Cropped Out of History: At the Margins of Culture

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.

 

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.

 

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.

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.