Blackness and lines of beauty in the eighteenth-century Anglophone Atlantic world

This essay recalibrates the visual signifier of blackness in eighteenth-century art to the period's adjoining theories and visual aesthetics of lines. The uneven archive of eighteenth-century Anglophone materials - comprised of visual representations of black subjects and written works by black subjects - invites readers of the present to move between, at least, visual and textual modes of interpretation. Building from the scholarship of David Dabydeen and the work of eighteenth-century Londoner, grocer, critic and free black artist Ignatius Sancho, this essay argues that the interplay of visual and textual lines renews readings of eighteenth-century representations of blackness. On the one hand, readings around this interplay open up a recognition of the interrelatedness of literary production, like the rise of the English novel, and the Caribbean plantation system; on the other, these readings gesture at the submerged relationships between eighteenth-century black subjects in the Anglophone Atlantic world

Atlantic World · Beauty · Visual culture · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Digital Humanities and Scholarship · Photography and Visual Culture

• Figures in Black

  Jr Henry Louis Gates•Figures in Black•1987

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• Staying power

  Peter Fryer•Staying power•1984

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• Epistolarity

  Janet Gurkin Altman•Epistolarity•1982

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• The Fortunes of Francis Barber

  Michael Bundock•Fortunes of Francis Barber•2015

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• Moral Capital

  Christopher Leslie Brown•Moral Capital•2012

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• Black London

  Open Access•Gretchen Gerzina, Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina•Black London•1995

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• Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African

  Open Access•Ignatius Sancho, Joseph Jekyll et al.•Letters of the Late Ignatius…•2013

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• The Complexion of Race

  Roxann Wheeler•Complexion of Race•2000

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• Plantation Futures

  Katherine Mckittrick•Small Axe A Caribbean Journal of…•2013

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• Things of Darkness

  Velvet Pearson•Sixteenth Century Journal•1996

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• Things of Darkness

  Andrew Fleck•Sixteenth Century Journal•1997

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• Hogarth, Walpole and Commercial Britain

  Ronald Paulson, David Dabydeen•Eighteenth-Century Studies•1988

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• Ignatius Sancho (1729-1780)

  Eileen Southern, Josephine Wright et al.•The Black Perspective in Music•1985

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• Atlantic Families

  Sarah M S Pearsall•Atlantic families•2008

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• The extraordinary Negro’

  Open Access•Brycchan Carey•Journal for Eighteenth-Century…•2003

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• Becoming African in America

  James Sidbury•Becoming African in America•2007

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