Christelle Lozère addresses two conflicting visual idioms of the morality of enslavement in the eighteenth-century Caribbean. Knowles reflects on the scholarship of whiteness at this moment, commenting suggestively on its deployment in elite commodities such as porcelain.
Caticha shares her experiences teaching intertwined histories of eighteenth-century race and fashion in the age of TikTok. Alicia Caticha and Marika Knowles both consider the importance of luxury commodities in representations and constructions of race. Íris Kantor and Milena Natividade da Cruz analyze how mural maps of Africa facilitated the racialization of African peoples in ways that justified their enslavement. Cabelle Ahn explores how Canadian Indigeneity was framed in the French colonial metropole. Katherine Calvin’s essay reveals the complex visual and social economies of the Senegalese slave trade. Multiple shorter interventions chart some of the many geographies of this topic, with two longer articles going into greater depth on specific subjects. As the papers collected in this issue make clear, despite universalist assertions by the current French president and others, invented racial categories have always mediated the unequal application of the law both within hexagonal France and in its colonial empire. It is here perhaps that we reach a limit of the term “representation” and its relatively narrow political implications of enfranchisement when considering the role that race has played in the political construction of Frenchness. As two scholars trained in the American academy, by invoking race in the context of French identity we are mindful of present-day cultural tensions concerning laïcité (or secularism) as a condition of French political identity. “Even as it proposes inclusivity,” Lisa Lowe writes, the form of “liberal universalism” that emerged in the eighteenth century “effects principles of inclusion and exclusion” that run counter to its claims to universality and related values like freedom and legal equality. But as scholars like Emanuelle Saada and Laurent Dubois have shown, the universalist rhetoric of Enlightenment Republicanism has long been grounded in constructions of racial difference, to say nothing of France’s more explicit denial of enfranchisement within its colonies. Part of the power of the exhibitions in New York and Paris was simply calling the bluff of this so-called absence: Blackness has always been visible even at the most central sites of French art, and visual culture has played a crucial role in the construction of whiteness and other racial categories, as well as Indigeneity.Ĭonsequently, “representation” in its many valences is central to our inquiry–especially for a country famous for the dramatic expansion of political enfranchisement in the final years of the eighteenth century. Yet Stephen Best, writing about the visual culture of enslavement, has cautioned against a “fetishization of absence” that redoubles the real exclusions of the historical record.
#Art history mjournal archive
The formation of the archive has inevitably constrained the visual records available to scholarship. Despite their increased importance to art history more broadly, race and critical race theory have only recently come to play a central role in some accounts of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French visual and material culture. Each project foregrounded histories of race that are often overlooked in the study of French art. The second comprised the sister exhibitions Posing Modernity at the Wallach Gallery in New York City and Le Modèle noir at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.
The first was the publication of Anne Lafont’s L’Art et la race, a new history of what she calls the “African presence” in French Enlightenment visuality. In 2019 two projects marked the emergence of a new chapter in the study of race in French art history, one that has only accelerated and become more urgent following the global protests that began in the United States in June 2020. Race: Representation in the French Colonial Empire
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