Slave’s (1869) relevance to American slavery occurred, only rarely was the black female slave cited. Rather, abolitionist sympathy generally actualized around concern for the octoroon female slave. An article in the Christian Inquirer was explicit:

148 Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

Figure 8.3 Hiram Powers, Greek Slave, 1869. Marble, 167.6 x 50.2 x 46.7 cm. Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York. Gift of Charles F. Bound (55.14).

White Marble, Black Bodies and the Fear of the Invisible Negro

149

Let no one keep down the natural promptings of his indignation by the notion of woolly heads and black skins. Let him rather read the advertisements of these sales . . . Let him not shut his eyes and his heart to the fact, that many who meet this fate are the daughters of white men, daughters brought up in luxury, and taught to expect fortune. Let him not ignore the fact that white skins, fair hair, delicate beauty, often enhance the market value of his country women thus exposed for sale. 31 The possibility of an emotional response in favour of the rejection of slavery is here clearly stated along precise racial lines. The abject bodies of Negro slaves with their “woolly heads and black skins” were seen as a deterrent to an abolitionist reading of the sculpture. Instead, the dominantly white viewing audience of Powers’s Greek Slave (1869) was urged to read the slave body as white or at least interracial. It was through the identification of whiteNegroes, the “daughters of white men” whose bodies bore the symbolic signs of white female identity—“white skins, fair hair, delicate beauty”—that the anti-slavery message of the Greek Slave (1869) was most widely deployed.32

DEGREES OF BLACKNESS A colonial racial terminology deeply invested in an obsessive quantification of race—here blackness—was central to nineteenth-century discourses of the body. The term “octoroon” was used to signify a person who was oneeighth black. The terms “quadroon” and “mulatto” indicated people who were one-quarter and one-half black, respectively. The fact that a person who was seven-eighths white and only one-eighth black would be rejected from the racial identification of whiteness demonstrates the extent to which blackness was viewed as a pathology that could corrupt the imagined purity of the white body. However, inasmuch as the body of the octoroon represented an aesthetically acceptable “black” body, it was also a transgressive site because, as Karen Sánchez-Eppler has noted: The quadroon’s one-fourth blackness represents two generations of miscegenating intercourse, the octoroon’s three—their numerical names attesting to society’s desire to keep track of ever less visible black ancestry even at the cost of counting the generations of institutionalized sexual exploitation.33 The female octoroon and her interracial counterparts were popularized as tragic heroines within mid-nineteenth-century American abolitionist fiction.34 The octoroon elicited sympathy because for all intents and purposes she was identifiable as white—or at least not readily visible as black. Traces of her Negro ancestry were often detectable in a “ruddy” complexion (effectively disavowed by white marble statuary) or her “too wavy or

150

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

curly” hair. But her otherwise white physiognomy allowed her to conform to Eurocentric paradigms of beauty and hence western aesthetic norms; simultaneously, her blackness provided the justification for a more limitless sexual (dis)ordering of the female body.35 Unlike Hiram Powers, several nineteenth-century sculptors engaged with the subject of the interracial body directly, as opposed to the circumspect route of cloaking the black subject in a white aesthetic acceptability. In 1861 the American sculptor John Rogers Jr. began production on what he envisioned as a career-defi ning life-size sculpture entitled The Flight of the Octoroon (c. 1861).36 Although never completed, Rogers’s immense aspirations for the work were explicitly documented in his desire that his sculpture be “what the Greek Slave was to [Hiram] Powers.”37 Whereas the representation of black subjects would become standard for Rogers, the attempt at a life-size, marble sculpture was indeed ambitious for the artist who had made his name on the sale of mass-marketed, small-scale plasters like his The Slave Auction (1859). As Rogers himself described in a letter to his mother, his choice of this specific interracial, black female type allowed for representational possibilities that neither a strictly white nor black female subject could have enabled: It represents a mother with her child in her arms who is just checking her flight to listen for pursuit. It will be very lightly draped which will give me a good opportunity for modeling form and with the great interest which slavery is exciting and the amount of expression and spirit I can put into the figure I feel every confidence in its success. You know an octoroon can have perfectly classical features and the only distinguishing mark will be a very pretty waviness to the hair.38 On the eve of the Civil War, Rogers clearly saw an opportunity to capitalize upon the prolific American and indeed international interest in the subjects of slavery. Rogers’s choice of an interracial female subject allowed him to exploit the physicality, sexuality and expressive qualities of his sculpture in ways that were not possible for a strictly white female body. The most obvious implications of racial preference and colonial desire in Rogers’s statement was his matter-of-fact revelation that the octoroon subject, despite her blackness, allowed him to create a female body that could be read as the “Beautiful,” the only explicit signifier of racial “otherness”—the abject black female body—being her “pretty waviness of hair.” However, it is within this knowledge of the interracial subject’s increasingly (in)visible blackness that the threat of miscegenation reoccurs and the colonial logic of racial identification is betrayed. As Karen Sánchez-Eppler has argued: miscegenation and the children it produces stand as a bodily challenge to conventions of reading the body, thus simultaneously insisting that the body is a sign of identity and undermining the assurance with which that sign can be read.39

White Marble, Black Bodies and the Fear of the Invisible Negro

151

Another example of white artists’ engagement with this theme was the British sculptor John Bell’s Octoroon (c. 1868), a full-scale marble figure of a standing female nude. Exhibited at the Royal Academy, London, in 1868, Bell’s white-Negro slave possesses the classical white beauty and “pretty waviness of hair” that John Rogers had intended for his unfi nished marble.40 But her racial difference is also registered in her large bosom and wide hips, the voluptuous and womanly body, which makes Powers’s female slave seem comparatively girlish and asexual.41 The strong narrative context of Powers’s Greek Slave (1869) was also not achieved. The identity of the octoroon was unclear, as was that of her enslaver and the nature of her enslavement. Unlike Powers’s white female slave, whose fidelity and morality were confi rmed by her locket and cross, she was devoid of the symbolic trappings of proper womanhood. Instead, her voluptuous body and the phallic exploitation of her unbound hair simultaneously identified her with and displaced her from the racial paradigm of whiteness. The (im)possibility of the black female body was such that the figure of the octoroon or interracial black woman became almost synonymous with the black woman within nineteenth-century American neoclassical sculpture. Not so for the black male body. John Quincy Adams Ward’s The Freedman (1863; Figure 8.4) clearly articulated a so-called full-blooded Negro physiognomy registered in the full lips, broad nose and “kinky” hair of the seated male figure. A striking example of the representational (im)possibilities and differences between the black male and female bodies was created in Edmonia Lewis’s Forever Free (1867). The standing male’s “kinky” hair and broad nose are absent from the kneeling woman with classicized facial features and unbound, relatively straight hair. The problems that sculptors faced in signifying race for the black female body was explicitly revealed in Anne Whitney’s struggles to race the body of her allegorical Africa (c. 1863–1864). In an attempt to represent an “appropriate” level of blackness, Whitney reworked the face of her black female subject several times, receiving criticism from her friend, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, for her avoidance of an explicitly black type.42 So, Whitney’s Africa (c. 1863–1864) was considered by some to be too white. But such criticism was rare within the colonial practice of nineteenth-century neoclassical sculpture. William Wetmore Story’s Libyan Sibyl (1861), a companion to his infamous Cleopatra (1869; Figure 8.5), was intended as an ideal representation of the black female abolitionist orator, Sojourner Truth.43 Story’s sculptural choices register two disavowals. Firstly, at the level of subject, Story’s rejection of a portrait in lieu of an allegorical figure begs questions of the ability of the heroic black female subject to be incorporated into neoclassical sculpture. Secondly, Story’s statement that he took as his racial model “Libyan African of course, not Congo” locates preferable types of blackness—the blackness that was most mixed with or associated through geographical proximity with whiteness—and the rejection of the so-called full-blooded Negro type, here identified explicitly with sub-Saharan Africa.44 Story’s

152

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

Figure 8.4 John Quincy Adams Ward, The Freedman, 1863. Bronze/metal, 49.8 cm. Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, USA. Gift of Alice Keys Hollister and Mary Eva Keys. Photo: Walsh, 1999. Accession #1921.502. .

White Marble, Black Bodies and the Fear of the Invisible Negro

153

Figure 8.5 William Wetmore Story, Cleopatra, 1869. Marble, 141 x 84.5 x 130.8 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA. Gift of John Taylor Johnston, 1888. Photo: Jerry L. Thompson. Image copyright: The Metropolitan Museum of Art/ Art Resource, New York, USA.

154

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

Cleopatra, displayed at the International Exhibition of 1862 at London, was also exuberantly received as a black queen, her body shifting between identifications of Nubian and Egyptian, allowing for an animalization of her sexuality and the repeated citations of corporeal excess.45

RACING THE BLACK FEMALE SUBJECT The difficulties artists faced in racing the black female body were largely attached to two main issues determined by the nineteenth-century “scientific” rejection of the black body: beauty and sexuality. As such, when the socalled full-blooded Negro female was allowed to be made visible, the context or theme of the sculpture called for a marginalized or abject female subject. I will close my discussion with an analysis of two very different works that are united in their representation of a legible so-called full-blooded Negro type. Whereas the blackness of the female subject in the first work was facilitated by the more unconventional representational limits of nineteenth-century print media and the diversity of the cross-class audiences who consumed it, the second example should draw our attention to the significance of the subjectivity of the artist and the issue of how their national and geographical specificity informs the racial limits of the subjects they represent. Published in the January–June 1851 edition of Punch, or the London Charivari, John Tenniel’s The Virginian Slave: Intended as a Companion to Power’s “Greek Slave” (c. 1851; Figure 8.6) disrupted the white audience’s ability to displace their colonial fear/desire of “other” bodies and reconcile a colonial gaze.46 Tenniel replaced Powers’s safely white female slave with a woeful black female one, stripped to the waist, her lower half covered in a tattered-looking skirt, hair bound in a headwrap and hands and feet shackled with more than decorative chains. Beside the slave, the phallic pillar once draped with discarded garments, cross and locket, was now wrapped poignantly in the American (and Union) flag (rejected by the eleven southern states that had seceded, forming the Confederacy during the Civil War). The flag was an impotent symbol of democracy and her pedestal was decorated with a succession of whips and chains above the now ironic slogan e pluribus unum (from many, one).47 In a subsequent edition, Punch imagined “Sambo” (the stereotype of an emasculated black male slave) responding to Powers’s white female slave: But though you am a lubly gal, I say you no correct; You not at all de kind ob slave a nigger would expect; you never di no workee wid such hands and feet as dose; You different from SUSANNAH, dere,—you not like coals black ROSE. Dere’s not a mark dat I see ob de cow-hide on your back; No slave hab skin so smooth as yourn—dat is, if slavee black.48

White Marble, Black Bodies and the Fear of the Invisible Negro

155

Figure 8.6 John Tenniel, The Virginian Slave: Intended as a Companion to Power’s “Greek Slave,” c. 1851. Engraving published in Punch, or the London Charivari (January–June 1851), 236. The John Rylands University Library of Manchester, Deansgate, Manchester, United Kingdom.

156

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

Hence, the poignancy and for some the “humour” of Punch’s ever so Negro Virginian Slave (1851) resided in the painful clarity of her racial difference from the comparatively delicate, leisured and asexual body of Powers’s white female slave. As the poet recognized, the body of the white female slave did not bear signs of slavery. It was not muscled from physical labour. It had not been branded by an “owner.” It did not bear the violent marks of the whip. Rather, as Kirk Savage has noted, the white female slave body still retained her religious, racial and class identifications and had not undergone the “social death,” the (de)/(re)identification of the slave body of which Orlando Patterson has written.49 In comparison, the black female slave was quite simply beyond the symbolic order, outside the limits of what was representable within the canons of western so-called “high art” practice. The black female slave of America and the diaspora was the (im) possible subject, the no-body of neoclassical sculpture, or at least, sculpture whose intention was to rally moral indignation or symbolize Beauty. It was, however, possible to deploy the body of the black female slave to other uses—mainly the abject racial body via social/economic disenfranchisement, noted earlier, or titillation and sexual spectacle. The Italian sculptor Giacomo Ginotti’s L’emancipazione dalla schiavitu (1877) exemplified this latter potential. The pose, composition, expression, context and narrative of this obviously black female slave stood in immediate contrast to the works by his American contemporaries. Ginotti clearly identified a so-called full-blooded Negro type by signifying deeply curled hair that escaped from the headwrap and identifiably black facial features. Like Bell’s Octoroon (c. 1868), Ginotti’s slave is largely devoid of the elaborate narrative context that facilitated and legitimized the nudity of white female subjects like Powers’s Greek Slave (1869). The black female body, defi ned by large globular breasts and full hips and buttocks, anatomically surpassed the voluptuousness and, therefore, sexual readiness even of Bell’s Octoroon. The ironically shackled wrists of Ginotti’s “emancipated” slave provided an excuse to represent her sexualized writhing and ministrations, which provoke an eroticized and illicit pose wherein her breasts are forced together and upwards, accentuated rather than concealed by the pendant cross that falls across her chest grazing her nipple, and the string of jewels wrapped about her upper left arm, which is juxtaposed with the left breast.50 The orgiastic movements of the black slave’s body also locate action, resistance and passion, all attributes that were oppositional to the patriarchal ordering of the white female body. As one male reviewer commented, “the blood rebels in her veins.”51 In lieu of the desire that supposedly chaste white marble nudes could engender in nineteenth-century viewers, it is not surprising that Ginotti’s black female slave also provoked inappropriate sexual feelings in its viewers—feelings associated with the pornographic. The same male author wrote of his desire that “the marble was a live woman,”52 presumably so that he could engage in some sort of sexual interaction with her.

White Marble, Black Bodies and the Fear of the Invisible Negro

157

CONCLUSION Nineteenth-century neoclassical sculpture was deeply invested in the racial differencing of the body. Neoclassicism’s fealty to white marble points up a disavowal of the black subject that was also actively enforced through limits of subjectivity. Within a colonial order, a black female subject, represented outside of the simultaneous marginalizations of race and sex, was a threat to the racial privilege of the white body and may not have been legible at all. Instead, the dominance of the interracial female body, a liminal site that simultaneously placated white anxiety and thwarted white denial of miscegenation, should alert us to the deep ambivalence of racial identifications because, of course, this white-Negro body was not possible at all without the interracial contact and violence that the white mind most feared and denied.

9

Vénus Africaine Race, Beauty and African-ness

Charles-Henri-Joseph Cordier, the French sculptor famous for his polychrome works, spent several years in Africa in the mid-nineteenth century on a state mission that had everything to do with colonial ideals of race and the possibility of their preservation as art—an exploration of art’s ethnographic potential. Although produced prior to his 1854–1856 trip, Cordier’s Vénus Africaine (1851; Figure 9.1) exemplifies the types of works he would go on to create, sculptures themselves that were types of racialized (and significantly) colonized peoples presumed to be on the verge of extinction or at least amalgamation, precipitated by miscegenation.1 With an awareness of his art as an ethnographic and therefore arguably scientific tool, Cordier’s Vénus Africaine (1851) is interesting in part for what the title promises yet fails to deliver; a failure that in this instance may signal the possibility of meanings that transcended the narrow colonial understandings of black femaleness in nineteenth-century France.

THE BLACK FEMALE SUBJECT IN WESTERN ART As I have discussed throughout this book, the black female subject has a strained relationship to the history of western visual art; frequently represented, yet often represented as an abject sexual and racial body, the polar opposite of the idealized white female subject. When considering art produced after the European colonization of Africa and the constitution of Trans Atlantic Slavery, we are dealing with aesthetic and material traditions that were invested in the racialization of bodies and bound up with the prolific hierarchization of race and the concomitant idealization of whiteness found elsewhere in fields like medicine and the human sciences. One major difference between these fields and the visual arts is the arts’ deep commitment to ideals of Beauty. Within the logic of patriarchal societies wherein men stood for rationality and the mind, women came to stand for irrationality and the body. The association of women with the body in western thought also served to align women with the Beautiful, a domain fit for male heterosexual fulfillment

Vénus Africaine 159

Figure 9.1 Charles-Henry-Joseph Cordier, French, African Venus, 1851. Bronze and gold, 15 9/16 X 8 in (39.5 x 20.3 cm). Photo © The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, USA.

160

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

and intellectual contemplation. However, beauty in western thought has been understood, often solely, as white female Beauty. Once race became not just supposed biological reality but visible corporeal fact, these notions of white Beauty, hand in hand with white superiority generally, served to expel black bodies from the possibility of aesthetic wholeness. Very few white scholars and artists of the nineteenth century recognized cultural relativity in the same manner as the artist William Hogarth, who, as Partha Mitter observes, although using blacks as “the other and witness to the depravity in English society that he wished to expose through his engravings,”2 nonetheless conceded that “the Negro who fi nds great beauty in the black Females of his country, may fi nd as much deformity in the European beauty as we see in theirs.”3 The endemic marginalization of black women in the colonial west means that black female subjects in art must be understood within the material, aesthetic and thematic limitations imposed upon them, and the nineteenthcentury occupies a specific historical context. The far-reaching European practice of Trans Atlantic Slavery extending to settler colonies such as Canada and slave havens in the Caribbean and elsewhere renders essential the consideration of slavery, abolitionism and emancipation. Put simply, black female and male subjects frequently entered western art through themes involving the representation of enslaved or free blacks. Black women were grieving or distraught slave mothers, kneeling or beseeching slaves or asexualized mammies, rather than noble mythological creatures or queenly allegories. The Black Venus or African Venus then is a true puzzle: a revered western mythological figure, the goddess of love, with definite connotations of Beauty and Antiquity, yet African/black and, therefore, by the racial definitions of western colonialism, antithetical to all that was thought beautiful. A nineteenth-century Venus requires both an understanding of ancient mythology and its understanding within modernity. As Caroline Arscott and Katie Scott argue: Classical gods are not so much metaphors, in early modern and modern culture, as signs of metaphoricity itself. This is doubly so in the case of Venus because she is aligned, through a notion of beauty, with art, and perhaps because she is aligned, through a notion of sexual congress, with reproduction.4 Venus in the nineteenth-century west marks a meeting of pagan mythology and European Christian morality. Venus was the embodiment of the Beautiful, but a “true” beauty beyond the reach of mortal decay. However, she was simultaneously understood as arbitrary, cruel, wily and deceptive.5 Venus was thus a precarious artistic subject, simultaneously providing a raison d’être for the female nude and licensing sexual desire through unintellectual contemplation of the female body. Venus was a potential moral trap. As Arscott and Scott have argued:

Vénus Africaine 161 The Venus motif in early modern and modern art cannot help but maintain a reference to these classical artefacts, even when there is not a forceful visual resemblance. This strongly marked cultural authority of the Venuses produces a curious situation in which it is impossible to deploy Venus as a subject like any other subject for art because the objectness of these classical sculptures intrudes.6 Objectness is particularly important to an exploration of Charles Cordier’s Vénus Africaine (1851) because of its distinct aesthetic and material properties as a polychrome sculpture, at a moment in the nineteenth century when white marble neoclassical sculptures were an equal if not stronger artistic force in European culture. Race, as it was materialized within polychromy for a black female subject, must be addressed together with the issues of sexuality and love implicit in the ideal of Venus. As Arscott and Scott relate, “Venus is a goddess after all and her powers cannot be resisted by the mere will of mortals. The fantasy is of irresistible, engulfi ng effect that sets asceticism and self-denial aside.”7

BLACK FEMINISM AND THE FEMALE NUDE/NAKED But what happens when such sexual promise and physical desire is located in a black body? Black feminisms depend upon an understanding of intersectionality and identity; that is, one’s sex/gender position is inextricable from one’s race/colour position.8 So to explore the ramifications of a Black Venus is not just to explore a shift in race/colour, but rather to acknowledge that any shift in the racial location of any body (not just marginalized bodies), provokes new readings and meanings for the sex and gender identification of that body. Patriarchal and colonial discourses of the body and sexuality, which dictated the paternalistic protection of the white female as the mother of the supposedly superior white race, also ensured that white female subjects were allocated to the realm of the nude, representing the “higher” moral ideal; the space where the unclothed body could legitimately be consumed through supposedly exclusive intellectual contemplation. As I discussed at length in Chapter 6 of this volume, the category of the naked was much more problematic. Rather than a traditional allegorical or mythical figure such as Venus, the naked female subject was often the specific individual, the “real” identifiable woman, whose body conveyed social, historical and biological specificity. Her lack of clothing was precisely that, a very transgressive lack, as opposed to the supposedly natural, always already unclothed state of the nude subject. As discussed in Chapter 6 of this volume, forms of sexual disguise were a mainstay of the representation of white female subjects as nude. They included the sleeping or dying woman; voyeurism, often delivered to the viewer by way of environmental distraction within

162

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

the artwork in the form of the female at her toilette; allegory, i.e., Venus, nymphs; and nature, the female body as metaphor for nature. The last and most overlooked category is race, in this case blackness. These elaborate representational strategies were fundamentally a means of externalizing the sexual gaze, expelling it from the idealized body and imagined soul of the white female subject and projecting responsibility for sexual desire onto the implied male heterosexual viewer. A Venus or seanymph was permitted a higher degree of sexualization precisely because she was not a “real” woman. But such conventions are strikingly absent from the examples of nude/naked black female subjects found throughout the history of western art, precisely because of black women’s abject sexual and racial positions. This multiple marginalization ensured that black women were defi ned as sexually different from white women, a difference identified as a licentiousness; excessive, pathological sexuality. Already positioned outside “normal” sexuality coded as white, black women were seen as needing no such protection or device to mediate their sexualization in art. A Black Venus thus becomes an interesting category that must be discussed in relation not only to the specific allegory and its myths and the history of the nude in western art, but also to dominant colonial ideals of race that prevailed at the time of production and reception.

BLACK/AFRICAN VENUS Ironically, some of the more dubious character traits traditionally assigned to the mythological white female subject seem all too fitting properties ascribed to the black female subject. T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting’s compelling observations on the representation of black women in French culture may usefully extend to other fields: “In his desire to illumine the dark continent of black femaleness, of racial and sexual alterity, the French male writer constructs an image that is captured in at least one particular and predominant narrative: Black Venus.”9 Black Venus was created in the collective colonial imagination by reference to primitive narratives that positioned black women as racial and sexual “others.” She is a site of competing and contradictory experience and sensation, provoking fear and desire, attraction and repulsion, and thereby registering the experience of anxiety.10 The Black Venus is “attractive” to white men precisely because of her racial difference, which is experienced as sexual “otherness” and danger. Yet, simultaneously, this cultivated difference threatens the stability and ideality of the white (male) body. To understand this paradox, we must recognize that pleasure is not neatly aligned with desire as absence of danger and maintenance of physical integrity, but that colonial pleasure, as structured through the mastering gaze/pen of the white (male) body, lies in the possibility of chaos, the splitting of the subject and the titillation that danger through proximity to the black body provokes. Thus, as Sharpley-Whiting argues:

Vénus Africaine 163 The Black Venus narrative is part of the larger discourse of Africanism in general, and French Africanism in particular. Sexual and racial differences inspire acute fears in the French male psyche. Fear is sublimated or screened through desire to master or know this difference, resulting in the production of eroticized/exoticized narratives of truths.11 Venus’s potential for sexual transgression is that which marries so well with her incarnations as black in the western imagination. Cordier’s Venus could join the ranks of Saartjie (Sarah) Baartman (best known by the racist moniker “Hottentot Venus” discussed in Chapter 7 of this volume), arguably an example of the worst of the inhuman mistreatment of black people within colonial exhibition practices,12 and Josephine Baker, the AfricanAmerican entertainer and star of Parisian café-concerts in the 1920s and 1930s.13 Each in her own moment was a black woman whose sexual otherness was cultivated and exploited by whites for white pleasure and titillation.14 And yet they were real women and Cordier’s Vénus Africaine (1851), although derived in part from the contemplation of individual African women, was an art object.

CONTEMPLATING AFRICA Hitherto, I have written as if the terms African and black were interchangeable. Yet the assumption is potentially problematic: Africa is and was in the nineteenth century a continent with diverse groups of people. The efforts of European philosophical and scientific thought to categorize these groups were part of the colonial process that paradoxically resulted in their homogenization as “African” even while the same system strove to document heterogeneity. The diversity of Africa’s populations was also a conundrum for the western imagination because colonial discourse sought to define racial types in part through geographical location. Europe was the home of the supposed Caucasoid race, Asia that of the Mongoloid, Africa of the Negroid and so forth. However, the visible differences between Northern and Southern Africans, not to mention other distinctions, called for explanation. Egypt—which Cordier visited in 1866, producing busts of “Arabs,” “Abyssinians” and fellahin—proved a particular problem for western human sciences.15 Within the colonial order of imperial geographies, Egypt represented either the pre-eminent African civilization or, to the die-hard Eurocentrist, the only African civilization, a belief manifested in allegorical representations of “Africa” that depended on symbolic and cultural reference to Egypt and a white-Negro body.16 Egypt’s geographical and racial proximity to western whiteness gave its people a privileged racial position that sometimes led to their categorization as Caucasoid rather than Negroid; Cleopatra’s Egyptian-ness, for example, held the possibility of a racially hybrid body at once a marginal site of whiteness and a superior form of blackness.

164 Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art Throughout the nineteenth century, western exploration and classification of blackness and African-ness were conducted in terms of degrees of colour and proximity to whiteness, so that physical and geographical distance from Europe came to stand for moral, intellectual, sexual and colour distance. Through those bodies whose colour, physiognomies and anatomies were seen as most divergent from the white ideal, Europe constituted its “other” as African and black. The visual arts were an essential element in the normalization of colonial ideals of blackness.

WHITENESS ONLY: NEOCLASSICISM VERSUS POLYCHROMY At this same historical moment, as I have discussed in Chapter 8 of this volume, the marble medium of neoclassical sculpture had been elevated to an ideal. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s description of witnessing the transfer of sculptures from plaster to marble at the deceased sculptor Thomas Crawford’s Roman studio captured the spiritual and moral implications of marble’s symbolic value: It is rather sad to think that Crawford died before he could see his ideas in the marble, where they gleam with so pure and celestial a light as compared with the plaster. There is as much difference as between flesh and spirit.17 Hawthorne’s distinction between the spirit and the flesh points up the regulatory function of marble, which he saw as embodying the power to transform the biological human body—flesh—into a work of art with moral merit— spirit; or rather, the denial of the flesh in lieu of the celebration of the spirit. As Édouard Papet has argued, “The discovery of antique polychrome architecture and sculpture launched one of the nineteenth-century’s most controversial debates on esthetics.”18 In actuality, ancient polychromy was not a “discovery” of the nineteenth century, but known to scholars in the previous century, like Wincklemann and others, who suppressed or rejected this knowledge. Since the eighteenth century, the French Academy had viewed colour as a seductive distraction, a mere simulation of the “real” that impeded the so-called beauty, grace, purity and nobility of white neoclassical sculptural form.19 The issue was not only that of colour but also illusion and integrity of material practice. The painter Thomas Cole complained that “of late [1847]: painters are but an inferior grade of artists. This exaltation of sculpture above painting, which in this country has prevailed, is unjust, and has never been acknowledged in the past.”20 Hence, the second-class status of painting, which, in its use of colour and perspectival systems that transformed flat canvas into three-dimensional space, was seen as untruthful in opposition to the supposed “truth” that could be represented in marble’s tangible and

Vénus Africaine 165 voluminous whiteness. 21 The elimination of colour, except for whiteness, became a method for purging sensualism from the marble and assuring a morally sound object. So as sculpture was pitted against painting, so too was neoclassicism pitted again polychromy. James Jackson Jarves’s elevation of neoclassicism at the expense of polychromy in his Art-Hints, Architecture, Sculpture and Painting (1855) was, as I discussed in Chapter 8 of this volume, a means of idealizing and universalizing the white body/subject. Through it he maligned the efficacy and quality of historical works, his reference to “blackamoors,” as well as the contemporaneous practice of Charles-Henri-Joseph Cordier’s material polychromy in works like Nègre du Soudan ou Nègre en costume algérien (1856–1857). Cordier notably produced polychromed representations of black subjects under a French government commission at mid-century. 22 Combining marble, onyx and bronze, works like his Nègre du Soudan ou Nègre en costume algérien (1856–1857) were intended for the new ethnographic gallery in the Musée national d’Histoire naturelle in Paris. Unlike the supposedly strict aesthetic pursuits of neoclassical sculpture, the sculpture of artist-ethnographers functioned in the nineteenth century like the ethnographic photographs, which were soon to replace them. They stood for objective representations of bodies that were consumed as scientific evidence of the racial difference and inferiority of “other” cultures and peoples, thereby supporting European colonization. In the manner of an ethnographer, Cordier’s physical proximity to his subjects served to validate his “findings” in the field. Travelling to France’s North African colonies on a grant of one thousand francs, his task was to portray racial “types” through the amalgamation of individuals into composites—an aim confi rmed by the ethnic, racial and cultural generalizations of the sometimes interchangeable titles attached to his sculptures.23 Based upon racial essentialism, the project identified the acceleration of racial hybridity within colonialism as a threat to so-called pure racial types that artist-ethnographers needed to capture. Like his human scientist counterparts, and more than the fi ne artist, the artist-ethnographer worked within a colonial process dependant upon the white gaze as an “objective” tool of visual scrutiny. Cordier’s ethno-aesthetic was anti-neoclassical in its media, which, through the use of coloured materials, signified racial difference at the level of skin. However, his work raises questions about his desire to represent “pure” racial types rather than individual portraits, and to what extent his practice was similar to the ideal works of neoclassicism and their investment in racial differencing.

RACING SEX The competing discourses of neoclassicism and polychrome polarized the aesthetic possibilities of representing human subjects as a particular racial

166

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

group and offered opposing ideals of how race could be visualized in art. Whereas the neoclassical preference for white marble left only physiognomy, anatomy and real or implied context open to sculptors, polychromists like Cordier implemented all of these tools as well as the added and arguably most immediate signifier of skin colour/complexion. But these aesthetic practices have racial and sexual implications. Put simply, the racing of bodies has profound implications for the sexualization of bodies. Or, the sexualization of bodies (how sex and sexuality are signified) impacts the racialization of the body, how race is made visible and legible. The Black Venus is an interesting category precisely because it defied the dominant historical western logic of female beauty as white. It is not incidental that the majority of neoclassical marble bodies sculpted were female because the idea that the white female body represented the pinnacle of aesthetic beauty was widely accepted. According to Jarves: Female loveliness is the most fascinating type of humanity. In it we have the highest development of form and color as united in beauty. The lines of the perfect human form are the most beautiful in their graceful curvatures that Nature produces. So of color. No hue of the animal or vegetable kingdom rivals the tints with which the charms of woman glow . . . The Art that can make us feel the smoothness and elasticity of the female skin, its clear, translucent surface, not lustrous but tender from its delicate mingling of white and pale warm red, subdued by the nicest gradations of the purest and most pearly greys into sense-captivating loveliness, is scarcely of earthly mould.24 This is of course white female loveliness that, in the context of nineteenthcentury colonial discourse, was one and the same as female loveliness. The translucent, delicate, clear flesh that he describes is no doubt the skin of the white female body (and a particular subset) that the white marble was used to represent. The marble’s moral efficacy helped to mediate the representation of potentially transgressive—sexually and racially—female subjects and specifically, their representation as the nude, a form that has traditionally required a raison d’être to establish its cultural legitimacy and secure its moral function. The Black Venus is by implication a paradox because the black female stood as antithetical to the paradigmatic colonial ideal of Beauty as both white and female.

