"Allegory of Nature": West Indies, 1774

• In Event: Exploited Bodies: Race, Environment, and Visual Culture

Abstract

In a late-eighteenth century French text, an image entitled “Allegory of Nature” appears. It shows, on the right, a group of four white men savagely beating half a dozen Black men. On the left, nestled in front of lush vegetation, sits a naked white woman nursing two children, one Black and one white. The image of a white woman simultaneously breast-feeding a Black and a white baby is notable in itself, but is made more unusual by the surprising fact that the woman has six breasts. On its own, this image has clear origins in classical mythology, evoking depictions of a wolf nursing Romulus and Remus. Yet it also raises questions about the multiple meanings of breast feeding in the context of colonial racial violence and, more specifically, how the image evokes “nature.”



This presentation will analyze visual culture of the colonial Atlantic world, with particular attention to categories of race as well as to what is labeled “natural” in the context of women’s bodies. Examining imagery of breast feeding in colonial publications raises questions of moral and racial “contagion” through the vehicle of breast milk, and the ways in which these questions were bound up with an increasingly dichotomous racialized rhetoric and culture. This presentation engages with imagery of breast-feeding as it relates to “nature,” asking in the process how ideas about nature inflected ideas about female bodies.

Author

• Kate Johnston, Montana State University