Subversive Images and Forgotten Truths: A Selected Visual History of Black Women Religious

Abstract

Subversive Images and Forgotten Truths: A Selected Visual History of Black Women Religious Shannen Dee Williams (bio) Paintings and sculptures of black women religious produced during the era of the transatlantic slave trade and photographs taken of black sisters before the turn of the twenty-first century are invaluable historical artifacts. Because so much of the history of black Catholic sisters has been systematically erased and made inaccessible by archival restrictions, visual sources are sometimes the only evidence available to researchers – beyond oral history – that document black sisters’ presence and experiences of racial segregation and exclusion in religious life.1 This is especially true for the church’s earliest black sisters and African-descended women and girls who entered European and historically white sisterhoods in the modern era. In an effort to bring more attention to black sisters’ rich, but often elusive, visual history, this issue of American Catholic Studies features seven pieces of visual art and photographs that survey their history from the rise of transatlantic devotion to St. Iphigenia (cover image) in the sixteenth century through the canonization of St. Josephine Bakhita in 2000. These selected images not only document black sisters’ pioneering histories in female religious life, but also chart their fiercely contested presence in the church when most equated whiteness with purity and holiness and blackness with evil and moral debasement. Unsurprisingly then, several of these images have been used by black Catholics and other members of the faith at various moments in history to promote black evangelization and contest white supremacy in the church and wider society. [End Page 93] Click for larger view View full resolution Photo Courtesy of Ben Tavener The eighteenth-century statue of St. Iphigenia (shown above) enshrined at the renowned and slave-built Sao Francisco Church and Convent of Salvador in Bahia, Brazil is one such example. Although extant church records reveal that Iphigenia and her convent of 200 Nubian virgins pioneered female religious life in the first century, widespread devotion to the church’s first black sister-saint did not begin until the late sixteenth century.2 This followed the forced conversion of [End Page 94] millions of Central and West Africans to Catholicism during the transatlantic slave trade and African dispersal throughout the Spanish and Portuguese world. As historian Erin Rowe has demonstrated, the veneration of sub-Saharan African saints by black Catholics and other members of the church’s faithful resulted in “the widespread distribution of images, including sculpture, painting, and engravings” of Iphigenia in Iberia and Latin America. 3 This visual art, often commissioned by black confraternities (lay associations), combined with fervent devotion, enabled African-descended Catholics struggling to free themselves from the chains of chattel slavery, European colonization, and racial apartheid to forge an alternative spiritual discourse on blackness that rejected demonization.4 It also seemingly inspired free and enslaved African-descended Catholic women and girls in Iberia and Latin America to seek freedom and other opportunities to expand their social mobility through various forms of female religious life. In late seventeenth-century Mexico, for example, at least one clandestine confraternity of African-descended women who appear in the historical record called themselves the religiosas (nuns) of Iphigenia.5 Although the church’s active participation in chattel slavery, colonization, and racial apartheid in the Americas and Africa kept the global black sister population low and statistically insignificant through much of the twentieth century, thousands of women and girls of black African descent embraced the religious state in the modern era. In Latin America, where St. Iphigenia was widely venerated, hundreds of African-descended women and girls entered religious life during the colonial era alone. However, admission restrictions based on blood purity, race, and color relegated black sisters to the lowest rank in their [End Page 95] Click for larger view View full resolution Courtesy of the University of New Mexico Press communities with rare exceptions.6 Most were permitted only to serve as donadas (religious servants who took vows and wore veils) and restricted to domestic and menial labor in their orders regardless of their status, education, and spiritual perfection. 7 Although church records are inundated with direct and fleeting references to African-descended donadas...