Currently
the Yale Center for British Art is featuring an exhibit called, “Figures of Empire: Slavery and Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Britain.” The
idea for the exhibit started when curators at the gallery began examining
William Hogarth’s 1735 painting, “A Family Portrait,” and they noticed a black
hand creeping into the portrait of an otherwise lily-white family of middle-class
eighteenth-century Brits.
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| Middle left: I've circled the servant's hand in red. |
Upon
further examination and x-rays of the painting, the researchers discovered that
the black servant figure included in the original painting had been later
cropped out of it—about 100 years after it was painted.
The
metaphorical meaning of this act is impossible to ignore, as slavery, the slave
trade, slave histories and narratives, and even the visual representations of
slavery and non-whites have been routinely “cropped out” of dominant histories.
It matters little whether we speak of history generally, or if we focus on
literary history, art history, musical history, or any other discipline. These
stories are often at the margins of where we are looking, not to mention that
these discussions are still marginalized in the classroom.
What
intrigues me, however, is how often the stories of slaves or Africans or
persons of African descent, enslaved or not, appear in the background of other
narratives or images. Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda,
originally published in 1801, contains a black character: Juba, the servant. In
the original version of the novel, Juba marries the (white) daughter of an
English farmer—but this element of the plot was cut out in subsequent editions.
Again, the story, the character was “cropped out.”
In
Frances Burney’s The Wanderer, racial
masquerade begins the novel. The main character, the “Incognita,” escapes
Revolutionary France in borrowed clothing with darkened features. She has
darkened her skin to hide who she really is, and the characters she meets in
England initially believe that she really is what she appears to be—a person of
African descent.
In
the novel, one of the characters asks the “stranger,” “What part of the world
might you come from? The settlements of the West Indies? Or somewhere off the
coast of Africa?...” Her arms and hands are described as “of so dark a colour,
that they might rather be styled black than brown…”
Of
course, quite soon we learn that the main character is not black at all—she is
French, and the darkening of her skin was one of many ways she attempted to
conceal her identity. While Burney may initially be asking us to sympathize
with an “apparently black” heroine, she does not require this of her readers
for very long.
The
idea of “blackening” one’s skin or hiding behind a mask of darker skin color is
apparent in John Raphael Smith’s pastel portrait “A Lady Holding a Negro Mask.”
Historian Kathleen Wilson recently wrote about this image in the ASECS Fall 2014 newsletter. As she points out, there are many ways of interpreting the
image. One thing that seems apparent to me in all of these examples is how integral
blacks were to British life throughout the eighteenth century. While they may
often only appear in the margins of literature or art, the consistent repetition
of these images and references suggest that we are only at the tip of the
proverbial iceberg.
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| Is she going to a masquerade? Is she happy about it? Is the painting about race? gender? beauty? identity? all those things? |
One
interesting project that is working to change how we think of literary history
in an American context is the “Just Teach One” project. Initially it began as a
project that would aid instructors of Early American literature in teaching
less-taught texts—texts that are out of print, difficult to find, or simply
unknown. A parallel project has grown out of that first one, focusing on prints
and literature of African Americans.
The
name of the projects asks us to consider what happens when we make a concerted
effort to teach at least one lesser-taught
text, or at least one text by an
African American who is, presumably, not Frederick Douglass (mostly because his
canonicity has become [mostly] established). Their website caters specifically
to instructors and aims to provide easily accessible versions of various
lesser-known texts.
Many
projects concerned with diversity and inclusivity have taken up the idea of moving
things, people, and historical moments from the margins and putting them at the
center of the conversation. We can only hope that this conversations keep
happening and that more and more projects, exhibits, and syllabuses are put in
the service of bringing hidden histories to light, of moving issues from the
margins to the center. In the end, perhaps we may also find ways to move the
conversation away from the binary of center and margin to other intertextual,
multivocal, and less hierarchical modes of thinking and teaching.
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| Johann Zoffany's Family of Sir William Young, 1770. The detail of this painting containing the African servant/slave is on my edition of Belinda, by Oxford World's Classics. Interestingly, the redesign of the cover scrapped this image and chose one of a corset. |
