Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

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

• 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