Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World

Agnes Lugo-Ortiz, Angela Rosenthal

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781107004399
• eBook ISBN:
  9781107352285
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

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

Table of contents

• Cover
• Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Plates and Figures
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Envisioning Slave Portraiture
• Part I Visibility and Invisibility
• One Slavery and the Possibilities of Portraiture
• Two Subjectivity and Slavery in Portraiture
• Three Looking for Scipio Moorhead
• Part II Slave Portraiture, Colonialism, and Modern Imperial Culture
• Four Three Gentlemen from Esmeraldas
• Five Metamorphoses of the Self in Early-Modern Spain
• Six Of Sailors and Slaves
• Seven Between Violence and Redemption
• Part III Subjects to Scientific and Ethnographic Knowledge
• Eight Albert Eckhout’s African Woman and Child (1641)
• Nine Embodying African Knowledge in Colonial Surinam
• Ten Exquisite Empty Shells
• Part IV Facing Abolition
• Eleven Who Is the Subject?
• Twelve The Many Faces of Toussaint Louverture
• Thirteen Cinqué
• Fourteen The Intrepid Mariner Simão
• Index