1 00:00:17,060 --> 00:00:24,560 Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us for the third in a series of four terror lectures in American art. 2 00:00:24,560 --> 00:00:30,860 This series is sponsored by the Terra Foundation for American Art, which is dedicated to fostering exploration, 3 00:00:30,860 --> 00:00:38,480 understanding and enjoyment of the visual arts of the United States for both national and international audiences. 4 00:00:38,480 --> 00:00:43,520 In collaboration with the Department of the History of Art at Oxford and Worcester College, 5 00:00:43,520 --> 00:00:49,030 the foundation grants an annual fellowship to a leading scholar in American art. 6 00:00:49,030 --> 00:00:53,820 This year, the terror visiting professor is Emily C. Burns. 7 00:00:53,820 --> 00:01:00,010 My name is Jeff Bachem, and I am the head of the history of art department at the University of Oxford. 8 00:01:00,010 --> 00:01:08,890 Our thanks go to the Terra Foundation and to torch the hosting the series as part of their online events in the Humanities Cultural Programme. 9 00:01:08,890 --> 00:01:14,850 One of the founding stones for the future, Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. 10 00:01:14,850 --> 00:01:21,990 Throughout this evening's lecture, if you have any questions, please feel free to type them in the YouTube chat box below, 11 00:01:21,990 --> 00:01:26,950 and we will do our best to answer as many of them as part of the session. 12 00:01:26,950 --> 00:01:33,530 We are delighted that this lecture will be introduced and moderated by Professor James Small's. 13 00:01:33,530 --> 00:01:39,980 Dr. James Smalls is professor and chair of visual arts at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. 14 00:01:39,980 --> 00:01:52,200 Smalls holds degrees from UCLA in ethnic arts and in art history, is taught at Rutgers University, Columbia University and the University of Paris. 15 00:01:52,200 --> 00:01:56,010 His work as an art historian focuses on the intersections of race, 16 00:01:56,010 --> 00:02:05,760 gender and queer sexuality in the arts and visual culture of the 19th century, as well as the art and visual culture of the black diaspora. 17 00:02:05,760 --> 00:02:18,120 He's the author of Homosexuality and Art from 2003 and the Homo Erotic Photography of Carl went back to public face private thoughts from 2006. 18 00:02:18,120 --> 00:02:28,040 He's also published essays in journals like American Art, the text art journal Criticism and Freeze magazine. 19 00:02:28,040 --> 00:02:36,980 Particularly foundational for the theme of this lecture, Smalls essays racial antics in late 19th century French art and popular culture, 20 00:02:36,980 --> 00:02:42,560 which appeared in the anthology Blacks and Blackness in European Art of the Long Nineteenth Century. 21 00:02:42,560 --> 00:02:55,090 Published in 2014 and Race a spectacle in late 19th century French art and popular culture, which was published in French Historical Studies in 2003. 22 00:02:55,090 --> 00:02:58,840 Smalls is currently completing a book entitled For Benga. 23 00:02:58,840 --> 00:03:06,670 African News of Modernism. It's my absolute pleasure to welcome James this evening, and now James will hand over to you. 24 00:03:06,670 --> 00:03:14,240 Thank you. Thank you, Jeff, for that wonderful introduction. 25 00:03:14,240 --> 00:03:23,450 It is great to be here today. And a virtual welcome to those who are watching. 26 00:03:23,450 --> 00:03:29,060 It is my pleasure to introduce Emily Burns. 27 00:03:29,060 --> 00:03:41,210 Emily is an Associate Professor of art history at Auburn University and a scholar of transnational exchange in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. 28 00:03:41,210 --> 00:03:51,860 In 2018, she published Transnational Frontiers the American West in France with the University of Oklahoma Press, 29 00:03:51,860 --> 00:03:59,450 and has a forthcoming anthology co-edited with Alice M. Rudy Price, 30 00:03:59,450 --> 00:04:08,990 titled Mapping Impressionist Painting in Transnational Contexts to be published with Rutledge Rutledge Press. 31 00:04:08,990 --> 00:04:15,050 During her tenure as the Tara Foundation for American Art Visiting Professor in the 32 00:04:15,050 --> 00:04:21,230 Department of History of Art at the University of Oxford and a visiting fellow at worst, 33 00:04:21,230 --> 00:04:28,970 her college professor Burns is completing her book manuscript from which today's talk comes. 34 00:04:28,970 --> 00:04:36,020 And that manuscript is entitled Performing Innocence, Cultural Belated Ness and US Art. 35 00:04:36,020 --> 00:04:44,780 In fact, the Seek the Paris. So, Emily, please take it away. 36 00:04:44,780 --> 00:04:54,760 In case so much, James. And thank you, Jeff, as well for the introductions. 37 00:04:54,760 --> 00:05:02,200 Thank you to everyone for joining us today. I also want to thank the archivists who have very generously scanned primary source 38 00:05:02,200 --> 00:05:07,660 material for me during the COVID era and that have really enabled this project to grow, 39 00:05:07,660 --> 00:05:15,160 especially from the Anacostia Community Museum, the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library, the Butler Library at Columbia, 40 00:05:15,160 --> 00:05:24,010 the American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery Library, the Ohio History Connexion and the University of Illinois Archives. 41 00:05:24,010 --> 00:05:33,620 All of this effort has supported this research in a time of so many closures. 42 00:05:33,620 --> 00:05:43,790 Competing constructions of black USA identities were performed in front of Sierra Club Paris, one paradigm was framed by blackface minstrel shows, 43 00:05:43,790 --> 00:05:54,290 which circulated caricatures of blackness that when they were regularly held by one of the U.S. artists clubs in Paris as photographed at left. 44 00:05:54,290 --> 00:06:03,590 The other, curated by black intellectuals for the Palace of the Social Economy in the Paris Exposition Universelle of 9500 45 00:06:03,590 --> 00:06:11,990 countered primitive rising stereotypes with narratives of African American progress seen in the display at right, 46 00:06:11,990 --> 00:06:17,150 as this talk will argue in spite of these polarised narratives. 