HIST 358: The Self before the Selfie (HC): Blacks and Ideas about Race

Between 1769 and 1819 London experienced a growth in the proliferation of texts and images in the popular sphere, engaging learned citizens in discussion and commentary on the most pressing social and political issues of the day. These prints, political pamphlets, plays, novels and periodicals collaborated in critique, praise and assessment of the country's changing socio-economic climate. African people were a critical aspect of this world of images, and their presence conveyed much about the implications of travel, colonialism and slavery on the collective psyche. This book explores how and why satirical artists both mocked and utilized African characters as subversive comic weaponry in their art. Online access available on Tripod.

This volume examines the Enlightenment-era textualization of the Black African in European thought. Curran rewrites the history of blackness by replicating the practices of 18th-century readers. Surveying French and European travelogues, natural histories, works of anatomy, pro- and anti-slavery tracts, philosophical treatises, and literary texts, Curran shows how naturalists and philosophes drew from travel literature to discuss the perceived problem of human blackness, describes how a number of now-forgotten anatomists revolutionized the era's understanding of black Africans, and charts the shift of the slavery debate from the moral, mercantile, and theological realms toward that of the "black body" itself. See Tripod for print copies.

Follows the development in the eighteenth century of the idea of race as it shaped and was shaped by the idea of aesthetics. Extensive illustrations allow the reader to see concepts of race translated into images. The author argues that such representations, and the theories that supported them, helped give rise to the racism of the modern era. See Tripod for print copies.

Based on research concerning the representations of Blacks in French art prior to the period of abolitionism. Anne Lafont covers art and visual cultures dating from the end of the seventeenth century, when colonial life began to influence the arts, to the first quarter of the nineteenth century when efforts to reinforce systems of slavery encouraged a partisan iconography that emphasized violence.

The Haitian Revolution has generated responses from commentators in fields ranging from philosophy to historiography to twentieth-century literary and artistic studies. But what about the written work produced at the time, by Haitians? This book is the first to present an account of a specifically Haitian literary tradition in the Revolutionary era. See Tripod for print copies.

Architect Victoria Perry explores the relationship between the wealth of slave-owning elites and the architecture and landscapes of Georgian Britain. She reveals how profits from Caribbean sugar plantations fed the opulence of stately homes and gardens. The book unearths the slavery-tainted history of Britain's manors, ports, roads and countryside, and powerfully explains what this legacy means today.

Through the lens of historic artworks, artefacts and natural history specimens, this book and the exhibition it accompanies analyse the rise and growth of enslavement, the profits made by Dutch and British traders and plantation-owners, the power of images, the knowledge produced by enslaved people, histories of resistance movements and the consequences of these events today.

Surya Parekh reimagines the Enlightenment from the position of the Black subject. Parekh examines the works of such Black writers as the free Jamaican Francis Williams (1697-1762), Afro-British thinker Ignatius Sancho (1729?-1780), and Afro-American poet Phillis Wheatley (1753?-1784), placing them alongside their white European contemporaries, David Hume and Immanuel Kant. Parekh prompts us to consider the timeliness of reading Black Enlightenment authors who become "free" in a society hostile to that freedom. Print copy in the Tripod catalog.

In recent years researchers, both affiliated and independent, have done exciting new research on Black people in Britain in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and even earlier. This book gathers this new work on people and events into a single, innovative volume.

Offers a comprehensive study of Agostino Brunias's intriguing pictures of colonial West Indians of color made for colonial officials and planter elites during the late-eighteenth century. This book investigates how the images both reflected and refracted ideas about race commonly held by eighteenth-century Britons, helping to construct racial categories while simultaneously exposing their constructedness and underscoring their contradictions. Online access available on Tripod.

Out of the grey expanse of official records in Spanish, English and French, The Common Wind provides a gripping and colorful account of inter-continental communication networks that tied together the free and enslaved masses of the new world. A powerful "history from below," this book follows those "rumors of emancipation" and the people who spread them, bringing to life the protagonists in the revolution against slavery.

