Fictions of Emancipation: Carpeaux’s Why Born Enslaved! Reconsidered — Book Review
Description:
A critical reexamination of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s bust Why Born Enslaved!, this book unpacks the sculpture’s engagement with — and defiance of — an antislavery discourse.
In this clear-eyed look at the Black figure in nineteenth-century sculpture, noted art historians and writers discuss how emerging categories of racial difference propagated by the scientific field of ethnography grew in popularity alongside a crescendo in cultural production in France during the Second Empire.
By comparing Carpeaux’s bust Why Born Enslaved! to works by his contemporaries on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as to objects by twenty‑first‑century artists Kara Walker and Kehinde Wiley, the authors touch on such key themes as the portrayal of Black enslavement and emancipation; the commodification of images of Black figures; the role of sculpture in generating the sympathies of its audiences; and the relevance of Carpeaux’s sculpture to legacies of empire in the postcolonial present.
The book also provides a chronology of events central to the histories of transatlantic slavery, abolition, colonialism, and empire.
Book Details:
Elyse Nelson, Wendy S. Walters, Caitlin Meehye Beach, Adrienne L. Childs, Rachel Hunter, Sarah E. Lawrence, Iris Moon, and James Smalls
The Metropolitan Museum of Art (March 29, 2022)
Hardcover ₦36,575.70 (140pp)
978–1–5883–9744–7
Disclosure:
This article is not an endorsement, but a review.