Fannie and Alan Leslie Center for the Humanities at Dartmouth College

Invisible Subjects? Slave Portraiture in the Circum-Atlantic World (1630-1890)

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Organized by Angela Rosenthal, Department of Art History, Dartmouth College and Agnes Lugo-Ortiz, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, University of Chicago.

The purpose of this two-day international and interdisciplinary conference is to bring together a group of scholars whose work addresses questions of identity and subjectivity under slavery to examine how these issues play themselves out in the practice of slave portraiture within the Circum-Atlantic world. In the context of colonial slavery, visual portraiture occupies an ambivalent position. While the period marked by expanding trade in human flesh (circa 1660s) coincides with the emergence of portraiture as a major field of representation, the two categories "slave" and "portraiture" appear to be mutually exclusive. The genre of portraiture assumes, by conventional definitions, the existence of a relatively stable and autonomous human "self" that exists and subsists beyond its pictorial frame of production. On the other hand, the very term "slave"--quite literally meaning non-subject, or rather "subject to somebody else"--refers to a human being whose social existence is understood to be subsumed under that of his or her master or mistress. Thus, what is at stake in the portrayal of a slave? What conditions render him or her representable as a "self," if it is indeed "selfhood" that is at stake in portrait painting? This conference seeks to bring the terms "slave" and "portraiture" into a rigorous, sustained, and critical dialogue in order to probe and historicize the notions of self and identity, as well as the processes of subjectification that cluster around and are simultaneously cast out under colonial slavery. To elucidate some of these complexities we are inviting not only art historians but also historians of science and slavery, as well as literary scholars, to disentangle the dense discursive and material webs within which the portrayal of slaves was made historically possible and to underscore its elusive significations.

Organizer: The Center for the Visual Study of Human Variety.

Sponsor: The Fannie and Alan Leslie Center for the Humanities and The John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding.

Co-Sponsors: The Hood Museum of Art, the Office of Institutional Diversity, African and African American Studies, Art History, Comparative Literature, English, French and Italian, Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies, Spanish and Portuguese, and Women's and Gender Studies.