47 00:06:17,150 --> 00:06:24,830 These two performances of black US identities in Paris both participated in and bolstered the larger, 48 00:06:24,830 --> 00:06:31,340 ongoing transnational discourse that imagined and constructed ideas of U.S. naivety, 49 00:06:31,340 --> 00:06:36,890 cultural innocence and relatedness that I'm framing in this lecture series. 50 00:06:36,890 --> 00:06:43,460 Both of these displays centred on immaturity, but in distinct terms and with different goals. 51 00:06:43,460 --> 00:06:50,720 Both affirm theories of social evolution, though in different ways between relatedness and progress. 52 00:06:50,720 --> 00:06:59,540 Race operated as a fulcrum for performances of U.S. cultural innocence in Paris and these opposing frames of blackness 53 00:06:59,540 --> 00:07:09,530 as primitive on the one hand and as incipient on the other operated as what I think of as an innocence entanglements. 54 00:07:09,530 --> 00:07:12,080 This talk will proceed in four parts. 55 00:07:12,080 --> 00:07:20,090 I will share new research about minstrelsy in the U.S. artist colony in Paris and contextualise the practise against the backdrop 56 00:07:20,090 --> 00:07:28,940 of French colonialism with its own mass culture images that we're simultaneously imagining Black Africans as primitives. 57 00:07:28,940 --> 00:07:34,610 The material from these first two sections is highly offensive and racist, 58 00:07:34,610 --> 00:07:43,130 and I share it in this public setting to critique it as I analyse how it operated in the US colony in Paris to 59 00:07:43,130 --> 00:07:51,650 forward ideas of a US primitive identity and also think through how it linked with French visual culture itself, 60 00:07:51,650 --> 00:08:01,790 using race to build a structure of difference. As James Smalls, Robin Mitchell, Tyler Stovall, Marcus Bruce and others have argued, 61 00:08:01,790 --> 00:08:08,360 I will briefly consider how African American artists intersected with these discourses in Paris and then turn 62 00:08:08,360 --> 00:08:15,860 to the exhibit of American Negroes in nineteen hundred with its revising tropes of youth and emergent culture. 63 00:08:15,860 --> 00:08:26,050 Ending with a discussion of two black US women in Paris who took up these conversations about primitivism and progress. 64 00:08:26,050 --> 00:08:36,310 Newspaper reports, documents, minstrel shows at the American Art Association of Paris annually from 1894 to 1899 and by 65 00:08:36,310 --> 00:08:44,200 annually from 19 one to 19 07 arising in the 1830s and circulating throughout the century. 66 00:08:44,200 --> 00:08:49,840 The fraught caricature of African-Americans presented in blackface minstrel shows entailed 67 00:08:49,840 --> 00:08:55,480 white performers darkening their flesh with burnt cork or polish paired with white, 68 00:08:55,480 --> 00:09:01,660 wide, bright red lips drawn around their mouths while singing and dancing to minstrel songs. 69 00:09:01,660 --> 00:09:09,670 These shows were presented first in the club headquarters in Montparnasse and then in several theatres nearby and across Paris, 70 00:09:09,670 --> 00:09:13,420 including the Negro Theatre, the Theatre Montparnasse and the theatre. 71 00:09:13,420 --> 00:09:22,270 Marry Me Here photographed, noting the accent is not the full length performances of what Smalls has productively labelled. 72 00:09:22,270 --> 00:09:28,270 Quote racial antics included multiple acts, pairing songs and comic skits. 73 00:09:28,270 --> 00:09:35,950 In keeping with typical minstrel show structure, a minstrel show in 19 of three centred around plantation melodies, 74 00:09:35,950 --> 00:09:41,440 a frequent theme that problematically presented plantation life as though idyllic. 75 00:09:41,440 --> 00:09:46,540 These spectacles were organised to earn money for the club's activities and facilities, 76 00:09:46,540 --> 00:09:54,310 which included a clubhouse featuring frequent exhibitions and social events for Anglo artists in Paris. 77 00:09:54,310 --> 00:10:02,620 On December 10th, 1898, the ape minstrel show was performed at the Nouveau Theatre on the block in the 9th arrondissement, 78 00:10:02,620 --> 00:10:06,370 which had a capacity of about 1000 viewers. 79 00:10:06,370 --> 00:10:13,030 This was also the day the Treaty of Paris was signed between the United States and Spain on the key d'orsay, 80 00:10:13,030 --> 00:10:20,260 which ended the war of 1898 and established the United States first overseas colonial possessions. 81 00:10:20,260 --> 00:10:28,780 The Paris edition of the New York Herald reported that Senator Cushman Kellogg Davis from Minnesota participated in both events, 82 00:10:28,780 --> 00:10:32,810 although the paper also reported that the negotiations went late into that evening. 83 00:10:32,810 --> 00:10:38,140 So perhaps Davis did not make the show by eight 8:45 as intended. 84 00:10:38,140 --> 00:10:45,430 Yet this concurrence between the minstrel shows projections of black evolutionary delay and belated ness and 85 00:10:45,430 --> 00:10:52,810 rising imperialist discourse that privileged white governments in building the US empire is suggestive. 86 00:10:52,810 --> 00:10:57,400 While inscribing a race hierarchy that justified U.S. expansion, 87 00:10:57,400 --> 00:11:05,650 minstrelsy as antics also deflected attention away from that power grab, which was largely unpopular in France. 88 00:11:05,650 --> 00:11:10,930 Reports about the minstrel show offered details about the show's length of five hours 89 00:11:10,930 --> 00:11:17,770 and the numbers of participants 50 to 60 young men as performers on this occasion. 90 00:11:17,770 --> 00:11:25,540 U.S. architecture students dominated the show, joined by dozens of students working in painting, drawing and sculpture. 91 00:11:25,540 --> 00:11:27,640 Not all were from the United States. 92 00:11:27,640 --> 00:11:34,780 Performers included two Australian painters a British illustrator and immigrants long resident in the United States, 93 00:11:34,780 --> 00:11:37,960 although originally from Italy and Germany. 94 00:11:37,960 --> 00:11:46,990 The show featured newly published minstrel songs from printed sheet music with both caricature photographs of blackface performers, 95 00:11:46,990 --> 00:11:53,680 which you can see at left, and exaggerated drawn caricatures of black figures that you can see right. 