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

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

As the U.S. government reinvents imperialism for the 21st century—vowing to “buy” Greenland, declare Canada the 51st state, and take over Gaza—and as we confront a new era of political repression, how can we set our sights on anything more than survival? Looking to the past as we face the present and prepare for the future, what lessons can we learn for living—and living fully—from those who arguably lived through worse? This interdisciplinary panel embraces a range of approaches and methods to consider Black creativity and creation under the shadows of slavery, its afterlives, and in the context of U.S. empire. Through five case studies, we explore how Black Americans have found the space, time, and freedom of mind to create under conditions of captivity and in a society structured by racial domination and imperial control. Mia L. Bagneris brings together art historical methods and black critical thought to illuminate a record of pleasure, connection to nature, and “feeling free” in the postbellum landscape paintings of Edward Mitchel(l) Bannister against the backdrop of Rhode Island’s history of slavery, present of racial domination, and imperial aspirations for the U.S.’s future in the Caribbean. Britt Rusert uses William J. Wilson’s Afric-American Picture Gallery (1859) as an access point for tracing a vibrant network of black bohemian creatives who were experimenting with radical forms of creativity and freedom of expression in late antebellum New York. Olivia Haynes turns to histories of race and medicine and black feminist methodologies to think about the lessons we might learn from the politics of birth work and death work in early national Philadelphia during a pandemic that rattled and changed the nation. Interlacing overlapping narratives from the eighteenth-century to the present, Camila Aguayo analyzes the implications of racial erasure in the mid-19th-century posthumous resurgence and rebranding of 18th-century Afro-Puerto Rican painter José Campeche for Black living through creativity in contemporary Puerto Rico. A lesson for living rooted in the living example of the dead, DaMaris Hill’s “Blood Bible” approaches the afterlife of slavery literally, using memoir, history, and poetry to tell a story about herself, her family, and slavery’s ongoing hauntings. Although the scholars on this panel situate our work in different primary disciplines—art history, English, history, creative writing—our papers cohere around shared intellectual commitments to Black studies and an appreciation for the pressure that Black critical thought puts on conventional academic disciplines and even inherently interdisciplinary fields like American studies. Accordingly, we intend the “Black creation” of our title to describe a capacious category that signals creative expression and cultural production but that also carries religious resonances and renders Black Women’s reproductive labor visible.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• Reframing a Master: Race & the Artistic Legacy of José Campeche - Camila Aguayo, Tulane University

• Free Within Himself?: Imagining the Radical Possibility of Being Black and "Feeling Free" in Edward Mitchel(l) Bannister’s Rhode Island - Mia L Bagneris, Tulane University

• From Yellow Fever to Black Maternal Health: African American Birth and Death Work as Community Preservation and Futurity - Olivia Haynes, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

• Blood Bible - DaMaris B Hill, Morgan State University

• "Our Essentially Aesthetic or Art-Nature": William J. Wilson and the Origins of Afro-Bohemia - Britt Rusert, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Chair

• Amber J Musser, CUNY Graduate Center

Biographical Information

Camila Aguayo studies colonial Caribbean art with a focus on the visual culture produced on the island of Puerto Rico during the Spanish regime. Through her research, she focuses on the intersections of race, class, and identity, exploring how imperial legacies influenced artistic practices and the formation of different sociocultural narratives. By examining artworks produced within the colonial structure of Puerto Rico, she observes the role artists played in constructing a national identity and creating a new visual culture for the island. She earned her B.A. in art history and completed a Hot Metal Bridge Fellowship in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh and is now an MA student in the Newcomb Art Department at Tulane University.

Mia L. Bagneris is an associate professor of art history and Africana studies, Director of the Africana Studies Program, and co-creator of the Mellon-funded Crossroads Cohort at Tulane University. Concentrating primarily on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and American visual culture, her scholarship explores the representation of race in the Anglo-American world and the place of images in the histories of slavery, colonialism, empire, and the construction of national identities. Her debut monograph, Colouring the Caribbean: Race and the art of Agostino Brunias (Manchester UP, 2018), offered the first comprehensive study of the artist’s work. Her forthcoming essay collection, Reframing “Black Art”: Case Studies in Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture, models new critical approaches to the study of pre-twentieth-century African diasporic art. The volume, co-authored with Anna Arabindan-Kesson, will be published by Routledge next year. Bagneris’s next book, Imagining the Oriental South: The Enslaved Mixed-Race Beauty in British Visual Culture, 1865-1900, investigates the enduring appeal of the enslaved mixed-race American beauty—more popularly known as the “tragic” mulatto/quadroon/octoroon—among Victorian Britons, especially after the 1865 abolition of slavery in the United States rendered the abolitionist utility of the figure obsolete. Dr. Bagneris’s recent work has been supported by the ACLS, the Yale Center for British Art, Harvard University’s W.E.B. DuBois Institute, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Olivia Haynes is a Ph.D. candidate in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she also completed the graduate certificate in Public History. Her research focuses on the history of slavery in the American North with an emphasis on the visual and material culture of slavery, social reproduction theory, and Black motherhood and reproduction under enslavement and nominal freedom. Her dissertation, Unseen Hands: Black Midwives, Care, and Belonging in the Early American North, seeks to recover and illuminate the lives, labor, and legacies of Black midwives in the Mid-Atlantic and New England during the colonial and early national periods. By examining the intersections of race, gender, and care work, her work highlights how Black midwives navigated the intimate spaces of childbirth and caregiving, fostering belonging and survival for Black communities in the face of devaluation and erasure.

DaMaris B. Hill is a poet and creative scholar. Her most recent book, Breath Better Spent: Living Black Girlhood, is deemed “urgent” and “luminous” in a starred Publisher’s Weekly review. Hill’s first poetry collection, A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing, is a powerful narrative-in-verse that bears witness to Black women burdened by incarceration. It was an Amazon #1 Best Seller in African American Poetry, a Publishers Weekly Top 10 History Title, and 2020 NAACP Image Award nominee for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry. Hill’s other books include The Fluid Boundaries of Suffrage and Jim Crow: Staking Claims in the American Heartland, and \Vi-zə-bəl\ \Teks-chərs\ (Visible Textures). Her digital work, “Shut Up In My Bones”, is a twenty-first century poem that uses remix/pastiche/intertextuality to honor a specific cultural past, while working to construct visions of a better future. Similar to her creative process, Hill’s scholarly research is interdisciplinary. She is a 2024-2025 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University and a fellow with the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. Hill is a Professor of Creative Writing, English, and African American Studies at the University of Kentucky.

Amber Jamilla Musser (Chair) is a professor of English and Africana studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. She writes and researches at the intersections of race, sexuality, and aesthetics. In addition to writing art reviews for The Brooklyn Rail. She has published widely in queer studies, black feminism, psychoanalysis, and critical theory. She is the author of Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism (NYU Press, 2014), Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance (NYU Press, 2018), and Between Shadows and Noise: Sensation, Situatedness, and the Undisciplined (Duke University Press, 2024). Her collaborative projects include co-editing Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies (NYU Press, 2021) and co-hosting its accompanying podcast Feminist Keywords; special issues of Signs: A Journal of Feminist Theory on "Care and Its Complexities" and ASAP Journal on "Queer Form;" and the series Elements in Feminism and Critical Theory for Cambridge University Press. She was President of ASAP (Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present) from 2022-2023 and co-chaired ASAP-14: Arts of Fugitivity in Seattle in 2023 and ASAP-15: Not a Luxury in New York City in 2024. She is also co-Editor of Social Text.

Britt Rusert is Professor of Afro-American Studies at UMass Amherst and Executive Editor of the Massachusetts Review. She is a 2024-25 NEH Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society and was a 2023-24 Fellow in the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. Rusert is the author of Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture (NYU Press, 2017) and co-editor of W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America (Princeton Architectural Press, 2018). Fugitive Science received sole finalist mention for the Lora Romero First Book Prize from the American Studies Association as well as an honorable mention for the MLA’s Prize for a First Book. Her second monograph, The Afric-American Picture Gallery: Imagining Black Art (1859), is under contract with Duke University Press. Another book-length project, The Care Underground: Mutual Aid in the Age of Slavery and Abolition, is under contract with Verso. Rusert holds a PhD in English and certificate in Feminist Studies from Duke University. Her research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies, and the Library Company of Philadelphia. She is an elected member of the American Antiquarian Society.