We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
Cursed Mimicry: France and Haiti, Again (1848 - 51).
- Authors
Grigsby, Darcy Grimaldo
- Abstract
In the opening of his "Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte," Karl Marx famously compared the revolutions of 1789 and 1848 and the betrayal of those revolutions by the Napoleonic coups d’état of 1799 and 1851, but he did not address another doubling in 1848: the second abolition of slavery. Nor have art historians interrogated its representation. This essay examines French caricatures concerning the novel status of black persons after the abolition of 1848 as well as the politics of doubling that bound Napoleon III and the newly self-appointed black Emperor of Haiti, Faustin Soulouque, and also Napoleon I and the Haitian revolutionary hero Toussaint L’Ouverture. Blackface, seldom discussed in French studies, proves a helpful way to interpret images of blacks become free and whites become black both in caricatures and on stage.
- Subjects
HAITI; BLACK people in art; 19TH century French art; CARICATURE; BLACKFACE entertainers; SLAVERY; REVOLUTIONS of 1848, Europe; NAPOLEON III, Emperor of the French, 1808-1873; SOULOUQUE, Faustin
- Publication
Art History, 2015, Vol 38, Issue 1, p68
- ISSN
0141-6790
- Publication type
Essay
- DOI
10.1111/1467-8365.12133