Art, Affect, and Enslavement

The Song of the Oxcart in Colonial Dutch Brazil

Bibliographic Data

ID21974698
AuthorsAngela Vanhaelen (McGill University, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume13
Issue1
Pages25
Publication date2024-01-30
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueArts (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2076-0752 • E-ISSN: 2076-0752
PublisherMDPI AG (PUBLISHER • IT)
DOI10.3390/arts13010025
OpenAlexW4391348212
LanguageEN
References cited24

Focusing on a single artwork, Frans Post’s painting called The Oxen Cart of 1638, this article explores what Édouard Glissant calls the emotional apartheid of the plantation system. It argues that the affective evasion of Post’s painting fosters anti-Black racism by denying the full humanity of captive peoples. The painting is read together with Caspar Barlaeus’s contemporary apologia for the leadership of Maurits of Nassau, who was the governor-general of Dutch Brazil and Post’s patron. Focusing on classical and Neostoic understandings of governance and enslavement, the article turns to Paul Alpers’s analysis of the pastoral mode as an art of evasion that justifies the exploitation of rural labourers. It concludes by taking up Saidiya Hartman’s concept of critical fabulation to consider the oppositional views and counter-narratives expressed in the music-making traditions of enslaved people

Archaeology · Colonialism · Political science · Sociology · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Communication · History · Race, History, and American Society

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