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Graduate Student, History of Art
PhD Candidate
King's College
Thesis Title: Roaming Beggars, Errant Servants and Sable Mistresses: Some African Characters from English satirical prints (1769 – 1819)
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Professor Jean Michel Massing
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About
I am interested in the ways art participates in identity politics, and how popular images influence and shape public opinion. Drawing on this premise my doctoral research has concerned itself with the African presence in Georgian satirical prints produced over the long eighteenth century.
Although a largely idiosyncratic medium, these distinctly metropolitan engravings and etchings have revealed much about Britain’s early race relations, through the attitudes and stereotypes they conveyed with frankness and irony. Against a dramatic backdrop of revolution, war, political uncertainty and the material prosperity of the slave trade, these comic images played with metaphors and meaning, magnifying the interactions amidst and between social distinctions, and with this conveying just how visceral and contradictory London life could be: these prints often conflated themes of slavery and liberty with those of fashion and taste; and they revelled in the prevalence of race fetishism within aristocratic and plebeian sexual culture. All the while satirical artists created a distinctive visual language, delineating memorable and subversive characters (both national and foreign) that re-dramatized incidents and events taking place on the local and international stage.
Exploring a largely neglected area of scholarship my thesis revealed several previously unpublished prints, and similarly unearthed unique examples of African presences and participation in British social, political and intellectual life. Ultimately my study provided an examination of the earlier histories of “blackface” by discussing comic characters and tropes that set the stage for the better-known American mythologies of Jim Crow, Uncle Tom, Zip Coon and Mammy. More broadly it sought to historically demonstrate how the repetition of ideas in combination with reproductive media are critical components to the entrenchment of racist attitudes and other cultural prejudices.
Keywords:
Iconography
African
Black presence
Satire
comic imagery
Humour
Metaphor
Slavery
Anti-slavery
Abolition
Propaganda
Stereotypes
Caricature
Women
Servants
Venus
Contact Information
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