Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World

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. The essays in this volume address this apparent paradox of "slave portraits" from a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives. They probe the historical conditions that made the creation of such rare and enigmatic objects possible and explore their implications for a more complex understanding of power relations under slavery.

Author: Agnes Lugo-Ortiz
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 04/14/2016
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 2.71lbs
Size: 10.13h x 6.97w x 1.06d
ISBN: 9781107533752

About the Author
Rosenthal, Angela: - Angela Rosenthal was Associate Professor of Art History at Dartmouth College. She was the author of Angelika Kauffmann: Bildnismalerei im 18. Jahrhundert and Angelica Kauffman: Art and Sensibility, which won the 2007 Historians of British Art Book Award in the pre-1800 category. She also was co-editor of The Other Hogarth: Aesthetics of Difference.Lugo-Ortiz, Agnes: - Agnes Lugo-Ortiz is Associate Professor of Latin American and Caribbean Literatures and Cultures at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Identidades Imaginadas: Biografía y Nacionalidad en el Horizonte de la Guerra and co-editor of Herencia: The Anthology of US Hispanic Writing, En Otra Voz: Antología de la Literatura Hispana de los Estados Unidos and Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage, Volume V.