Blackness and lines of beauty in the eighteenth-century Anglophone Atlantic world

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis essay recalibrates the visual signifier of blackness in eighteenth-century art to the period’s adjoining theories and visual aesthetics of lines. The uneven archive of eighteenth-century Anglophone materials – comprised of visual representations of black subjects and written works by black subjects – invites readers of the present to move between, at least, visual and textual modes of interpretation. Building from the scholarship of David Dabydeen and the work of eighteenth-century Londoner, grocer, critic and free black artist Ignatius Sancho, this essay argues that the interplay of visual and textual lines renews readings of eighteenth-century representations of blackness. On the one hand, readings around this interplay open up a recognition of the interrelatedness of literary production, like the rise of the English novel, and the Caribbean plantation system; on the other, these readings gesture at the submerged relationships between eighteenth-century black subjects in the Anglophone Atlantic world.