Black Women Slaves Who Nourished a Nation: Artistic Renderings of Wet Nurses in Brazil

Abstract

The Black wet nurse remains to this day one of the most romanticized representations of Brazilian slavery. Common to other slave societies, such as those in the US South, the idealization of the motherly, affectionate devotion of Black enslaved women not to their own children but to their white charges is inextricably linked to the forging of the symbolic figures of “Black mothers” or “mammies,” central to the imaginary of racially harmonious postslave societies.The importance of this topic to understanding past and present race and gender social dynamics makes Kimberly Cleveland's book a timely contribution to the growing field on the intersections between race, visuality, and other social markers. Cleveland aims to analyze Black wet-nursing historically from the point of view of visual culture, centering images rather than taking them as complements to other discourses and sources. The author openly adopts a transdisciplinary approach in order to investigate paintings, photographs, and sculptures from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that depict Black wet nurses and thus reveal changing racial standards and politics in Brazil.Such an ambitious project would certainly be of great interest to historians and other scholars studying slavery, abolition, postabolition, and African diaspora. However, the project comes up against some obstacles. First, the magnitude of Cleveland's goals are somewhat diminished by the fact that, for a book that delves into visual culture, she uses a rather small sample of images to build an encompassing argument. For instance, in the book's second chapter, dedicated to representations of wet nurses in the second half of the nineteenth century, Cleveland chooses to work with four photographs of Black women from one single imperial province, Bahia. In fairness, many of the known photographs of Black wet nurses and their white charges produced at that time were taken in northeastern provinces. It is difficult, however, to see how a few images from a single locale could reveal a comprehensive scenario in which visual conventions of photography are intertwined with market practices, photographers' aesthetic choices, and the agency of those who are photographed—women who, albeit probably portrayed at the orders of their masters, contributed to the photographic act with their bodies, gestures, and gazes.Notwithstanding the author's careful methodological treatment of images and her recourse to an extensive bibliography to substantiate interpretations, the limited primary source base gives readers the misleading impression that examples of visual representations of Black wet nurses are scarcer than they actually are. This also affects a deeper understanding of how images dialogue both with their historical and social context of creation and with other images and representations. A consideration of this symbolic circulation seems crucial to properly understanding the emergence and transformations of visual discourses and the role that these discourses play in the construction of social imaginaries of slavery and race relations in the Brazilian empire and republic.The author makes an interesting point about the varying names and meanings attributed to representations of enslaved women engaged in domestic work and the care of white children, identifying differences between Black wet nurses and mammies. The very important matter of how representations of enslaved domestic workers transformed into a mythic Black motherhood able to pacify racial conflicts in postabolition Brazil, however, is left unresolved.In addition, although the book focuses on gendered and racialized representations, the white male perspective is at its center. Cleveland argues that white male artists and doctors had the power to control the lives of their enslaved Black wet nurses and to determine how they would be seen and spoken of. It is a bit disappointing, however, that Black women's agency is only considered via a problematic claim that white male domination was subverted by these women when they rented out their wet-nursing services—a stance that does not consider the violent nature of the wet-nursing labor market and the many challenges faced by enslaved and freed women to get by and raise and support their families. At stake here is an understanding of agency as free will that has been overtly criticized by specialists.Nevertheless, Cleveland's work is a well-written, carefully edited book that delves into crucial matters and can attract a broad reading public interested in understanding both the historical processes that forged a complex visuality of race and gender in postslavery Brazil and the violent, unequal society that this visuality helped to create.