CORDIER’S BLACK VENUS There is evidence that Cordier valued what the human sciences could offer sculpture. In a lecture entitled “Representing Different Ethnic Types in Sculpture” given in 1862 before the Society of Anthropology, Paris, he elaborated upon his process of obtaining physiognomical measurements

Vénus Africaine 167 aimed at representing “the position of each feature, each depression, every landmark, and so on for all the lines, for all the contours, down to the most delicate crevice and protrusion.”25 Although the black populations of Paris and France appear to have been quite small throughout most of the nineteenth century, Cordier, unlike many of his contemporaries, gained direct access to other races through a government-funded trip to Africa. 26 With his government grant, awarded so that he could study indigenous types, Cordier travelled to Algeria where he stayed from April to October 1856.27 However, because Cordier’s Vénus Africaine (1851) was completed before he travelled to Africa, it appears he had to rely upon access to a black female model living in Paris at the time. Vénus Africaine (1851) was produced after Cordier, at the age of twentyone, had sculpted “a superb Sudanese” from Darfur who came into the studio of François Rude, under whom Cordier studied. 28 After completing the sculpture in two weeks and casting it in bronze, it was exhibited at the Salon of 1850 under the deliberately more exotic title choice of Nègre de Tombouctou (1848). 29 Honour, too, has noted that Cordier’s decision to shift the location of his Sudanese man from Darfur to Tombouctou also signaled a move away from what the sculpture was, to what it was commissioned to be: the transformation from portrait to ethnographic type.30 It is significant that Venus and the earlier work, seen as a couple, were state purchases and, more so, that they were intended for the ethnographic gallery of the Musée national d’Histoire naturelle in Paris to sit amongst a collection of skulls, 31 according to de Margerie, at the Jardin des Plantes. 32 A bronze pair was also purchased by the English royal family and the busts were displayed at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851.33 Cordier’s Venus seems at fi rst a confl icted work, its inconsistencies expressed in part in its oppositional possession and display histories; at once as racial type made to stand in for blackness in ethnographic collections and simultaneously a decorative, artistic object in wealthy and aristocratic European households. 34 Yet, was she not called upon to function in the same colonial racialized vein in both cases, whether purportedly for scientific or aesthetic contemplation? Cordier’s Venus is remarkably un-Venus-like. For one thing, she is not a nude or even a naked. As a sculptural bust, represented from the waist up, she defies the promise of Venus, typically a completely unveiled body, and is instead covered demurely with patterned cloth, draped elegantly about her chest; the secure fastening does not even allude to the potential revelation of flesh, unlike so many representations of falling drapery, designed to titillate. As a clothed figure, she is a precursor of the demure black maid in Manet’s Olympia (1863) (which I have discussed at length in Chapter 7 of this volume) juxtaposed with the acrid nakedness of the white female prostitute. Moreover, Vénus’s downcast eyes in a tilted head capture an intelligently introspective expression. The curve of her lips and nose registers a black African as opposed to any so-called racially mixed physiognomy, as do

168

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

the fabulous dense curls of her hair, arranged in tight neat coils/locks. It is hard to think of this woman as anything but a portrait. Her specificity seems not to signal a (stereo)type, but an individual, recognizable and legible to those who would have known her. But however portrait-like Cordier’s subjects appear, their reception and his own self-described sculptural process suggest a conscious method of selection and assemblage, reliant upon his own ideas of “common characteristics” and “individual variation,” to produce a general type “in which all the beauties of the race . . . are combined.”35 Like Pygmalion, 36 Cordier worked from many models towards an ideal type, which then took on the form of an individual. The problem here is that as a white Frenchman, his ideal of beauty in other races (as his idea of representativeness) would have of course been influenced by the ideals of beauty in his own. In correspondence with government ministers between 1854 and 1856, Cordier’s forthcoming trip to Africa was billed as an artistic mission of the highest order, which would result in thirteen durable objects (sculptures) of importance to both the arts and sciences.37 Within the colonial discourses of the time there was considerable fear of miscegenation and its effects, one of which was presumed to be the end of discrete races. Although Cordier escaped the dominant commitment to the ideas of racial hierarchy and white superiority, he did express his mission in Algeria as the process of sculpting racial human types that were on the verge of blending together.38 Of course this “blending together,” or the miscegenation that Europeans so feared, was precisely the result of their colonial drive, bringing together different peoples within hierarchically racialized relationships and institutions including slavery. The same colonial drive simultaneously and ironically sought to document and preserve the “original” racial types that colonialism itself was “destroying.” Fundamentally, the fear of miscegenation was also a fear of annihilation of racial difference and, most frighteningly for whites, their supposed distinctiveness and superiority. Such a fear of miscegenation was often aligned with fear of degeneration; of the white race of course.

CONCLUSION Although the colonial ideologies that underpinned and lead to the funding of his travel called for representation of “others” in opposition to European whiteness, Cordier’s sculptures frequently defied the belief in a singular beauty, attainable only by Europeans. He saw his practices as creating new value in sculpture through a study of races that could widen the ideals of beauty by locating them outside of solely European origins.39 Remarkably, he seems to have possessed an idea of cultural relativity quite ahead of his time. Arguing for the universality of beauty rather than its exclusiveness to whites, Cordier told the superintendent of the Imperial Museums that:

Vénus Africaine 169 The most beautiful Negro is not the one who looks most like us, nor the one who presents the most pronounced characteristics associated with his race. It is the individual in who[m] are united such forms and traits, and a face that reflects with harmony and balance the essential moral and intellectual character of the Ethiopian race.40 This is a remarkable statement for the nineteenth century because it was directly opposed to the most pervasive and socially accepted scientific and scholarly thought of its time. Nevertheless, although Cordier’s search for beauty in other races had anti-colonial and anti-slavery aspects, seen explicitly in his Aimez-vous les uns les autres or Fraternité (1867), he also at times expressed the dominant belief in a hierarchy of beauty with the white subject on top.41 And whereas his attitudes were relatively progressive, both the impetus and resulting sculptures undeniably contributed to the colonial ideologies of race that so dominated his century. And yet, Cordier’s African Vénus seems oddly a testament more of things that would come than of his own age. There is a dignity to Vénus Africaine (1851) missing from the sculptures of black female subjects of many of his contemporaries, whether polychromists or neoclassicists. There is a specificity that belies the allegorical name and offers instead the possibility of a portrait. There is a selfness that defies the desire to reduce her to ethnographic specimen. And yet, sadly, that was precisely how the work functioned for so many. Nevertheless, it appears that Cordier’s African Vénus, distinct from the colonial mould of black female stereotypes, may have been Venus in name only.

10 Allegory, Race and the Four Continents Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s Les quatre parties du monde soutenant la sphere céleste

Often imagined as a grouping of three or four, the allegorization of continents through the representation of female subjects became an ever more appealing and central mode of global representation as European nations increased their imperial possession through the violent acquisition of new territories. The four continents—Africa, Asia, Europe and America—went hand in hand with the idea of woman as nature, literalizing the symbolic representation of woman as territory and allowing for an aesthetic exploration of the female body as both beautiful and sublime. Within colonial ideals of racial classification, the beautiful was most often reserved for Europe as a white woman and sometimes for a sisterly America, if rendered as a woman of European descent.1 Asia and Africa were displaced from the white paradigm of beauty and civilization, and America, when depicted as a Native woman, also joined this marginalized sisterhood. This allegory then was a geographical one that through compositional and aesthetic distinctions reproduced colonial ideals of race within essentialized hierarchies through a supposed accurate representation of the types of (wo)mankind that inhabited the four corners of the earth. By the nineteenth century, the allegory of the four continents was an ubiquitous imperial trope deployed within painting, sculpture, as architectural motifs, ceramics, print culture and other forms of art and visual culture. Readily recognizable, it functioned dominantly as a celebration of European imperial expansionism while affording the white viewer the pleasurable experience of seeing the colonized “other” and of seeing themselves as culturally and aesthetically superior to the populations they were colonizing. But not all artists adhered to the expected racial hierarchies of the theme. In what follows, I examine Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s Les quatre parties du monde soutenant la sphere céleste (1874; Figure 10.1) as an example of a breach of this very tradition; one that points up issues of racial classification and legibility. But perhaps the most poignant lesson to be gathered from Carpeaux’s non-traditional four continents is the price artists paid

Allegory, Race and the Four Continents

171

Figure 10.1 Jean-Baptistse Carpeaux, Les quatre parties du monde soutenant la sphere céleste or The Four Corners of the World Holding a Celestial Sphere, 1874. Bronze. Fountain of the Observatory, Jardin du Luxembourg, Paris, France. Photo Credit: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, New York, USA.

for non-adherence; a price coded within art criticism as an intensification of the colonial abjection of the black female subject and the “blackening” of her sisters.

NEGRESSES AND SAVAGES Writing in La Liberté in 1872 the art critic Paul de Saint-Victoire made a cryptic comment about a proposed civic sculpture. Of the four female subjects represented in the work, he stated that they were “neither man, nor woman, all negresses.”2 I wish to start by deciphering de Saint-Victoire’s obviously racial comment in order to propose implications for what was at

172

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

Figure 10.2 Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Les quatre parties du monde soutenant la sphere céleste or The Four Corners of the World Holding a Celestial Sphere, detail, c. 1867. Plaster model, 280 x 177 x 145 cm. Musée D’Orsay, Paris, France. Photo: Hervé Lewandowski. Photo Credit: Réunion des Musée Nationaux, Paris/Art Resource, New York, USA.

stake in the representation of racial identity within the field of nineteenthcentury western sculpture. The focus of this blatantly racist criticism was the French sculptor JeanBaptiste Carpeaux’s Les quatre parties du monde soutenant la sphere céleste (1874), which represented four unclothed female subjects supporting a globe, symbolizing the earth, above their heads. His last major decorative commission, the sculpture was conceived and completed between 1867 and 1874 as the centerpiece of a fountain for the Luxembourg Gardens near the observatory in Paris.3 It is in the shadow of the scandalous reception of his earlier modernist work, La Danse (1865–1869), that Carpeaux revealed his plans for Les quatre parties du monde (1874) at the Paris Salon of 1872.4 Significantly, Paul de Saint-Victoire’s criticism indexed his perception of racial uniformity in Carpeaux’s four female subjects, a uniformity that, through the term “Negresses,” he described as blackness. Contrary to de Saint-Victoire’s assertion of racial sameness, I would argue that Carpeaux’s

Allegory, Race and the Four Continents

173

monumental sculpture was an interpretation of the long-standing allegorical theme of the four continents and, operating within the visual requirements of this allegorical formula, the artist had taken great pains to represent four racially distinct women: African, Asian, (Native) American and European. So the question becomes: how did Carpeaux represent racial difference and why was it illegible to de Saint-Victoire? Paul Mantz’s criticism of Carpeaux’s Les quatre parties du monde (1874) and bust of Jean-Léon Gérôme, both displayed at the 1872 Paris Salon, also reveals difficulties with the physicality of Carpeaux’s allegorical nudes: We arrive at the picturesque sculptors, at the pure decorators, at the archaeologists, but who knows in what category to class M. Carpeaux, the author of a complicated and unhealthy machine, the Quatre Parties du monde soutenant le sphere. This group, destined to top a fountain, is not reassuring. It represents four savage and ill-nourished women who, cheerful to no purpose, hand in hand dance a mad sarabande, under the pretext of carrying a globe they are about to drop. The Jardin du Luxembourg, where the catalogue would like to place these awkward hoppings, will be embellished in only the most mediocre way. M. Carpeaux, let me say quickly, has something else than gaiety—he has a feeling for the portrait, and he is exhibiting an excellent bust of M. Gérôme. This bronze, where the character of the modelling is ingeniously studied, is surprisingly life like; it moves, it breathes, and freedom in execution here has a wonderful aspect.5 (emphasis mine) Anne Middleton Wagner has seen the divide between the criticism of both sculptures as hinging primarily on the contemporaneous view of what was appropriate for the public as opposed to the private sphere. “Apparently Carpeaux’s audience was perfectly prepared to see itself as alive, vivid, breathing—but not to regard the same experience as proper to the content of public art.”6 However, Mantz’s choice of words and descriptions left clues that point us beyond the consideration of the public and private realms to questions that converge around notions of the regulation of the racialized female body. Precisely, the questions of whose body, what type of body and in what state a body was deemed appropriate to occupy space, not just in the public sphere but to be represented at all. The bust of Gérôme represented a male and not even a male nude at that. In comparison, Carpeaux’s Les quatre parties du monde (c. 1867; Figure 10.2) represented four unclothed female subjects (again not nude) who were, although allegorical in theme, rendered in a sexually and racially specific way that ruptured their traditional allegorical reading. Firstly, the critic’s choice of the word machine is a dehumanizing strategy that acted to further objectify and dehumanize the female subjects. Secondly, the author’s use of the term savage has obvious racial connotations with similar implications to Paul de Saint-Victoire’s earlier comments. To

174 Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art de Saint-Victoire all four women were Negresses, to Mantz all were savages. In both cases the language of criticism is racialized, evoking western conceptions of Africa and other non-European geographies as uncivilized spaces filled with “primitive” peoples. Although the choice of words was different, the result was similarly the dehumanization of the female subjects through critiques that not only uniformly equated them all with the racially marginalized black female subject, but performed that marginalization. Whereas de Saint-Victoire took pains to specify that the category of Negress was outside of maleness or femaleness and therefore a sexually aberrant position, Mantz’s label of savage conjured ideals of an uncivilized state of black hypersexuality. Both positions are colonial stereotypes that exhibit the excessive and ambivalent qualities that Homi K. Bhabha has identified as critical to their formation and repetition.7 The word savage was coupled with the word ill-nourished, a description that located the social and biological function of the body. Presumably this lack of proper nutrition was something that became manifest in the symbolic markings of their bodies. A body that can be described as ill-nourished is a body that needs food for sustenance. Such a body exists within the realm of the real and is therefore neither nude nor allegorical. The allegorical body is already always fed or perhaps more accurately, occupies a space within which food and other forms of normal biological and social human functioning become unnecessary. Mantz’s use of the term ill-nourished catapulted Carpeaux’s four female subjects back into the space of the real, pointing up the gap between the representation of their bodies and the nineteenth-century ideal of the female nude that prevailed. Mantz continued, taking offense to what he saw as the purposeless cheerfulness of the women and further objected to what he called their “pretext” of carrying a globe. Obviously, Mantz, as de SaintVictoire, would have been very familiar with the theme of the four continents and Carpeaux’s title makes obvious his intention to represent that allegory. Therefore, Mantz’s objection to the “pretext” of carrying a globe has nothing to do with his misunderstanding of the allegorical theme but instead was Mantz’s way of objecting to Carpeaux’s allegorical recruits.

THE TRADITION OF THE FOUR CONTINENTS Who were these imposters and what had Carpeaux done to the “real” four continents? Unlike many of his predecessors, Carpeaux’s signification of race was performed on the body through the anatomical and physiognomical characteristics of the female subjects rather than with extensive dependence upon external contextualizing signs like props, costume and setting. Carpeaux’s desire for the direct racing of the bodies had been even more explicit than the finished work reveals. Dreading the inevitable greenness of an

Allegory, Race and the Four Continents

175

aging bronze sculpture, he had originally intended to polychrome the female subjects, applying different patinas to their bodies to further distinguish their racial identities by representing distinct complexions. His request was denied by the commission.8 Les quatre parties du monde (1874) disrupted the tradition of symbolic racial hierarchy in the allegorization of the four continents. The standing figures were approximately all of the same height, none positioned symbolically or literally above the others, their unclothed bodies each equally engaged in the process of supporting the globe. In dramatic contrast, the earlier prototypical representations by Cesare Ripa in Iconologia (1758–1760) represented Europe as the embodiment of “civilization.” A seated, fully and regally clothed white female figure, Europe’s whiteness was as much a facet of her body as her queenly clothing and her body’s contextualization within a setting replete with symbols of European culture, religion and science. Derived from the allegory of Rome or Minerva, Europe was often represented with helmet and armour or alternatively with crown and robes. In contrast, Africa was often represented as a partially or fully unclothed female allegory. Nineteenth-century examples like William Theed’s Africa (1864–1872), a part of the Albert Memorial in London, and the American sculptor Daniel Chester French’s Africa (1904), one of his four continents that adorned the exterior of Cass Gilbert’s Custom House in New York City, regularly represented the black female subject in sleep or as a despondent and gazeless woman woefully contemplating the demise of her downtrodden race. Anne Whitney’s Africa (c. 1863–1864), mentioned earlier in Chapter 8 of this volume, was similarly represented awaking from sleep, one hand shielding her eyes as if from the blinding light that was symbolically open for interpretation: her unseeable future, the brilliance of European civilization, etc. In contrast, Carpeaux’s Africa (1874) was only distinguishable from her sisters, outside of the racial signification of her body, by the broken shackle that was attached to her right ankle. Western traditions of the four continents reveal that, historically, the blackness of Africa was deployed primarily in the signification of the context outside of her body. Often accompanied by a lion, Africa also commonly carried or was surrounded by cornucopia of wheat, her head covered by an exoticizing hat made of an elephant’s head and tusks. Monkeys, crocodiles, scorpions and snakes helped to define a wild and dangerous natural environment along with tropical plants like the palm or cacti. Whereas Europe symbolized logic, rationale and knowledge, Africa symbolized superstition, paganism and barbarity, the dark continent here was embodied in black woman. The interdependence of these allegories was constant and inasmuch as each body performed its own racial identity and implied social position within the colonial racial hierarchy, they also prepared and authorized the spaces for the “other” bodies. The allegorized ideal of Europe could never perform colonial ideals of whiteness without an abject Africa who performed an ideal of blackness that was “other” than Europe.

176

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

UNDERSTANDING ALLEGORY In the Lacanian sense, the signifier’s signification (in this case of somebody) does not operate in a vacuum but can only operate in relation to other signifiers; hence, in the end a signifier can be said to reference multiple signifieds—blackness comes to signify what whiteness is not, etc. Although most obviously the allegorical tradition of the four continents has reflected western ideals of feminized nature and geographical space, the four continents was also a thematic tool for the representation of colonial ideals of race. Africa, as it was performed within the guise of a black female body, did not merely function as an allegory of a continent but performed blackness and black femaleness in ways that reinforced coloniality. Thus inevitably, the theme of the four continents was the allegorical performance of race itself. Western visual allegorical tradition has an ambivalent relationship with the symbolic order, sometimes supporting and at other times in opposition to a subject’s symbolic mark. The allegorization of the human body has necessitated the evacuation of individuality and specificity in order to facilitate the possession of the body by a greater ideal. The (dis)embodied characteristic of allegory is what allows for this ambivalence because the subject that is represented is not (or at least not intended to be) the subject of representation. The allegorical function is in part the suppression of the represented to the subject of representation. This inherent relationship is ambivalent. The symbolic mark of the represented subject is revealed through ideological absence and excess so that “other” deferred meanings become possible for the allegorical subject within the symbolic order. The allegorical subject performs two functions: firstly, to stand as a representation of a body and, secondly, to communicate (an)other message or ideal that transcends any individual body.9 According to Angus Fletcher, “the secondary meaning arises immediately from the primary surface of literal narration or drama, and constitutes the raison d’être of the primary surface.”10 In order for an ideal to be read and understood, in order for the allegory to fulfill its function, it must be knowable and transparent. It must be performed within a visual language that its audience shares and recognizes and the resultant representation must be decipherable and legible. Part of this legibility is a function of the directed viewing of the representation. According to Fletcher, “Since allegorical works present an aesthetic surface which implies an authoritative, thematic, ‘correct’ reading, and which attempts to eliminate other possible readings, they deliberately restrict the freedom of the reader.”11 As such, allegories, perhaps more than other forms of representation, are particularly invested in guiding the viewer’s consumption of a particular narrative or ideological intent. It is for this reason that allegories have proven a significant vehicle for the dissemination of political ideologies and have been vigorously employed by governmental, monarchial and imperial agents in the communication with

Allegory, Race and the Four Continents

177

the populace. As Marcia Pointon has stated, “allegory as a method has particular political resonances.”12 Politically, allegory can be used to disguise, mask or obfuscate the historical specificity of a narrative or subject in order to make possible an otherwise threatening and transgressive representation. Allegory is a tool through which the unspeakable can be spoken, the unrepresentable represented.13 However, because allegory is a representational mode that functions to cloak or disguise a narrative or subject within a suitable guise, there is always the threat of rupture. Here I would offer that one of the critics’ problems with Carpeaux’s four continents was that it did not enforce the traditional allegorical narrative, instead allowing for the possibility of undirected viewing and thereby creating a space for alternative readings of race.

PERFORMING RACE: OF DIFFERENCE AND LEGIBILITY Within the western tradition of the four continents, the anatomical and physiognomical differences between the bodies of the female subjects were largely superficial. Instead, the primary distinguishing characteristic between Africa and Europe was complexion, with Africa often looking like a coloured-in white woman. In stark comparison to this tradition, Carpeaux’s representation of race was explicit and, above all, corporeal. De Saint-Victoire’s declaration that all of Carpeaux’s women were Negresses had little to do with his actual visual (mis)reading of the four racialized female subjects as African, but everything to do with the western visual tradition of the four continents and the ways in which Carpeaux’s representation of race had transgressed this colonial system, almost to the point of illegibility. Interfering with the traditional colonial hierarchy, Carpeaux’s deployment of race threatened to override the white audience’s desire to see something altogether different. In stepping outside of the hegemonic formula of the four continents, Carpeaux inflamed his critics by performing race on the body in a way that thwarted nineteenth-century cultural assumptions of the white female’s aesthetic supremacy through a visual contestation of entrenched colonial hierarchies of race. Paul de Saint-Victoire’s inflammatory statement stands as a testament to the inseparability of race and sex within the human subject and the endemic dehumanization of the black female within colonialism. To this critic, four female subjects that should have been obviously symbolically and physically distinct expressed an unacceptable racial congruence. It is of critical importance that this sameness was named as blackness. Through this maneuver, these female subjects were united in a racial marginalization that also yielded consequences for their gendered and sexual identities. As Negresses, they were placed in a category beyond normal sexual and gender boundaries, a category outside of human limits (they were neither man nor woman) and a category at the bottom of the western human science’s

178

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

“tree of man.” In order to understand this caustic label and its sexual and racial implications, the break-down of Carpeaux’s allegorical legibility must be understood within the context of the colonial logic of western cultural practice. As I have argued throughout this book, within a cultural field invested in the racial differencing of the body, black female subjects were regularly marginalized at the level of aesthetics, material, subject and narrative possibility. I have discussed the repercussions for Carpeaux’s four continents, a work that refused the colonial logic of racial difference. What was at stake was the sculpture’s very legibility, the audience’s ability to read the four bodies as racially distinct and by implication to assume a racial hierarchy. But as I have demonstrated, this was a process that was not strictly a function of the audience’s ability to read the subjects in an a priori sense, but rather a matter of whether their colonial desire for predetermined identities would override their willingness to see something altogether different. As I have demonstrated, the black female subject was highly visible within historical western culture. The historical popularity of subjects that derived from Trans Atlantic Slavery, abolition and emancipation meant that the black female body was consistently evoked, referenced or represented as the embodiment of racial inferiority, disenfranchisement or liberation. The dominance of the interracial female body not only locates the significance of miscegenation to the institution of slavery, but the deliberate suppression of the signification of blackness in the female body and the white fear of proximity to blackness, both biologically and physically. It is critical to note how the inconsistent and arbitrary nature of this white colonial fear/ desire of the black body was regulated through the various legal, cultural, political and social apparati that sanctioned or criminalized cross-racial contact, normalizing or erasing the daily coercive and violent cross-racial sexual interactions of slavery. Like western art generally, nineteenth-century sculpture was deeply invested in the racial differencing of the body and the deployment of registers of blackness organized hierarchically by their proximity to the white body. The aesthetic limits of blackness are apparent in the (im)possibilities of the black female subject and the repeated disavowal at the level of aesthetic and material practice, subject and narrative. But the colonial insistence upon the visibility and measurability of race was disrupted by the invisibility of blackness in miscegenated bodies. This racial ambivalence should alert us to the flexibility of racial identification and inevitably the futility of ever trying to locate race as a stable visual or quantifiable sign of the body.

Conclusion Whiteness as Collective Narcissism, Towards a New Vision

Throughout the previous ten chapters I have explored the representation of black female subjects in “high” and “low” western art. Various types of art, like sculpture, painting, prints and photography, have been discussed. Different genres, like portraits, nudes/nakeds and ideal works, have been addressed and various styles and practices, like neoclassicism, polychromy and modernism, have been examined. At this point it should be clear that the black female subject has been constructed as a malleable fiction across a range of visual cultural practices and traditions, a fiction wherein race, sex, gender, sexuality and class have been strategically marshaled to serve various competing and often contradictory purposes. As a colonial invention, Black Woman and her precursor Black Girl are a measure of white colonial fear/desire and the abject black female subject is revelatory of an imagined whiteness, equally fictive and reified through an incessant socio-cultural and racist collective narcissism that builds this imagined racial purity through the perpetual exploitation and marginalization of black subjects. This idea of a collective narcissism is an important one. I use the term to defi ne an endemic self-love that becomes destructive, even pathological to the extent that it impedes one’s ability to see, engage with and to feel caring or love for that which is perceived to be different from the self. It is perhaps best to think of such a collective narcissism as a by-product of an historically pervasive, defective and selective colonial vision. Whiteness within the history of the modern west’s making of the Trans Atlantic World has invented and sustained itself through the process of disseminating (making pervasive) this defective, selective vision. Colonial discourse and its constitution through the processes of colonization and imperialism can be said to have constituted a pervasive Eurocentric sensory way of being, a mode of engagement with the world, with oneself, one’s culture and one’s place but also with other subjects, cultures and places that functions always through a negating principle that assesses and names dissimilarity as lack. The ability of European nations and empires (and individuals acting as agents for nations and empires) to deny the humanity and civilization of the complex and heterogeneous populations that they encountered and colonized around the globe was based on their ability to erase the human

180

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

presence, literally and symbolically, of the territories they sought to claim. But on the ground, in the daily processes of contact and interaction, this meant a radical ability to reimagine peoples as objects; objects in need of European order, regulation and discipline defi ned as “civilization.” As a racialized way of engaging with the world, white vision implied the ability to see and access bodies of colonized subjects based upon proximity and surveillance but also upon the ability to represent what had been seen with supposed objectivity. The white eye of science then became a way for European foreigners, strangers in new lands, to lay claim to authority, authenticity and accuracy by producing visual and other types of knowledge always within the boundaries of their own Eurocentrically defi ned logic. But what the previous chapters have illustrated is that this vision was not at all objective, nor scientific, but constantly self-referential and capable of an outward projection of the dominant culture’s ideals, attitudes, beliefs, cultures, etc., onto the bodies of those they sought to dominate. The proximity of which I speak is the literal physical contact, such as the conditions of local and even domestic interaction between François Malépart de Beaucourt and his black female slave Marie-Thérèse-Zémire that produced Portrait of a Negro Slave (1786; Figure 1.1) or the international travel from the imperial metropolis of Paris to the French colony of Algeria that marked the process of Charles Cordier’s creation of sculptures like Nègre du Soudan ou Nègre en costume algérien (1856–1857; Figure 8.2). The centrality of surveillance as a colonial mode of claiming power through the application of regulated and remote vision has been demonstrated in my discussions of the socio-sexual manipulation of black girls within Trans Atlantic Slavery and the coercive and exploitative histories of public and private display that underpinned the construction of the “Hottentot Venus.” Therefore, the white gaze, whether up close and personal or hidden, distant and insulated, has functioned towards the same colonial ends. The critical point of intersection, that point of connection between the gaze and the image, is the process through which re-imagination becomes re-presentation; the process where what one “sees” is translated into an actual art or visual cultural object that represents another’s body. But because it is the identity and subjectivity of the white artist that is the dominant structuring element of the black female subject, the archive of representations of the black female subject reveals the white body/subject as a constant haunting absence. White artists sought out black female subjects precisely because these women and girls were a supposed embodiment of the qualities and attributes—physical, cultural, social, intellectual and emotional—that the white producers did not or could not see within themselves. Often oscillating between stereotypical extremes, the black female subject in art (as in life), has shifted between invisibility and hypervisibility. Both were dangerous and life threatening. Within Trans Atlantic Slavery, to be invisible to one’s master or mistress could signal deprivation and lack in terms of

Conclusion

181

food, clothing, housing and other necessities of life. But at the same time, to be the visual target of white mastery meant the threat of exploitation, vengeance, abuse, torture or execution. To this end, we must also always consider what it meant for black female subjects to become the artistic targets of a white cultural vision. White collective narcissism is fuelled by the racialization of vision and sensory perception. Here I am guided by Johannes Fabian’s visualism. It was not just the idea of vision as the noblest sense and the equation of vision and knowledge that fuelled colonialism, but the idea of a singular authoritative vision and its selective operation as an outward projection of the self as always already at the center; the white subject as both measure and producer of the entire world, the white eye as the assumed perfect global filter. And yet, that eye has also always been directed inward, because seeing has been a predetermined act tainted by the colonial assumptions of the one doing the seeing, assumptions that impede any type of complex, interactive vision as the engagement between a body as viewer and what is actually embodied in the other subject. It is the absence of interactive vision, vision as a give and take, as active and passive, as culturally relative, that produces this collective narcissism. For what the white colonial eye refuses most violently is the possibility of being the object of vision by the very body it is attempting to discipline. In this sense, it is fascinating to contemplate if Dorothy Stevens, who called for more “exotic” children to sketch at the department store, stopped to think about what those black, Asian and Native children thought of her. The white body as viewer, to sustain its power, must constantly repel, redirect, erase or otherwise sublimate the other’s gaze and sensory world as inauthentic, uncivilized, unscientific and inadequate. This rupture between imagined and actual bodies—what the white subject perceives and wants to see and what is actually there—marks the inability of whites to see blacks outside of a racialized projection of their own bodily privilege. To this extent, within the context of colonial vision, white subjects suffer from a strategic blindness. This vision, most often described as the gaze for the inference of power in looking, was a act of erasure, for through it whites could imagine that blacks and other colonized subjects either saw and experienced the world precisely as they did or that they possessed an impaired and racially compromised vision that could be “civilized” through regulation and discipline. But this vision was also a form of narcissism because it allowed whites to see and impose upon the bodies of black subjects their own colonial fantasies. The black female subject of western art, whether as tragic octoroon, as mammy or as hypersexualized vixen, always pre-existed the actual black female model or sitter for she was fi rst and foremost a fabrication of the vision and the mind of the white artist, which often had little or nothing to do with the actual life, thoughts, feelings, appearance and experiences of the literal historical women and girls whose images we have inherited. For

182

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

the most part then, these artworks are products of whiteness and reveal to us not only white perceptions of blackness and white fear/desire of blackness but properties of whiteness itself, qualities and characteristics upon which the essential violence of colonialism depended but from which whiteness as racial paradigm had to be disassociated. The pervasiveness of images of black females within western art is telling. What it tells us is not only that black female subjects, for centuries, were consistently popular subjects of art and visual culture, but that this persistent interest transcended various and seemingly distinct locations of the Trans Atlantic world as well as different art forms, styles and cultural practices. From Canada to Britain, in America, France and Italy, within sculpture, prints, photography and painting, white artists, although separated by culture, ethnicity, nationality and geography, created remarkably similar images that helped to produce and globalize an idea of the black female as both racial and sexual other. However, my explorations equally have revealed the moments when artists have defied the dominant colonial ideals of race, breeching the expected limits of representation to literally trouble their audiences by provoking often caustic and panicked responses to alternative representations; ones that did not succumb to the dominant expectations of racial and sexual marginalization. Whereas I have used these artworks as texts through which to recuperate erased histories of black female presence, I am aware that they can never be fully regarded as truthful or accurate representations. Rather, these collected art objects, either through what they recorded or disavowed, may reveal to us something of the identity and subjectivity of their black female subjects. But they are also equally repositories of a pervasive colonial whiteness, holding knowledge about the white artists who created them and the whitened cultures in which they lived. As we move forward, our urgent task is as much the humanization of the black female subjects whose images have been central to western cultural production and the recuperation of their presence. But we must also seek to dismantle the singular, oppressive white gaze as the defi ning eye and, with it, its colonial objectifying and classificatory power. We must conceptualize new ways of seeing that are not anchored in systemic white privilege and archaic colonial notions of racial difference and hierarchy. We must ensure the continuing democratization of art production so that the next two hundred years of art in the west allow for blacks and other racially marginalized groups to represent themselves in their full complexity.