96 00:11:53,680 --> 00:12:03,580 The show featured. Sorry, I went back alone, French born U.S. architect Eduard Freres Co., 97 00:12:03,580 --> 00:12:11,050 then training at the Accordé Bazaar under Viktor Lallu, performed the song I Don't Like No Cheap Man. 98 00:12:11,050 --> 00:12:21,370 While the song has a male narrator, the frequent quoting of a Mr. Simpson invited company as a performer to adopt gender bending to other architecture 99 00:12:21,370 --> 00:12:27,310 students who knew each other at Columbia before moving to Paris were at the centre of this performance. 100 00:12:27,310 --> 00:12:35,560 Kenneth McKenzie Murchison from New York played Mr. Tambo and William G toshow from Kentucky played Mr. Bones. 101 00:12:35,560 --> 00:12:44,500 Tasha presented the warmest baby in the bunch, the Ethiopian ditty that you see the sheet music for on the right by George Cohen. 102 00:12:44,500 --> 00:12:50,950 While Murchison performed to keep away from Emmeline by John Stromberg and Harry B. sent the sheet, 103 00:12:50,950 --> 00:12:59,500 music reinforces the racist caricatures exported into the club's headquarters and Paris theatres through lyrics and music. 104 00:12:59,500 --> 00:13:08,950 The music plays on exaggeration. The songs have dramatic narrative lyrics, often recited or sung with imagined and caricatured dialect. 105 00:13:08,950 --> 00:13:13,630 Upbeat tones that linger in the ear and they are speedily paced. 106 00:13:13,630 --> 00:13:21,400 And right now on the chat screen, my torch colleagues will offer a link to a modern recording of I don't like no cheap man. 107 00:13:21,400 --> 00:13:29,650 If you're interested to listen later to hear one of the racist soundscapes that I'm working to analyse in my larger chapter, 108 00:13:29,650 --> 00:13:36,610 musicologist Matthew Morrison has used the term black sound, which he defines as the quotes, 109 00:13:36,610 --> 00:13:47,230 legacy's sounds and movements of African-American bodies both real and imagined, which blackface performance and popular entertainments were based, 110 00:13:47,230 --> 00:13:53,740 thinking of such displays as scripts and what he calls an embodied production of sound. 111 00:13:53,740 --> 00:13:57,340 Morrison notes that the characteristic quote simplicity, 112 00:13:57,340 --> 00:14:09,100 decisiveness and catchiness of minstrel songs became mapped onto an ontology of blackness as simple and thereby not equal to its white counterparts. 113 00:14:09,100 --> 00:14:17,380 Historian Saadia Hartman concurs that minstrelsy falsely quotes constituted the African as childish and primitive. 114 00:14:17,380 --> 00:14:27,160 This translation between simple jingle and simple culture shaped these US projections in Paris, while blackface prevailed in these performances. 115 00:14:27,160 --> 00:14:30,220 It was occasionally mingled with red face. 116 00:14:30,220 --> 00:14:40,150 In April 1895, one number featured a quote Wild Red Indian dance by an art student who assumed the name man afraid of soap. 117 00:14:40,150 --> 00:14:46,630 Students sometimes donned such costumes and make up for the famous Wildcats catch in the Latin Quarter. 118 00:14:46,630 --> 00:14:52,570 In 1955, the minstrel show coincided with Buffalo Bills Wild West on the Qamdo Mars. 119 00:14:52,570 --> 00:14:56,260 In April, advertisements appeared in the newspaper side by side, 120 00:14:56,260 --> 00:15:06,760 as you see here in dialogue with theories of evolution lead late 19th century anthropological discourse declared both black and indigenous cultures, 121 00:15:06,760 --> 00:15:11,290 as at an earlier state in development than white cultures. 122 00:15:11,290 --> 00:15:18,670 By foregrounding associations with these quote unquote stereotypically primitive races, 123 00:15:18,670 --> 00:15:25,840 the U.S. colony in Paris manipulated French perceptions of U.S. character and culture. 124 00:15:25,840 --> 00:15:35,050 A 1987 article about U.S. expatriates in Paris printed this photograph the only one I've found so far related to these clubs. 125 00:15:35,050 --> 00:15:42,850 Labelled far from the old folks at home, the label references another popular minstrel song likely performed at the events, 126 00:15:42,850 --> 00:15:49,030 but takes on added resonance in the literal distance of the U.S. artists from their homes. 127 00:15:49,030 --> 00:15:54,790 The performers sit on the ground at centre, some in blackface with uniform deep black, 128 00:15:54,790 --> 00:16:01,990 creating a singular typology of blackness, a figure to the right of centre and I'll bring my cursor there. 129 00:16:01,990 --> 00:16:09,190 Here wears a mask shaped as a cylinder with thick white outlined eyes and projections 130 00:16:09,190 --> 00:16:16,210 emerging from the mask that make the figure appear other than human tuxedo clad white men. 131 00:16:16,210 --> 00:16:24,970 Either club members in the chorus or attendees build a literal hierarchy as they tower over the blackface figures. 132 00:16:24,970 --> 00:16:32,860 My ongoing research on this organisation has identified about 1000 members between 1890 and 1914, 133 00:16:32,860 --> 00:16:39,760 with membership from across the United States, although mostly from the eastern seaboard, north and south alike. 134 00:16:39,760 --> 00:16:45,880 An article in 1981 numbered AIP membership at 400 that year. 135 00:16:45,880 --> 00:16:53,290 Documents of the minstrel show records I've collected show about 100 individuals performing, 136 00:16:53,290 --> 00:16:57,930 and I offer a list of artists I've been able to identify based on these records. 137 00:16:57,930 --> 00:17:06,630 Although a lot of the names are lost in racist pseudonyms, most of the artists performers were operating as amateurs, 138 00:17:06,630 --> 00:17:13,170 producing an effect that doubles the construct of a projected US primitivism in Paris. 139 00:17:13,170 --> 00:17:21,360 Handbooks targeting these amateur minstrels, published in the 1890s, might have shaped the artist's engagement with the genre. 140 00:17:21,360 --> 00:17:26,520 This implied and ironically trained amateurism extended to projections about 141 00:17:26,520 --> 00:17:32,730 American art as reviewers explicitly linked the shows with American art practise. 