Enlightenment thinkers such as Rousseau and Montesquieu are best known for their humanist theories and liberating influence on Western civilization. But as renowned French intellectual Louis Sala-Molins shows, Enlightenment discourses and scholars were also complicit in the Atlantic slave trade, becoming instruments of oppression and inequality.

As a lawyer, philosophe, and Enlightenment polymath, Moreau created and compiled an immense archive that remains a vital window into the social, political, and intellectual fault lines of the Age of Revolutions. Sara Johnson's arresting investigation of race and knowledge in the revolutionary Atlantic surrounds Moreau with the African-descended people he worked so hard to erase, immersing him in a vibrant community of language innovators, forgers of kinship networks, and world travelers who strove to create their own social and political lives.

As a "natural history of man," anthropology during the Enlightenment argued that humans across the globe belonged to a single species and that human diversity could be explained as the product of time and space, climate and geography. While this knowledge could be emancipatory--fostering curiosity rather than superiority around questions of difference among some thinkers--it also contributed to the emergence of new notions, especially "race" and "culture," that were used by many to justify slavery and the colonial project.

In this book, Nelson focuses on Enlightenment-era visions of eugenics (including proposals to establish programs of selective breeding), forms of penal slavery, and spurious biological arguments about the supposed inferiority of particular groups. In his reading of the birth of biopolitics and its transformations, Nelson examines the shocking conceptual and practical connections between inclusion and exclusion, equality and inequality, rights and race, and the supposed "improvement of the human species" and practices of dehumanization.

Considers flesh and skin in art theory, image making and medical discourse in seventeenth to nineteenth-century France. Describing a gradual shift between the early modern and the modern period, it argues that what artists made when imitating human nakedness was not always the same. Initially understood in terms of the body's substance, of flesh tones and body colour, it became increasingly a matter of skin, skin colour and surfaces. Looking in particular at works by Fragonard, David, Girodet, Benoist and Ingres, the focus is on portraits. See Tripod for a print copy.

A rigorous study of pre-French Revolution performance practices in Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), Powers's book examines the elaborate system of social casting in these colonies; the environments in which nonwhite artists emerged. The status of nonwhite artists in colonial society; the range of operas in which they performed; their accomplishments and criticism; and the use of créole texts and white actors/singers (with blackened faces). Approaching the French Revolution, the study concludes with an examination of the ways in which colonial opera was affected by slave uprisings, the French Revolution, the emergence of "patriotic theaters" and their role in fostering support for the king. See Tripod for a print copy.

Europe and the World Beyond focuses geographically on peoples of South America and the Mediterranean as well as Africa--but conceptually it emphasizes the many ways that visual constructions of blacks mediated between Europe and a faraway African continent that was impinging ever more closely on daily life, especially in cities and ports engaged in trading enslaved people.

This volume offers a rich collection of images of Africans representing the enslaved and the beginnings of abolition. Old visual tropes of a master with adoring attendant gave way to depictions of Africans as individuals, while at the same time the intellectual foundations of scientific racism were established.

Written in 1774, Long's History, that most 'civilised' of documents, attempted to define White and Black as essentially different and unequal. Long deployed natural history and social theory, carefully mapping the island, and drawing on poetry and engravings, in his efforts to establish a clear and fixed racialized hierarchy. Catherine Hall unpicks the many contradictions in Long's thinking, exposing the insidious myths and stereotypes that have poisoned social relations over generations and allowed reconfigured forms of racial difference and racial capitalism to live on in contemporary societies.

By adopting a multidisciplinary approach, between art history and history of ideas, this exhibition catalog looks at aesthetic, political, and racial issues as well as the imaginary revealed by the representation of black figures in the visual arts, from the abolition of slavery in France (1794) to the present day.

