Against the Scopic Regime of the Plantation?: Slave Portraiture in the Colonial Caribbean

Agnes Lugo-Ortiz (The University of Chicago)

Saidiya Hartman, in her remarkable book Scenes of Subjection, has suggested that hypervisibility is the ruling visual logic of modern plantation slavery. The condition of the slave as the permanent object of a surveying gaze is the fantasy deployed very early on by plantation legal discourses in the Americas, starting with the infamous "Barbados Act" of 1661, up to the 1665 Louisiana Code Noir, the "Virginia Slave Code" of 1705, and the 1842 "Hispano-Cuban Slave Code."This body of legislation clearly stipulated that, in the daily practices of plantation slavery—a system that could be understood as the first high security jail of modernity, as well as (pace Agamben) its first state of exception—the slave was expected to be visible (even when absent) to the eye of the master or to the eye of the master's figurative substitute, the overseer. Hypervisibility was, then, a technology of subjection aimed at the de-subjectification of the slave, insofar as it attempted to render him or her as a surface without depth permanently available to the scopic will of the master.
Given this visual logic, which was supported both by law and by the brutal daily practices of slavery, what is the significance of representations of slaves in the realm of high visual portraiture, a genre that has conventionally been reserved to convey notions of status and power, as well as individuality and subjectivity? Is this visualization of slaves in oil portraiture an extension of the slaveholding disciplinary gaze, or, on the contrary, does it trouble it? In this presentation I will discuss in detail some of the few slave portraits that were produced in the Caribbean between the mid-eighteenth and the late nineteenth century and in which slaves appear to be portrayed as dignified subjects. What conditions made these artifacts possible and what do they tell us about the dynamics of slave subjectification at specific junctures in the history of Caribbean colonial slavery? What explains the artistic attention granted to these particular slaves, attention that creates the illusion of an afterlife and of transcending the mortal body through representation?

Agnes Lugo-Ortiz - The University of Chicago

Agnes Lugo-Ortiz is associate professor of Latin American and Caribbean Literatures at the University of Chicago, and coordinator of the Project Towards a New Americas Studies. Born and raised in Puerto Rico, she obtained her BA in Comparative Literature from the University of Puerto Rico at Río Piedras, and her Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures from Princeton University. She is the author of Identidades imaginadas: Biografía y nacionalidad en el horizonte de la guerra (Cuba, 1860-1898) (University of Puerto Rico Press, 1999) and co-editor of Herencia: The Anthology of US Hispanic Writing (Oxford UP, 2001), En otra voz: Antología de la Literatura Hispana de los Estados Unidos, and Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Hertiage, volume V (both with Arte Público Press, 2002 and 2006 respectively), as well as of numerous essays on nineteenth- and twentieth -centuries on Latin American and Caribbean literatures. She has recently completed, in collaboration with Angela Rosenthal, the edition of a collection of essays entitled Invisible Subjects: Slave Portraiture in the Circum-Atlantic World (1599-1890) which relates to her current research project on the culture of slavery in colonial Cuba.