142 00:17:32,730 --> 00:17:40,710 In 1895, one paper reported on a piece in the minstrel show called the quote Dark Town Art Academy. 143 00:17:40,710 --> 00:17:46,650 One viewer of the 1898 show also thought that the artists had written the songs that they performed, 144 00:17:46,650 --> 00:17:53,730 interpreting those as an indicator of the quote versatility and ingenuity of these young American students, 145 00:17:53,730 --> 00:17:57,690 as the New York Herald's Paris Edition declared in 1898. 146 00:17:57,690 --> 00:18:06,300 Quote Those who had come prepared to be lenient to the young amateurs went away saying, Oh, these young fellows can do anything. 147 00:18:06,300 --> 00:18:11,820 This tension between amateur and professional and the triumph of amateur frames, 148 00:18:11,820 --> 00:18:21,300 the operations of the minstrel shows and the reception linking NAFTA and its possibilities with U.S. art practise in Paris. 149 00:18:21,300 --> 00:18:24,180 The shows operated as social events. 150 00:18:24,180 --> 00:18:32,400 In 1895, the American Register announced quote The American colony turned out in full force to witness the entertainment. 151 00:18:32,400 --> 00:18:41,730 In 1898, General Horace Porter and Sir Edmund Monson, who were then the U.S. and British ambassadors to France, attended the show. 152 00:18:41,730 --> 00:18:51,150 Other attendees were members of the Paris based art world, such as Jean Charles Kazan and Mary Cezanne and Jean Paul Lawrence, 153 00:18:51,150 --> 00:18:57,480 who taught some of the U.S. painters in Paris, including Henry, also a tenor in the 1890s. 154 00:18:57,480 --> 00:19:04,680 The interwoven relationship between U.S. businessmen in Paris who funded the AP is most 155 00:19:04,680 --> 00:19:10,260 clear in the list of men who acted as the welcoming committee for the 1983 minstrel show, 156 00:19:10,260 --> 00:19:13,020 which was also held at the Nuvo Theatre. 157 00:19:13,020 --> 00:19:24,540 These included Percy Peck Statue of the Equitable Life Insurance Company, Sidney White's hat exporter Charles F. Green of Spalding and Co. Jewellers. 158 00:19:24,540 --> 00:19:29,670 Francis Kimball and George, a US timer of shipping and export companies. 159 00:19:29,670 --> 00:19:37,020 And Herman and John Hargis, who were both U.S. bankers bankrolling the activities of the club. 160 00:19:37,020 --> 00:19:43,470 In 1983, the American register touted quote The house was crowded with elegantly dressed Americans and others, 161 00:19:43,470 --> 00:19:53,040 and there was an impressive display of jewels. This event reverberated back to the United States, making news in Philadelphia and Chicago. 162 00:19:53,040 --> 00:19:57,780 So Black Face participated not only in the construction of a U.S. artist's colony, 163 00:19:57,780 --> 00:20:05,100 but also shaped the identity of the wider colony in Paris and also back at home. 164 00:20:05,100 --> 00:20:13,410 These events were not singular aberrations. Rather, they were a sustained and repeated part of the organisation's programme. 165 00:20:13,410 --> 00:20:18,600 The collective acts reaffirmed an exclusive white collective U.S. culture by 166 00:20:18,600 --> 00:20:23,970 establishing their own authority to undertake such race performance as cultural studies. 167 00:20:23,970 --> 00:20:31,020 Scholar Eric Lott argues minstrelsy reveals as much about dialectic definitions of whiteness as it does 168 00:20:31,020 --> 00:20:38,280 about blackness in what he defines as a quote simultaneous drying up and crossing of racial boundaries. 169 00:20:38,280 --> 00:20:42,210 Lott sees minstrelsy as quote dipping into Bohemia, 170 00:20:42,210 --> 00:20:49,020 which parallels how many U.S. artists navigated Parisian culture, which we were talking about next week. 171 00:20:49,020 --> 00:20:57,660 And indeed, by playing primitive in blackface. U.S. artists shared the Puritan gravity that we were talking about last week, 172 00:20:57,660 --> 00:21:07,650 using race performance to transgress that identity while capitalising on ideas of U.S. cultural innocence of a different sort in Paris. 173 00:21:07,650 --> 00:21:13,800 Likewise, the gender bending I noted earlier enabled white male U.S. art students to acceptably and 174 00:21:13,800 --> 00:21:20,070 temporarily break out of social norms as performing in blackface redefined whiteness, 175 00:21:20,070 --> 00:21:29,320 playing as female or as an effeminate dandy, reinvigorated masculinity as some minstrels characters especially, 176 00:21:29,320 --> 00:21:36,120 said Coon, parody the black dandy to denigrate black communities desires for social mobility. 177 00:21:36,120 --> 00:21:46,530 The performance of these figures in France echoes U.S. artists cultural anxieties about their own hopes for upward mobility in the French art world. 178 00:21:46,530 --> 00:21:54,120 When presented in Paris, as one newspaper declared quote such as Only Americans can produce blackface, 179 00:21:54,120 --> 00:22:02,480 exported men and women constructions of U.S. culture. As exotic and for foreign audiences. 180 00:22:02,480 --> 00:22:05,570 But these were not the first minstrel shows in Paris, 181 00:22:05,570 --> 00:22:15,770 as Smalls has traced minstrelsy arrived in France first by the United Kingdom in the 1840s, with U.S. performers arriving in the late 1850s. 182 00:22:15,770 --> 00:22:23,990 In 1859, Le Monde illustrator reproduced a page of engravings related to a minstrel show, then in Paris. 183 00:22:23,990 --> 00:22:30,080 The scene is framed by two caricatured black poutine, one with exaggerated lips and nose, 184 00:22:30,080 --> 00:22:36,200 and the other with dense, curly hair carrying a banner to announce a LaBeouf American. 185 00:22:36,200 --> 00:22:38,750 We're kind of comedic clowns. 186 00:22:38,750 --> 00:22:46,790 A U.S. flag drapes at left over a box of vignettes, which include a scene of nine musicians seated in a semi-circle at top. 187 00:22:46,790 --> 00:22:51,770 And this is the standard minstrel stage structure. 188 00:22:51,770 --> 00:23:00,920 Two images of dancing figures flanking a central vignettes and four figures playing stodgy puritans at the bottom at centre. 