Cursed mimicry: France and Haiti, again (1848-51)

• Autores: Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby
• Localización: Art history: journal of the Association of Art Historians, ISSN 0141-6790, Vol. 38, Nº. 1, 2015, págs. 68-105
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • In the opening of his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Karl Marx famously compared the revolutions of 1789 and 1848 and the betrayal of those revolutions by the Napoleonic coups d'état of 1799 and 1851, but he did not address another doubling in 1848: the second abolition of slavery. Nor have art historians interrogated its representation. This essay examines French caricatures concerning the novel status of black persons after the abolition of 1848 as well as the politics of doubling that bound Napoleon III and the newly self-appointed black Emperor of Haiti, Faustin Soulouque, and also Napoleon I and the Haitian revolutionary hero Toussaint L'Ouverture. Blackface, seldom discussed in French studies, proves a helpful way to interpret images of blacks become free and whites become black both in caricatures and on stage.