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DESCRIPTION:Charmaine\nA. Nelson will present at the Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J
 . Horowitz Seminar on\nNew York and American Material Culture on Tuesday\,
  November 13\, at 6 pm. Her\ntalk is entitled “‘Of a Remarkably Down-Cast 
 Countenance\, and a Black and Copper\nColoured Mixt Complexion’: Fugitive 
 Slave Advertisements and/as Portraiture in Late\nEighteenth- and Early Nin
 eteenth-Century Canada.”\n\nFound throughout the Transatlantic\nWorld\, fu
 gitive slave advertisements demonstrate the ubiquity of African\nresistanc
 e to slavery. While such newspaper notices have been exhaustively\nstudied
  since the 1970s in the Caribbean\, South America\, and in the USA on a\ns
 tate-by-state basis\, scholars of Canadian slavery have mainly studied the
 \nfugitive slave archive for other ends. In this talk\, Nelson proposes th
 e study\nof Canadian (Nova Scotia and Quebec) and Jamaican fugitive slave
 \nadvertisements\, alongside portraiture and genre studies as a means of c
 omparing\nthe visual dimensions of creolization in slave minority and slav
 e majority\nsites of the British Atlantic world. Produced by white slave o
 wners seeking to\nrecapture their runaway “property\,” standardized icons 
 of enslaved males and\nfemales became a staple of such print advertisement
 s. However\, the more complex\ntextual descriptions were also fundamentall
 y visual and arguably comprise an\narchive of very dubious\, unauthorized 
 “portraits” that have sadly come to stand\nas “the most detailed descripti
 ons of the bodies of enslaved African Americans\navailable.” (Graham White
  and Shane White\, 1995\, p. 49*). Besides noting things\nlike names\, spe
 ech\, accents\, language\, and skills\, fugitive slave notices\nfrequently
  recounted the dress (hairstyles\, adornment\, clothing\, etc.)\,\nbrandin
 g\, scarification\, mannerisms\, physical habits\, and even the gestures a
 nd\nexpressions of runaways. This talk seeks to analyze the differences an
 d\nsimilarities between “high” art representations of enslaved Africans an
 d the textual\ndescriptions of enslaved people’s bodies which became a sta
 ple of fugitive\nadvertisements. Recalling fugitive slave advertisements a
 s a form of visual\nculture\, this talk positions them as one part of the 
 colonial infrastructure\nand network (including slave owners\, printers\, 
 and jailers) that sustained the\nracialized distinction between free and u
 nfree populations.\n\nCharmaine A. Nelson is a Professor of\nArt History a
 t McGill University. She received her PhD in Art History from the\nUnivers
 ity of Manchester (UK) in 2001. Her research and teaching interests\ninclu
 de postcolonial and black feminist scholarship\, Transatlantic Slavery\nSt
 udies\, and Black Diaspora Studies. She has made ground-breaking contribut
 ions\nto the fields of the Visual Culture of Slavery\, Race and Representa
 tion\, and\nBlack Canadian Studies. Nelson has published six books includi
 ng the edited\nbook Ebony Roots\, Northern Soil:\nPerspectives on Blacknes
 s in Canada (Cambridge Scholars Press\, 2010)\, and\nthe single-authored b
 ooks The Color of\nStone: Sculpting the Black Female Subject in Nineteenth
 -Century America (University\nof Minnesota Press\, 2007) and Slavery\,\nGe
 ography\, and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Marine Landscapes of Montreal a
 nd\nJamaica (Routledge/Taylor & Francis\, 2016). Her seventh book\, Toward
 s an African Canadian Art History:\nArt\, Memory\, and Resistance (Captus 
 Press\, in press\, forthcoming 2018)\,\nwill be the first to consolidate t
 he field of African Canadian Art History. Her\ncurrent research project ju
 xtaposes fugitive slave advertisements\, portraiture\,\nand genre studies 
 from Nova Scotia\, Quebec\, and Jamaica\, to examine differences\nin the v
 isual dimensions of creolization between slave minority and slave\nmajorit
 y sites of the British Atlantic world. She has\ngarnered several prestigio
 us fellowships and appointments including a\nCaird Senior Research Fellows
 hip\, National Maritime Museum\, UK (2007) and a\nFulbright Visiting Resea
 rch Chair\, University of California – Santa Barbara\n(2010). In 2016\, sh
 e was named as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada\,\nCollege of New S
 cholars\, Artists\, and Scientists and in 2017–2018 she was the\nWilliam L
 yon Mackenzie King Visiting Professor of Canadian Studies at Harvard\nUniv
 ersity.*Shane White and Graham White\,\n“Slave Hair and African American C
 ulture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth\nCenturies\,” The Journal of South
 ern History 61\, no. 1 (Feb 1995): 45-76.
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20181113T180000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20181113T193000
SUMMARY:Bard Graduate Center: CANCELED—“Of a Remarkably Down-Cast Countenan
 ce\, and a Black and Copper Coloured Mixt Complexion”: Fugitive Slave Adve
 rtisements and/as Portraiture in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Cen
 tury Canada
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