Notes

NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION 1. Gerald McMaster, “Towards an Aboriginal Art History,” Native American Art in the Twentieth Century, ed. W. Jackson Rushing III (London: Routledge, 1999), 77, 81. 2. For a list of some of these sources, see Chapter 1, note 4. 3. Lorraine O’Grady, “Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity,” New Feminist Criticism, ed. Joanna Freuh et al. (New York: Harper Collins, 1994), 152; Carla Williams and Deborah Willis, The Black Female Body: A Photographic History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), 1. “Sarah” for Willis and Williams refers to Saartjie Baartman (also known as Sarah), the Khoisan woman who was exhibited as a sexual freak in Europe and whose remains became the site of human science excavation. They also mention a song by Nina Simone that tells of black female suffering and strength endured by an Aunt Sarah. 4. Postcolonial Studies is one of the academic arenas in which questions of race are most rigorously and critically explored. The most notable English language contributions to an international postcolonial scholarship around the topic of blackness have been from Caribbean, American and British authors. A postcolonial understanding of the complex defi nitions of race and its social, psychic and cultural dimensions underpins this project. See: Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967); Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979); Henry Louis Gates Jr., Figures in Black, Words, Signs, and the “Racial” Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Toronto: Between the Lines Press, 1992); Cornel West, Race Matters (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993); Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Kobena Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1994); W.E.B. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1994); Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay, eds., Questions of Cultural Identity (London: Sage, 1996); Christopher Lane, ed., The Psychoanalysis of Race (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000); Homi K. Bhabha, Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 2004). 5. Black feminisms emerged from a desire to locate and analyze the importance of race/colour identity in women’s lives and to challenge white feminisms’ historical unwillingness to deal with race and colonialism as critical factors in the female experience. Black feminisms reveal the intersecting logics of

184 Notes

6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

patriarchy and colonialism. This project’s black feminist framework expands beyond postcolonial scholarship’s investment in race/colour by fundamentally acknowledging intersectionality. A central tenet of black feminisms is that race/colour identification is simultaneous to and intertwined with sex/gender identification. See: Michele Wallace, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (New York: Dial Press, 1979); bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Boston: South End Press, 1981); Valerie Smith, Not Just Race, Not Just Gender: Black Feminist Readings (New York: Routledge, 1998); Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 2000). See: Gilroy, Black Atlantic, and Maria Diedrich, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Carl Pedersen, eds., Black Imagination and the Middle Passage (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). See: Hilary McD. Beckles and Verene A. Shepherd, eds., Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World: A Student Reader (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, 2000); Gad Heuman and James Walvin, eds., The Slavery Reader (London: Routledge, 2003). Griselda Pollock, Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories (London: Routledge, 1999). Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1993). See: hooks, Ain’t I a Woman, and Collins, Black Feminist Thought. See: Fanon, Black Skin; Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk; Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism. See: Bice Benvenuto and Roger Kennedy, The Works of Jacques Lacan: An Introduction (London: Free Association, 1986); Elizabeth Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (London: Routledge, 1990). Lane, The Psychoanalysis of Race. The realm of the sublime, as opposed to the beautiful, has been the one in which western aesthetics has positioned images deemed to be excessive in terms of the grotesque, the horrific, the pornographic or the traumatic. Images of the Middle Passage would, for instance, be conceived within this category. See: Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993); Lane, The Psychoanalysis of Race; Pollock, Differencing the Canon; and Bhabha, Location of Culture. Fassil Demissie, Sandra Jackson and Michele Goodwin, eds., Imagining, Writing, (Re)Reading the Black Body (Pretoria: UNISA Press, 2009), xiv. Chapters 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8 and 9, although they have undergone various levels of rewriting, were previously published. The others, Chapters 2, 5 and 10, are new. The exhibition opened at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery (Oshawa, Ontario) and then subsequently travelled to the Thames Art Gallery (Chatham, Ontario), the Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Concordia University (Montreal, Quebec) and fi nally to the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia (Halifax, Nova Scotia).

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1 1. Among the Eurocentric “scientific” knowledge that sought an essential source of sexual pathology in the black female body were: craniology, phrenology, physical anthropology and comparative anatomy. For a concise description of the production of race within western human sciences, see Kay J. Anderson, Vancouver’s Chinatown: Racial Discourse in Canada, 1875–1980 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991).

Notes

185

2. The tree of man was a structural symbol within the human sciences used to visualize the supposed evolutionary differences between human beings from varying racial origins. 3. It is important here to note the rather disturbing contemporary trend in Canadian art galleries of renaming works of art that represent black subjects. Whereas this practice has evolved out of an admirable sensitivity to what are now largely offensive racial terms, I would argue that such renaming practices are dangerous in that they perform a retroactive erasure of the social, historical and political contexts of production. The idea of recovering the identities of the black models is both noble and necessary but it should not be done at the expense of the artists’ original texts and the obliteration of the colonial cultural space of production. At the National Gallery of Canada, this practice seemed to be largely undefi ned and left to the individual preferences of curators. For example: Dorothy Stevens’s Amy Piccaninny (c. 1930) was altered simply to Amy, the French title of Albert Curtis Williamson’s Young Negro (1916) (Jeune Negresse) was altered to Jeune Noire to avoid racist connotations of the original term and Edwin Holgate’s Head of a Negress (1938) was changed to Head of a Woman. See: National Gallery of Canada, curatorial fi le 3983, memo 20 March 1995; 4735 memo 2 July 1992 and 30154 memo 11 December 1991. 4. For more on the representation of the black subject in western art, see, for example: Ellwood C. Parry, The Image of the Indian and the Black Man in American Art, 1590–1900 (New York: G. Braziller, 1974); Alaine Locke, The Negro in Art: A Pictorial Record of the Negro Artist and the Negro Theme in Art (New York: Hacker Art Books, 1979); Hugh Honour, The Image of the Black in Western Art (Cambridge, MA: Menil Foundation/ Harvard University Press, 1989); Guy C. McElroy, Facing History: The Black Image in American Art 1710–1940 (Washington: Bedford Art Publishers in association with The Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1990); Albert Boime, The Art of Exclusion: Representing Blacks in the Nineteenth Century (London: Thames and Hudson, 1990); Thelma Golden, Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994); Paul Gilroy, Picturing Blackness in British Art: 1700s–1990s (London: Tate Gallery, 1996). 5. Some of the aforementioned studies have attempted to chronicle the history of the unspecified black subject within the vast field of western art. Others have included the production of black and white artists. The general nature of some of these studies creates problems that stem from their inability to consider the impact of nationally specific cultural practices and the differences between male and female identities and subjectivities. 6. While acknowledging the heterogeneity of black experience, for the purposes of this project, the term black is being deployed as a term that signifies the collective experiences of a diverse group of African descendents (Africans, African-Caribbeans, African-Canadians, etc.) who have historically shared similar experiences based on their collective experiences of race and colour. 7. After the British conquest of New France in the late eighteenth century, however, French identity was increasingly marginalized as “other” to the British construction of Canadian-ness. 8. Immigration policy and recruiting mandates often specified where specific immigrant groups could settle, especially in the case of labour recruitment through which immigrants were provided entry to perform specific pre-arranged jobs for specific periods of time. See: Franca Iacovetta, Such Hard-Working People: Italian Immigrants in Post-War Toronto (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993).

186

Notes

9. Preferential citizens were Northern Europeans. Other Europeans were seen as less desirable, especially southern Italians. French people were also viewed as undesirable by the dominant British citizenry. 10. Mohammad Qadeer, “Urban Planning and Multiculturalism in Ontario, Canada,” Race, Equality and Planning: Policies and Procedures, eds. Huw Thomas and Vijay Krishnarayan (Aldershot: Avebury, 1994), 190–94. In fact, it was not uncommon, even up until the 1960s, for rental notices in Canada to state “coloured persons not wanted.” 11. By this I mean that the representation of race and blackness has not generally been discussed within a context that references colonialism. The absence of significant cultural scholarship that defi nes the specificities of the historical representation of the black female subject (and other colonial subjects) as racialized, sexualized and gendered identities in Canadian art points to an overwhelming lack of a diversity within the discipline of Art History (of person and practice) and the extent to which colonial representational practices have been normalized within Canadian culture. 12. Identity, as produced within colonial discourse, is founded upon the colonizer’s ability to project his/her desire or anxiety onto the body of the colonial subject. However, when subjected to scrutiny, the fantasy of colonial stereotyping reveals inherent contradictions and gaps in logic. 13. Elizabeth Cadiz Topp, Endless Summer: Canadian Artists in the Caribbean (Kleinburg: McMichael Canadian Art Collection, 1988), 35. 14. Pearl McCarthy, “Canadian Painters Devoting More Attention to Tropics,” The Globe and Mail, Toronto, 12 May 1951. While Dorothy Stevens visited Haiti and the Virgin Islands, Yvonne McKague Housser and Edwin Holgate painted in Jamaica, Cleeve Horne in Morocco, Will Ogilvie in his native South Africa and Leonard Brooks, Gordon Macnamara, Walter Yarwood, Jack Bush and York Wilson in Mexico. Isabel McLaughlin used her family home in Bermuda as a type of artistic retreat for herself and fellow artists, Pauline Harris visited Trinidad and Gladys Montgomery and John Lyman worked in Barbados. 15. The Canada-West-Indies Magazine, published from 1911 to 1959, juxtaposed information about trade, commerce and shipping with tourist photo essays and deluxe passenger service steamship advertisements. 16. The practice of equating the female body with nature through the juxtaposition of fruit with breasts outlived François Malépart de Beaucourt as a staple of western art, as is revealed in works like Paul Gauguin’s Tahitian Women with Mango Fruits (1899). 17. Charmaine Nelson, “Multiple Disguises,” Coloured Nude: Fetishization, Disguise, Dichotomy (Montreal: Concordia University, M.A. Art History, 1995), 39. 18. The overdetermined view of black female sexuality has been vigorously researched and documented within the colonial traditions of the western human sciences. See: Anita Levy, Other Women: The Writing of Class, Race and Gender, 1832–1898 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991); Sander L. Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Towards an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine and Literature,” Critical Inquiry 12 (1985). 19. For centuries western social and cultural structures have stridently contested women’s sexual self-knowledge and maintained white male authority and access to women’s bodies. See: Eunice Lipton, “Bathers: Modernity and Prostitution,” Looking into Degas: Uneasy Images of Women in Modern Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 168; Anathea Callen, “Degas’ Bathers: Hygiene and Dirt—Gaze and Touch,” Dealing with Degas:

Notes

20. 21.

22.

23. 24. 25. 26.

27.

187

Representations of Women and the Politics of Vision, eds. Richard Kendall and Griselda Pollock (New York: Univers, 1992), 162. Painting in Canada a Selective Historical Survey (Albany: The Albany Institute of History and Art, 1946); see fi le M12067 McCord Museum of Canadian History, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. As I discuss further in Chapter 2 of this volume, rape was systematically used against black women within slave societies as a sex-specific form of punishment that benefited white slave owners through violent sexual fantasy and the reproduction of new slaves. The black woman bore a significant burden within slave practices because, within colonial legal discourse, any child born to a black mother was by defi nition a slave regardless of the race or status of the father. In the case of Study for Nude Figure (1932), the original pastel sketch for the work reveals the careful juxtaposition of the bananas with the female breasts as a later addition to the fi nal oil painting. One can assume then that the bananas were a most deliberate and thoughtful appendage within the fi nal oil painting. The bananas evoke the racialized sexual spectacle of the African-American stage performer, singer and actress Josephine Baker, whose eroticized performance of African-ness is perhaps most synonymous with her titillating dance performed topless in a skirt of phallic bananas. Stevens’s pose is derived from nineteenth-century representations of female slaves at auction. Perhaps the most famous predecessors are Gérôme’s Roman Slave Market and Slave Sale at Rome (both c. 1884). Stevens’s paintings include Breton Peasant (c. 1912), The Apache (c. 1914), Amy (c. 1930), Coloured Nude (c. 1933), Mexican Mother and Child (c. 1949), High Yellow (n.d.) and Coloured Child in Banana Grove (n.d.). Lisa Ramsay, “You Splash Plenty of Colour Around,” Maclean’s Magazine 1 (July 1950), 48. See, for example: Augustus Bridle, “Variety and Ability Mark R.C.A. Display,” Toronto Daily Star 4 (November 1932), 3; Pearl McCarthy, “Royal Canadian Academy Exhibition is Broadly Representative,” Globe and Mail, Toronto, 4 November 1932, 3; “New Names on Roster of Artists Whose Works Academy has Accepted,” Evening Telegram, Toronto, 5 November 1932, 14; “The Royal Canadian Academy,” Canadian Homes and Gardens (December 1932), 23; “Horrors and Experiments Deck Halls of R.C.A. Show,” Evening Telegram, Toronto, 4 November 1932, 5. Charmaine Nelson, “The Nude in Canadian Art Practice: Censorship, Controversy and White Female Nudes,” Coloured Nude: Fetishization, Disguise, Dichotomy (Montreal: Concordia University, M.A. Art History, 1995), 9. In 1931, Bertram Brooker’s Figures in the Landscapes (1931) was censored from the 59th Annual Ontario Society of Artists Show at the Art Gallery of Toronto. Lilias Torrance Newton’s Nude in the Studio (1933) was similarly censored from the premier Canadian Group of Painters Show in November 1933 also held at the Art Gallery of Toronto. The censorship of artworks was also applied to foreign artists. As I discuss more fully in Chapter 7 of this volume, at the International Exhibition of Modern Art (Art Gallery of Toronto), hosted by the Société Anonyme in 1927, three representations of white women were removed (Max Weber’s Contemplation and Retirement and Alexander Archipenko’s The Bather). Other forms of admonishment were also popular. John Russell’s A Modern Fantasy (c. 1927), displayed during August and September of 1927 at the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto, so offended the public that it sparked a censorship campaign and garnered newspaper attention across Canada. Edwin Holgate’s Young Woman and Nude in the Open (both c. 1930), exhibited at the 1931 Group

188 Notes

28.

29. 30.

31.

32.

33.

34. 35.

of Seven Show (Art Gallery of Toronto), inspired the moralist letter-writing project of a Toronto lawyer who campaigned against the “offensive” nudes. Bertram Brooker, “Nudes and Prudes,” Open House (Ottawa: Graphic Publishers Limited, 1931); Louis Muhlstock, “An Excess of Prudery,” Canadian Art 5, no.2 (Christmas–New Year 1947–1948). Bertram Brooker accused the Canadian art community of being puritanical, and over fi fteen years later Louis Muhlstock sited an “excess of prudery” as a significant problem. The term Black Woman describes an utterly fetishized subject whose specificity has been so eradicated as to produce a type of body that attempts to stand for and produce a homogenous category. Within western art, nineteenth-century white female nudes were largely depicted without body hair. Long after the practice became passé for European modernists, it was continued well into the twentieth century by Canadian artists. For discussions of the significance of the deletion or omission of female body hair within western traditions of figure painting, see Charles Bernheimer, Figures of Ill Repute (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 105. For a discussion about the use of sleep as disguise for the mediation of white female sexuality, see Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-De-Siècle Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 28, and Chapter 6 in this volume. The downcast eyes of the woman in Coloured Nude (c. 1933) are very different from the closed eyes of white women traditionally depicted in sleep as a form of sexual disguise. Through sleep, white female innocence and morality was preserved as the viewer is positioned as a voyeur who must take responsibility for the origination of the sexual gaze. In contrast, the standing black woman’s downcast eyes do not connote sleep as a state of unconsciousness and thereby invest the agency of choice and the culpability of sexual knowledge and intention in the black female subject. It is significant to note that although Dorothy Stevens was a female artist, her construction of the black female body did not deviate from patriarchal and colonial ideals of black female sexuality. Rather it reinscribed them. White feminist art historical literature often unproblematically infers that female artists have and will represent other women in more “positive” ways than their male counterparts. However, this essentializing deployment of the category of Woman dismisses the legacy of colonialism (and its benefit to white women) and elides differences in race, colour, class, ethnicity and sexual orientation and their role in mediating the act of representation. Edwin Holgate is perhaps the reigning Canadian champion of the tradition of the white female nude in nature. Holgate produced a significant number of such artworks that ideologically supported the man–woman, culture–nature dichotomy of western thought; see, for example: Nude in a Landscape (1930), By the Lake Bathers (1934) and The Bathers (1937). Contrasting Holgate with Dorothy Stevens’s Coloured Nude (c. 1933), a white woman– black woman, nature–Nature dichotomy is revealed. Again, the black female subject is made “other” to the white subject. Topp, Endless Summer, 33. Lyman spent his winters after retirement in Barbados from 1959 until his death in 1967. An example of the trope of juxtaposing black and white females in the same work is Gérôme’s Moorish Bath (c. 1880), which depicts a frontal, barechested and muscular black maid aiding the demurely positioned and relatively plump white concubine at her bath. This trope was also commonly applied to the black girl–white woman relationship. See Dante Gabriel Rossetti The Bride or The Beloved (1856–1866).

Notes

189

36. The naked has historically been equated with the sublime and therefore has been the more disturbing and socially unacceptable of the two categories. The nude has largely been the space of idealized female beauty and in western art has been dominated by representations of white female subjects. 37. For more on the purpose and delineation of the female nude, see Lynda Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality (London: Routledge, 1992). The reality of the body is precisely what western traditions of the female nude have tried to suppress. 38. Lilias Torrance Newton’s Nude in the Studio (1933) was censored from the premier Canadian Group of Painters exhibition in November 1933. The white female subject’s green slippers, on an otherwise unclothed body, were targeted as the “offensive” trigger that revealed the process of the nude through the act of undressing. See Nelson, Coloured Nude, 25–31; interview of Lilias Torrance Newton by Charles Hill, National Gallery of Canada Archives, 11 September 1973, tape #2. 39. Michelle A. Jacques, A Reassessment of Prudence Heward’s Black Nudes (Downsview: York University, M.A. Art History, 1995), 9. Heward’s interest in the black female subject was not a surface curiosity but indicative of a prolonged preoccupation fostered in part by trips to Bermuda where she visited fellow artist and friend Isabel McLaughlin. 40. Jacques, A Reassessment, 5. Michelle Jacques aptly points out that in comparison to the four major paintings of black female nudes, Heward’s only white female nude was Girl Under a Tree (1931). 41. Natalie Luckyj, Expressions of Will (Kingston: Agnes Etherington Art Centre, 1986), 65. 42. In Heward’s Dark Girl (1935), her manipulation and stylization of the Canadian Sumach creates a lush, dense “tropical” landscape within which the black female body is framed. 43. Heward’s black models were likely domestic labourers in Montreal and Bermuda at a time when economic, commercial and social roles were dominantly informed by racial segregation and exclusion. 44. Harris represented a professional model in his Toronto studio over the period of one month in 1937. Interestingly, Harris spoke of the small cactus plants as “fi nding their way” into the painting, a statement that denies artistic intention. See Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Catalogue information sheet, Background, Accession #: 65.1, Lawren Harris Negress. 45. Muhlstock has displayed a consistent and pervasive interest in black subjects. Within one exhibition of his drawings at the Art Association of Montreal (16 November to 27 November 1935), nine of sixty-six works displayed can defi nitively be named as representations of black subjects. See National Gallery of Canada Archives, Louis Muhlstock, artist’s fi le. 46. Eva was widely represented. Muhlstock recalled that she had approached him at his home with knowledge of his occupation, offering to work as his model. Interview with the artist by author, Montreal, winter 1994. 47. Muhlstock created at least one other study of a pregnant black female nude (most likely of the model Eva), Grossesse (1947). 48. I would like to thank Terry Provost for her insightful comments on this work. 49. Although the nineteenth century saw a distinct shift in the use of photography for this purpose, some art patrons still preferred the sense of wealth, distinction and luxury that sitting for an artist conveyed. 50. These jobs would have been, alongside those of domestic labourers, ones that were accessible to black women. Louis Muhlstock has spoken of a cultural center in Montreal’s significantly black community, Little Burgundy,

190 Notes

51.

52.

53.

54. 55.

56.

57. 58.

59.

60. 61. 62.

63. 64.

where black models were available to artists. Louis Muhlstock interviewed by author, Montreal, winter 1994. The representation of particular emotions, character or countenance references the way in which artists have a role in the representation of the psychology of blackness. Here I refer to the colonial attempts to fi x black subjects within specific and narrow character types. Topp, Endless Summer, 25. Holgate had apparently lived in Jamaica as a child after his father, a civil engineer, had relocated the family to the Caribbean island. His access to black subjects came via a family property inherited by his brother. The title Elfreda was not a retroactive adaptation made by a museum. Lawren Harris Jr. exhibited the work under this title at the Royal Canadian Academy exhibition in 1937 (#92) as well as at the 66th Annual Ontario Society of Artists exhibition in 1938 (#77). “Canadian Artist—Elizabeth Wyn Wood,” Evening Telegram, Toronto, 28 April 1934. Wood’s Head of a Negress (1926) was exhibited at the 48th Annual Royal Canadian Academy exhibition in 1926–1927 (#169) and purchased in 1927 by the National Gallery of Canada from their Annual Exhibition of Canadian Art. In terms of a young artist’s fi rst forays into the competitive and often hostile climate of public exhibiting, a choice of subject matter that could establish the artist as unique and innovative without being too substantial a challenge to the conservative status quo was an essential component of a noteworthy work. The success and purchase of Wyn Wood’s Head of a Negress (1926) demonstrates the extent to which black women were perceived as acceptable yet intriguing subject matter in Canadian art. “Many Fine Pictures at Academy Exhibit,” Toronto Daily Star, 18 November 1926. “Canadian Artist—Elizabeth Wyn Wood.” For more about Wood’s and Hahn’s work and creative relationship, see Victoria Baker, Emmanuel Hahn and Elizabeth Wyn Wood: Tradition and Innovation in Early TwentiethCentury Canadian Sculpture (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1998). D.M. Le Bourdais, “Hahn and Wife, Sculptors,” Maclean’s Magazine 1 (November 1945), 19. Hahn’s mask of a black female head may be the same tinted plaster work that was exhibited under the title Negress at the 72nd Annual Ontario Society of Artists exhibition in 1944 (#200). Wheeler’s Head of a Girl (1946) was deposited as a Royal Canadian Academy diploma work. National Gallery of Canada, Curatorial File, Orson Wheeler Head of a Girl. For more about the history of black men in the Canadian military, see Calvin W. Ruck Canada’s Black Battalion: No. 2 Construction 1916–1920 (Halifax: The Society for the Protection and Preservation of Black Culture in Nova Scotia, 1986) and The Black Battalion 1916–1920: Canada’s Best Kept Military Secret (Halifax: Nimbus Publishing Limited, 1987). The contributions of black men to Canadian war efforts and the struggles they underwent to gain the right to serve their country have gone unrecognized for many decades. However, the contributions of black and other marginalized women to the war efforts have been even less well documented. Charmaine Nelson, Copyright Status CWM Art Collection (Ottawa: Canadian War Museum, 1995–96), unpublished. Although Bobak does not recall the specific context of production, she speculated that the image was conceived in a canteen environment possibly during

Notes

65. 66. 67. 68.

69. 70. 71.

72.

73.

74.

75.

191

1943 in Hamilton, Ontario. Letter from Mrs. Molly Bobak to author, 24 September 1998. Letter from Mrs. Molly Bobak to author, 24 September 1998. Although she could not recall defi nitively, Bobak speculated that Roy was likely a friend or acquaintance who agreed to be painted. This landscape may be a product of Heward’s time spent at her good friend Isabel McLaughlin’s family home in Bermuda. High Yellow (n.d.) was reproduced under the name Virgin Islands Girl, in Pearl McCarthy’s “Canadian Painters Devoting More Time to the Tropics,” Globe and Mail, Toronto, 12 May 1951. The term “high yellow” is of the same tradition as other colonial terms like mulatto, quadroon and octoroon that locate the western colonial obsession with measuring and controlling degrees of blackness produced through miscegenation, another colonial term used to defi ne sex between races. Stanley G. Triggs, The Stamp of a Studio (Toronto: Coach House Press, 1985), 23. These portraits were most likely taken at Notman’s established Montreal studio that had been located in two greystone residences since the late 1850s. This portrait also functions as an important historical document that reveals black female participation in the professionalization of domestic labour in Canada. See: Ellen Ross, Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870–1918 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Carol Duncan, “Happy Mothers and Other New Ideas in Eighteenth-Century French Art,” Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany, eds. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1982). Slavery systematically undermined black families and the attachments black mothers could make with their own children. Because the ultimate power of life or death and closeness or distance lay with the white slave owners, many black mothers suffered the loss of children not only through the deaths caused by heinous labour abuses and punishment practices but through the sale of their children to other plantations and owners. Maura Broadhurst, “Forgotten Women: Henrietta Shore and Negro Woman and Children,” conference paper, 13th Annual Inter-University Colloquium for Graduate Research in Art History and Architecture, Concordia University, Montreal, 5 April 1997. Indeed, cross-racial histories of pedophilia have yet to be fully explored. However, the prolific nature of racialized sexual abuse within various contexts of colonialism begs the question, to what extent did white sexual predators feel more entitled to abuse Native children and children of colour than their white counterparts? The Canadian case of the endemic sexual and physical abuse of countless Native children within Christian residential schools is a horrific example of the ways in which Native children became the targets of white sexual deviance and criminality. See: Jode Kechego, ed., Moving Beyond: Understanding the Impact of Residential Schools (Owen Sound, Ontario: Ningwakwe Learning Press, 2007); Deborah Chansonneuve, Reclaiming Connections: Understanding Residential School Trauma among Aboriginal People (Ottawa: Aboriginal Healing Foundation, 2005). Will Ogilvie’s Xosa Mother and Child (c. 1933) and John Alfsen’s Mother and Child (c. 1937) both fi xate on these latter characteristics in their depiction of unclothed black women and infants. For reproductions, see: “Studies in the Nude,” Canadian Homes and Gardens (April 1933), 5; Canadian National Exhibition Catalogue, 27 August–11 September 1937, 30. Will Ogilvie’s Xosa Mother and Child (c. 1933) was completed in his native South Africa.

192 Notes 76. Letter from Colonel R.S. McLaughlin to H.O. McCurry, Director of the National Gallery of Canada, 19 July 1948, cited in Jacques, A Reassessment, 9. 77. Luckyj, Expressions of Will, 82. 78. That this portrait was exhibited solely under the title of Piccaninny throughout Ontario (Exhibition of Pictures by Canadian Artists, under the Auspices of The Art Association of Canadian Service Clubs and the Ontario Society of Artists, Winter 1930–1931) reveals the circulation and acceptance of derogatory racialized naming practices for blacks within Canadian culture. 79. Topp, Endless Summer, 28–29. 80. Topp, Endless Summer, 28; cited in Yvonne McKague Housser papers, Public Archives of Canada, Ottawa. 81. Yvonne McKague Housser papers, Public Archives of Canada MG30D305 vol. 2, fi le 2–11; also reproduced in Topp, Endless Summer, 45. 82. Yvonne McKague Housser’s interest in depicting “other” types of people is evident in her painting The New Bonnet (c. 1947) that depicts a Native mother and child. Reproduced in “With Trilliums in her Hair,” Canadian Art 4, no. 4 (Summer 1947), 148. 83. Catalogue of Paintings by Will Ogilvie, Gainsborough Galleries, 25 May–7 June 1954. The term Xosa (koh’-sah), also spelled Xhosa, refers to a group of related African tribes that constituted a political chiefdom within what is now known as South Africa. During the nineteenth century, the political power of the Xosa was nullified by the colonizing efforts of the Afrikaners and British. 84. At the 1913 exhibition, Brown praised Brownell’s production extensively for its evocation of the island experience. See National Gallery of Canada Curatorial File, Franklin Brownell—2033. 85. Jim Burant and Robert Stacey, Du Nord et du Sud: L’Art de Peleg Franklin Brownell (1857–1946) (Ottawa: The Ottawa Art Gallery, 1998), 27. 86. Thomas Beament’s interest in the labouring black subject is also expressed in his oil painting Sponge Trimmers, Nassau (1933), which depicts black men and women in various stages of preparing and packing the sponge for shipment. 87. Tod has employed images and symbols of black, Asian and Native peoples in paintings like My Father, Bob and I (1983), Johannesburg Suite (1983), Decoration Knows No Bounds (1984), Miss Lily Jeanne Randolph (1984), Amway Consciousness (1984), Five to Twelve (1988), Purple Heart (1989) and No Compensation (1990). 88. Joanne Tod, discussion with author, 6 November 1998. 89. Letter from Joanne Tod to author, 26 November 1998. 90. Tod performs a clever inversion of the colonial dichotomization of dark and light women. Here, the black woman is normal and the lighter Asian female body is displayed in a potentially pornographic manner. However, In the Kitchen (1975) can of course be read against the grain as a statement against sexual exploitation, and the slippage produced by the double representation of the work further prohibits any attempt to stereotype Asian female sexuality. 91. Letter from Joanne Tod to author, 26 November 1998.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2 1. See: Ross, Love and Toil; Duncan, “Happy Mothers.” 2. See: Richard Steckel and James Trussell, “The Age of Slaves at Menarche and First Birth,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 8, no. 3 (Winter 1978),

Notes

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

193

492, cited in Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1999), 104. Anon., “The Race Problem—An Autobiography, by A Southern Woman,” The Independent 56, no. 2885 (17 March 1904). Linda A. Pollock, “Foreword,” Picturing Children: Constructions of Childhood between Rousseau and Freud, ed. Marilyn Brown (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), xv–xix. Marilyn R. Brown, “Introduction: Baudelaire between Rousseau and Freud,” Picturing Children: Constructions of Childhood between Rousseau and Freud, ed. Marilyn Brown (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 3. Brown, “Introduction: Baudelaire,” 1. According to Brown, this cult is thought to have begun in literature with Rousseau’s Emile (1762) and visually in British portraiture. Brown, “Introduction: Baudelaire,” 3. Kenneth F. Kiple and Virginia H. Kiple, “Slave Child Mortality: Some Nutritional Answers to a Perennial Puzzle,” Journal of Social History 10, no. 3 (Spring 1977), 287–88. Steckel has drawn from slave manifests, legislated by the US Congress in 1807, which necessitated that ship’s captains produce lists detailing the name, age, sex, colour and height of each slave. These manifests were lodged both at the point of embarkation and at the fi nal destination. The data included 10,562 manifests, listing 50,606 slaves between 1820 and 1860. See Richard H. Steckel, “A Peculiar Population: The Nutrition, Health and Mortality of American Slaves, from Childhood to Maturity,” Journal of Economic History 46, no. 3 (September 1986), 722–23. Steckel, “A Peculiar Population,” 732. Kiple and Kiple, “Slave Child Mortality,” 288. Hominy is dried corn that has gone through a process of nixtamalization that is the process of soaking it in sodium or potassium hydroxide, an example of which is limewater. The process removes the germ and the outer hull, making it easier to digest. Kiple and Kiple detail a host of ailments, including deformed bones, blindness, lameness, skin lesions and dental problems. They also calculated that black slave children, aged zero to nine, most commonly died from convulsions, teething, tetanus, lockjaw, suffocation and worms, and were four times more likely to die from these ailments than their white counterparts. See Kiple and Kiple, “Slave Child Mortality,” 289–91. Stanley L. Engerman and Herbert S. Klein, “Fertility Differentials between Slaves in the United States and the British West Indies: A Note on Lactation Practices and Their Possible Implications,” William and Mary Quarterly 35, no. 2 (April 1978), 357. Engerman and Klein, “Fertility Differentials,” 358. Klein and Engerman argued that a key factor in the distinction in reproduction between slave women in the US and in the West Indies was the length of lactation. Whereas the American slaves generally breast-fed for one year, their West Indian counterparts did so for two, effectively, deliberately or not, using lactation as a contraceptive. Treckel concurs with the idea of breast-feeding as contraception and has written that a nursing woman’s return to fecundity, signaled by the return of her menstrual cycle, is a matter of the type of breast-feeding that she practices. She points out that women who nurse partially are fecund within eight months, compared to those who nurse fully and are fecund after eleven. See Paula A. Treckel, “Breastfeeding and Maternal Sexuality in Colonial America,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 20, no. 1 (Summer 1989), 39. Jamaica became the jewel of Britain’s imperial crown, largely for its sugar production, and from a very early moment in its colonization was identified

194 Notes

16.

