Portraiture and Enslavement at the Thresholds of Emancipation (A Caribbean Meditation)

A talk by Agnes Lugo-Ortiz

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This talk will address the only two extant oil portraits of enslaved women produced during the periods of emancipation in the French- and Spanish-speaking Caribbean. By underscoring the conflictive political and ideological forces, affective dynamics, and aesthetic principles at work in their composition, it will focus on the conditions that made possible the visual configuration of black people as subjects of freedom and on its problematic re-articulation of the boundaries between the human and the animal. The talk is being presented in conjuction with the Posing Modernity exhibit at the Wallach Gallery, Lenfest Center for the Arts.

Agnes Lugo-Ortiz is Associate Professor of Latin American Literature in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, University of Chicago

The event is co-sponsored by Columbia University Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Barnard Art History, Columbia University Center for the Study of Social Difference: Reframing Gender Violence Project, The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University, Columbia University Department of Anthropology, The Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy at Columbia University, Columbia University Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures, Columbia University Department of Art History & Archaeology, & Columbia Maison Française.