Surveying a range of philosophical and natural-scientific texts, dating from the Spanish Renaissance to the German Enlightenment, this book charts the evolution of the modern concept of race and shows that natural philosophy, particularly efforts to taxonomize and to order nature, played a crucial role. Smith demonstrates how the denial of moral equality between Europeans and non-Europeans resulted from converging philosophical and scientific developments, including a declining belief in human nature's universality and the rise of biological classification. See Tripod for print copy.

This book examines texts from the fields of political philosophy, medicine, and colonial venture, as well as interrogating works of drama and literature, in order to track how climate-based understandings of human variety at this time became increasingly imbued with noble traditions of genealogical purity. This process allowed for an already familiar pattern of hierarchical inequality, and offered a ready made model of natural supremacy.

Jamaica and Saint-Domingue were especially brutal but conspicuously successful 18th century slave societies and imperial colonies. These plantation regimes were, to adopt a metaphor of the era, complex "machines," finely tuned over time by planters, merchants, and officials to become more efficient at exploiting their enslaved workers to serve their empires. Burnard and Garrigus find deep and unexpected similarities in the two colonies. Events of that period, notably a slave poisoning scare in Saint-Domingue and a near-simultaneous slave revolt in Jamaica, cemented white dominance. The authors argue that local political concerns, not emerging racial ideologies, explain the rise of distinctive forms of racism in these two societies. By the 1780s whites were prospering as never before--and blacks were suffering in new and disturbing ways. See Tripod for print copy.

This book examines the relationship between public theatre and the enslaved people of Saint-Domingue--something that is generally given short shrift owing to a perceived lack of documentation. Here, a range of materials and methodologies are used to explore pressing questions including the 'mitigated spectatorship' of the enslaved, portrayals of enslaved people in French and Creole repertoire, the contributions of enslaved people to theatre-making, and shifting attitudes during the revolutionary era. The book demonstrates that slavery was no mere backdrop to this portion of theatre history but an integral part of its story.

This book presents the processes of racialization that punctuated the transformation of Europe and its colonies from the end of the Middle Ages to the age of revolutions. It documents the desire to discriminate and organize large-scale oppression. Enlightenment authors value human groups according to a hierarchy but also proclaim the universality of human rights.

The Scottish Enlightenment shaped a new conception of history as a gradual and universal progress from savagery to civil society. Whereas women emancipated themselves from the yoke of male-masters, men in turn acquired polite manners and became civilized. Such a conception, however, presents problematic questions: why were the Americans still savage? Why was it that the Europeans only had completed all the stages of the historic process?

The British country house has long been regarded as the jewel in the nation's heritage crown. But the country house is also an expression of wealth and power, and as scholars reconsider the nation's colonial past, new questions are being posed about these great houses and their links to Atlantic slavery.This book, authored by a range of academics and heritage professionals, grew out of a 2009 conference on 'Slavery and the British Country house: mapping the current research'. It asks what links might be established between the wealth derived from slavery and the British country house and what implications such links should have for the way such properties are represented to the public today.Lavishly illustrated and based on the latest scholarship, this wide-ranging and innovative volume provides in-depth examinations of individual houses, regional studies and critical reconsiderations of existing heritage sites.

This book examines the daily details of the work of the enslaved in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic, focusing on case studies of large plantations in Barbados, Jamaica and Virginia. Slaves' day-to-day work routines were shaped by plantation management strategies that drew on pan-Atlantic intellectual and cultural principles. Although scholars often associate the late eighteenth-century Enlightenment with the rise of notions of liberty and human rights and the dismantling of slavery, this book explores the dark side of the Enlightenment. Many planters increased the workloads of the enslaved and employed supervisory technologies to increase labor discipline in ways that were consistent with the process of industrialization in Europe. British planters offered alternative visions of progress by embracing restrictions on freedom and seeing increasing labor discipline as central to the project of moral and economic improvement. See Tripod for print copy.

