The Reframing Gendered Violence project at the Center for the Study of Social Difference is proud to co-sponsor a talk organized by our affiliate the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality:

“Portraiture and Enslavement at the Thresholds of Emancipation (A Caribbean Meditation)”
(in conjunction with the Posing Modernity exhibit at Columbia’s Wallach Gallery)

This talk will address the only two extant oil portraits of enslaved women produced during the periods of emancipation in the French- and Spanish-speaking Caribbean. By underscoring the conflictive political and ideological forces, affective dynamics, and aesthetic principles at work in their composition, it will focus on the conditions that made possible the visual configuration of black people as subjects of freedom and on its problematic re-articulation of the boundaries between the human and the animal.

Organized by the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality, and co-sponsored by: Maison Française, Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, Barnard Art History, Columbia University Center for the Study of Social Difference: Reframing Gender Violence Project, The Society of Fellows and the Heyman Center for the Humanities, Department of Anthropology, and Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures.