Free Within Himself?: Imagining the Radical Possibility of Being Black and "Feeling Free" in Edward Mitchel(l) Bannister’s Rhode Island

• In Event: Black Creation: Lessons for Living under the Shadow of Slavery and Empire

Abstract

Often limiting discussion of a painting’s significance to its connections to the reality of slavery, the fight for abolition, or the challenges of Reconstruction, conventional investigations of nineteenth-century landscape painting by U.S. artists of African descent have generally offered a myopic view of these works that prioritizes the politics race while completely sidelining any consideration of Black artists’ pursuit of pleasure or experience of beauty in nature. Aligned with the scholarship of contemporary theorists of Black interiority and guided by Tyra A. Bynum’s proposition to see what interpretations open up when we center Black interiority—the place “where imagination can do its creative work and where feelings feel freely”—and look closely “for pleasure and with possibility, in mind”, this talk re-evaluates the postbellum Rhode Island landscapes of Edward Mitchel(l) Bannister from a new vantage point. Using this perspective to bring critical visual analysis together with two virtually unknown archival texts reveals Bannister’s understanding of his own subjectivity and rich interior life and corroborates the pleasure he experienced in connection with nature. It also suggests the possibility of an immediately postbellum local context in which these aspects of the artist’s identity—and not his race—were regarded as the most remarkable thing about him. Ultimately, I consider how we might understand these landscapes as visual indexes of Bannister’s interiority and the creative work of a Black individual who—in spite of the state’s fraught history of slavery and the present specter of U.S. imperial ambition—found, in Rhode Island’s natural world, a place to let his feelings feel freely, where he could, at least for fleeting moments, feel fully himself.

Author

• Mia L Bagneris, Tulane University