Spaces

From plantations to dwellings to markets, depictions of the spaces inhabited by enslaved people often operate as indexes of violence and coercion. In the wake of slavery, such modes of seeing persist in images by painters and photographers who either reproduce the colonial picturesque gaze or exoticize Afro-descendants in their homes as atavistic and non-modern. Still, as the palimpsests in this room show, Black subjects have always found ways to subvert this visual order by either reclaiming urban sites as spaces of Black sociability—such as markets—or by artistically intervening in earlier visual representations of the plantation landscape.