Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

Charmaine A. Nelson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136968068
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: African Art

This book offers the first concentrated examination of the representation of the black female subject in Western art through the lenses of race/color and sex/gender. Charmaine A. Nelson poses critical questions about the contexts of production, the problems of representation, the pathways of circulation and the consequences of consumption. She analyzes not only how, where, why and by whom black female subjects have been represented, but also what the social and cultural impacts of the colonial legacy of racialized western representation have been. Nelson also explores and problematizes the issue of the historically privileged white artistic access to black female bodies and the limits of representation for these subjects. This book not only reshapes our understanding of the black female representation in Western Art, but also furthers our knowledge about race and how and why it is (re)defined and (re)mobilized at specific times and places throughout history.

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 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 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 financial 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.

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

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) defined 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 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 Malé-part 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 juxtaposi-tion 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 ge...