17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25.

(even before British possession) as a “gallant plantation” with enormous agricultural productive capacities. According to Mair, in 1805 Jamaica was the world’s largest sugar producer and for most of the nineteenth century its production commanded most of the island’s natural, human and economic resources. See: Lucille Mathurin Mair, “Women Field Workers in Jamaica During Slavery,” Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World: A Student Reader, eds. Verene Shepherd and Hilary McD. Beckles (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2000), 390. Islands like Jamaica were extremely fertile, however, and one nineteenth-century source sites the following natural products amongst the islands exports from 29 September 1820 until 29 September 1821: sugar, rum, molasses, coffee, ginger, pimento, cocoa, cotton, indigo, hides, log-wood, fustic, nicawood, lignum, mahogany, cedar and lance-wood. See James Hakewill, A Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica, from Drawings Made in the Years, 1820 and 1821 (London: Hurst and Robinson, Pall-Mall, E. Lloyd, Harley Street, 1825). Mair, “Women Field Workers,” 390. Mair, “Women Field Workers,” 390–91. First, Kiple and Kiple argued that the sickling trait that protected West Africans from malaria in their original context became the origin of potential illness, sickle cell anemia, within diaspora. The trait also increased the person’s need for iron and folic acid. Second, the high frequency of lactose intolerance (70 to 77 per cent of blacks in the US in the 1970s) caused by the absence of the lactase enzyme that metabolizes milk sugars meant that many slaves likely eliminated milk from their diet (if they were provided it at all). This, of course, would have resulted in calcium deficiencies. And fi nally, the darker pigmentation of black slaves that had helped to cool their bodies in Africa in some North American contexts (like more Northern States and Canada) would have resulted in vitamin D deficiency. See Kiple and Kiple, “Slave Child Mortality,” 285–86. Philip D. Morgan, “The Significance of Kin,” The Slavery Reader, eds. Gad Heuman and James Walvin (London: Routledge, 2003), 338. Morgan, “The Significance of Kin,” 340. William Renwick Riddell, “Slavery in the Maritime Provinces,” Journal of Negro History 5, no. 3 (July 1920), 363. Ulrich B. Phillips, Plantation and Frontier: Documents, 1649–1863, vol. 1 (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clarke, 1909), 27. Cited in White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?, 113. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, western medicine commonly conceptualized breast milk as diverted menstrual blood. Accordingly, many medical texts advised lactating women against any sexual activity, and some even against sexual thought, due to the fear that sexual stimulation would result in the reversion of the milk back into blood. Such manuals also advised that the resumption of menses was the time for mother’s to wean their children. See Treckel, “Breastfeeding and Maternal Sexuality,” 32. Even when slave children grew older, their nutrition was largely determined by the policy of their slave owner. In the American South, Steckel has argued that slave owners often discussed the care and feeding of slaves amongst themselves in agricultural journals. Their goal was to determine the ideal quantity of food necessary to extract the maximum labour potential from a slave at minimum cost. As standard practice, slave children’s nutrition was to be “proportionately less” than that of an adult slave (proportional in reference to their work effort). Steckel argues that the plump bellies, shiny bodies and glistening ribs of slave children, reported by travellers as signs of the

Notes

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33.

34.

35.

36. 37. 38.

39.

195

good health of slaves, were actually signs of malnutrition and protein deficiency. See Steckel, “A Peculiar Population,” 733–34. White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?, 113. Brown’s mother would take him to the field with her and was whipped for taking time away from her work to nurse him. White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?, 67. White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?, 67. White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?, 68. White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?, 111. White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?, 111. White also claims that the white slave mistress was sometimes present at the delivery of new slave children. But this can easily be read as the female slave owner’s desire to watch over her economic investment. White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?, 112. This belief led not only to various preventable ailments like backaches, uterine pain and hernias, but in some cases to the death of the slave. White notes that within the first two to three weeks of giving birth, slave women were put back to work spinning, weaving and sewing. Further damage was often done to them by this hasty return to work before their bodies were given sufficient time to recuperate. Additionally, slave owners were quick to use physical punishment, like whipping, if slave women lagged behind their expectations. See: White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?, 112–13. Treckel has argued that the normalcy of the custom of employing black female slaves as wet nurses for white children in the American South is hard to pinpoint. She speculates that this is in part due to the biological racism of whites who feared that such intimate contact and transfer of bodily fluid might result in the racial degeneration of white children. This degeneration of course was defi ned as a potential “blackening” of white children. As such, Treckel has questioned whether the significant literary examples of white visitors’ commentary on slave wet nurses is a sign of the normalcy of the custom or simply a sign that whites noticed and recorded the practices frequently due to their own racial fears and fascinations. See Treckel, “Breastfeeding and Maternal Sexuality,” 47–50. Treckel has noted the dominance of wet nurses for upper-class white English children in the 1700s and amongst the white American elite in the same period. This was in part fashion and in part the state of western medicine because throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, various medical texts instructed women to avoid initiating breast-feeding too early. The fear was that the colostrum, the initial secretion that is a potent immunological defense, was instead toxic and fatal. See Treckel, “Breastfeeding and Maternal Sexuality,” 26–27. Steckel, “A Peculiar Population,” 732. For more on the plantation records upon which Steckel based his research, see Richard H. Steckel, “Birth Weights and Infant Mortality among American Slaves,” Explorations in Economic History 23 (April 1986), 173–98. White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?, 201. White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?, 98–99. White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?, 99–100. White mentions one Major Wallon who bestowed a calico dress and silver dollar upon every female slave every time they produced a child. In the context of the American South, White points out that pregnant female slaves were often moved to the “trash gang” as they neared delivery, a job that was less arduous than other field duties. White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?, 104. Given the estimated period of sterility following menarche of 2.6 years, slave women were able to delay childbirth by at least two years. These fi ndings were based upon the height, weight and age data derived from slave ship manifests. See Trussell and Steckel, “The Age of Slaves at Menarche and First Birth,” 492.

196 Notes 40. White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?, 101. White mentions lawsuits wherein buyers were refunded their monies due to the reproductive “defect” of slave women who were unable to “breed.” Reasons for poor reproductive health included sexually transmitted diseases like syphilis and gonorrhea and gynecological problems like uterine infections. I mention the element of public humiliation because these buyers were able to recoup their money through the public legal documentation of the female slave as “defective.” 41. White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?, 70. White points out that women in this agegroup were often pregnant, nursing or caring for small children and less likely than male parents to abandon their children. One sound example of the indelible bond and commitment of slave mothers to their children is the fact that of the 151 fugitive women listed in advertisements in New Orleans newspapers of 1850, none was listed as having run away without her children. See White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?, 71. 42. See, for example: Bartholomew Dandridge, The Price Family (c. 1728); Jacob Huysmans, Edward Henry Lee, First Earl of Litchfi eld, and his Wife, Charlotte Fitzroy as Children (c. 1676–1677); Justus Englwhardt Kuhn, Henry Darnall III as a Child (c. 1710); Sir Peter Lely, Elizabeth Murray Countess of Dysart (c. 1651–1652); Antonis Mor, Joanna of Austria with a Slave (mid-sixteenth century); François de Troy, Presumed Portrait of Madame de Franqueville and her Children (1712); Phillip Wickstead, Richard and Jane Pusey (c. 1775). 43. “Bill of Sale of Abraham Van Vleek,” Black Women in White America: A Documentary History, ed. Gerda Lerner (New York: Vintage Books, A Division of Random House, Inc., 1992), 7. 44. “Mrs. Blankenship Wishes to Buy a Slave Girl,” Black Women in White America: A Documentary History, ed. Gerda Lerner (New York: Vintage Books, A Division of Random House, Inc., 1992), 8. 45. The term mulatto was used to defi ne a person who was half black and half white. Generally, such persons were seen as visually embodying both white and black racial characteristics (i.e., hair that was neither straight nor socalled kinky, complexions that were neither white nor brown and similarly in-between physiognomical features). Yet, of course, vast differences existed in what a mulatto looked like. Regardless, they were considered by whites to be morally, physically and intellectually closer to them because of their biological proximity to whiteness. It is interesting to contemplate why this woman specifically desired a so-called dark mulatto and the specific significance that she attached to the racial embodiment of such a slave. 46. David Eltis and David Richardson, “West Africa and the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade,” The Slavery Reader, eds. Gad Heuman and James Walvin (London: Routledge, 2003), 52–53. and Marcus Rediker “The Evolution of the Slave Ship” The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York: Penguin Books, 2007), 69. 47. Having worked in several Canadian museums within collection management units, it has become clear to me that the white feminist warning about the patriarchal nature of archives also readily applies to museum collections, and that such a warning should of course be expanded to encompass issues of race and racism in collecting and archiving practices. Historically in western museums, and likely to an even greater extent in Canada due to our national delusion of a race-blind multiculturalism, museum collections have been endemically racially miscatalogued. These archival errors have largely been committed through the error of omission, where well-meaning white museum staff excluded details of the race of the sitter/subject or artist/producer, helping to create the illusion of a universal whiteness. Due to these compiled absences and sanitizations, there is no way of knowing how many

Notes

48.

49. 50.

51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58. 59. 60.

61.

197

important works representing or produced by black Canadians exist and simply cannot at present be identified as such. Marcus Wood, “Rhetoric and the Runaway: The Iconography of Slave Escape in England and America,” Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780–1865 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 79. Wood “Rhetoric and the Runaway,” 80. The slaves were listed as a woman of thirty-five, boys of twelve and thirteen, two boys of eighteen and a man of thirty. There is no indication given by Riddell if the group was related or from where they were migrated. Riddell, “Slavery in the Maritime Provinces,” 360. Riddell, “Slavery in the Maritime Provinces,” 360. Riddell, “Slavery in the Maritime Provinces,” 362. Riddell, “Slavery in the Maritime Provinces,” 363. The slave girl was sold for fi fteen pounds Halifax currency and after a year was assigned to the purchaser’s daughter, Mrs. Mary Day. See Riddell, “Slavery in the Maritime Provinces,” 361–62. Riddell, “Slavery in the Maritime Provinces,” 373. I deliberately say mothers here, as opposed to parents, because in most cases of “miscegenating sex” (due to the prolific nature of the sexual abuse of black female slaves) the mothers of slave children would have been dominantly black females. Riddell, “Slavery in the Maritime Provinces,” 360. See William Renwick Riddell, “Notes on the Slave in Nouvelle-France,” Journal of Negro History 8, no. 3 (July 1923), 319, 323–24. Riddell, “Notes on the Slave in Nouvelle-France,” 318–19. Riddell documented Isabella as fi rst being sold by Captain Thomas Venture to George Hipps at auction but gave no date. Hipps, described as a merchant butcher, then sold Isabella to the lieutenant governor on 14 November 1778, who later sold her to Peter Napier, a captain in the British Navy, on 20 April 1779. See Riddell, “Notes on the Slave in Nouvelle-France,” 324. The fact that many of the slave owners in Lower Canada were military men of various ranks (cadets, captains, officers) increased the vulnerability and forced mobility of the slaves they owned because the soldiers’ postings were largely not within their own control. But slaves owned by people of non-military backgrounds also experienced the same upheaval. Riddell documented the “hiring out” of a Negro male slave known as Louis Lepage by Jean Baptiste Vallée of Quebec on 27 December 1744 to François de Chalet, inspector general of the Compagnie des Indes, “to serve him as a sailor for the remaining term of de Chalet’s tenure of the Ports of Cataraqui (Katarakouye, i.e., now Kingston, Ontario) and Niagara.” Other cases include a Negro female slave named Flora who was relocated from L’Assomption to Montreal (both Lower Canada, now Quebec) when she was sold along with a Negro male named Caesar to Solomon Levy by James McGill acting on behalf of Thomas Curry. A Negro woman named Sarah was moved from Saratoga to Montreal when she was sent by her owner, Hugh McAdam, to be sold by his friend John Brown to James Morrison of Montreal on 20 February 1785. Three Negro slaves (Tobi, aged twenty-six; Sarah, aged twenty-one; and a child) were sold on the open market at Montreal by William Ward of Vermont, who had purchased them, along with a fourth Negro (Joseph, aged twenty-two), from Elijah Cady of Albany, New York. And fi nally, a Negro female slave named Nancy Morton had been moved from “Mary Land” to New Brunswick by her owner Caleb Jones. See Riddell, “Notes on the Slave in NouvelleFrance,” 322–23, 327–28; “Slavery in the Maritime Provinces,” 370–71.

198

Notes

62. Riddell, “Slavery in the Maritime Provinces,” 361. 63. Kitts was sold on 10 August 1792, Tanno was gifted on 27 July 1793 and Pierre was sold on 11 July 1793. See Riddell, “Notes on the Slave in Nouvelle-France,” 329. 64. Riddell, “Slavery in the Maritime Provinces,” 363. 65. See Riddell, “Notes on the Slave in Nouvelle-France,” 327–28; “Slavery in the Maritime Provinces,” 360, 362. Not only were the black slaves within Canada international, but white Canadian slave owners also owned slaves who lived outside of Canada. In one such case the executors of the estate of John Margerum of Halifax, who was deceased, noted credits of 29.9.4.1/2 pounds for the sale of a Negro boy at Carolina. See Riddell, “Slavery in the Maritime Provinces,” 362. 66. Another mark would, of course, be the lack of monocrop plantations as the economic fuel (as opposed to other types) of slavery. 67. The Middle Passage has been theoretically and historically discussed only as the Atlantic crossings that took place between the coasts of Africa and the “New World” ports of the Americas and the Caribbean. To my knowledge, scholars have yet to research, theorize or conceptualize the secondary Trans Atlantic crossings through which ships departed from more southern “New World” ports and landed at northern ones like those in Canada and the Northeastern United States. The black female slave represented in François Malépart de Beaucourt’s Portrait of a Negro Slave (1786) might have been just such a survivor. There is then a wealth of documentation and historical evidence to be examined that would shed light on the origins, cultural and racial backgrounds, experiences, beliefs and trials of the many black slaves who were forced to undertake such crossings. It would be interesting, for instance, to determine how many of these slaves were born in Africa as opposed to the Caribbean, South or Central America, etc., and how many had already survived the initial Middle Passage. In the case of slaves being forced on not one, but two traumatic crossings in a lifetime, any recuperation, if at all possible, of the mental state of such slaves would shed light on the psychic burdens of slavery as geographical displacement. Such slaves who survived two crossings would have had a wealth of knowledge, agricultural, geographic, social, linguistic, etc., from their experiences in multiple locations of diaspora. Also, differences in ratios of male to female slaves and the ages of such slaves would contribute to an understanding of why they were relocated in the fi rst instance. It would be imperative to investigate the state of these slaves and indeed merchant ships (because in the case of Canada, many of the slaves seem to have been secondary imports on merchant ships along with cargoes of rum, sugar, molasses, etc.) in order to understand whether or not the secondary Trans Atlantic passage was indeed as horrific as the fi rst. And, fi nally, it would be interesting for Slavery Studies scholars whose interests lie in biological history (many cited throughout this chapter) to investigate whether there are any discernable and measurable biological differences between slaves who survived or died during the second Middle Passage and slaves who embarked upon two or more such voyages. 68. Janelle M. Jones, Richard N. Lalonde and Mirella L. Stroink, “Racial Identity, Racial Attitudes, and Race Socialization among Black Canadian Parents,” Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science 40, no. 3 (2008), 130. 69. Jones, Lalonde and Stroink, “Racial Identity, Racial Attitudes, and Race Socialization,” 129. 70. Letter from Colonel R.S. McLaughlin to H.O. McCurry, director of the National Gallery of Canada, 19 July 1948, cited in Jacques, A Reassessment, 9.

Notes

199

71. The normalcy of racist language to describe black bodies is evidenced in the fact that this painting was exhibited under the title of Piccaninny throughout Ontario in the Exhibition of Pictures by Canadian Artists, under the auspices of The Art Association of Canadian Service Clubs and The Ontario Society of Artists, in the winter of 1930–1931. 72. I do not wish to glamorize or glorify patriarchal authority; however, we must honestly consider the ramifications of the fact that this historical means of supporting, protecting and providing for one’s family was denied black male slaves.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 3 1. Marcia Pointon, Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 2. 2. Eva Mackey The House of Difference: Cultural Politics and National Identity in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999). 3. By dominance I am referring to the sheer primacy of production and exhibition as has been charted by Marcia Pointon through an analysis of works exhibited at the Royal Academy, the undisputed center of London artistic life in the eighteenth century. Pointon’s research reveals portraiture as the dominant submission to Academy exhibitions between 1781 and 1785. Portraits made up 44.67 per cent of the exhibits of 1783, excluding miniatures. 4. Dennis Reid, A Concise History of Canadian Painting (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1988), 40. Reid’s speculation on this subject was predated by Gérard Morisset, who proposed that the fruits and the landscape were suggestive of experience in the West Indies. However, at the same time, Morisset claims that the painting was “supposed to have been painted in Montreal” but does not provide any evidence. John Bentley Mays went even further than Reid, claiming that François Malépart de Beaucourt had travelled on sugar boats from France to Guadeloupe. See Gérard Morisset, “An Essay on Canadian Painting,” Painting in Canada: A Selective Historical Survey (Albany: Albany Institute of History and Art, 1946), 22, and John Bentley Mays, “From Pine Tress to Palm Trees,” Globe and Mail, 5 March 1988, C5. 5. Because the painting was fundamentally a studio portrait, it would be clear to art historians that the landscape setting, tropical or not, would be fundamentally a retroactive inclusion that did not necessarily adhere to the actual location of production. 6. Madeleine Major-Frégeau, La Vie et L’oeuvre de François Malépart de Beaucourt, 2nd ed. (Quebec: Ministère des Affaires culturelles Dépot legal, Bibliothèque nationale du Quebec, 1979), 59–60. Major-Frégeau uses the expression “un jeune antillaise parfaitement libre.” The transformation of the sitter, named as a slave in the title, into a free woman is disturbing for the way that it inacts a retroactive erasure of slavery that was, at this moment in the eighteenth century, a prolific and entrenched institution of western imperial power, especially in the Caribbean. 7. Barry Lord, Painting in Canada: Toward a People’s Art (Toronto: NC Press, 1974), 44. Lord aptly notes the exoticization of the black female sitter as a way to create a racial and geographical distance between her represented body and that of her white viewers. 8. Morisset, “An Essay on Canadian Painting,” 22. See also Curatorial File M12067, McCord Museum of Canadian History, Library Archives, Montreal, Canada.

200

Notes

9. Donald Blake Webster, Georgian Canada: Conflict and Culture 1745–1820 (Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum, 1984), 141. 10. Webster, Georgian Canada, 141. For example, Webster argues, without providing evidence, that the black female sitter in the portrait was known to be living in Montreal in 1832, “probably having been freed long since.” The assumption of the woman’s manumission, along with her presence in the city a full forty-six years after she had been painted as an adult, is strategic in that it implies the benevolence of her white slave holders that is supposedly evidenced not only through her freedom, but by the fact that she has survived into old age. 11. The fi rst recorded black visitor to Canada is generally thought to have been Mattieu da Costa (de Coste), a young boy who was a part of an expedition either to Port Royal (on the north bank of the Annapolis River) or that founded Port Royal in 1605 or 1606. Whereas Leo Bertley has identified the expedition as that of Poutrincourt-Champlain, Daniel G. Hill has described it as the expedition of Pierre de Gua, sieur De Monts. Winks reproduces this latter name as Sieur Du Gua de Monts and names him as the governor. Although da Costa’s non-African name locates a staple of slave practice, the renaming of blacks within a European tradition, which was meant to strip slaves of personal identification and its suggestion of cultural heritage and autonomy, most scholars agree that he was most likely not a slave in the strictest application of chattel slavery that would later be introduced in the region. Whereas there is general agreement that da Costa was valuable as a translator between the French and Mi’kmaq—a fact that may indicate that he had visited the region before—they disagree on whether he remained a visitor or became a resident. Bertley claims that he also visited Nova Scotia in 1606, became a charter member of The Order of Good Cheer (Canada’s oldest social club) and when he died, that he was buried on the grounds of the habitation. But Bertley provides no archival sources to substantiate these claims. However, da Costa’s burial location, if correct, is significant because it would indicate he had been baptized. See: Leo W. Bertley, Canada and Its People of African Descent (Pierrefonds, Quebec: Bilongo Publishers, 1977), xi; Maureen G. Elgersman, Unyielding Spirits: Black Women and Slavery in Early Canada and Jamaica (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1999), 5–6; Robin W. Winks, The Blacks in Canada: A History, 2nd ed. (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), 1. 12. Le Jeune was apparently brought to New France from Madagascar as a boy of about nine years by what Bertley describes as an invading force led by the Kirke brothers. He eventually became the slave of David Kirke. Kirke later sold him to Olivier Le Tardif, the head clerk of the French colony, who eventually gave Le Jeune as a gift to the Couillard family. His last owner was Guilaume Couillard, who may have granted his freedom before his death in his thirties in 1654. The speculation of Le Jeune’s possible manumission stems from the fact that he was described on his death certificate as domestique as opposed to esclave. Bertley indicates that his family name was adopted in reference to Father Le Jeune, the Jesuit Superior who ran a school that he attended. This would make Oliver Le Jeune one of the fi rst students of a western educational establishment in the history of Canada. See Bertley, Canada and its People, xi–xii, and Winks, The Blacks in Canada, 1–2. 13. Winks, The Blacks in Canada, 3–4. 14. Winks, The Blacks in Canada, 5–6. 15. It would also appear that many an ordonnance was in response to the problem of fugitive slaves.

Notes

201

16. Winks asserts that black slaves enjoyed privileges normally reserved for whites, such as acting as witnesses at religious ceremonies and serving petitions against free persons. See Winks, The Blacks in Canada, 10–11. 17. The code was mainly introduced to discourage slave revolt and violence by slaves against whites. Although scholars have speculated on the enforcement of Le Code Noir in New France, as early as 1689 the governor of New France, Jacques-Réne de Brisay, Marquis de Denonville, aided by the incumbent attorney-general, Charles-François-Marie Ruette d’Auteuil, petitioned the king that both slavery and the code should be adopted in New France. See Winks, The Blacks in Canada, 5–7, and Elgersman, Unyielding Spirits, 14–15. 18. For instance, thefts of sheep, pigs and sugar cane could be punished with branding. Fugitives in absence for a month were to have their ears cut off and be branded on one shoulder. Violence against the master or his family, especially if blood had been spilled, was punishable by death. Even in death the slave’s body could act as a sign of ultimate commodification and possession because such death sentences were often carried out as spectacular public displays. See William Renwick Riddell, “Le Code Noir,” Journal of Negro History 10, no. 3 (July 1925), 323–25. 19. Riddell, “Le Code Noir,” 322. 20. Riddell, “Le Code Noir,” 323. 21. The term panis evolved from the tribal name Pawnee from which the indigenous slave populations were at least initially culled. See Winks, The Blacks in Canada, 9. 22. Marcel Trudel, L’esclavage au Canada français: Histoire et conditions de l’esclavage (Quebec: Presse de L’Université Laval à Québec, 1960), cited in Winks, The Blacks in Canada, 11. 23. Trudel, L’esclavage au Canada français: Histoire et conditions de l’esclavage; L’esclavage au Canada français (Montreal: Presse de L’Université Laval, 1963); Dictionnaire des Esclaves et de leurs Propriétaires au Canada Français (La Salle: Éditions Hutubise HMH Ltée, 1990). See also Elgersman, Unyielding Spirits, 15. 24. Trudel, L’esclavage au Canada français, cited in Winks, The Blacks in Canada, 9. 25. Winks, The Blacks in Canada, 10. 26. Winks, The Blacks in Canada, 9. 27. Elgersman, Unyielding Spirits, 5–6. 28. Elgersman, Unyielding Spirits, 5. 29. Winks, The Blacks in Canada, 10. 30. Another key factor in the differences between panis and black slave life expectancies was the Native susceptibility to European diseases like smallpox. Winks documents the death of fi fty-eight Natives and only two Negroes to an epidemic in 1733 and fi fty-six Natives and six Negroes in 1755. 31. Early census records in the colony are not a reliable source because they did not distinguish the slaves by race. An examination of some twenty advertisements about the sale or escape of slaves in the Quebec Gazette between 1778 and 1794 reveals a twelve-to-eight male to female ratio. Notarized documents about the appraisal and sale of slaves reveal a similar imbalance of two-to-one. See Elgersman, Unyielding Spirits, 16, 19, note 42. 32. Although most accounts claim that François’s father, Paul Beaucourt (1700– 1756), was a French military man, they disagree as to whether he was in naval or army service. Posted to New France in 1720, he eventually settled in La Prarie (near Montreal) where his son was to be born. Taking up painting

202 Notes

33.

34.

35.

36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42.

42.

after his discharge, Paul was his son’s fi rst art teacher but would later encourage him to pursue formal training, which he did in Bordeaux. Barry Lord has indicated that the addition of the de by François to his last name was an aristocratic pretension that reveals the painter’s class aspirations. See Webster, Georgian Canada, 141, and Lord, Painting in Canada, 31–32. Trudel lists the other slave as a male, Jean-Baptiste-François, who was reportedly baptized on 14 April 1791 at the approximate age of fourteen. See Trudel, Dictionnaire des Esclaves. A contradictory account problematizes the validity of Marie as the model for the portrait. Benoite Camagne mentions a “Catherine Cora negresse” as the woman represented in the portrait. See Archives judiciaires ed Montréal, Greffe de Patrice Lacombe, acte numéro 70 (le 5 juillet 1832), cited in Major-Frégeau, La Vie et L’oeuvre, 60. There is much disagreement over the precise dates of Malépart de Beaucourt’s departure from Europe. Barry Lord puts his European dates even longer at 1771 to 1786. Meanwhile, Michael Measures places him in France from possibly 1763 and claims that the December 1784 Minutes of the Bordeaux Academy, to which de Beaucourt had been elected in 1783, recorded his plans to depart for America and his leave of the Academy. See Lord, Painting in Canada, 32, and Reid, A Concise History, 40. Dennis Reid, A Concise History of Canadian Painting (Don Mills: Oxford University Press-Canada, 1988), 40. While studying art abroad in Bordeaux under Joseph-Gaétant Camag(n)e, François met and married his daughter in 1773 (see Webster, Georgian Canada; Harper). Because Trudel lists Benoite Gaétant as the slave owner, another possibility is of course that Marie had resided with her mistress in Europe before the marriage to François. Reid, A Concise History, 40. Other scholars concur with Reid’s assessment that the portrait was not produced in Canada. Major-Frégeau suggests that the work was painted in or based upon experience in the West Indies. See Major-Frégeau, La Vie et L’œuvre, 60. The earliest postcolonial reading of this painting is an excellent contemplation of the composition, its commission, function and audience within the specific colonial context of production by Barry Lord. Lord, Painting in Canada, 43. Lord’s reference to the rates for portraits pertains to the Canadian portraitist Théophile Hamel (1817–1870), born near Québec City. See, for example: Maurice La Tour, Portrait of a Black Servant (1741); Wayan Adams, New Orleans Mammy (c. 1920). Lord, Painting in Canada, 43. Lord, Painting in Canada, 44. Lord insightfully expands on this point through an equation of the treatment of the black female body with pornography. In a critical analysis of the work, he equates the portraits function with “prettifying” the oppressed colonial for the pleasure of the patron classes. See, for example: Peter Lely, Lady Charlotte Fitzroy with an Indian Page (c. 1674); Johann Zoffany, Family of Sir William Young (c. 1770); Anthony van Dyck, Marchesa Elena Grimaldi, Wife of Marchese Nicola Cattaneo (c. 1623); Eglon Hendrik van der Neer, Lady Attended by Negro Page and Maidservant (n.d.); Joseph Wright of Derby, Two Girls with their Negro Servant (1770). Or it would appear at least that the painting became anonymized perhaps rather quickly within the history of its circulation. Nevertheless, if it is Canadian Art History and not the artist that is responsible for this erasure, it is still troubling in the implications for the lack of preservation of individuality of marginalized subjects.

Notes

203

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4 1. Pointon, Hanging the Head, 5. 2. Webster, Georgian Canada, 141. 3. See J. Russell Harper, La Peinture au Canada des origines à nos jours (Québec City: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 1969), 56. 4. See Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies,” 204–42, and Levy, Other Women. 5. Martha J. Bailey, “Servant Girls and Upper Canada’s Seduction Act: 1837– 1946,” Dimensions of Childhood: Essays on the History of Children and Youth in Canada, eds. Russell Smandych, Gordon Dodds and Alvin Esau (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba, Legal Research Institute, 1991), 162. 6. Pierre-Marie Deparis, Le Grand Livre des Fruits et Legumes: Histoire, Culture et Usage (Besançon: Editions La Manufacture, 1991), 101. 7. Sam Segal, “Flower and Fruit Still Lifes,” A Prosperous Past: The Sumptuous Still Life in the Netherlands 1600–1700, ed. William B. Jordan (The Hague: SDU Publishers, 1989), 108. 8. Segal, “Flower and Fruit Still Lifes,” 108. 9. Segal, “Flower and Fruit Still Lifes,” 117. 10. Segal, “Flower and Fruit Still Lifes,” 108. 11. Segal, “Flower and Fruit Still Lifes,” 109. 12. Of course, the need for sittings was altered by the technological development of photography. However, the traditional process ensured the artist’s direct contact with the sitter and thus a certain degree of familiarity with them. 13. Trudel, Dictionnaire des Esclaves, 379. For a fuller discussion of the complex context of production of this portrait and a consideration of the colonial power relations between sitter and artist see chapter 3. For information about the other enslaved person owned by the artist and his wife see chapter 3, endnote 32. 14. For a fuller discussion of a potential timeline of Marie’s purchase by the artist and/or his wife see chapter 3, endnote 33. The speculative nature of the discussion hinges upon the uncertainty of the dates of Malépart de Beaucourt’s European sojurn which he undertook to professionalize himself as an artist. 15. Reid, A Concise History, 40. Other scholars also concur with Reid’s assessment that the portrait was not produced in Canada. See Major-Frégeau, La Vie et L’œuvre, 61. 16. White, Ar’n’t I a Woman, 68. 17. Londa Schiebinger, Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), 179. 18. White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?, 201–2. 19. Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 83. 20. Schiebinger, Nature’s Body, 183. 21. Major-Frégeau, La Vie et L’oeuvre, 60. 22. A.G. Reid, “Intercolonial Trade during the French Regime,” Canadian Historical Review 32, no. 3 (1951), 236–51. 23. Hoag Levins, Symbolism of the Pineapple: Being the Brief and Colorful History of a Truly American Fruit, www.levins.com/pineapple.html (last accessed 9 October 2009). 24. Deparis, Le Grand Livre des Fruits et Legumes, 280. 25. Levins, Symbolism of the Pineapple.

204 Notes 26. Geo Coppens d’Eeckenbrugge, Kenneth G. Rohrbach and Freddy Leal, “History, Distribution and World Production,” The Pineapple: Botany, Production and Uses, eds. D.P. Bartholomew, R.E. Paull and K.G. Rohrbach (Honolulu: CABI Publishing, 2003), 2. This source cites Le Cour (La Court) as the fi rst to achieve success with greenhouse cultivation of the pineapple at the end of the seventeenth century near Leyden. 27. d’Eeckenbrugge, Rohrbach and Leal, “History, Distribution and World Production,” 2. 28. See www.rain-tree.com/ (last accessed 9 October 2009). 29. John M. Riddle, Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 17–18. 30. See www.hort.purdue.edu/newcropmorton/index.html (last accessed fall 2004), and White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?, 84–85. 31. Schiebinger, Nature’s Body, 181. 32. Morgan, Laboring Women, 114. Morgan also notes the use of vaginal suppositories, infusions of gum, camphor and rue, as contraceptives in the American South in the nineteenth century. 33. Morgan, Laboring Women, 114. 34. d’Eeckenbrugge and colleagues also cite the pineapple as an abortifacient used by Native Americans. See d’Eeckenbrugge, Rohrbach and Leal, “History, Distribution and World Production,” 1. 35. A great exception is, of course, the device of representing a person, often the artist, in a reflective surface of a vessel or other object represented within the ensemble. See Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 19–21. 36. Winks, The Blacks in Canada, 9. 37. For example, Paul Gauguin, Tahitian Women with Mango Fruits (1899). 38. For a reproduction of this image, see Schiebinger, Nature’s Body, 162. It is important to note also that Kolb’s assertion that “Hottentot” women smoked marijuana while breast-feeding with their seemingly abnormally elastic breasts would have appeared particularly unfeminine if not inhuman and uncivilized to most white European readers.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 5 1. Rex Nettleford’s “Foreword” in Steeve O. Buckridge, The Language of Dress: Resistance and Accommodation in Jamaica, 1760–1890 (Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies, 2004), x. 2. Graham White and Shane White, “Slave Hair and African American Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” Journal of Southern History 61, no. 1 (February 1995), 47–48. 3. Buckridge, The Language of Dress, 1–2. Buckridge ably argues against the historical hierarchy of documents over material culture artifacts, pointing out the disciplinary territorialization that fuels the neglect of material culture. For example, Buckridge identifies Archeology’s disengagement with the study of belief as the domain of Cultural Anthropology and its similar disengagement from aesthetics as the purview of Art History. 4. Buckridge, The Language of Dress, 3. Buckridge understands apparel to be more limited than dress in its exclusion of bodily modification. Costume is similarly a narrower field because it refers to out-of-the-ordinary social roles or activities.

Notes

205

5. Hilary McD. Beckles, “An Economic Life of their Own: Slaves as Commodity Producers and Distributors in Barbados,” Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World, eds. Verene Shepherd and Hilary McD. Beckles (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers Limited, 2000), 732. Beckles also discusses concrete examples of the ways in which the white-dominated colonial governments of the Caribbean (Jamaica, St. Lucia, French Antilles, St. Vincent) sought to prohibit, through legislation, the economic participation of slaves. See 742, note 2. 6. Beckles defi nes huckstering as “the distributive dimension of small-scale productive domestic activity” and traces its practice in the Caribbean as part of an African continuum. See Beckles, “An Economic Life of their Own,” 732. But in the context of Barbados, Beckles has also noted the participation of poor white women (mainly Irish Catholic) in huckstering, the interconnection of their economic practices with and the degree of cultural transfer from their black female counterparts. However, he has also demonstrated the ways in which white hucksters often abused, exploited and robbed their black counterparts, a situation exemplified and assisted by law through the differential application of punishment for the crime of huckstering. Under the law of 1708, whereas whites could be fi ned five pounds, blacks could legally be punished by whipping, receiving twenty-one stripes on their bare backs upon the evidence of any white person. To gain legal exemption, blacks were supposed to wear a metal collar around their neck or leg with the “master’s and maker’s name and place of residence.” This collar acted as a commodifying mark that would recall the slave’s status as property even as they sought to eke out a modicum of economic and social freedom through huckstering. The metal collars would have had a visceral and psychic effect on the slaves, stripping them of their humanity through the public spectacle of their collared bodies. Beckles, “An Economic Life of their Own,” 736–38. 7. Provision grounds were areas of land that slave owners provided to their slaves specifically for the cultivation of agricultural products for the slaves’ subsistence. These lands were customarily substandard to the plots that were reserved and most conducive for the monocrop cultivation of the cash crops that fuelled an estate. This practice was not universal but specific to certain islands like Jamaica. In other islands like Barbados, huckstering emerged from slaves selling their food rations, like guinea corn, in order to obtain a greater variety in their food supply. Beckles, “An Economic Life of their Own,” 733. 8. Elgersman, Unyielding Spirits, 5–6. Elgersman argues that black slaves were priced higher than panis/panise and that black females were priced higher than males due to their rarity. A part of these differences likely had to do with the exoticism that attached to the blackness of the African-descended slaves, who could come to stand for their owners’ colonial reach and thereby serve symbolic as well as concrete material functions. Robin Winks also adds that black slaves tended to have greater resistance to European disease and therefore lived longer than their Native counterparts. See Winks, The Blacks in Canada. William Renwick Riddell, one of the earliest if not the earliest historian of slavery in Canada, provides a significant sampling of prices for slaves, male and female, panis and black, in eighteenth-century Lower Canada in “Notes on the Slave,” 316–30. Of the ten sales given in livres, a French monetary unit that was later displaced by francs, Riddell records six Negro males, four Negro females, one panise (Native female) and one panis (Native male). The average price of the four categories, in livres, is as follows: (a) Negro male: 598.00; (b) Negro

206 Notes

9.

10.

11. 12. 13.

14.

female: 1,000.00; (c) panis: 350.00; (d) panise: 483.33. I have excluded from this calculation, the one group sale of five Negro slaves (two men, two women and one girl) for 3,000 livres because it is impossible to decipher the individual value of each of the slaves. When sales made in pounds are also taken into consideration, the following averages result: (a) Negro male: 760.57; (b) Negro Female: 669.00; (c) panis: 369.66; (d) panise: 483.33. In this latter calculation of slaves, I have also excluded group purchases. We can see in the latter calculation that the average price for Negro male slaves goes up, surpassing that of the Negro females that falls. Meanwhile, the panis slaves are, in both cases, well below the price of their Negro counterparts, with the female price in both instances above the male. It is clear from the descriptions of the slaves provided during the sale transactions that their owners and buyers took into consideration their race, sex and age, as well as skills and whether or not the slave was being sold with any possessions (i.e., linen and clothing). The price was also based upon what type of upkeep the slave owner was to provide for the slave (food, liquor, tobacco and even money). It seems also that amongst the black slaves, complexion would have played a significant role in pricing. Mulattoes were listed separately from Negroes and, given the colonial focus on complexion or proximity to whiteness as a sign of civilization and beauty, black slaves with lighter complexions may have received, in some instances, better treatment than their darker counterparts. In terms of the racial sexualization of black women, however, there are ways in which mulatto or otherwise mixed race women may have both suffered from and wielded some degree of power from white male sexual attention. (Conversion of pounds into livres was derived from the following website: http://www.pierre-marteau. com/currency/converter/eng-fra.html; accessed 23 July 2009.) This is not to say that the sitter would not have had direct familiarity and possibly even experience with huckstering and the agricultural labour practices of the Caribbean. We cannot know this for certain until we are able to pinpoint her geographical and ethnic origins prior to her arrival in Montreal. As with the Estcourt watercolour, The Good “Woman of Colour” (1838– 1839), it is difficult to detect whether or not this style of headwrap represents a continuum between the headwrapping practices of black female hucksters in the Caribbean because the back of the head (and therefore the style of the headwraps as they appeared from the back) are not visible. Buckridge has noted that amongst market women in Jamaica in the later nineteenth and early twentieth century, the bandanna headwrap became a staple of their dress, identifying them as traders and labourers and even signaling their marital status. These bandannas were secured at the center of the back of the head and the ends of the fabric were then manipulated into various shapes. For instance, if peaked and curved, the style was known as the “peacock” or “cock’s tail.” See Buckridge, The Language of Dress, 163–64. Beckles, “An Economic Life of their Own,” 735. Buckridge, The Language of Dress, 86. Marietta Morrissey, “Women’s Work, Family Formation, and Reproduction among Caribbean Slaves,” Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World, eds. Verene Shepherd and Hilary McD. Beckles (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers Limited, 2000), 671. Hilary McD. Beckles, “Property Rights in Pleasure: The Marketing of Enslaved Women’s Sexuality,” Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World, eds. Verene Shepherd and Hilary McD. Beckles (Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers Limited, 2000), 692.

Notes

207

15. Beckles, “Property Rights in Pleasure,” 693. 16. Beckles, “Property Rights in Pleasure,” 692. 17. Samuel de Champlain is credited with the erection of the fi rst European fortification at the settlement of Montreal in the early 1600s. However, during his initial visit to the island in 1535, Jacques Cartier had encountered a fortified settlement or circular palisade inhabited by Native peoples at the base of the mountain. This settlement was known as Hochelaga. Cartier and Champlain, both French, were and are still problematically cited as two of the “founding fathers” of Canada. This recitation of narratives of “discovery” perpetually seeks to erase and marginalize the complex, rich and diverse presence of Native peoples. See Alfred Sandham, Montreal and its Fortifications (Montreal: Daniel Rose, 210 St. James Street, 1874), 6–7. The state of disrepair of the fortifications was at least partially responsible for the ease with which the British seized the French settlement on 18 September 1760, under the army of Lord Jeffrey Amherst. The walls of the settlement began to be dismantled in 1801 through an act that was passed in the Lower Canada House of Assembly. However, they were not completely removed until 1817. Therefore, the date of the portrait is fi rmly positioned within the dates of the fortified settlement. See Sandham, Montreal and its Fortifications, 18–22. 18. For example, Morrissey discusses the lightening of the slave population in Jamaica in the early nineteenth century. See Morrissey, “Women’s Work,” 671. 19. Buckridge, The Language of Dress, 13. 20. The term headwrap seems to encompass more broadly any fabric that was tied about the head. It was only in post-emancipation Jamaica that the term bandanna came into common usage. Bandannas were commonly made of Madras cloth, a mass-produced and affordable cloth manufactured in India. Common patterns included red, or yellow and orange checked cotton. Due to this mass production, headwrapping lost much of its aesthetic uniqueness and specificity that was common during the period of slavery when fabrics were frequently produced by the wearer or on a small scale. See Buckridge, The Language of Dress, 162. 21. I am not solely referring to resistance as the meeting of violence (that of the white ruling class) with violence, as with the practice of rebellion and the use of fi re, but resistance as performance, as mimicry (in the sense of Homi Bhabha), as taking up the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house, as running away and even as choosing to take one’s life and thereby thwart the master by taking “his/her” property. For more on slave torture and physical violence, see Wood, Blind Memory; for more on black resistance, rebellion and revolution see Hilary McD. Beckles and Verene Shepherd, eds., Section XIII, “Rejecting Slavery: Blacks Speak Back,” Section XIV, “Caribbean Wars: Marronage and Rebellion,” Section XV, “The Haitian Revolution,” and Section XVI, “Rebel Women: Anti-Slavery Feminist Vanguard,” in Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers Limited, 2000), 821–1029. 22. White and White, “Slave Hair and African American Culture,” 49. 23. Buckridge, The Language of Dress, 17. 24. Buckridge, The Language of Dress, 3. 25. Buckridge, The Language of Dress, 3. 26. Buckridge, The Language of Dress, 86–94. 27. African men also participated in this intricate form of self-care and aestheticization. For example, White and White have noted that in 1602, the

208

28.

29.

30.

31.

32.

Notes Dutchman Pieter de Marees produced a print representing sixteen different hair-styles of Benin men and women across different classes. They have also discussed the continuation of African hair practices and the huge variety of styling possibilities of black hair in the context of America. See White and White, “Slave Hair and African American Culture,” 49–51. Buckridge, The Language of Dress, 24, 94. According to Buckridge, the headwraps of Yoruba women, known as gele or oja, often matched their dresses. The fabrics were often dyed with indigo and had bold white patterns. It should be noted, though, that not all scholars agree that the headwrap was fundamentally African in origin. Although they problematize the veracity of white sources as accurate descriptions of black dress within slavery and colonization, White and White also argue, following John Thornton, that most Europeans who fi rst encountered Africans recorded a “nearly universal bare-headedness.” See White and White, “Slave Hair and African American Culture,” 71. See also John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 233. White and White, “Slave Hair and African American Culture,” 70–71. The article details the process of “wrapping” or “threading” wherein hair was combed and then coiled around cotton or other fabric and then wrapped in a bandanna. The coiled hair was also sometimes braided. The end result when the hair was unbound would be curls that could then be styled into a desired shape. They also discuss a runaway female slave whose white master believed that she used a handkerchief to conceal scars on her forehead. Buckridge, The Language of Dress, 46. Jamaican slave owners were legally required to provide osnaburg (also spelled oznaburgh or oznaberg) fabric, a coarse, durable and low grade of cheap linen or cotton originally made in Osnabrück, Germany, that became the staple fabric for slave clothing in the British Caribbean and parts of the American south. See Buckridge, The Language of Dress, 238. White and White mention a new osnaburg coat as part of the attire of a runaway female slave who escaped from a plantation in South Carolina in 1769. See White and White, “Slave Hair and African American Culture,” 72. According to Buckridge, laghetto was also known by the name lace-bark tree and was indigenous to Jamaica, Cuba and Hispaniola. Growing in woodlands and on limestone, it was valued for medicinal as well as material properties. For more on the production of lace bark and for images of its manufacture, see Buckridge, The Language of Dress, 50–53. I have previously speculated about the application of Le Code Noir within Lower Canada in terms of the interaction between free and enslaved persons. I have also discussed the fi nes for sexual misconduct that were to be paid in pounds of sugar. In particular, I have wondered for some time if these fi nes were, in the context of Lower Canada, translated into another local produce, or if indeed the fi nes paid in sugar would have been a regular occurrence in, say, Montreal or Quebec City. Riddell’s pioneering research sheds some light on this issue. In particular, he cited the sale of a panis (Native male) slave for 350 livres, 250 of which was to be paid in money and the balance in the form of two barrels of barriques or molasses. This data reveals the commonplace nature of slave-produced plantation crops (here molasses, which was derived from the processing of sugar cane) in Lower Canada. Although this case was in relation to the sale of a slave, it is reasonable to assume that penalties under the code may have also been paid in such a manner. But lest

Notes

33.

34.

35.

36. 37.

209

we think that foreign produce was the only kind that could be exchanged for slaves, Riddell has also noted the case of Jesse Gray of Argyle who in 1788 in Shelburne accepted 100 bushels of potatoes as payment for a Negro woman slave. See Chapter 3 of this volume. Also see Riddell, “Notes on the Slave,” 321–22, and “Slavery in the Maritime Provinces,” 367. For more on the history of Montreal as an important transnational site of colonial commerce and triangular trade, see Gerald Tulchinsky, The River Barons: Montreal Businessmen and the Growth of Industry and Transportation 1837–53 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977). The stereotype of the mammy proliferated in various colonial sites as a marginalizing image of a supposedly unattractive, heavy-set, masculine and asexual black woman. The mammy was also depicted as loud and callous, one who aligned herself with the white slave owning family and lavished affection on the white master’s children. Her supposed unattractiveness worked also to mask or sublimate the reality of the endemic sexual exploitation and abuse of black women by white men because her “ugliness” dispelled the constancy of white male desire for black women. Willis and Williams have also pointed out the ways in which this stereotypes functioned as “pervasive romaticizations of servitude.” See Williams and Willis, The Black Female Body, 128–37. Buckridge, The Language of Dress, 88–91. Nadar’s photographs of a black female sitter also demonstrate cultural continuity of female headwrapping practices within the Black Diaspora, in this case France. His images of Maria from the French Antilles, a young woman assumed to be his servant, are sexually charged, ethnographic images that play upon the difference (from an assumed universal European whiteness) of her body and her dress. At least three images (reproduced in Williams and Willis) show her with her head wrapped. In one of the images, her breasts are exposed by the orchestrated positioning of the drapery that in another shot is shown covering her breasts. Willis and Williams have aptly titled the subheading for this section “Ethnography and Artifice.” As with the Malépart de Beaucourt work at the center of this chapter, the exposure of Maria’s flesh is strategic and racializing and the power imbalance between sitter and artist raises questions of exploitation, sexual and otherwise. It is interesting to note that two of the photographs (#18 and #19) represent headwrap styles that are reminiscent of Buckridge’s study of the Caribbean and therefore may indicate a continuity of headwrap styles between the French Caribbean and France. In the other image (#20), the tasseled and patterned material appears unlike any other Caribbean, Canadian or American headwrap fabric that I have seen and may indicate Nadar’s appropriation of another cultural or racial dress or an outright fabrication. See Williams and Willis, The Black Female Body, 25–28. Riddell, “Notes on the Slave,” 322–24. Isabella, also known as Bella, was a mere fi fteen years old at the time of her fi rst recorded sale on 14 November 1778. She was sold by the merchant butcher George Hipps to the Honorable Hector-Theophile Cramahé, lieutenant governor of Quebec. Bella’s age and her “mulatto” traits, such as a likely lighter complexion and straighter hair, may have made her more susceptible to sexual exploitation. Buckridge, The Language of Dress, 90. Buckridge reproduces a photograph entitled Nineteenth Century Negro Woman, Lydia Ann (c. 1864–1865) by Adolphe Duperly, in which a working-class black female sitter is shown in her “Sunday best,” wearing a patterned bandanna under a decorated straw hat. See Buckridge, The Language of Dress, 143–44.

210

38.

39.

40. 41.

Notes Other notable examples of visual representations of this headwrap–hat combination in the Caribbean include the print by Cordon, after W.E. Beastall, entitled Negroes Sunday-Market at Antigua (1806) and at least two watercolours in the sketchbook of the naval officer Edward Pelham Brenton. See Robert J. Blyth and Douglas Hamilton, eds., Representing Slavery: Art, Artefacts and Archives in the Collections of the National Maritime Museum (Aldershot: Lund Humphries, 2007), 57, 256. Frederick Wheelock Harris, quoted in Charlotte Isabella Perkins, The Romance of Old Annapolis Royal (Annapolis Royal: Historical Association of Annapolis Royal, 1952). See http://www.gov.ns.ca/nsarm/virtual/africanns/archives.asp?ID=33& (accessed 24 July 2009). Estcourt, the wife of a British army officer, painted the portrait while living near Niagara Falls. The sitter was a black Canadian woman who lived near the artist on Lundy’s Lane. Estcourt’s characterization of her as “good” stemmed from the fact that she had taken in a sick black man to nurse after he had been turned out on the street for his inability to pay for his lodging. See http://www. portraits.gc.ca/009001–1106.8-e.html (accessed 24 July 2009). Riddell, “Slavery in the Maritime Provinces,” 360. The phrasing “every other thing” has potentially disturbing sexual connotations that I explored earlier. The words may be read as advertising sexual services as a part of the black female slave’s labour to her prospective buyers.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 6 1. These concepts, fi rst made popular by Kenneth Clark in his book The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (New York: Pantheon Books, 1957), have subsequently been extensively developed within art historical discourse. 2. Marcia Pointon, Naked Authority: The Body in Western Painting 1830– 1908 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 14. 3. T.J. Clark’s discussion of the female body as nude and naked in the chapter “Olympia’s Choice,” The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers (London: Thames and Hudson, 1985) is based primarily on issues of class. Clark read Olympia’s nakedness as a result of her social specificity as a prostitute, failing to connect the presence of the black maid with Olympia’s sexualization. Whereas Sander Gilman (“Black Bodies, White Bodies,” 204–42) proposes that the western tradition of depicting black and white women in the same frame was enacted to produce a projection of the black woman’s deviant sexuality onto the “pure” white body, Clark reads the presence of the black woman as a marker of Olympia’s class within the social hierarchy of prostitution. 4. I shall not expand this discussion in terms of construction of black male bodies. Nevertheless, I acknowledge the importance and interconnectedness of this project to my study. For an American exhibition and publication that pursues this very case, see Golden, Black Male. 5. Valerie Smith, “Black Feminist Theory, and the Representation of the ‘Other,’” Changing Our Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women, ed. Cheryl A. Wall (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 47. 6. Homi K. Bhabha, “The Other Question: Difference, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism,” Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, eds. Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha and Cornel West (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1990), 72.

Notes

211

7. Bhabha, “The Other Question,” 80. 8. Nelson, Coloured Nude. 9. “New Names on Roster of Artists whose Work Academy Has Accepted,” Evening Telegram, Toronto, 5 November 1932, 14. 10. See: Brooker, “Nudes and Prudes,” 93–106; Muhlstock, “An Excess of Prudery,” 75–79. 11. “The Royal Canadian Academy,” 23. 12. Bridle, “Variety and Ability Mark R.C.A. Display,” Toronto Daily Star 4 (November 1932), 3. 13. “Horrors and Experiments,” 5. 14. McCarthy, “Royal Academy Exhibition,” 3. 15. This “object” and “animal” distinction is proposed by Alice Walker in her book You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down (New York: Harcourt, 1982), 52. 16. Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 170. 17. Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1981), 119. 18. Parker and Pollock, Old Mistresses, 116. 19. Liam Hudson, Bodies of Knowledge: The Psychological Signifi cance of the Nude in Art (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982), 17. 20. Nead, The Female Nude, 6. 21. This was made obvious in the newspaper caricatures that were published of Olympia (1863). Several offensive depictions represented the black maid as a “Mammy,” exaggerating her size and burlesquing her features. In a 1901 pencil sketch, Pablo Picasso went even further, reconstituting Olympia as an unclothed black woman with an exaggerated “Hottentot” physiognomy, reclining on a bed between two white males—one a self-portrait. 22. Gill Saunders, The Nude: A New Perspective (London: Herbert, 1989), 25. 23. The courtesan as Desire was a disguise meant to facilitate male participation within the sex trade. Seductive, submissive and controlled, traditional images of white female nudes sought to conceal the social, moral and physical dangers of prostitution. Olympia openly declared her status and purpose within the Parisian demi-monde. She did not participate in the fantasy. Therefore, she could not be passively consumed as a complacent object by the viewing public. 24. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life, 133. 25. Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 168. 26. See Edwin Holgate’s Nude in a Landscape (c. 1930), National Gallery of Canada, and Randolph Hewton’s Sleeping Woman (c. 1929), National Gallery of Canada. 27. Bernheimer, Figures of Ill Repute, 105. 28. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life, 136. 29. The universalizing discourse of psychoanalysis reveals a Eurocentric and patriarchal ideological framework. Whereas this bias makes psychoanalysis problematic, it arguably remains, because of this bias, a useful tool for the understanding, study and critique of colonial perceptions of identity and identity construction. 30. Nicholas Green, The Spectacle of Nature: Landscape and Bourgeois Culture in Nineteenth-Century France (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 147. 31. See, for example, Linda Nochlin, “The Imaginary Orient,” The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Art and Society (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1989), 44–45. 32. This pose evokes memories of the violation suffered by black women within the practice of slave auctions. Displayed naked in public spaces, black

212

33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48.

49. 50. 51.

Notes women’s sexuality warranted no proprietary concern. What was private and sacred for the white woman was deemed public and profane for the black. The burden of sustaining the slave population fi rmly on their shoulders, black women were regarded and handled like breeding animals. Publicly stripped and examined for markers of sexual fertility, they often suffered horrendous sexual violation during forced gynecological examinations attended by male “medical professionals” and potential buyers. Kenneth Little, “On Safari: The Visual Politics of a Tourist Representation,” The Varieties of Sensory Experience: A Sourcebook in the Anthropology of the Senses, ed. David Howes (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 157. Hudson, Bodies of Knowledge, 13. Nead, The Female Nude, 16. Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies,” 204. Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies,” 204. Saunders, The Nude, 24. Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity, 28. Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity, 60. Saunders, The Nude, 22. Saunders, The Nude, 23. Saunders, The Nude, 25. Parker and Pollock, Old Mistresses, 116. Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens (New York: Atheneum, 1985), 82. Beatrice Farwell, Manet and the Nude: A Study in Iconography in the Second Empire (New York: Taylor and Francis, 1981), 37. Human sciences in the west have historically sought to locate black women as a source of sexual pathology. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, countless “scientific” studies were performed on black women’s bodies, living and dead. Autopsies compared sexual organs and body structures to the uncontested paradigm of white women in an effort to position black people as inferior and their sexuality as biologically inferior and animalistic. Here, for example, I propose that if Manet had placed a look of invitation rather than confrontation on the face of Olympia, the painting would have been utterly dismissed as pornographic. It was Olympia’s ambivalent expression that saved the painting from this fate. Saunders, The Nude, 72. Bhabha, “The Other Question,” 80. Bhabha, “The Other Question,” 71.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 7 1. O’Grady, “Olympia’s Maid,” 153. 2. For an understanding of modernism within the visual arts, see Clement Greenberg, Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). For a feminist critique of this tradition, see Griselda Pollock, “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity,” Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art (London: Routledge, 1988). 3. T.J. Clark quotes a nineteenth-century source that perverts the black maid’s representation as that of a “hideous negress,” uncritically uses the Hottentot Venus as a barometer of the grotesque and includes contemporaneous

Notes

4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9.

10.

11.

12. 13. 14.

15. 16.

213

“humourous” engravings of Olympia that radically burlesqued and mammified Manet’s demure, even pretty, black maid. However, he fails to address the core issues of race and racialized sexuality as an obvious theme compelled by the deliberate juxtaposition of the white and the black female bodies. See Pollock, “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity.” Pollock, Differencing the Canon, 187. Petrine Archer-Straw, Negrophilia: Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2000), 10. A significant tactic used in the policing of traditional art historical hegemony is to control which questions may or may not be formulated in the face of an artwork. A fitting recent and personal example occurred in a review of my art exhibition Through An-Other’s Eyes: White Canadian Artists—Black Female Subjects (1998), in which I employed a postcolonial feminist perspective to explore the three century–long fascination of white Canadian artists with black female subjects. In a review by Henry Lehman in The Gazette, rather than critique the exhibition within its own stated thesis and discourse, he belittled the very premise of the show by demonstrating its difference, and implied inferiority and exteriority to the discourse of modernist Art History and its singular and supposedly universal concerns with formal analysis and “pure” aesthetics. In so doing, Lehman also effectively dismissed the possibility and legitimacy of anything other than a white male viewing body. See Henry Lehman “Artists’ vision colured by prejudice?” The Gazette Montreal 4 March 2000, J2. See Parker and Pollock, Old Mistresses, and Pollock, Differencing the Canon. Two fairly recent examples of a postcolonial Art History are Griselda Pollock’s Differencing the Canon and Marcus Wood’s Blind Memory. In the context of Canadian Art History, Monika Kin Gagnon’s Other Conundrums: Race, Culture and Canadian Art (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2000) and Joan Acland’s “Elitekey; The Artistic Production of Mi’kmaq Women,” Canadian Art Review/Revue d’art canadienne 25, nos. 1–2 (1998), 3–11, have set a high standard. See, for example: James Clifford, Predicament in Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); and Annie Coombes, “Museums and the Formation of National and Cultural Identities,” Oxford Art Journal 11, no. 2 (1988), 58–68; Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine, eds., Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991). Curtis M. Hinsley, “The World as Marketplace: Commodification of the Exotic at the World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893,” Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, eds. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 344–65. Rosemary Wiss, “Lipreading: Remembering Saartjie Baartman,” Australian Journal of Anthropology 5, nos. 1–2 (1994), 12. James Cowles Prichard, Researches into the Physical History of Mankind, 4th ed., 3 vols. (London: Houlston and Stoneman, 1851), 109. Michelle Wallace, “Modernism, Postmodernism and the Problem of the Visual in Afro-American Culture,” Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, eds. Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minhha and Cornel West (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1990), 45. Wiss, “Lipreading,” 13. Jean-Yves Jounnais, “The Hottentot Venus,” Art Press 191 (May 1994), 34; Wiss, “Lipreading,” 11, 13.

214 Notes 17. Within the scientific discourse of the body, the Hottentot’s increasing viability as a “missing link” between the animal kingdom and human beings is consistent with Saat-Jee’s bestialization and display as part of a stable of animals. 18. Stephen Gould, “The Hottentot Venus,” Natural History 91 (1982), 20–27. 19. See: Mohammed Allie, “Return of ‘Hottentot Venus’ Unites Bushmen,” BBC News (6 May 2002), http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/19711003. stem (accessed 25 October 2003); Jounnais, “The Hottentot Venus”; Wiss, “Lipreading,” 11. 20. The Art Gallery of Toronto is today known as the Art Gallery of Ontario. I will henceforth refer to this institution by the abbreviation AGT. 21. Brooker, “Nudes and Prudes,” and Muhlstock, “An Excess in Prudery.” 22. Twentieth-century Canadian landscape painting, although heavily dependent upon Dutch art, was decidedly more progressive than figure painting. Whereas many landscape artists, including the acclaimed Canadian Group of Seven, aggressively pursued a modern vision of the vast Canadian territory, figure painters adhered more rigidly to nineteenth-century European prototypes. 23. See Clark, The Nude; Nead, The Female Nude. 24. Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 6. 25. Ruth Louise Bohan, The Société Anonyme’s Brooklyn Exhibition, 1926– 1927: Katherine Sophie Dreier and the Promotion of Modern Art in America (College Park, MD: University of Maryland, PhD dissertation, 1980), iii. 26. Bohan, The Société Anonyme’s Brooklyn Exhibition, 1926–1927, ii. 27. Bohan, The Société Anonyme’s Brooklyn Exhibition, 1926–1927, 140. 28. L.R. Pfaff, “Lawren Harris and the International Exhibition of Modern Art: Rectifications to the Toronto Catalogue (1927), and Some Critical Comments,” Canadian Art Review 11, nos. 1–2 (1984), 80. 29. Brooker, “Nudes and Prudes,” 94. 30. Brooker, “Nudes and Prudes,” 94. 31. “Paintings of Nudes Consigned to Cellar,” Toronto Daily Star, 4 April 1927, 22. 32. Archer-Straw, Negrophilia, 19. 33. Clifford, Predicament in Culture, 197. 34. William H. Gerdts Jr., Max Weber: Retrospective Exhibition October 1st – November 15th, 1959 (Newark: The Newark Museum, 1959), 7. 35. Gerdts, Max Weber, 7. 36. Katherine Janszky Michaelson, Alexander Archipenko: A Centennial Tribute, (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Washington and Tel Aviv Museum, 1986), 19. 37. The bronze sculpture Negro Dancer (1911) is in the Schueler Collection, Stockholm, Sweden. 38. Michaelson, Alexander Archipenko, 20. 39. See, for example: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Bride or The Beloved (1865– 1866); Jean Léon Gérôme, Moorish Bath (c. 1870); Lily Martin Spencer, Dixie Land (1862); John Lyman, Sun Bathing 1 (1955). 40. Williams and Willis, The Black Female Body, 1. 41. See T.J. Clark, “Olympia’s Choice.” 42. Pablo Picasso, Olympia (1901), pen and coloured crayon, private collection, Paris, France. 43. The institutionalization of breeding practices that effectively encouraged the rape of black female slaves for the economic benefit of the white plantocracy must be scrutinized with regard to the de-/regendering of black bodies within slavery. 44. Archer-Straw, Negrophilia, 56.