189 00:23:00,920 --> 00:23:07,550 A figure with his face in profile to reveal exaggerated physiognomy plays the banjo. 190 00:23:07,550 --> 00:23:11,420 Neither his body nor his instrument are contained within the frame. 191 00:23:11,420 --> 00:23:20,150 His feet project outward towards the viewer and billow toward the Puritans, and the banjo overlaps the ongoing cakewalk at right. 192 00:23:20,150 --> 00:23:28,190 This juxtaposition of Puritan and blackface constructions reinforces the differences between these identity performances, 193 00:23:28,190 --> 00:23:30,500 though as between last week and this, 194 00:23:30,500 --> 00:23:40,310 the US community in Paris adopted both to construct narratives of cultural uniqueness through fraught and problematic tropes of innocence. 195 00:23:40,310 --> 00:23:44,900 Smalls has can contextualised blackface in Third Republic, France, 196 00:23:44,900 --> 00:23:51,620 when it became particularly popular as a tool to frame anxieties about Frenchness and xenophobia. 197 00:23:51,620 --> 00:23:58,880 He describes these quote visual shenanigans of racialized spectacle as tools to render otherness 198 00:23:58,880 --> 00:24:06,770 invisible minstrelsy operated in tandem with colonialism by exercising the black body in France, 199 00:24:06,770 --> 00:24:14,360 where, as Mitchell has recently argued, quote blacks could not and should not be a part of the French body politic. 200 00:24:14,360 --> 00:24:20,210 A system of exclusion was built as Beth Gordon, Janine Lewicki, 201 00:24:20,210 --> 00:24:30,830 Dana Hale and many others have argued French imperial projects designs narratives of blacks from Africa as primitives which justified colonialism. 202 00:24:30,830 --> 00:24:43,760 And I show you here a map of French West Africa. By 1914, the Dahomey Kingdom, heir to the oil empire, had been annexed as a French colony in 1894. 203 00:24:43,760 --> 00:24:49,640 In the 1890s to hominins were exhibited in Paris in human zoos like the Jordan to act in a 204 00:24:49,640 --> 00:24:57,350 touchstone where Parisians would observe so-called primitive people to build a sense of difference. 205 00:24:57,350 --> 00:25:05,000 A colonial village with two hominins on display in traditional dress was constructed at the Universal Exposition in nineteen hundred. 206 00:25:05,000 --> 00:25:12,920 And that's what I showed you in these two stereo views, and the space featured rustic, straw roofed huts, roughly stucco, 207 00:25:12,920 --> 00:25:21,290 wood architecture and other elements of a perceived primitive culture to justify French colonial oversights. 208 00:25:21,290 --> 00:25:31,610 Primitive East caricatures based on minstrelsy circulated perniciously in French visual culture in evolutionary narratives applied to human society. 209 00:25:31,610 --> 00:25:38,660 The cakewalk, for example, became a symbol, as Gordon argues of quote, black regressive traits. 210 00:25:38,660 --> 00:25:43,730 The reader reproduced this caricature by George Edward that literally says this reversion 211 00:25:43,730 --> 00:25:50,630 with the title quote how the Parisian insists on demonstrating that we descend from the ape. 212 00:25:50,630 --> 00:25:58,790 The caricature traces three pairs performing the cakewalk, leaning their bodies backward while prancing forward white figures that left 213 00:25:58,790 --> 00:26:04,100 black or black face figures at centre and monkeys at right there curled tails, 214 00:26:04,100 --> 00:26:07,250 echoing the ribbon shape, edging the box. 215 00:26:07,250 --> 00:26:18,440 The image implies a social evolution that places white copy of the dance farther along in progress from the animal forms than the black figures. 216 00:26:18,440 --> 00:26:28,220 Ideas of the cake walk as evolutionary regression framed the perceptions of Americans as primitive when they performed in blackface. 217 00:26:28,220 --> 00:26:34,910 Other minstrel shows in Paris likely propelled U.S. artists in the AP to host their own. 218 00:26:34,910 --> 00:26:42,200 They would have observed that such displays had currency in bohemian Paris and with elite audiences. 219 00:26:42,200 --> 00:26:50,150 And here I show you a painting other minstrel show by Jean-Francois Afellay that James Smalls has written about at length, 220 00:26:50,150 --> 00:26:57,360 painted in 1887, presenting black figures as curiosities for French observers overlapping with. 221 00:26:57,360 --> 00:27:06,900 Practises of race display in the human zoos, the performers are carefully confined in a space between the audience, in the background and the viewer. 222 00:27:06,900 --> 00:27:12,390 And colour operates suggestively. Most of the viewers are white and wear white, 223 00:27:12,390 --> 00:27:19,140 and the ground separating the performers from the viewers is literally ensconced in strokes of whiteness, 224 00:27:19,140 --> 00:27:24,840 while roughly renders ambiguous whether these are black or blackface performers, illustrating how, 225 00:27:24,840 --> 00:27:31,680 as Smalls argues, quote, blackness becomes a floating signifier a malleable trope in Paris. 226 00:27:31,680 --> 00:27:35,850 The AP photograph renders the blackface explicit. 227 00:27:35,850 --> 00:27:43,260 Here, the pairing of white tuxedo clad and blackface figures on stage blurs the boundaries that Raphael polices. 228 00:27:43,260 --> 00:27:48,240 Yet, as in Rafales painting, we remain distanced from the figures on the stage. 229 00:27:48,240 --> 00:27:55,290 Here, with a blinding reflection of whiteness reflecting on the wood in the context of popular performance in France, 230 00:27:55,290 --> 00:28:05,070 like the one Rafaela relates French viewers primitive IST, I was primed to receive blackface as a claim to primaeval identity. 231 00:28:05,070 --> 00:28:11,670 How did African-American artists entry into Paris intervene in these cultural conversations? 232 00:28:11,670 --> 00:28:17,980 African-Americans were generally not welcomed at the U.S. artists clubs in Paris vote work. 233 00:28:17,980 --> 00:28:27,210 Fuller was denied admission to her prearranged lodgings at the American Girls Club in autumn 1899 by the director, Miss Actorly, 234 00:28:27,210 --> 00:28:35,470 whom the artist recalled in a later interview in a transcript to which I'm grateful to Renee Ater for sharing with me. 235 00:28:35,470 --> 00:28:40,080 I actually told her quote I would hate to see you ill treated, discriminated against, 236 00:28:40,080 --> 00:28:45,900 and there are southern girls here in the club and they may not show you welcome end quote. 