Enslavement and Its Legacies: “Constantly to look at me”

Abstract

Combining quantitative study with close visual analysis of colonial Virginia portraits, this study argues that white colonists rendered enslaved people invisible in portraiture in an attempt to remove the “right to look” from the Black gaze. Simultaneously, enslaved audiences engaged with portraits in subversive ways, finding ways to “converse” with them and to affirm their own subjectivity. The resulting tension between Black and white gazes on plantations turned the gaze into a material practice through domestic portraiture and affected the function and development of American portraiture.