Notes

215

NOTES TO CHAPTER 8 1. Albert Gardner, Yankee Stone Cutters: The First American School of Sculpture (New York: Published for The Metropolitan Museum of Art by Columbia University Press, 1945), 21. Jean Fagan Yellin has detailed the symbolic significance of chains to the representation of the enslaved subject within nineteenth-century abolitionist discourse. The deployment of chains, manacles or shackles, like the liberty cap, became so indelibly linked to abolitionist visual discourse that pro-slavery advocates aggressively sought to curtail their use in national art commissions. See Jean Fagan Yellin, “Caps and Chains: Hiram Powers’ Statue of ‘Liberty,’” American Quarterly 38 (1986), 798–826. 2. It is crucial to note the extent to which, within nineteenth-century discourses of race, being black was often commensurate with being a slave. In his Democracy in America (1835), Alexis de Tocqueville described blackness as “the eternal mark of ignominy,” which Negroes could not help but transmit to their descendants. This biological essentialism located blackness as the source of inherent racial inferiority. Blackness then was a symbolic mark of race that determined social status and potential yet was also significantly divorced from both because Tocqueville did not distinguish between free or enslaved blacks. To be free as a black, then, was to be free of the “eternal mark” and thus not to be black at all. See Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Henry Reeve (1835; repr., New York: Colonial Press, 1900). 3. During the nineteenth century, slavery was commonly referred to in America as the “peculiar institution,” a term that captured the inherent contradictions of many of its structures and practices and the ambivalence of its racialized subjects. Charmaine A. Nelson, Narrating Blackness: Studies in Femininity, Sexuality and Race in European and American Art of the NineteenthCentury, (Manchester: University of Manchester, PhD dissertation, 2001), 161, 163, 199. 4. Elizabeth Grosz has argued that time, as a commonly assumed term of all discourse, has nevertheless suffered great scholarly neglect as a primary focus of research. The idea of bodily becoming or materialization is evident in various branches of critical academic and theoretical scholarship that have contested the concept of identity as a fi xed and static notion relatable to a body with defi nitive attributes and meanings. Judith Butler’s notion of morphology is particularly useful to the idea of becoming because it describes the body’s materialization as ability to produce a morphe or image of the body/self. The key to these notions is that identity is active and ongoing. Such a conceptualization of the body has an obvious potential to disrupt the production and deployment of colonial and other stereotypes that have functioned through the assumption of the fi xity and always already-ness of identity. Psychoanalysis is also useful to the theoretical revisioning of the body precisely because its historical phallocentrism and colonialism demonstrate the negotiation of identity and identification as a process of materialization based upon the interaction of subjects and their differentiation according to a normative body. Elizabeth Grosz, ed., Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999). 5. Butler, Bodies that Matter, 76. 6. Butler, Bodies that Matter, 65. 7. Whereas on a specific level I am referring to an examination of identity and identification within the nineteenth-century practice of neoclassical sculpture and western visual art, I am also referring to a larger theorization of identity as a process of constant negotiation. See Stuart Hall, “Introduction:

216

8. 9.

10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21.

Notes Who Needs ‘Identity’?” Questions of Cultural Identity, eds. Stuart Hall and Paul Du Gay (London: Sage, 1996). Butler, Bodies that Matter, 65. Joy S. Kasson, Marble Queens and Captives: Women in Nineteenth-Century American Sculpture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 32. The moral and religious purpose of art was widely accepted and is reflected in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s concept of sculpture as “sermons in stones.” Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun: or the Romance of Monte Beni (1860; repr., Cincinnati: Ohio State University, Center for Textual Studies 1968), 151. Kirk Savage has noted the relationship between sculpture and the “theoretical foundations of racism.” Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 8. Edward E. Hale, Ninety Days’ Worth of Europe (Boston: Walker, Wise, and Company, 1861), 150. For a discussion of fetishization as the regulation of difference, see Parveen Adams, The Emptiness of the Image: Psychoanalysis and Sexual Differences (London: Routledge, 1996), 32. Wolfgang Drost, “Colour, Sculpture, Mimesis: A Nineteenth-Century Debate,” The Colour of Sculpture: 1840–1910, ed. Andreas Blühm (Amsterdam: Van Gogh Museum, 1996), 62. I have found no references to imply or confi rm that artists used wash, pigment, chemicals or any other substance to bleach the marble a more “pure” white colour. Whereas applied polychromy can be defi ned as sculptures constructed of white marble to which pigment was later added, frequently through tinting or painting, material polychromy indicates the use of more than one type and colour of material in a sculpture (i.e., bronze and multiple colours of marble). Anne Brewster, “American Artists in Rome,” Lippincott’s Magazine of Literature, Science, and Education 3 (February 1869), 197. The coloured pavilion was a large architectural enclosure designed to house and exhibit the sculpture. Classical in style, the pavilion was also painted or polychromed to coincide with Gibson’s own work. The American sculptor Joseph Mozier was also known to dabble in polychromy. In at least one version of his Wept of Wish-ton-Wish (1859) he adopted the controversial practice, presumably to emphasize the blond hair and blue eyes of the female subject described in James Fenimore Cooper’s book of the same name published in 1829. A version of this work is in the collection of the Hirschl and Adler Galleries, New York. See Kasson, Marble Queens and Captives, 97. “Notabilia of the International Exhibition,” Art Journal (July 1862), 161. Samuel Young Jr. (a.k.a. T.Q.), A Wall-Street Bear in Europe, with his Familiar Foreign Journal of a Tour through Portions of England, Scotland, France and Italy (New York: Samuel Young Jr., 1855), 57, 98. These concepts, fi rst popularized in art historical discourse by Kenneth Clark, have been subsequently developed with social art historical and feminist perspectives. Whereas Kenneth Clark associated the nude with art and beauty, he characterized the naked as a shameful and embarrassed state of undress that corresponded with the category of pornography and the Kantian notion of the sublime. Subsequently, T.J. Clark addressed the nude and the naked in terms of class identifications in his discussion of the representation of the bodies of prostitutes in nineteenth-century French painting. Feminist art historians have expanded the categories to describe the representational

Notes

22. 23. 24.

25.

26. 27.

28.

217

possibilities and limitations of the female body within a traditionally patriarchal visual culture. Using psychoanalysis, Lynda Nead has aptly noted the gender/sex specificity of these concepts. She has discussed the nude as the controlled and ordered female body, the body disciplined (fetishized) by the artist to disguise the sexual lack of female otherness and present a legible and palatable (phallicized) female body for a dominantly heterosexual male gaze. In contrast, she has located the traditionally transgressive potential of the naked in its disorder, its biological and social specificity and the way it points up the process of becoming the nude, often through the representation of clothing that disrupts the idea of an always already unclothed body. However, as I have argued in Chapter 6 of this volume, these art historians have largely overlooked the extent to which both concepts have been informed by race and defi ned according to the paradigm of the white female body and therefore offer racially and sexually exclusive defi nitions of the sexualized body. In my assessment of the racial specificity of the representation of the black female body as the nude or the naked, I have determined that attributes of both categories often coexisted simultaneously because the representation of the black female subject was often strategically deployed outside of the sexual limits of white bourgeois female identity. See: K. Clark, The Nude; T.J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life; Nead, The Female Nude. Hale, Ninety Days’ Worth of Europe, 149. Hale, Ninety Days’ Worth of Europe, 149. James Jackson Jarves, Art-Hints, Architecture, Sculpture and Painting (London: Sampson Low, Son, and Co., 1855). Jarves distinguished between “high art” and “common art”; the former being products of genius that included works of the spirit that appealed to the soul and the latter “faithful representations of natural objects” that were a product of “industry and clever imitation.” Jarves, Art-Hints, 66, 155–56. There exist classical examples of sculptural busts that indicate a seemingly arbitrary relationship between the race of the subject and the colour of stone or other material used to represent their skin colour. Several portrait busts in the collection of the Musei Capitolini (Piazza del Campidoglio, Rome) are indicative of this tendency. In some cases, non-white stone or other material was used to represent the flesh of white subjects. However, my research indicates that nineteenth-century polychrome sculptures generally utilized coloured materials best suited to represent the skin colour and race of the subject in question. Even when white subjects were sculpted using polychromy techniques, their flesh was created with a type and colour of material that represented its whiteness. In English, this sculpture is often identified as Sudanese in Algerian Dress. For an innovative discussion of castration as fetish, an attempt to disavow female sexual difference instead of the Freudian defi nition of the fetish as a tool for disguising female sexual lack, see Charles Bernheimer, “‘Castration’ as Fetish,” Paragraph 14 (1991), 1–9 (especially page 3). The fi rst version, originally intended for Lord Powerscourt, was instead ordered in 1843 by Captain John Grant of Devonshire, England, and completed in 1844. It is now in a private collection and housed at Raby Castle, Staindrop, Durham, England. Powerscourt, who presumably quibbled with Powers about the price, later regretted “losing” the work to another patron. The second version, commissioned in 1846 and intended for Lord Ward (later the Earl of Dudley), instead entered the collection of James Robb of New Orleans after public exhibition in America. After being exhibited by Robb in New Orleans, the sculpture was sold to the Western Art Union of Cincinnati, who raffled the work in a lottery won by William Wilson

218 Notes Corcoran. This version is today in the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC. The third version, from 1847, was extensively exhibited throughout America after being declined by the original patron, Sir Charles Coote of Dublin, due to “change of fortune.” The sculpture was then purchased by C.L. Derby of Sandusky, Ohio, in 1854 before being awarded in a lottery through the Cosmopolitan Art Association to Mrs. Kate Gillespie of Brady’s Bend, Pennsylvania, in 1855. Mrs. Gillespie exhibited her sculpture in Ohio and Pennsylvania before it was auctioned in New York in 1857 and reacquired by the Cosmopolitan Art Association for six thousand dollars. After exhibiting the sculpture at the Dusseldorf Gallery in New York, the association again offered it in a lottery on 5 June 1858 when it became the property of Miss Coleman of Cincinnati, who sold it to the collector Alexander T. Stewart. After Stewart’s death, the work, sold through the American Art Association, was acquired by Captain Delmar for a mere $1,250, eventually ending up in the collection of Franklin Murphy, whose son gifted it to the Newark Museum in 1926. The fourth version, destined for Lord Ward (Earl of Dudley), is today unlocated. The fi fth version, which was purchased by the Russian Prince Paul Demidoff for his villa San Donato near Florence for seven hundred pounds, was later owned by a string of collectors, including Mr. Phillips, Edward M. Scott of London, Claude de Bernales, Alton Lodge, Roehampton, and Michael Harvard, London, before being purchased from the New York market by Yale University Art Gallery in 1963. And, finally, the sixth version, from 1869, was commissioned by E.W. Stoughton of New York and donated to the Brooklyn Museum by his heirs. Regarding the fi rst version, see C.E. Lester, The Artist, the Merchant and the Statesman of the Medici, and of our Own Times, 2 vols. (New York: Paine and Burgess 1845), 1:84–85; regarding all versions, see William H. Gerdts and Samuel Roberson, “‘ . . . so undressed, yet so refi ned . . . ’: The Greek Slave,” The Museum: New Series 17, nos. 1–2 (Winter–Spring 1965), 3–23. 29. Part of a sculpture’s quality was judged by the artist’s ability to narrate a safe space of viewing and to aestheticize and abstract the human body in a way that permitted the viewer to consume unclothed subjects within nineteenthcentury bourgeois limits of politeness and sexual propriety. Neoclassical subjects, frequently unclothed or partially draped, were often female. Their nudity needed to be justified with a cause that would remove responsibility for a potentially transgressive sexual gaze from the white female subject. The expectation of polite nudity was complicated by slavery, whose brutalities, regularly represented within popular culture, were deemed largely inappropriate for the realm of “high art.” Powers himself was instrumental in the fabrication of a moral tone for his Greek Slave. In a letter to a patron, he detailed his desire to sculpt a Christian slave whose piety and chastity, in the midst of grave moral and sexual menace, made her unaware of her nakedness. This moralizing narrative was to be continually repeated in newspaper reviews, laudatory poems and descriptions of the sculpture. Letter, Hiram Powers to Edwin Stoughton, 29 November 1869, Hiram Powers Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC. 30. The political ambivalence of Powers’s Greek Slave is evident in its celebration by pro-slavery factions. The popularity of the sculpture was proven in the success of public tours and the fact that one of the sculpture’s earliest patrons was a slave holder from South Carolina, the state that held the dubious honour of having the most slaves in the Union in 1860. David Moltke-Hanson, Art in the Lives of South Carolinians: Nineteenth-Century Chapters (Charleston, SC: Carolina Art Association, 1979), RSa7, Rsb5–7.

Notes

219

31. Christian Inquirer 1 (9 October 1847), 207, Hiram Powers Scrapbook, cited in Vivien Green, “Hiram Powers’ Greek Slave: Emblem of Freedom,” American Art Journal 14, no. 4 (Autumn 1982), 38. Also partially cited in Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves, 28. This quote explicitly locates the confl ation of race and class positions because it is the “whiteness” of these “daughters of white men” that has informed their expectations of “fortune.” But it also indexes the white male privilege of patriarchy because it is the white fathers who have the social, political and legal privilege to own the property and create the wealth that their “black” daughters are denied. 32. Within the practices of Trans Atlantic Slavery, any child born to a black female slave was historically deemed to be a slave also. Significantly then, the Christian Inquirer’s emphasis on the paternal lineage of the female slaves, “daughters of white men,” served to locate the status of interracial children within colonial legal discourses. The existence of white fathers of black slaves named the entrenched practices of sexual violation that saw black women raped by white men for the purpose of the economic expansion of property: the conception of new slave bodies/commodities. But the author’s refusal to name the “other” sexual possibility of interracial children—white mothers and black fathers—also spoke volumes about the absolute denial of the possibility of sexual attraction/contact between these two subjects, a refusal supported by the stereotypes of the chaste, virginal and pure white female and the animalized, lascivious black male rapist. This stereotype, which was used to justify the practice of lynching, mirrors the racial stereotypes deployed against Turkish men in the narration of Powers’s Greek Slave. 33. Karen Sánchez-Eppler, “Bodily Bonds: The Intersecting Rhetorics of Feminism and Abolition,” Representations 24 (Fall 1988), 40. 34. Vivien Green provides a concise list of some of the literary works that adopted the female octoroon as heroine. See Green, “Hiram Powers’ Greek Slave,” 36. 35. I would argue that part of the fetishization of the black female body has been its disordering, a representational strategy that, unlike the representation of the white female body as the nude, did not ultimately seek the containment or control of the body but oppositionally the signification of sexual and corporeal excess. Colonial associations between blackness and excessive, pathological sexuality informed the representation of the black female body in ways that did not conform to the proprietary restrictions of the visualization of the bourgeois white female subject. 36. David H. Wallace, John Rogers: The People’s Sculptor (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1967), 200. Besides the obvious affinity of nineteenthcentury American sculpture for themes that deployed black female subjects and the popularity of “tragic octoroon” narratives, Wallace has suggested that Rogers drew inspiration specifically from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin: A Tale of Life Among the Lowly (London: Ingram, Cooke, and Co., 1852) and Dion Boucicault’s popular play The Octoroon, which was contemporaneously showing in New York where Rogers had his studio. The Octoroon was fi rst performed at the Winter Garden Theatre, New York, on 5 December 1859. 37. Wallace, John Rogers, 61, 200. By 1861, Rogers would have been well aware of the iconic status of Hiram Powers’s Greek Slave, which he saw exhibited at the Boston Horticultural Hall in 1848. 38. Wallace, John Rogers, 200. 39. Sánchez-Eppler, “Bodily Bonds,” 41.

220

Notes

40. Bell’s Octoroon was also exhibited in Blackburn, England, in the Art and Industry Exhibition (1874) at the newly opened library and museum where it was subsequently, due to the public urgings of a resident named Mr. Jessie Slater, acquired by public subscription for the reduced sum of 150 pounds from the artist (due to defects in the marble). Curatorial Files, Blackburn Museum and Art Galleries, Blackburn, UK, John Bell Octoroon. 41. Such signs of “womanhood” were also read within the context of slavery as signs of female procreative capacity (breeding hips, lactating breasts) and female sexual readiness, discerned in the bodies of black female slaves scrutinized by the white audiences of potential slave holders who desired physical evidence of the slave’s potential to “breed” and therefore expand the master’s economic holdings by both becoming and producing commodities. 42. Elizabeth Rogers Payne, “Anne Whitney: Art and Social Justice,” Massachusetts Review 12 (Spring 1971), 245–60, cited in Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves, 59, 228. 43. Both sculptures were originally commenced in the late 1850s. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote of seeing Story’s Cleopatra only fourteen days in the clay at his studio at Via Sistina in February 1858. See Nathaniel Hawthorne, Passages from the French and Italian Note-Books of Nathaniel Hawthorne, vol. 1 (London: Strahan and Co., Publishers, 1871), 84–85. 44. Jan M. Seidler, A Critical Reappraisal of the Career of William Wetmore Story (1818–1895), American Sculptor and Man of Letters (Boston: Boston University, PhD dissertation, 1985), 502–22, cited in Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves, 59. 45. For more on the reception of Story’s Cleopatra as a black queen, see Henry Adams, The Letters of Henry Adams: 1858–1868, vol. 1, eds. J.C. Levenson, Ernest Samuels, Charles Vandersee and Viola Hopkins Winner (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1982), 147; “William W. Story and his Cleopatra,” Dwight’s Journal of Music 17, no. 18 (28 July 1860); Hale, Ninety Day’s Worth, 145–46; “International Exhibition,” The Athenaeum: Journal of English and Foreign Literature, Science, and the Fine Arts, no. 1802 (10 May 1862), 631; Lilian M.C. Randall, “An American Abroad: Visits to Sculptors’ Studios in the 1860s,” Journal of the Walters Art Gallery 33–34 (1970–1971), 48; James Jackson Jarves, Art Thoughts: The Experiences and Observatiosn of an American Amatuer in Europe (New York: The Riverside Press, 1879), 312; “Art Notes,” New York Times (13 June 1882), C. 2, 2; William W. Story, “Cleopatra,” Dwight’s Journal of Music 25, no. 13 (16 September 1865). 46. “The Virginian Slave: Intended as a Companion to Powers’ ‘Greek Slave,’” Punch, or the London Charivari 20 (January–June 1851), 236. 47. The Latin expression e pluribus unum today appears on the Great Seal of the United States and on all coins. The expression was officially adopted on 20 June 1782 by a committee chosen on 4 July 1776 to prepare a device for the nation’s seal. Grolier Multimedia Encyclopaedia (Danbury, CT: Grolier Interactive Inc. 1998). Tenniel’s clever inclusion of whips and chains on the pedestal recalled the popular allegorical emblem of William Lloyd Garrison’s American AntiSlavery Society in which a female figure of Liberty stands upon broken whips and chains as she holds a banner with a liberty cap on top of its pole. 48. As a colonial stereotype, the “Sambo” was used in the North American context to emasculate black men by deploying a representation of a “yes ma’am/ sir” subject, a buffoonish character who willingly did the biddings of his white masters and did not contest his inferior racial position. There have been stereotypical equivalents to the “Sambo” deployed in other geographical and national contexts. “Sambo to the ‘Greek Slave,’” Punch, or the London Charivari 21 (July–December 1851), 105.

Notes

221

49. Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves, 30; Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 35–76. The Greek Slave’s retention of her identifi cations was due not only to the signifi cation of her body but also to Powers’s use of external symbols like the cross and locket, which decorate the pillar. 50. Although I have argued that the material practices and aesthetic preferences of nineteenth-century neoclassicism erased the efficacy of skin colour as a racial signifier on the material level, within the realm of imagination and fantasy, viewers were able and expected to facilitate and overcome this aesthetic and colour deficit with their own knowledge of the subject and its narrative. Hence, Ginotti’s obviously black female slave, although deployed in white marble, allowed for the evocation of the black skin that could not be represented, the black skin that Costantino Abbatecola undoubtedly imagined when he wished this slave woman was alive. The blackness that the audience was able to imagine takes on deeper aesthetic meanings when one can also imagine the dramatic juxtaposition of the brown colour of the slave’s breast with the likely white pearls of her upper left arm and colourful beads of her necklace. 51. Costantino Abbatecola, Guida e critica della grande esposizione nazionale di Belle Arti di Napoli del 1877 (Naples: tip. di L. Gargiulo, 1877), 104, cited in Hugh Honour, The Image of the Black, 171. 52. Abbatecola, Guida e critica, 104, cited in Honour, The Image of the Black, 171.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 9 1. Although a version of the sculpture was cast in 1861, the original work was sculpted a decade earlier in 1851. Nineteenth-century sculptors working in the neoclassical or polychrome styles regularly produced more than one copy of their works. 2. Partha Mitter, “The Hottentot Venus and Western Man: Reflections on the Constructions of Beauty in the West,” Cultural Encounters: Representing ‘Otherness’, eds. Elizabeth Hallam and Brian V. Street (London: Routledge, 2000), 44. 3. W. Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), 113–14, cited in Mitter, “The Hottentot Venus,” 45. 4. Caroline Arscott and Katie Scott, “Introducing Venus,” Manifestations of Venus: Art and Sexuality, eds. Caroline Arscott and Katie Scott (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2000), 19. 5. Arscott and Scott, “Introducing,” 19. 6. Arscott and Scott, “Introducing,” 3. 7. Arscott and Scott, “Introducing,” 6. 8. For more on black feminisms, see: Stanlie M. James and Abena P.A. Busia, eds., Theorizing Black Feminisms: The Visionary Pragmatism of Black Women (London: Routledge, 1994); Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought. 9. T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 6. 10. Sharpley-Whiting, Black Venus, 6. 11. Sharpley-Whiting, Black Venus, 7. 12. Baartman was taken from South Africa in 1810 by Hendrik Cezar (the brother of her Dutch “master”) and the Englishman Alexander Dunlop (a

222 Notes

13. 14.

15.

16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21.

22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27.

ship’s surgeon and trader of “museum specimens”) to London, England, where she was publically exhibited naked to curiosity-seekers as an example of racial primitiveness and sexual pathology. Other Khoisan women suffered similar fates. After her death, Saartjie’s body was dissected and studied by the revered comparative anatomist Georges Cuvier and eventually ceded to the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, where her skeleton, genitals and brain were displayed until 1974. Her remains were only just repatriated by the Khoisan people some 186 years after her death in 1815. For more on Saartjie Baartman, see the anthology: Deborah Willis ed., Black Venus 2010: They Called Her Hottentot (Philadelphia: Temple University Press Academic, 2010). See Archer-Straw, Negrophilia. This is not to infer that Baker had no control over her representation. She certainly had more than Baartman. However, regardless of her self-identification, the interpretation of her black female identity was ultimately in the hands of a white cultural machine in a colonial society. For more on Baker, see Archer-Straw, Negrophilia. See, for example: Robert Knox, The Races of Men: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Influence of Race Over the Destinies of Nations, 2nd ed. (London: Henry Renshaw, 1862); Edward Blyth Cuvier, Animal Kingdom, Arranged According to its Organization; Forming the Basis for a Natural History of Animals and an Introduction to Comparative Anatomy (London: Wm. S. Orr and Co., 1840); James Cowles Prichard, Researches into the Physical History of Mankind, 4th ed., 3 vols. (London: Houlston and Stoneman, 1851). This supposed whitening of Africa through the idealization of a north African racial type, became a way to render Africa as allegory more racially acceptable. Hawthorne, Passages, 1:157. Édouard Papet, “To Have the Courage of his Polychromy: Charles Cordier and his Sculpture of the Second Empire,” Facing the Other: Charles Cordier, 1827–1905, Ethnographic Sculptor, (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, 2004), 51. Drost, “Colour, Sculpture, Mimesis,” 63–64. L.L. Noble, The Course of Empire, Voyage of Life, and Other Pictures of Thomas Cole (New York: Cornish, Lamport and Co. 1853), cited in Gardner, Yankee Stone Cutters, 15. A notable detractor from the polarization of painting and sculpture was the art critic James Jackson Jarves. Jarves was not dismissive of painting; quite the contrary, he thought it the more elevated art form. However, he also felt that it was more difficult to appreciate and its faults more conspicuous. Jarves, Art-Hints, 161. Curatorial File, Charles-Henri-Joseph Cordier, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. For example, some titles of Cordier’s sculptures include: Vénus Africaine or Négresse des Côtes d’Afrique (1851); Nègre du Darfour or Nègre de Tombouctou (1853); Noir du Soudan (1856); Homme Arabe de Biskra (1856); Mauresque Noire (1856) or Mulatresse. All of these sculptures are in the collection of the Musée de L’Homme, Paris. Jarves, Art-Hints, 152. Laure de Margerie, “The Most Beautiful Negro Is Not the One Who Looks Like Us,” Facing the Other: Charles Cordier (1827–1905), Ethnographic Sculptor (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, 2004), 27. de Margerie, “The Most Beautiful,” 16. Laure de Margerie, “Chronology,” Facing the Other: Charles Cordier (1827–1905), Ethnographic Sculptor (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, 2004), 131–32.

Notes

223

28. Honour, The Image of the Black, 101. 29. This work is also known as Saïd Abdallah de la tribu du Darfour. See Jeannine Durand-Revillon, “Catalogue Raisonné” eds. Laure de Margerie and Edouard Papet Facing the Other: Charlers Corolier (1827–1905) Ethnographic Sculptor (New York: Harry N. Abrams Inc., Publishers, 2004), 205. 30. Honour, The Image of the Black, 101. 31. Honour, The Image of the Black, 102. Cordier seems to have sculpted both works originally as têtes d’étude and subsequently received commissions for bronze casts. 32. de Margerie, “Chronology,” 131. 33. See: Honour, The Image of the Black, 102. 34. Although Cordier received government commissions, according to Hugh Honour, the majority of his busts were purchased by wealthy private patrons for personal residences. See Honour, The Image of the Black, 105–6. 35. Charles Cordier, “Types ethniques représentés par la sculpture,” Bulletin de la Société d’anthropologie de Paris 3 (1862), 65–68. 36. Interestingly, Pygmalion is likely the best metaphor for the process of Cordier’s Venus not just as a guide for the compilation of a female ideal but, further, in the fi nal state in which the sculpture becomes a real woman. In the myth, the real indicates her coming to life, but also her uniqueness and specificity as an individual like no other. Paradoxically perhaps, Cordier, who professed himself to work from many models towards a racial type, seems to have in the end and despite the title created a sculpture that reads more like a portrait than an ethnographic type. I would like to thank Jan Marsh for her critical insights on the meanings of Pygmalion. 37. de Margerie, “The Most Beautiful,” 16. 38. Cordier to Achille Fould, Ministre état and directeur des Beaux-Arts, 28 January 1854, Paris, Archives nationales, F 21 72, transcribed by Jeannine Durand-Revillon. 39. Honour, The Image of the Black, 102. 40. de Margerie, “The Most Beautiful,” 28, cited from letter from Charles Cordier to Count de Nieuwerkerke, director of the Imperial Museums, superintendent of the Beaux-Arts, 1862. 41. Honour, The Image of the Black, 104.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 10 1. America was often represented as a Native woman, a racial shift that also marked a difference in her signification and her place in the allegorical hierarchy. 2. Paul de Saint-Victoire, La Liberté, 22 June 1872, cited in Dirk Kocks, “La Fontaine de l’Observatoire von Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux: Zur Ikonographie der Kosmos-Vorstellung im 19. Jahrhundert,” Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch 38 (1976), 131–44. 3. Jennifer Gordon Lovett, A Romance with Realism: The Art of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux (Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 1989), 30. 4. H.W. Janson, Nineteenth-Century Sculpture (London: Thames and Hudson, 1985), 143. La Danse was one of four, three-figure sculptural groups designed for the facade of the new Paris Opera by the architect Garnier, a long-time friend of Carpeaux.

224

Notes

5. Paul Mantz, “Salon de 1873” GBA 2, no. 6 (1872), 63, cited in: Anne Middleton Wagner, Jean Baptiste Carpeaux: Sculptor of the Second Empire (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), 262, 265. 6. Wagner, Jean Baptiste Carpeaux, 270. 7. Bhabha, “The Other Question,” 71. 8. Curatorial File, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Musée D’Orsay, Paris. 9. Here (an)other message can be understood as the intended message of the allegorical representation as well as the message of the “other” because the signification of a subject is as much a declaration of the absence of its “other” as its own presence (i.e., the black body declares the white). 10. Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1964), 220. 11. Fletcher, Allegory, 305. The directed viewing of a visual allegorical work is in part activated by the title, which works to tell the viewer what they are supposed to be seeing. 12. Pointon, Naked Authority, 115. 13. Allegory has functioned as disguise in the sexualization of the white female subject as nude. As discussed at length in Chapter 6 of this volume, it has performed a mediating function, allowing the white female subject to take up otherwise inappropriately immoral sexual narratives or significations.

Bibliography

Abbatecola, Costantino, Guida e critica della grande esposizione nazionale di Belle Arti di Napoli del 1877 (Naples: tip. di L. Gargiulo 1877). Acland, Joan, “Elitekey: The Artistic Production of Mi’kmaq Women,” Canadian Art Review/Revue d’art canadienne 25, nos. 1–2 (1998), 3–11. Adams, Henry, The Letters of Henry Adams: 1858–1868, vol. 1, eds. J.C. Levenson, Ernest Samuels, Charles Vandersee and Viola Hopkins Winner (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1982). Adams, Parveen, The Emptiness of the Image: Psychoanalysis and Sexual Differences (London: Routledge, 1996). Alpers, Svetlana, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). Anderson, Kay J., Vancouver’s Chinatown: Racial Discourse in Canada, 1875– 1980 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991). Archer-Straw, Petrine, Negrophilia: Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2000). Arscott, Caroline, and Katie Scott, “Introducing Venus,” Manifestations of Venus: Art and Sexuality, eds. Caroline Arscott and Katie Scott (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2000). Bailey, Martha J., “Servant Girls and Upper Canada’s Seduction Act: 1837–1946,” Dimensions of Childhood: Essays on the History of Children and Youth in Canada, eds. Russell Smandych, Gordon Dodds and Alvin Esau (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba, Legal Research Institute, 1991). Baker, Victoria, Emmanuel Hahn and Elizabeth Wyn Wood: Tradition and Innovation in Early Twentieth-Century Canadian Sculpture (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1998). Ball, Charles, Slavery in the United States: A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball, a Black Man (Lewistown, PA: J.W. Shugert, 1836). Beckles, Hilary McD., “An Economic Life of their Own: Slaves as Commodity Producers and Distributors in Barbados,” Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World, eds. Verene Shepherd and Hilary McD. Beckles (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2000). Beckles, Hilary McD., “Property Rights in Pleasure: The Marketing of Enslaved Women’s Sexuality,” Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World, eds. Verene Shepherd and Hilary McD. Beckles (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2000). Beckles, Hilary McD., and Verene A. Shepherd, eds., Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World: A Student Reader (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2000). Benvenuto, Bice, and Roger Kennedy, The Works of Jacques Lacan: An Introduction (London: Free Association, 1986). Bernheimer, Charles, “‘Castration’ as Fetish,” Paragraph 14 (1991), 1–9.

