ECR French Nineteenth-Century Art Network:
Errant Portraiture in the Black Atlantic: Evolutionary Theory and Racial Aesthetics from Haiti
Dr. C.C. McKee (Bryn Mawr College)
Thurs 25 April 1700 (BST) / 1800 (CEST) / 1200 (EDT) / 0900 (PDT)
This paper takes as its foundation a suite of seemingly staid realist portraits by the Haitian painter Louis Rigaud exhibited during the 1884 World’s Cotton Centennial in New Orleans. These paintings portray Haitian heads of state from Toussaint Louverture through Lysius Salomon, who was President during the Exposition. While this paper takes an interest in the prominence of Haiti, symbolic and actual, within a burgeoning international black consciousness, I am most interested in the eccentricities of Rigaud’s paintings, which I characterize as a proto-modernist form of Black internationalism. Among these seventeen canvases there are prominent stylistic and anatomical deformities: tropical chiaroscuro backgrounds at the edge of dissolution, architectonically stiff uniforms, clumsily rendered hands, eyes set askew on the face, and physiognomies that verge on caricature. I position this suite of paintings within the discussion of evolutionary aesthetics to interrogate the value of deformity, as an errant articulation of subjecthood, for black peoples in the ongoing struggle for personhood. Rigaud’s paintings form a unique node within the evolutionary theory and racial anthropology that emerged with slavery’s abolition in the Atlantic World. First, they strike a key with a note from Darwin’s manuscript which intimates that “Deformity is required” in the aesthetic evaluation of beauty. Second, Rigaud’s portraits presage the use of evolutionary theory by the Haitian anthropologist Anténor Firmin to affirm the humanity of blackness. For instance, in his 1885 De l’égalité des races humaines, Firmin draws from Darwin to assert that “an esthetic evolution can be accomplished in a race under the empire of the imagination” in order to affirm the beauty of African diasporic individuals. Distinct from both of these positions, Rigaud’s portraits divert the conventions of Western portraiture to represent a modern free black citizenry askew from eugenicist mobilizations of evolution.
C.C. McKee is Assistant Professor of History of Art at Bryn Mawr College and a current Mads Øvlisen Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Copenhagen. Their research focuses on the intersections of art, colonialism, and natural science in the modern Atlantic World (c. 1750-1950) with an emphasis on the Caribbean. McKee also researches the exploration of colonialism and slavery’s injurious ecological “afterlives” in contemporary Caribbean and African Diasporic art.
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About the Research Forum: ECR French Nineteenth-Century Art Network Research Forum is a virtually held research forum that allows recent PhD graduates, early career researchers as well as research fellows to present their most recent research. The forum aims to expose new and emerging scholarship and scholars engaging in exciting areas of research. The sessions will last around one hour, including an opportunity for questions and answers after the presentation. The events are open to all.
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