1st Edition

Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

By Charmaine A. Nelson Copyright 2010
258 Pages 20 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

260 Pages 20 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

260 Pages 20 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

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... Read more

Introduction  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  2. Racing Childhood: Representations of Black Girls in Canadian Art  Part II: Slavery and Portraiture: Agency, Resistance and Art as Colonial Discourse  3. Slavery, Portraiture and the Colonial Limits of Canadian Art History  4. The Fruits of Resistance: Reading Portrait of a Negro Slave on the Sly  5. Tying the Knot: Black Female Slave Dress in Canada  Part III: The Nude and the Naked: Black Women, White Ideals and the Racialization of Sexuality  6. Coloured Nude: Fetishization, Disguise, Dichotomy  7. The "Hottentot Venus" in Canada: Modernism, Censorship and the Racial Limits of Female Sexuality  Part IV: From White Marble to Coloured Stone: Aesthetics, Materiality and Degrees of Blackness  8. White Marble, Black Bodies and the Fear of the Invisible Negro: Signifying Blackness in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Neoclassical Sculpture  9. Vénus Africaine: Race, Beauty and African-ness  10. Allegory, Race and the Four Continents: Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s Les quatre parties du monde soutenant la sphere céleste.  Conclusion: Whiteness as Collective Narcissism, Towards a New Vision

Biography

Charmaine A. Nelson is Associate Professor of Art History at McGill University.