Fictions Of Emancipation: Carpeaux’s Why Born Enslaved! Reconsidered

Edited by Elyse Nelson and Wendy S. Walters

This critical reexamination of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s iconic bust Why Born
Enslaved! unpacks the sculpture’s complex and sometimes contradictory
engagement with an antislavery discourse. Noted art historians and writers
discuss how categories of racial difference grew in popularity in the nineteenth
century alongside a crescendo in cultural production in France during the
Second Empire. By focusing on Why Born Enslaved! and comparing it to works by Carpeaux’s contemporaries on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as to objects by twenty-first-century artists Kara Walker and Kehinde Wiley, this volume explores such key themes as the portrayal of Black enslavement and emancipation; the commodification of images of Black figures; the…See More