Introduction: Imaging Blackness in the Long Nineteenth Century

Abstract

This special issue of Visual Resources examines images of Africans and African Americans produced between 1820 and 1914 in the context of politics, popular culture and scientific studies of this period. The mechanisms of racial identification and classification receive particular attention, as does the constructed and performative nature of blackness, and race more generally. This issue contributes to the growing literature on American and European depictions of blacks by providing compelling case studies from the long nineteenth century, and underscores the fact that the visualization and conceptualization of race and ethnicity are inexorably intertwined.

Keywords:

• Blackness
• Blacks
• Africans
• African Americans
• Race
• Critical Race Theory

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the Nineteenth Century Studies Association for sponsoring stimulating annual conferences, such as the one that gave rise to this special issue; my fellow contributors Catherine Anderson, Guy Jordan, Peter Miller and Kevin Scott for their articles and overall intellectual input; Visual Resources editor Christine Sundt for her generous guidance and boundless enthusiasm; and my husband and chief proofreader Andy Dickerson for his support.

Notes

1. The conference, held at Susquehanna University, 8–10 March 2007, was organized and co‐chaired by J. Andrew Hubbell of Susquehanna University, with Leslie Patrick of Bucknell University serving as the other program co‐chair. The full conference program is available online at: http://www.english.uwosh.edu/roth/ncsa/2007program.htm

2. See, e.g., Albert Boime, The Art of Exclusion: Representing Blacks in the Nineteenth Century (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990); Ladislas Bugner, ed., The Image of the Black in Western Art, 4 vols. in 6 tomes (Houston, TX: Menil Foundation, 1976–1989); David Dabydeen, Hogarth's Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth Century English Art (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987); Michael D. Harris, Colored Pictures: Race and Visual Representation (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Jan Marsh, ed., Black Victorians: Black People in British Art, 1800–1900 (Manchester: Manchester Art Gallery, 2005); Guy C. McElroy, Facing History: The Black Image in American Art, 1710–1948 (San Francisco, CA: Bedford Arts; Washington, DC: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1990); Jan Nederveen Pieterse, White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992); Kymberly N. Pinder, ed., Race‐ing Art History: Critical Readings in Race and Art History (New York: Routledge, 2002); Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century, exh. cat. (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2006).

3. It should be noted that the Association for Critical Race Art History (ACRAH), founded in 1999 with the goal of promoting the study of race in art and visual culture from a critical and historical perspective, has recently joined the College Art Association as an affiliated society.

4. As art historian Stephen F. Eisenman notes: “The few scholars who address art in a colonial context often elide histories that ought to be carefully separated, and regularly fail to engage the past and present actualities of subject populations. The actions, policies, and collecting habits of the French in Dahomey, for example, were different from those of the British in Benin; the lives of Moroccan harem women portrayed by Delacroix were vastly different from those of Tahitian vahines painted by Gauguin” (“Triangulating Racism,” Art Bulletin 78, no. 4 [December 1996]: 604).

5. On miscegenation in art, see Judith Wilson, “Optical Illusions: Images of Miscegenation in Nineteenth‐ and Twentieth‐Century American Art,” American Art 5, no. 3 (Summer 1991): 88–107.

6. On Native Americans as historical, political and scientific subjects of nineteenth‐century intellectual discourse, see Steven Conn, History's Shadow: Native Americans and Historical Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

7. Deux têtes d'arabes, Louvre RF 25.412, reproduced in Louis‐Antoine Prat, Dessins de Théodore Chassériau, 1819–1856 (Paris: Ministère de la culture et de la communication/Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1988), 2:588, cat. 1621: “le teint presque noir nègre rougeâtre.”

8. On Cordier, see Laure de Margerie and Édouard Papet, Facing the Other: Charles Cordier (1827–1905), Ethnographic Sculptor, exh. cat., trans. Lenora Ammon, Laurel Hirsch and Clare Palmieri (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2004); Barbara Larson, “The Artist as Ethnographer: Charles Cordier and Race in Mid‐Nineteenth‐Century France,” Art Bulletin 87, no. 4 (December 2005): 714–722; Charmaine Nelson, The Color of Stone: Sculpting the Black Female Subject in Nineteenth‐Century America (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 63–65.

9. For an analysis of ongoing attempts to classify people, see Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, rev. ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996). For a response to this work that considers the tendency to view men as the normal standard to the detriment of women, see Carol Tavris, The Mismeasure of Women: Why Women Are Not the Better Sex, the Inferior Sex, or the Opposite Sex (New York: Touchstone, 1992).

10. Anderson is the only author to discuss black self‐fashioning, and the lack of consideration of art produced by artists of color is a recognized gap in this special issue. Furthermore, it should arguably be mentioned that, in addition to primarily addressing representations of Africans and African Americans produced by white artists, all of the contributors to this special issue are themselves white. While placing interdictions on research subjects based on the identity of a given scholar could—and probably should—be viewed as racist, careful consideration should be given to art historian Martin Berger's recent observation that “[t]here is a way in which the public and academic attraction of whites to images depicting blacks might constitute a twenty‐first‐century incarnation of the minstrel show” (Sight Unseen: Whiteness and American Visual Culture [Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2005], 3).

11. Nelson, for one, notes “the critical importance that sex, gender, and sexuality play in the construction of racial identity” (The Color of Stone, xxii).

12. Harris has noted that “there is a fluidity between popular culture and fine art that gains momentum in the mid‐nineteenth century and is taken for granted at the beginning of the twenty‐first century” (Colored Pictures, 11).

13. That the topic addressed in this special issue is of growing interest is reflected in the fact that the 2009 annual conference of the College Art Association will include a session on “Blacks and Blackness in European Visual Culture of the Long Nineteenth Century,” chaired by Susan Libby of Rollins College and Adrienne Childs of University of Maryland.

14. Some would make the case that this sentence should read “the first openly black president,” as it has been suggested that Warren Harding (1865–1923), the twenty‐ninth President of the United States, for one, had black ancestry (see Beverly Gage, “Our First Black President?” New York Times, 6 April 2008. Available online at: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/06/ magazine /06wwln‐essay‐t.html?_r = 1&ref = magazine&oref = slogin; accessed 16 June 2008).