226

Bibliography

Bernheimer, Charles, Figures of Ill Repute (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). Bertley, Leo W., Canada and Its People of African Descent (Pierrefonds, Quebec: Bilongo Publishers, 1977). Bhabha, Homi K., Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 2004). Bhabha, Homi K., “The Other Question: Difference, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism,” Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, eds. Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha and Cornel West (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1990). Blyth, Robert J., and Douglas Hamilton, eds., Representing Slavery: Art, Artefacts and Archives in the Collections of the National Maritime Museum (Aldershot: Lund Humphries, 2007). Bohan, Ruth Louise, The Société Anonyme’s Brooklyn Exhibition, 1926–1927: Katherine Sophie Dreier and the Promotion of Modern Art in America (College Park, MD: University of Maryland, PhD dissertation, 1980). Boime, Albert, The Art of Exclusion: Representing Blacks in the Nineteenth Century (London: Thames and Hudson, 1990). Bourdais, D.M. Le, “Hahn and Wife, Sculptors,” Maclean’s Magazine 1 (November 1945), 19–20. Brewster, Anne, “American Artists in Rome,” Lippincott’s Magazine of Literature, Science, and Education 3 (February 1869), 196–99. Bridle, Augustus, “Variety and Ability Mark R.C.A. Display,” Toronto Daily Star 4 (November 1932). Brooker, Bertram, “Nudes and Prudes,” Open House (Ottawa: Graphic Publishers Limited, 1931). Brown, Marilyn R., “Introduction: Baudelaire between Rousseau and Freud,” Picturing Children: Constructions of Childhood Between Rousseau and Freud, ed. Marilyn Brown (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002). Buckridge, Steeve O., The Language of Dress: Resistance and Accommodation in Jamaica, 1760–1890 (Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies, 2004). Burant, Jim, and Robert Stacey, Du Nord et du Sud: L’Art de Peleg Franklin Brownell (1857–1946) (Ottawa: The Ottawa Art Gallery, 1998). Butler, Judith, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993). Callen, Anathea, “Degas’ Bathers: Hygiene and Dirt—Gaze and Touch,” Dealing with Degas: Representations of Women and the Politics of Vision, eds. Richard Kendall and Griselda Pollock (New York: Universe, 1992). Césaire, Aimé, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000). Chansonneuve, Deborah, Reclaiming Connections: Understanding Residential School Trauma among Aboriginal People (Ottawa: Aboriginal Healing Foundation, 2005). Clark, Kenneth, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (New York: Pantheon Books, 1957). Clark, T.J., “Olympia’s Choice,” The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers (London: Thames and Hudson, 1985). Clifford, James, Predicament in Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). Collins, Patricia Hill, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 2000). Coombes, Annie, “Museums and the Formation of National and Cultural Identities,” Oxford Art Journal 11, no. 2 (1988), 58–68.

Bibliography 227 Cooper, Afua, The Hanging of Angelique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montreal (Toronto: Harper Perennial, 2006). Cordier, Charles, “Types ethniques représentés par la sculpture,” Bulletin de la Société d’anthropologie de Paris 3 (1862), 65–68. Cuvier, Edward Blyth, Animal Kingdom, Arranged According to its Organization; Forming the Basis for a Natural History of Animals and an Introduction to Comparative Anatomy (London: Wm. S. Orr and Co., 1840). Demissie, Fassil, Sandra Jackson and Michelle Goodwin, eds., “Introduction,” Imagining, Writing, (Re)Reading the Black Body (Pretoria: UNISA Press, 2009). Deparis, Pierre-Marie, Le Grand Livre des Fruits et Legumes: Histoire, Culture et Usage (Besançon: Editions La Manufacture, 1991). Diedrich, Maria, Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Carl Pedersen, eds., Black Imagination and the Middle Passage (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). Dijkstra, Bram, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-De-Siècle Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). Drost, Wolfgang, “Colour, Sculpture, Mimesis: A Nineteenth-Century Debate,” The Colour of Sculpture: 1840–1910, ed. Andreas Blühm (Amsterdam: Van Gogh Museum, 1996). Dubois, W.E.B., The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1994). Duncan, Carol, “Happy Mothers and Other New Ideas in Eighteenth-Century French Art,” Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany, eds. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1982). Durand-Revillon, Jeannine, “Un Promoteur de la sculpture polychrome sous le Second Empire, Charles-Henri-Joseph Cordier (1827–1905),” Bulletin de la sociéte de l’historie de l’art française 2 (février 1982), 181–98. Eeckenbrugge, Geo Coppens d’, Kenneth G. Rohrbach and Freddy Leal, “History, Distribution and World Production,” The Pineapple: Botany, Production and Uses, eds. D.P. Bartholomew, R.E. Paull and K.G. Rohrbach (Honolulu: CABI Publishing, 2003). Elgersman, Maureen G., Unyielding Spirits: Black Women and Slavery in Early Canada and Jamaica (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1999). Eltis, David, and David Richardson, “West Africa and the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade,” The Slavery Reader, eds. Gad Heuman and James Walvin (London: Routledge, 2003). Engerman, Stanley L., and Herbert S. Klein, “Fertility Differentials between Slaves in the United States and the British West Indies: A Note on Lactation Practices and Their Possible Implications,” William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 35, no. 2 (April 1978), 357–73. Fanon, Frantz, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967). Farwell, Beatrice, Manet and the Nude: A Study in Iconography in the Second Empire (New York: Taylor and Francis, 1981). Fletcher, Angus, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1964). Frankenberg, Ruth, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). Gagnon, Monika Kin, Other Conundrums: Race, Culture and Canadian Art (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2000). Gardner, Albert, Yankee Stone Cutters: The First American School of Sculpture (New York: Published for The Metropolitan Museum of Art by Columbia University Press, 1945).

228

Bibliography

Gates Jr., Henry Louis, Figures in Black, Words, Signs, and the “Racial” Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). Gerdts Jr., William H., Max Weber: Retrospective Exhibition October 1st –November 15th, 1959 (Newark: The Newark Museum, 1959). Gerdts Jr., William H. and Samuel Roberson, “‘ . . . so undressed, yet so refi ned . . . ’: The Greek Slave,” The Museum: New Series 17, nos. 1–2 (Winter–Spring 1965), 3–23. Gilman, Sander L., “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Towards an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine and Literature,” Critical Inquiry 12 (1985), 204–42. Gilroy, Paul, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). Gilroy, Paul, Picturing Blackness in British Art: 1700s–1990s (London: Tate Gallery, 1996). Golden, Thelma, Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994). Gould, Stephen Jay, “The Hottentot Venus,” Natural History 91 (1982), 20–27. Gould, Stephen Jay, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1993). Green, Nicholas, The Spectacle of Nature: Landscape and Bourgeois Culture in Nineteenth-Century France (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990). Green, Vivien, “Hiram Powers’ Greek Slave: Emblem of Freedom,” American Art Journal 14, no. 4 (Autumn 1982), 31–39. Greenberg, Clement, Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). Grosz, Elizabeth, Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999). Grosz, Elizabeth, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (London: Routledge, 1990). Hakewill, James, A Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica, from Drawings Made in the Years, 1820 and 1821 (London: Hurst and Robinson, Pall-Mall, E. Lloyd, Harley Street, 1825). Hale, Edward E., Ninety Days’ Worth of Europe (Boston: Walker, Wise, and Company, 1861). Hall, Stuart, “Introduction: Who Needs ‘Identity’?” Questions of Cultural Identity, eds. Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay (London: Sage, 1996). Hall, Stuart, and Paul du Gay, Questions of Cultural Identity (London: Sage, 1996). Harper, J. Russell, La Peinture au Canada des origines à nos jours (Québec City: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 1969). Hawthorne, Nathaniel, The Marble Faun: or the Romance of Monte Beni (1860; repr., Cincinnati: Ohio State University, Center for Textual Studies, 1968). Hawthorne, Nathaniel, Passages from the French and Italian Note-Books of Nathaniel Hawthorne, vol. 1 (London: Strahan and Co., Publishers, 1871). Heuman, Gad, and James Walvin, eds., The Slavery Reader (London: Routledge, 2003). Hinsley, Curtis M., “The World as Marketplace: Commodification of the Exotic at the World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893,” Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, eds. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991). Hogarth, W., The Analysis of Beauty (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997). Honour, Hugh, The Image of the Black in Western Art: IV From the American Revolution to World War I—2 Black Models and White Myths (Cambridge, MA: Menil Foundation/Harvard University Press, 1989).

Bibliography 229 hooks, bell, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Boston: South End Press, 1981). hooks, bell, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Toronto: Between the Lines Press, 1992). Hudson, Liam, Bodies of Knowledge: The Psychological Signifi cance of the Nude in Art (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982). Iacovetta, Franca, Such Hard-Working People: Italian Immigrants in Post-War Toronto (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993). Jacques, Michelle A., A Reassessment of Prudence Heward’s Black Nudes (Downsview: York University, MA Art History, 1995). James, Stanlie M., and Abena P.A. Busia, eds., Theorizing Black Feminisms: The Visionary Pragmatism of Black Women (London: Routledge, 1994). Janson, H.W., Nineteenth-Century Sculpture (London: Thames and Hudson, 1985). Jarves, James Jackson, Art-Hints, Architecture, Sculpture and Painting (London: Sampson Low, Son, and Co., 1855). Jarves, James Jackson, Art Thoughts: The Experiences and Observations of an American Amateur in Europe (New York: Riverside Press, 1879). Jones, Janelle M., Richard N. Lalonde and Mirella L. Stroink, “Racial Identity, Racial Attitudes, and Race Socialization among Black Canadian Parents,” Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science 40, no. 3 (2008), 129–39. Jounnais, Jean-Yves, “The Hottentot Venus,” Art Press 191 (May 1994), 33–40. Karp, Ivan, and Steven D. Lavine, eds., Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991). Kasson, Joy S., Marble Queens and Captives: Women in Nineteenth-Century American Sculpture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990). Kechego, Jode, ed., Moving Beyond: Understanding the Impact of Residential Schools (Owen Sound, Ontario: Ningwakwe Learning Press, 2007). Kiple, Kenneth F., and Virginia H. Kiple, “Slave Child Mortality: Some Nutritional Answers to a Perennial Puzzle,” Journal of Social History 10, no. 3 (Spring 1977), 287–88. Knox, Robert, The Races of Men: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Infl uence of Race Over the Destinies of Nations, 2nd ed. (London: Henry Renshaw, 1862). Kocks, Dirk, “La Fontaine de l’Observatoire von Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux: Zur Ikonographie der Kosmos-Vorstellung im 19. Jahrhundert,” Wallraf-RichartzJahrbuch 38 (1976), 131–44. Lane, Christopher, The Psychoanalysis of Race (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). Lehman, Henry, “Artists’ vision coloured by prejudice?” The Gazette Montreal, 4 March 2000, J2. Lester, C.E., The Artist, the Merchant and the Statesman of the Medici, and of our Own Times, 2 vols. (New York: Paine and Burgess, 1845). Levy, Anita, Other Women: The Writing of Class, Race and Gender, 1832–1898 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991). Lipton, Eunice, “Bathers: Modernity and Prostitution,” Looking into Degas: Uneasy Images of Women in Modern Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). Little, Kenneth, “On Safari: The Visual Politics of a Tourist Representation,” The Varieties of Sensory Experience: A Sourcebook in the Anthropology of the Senses, ed. David Howes (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991). Locke, Alaine, The Negro in Art: A Pictorial Record of the Negro Artist and the Negro Theme in Art (New York: Hacker Art Books, 1979). Long, Edward, The History of Jamaica or General Survey of the Ancient and Modern State of the Island: With Refl ections on its Situation, Settlements, Inhabitants, Climate, Products, Commerce Laws and Government, vol. 3 (London: T. Lowndes, 1774).

230 Bibliography Lord, Barry, Painting in Canada: Toward a People’s Art (Toronto: NC Press, 1974). Lovett, Jennifer Gordon, A Romance with Realism: The Art of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux (Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 1989). Luckyj, Natalie, Expressions of Will (Kingston, Canada: Agnes Etherington Art Centre, 1986). Mair, Lucille Mathurin, “Women Field Workers in Jamaica During Slavery,” Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World: A Student Reader, eds. Verene Shepherd and Hilary McD. Beckles (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2000). Major-Frégeau, Madeleine, La Vie et L’oeuvre de François Malépart de Beaucourt, 2nd ed. (Quebec: Ministère des Affaires culturelles Dépot legal, Bibliothèque nationale du Quebec, 1979). Mantz, Paul, “Salon de 1873” GBA 2, no. 6 (1872), 63. Margerie, Laure de, “Chronology,” Facing the Other: Charles Cordier (1827– 1905), Ethnographic Sculptor (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, 2004). Margerie, Laure de, “The Most Beautiful Negro Is Not the One Who Looks Like Us,” Facing the Other: Charles Cordier (1827–1905), Ethnographic Sculptor (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, 2004). Mays, John Bentley, “From Pine Tress to Palm Trees,” Globe and Mail, 5 March 1988, C5. McCarthy, Pearl, “Canadian Painters Devoting More Attention to Tropics,” Globe and Mail, Toronto, 12 May 1951. McCarthy, Pearl, “Royal Canadian Academy Exhibition is Broadly Representative,” Globe and Mail, 4 November 1932, 3. McElroy, Guy C., Facing History: The Black Image in American Art 1710–1940 (Washington, DC: Bedford Art Publishers in association with The Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1990). McMaster, Gerald, “Towards an Aboriginal Art History,” Native American Art in the Twentieth Century, ed. W. Jackson Rushing III (London: Routledge, 1999). Mercer, Kobena, Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1994). Michaelson, Katherine Janszky, Alexander Archipenko: A Centennial Tribute (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Washington and Tel Aviv Museum, 1986). Mitter, Partha, “The Hottentot Venus and Western Man: Reflections on the Constructions of Beauty in the West,” Cultural Encounters: Representing “Otherness,” eds. Elizabeth Hallam and Brian V. Street (London: Routledge, 2000). Moltke-Hansen, David, Art in the Lives of South Carolinians: Nineteenth-Century Chapters (Charleston, SC: Carolina Art Association, 1979). Morgan, Jennifer L., Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). Morgan, Philip D., “The Significance of Kin,” The Slavery Reader, eds. Gad Heuman and James Walvin (London: Routledge, 2003). Morisset, Gérard, “An Essay on Canadian Painting,” Painting in Canada: A Selective Historical Survey (Albany: Albany Institute of History and Art, 1946). Morrissey, Marietta, “Women’s Work, Family Formation, and Reproduction among Caribbean Slaves,” Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World, eds. Verene Shepherd and Hilary McD. Beckles (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2000). Muhlstock, Louis, “An Excess of Prudery,” Canadian Art 5, no. 2 (Christmas– New Year 1947–1948), 75–79. Nead, Lynda, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality (London: Routledge, 1992).

Bibliography 231 Nelson, Charmaine, “Multiple Disguises,” Coloured Nude: Fetishization, Disguise, Dichotomy (Montreal: Concordia University, MA Art History, 1995). Nelson, Charmaine, Narrating Blackness: Studies in Femininity, Sexuality and Race in European and American Art of the Nineteenth-Century (Manchester: University of Manchester, PhD dissertation, 2001). Nelson, Charmaine, “The Nude in Canadian Art Practice: Censorship, Controversy and White Female Nudes,” Coloured Nude: Fetishization, Disguise, Dichotomy (Montreal: Concordia University, MA Art History, 1995). Nettleford, Rex, “Foreword,” The Language of Dress: Resistance and Accommodation in Jamaica, 1760–1890, by Steeve O. Buckridge (Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies, 2004). Noble, L.L., The Course of Empire, Voyage of Life, and Other Pictures of Thomas Cole (New York: Cornish, Lamport and Co., 1853). Nochlin, Linda, “The Imaginary Orient,” The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Art and Society (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1989). O’Grady, Lorraine, “Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity,” New Feminist Criticism: Art, Identity, Action., ed. Joanna Freuh, Cassandra L. Langer and Arlene Raven (New York: Harper Collins, 1994). Papet, Édouard, “To Have the Courage of his Polychromy: Charles Cordier and his Sculpture of the Second Empire,” Facing the Other: Charles Cordier (1827–1905), Ethnographic Sculptor (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, 2004). Parker, Rozsika, and Griselda Pollock, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1981). Parry, Ellwood C., The Image of the Indian and the Black Man in American Art, 1590–1900 (New York: G. Braziller, 1974). Patterson, Orlando, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). Payne, Elizabeth Rogers, “Anne Whitney: Art and Social Justice,” Massachusetts Review 12 (Spring 1971), 245–60. Perkins, Charlotte Isabella, The Romance of Old Annapolis Royal (Annapolis Royal: Historical Association of Annapolis Royal, 1952). Pfaff, L.R., “Lawren Harris and the International Exhibition of Modern Art: Rectifications to the Toronto Catalogue (1927), and Some Critical Comments,” Canadian Art Review 11, nos. 1–2 (1984), 79–96. Phillips, Ulrich B., Plantation and Frontier: Documents, 1649–1863, vol. 1 (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clarke, 1909). Pointon, Marcia, Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993). Pointon, Marcia, Naked Authority: The Body in Western Painting 1830–1908 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Pollock, Griselda, Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories (London: Routledge, 1999). Pollock, Griselda, “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity,” Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art (London: Routledge, 1988). Pollock, Linda A., “Foreword,” Picturing Children: Constructions of Childhood between Rousseau and Freud, ed. Marilyn Brown (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002). Prichard, James Cowles, Researches into the Physical History of Mankind, 4th ed., 3 vols. (London: Houlston and Stoneman, 1851). Qadeer, Mohammad, “Urban Planning and Multiculturalism in Ontario, Canada,” Race, Equality and Planning: Policies and Procedures, eds. Huw Thomas and Vijay Krishnarayan (Aldershot: Avebury, 1994). Ramsay, Lisa, “You Splash Plenty of Colour Around,” Maclean’s Magazine 1 (July 1950).

232

Bibliography

Randall, Lilian M.C., “An American Abroad: Visits to Sculptors’ Studios in the 1860s,” Journal of the Walters Art Gallery 33–34 (1970–1971), 42–51. Reid, A.G., “Intercolonial Trade during the French Regime,” Canadian Historical Review 32, no. 3 (1951), 236–51. Reid, Dennis, A Concise History of Canadian Painting (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1988). Riddell, William Renwick, “Le Code Noir,” Journal of Negro History 10, no. 3 (July 1925), 321–29. Riddell, William Renwick, “Notes on the Slave in Nouvelle-France,” Journal of Negro History 8, no. 3 (July 1923), 316–30. Riddell, William Renwick, “Slavery in the Maritime Provinces,” Journal of Negro History 5, no. 3 (July 1920), 359–75. Riddle, John M., Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). Ross, Ellen, Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870–1918 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). Ruck, Calvin W., The Black Battalion 1916–1920: Canada’s Best Kept Military Secret (Halifax: Nimbus Publishing Limited, 1987). Ruck, Calvin W., Canada’s Black Battalion: No. 2 Construction 1916–1920 (Halifax: The Society for the Protection and Preservation of Black Culture in Nova Scotia, 1986). Said, Edward, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). Saint-Victoire, Paul de, La Liberté, 22 June 1872. Sánchez-Eppler, Karen, “Bodily Bonds: The Intersecting Rhetorics of Feminism and Abolition,” Representations 24 (Fall 1988), 28–59. Sandham, Alfred, Montreal and its Fortifications (Montreal: Daniel Rose, 210 St. James Street, 1874). Saunders, Gill, The Nude: A New Perspective (London: Herbert, 1989). Savage, Kirk, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). Schiebinger, Londa, Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993). Segal, Sam, “Flower and Fruit Still Lifes,” A Prosperous Past; The Sumptuous Still Life in The Netherlands 1600–1700, ed. William B. Jordan (The Hague: SDU Publishers, 1989). Seidler, Jan M., A Critical Reappraisal of the Career of William Wetmore Story (1818–1895), American Sculptor and Man of Letters (Boston: Boston University, PhD dissertation, 1985). Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean, Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999). Smith, Valerie, “Black Feminist Theory, and the Representation of the ‘Other,’” Changing Our Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women, ed. Cheryl A. Wall (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989). Smith, Valerie, Not Just Race, Not Just Gender: Black Feminist Readings (New York: Routledge, 1998). Steckel, Richard H., “Birth Weights and Infant Mortality among American Slaves,” Explorations in Economic History 23 (April 1986), 173–98. Steckel, Richard H., “A Peculiar Population: The Nutrition, Health and Mortality of American Slaves, from Childhood to Maturity,” Journal of Economic History 46, no. 3 (September 1986), 721–41. Steckel, Richard, and James Trussell, “The Age of Slaves at Menarche and First Birth,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 8, no. 3 (Winter 1978), 477–505.

Bibliography 233 Story, William W., “Cleopatra,” Dwight’s Journal of Music 25, no. 13 (16 September 1865). Stowe, Harriet Beecher, Uncle Tom’s Cabin: A Tale of Life among the Lowly (London: Ingram, Cooke, and Co., 1852). Thornton, John, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400– 1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1992). Tocqueville, Alexis de, Democracy in America, trans. Henry Reeve (1835; repr. New York: Colonial Press, 1900). Topp, Elizabeth Cadiz, Endless Summer: Canadian Artists in the Caribbean (Kleinburg: McMichael Canadian Art Collection, 1988). Treckel, Paula A., “Breastfeeding and Maternal Sexuality in Colonial America,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 20, no. 1 (Summer 1989), 25–52. Triggs, Stanley G., The Stamp of a Studio (Toronto: Coach House Press, 1985). Trudel, Marcel, Dictionnaire des Esclaves et de leurs Propriétaires au Canada Français (La Salle: Éditions Hutubise HMH Ltée, 1990). Trudel, Marcel, L’esclavage au Canada français (Montreal: Presse de L’Université Laval, 1963). Trudel, Marcel, L’esclavage au Canada français: Histoire et conditions de l’esclavage (Quebec: Presse de L’Université Laval à Québec, 1960). Tulchinsky, Gerald, The River Barons: Montreal Businessmen and the Growth of Industry and Transportation 1837–53 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977). Wagner, Anne Middleton, Jean Baptiste Carpeaux: Sculptor of the Second Empire (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986). Walker, Alice, You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down (New York: Harcourt, 1982). Wallace, David H., John Rogers: The People’s Sculptor (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1967). Wallace, Michele, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (New York: Dial Press, 1979). Wallace, Michelle, “Modernism, Postmodernism and the Problem of the Visual in Afro-American Culture,” Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, eds. Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha and Cornel West (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1990). Warner, Marina, Monuments and Maidens (New York: Atheneum, 1985). Webster, Donald Blake, Georgian Canada: Conflict and Culture 1745–1820 (Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum, 1984). West, Cornel, Race Matters (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993). White, Deborah Gray, Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1999). White, Graham, and Shane White, “Slave Hair and African American Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” Journal of Southern History 61, no. 1 (February 1995), 47–72. Williams, Carla, and Deborah Willis, The Black Female Body: A Photographic History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002). Willis, Deborah, ed., Black Venus 2010: They Called Her Hottentot (Philadelphia: Temple University Press Academic, 2010). Winks, Robin W., The Blacks in Canada: A History, 2nd ed. (Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1997). Wiss, Rosemary, “Lipreading: Remembering Saartjie Baartman,” Australian Journal of Anthropology 5, nos. 1–2 (1994), 11–40. Wood, Marcus, Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780–1865 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000).

234 Bibliography Yellin, Jean Fagan, “Caps and Chains: Hiram Powers’ Statue of ‘Liberty,’” American Quarterly 38 (1986), 798–826. Young Jr., Samuel (a.k.a. T.Q.), A Wall-Street Bear in Europe, With his Familiar Foreign Journal of a Tour through Portions of England, Scotland, France and Italy (New York: Samuel Young Jr., 1855).

CORRESPONDENCE, DISCUSSIONS AND INTERVIEWS Discussion, Joanne Tod with author, 6 November 1998. Interview, Lilias Torrance Newton by Charles Hill, National Gallery of Canada Archives, 11 September 1973, tape #2. Interview, Louis Muhlstock by author, Montreal, winter 1994. Letter, Colonel R.S. McLaughlin to H.O. McCurry, director of the National Gallery of Canada, 19 July 1948, cited in Jacques, A Reassessment, 9. Letter, Cordier to Achille Fould, Ministre état and directeur des Beaux-Arts, 28 January 1854, Paris, Archives nationales, F 21 72, transcribed by Jeannine Durand-Revillon. Letter, Hiram Powers to Edwin Stoughton, 29 November 1869, Hiram Powers Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Letter, Joanne Tod to author, 26 November 1998. Letter, Mrs. Molly Bobak to author, 24 September 1998.

ARCHIVAL DOCUMENTATION, CURATORIAL FILES AND LECTURES Archives judiciaires ed Montréal, Greffe de Patrice Lacombe, acte numéro 70 (le 5 juillet 1832). Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Catalogue information sheet, Background, Accession #: 65.1, Lawren Harris Negress. Broadhurst, Maura, “Forgotten Women: Henrietta Shore and Negro Woman and Children,” conference paper, 13th Annual Inter-University Colloquium for Graduate Research in Art History and Architecture, Concordia University, Montreal, 5 April 1997. Curatorial File, Blackburn Museum and Art Galleries, Blackburn, UK, John Bell Octoroon. Curatorial File, Charles-Henri-Joseph Cordier, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Curatorial File, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Musée D’Orsay, Paris. Curatorial File M12067, McCord Museum of Canadian History, Library Archives, Montreal, Canada. Measures, Michael, François Malépart de Beaucourt (1740–1794), Canadian Artist; a 20-Minute Appreciation Woven around the Related Photo-Slides Available from the Library of the National Gallery of Canada, lecture, 23 October 1980. National Gallery of Canada, curatorial fi le 3983, memo 20 March 1995; 4735, memo 2 July 1992; 30154, memo 11 December 1991. National Gallery of Canada Archives, Louis Muhlstock, artist’s file. National Gallery of Canada Curatorial File, Franklin Brownell—2033. National Gallery of Canada, Curatorial File, Orson Wheeler Head of a Girl. Nelson, Charmaine, Copyright Status CWM Art Collection (Ottawa: Canadian War Museum, 1995–1996), unpublished.

Bibliography 235 Yvonne McKague Housser papers, Public Archives of Canada MG30D305 vol. 2, fi le 2–11.

ANONYMOUS “Art Notes,” New York Times, 13 June 1882, C. 2, 2. “Bill of Sale of Abraham Van Vleek,” Black Women in White America: A Documentary History, ed. Gerda Lerner (New York: Vintage Books, A Division of Random House, Inc., 1992). “Canadian Artist—Elizabeth Wyn Wood,” Evening Telegram, Toronto, 28 April 1934. Canadian National Exhibition Catalogue, 27 August–11 September 1937, 30. Catalogue of Paintings by Will Ogilvie, Gainsborough Galleries, 25 May–7 June 1954. Christian Inquirer 1 (9 October 1847), 207, Hiram Powers Scrapbook. Grolier Multimedia Encyclopaedia (Danbury, CT: Grolier Interactive Inc. 1998). “Horrors and Experiments Deck Halls of R.C.A. Show,” Evening Telegram, Toronto, 4 November 1932, 5. “International Exhibition,” Athenaeum: Journal of English and Foreign Literature, Science, and the Fine Arts, no. 1802 (10 May 1862), 631. “Many Fine Pictures at Academy Exhibit,” Toronto Daily Star, 18 November 1926. “Mrs. Blankenship Wishes to Buy a Slave Girl,” Black Women in White America: A Documentary History, ed. Gerda Lerner (New York: Vintage Books, A Division of Random House, Inc., 1992). “New Names on Roster of Artists Whose Works Academy has Accepted,” Evening Telegram, Toronto, 5 November 1932, 14. “Notabilia of the International Exhibition,” Art Journal (July 1862), 161. Painting in Canada a Selective Historical Survey (Albany: The Albany Institute of History and Art, 1946); see fi le M12067 McCord Museum of Canadian History, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. “Paintings of Nudes Consigned to Cellar,” Toronto Daily Star, 4 April 1927, 22. “The Race Problem—An Autobiography, by A Southern Woman,” The Independent 56, no. 2885 (March 17, 1904). “The Royal Canadian Academy,” Canadian Homes and Gardens (December 1932), 23. “Sambo to the ‘Greek Slave,’” Punch, or the London Charivari 21 (July–December 1851), 105. “Studies in the Nude,” Canadian Homes and Gardens (April 1933), 5. “The Virginian Slave: Intended as a Companion to Powers’ ‘Greek Slave,’” Punch, or the London Charivari 20 (January–June 1851), 236. “William W. Story and his Cleopatra,” Dwight’s Journal of Music 17, no. 18 (28 July 1860). “With Trilliums in her Hair,” Canadian Art 4, no. 4 (Summer 1947), 148.

ELECTRONIC REFERENCE Allie, Mohammed, “Return of ‘Hottentot Venus’ Unites Bushmen,” BBC News (6 May 2002), http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/19711003.stem (accessed 25 October 2003).

236

Bibliography

http://www.gov.ns.ca/nsarm/virtual/africanns/archives.asp?ID=33& (accessed 24 July 2009). Levins, Hoag, Symbolism of the Pineapple: Being the Brief and Colorful History of a Truly American Fruit, www.levins.com/pineapple.html (accessed 9 October 2009). http://www.pierre-marteau.com/currency/converter/eng-fra.html (accessed 23 July 2009). http://www.portraits.gc.ca/009001–1106.8-e.html (accessed 24 July 2009). www.hort.purdue.edu/newcropmorton/index.html (accessed fall 2004). www.rain-tree.com/ (accessed 9 October 2009).