Millions of Africans were enslaved and transported to the Americas in the 18th century. Europeans--many of whom viewed themselves as enlightened--funded, legislated, and executed the slave trade. This atrocity had a profound impact on philosophy, but historians of the discipline have so far neglected to address this. Many authors--including enslaved and formerly enslaved Black authors--used philosophical ideas to advocate for abolition and analyze racist attitudes. Also available in print in Tripod.

Asks questions about paintings and prints from the British West Indies, when the trade in sugar and slaves was most active and profitable. In a study of scientific illustrations, scenes of daily life, caricatures, and landscape imagery, Kay Dian Kriz analyzes the visual culture of refinement that accompanied the brutal process by which African slaves transformed sugar cane into pure white crystals. Many artists capitalized on characteristics of animality, sensuality, and savagery that increasingly became associated with all the island inhabitants, yet others produced works that offered the possibility of colonial refinement, not just economic profit and sexual pleasure, thus complicating perceptions of difference between the two sides of the Atlantic.

Focusing on eighteenth-century cultural productions, Wendy Sutherland examines how representations of race in philosophy, anthropology, aesthetics, drama, and court painting influenced the construction of a white bourgeois German self. Sutherland positions her work within the framework of the transatlantic slave trade, showing that slavery, colonialism, and the triangular trade between Europe, West Africa, and the Caribbean function as the global stage on which German bourgeois dramas by Friedrich Wilhelm Ziegler, Ernst Lorenz Rathlef, and Theodor Körner (and a novella by Heinrich von Kleist on which Körner's play was based) were performed against a backdrop of philosophical and anthropological influences.

In this volume, Nicholas R. Jones analyzes white appropriations of black African voices in Spanish theater from the 1500s through the 1700s, when the performance of Africanized Castilian, commonly referred to as habla de negros (black speech), was in vogue. Accessibly written and theoretically sophisticated, Jones's groundbreaking study elucidates the ways that habla de negros animated black Africans' agency, empowered their resistance, and highlighted their African cultural retentions.

Examines the paradox of political antislavery and institutional racism in the century prior to the French Revolution. Black slaves who came to France as domestic servants of colonial masters challenged their servitude in courts. On the basis of the Freedom Principle, a judicial maxim granting freedom to any slave who set foot in the kingdom, hundreds of slaves won their freedom. Peabody shows how the political culture of late Bourbon France created ample opportunities for contestation over the meaning of freedom. Men of letters used the metaphor of slavery to critique the supposed despotism of Louis XV and Louis XVI. In the second half of the century, courts and the crown colluded to erect a series of laws prohibiting the entry of blacks into the metropolis.

In Trading Places, Madeleine Dobie explores the place of the colonial world in the culture of the French Enlightenment. She shows that until a turning point in the late 1760s questions of colonization and slavery occupied a very marginal position in literature, philosophy, and material and visual culture. In an exploration of the causes and modalities of this silence, Dobie traces the displacement of colonial questions onto two more familiar-and less ethically challenging-aspects of Enlightenment thought: exoticization of the Orient and fascination with indigenous Amerindian cultures.

The first translation and publication of sixteen submissions to the notorious eighteenth-century Bordeaux essay contest on the cause of black skin--an indispensable chronicle of the rise of scientifically based, anti-Black racism. Documented on each page are European ideas about who is Black and why. Also available in print.

This book offers an examination of the shifting iconography of slavery in British and European art between 1760 and 1840, looking at the role of the eyewitness account in the representation of slavery in British and European art gathering together over 160 paintings, watercolors, drawings, and prints. In addition to considering how the work of artists such as Agostino Brunias, James Hakewill, and Augustus Earle responded to abolitionist politics, Sarah Thomas examines the importance of the eyewitness account in endowing visual representations of transatlantic slavery with veracity. This volume reconsiders how slavery was depicted within an historical context in which truth was a deeply contested subject.