237 00:28:45,900 --> 00:28:57,600 Fuller did exhibit at the clubs in 19 02 and showed her dynamic sculpture The Wretched at the salon of the Societe Nacional de Bozak in 19 03. 238 00:28:57,600 --> 00:29:11,400 William A. Harper, whose royal French landscape is at rights, was denied membership at the AP in 1985, when 13 club members objected to his inclusion. 239 00:29:11,400 --> 00:29:18,300 Yet Tanner was a member of the AP from the summer of 1890 to a photograph from his papers 240 00:29:18,300 --> 00:29:23,820 depicts him seated amongst fellow club members in the garden in front of the AP's first site. 241 00:29:23,820 --> 00:29:28,920 And he's located here labelled labelled himself as Fig. five. 242 00:29:28,920 --> 00:29:38,520 He exhibited at least 15 times between 1896 and 1922 and was a staple in reports on AARP activities and events. 243 00:29:38,520 --> 00:29:43,800 Unsurprisingly, he does not appear to have attended the minstrel shows that we might imagine them 244 00:29:43,800 --> 00:29:48,870 to have been almost inescapable at the club through the racist sheet music, 245 00:29:48,870 --> 00:29:55,500 the soundscape of racial antics in the rehearsals of the offensive lyrics and jarring tones of the music 246 00:29:55,500 --> 00:30:02,970 echoing in the club quarters attached to the artist who was fastidiously seeking equality in France. 247 00:30:02,970 --> 00:30:08,400 Several scholars working on blackface and music have noted a recurrent quote terror that 248 00:30:08,400 --> 00:30:16,050 minstrelsy and cited for African-Americans as it restaged white mastery even after emancipation. 249 00:30:16,050 --> 00:30:24,810 Tanner's paintings of the period, like Daniel in the Lion's Den, which he exhibited at the Salon des artist Forcé in 1896, 250 00:30:24,810 --> 00:30:32,280 inflect biblical stories that draw on torments and that reveal a sense of self and interiority. 251 00:30:32,280 --> 00:30:39,990 Art historians Dewey Moseby and Maurice Frank Woods have read Daniel as an extension of Tanner himself, 252 00:30:39,990 --> 00:30:43,830 adding minstrelsy to other injustices imposed on the artist. 253 00:30:43,830 --> 00:30:53,610 One imagines how the growling sounds from the prowling lions pervade an echo in the basement prison like the echoes of minstrel songs. 254 00:30:53,610 --> 00:31:03,000 Daniel offers a spiritual quietude and interiority that counters the noisy antics of minstrelsy in the same way Tanner's faith, 255 00:31:03,000 --> 00:31:07,740 work ethic and imaginative art practise supersede the racist structures. 256 00:31:07,740 --> 00:31:12,210 He navigated a metaphorical den of hungry lions. 257 00:31:12,210 --> 00:31:14,730 There is a thickness to the painted surface, 258 00:31:14,730 --> 00:31:23,130 and in the end you can see the kind of texture and impasto in the image on the left protective and insulating paints, 259 00:31:23,130 --> 00:31:30,690 building and impenetrability in response to the thick club harshness of the Paris art world around him. 260 00:31:30,690 --> 00:31:40,110 Exhibited again at the Palais de Bazaar at the Exposition in 19:00, Daniel in the Lion's den won a gold medal there. 261 00:31:40,110 --> 00:31:46,800 Tanner's painting offered a bookend to the exhibit of American Negroes in the Palace of Social Economy, 262 00:31:46,800 --> 00:31:49,770 which was just a ten minute walk from the Grand Palais. 263 00:31:49,770 --> 00:31:57,000 And on the map on the screen, Ive starred where Tanner's painting was and where the exhibition were now going to talk about was in. 264 00:31:57,000 --> 00:32:05,020 Stalled. This exhibition intercepted the stereotypes of blackness built both by the U.S. colony and 265 00:32:05,020 --> 00:32:11,680 by French exotic science displays in Paris with a small congressional budget of $15000. 266 00:32:11,680 --> 00:32:17,530 It was organised over a five year or five month period by Thomas Callaway, 267 00:32:17,530 --> 00:32:25,150 W.E.B. Dubois and Daniel Murray to be placed amongst sociological studies and humanitarian projects. 268 00:32:25,150 --> 00:32:34,870 It comprised about one quarter of the display, and you can see the layout of the room at the rate with boxes around this exhibition, 269 00:32:34,870 --> 00:32:40,510 and it was actually in the same room as the equitable life insurance company display bring, 270 00:32:40,510 --> 00:32:47,920 likely bringing in a piece for Pixar to whom I mentioned earlier as involved with the minstrel shows. 271 00:32:47,920 --> 00:32:56,440 The exhibit of American Negroes inhabited only a 12 square, 12 foot square space, with a few adri adjacent to the trains. 272 00:32:56,440 --> 00:33:01,120 But the exhibit offered a massive array of well-organised material. 273 00:33:01,120 --> 00:33:07,750 Its linear structure, order and balance immediately counters the sloppy and unwieldy caricature of 274 00:33:07,750 --> 00:33:14,440 African-Americans built by minstrelsy by refusing to define blackness in any singular way. 275 00:33:14,440 --> 00:33:18,070 It revealed the limitations of the stereotype. 276 00:33:18,070 --> 00:33:26,050 Further, its manifold representations of complex ideas of blackness could not be contained by a single photograph. 277 00:33:26,050 --> 00:33:35,410 Another photograph looking towards the entrance of the room just to the right of the exhibition includes bookcases Jim pointing out here, 278 00:33:35,410 --> 00:33:43,180 which I think part of the exhibit and then in the photograph on the right's looking down the hallway. 279 00:33:43,180 --> 00:33:51,280 The image only hints at these cases to the left, but in here there were small dioramas that I'll talk about later, which were placed. 280 00:33:51,280 --> 00:33:56,020 In addition, many parts of the exhibition, especially photographs and written texts, 281 00:33:56,020 --> 00:34:00,430 were in bound volumes that aren't captured in the renderings of the space. 