Index

A abolition/abolitionism, 60, 160, 169, 178 abolitionist, 141, 147, 149, 151 Africa, 2, 6, 15, 26, 67, 86, 88, 89, 101, 127, 132, 158, 167, 168, 170, 174, 175, 176, 177; and children, 52; as “dark continent”, 2, 26, 162, 175; North/ Northern, 163, 165; Southern, 163; West Africa/West African, 3, 42, 83, 97; see also blackness; South Africa African , 3, 4, 19, 21, 33, 54, 57, 95, 96, 97, 122, 131, 132, 135, 136, 163, 164, 167, 173, 177; AfricanAmerican, 57; African-Canadian, 57; African-Caribbean, 57; art, 132; heritage, 48; knowledge, 96; people, 19; women, 81, 126; see also Venus, African Algeria, 23, 167, 168 Africanism, 163 African-ness, 14, 164 allegory/allegorical, 9, 14, 176, 177, 178; allegorical performance of race, 176; see also four continents; nude, allegory America, 41, 48, 101, 170, 182; Central America, 82; Georgia, 43; Los Angeles, 31; Louisiana, 67; North, 11, 154; Reconstruction, 139; South (USA), 13, 37, 39, 47, 53, 83, 101; see also South America (continent of) American, 8, 14, 47, 67, 147, 173; art/culture, 20; Civil War, 139, 150; flag, 154; War of Independence, 99

anti-slavery; see abolitionism/abolitionism; abolitionist Archer-Straw, Petrine, 124, 131, 135 Archipenko, Alexandre, 14, 127, 130, 131, 132, 133, 135, 136; The Bather, 127, 130 Art Gallery of Toronto, 109, 127, 130, 135, 136 Art History, 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 63, 65, 76, 102, 121, 122, 123, 124, 139; Canadian, 75, 78, 122; canon, 65, 70, 76, 123; and discourse, 74, 105, 106, 107, 122; and Modernism, 122 Asia. see racial types, Asian

B Baartman, Saartjie/Sarah, 2, 126, 127, 134, 163; see also “Hottentot Venus” Baker, Josephine, 132, 163; and caféconcerts, 163 bandanas. see Dress, headwrap Barbados, 92 Beament, Thomas Harold, 32, 33; West Indian Washerwomen, 32, 33 Beckles, Hilary (Sir), 90, 94, 102 becoming, 6, 140 Bell, John, 151, 156; Octoroon, 151, 156 Benetton, 46; Breast Feeding, 46 Bermuda, 32 Bhabha, Homi K., 106, 120, 121, 174; see also stereotype, colonial black; female labour, 28, 32, 33, 34, 60; female professor, 10; female sexuality, 11, 23, 78, 81, 112, 115, 134, 180; female sitter, 13,

238

Index

60, 70, 75, 76, 77, 78, 81, 84, 88, 97, 181; female subjectivity, 139; feminist/feminism, 3, 4, 5, 6, 11, 38, 41, 63, 74, 75, 76, 77, 79, 161; girls, 9, 11, 16, 32, 47, 49, 60, 179; hair, 114, 149, 150, 151, 156, 167; male, 12, 47, 57, 59, 69; maternity/ mother, 31, 43, 59; nanny, 46; queen, 154; sexuality, 19, 25, 136, 147, 154, 162; Venus, 14, 160, 161, 162, 163, 166; wife, 59; Woman, 25, 107, 115, 116, 129, 135, 179; womanhood, 19, 20, 36; women, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 16, 19, 21, 23, 24, 32, 78, 84, 86, 92, 99, 107, 109, 110, 113, 115, 116, 118, 119, 120, 121, 134, 154, 160, 162, 166, 175, 177, 178, 182; women and basket making, 91, 92; women as domestics, 28; women and huckstering, 90, 91, 92; women and sexual deviance, 16; see also Africa; Cleopatra; dress, black female dress; dress, and blackness; dress, hair; racial types blackness, 5, 10, 12, 19, 21, 36, 40, 97, 107, 108, 119, 131, 132, 135, 136, 139, 140, 149, 150, 151, 161, 162, 164, 167, 176, 177, 178, 182; and abuse, 31; and children, 31, 38, 39, 40, 46, 48, 49, 52, 58, 59, 180; degrees of, 149; and family, 58; and queen, 154 Black Atlantic, 3 Black Diaspora, 3, 8, 10, 13, 15, 41, 42, 54, 57, 89, 91, 93, 95, 97, 98, 156; Black Diaspora Studies, 1, 8, 101, 102 Bobak, Molly Lamb, 29, 31; Private Roy, Canadian Women’s Army Corps, 29, 31 Brazil, 3, 41, 53, 82 “breaking”. see slavery, and “breaking”; slavery, and punishment; slavery, and torture “breeders”/“breeding”, see slavery, and “breeders”/“breeding” Britain, 9, 64, 182; British (English, Irish, Scottish), 8, 9, 14, 15, 20, 63, 64, 160; Crystal Palace, 143; Great Exhibition

(1851), 167; International Exhibition, 143, 154; London, 64 126, 143; Royal Academy, 151 Brooker, Bertram, 128 Brown, William Wells, 43 Brownell, Peleg Franklin, 32, 33; The Beach, St.Kitts, 32, 33 Buckley, William H., 45; Nanny with Children in her Care, Guysborough, 45, 52 Buckridge, Steeve O., 89, 93, 96, 102

C Canada, 9, 13, 14, 20, 21, 26, 28, 36, 53, 54, 55, 57, 63, 64, 66, 67, 70, 78, 80, 91, 94, 102, 127, 128, 135, 182; Annapolis Royal, 99; and black people/ populations, 9, 57; Concordia University, 49; Digby, 99; European-Canadian, 27; Halifax, 13, 32, 39, 43, 54, 55, 57, 91, 101; Lower, 53, 89, 91, 98, 101; Maritimes, 53; Montreal, 13, 15, 39, 57, 70, 81, 89, 90, 93, 94, 95, 97, 98, 101, 102, 128; nation-building, 64; New France, 24, 63, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 75, 76, 77, 78, 81, 82, 85, 89; New France and Le Code Noir, 67, 69; New France and fines, 68; New France and meubles (moveable personal property), 67; Nova Scotia, 99; Old Montreal, 15; Québec, 71; Saint John, 99; Toronto, 107, 131; Upper, 53; see also Art Gallery of Toronto; International Exhibition of Modern Art; National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa); Ontario College of Art Canadian, 7, 8, 9, 12, 22, 33, 35, 36, 42, 58, 59, 71, 77, 81, 88, 89, 109, 130, 131; art/culture, 7, 20, 21, 23, 28, 35, 36, 48, 64, 65, 70, 74, 99, 107, 108, 113, 114, 120, 128, 129, 130; ; Black Canadian Studies, 12;family, 28; history, 101; and portraiture, 9; Royal Canadian Academy, 109; slavery, 67, 70, 101;slaves, diversity of, 57; studies, 101; white artists, 21, 23, 28; and

Index whiteness, 20; see also Art History, Canadian Caribbean, 8, 13, 21, 23, 32, 33, 39, 41, 42, 48, 53, 54, 55, 57, 65, 67, 68, 70, 80, 81, 82, 83, 90, 93, 96, 99, 101, 102, 160; see also French Antilles Carlisle, W. O., 32, 91; Negress Selling Mayflowers on the Market Place, 32, 91 Carpeaux, Jean-Baptiste, 14, 15, 170, 172, 173, 174, 175, 177, 178; Africa, 175; La Danse, 172; Les quatre parties du monde soutenant la sphere céleste/The Four Corners of the World Holding a Celestial Sphere, 14, 170, 172, 173, 175, 178; Jean-Léon Gérôme, 173 censorship. see nude, and censorship Childhood Studies, 13, 38, 60 children, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 49, 58; labour, 40; see see also blackness, and children; slavery, children; whiteness, children; whiteness, girl choses africaines, les, 131 Civil War. see American, Civil War civilization, African 163; European, 4, 175, 180, 181 Clark, T.J., 123 Cleopatra, 163 see also blackness, queen Clifford, James, 132 clothing; see Dress Cole, Thomas, 164 colonial/colonialism, 3, 7, 8, 10, 14, 20, 21, 76, 80, 112, 118, 120, 124, 125, 126, 128, 132, 134, 141, 149, 154, 157, 158, 160, 162, 163, 164, 166, 168, 169, 170, 171, 175, 176, 177, 178, 181; anti-colonial, 169; desire, 150, 178; discourse, 4, 36, 107, 121, 129, 135, 161, 163, 166, 168, 179;drive, 168;economy, 90, 92; and exploitation, 74; and fantasy, 26, 181; ideology, 168, 169; legacy, 8, 107; mastery, 94; pleasure, 162; power, 106; subject, 106; trade, 95; violence, 182; west, 14 colonization, 4, 15, 147, 165; European 15, 86, 165, 179

239

coloured; see racial types, coloured commodification, and visual, 66 commodity, 66, 90; see also slavery, and commodities complexion; see skin Congo, 151 Cooper, Afua, 88 Cordier, Charles-Henri-Joseph, 7, 145, 158, 161, 163, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 180;African Venus/ Vénus Africaine, 14, 158, 161, 163, 166, 167, 169;Aimez-vous les uns les autres / Fraternité, 169; Nègre de Tombouctou, 167; Nègre du Soudan ou Nègre en costume algérien /African of the Sudan/ African in Algerian Costume, 14, 145, 165, 180; see also black, Venus; Venus, African cotton. see slavery, and crops Craig, George H., 91, 92; Selling Baskets on Market Day Halifax, 91 Crawford, Thomas, 164; and Roman studio, 164 Critical Race Studies, 8 Cuba, 23

D Darfur, 167 “dark continent”; see Africa, as “dark continent” Degas, Edgar, 118 Delaunay, Robert, 132 deprivation (economic, social); see slavery, and deprivation (economic, social) diaspora; see Black Diaspora discourse; see theory, discourse Dreier, Katherine, 130, 131; see also International Exhibition of Modern Art Dress; adornment, 96, 97; African, 97; black female dress, 30, 46, 49; and blackness, 30, 33; and hair, 96, 97, 114, 149, 150, 150, 151, 156; headwrap, 23, 88, 89, 91, 95, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 154; jewellery, 90, 92, 93, 94, 156; self care, 96; and slavery 13, 48, 89, 90, 95, 96, 98, 181

E Egypt/Egyptian, 154, 163

240 Index emancipation (post-emancipation), 96, 160, 178 empire, 95, 179; see also imperialism English; see British Estcourt, Caroline Bucknall, 92, 99; The Good “Woman of Colour”, 92, 99 Ethiopian, 169 ethnographer/ethnography, 9, 165; artist-ethnographer, 165; and photography, 165 Eurocentric, 2, 39, 86, 105, 106, 107, 112, 113, 114, 122, 125, 129, 147, 150, 163, 179 Europe, 48, 64, 78, 79, 80, 82, 125, 126, 127, 164, 170, 175, 177 European, 4, 9, 15, 48, 49, 52, 64, 66, 82, 83, 88, 95, 97, 113, 125, 128, 147, 158, 161, 163, 167, 168, 170, 173, 175, 179, 180; art/culture, 20; artists, 11; imperialism15, 19, 40; see also civilization, European; colonization, European; imperial/imperialism; whiteness exotic/exoticism, 21, 33, 36, 48, 66, 71, 72, 73, 76, 78, 79, 82, 84, 85, 86, 111, 134, 163, 175, 181; deexoticization, 35; see also other, exotic

F Fabian, Johannes, 181; and visualism, 181 fear/desire, 22, 105–06, 136, 154, 162, 178, 179, 182 four continents, 14, 170, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178; see also allegory/allegorical, allegorical performance of race; nude, allegory France, 9, 112, 158, 165, 167, 182; Paris, 64, 111, 126, 127, 133, 134, 163, 167, 172, 180; see also Jardin du Luxembourg; Musée national d’Histoire naturelle; Paris Salon (1872) French, 7, 8, 14, 15, 20, 67, 162, 163, 168, 172, 180; Academy, 164 French, Daniel Chester, 175; Africa, 175 French Antilles, 67, 68, 84, 85, 98; see also Caribbean Freud, Sigmund, (Freudian), 6, 107, 120, 136; see also psychoanalysis

G Gauguin, Paul, 110 gaze, 11, 19, 26, 30, 34, 35, 45, 49, 74, 96, 99, 112, 113, 115, 116, 118, 119, 129, 154, 162, 180, 181, 182; black female, 24; male heterosexual, 81, 105, 111, 134; sexual, 35, 94, 116, 117, 119, 162; white, 27; see also psychoanalysis; voyeur/voyeurism; viewer; vision Gêrome, Jean-Léon, 115, 173; Roman Slave Market, 115; Slave Sale at Rome, 115 Gibson, John, 143, 147; Tinted Venus, 143, 147 Gilman, Sander, 116 Ginotti, Giacomo, 156; L’emancipazione dalla schiavitu, 156 Greek War of Independence, 147 Group of Seven, 131; see also Harris, Lawren Sr., Guadeloupe, 23, 65, 70, 80, 81, 82, 98

H Hahn, Emmanuel, 29; Negress, 29 hair; see black, hair; Dress, and hair Hall, Stuart, 140 Harris, Lawren Jr., 27, 29, 32, 74; Clytie, 32; Elfreda, 29; Negress, 27, 74 Harris, Lawren Sr., 130–1 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 164 Heward, Prudence, 2, 25, 26, 27, 58, 74; Clytie, 2, 58, 59; Dark Girl, 2, 25, 26, 27, 30, 74; Girl in the Window, 2, 26, 27, 30; Hester, 2, 26, 30; Negress with Flower, 2, 29; Hewton, Randolph, 117; Sleeping Woman, 117 Holgate, Edwin, 29, 114; Head of a Woman, 29; Nude in a Landscape, 114 Honour, Hugh, 167 “Hottentot”/ “Hottentot Venus”, 14, 86, 122, 125, 126, 127, 131, 133, 135, 136, 163, 180 see also Baartman, Saartjie/Sarah; black, Venus; Cordier, Charles-HenriJoseph, African Venus/Vénus Africaine; Khoisan; Venus, African

Index Housser, Yvonne McKague, 32, 33; Marketplace, 32, 33; Negro Girl with Red Flower, 32 huckstering. see slavery, and labour, huckstering human science, 19, 177;tree of man, 19, 178

I immigrant, 20, 21, 57, 64, 95; black, 21 immigration, 64; and policy, 21 imperial/imperialism9, 15, 110, 170, 179, 180; imperialist, 66; see also European, imperialism, Indian;see Native; slavery, and Native (Canada) Indigenous;see Native; slavery, and Native (Canada) indigo;see slavery, and crops Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique, 119 International Exhibition of Modern Art, 127, 130, 131, 136 Irish. see British Italy, 182 Italian, 8, 14; Rome, 143, 164; see also Crawford, Thomas and Roman studio,

J Jamaica, 3, 23, 32, 33, 42, 90, 93, 96, 98 Jamaican, 33 Jardin du Luxembourg / Luxembourg Gardens, 172, 173 Jarves, James Jackson, 145, 165, 166 jewellery;see Dress, jewellery Jezebel;see stereotype, Jezebel

K Khoisan, 127; see also “Hottentot Venus”

L Lacan, Jacques (Lacanian), 6, 176; see also psychoanalysis lactation; see slavery, and maternity Le Jeune, Olivier, 67 Lewis, Edmonia, 151; Forever Free, 151 Libya/Libyan, 151 Loyalist, 99 Luxembourg Gardens, see Jardin du Luxembourg Lyman, John, 25, 74; Sun Bathing 1, 25; Negress, 74

241

M Malépart de Beaucourt, François, 13, 21, 23, 24, 26, 28, 44, 52, 63, 65, 68, 70, 71, 72, 74, 76, 77, 85, 86, 88, 91, 92, 94, 95, 97, 99, 180; Benoite Gaétant (wife of), 70, 74, 77, 80, 93, 94, 95, 101; Madame Eustache-Ignace Trottier dit Desrivières née Marguerite Malhiot, 72, 94; Portrait of a Negro Slave, 13, 21, 23, 24, 44, 52, 63, 65, 70, 72, 76, 80, 88, 92, 94, 95, 101, 180; and breast, 23, 66, 72, 79, 81, 86, 94; and dress, 23; and fruit, 23, 72, 78, 81, 84, 87, 88 mammy; see stereotype, mammy Manet, Edouard, 1, 35, 111, 112, 116, 122, 123, 134, 135, 167; black cat, 111; black maid, 111, 112, 122, 123, 124, 135, 167; courtesan/prostitute, 111, 112; Déjeuner sur l’herbe, 133; Olympia, 1, 35, 111, 112, 116, 122, 123, 134, 167; white prostitute, 1, 112, 134, 135 Mantz, Paul, 173, 174 marble, 14, 141, 142, 143, 145, 147, 164, 165, 166; quarry (Rutland, Seravezza), 142; white, 14, 140, 142, 147, 149, 156, 157, 161, 165, 166 Martinique, 23, 81, 98 Marxism, 1 maternity; see nude, pregnant; slavery, and maternity Matisse, Henri, 132, 135; Blue Nude (Souvenir of Biskra),135 meubles (moveable personal property); see Canada, New France and meubles Mexico, Southern, 82 Middle Passage, 3, 13, 52, 83, 96; Second Middle Passage, 57 Mi’kmaq,91; see also racial types, Native; slavery, and Native (Canada), miscegenation, 66, 68, 69, 141, 150, 157, 158, 168, 178 Montreal. see Canada, Montreal Morrice, James Wilson, 7, 23; Portrait of Maude, 23 Morocco, 23 motherhood; see slavery, and maternity

242

Index

Muhlstock, Louis, 27, 32, 58, 128; Eva Spring, 27; Evelyn Pleasant, St. Famille Street, 32, 58; Pregnant Eva, 27 mulatto; see racial types, mulatto Musée de l’Homme, 127 Musée national d’Histoire naturelle, 165, 167

N naked, 1, 11, 13, 14, 25, 95, 105, 106, 107, 108, 111, 112, 120, 121, 134, 136, 143, 161, 162, 167, 179; see also nude nation-building, 20 National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), 33 Native; see racial types, Native; slavery, and Native (Canada), 15, 20 negrophilia, 124, 131, 132 neoclassical/neoclassicism; see sculpture, neoclassical/neoclassicism Nettleford, Rex, 88 New France; see Canada, New France Notman, William, 30, 31, 51, 52; Mrs. Coburn, 30, 31; Mrs. Cowan’s Nurse, 31, 51, 52; Miss Guilmartin, 30, 31 Nubian, 154 nude, 11, 13, 14, 23, 25, 95, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 111, 113, 115, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 129, 130, 131, 136, 143, 145, 160, 161, 162, 166, 167, 170, 174, 179; allegory, 25, 110, 111, 116, 119, 129, 161, 162, 174; and beautiful, 113, 119, 170; and censorship, 14, 24, 109, 129, 130; and body hair, 113; and sexual disguise, 14, 24, 110, 119; environmental distraction/ toilette, 113, 116, 118, 161, 162; nature, 109, 110, 114, 162, 170; performance of race, 25, 110, 111, 116, 119, 129, 161, 162, 174; and pornographic/ pornography, 11, 105, 109, 110, 111, 113, 120, 129, 136, 156; pregnant, 27; race, 116, 162; raison d’être, 119, 129, 160, 176; and sexual disguise, 24; sleep/ death, 116, 117, 119, 161; and sublime, 6, 111, 112, 113, 120, 170; white female, 23, 111, 113, 114, 115, 116, 119, 130; see

also alegory/allegorical; allegorical performance of race; four continents; naked nursing; see slavery, and maternity

O octoroon; see racial types, octoroon Ogilvie, Will, 32, 33; Xosa Mother, 33; Xosa Woman, 33; Xosa Women, 33; Xosa Women Washing, 32, 33 O’Grady, Lorraine, 2, 122 Ontario College of Art, 29 “other”, 23, 34, 72, 106, 107, 110, 112, 120, 121, 126, 129, 141, 147, 154, 164, 168, 170, 175, 176, 181; exotic, 23, 24, 115; land, 19; otherness, 113; otherness and race/ethnic/colour, 20, 21, 24, 35, 112, 150, 182; otherness and the sexual, 21, 24, 35, 162, 163, 182; self/other, 20, 27; see also colonial; exotic

P Paraguay, 82 Paris Salon (1872), 172, 173 Patterson, Orlando, 156; and social death, 156 “peculiar institution” 139; see also slavery perverse intimacy, 39 Picasso, Pablo, 132, 135; Olympia, 135; prostitute, 135 pimento; see slavery, and crops piracy, 93 plantation 3, 40, 42, 44, 60, 68, 97, 98; , economy, 68; mono-crop plantation, 3, 42, 94; slavery, 94; see also tropical, plantation planter; see slavery, and owner Pointon, Marcia, 177 Pollock, Griselda, 123 pornography; see nude, and pornography Portugal/Portuguese, 67 Postcolonial Studies, 1, 8, 124 Powers, Hiram, 147, 149, 150, 151, 154, 156; Greek Slave, 147, 149, 150, 151, 154, 156 pregnant/pregnancy; see nude, pregnant; slavery, maternity primitive, 7, 40, 125, 132, 133, 134, 136, 162, 174

Index psychoanalysis, 1, 5, 6, 14, 20, 105, 136, 143; and abjection, 20, 141; and castration, 56, 106, 147; desire, 112, 177; fetish/ fetishization, 14, 105, 106, 107, 113, 114, 120, 143; and phallic/ phallus, 46, 105, 110, 113, 114, 120, 136, 147; psyche, 163; psychic, 5, 7, 21; symbolic order, 176; trauma, 45, 53; see also fear/desire; Freud, Sigmund; whiteness, as collective narcissism; voyeur/voyeurism Pygmalion, 168

Q quadroon; see racial types, quadroon

R race, 118, 132, 135, 139, 158, 161; and degeneracy, 19; degrees of blackness, 95; and hierarchy, 112; and legibility, 170; privilege, 117 Race and Representation, 1, 2, 7 racial types, 165, 167; Abyssinian, 163; Arab, 147, 163; Aryan, 24; Asian, 35, 124, 163, 170, 173, 181; blackamoors, 165; Caucasian/Caucasoid, 4, 147, 163; Chinese, 24; coloured, 20, 37, 39; Creole, 48, 95, 101; dark, 20, 25, 46; fair, 25, 30; fellahin, 163; high yellow, 20, 30; interracial, 45, 68, 69, 145, 149, 150, 151, 157, 178; Mongoloid, 163; mulatto, 15, 52, 55, 56, 95, 98, 149; Native, 20, 38, 96, 122, 124, 170, 173, 181; Negress/Negro/Negroid, 4, 14, 15, 20, 24, 27, 52, 54, 56, 66, 69, 75, 97, 99, 101, 125, 132, 149, 151, 160, 169, 171, 172, 174; full-blooded Negro type, 151, 154, 156; nigger, 154; octoroon, 95, 149, 150, 151; quadroon, 55, 95, 149; ruddy, 145, 149; white-Negro, 141, 151, 157, 163; see also “Hottentot Venus”; slavery, and Native (Canada); stereotype racism, 5, 40, 57, 121, 124; and surveillance, 5; and violence, 5 rebellion; see slavery, and rebellion/ resistance/revolt

243

Reconstruction; see America, Reconstruction religion; and Catholicization, 68; and church, 68; and priests, 69; resistance; see slavery, and rebellion/ resistance/revolt revolt; see slavery, and rebellion/resistance/revolt rice; see slavery, and crops Riddell, William Renwick, 53, 69, 98, 101, 102 Ripa, Cesare, 175; Iconologia, 175 Rogers, John Jr., 150; The Flight of the Octoroon, 150; The Slave Auction, 150 Rose Fortune, 92, 99 Rousseau, Henri, 132 Royal Canadian Academy; see Canadian, Royal Canadian Academy

S de Saint-Victoire, Paul, 171, 174, 177 savage; see stereotype, savage Scottish; see British sculpture, 9, 12, 14, 139, 142, 143, 145, 147, 150, 165, 170, 172, 173, 175, 178, 179, 182; bronze, 145, 165, 167, 173, 175; neoclassical/neoclassicism, 14, 139, 141, 142, 143, 145, 147, 151, 156, 157, 161, 164, 165, 166, 169, 179; antineoclassical, 165; onyx, 165; plaster, 150, 164; polychrome/ polychromy, 143, 145, 158, 161, 164, 165, 166, 169, 175, 179; ancient/antique, 164 Second Middle Passage; see Middle Passage, and Second Middle Passage self; see “other”, self/other sexual/sexuality, 35, 110; exploitation, 27;sexual bondage, 35; see also black, female sexuality; black, women and sexual deviance; slavery, and sexual exploitation; whiteness, white female sexuality; whiteness, white sexuality shackles; see slavery and chains/manacles/shackles ship, 98 Shore, Henrietta, 31, 49; Negro Woman and Two Children, 31, 49 skin, 13, 25, 119, 120, 135, 140, 142, 143, 147, 149, 164, 166, 167;

244

Index

black, 40, 109, 149; brown, 99, 100; complexion, 30, 89, 100, 142, 145, 166; white, 72, 142, 149 slavery, 4, 8, 9, 40, 46, 50, 52, 53, 58, 60, 65, 66, 67, 70, 89, 92, 93, 108, 115, 139, 147, 149, 150, 156, 158, 160, 168, 178, 179, 180; advertisements, 43, 53, 54, 55, 149; and agency 84, 93;and auction, 43, 49;and “breaking”, 57; and “breeders”/“breeding”, 6, 43, 44, 47, 52, 55, 69, 80, 81, 93; and chains/manacles/shackles, 139, 156; and children, 13, 37, 41, 43, 44, 45, 47, 48, 49, 53, 55, 56, 68, 69, 78, 83, 94; and commodification, 63; and commodities (molasses, rum), 56, 68, 81; and contraception, 83, 84, 85; and crops (cotton, indigo, pimento, rice, sugar, tobacco), 42, 44, 56, 68, 82; and deprivation (economic, social), 43, 93, 180; and father, 53; and fines, 68; fugitive slaves, 47, 53, 54; and health, 41, 55, 83, 181; and holders. see slavery, and owner; and housing, 181; and labour, 16, 19, 37, 42, 43, 44, 47, 49, 56, 70, 83, 91; labour in the field, 42, 97, 98; labour in the house, 97, 98; labour huckstering, 90, 91, 92; and luxury, 70, 90; and manumission, 68, 69; and marriage, 97; and maternity, 27, 31, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 49, 56, 69, 94, 97, 160; and men, 47, 56; and Native (Canada), 53, 55, 67, 69, 70, 90, 95, 98; and “natural increase”, 47; and nutrition, 41, 44, 56; and owner, 43, 47, 52, 53, 54, 56, 69, 70, 73, 75, 78, 80, 83, 84, 85, 93, 97, 115, 180; and overseer, 83; “peculiar institution”, 139; pro-slavery, 141; and punishment, 43, 46; and rebellion/resistance/revolt, 8, 47, 83, 85, 96, 97; and sexual exploitation, 6, 45, 46, 47, 49, 53, 56, 60, 66, 69, 80, 85, 93, 94, 95, 149; and surveillance, 49, 90, 96; and torture, 6, 43, 46, 57, 90, 96, 139, 181; and

women, 14, 42, 44, 68, 70, 75, 79, 80, 85, 90, 93, 94 slave, 4, 15, 54, 68, 69, 72, 73, 90, 154; slave-master, 147 slave sale advertisements; see slavery, advertisements smuggling; see piracy social death; see Orlando Patterson, social death; Society of Anthropology, 166 South Africa, 33, 126; see also Africa South America (continent of), 82; see also America St. Lucia, 98 stereotype, 6, 35, 77, 78, 110, 118, 120, 121, 141, 168, 169; colonial, 107, 120, 174; colonial as fetish, 19, 35, 40, 81, 107, 121, 127, 174; Jezebel, 11, 22; mammy, 7, 22, 98, 160; piccaninny, 32; savage, 40, 171, 173, 174; stereotypical, 5, 24, 25, 85, 135, 180; Uncle Tom, 46; see also Bhabha, Homi K., racial types, see also Stevens, Dorothy, Amy (Piccaninny) Stevens, Dorothy, 7, 14, 24, 30, 58, 107, 108, 109, 110, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 120, 181; Amy, (Piccaninny), 32, 58, 59; see also stereotype, piccaninny; Coloured Nude, 14, 24, 25, 74, 107, 108, 109, 110, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 120; High Yellow, 30, 31 Story, William Wetmore, 151, 154; Cleopatra, 151, 154; Libyan Sibyl, 151 Street, Robert, 48; Children of Commodore John Daniel Daniels, 48 Sub-Saharan, 151 sugar; see slavery, and crops Suriname, 98, 99 surveillance; see racism, and surveillance

T Tangiers, 23 Tenniel, John, 154; The Virginian Slave: Intended as a Companion to Power’s “Greek Slave”, 154, 156 Theed, William, 175; Africa, 175 theory, discourse, 1; Kant (Kantian), 111; Postcolonial, 3, 4; W.E.B. Dubois/Duboisian, 58; doubleconsciousness, 58; see also Sigmund Freud

Index Thérèse-Zémire, Marie, 70, 71, 72, 74, 75, 77, 80, 81, 85, 86, 180; see also Malépart de Beaucourt, François, Portrait of a Negro Slave tobacco; see slavery, and crops Tod, Joanne, 21, 34, 35; Identification/ Defacement, 34; In the Bedroom, 21, 35; In the Kitchen, 35 Tombouctou, 167 torture; see slavery, and punishment Trans Atlantic Slavery; see slavery Trans Atlantic Slavery Studies, 1, 6, 8, 101, 102 Trinidad and Tobago, 23, 32 tropical, 2, 3, 26, 42, 82, 99; and fruit, 23, 65, 66, 79, 82, 85; and landscape, 25, 115; and location, 65; plantation, 68; produce, 98 Trudel, Marcel, 69, 70, 80

U underground railroad, 21 United States of America; see America

V Vaughan, Lucille, 49; see also Wheeler, Orson, Head of a Girl Venus, 25, 119, 125, 143, 145, 160, 161, 162, 163, 167, 169; African,14, 160, 169; see also black, Venus; Cordier, Charles-HenriJoseph, African Venus/Vénus Africaine; “Hottentot Venus” viewer, 25, 34, 35, 59, 72, 110, 111, 112, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 125, 135, 177, 181; alternative, possibility of, 74; male heterosexual viewer, 7, 162; viewership, 6, 8; white, 7, 73, 115, 126, 141, 170; see also gaze; vision violence; see racism, and violence vision, 5, 34, 115, 117, 179, 181 voyeur/voyeurism, 35, 112, 118, 119, 122, 161;see also gaze; psychoanalysis; vision

W Walker, Kara, 46; African’t, 46; The Battle of Atlanta: Being a Narrative of a Negress in the Flames of Desire—A Reconstruction, 46; The End of Uncle Tom, 46; The Means to an End—A Shadow Drama in Five Acts, 46

245

Ward, John Quincy Adams, 151; Freedman, 151 Weber, Max, 14, 127, 130, 131, 132, 135, 136; Contemplation, 127, 130; Retirement, 127 West Africa; see Africa, West Africa West Indian/West Indies; see Caribbean Wheeler, Orson, 29, 49; Head of a Girl, 29, 49; see also Vaughan, Lucille whip/whipping; see slavery, and punishment; slavery, and torture White, Deborah Gray, 43 whiteness, 10, 12, 15, 21, 40, 96, 106, 109, 110, 129, 141, 142, 143, 145, 151, 160, 161, 165, 176, 179, 182; as collective narcissism, 179, 181; artist, 8, 12, 19, 21, 23, 129, 181; audience, 112, 177; children, 39, 45, 46, 47, 48, 58; colonizer (colonizing mind/body), 95; family, 39, 48, 50, 51; female beauty, 113, 160, 166; female body, 109, 110, 113, 121, 129, 166; female hair, 114; female sitter, 72; female prostitute, 1; female sexuality, 107, 114, 118, 136; gentlemen, 37; girl, 11, 39; household, 28, 85; male artist (master), 19, 65, 76, 93, 110, 122; male heterosexual, 19, 24, 106, 111; men, 4, 11, 19, 37, 57, 68, 77, 110, 114, 127, 136, 149, 168; pleasure, 163; power, 39, 90, 96, 181; privilege, 182; sexuality, 25, 39; subjects, 75, 165; supremacy, 46, 96; women, 7, 11, 12, 14, 24, 32, 33, 44, 52, 69, 110, 111, 112, 114, 117, 118, 125, 126, 129, 134, 136, 158, 161, 162, 166, 177; women and “cult of invalidism”, 117; see also colonial, economy; Europe; slavery, and owner Whitney, Anne, 151, 175; Africa, 151, 175 Wincklemann, Johann Joachim, 143, 164 women, fantasy, 27; see also African, women; black, women womanhood, 2, 136; cult of white, 11, 24, 72, 109; Eurocentric, 1 Wood, Elizabeth Wyn, 29; Head of a Negress, 29