Picturing White Skin on Elephant Tusk

Abstract

This article introduces African elephants into the study of ivory miniatures in the nineteenth-century United States. Despite the presence of elephant tusk in these diminutive portraits, discussion of the massive mammals remains absent in art-historical scholarship. This omission obscures the transatlantic networks of violence that enabled the creation of miniatures, including the enslavement of human beings and the hunting of elephants. Tracing this history makes possible a new critique of the representation of White skin on ivory. Seizing upon the material’s unique translucency, miniaturists participated in a broader trend of idealizing White bodies by rendering them immaterial. This aesthetic tactic affirmed racial hierarchy by setting Whiteness in opposition to Blackness, conceptualized as opaque and basely material. In order to undermine this insidious ideology, this article looks at rather than through the translucent slivers of ivory to uncover a profoundly material Whiteness—constituted by violence inflicted upon other bodies, both animal and human.