282 00:34:00,430 --> 00:34:10,780 Although all or almost all are extant in the Library of Congress collections, together, the display builds a cumulative intermediate set of arguments, 283 00:34:10,780 --> 00:34:20,920 with material compiled from black colleges, boarding schools and businesses, and it won a grand prise medal as well as 15 individual medals. 284 00:34:20,920 --> 00:34:26,380 Scholars in the history of photography and in African-American studies including Deborah Willis, 285 00:34:26,380 --> 00:34:30,040 David Levering Lewis, Mabel Wilson, Sean Michelle Smith, 286 00:34:30,040 --> 00:34:41,710 Laura Wexler, Judith Davidoff and many others have shown that the exhibits accumulated arguments operated on multiple visual and discursive levels. 287 00:34:41,710 --> 00:34:45,190 The multivalent display did not have a unified message. 288 00:34:45,190 --> 00:34:53,050 For instance, ideological directives from black intellectuals like Booker T. Washington and Dubois do not align, 289 00:34:53,050 --> 00:34:58,390 and there are other competing threads. I'm happy to talk through with you in the Q&A. 290 00:34:58,390 --> 00:35:06,640 Yet many of these distinct threads cohere in their shared attempts to counter the caricatures of blackface and of primitivism, 291 00:35:06,640 --> 00:35:13,300 as one reviewer put it to quote correct erroneous ideas which may have gained currency 292 00:35:13,300 --> 00:35:20,620 unquote and in their articulation of their own cultural use in order to do so. 293 00:35:20,620 --> 00:35:32,410 The concept of the new Negro, which emerged in this period and became codified in the 1920s, drew attention to the idea of burgeoning culture. 294 00:35:32,410 --> 00:35:39,070 Calloway's ideas emphasised the display of African-American development and possibilities, 295 00:35:39,070 --> 00:35:44,200 and he summarises the exhibition's attention to and here again, I quote from him. 296 00:35:44,200 --> 00:35:53,320 Advancement made with regard to domestic and educational life as a result of the newborn aspirations of the race to boys. 297 00:35:53,320 --> 00:35:59,140 Claims about the role of candidness in the exhibition also reinforce these ideas. 298 00:35:59,140 --> 00:36:01,540 He summarised it as a quote Honest, 299 00:36:01,540 --> 00:36:12,250 straightforward exhibit of a small nation of people picturing their lives and developments without apology or gloss and above all, made by themselves. 300 00:36:12,250 --> 00:36:19,510 This language calloway's advancement and newborn aspirations and Dubois is honest, 301 00:36:19,510 --> 00:36:24,880 straightforward without apology or gloss underscore narratives of birth, 302 00:36:24,880 --> 00:36:35,410 youth, incipient culture, directness and unmediated imagery that paralleled the South projections in the mostly white U.S. colony in Paris. 303 00:36:35,410 --> 00:36:42,220 These ideas echo comments from contemporaries I shared with you at the first lecture, such as from Gilbert Parker, 304 00:36:42,220 --> 00:36:48,280 who claimed in 1891 that Americans as a whole see quote without the intervening veil of 305 00:36:48,280 --> 00:36:54,910 convention and tradition the narratives the exhibition proposed about African American culture, 306 00:36:54,910 --> 00:36:58,570 its progress, fraternity and origin story. 307 00:36:58,570 --> 00:37:06,700 Drew on characteristics that paralleled and ultimately fuelled wider cultural projections of the U.S. colony in Paris. 308 00:37:06,700 --> 00:37:10,570 So even as they're countering stereotypes of minstrel shows, 309 00:37:10,570 --> 00:37:19,600 as Smith observes quote disrupting centralised narratives that depicted people of colour as the uncivilised infants of human evolution. 310 00:37:19,600 --> 00:37:28,840 Many images traded in the same myths of U.S. culture as useful and in progress that were already circulating in France. 311 00:37:28,840 --> 00:37:38,620 Within the persuasive space of the display. Images, charts and texts fostered the useful trajectory of black culture in the reconstruction era, 312 00:37:38,620 --> 00:37:48,850 arguing for a parallel reversal from the liability of relatedness to the asset of being new information and looking to the future. 313 00:37:48,850 --> 00:37:58,150 This narrative of directness of origins and incipient both subtly and overtly weaves through many of the objects on display. 314 00:37:58,150 --> 00:38:05,140 One of the sociological charts from the Atlantic University uses the colour black to denote percentage 315 00:38:05,140 --> 00:38:14,740 of enslavement and green as symbolic of freedom to highlight the moment of 1865 as a key origin point. 316 00:38:14,740 --> 00:38:23,680 Many parts of the display focussed on literacy and writing as a symbol of budding African-American education and cultural production. 317 00:38:23,680 --> 00:38:29,530 For instance, another chart highlighted the decline of the literacy following emancipation. 318 00:38:29,530 --> 00:38:37,120 Librarian of Congress Daniel Murray made a pamphlet listing 14 known books published by African-American authors, 319 00:38:37,120 --> 00:38:48,370 and two hundred examples were on view in the exhibition. And one reviewer speaking in particular about this part of the display noted that the display 320 00:38:48,370 --> 00:38:55,750 revealed how quote a people without a country and without favour undertook a literary practise, 321 00:38:55,750 --> 00:39:03,760 and this reviewer's tone suggests this idea again of culture information writing of literature published following emancipation. 322 00:39:03,760 --> 00:39:09,730 The author described it as the quote first literary utterance of the Negro, who has been to school. 323 00:39:09,730 --> 00:39:12,910 It is also prophetic of what may be expected. 324 00:39:12,910 --> 00:39:20,680 It is the promise that authorship of the most interesting and valuable kind will develop in the course of the progressive life of the race. 325 00:39:20,680 --> 00:39:29,410 End quote. Such literacy was underscored in the photograph of the Reading Nurse by Thomas Askew that I showed you last week, 326 00:39:29,410 --> 00:39:30,880 and I'll show you some other photographs. 327 00:39:30,880 --> 00:39:37,960 And as we go through them, think about the kind of array of variation in skin tone across the photographs itself, 328 00:39:37,960 --> 00:39:42,520 a counter to the singularity of blackface. 329 00:39:42,520 --> 00:39:51,790 The exhibition included a set of framed mastheads of Black owned newspapers, a charts and photographs of the planets in Richmond, Virginia, 330 00:39:51,790 --> 00:40:02,110 being assembled and printed as ways to articulate burgeoning control over representation to many of the photographs in a 331 00:40:02,110 --> 00:40:10,810 Atlanta series depict young children in one three barefoot boys sit or lean against a faux rock in a portrait studio, 332 00:40:10,810 --> 00:40:15,880 as though pausing from play in a portrait of a young girl at writes. 333 00:40:15,880 --> 00:40:23,410 Askew places her between two sculptures and holding an oversized picture book that seems to depict stone architecture. 334 00:40:23,410 --> 00:40:31,030 She is pensive, and her social mobility is implied by her curiosity and the sumptuous fabrics which flank her. 335 00:40:31,030 --> 00:40:41,080 This focus on children underscored a projection of metaphorical cultural use, but in culture also emerged in representations of tutelage, 336 00:40:41,080 --> 00:40:48,190 such as in the transmission of knowledge in a piano lesson imagined in a wealthy black parlour at Left, 337 00:40:48,190 --> 00:40:56,500 an echo of Turner's paintings of instruction from the 1890s, to which we'll turn our attention next week. 338 00:40:56,500 --> 00:41:05,860 Some of Frances Benjamin Johnston photographs from the Hampton School also use construction metaphorically to signal progress in this one. 339 00:41:05,860 --> 00:41:15,670 Three students, two black and one Native American working to model a space and imply an incipient development 340 00:41:15,670 --> 00:41:21,410 and maturity in their acts and in their compositional scaffolding of the figures. 341 00:41:21,410 --> 00:41:28,630 Through work, there will be progress and it is this social mobility that minstrelsy sought to repress. 342 00:41:28,630 --> 00:41:36,170 These themes came to the fore in the dioramas value, rising education and progress in Black Life, which were placed in those hallway. 343 00:41:36,170 --> 00:41:40,690 The trains I mentioned earlier and I've been scouring for photographs. 344 00:41:40,690 --> 00:41:45,550 So if anyone happens to know if there are other photographs of these models, 345 00:41:45,550 --> 00:41:50,410 the only ones I've found are the one that I show you on the screen to the right. 346 00:41:50,410 --> 00:41:58,040 These models were made by painter Thomas Hunter and his students at the Washington, D.C., Coloured Public School on. 347 00:41:58,040 --> 00:42:02,960 Street and stair builds an integrated arts curriculum which crossed fine arts, 348 00:42:02,960 --> 00:42:08,360 meanwhile, in industrial arts and across architecture and landscape drawing alike. 349 00:42:08,360 --> 00:42:17,240 The models here are visible under the counter, where they were displayed in the American exhibition in Buffalo, 350 00:42:17,240 --> 00:42:22,460 and they were made with miniature figures of persons, schoolhouses and surroundings. 351 00:42:22,460 --> 00:42:31,260 One visitor described. They traced for one reporter progress from quote the most primitive backward hut to 352 00:42:31,260 --> 00:42:36,420 the finely appointed and commodious coloured high school building in Washington, 353 00:42:36,420 --> 00:42:43,170 Calloway lingers on this origin point. Quote A family of sex slaves has just emancipated. 354 00:42:43,170 --> 00:42:51,870 Just behind them are woods representing the darkness of slavery and before them is a winding path leading into an unknown future. 355 00:42:51,870 --> 00:42:57,570 A baby signifies a mother's quote first joy of freedom and the young boy, 356 00:42:57,570 --> 00:43:05,910 the character whose development is traced through these nine models, of course, grows to become the principal of the M Street School. 357 00:43:05,910 --> 00:43:11,820 The model's frame the central role of education in enabling that progress with the growing child, 358 00:43:11,820 --> 00:43:22,020 a metaphor for the growth of African-American culture extent reviews herald the models as a display of black development after emancipation. 359 00:43:22,020 --> 00:43:32,640 Fellow teacher and later principal of the M Street School, Anna Julia Cooper, a formerly enslaved person, celebrated the model's arguments in 1892. 360 00:43:32,640 --> 00:43:40,680 Cooper published a book called A Voice from the South by a black woman of the South, which was listed in Murray's pamphlet. 361 00:43:40,680 --> 00:43:48,900 And in a review of the exhibition, she described hamster's models lingering on the last one as the quotes climax of the upward 362 00:43:48,900 --> 00:43:55,560 struggles of her people and the chasm bridged in the second generation along the shadowy path, 363 00:43:55,560 --> 00:44:03,240 unquote quote reinvigorating the trajectory of education and self-determination at the centre of hamster's models. 364 00:44:03,240 --> 00:44:06,900 Cooper later completed her doctorate at the Sorbonne in Paris, 365 00:44:06,900 --> 00:44:12,750 where she wrote a dissertation on French perceptions of enslavement after the French Revolution. 366 00:44:12,750 --> 00:44:20,130 In recounting the details of the contents and reception of the exhibition on the whole, Callaway lingered on the models, 367 00:44:20,130 --> 00:44:26,790 arguing that this would be the quote most attractive feature of goal building a hierarchy across the Intermedia 368 00:44:26,790 --> 00:44:33,630 Display that rendered the models the most legible and the most accessible even more than the photographs. 369 00:44:33,630 --> 00:44:38,490 Callaway declared quote If thousands have looked at other features of the exhibit, 370 00:44:38,490 --> 00:44:44,280 tens of thousands have studied these models dramatic figures of real life. 371 00:44:44,280 --> 00:44:49,230 They speak to the most ignorant visitor end quote. 372 00:44:49,230 --> 00:44:54,420 So the primitive and primitive ized ideas of blackness designed by the ape minstrel 373 00:44:54,420 --> 00:45:00,960 shows builds a cultural immaturity in Paris that was ironically matched by the incipient 374 00:45:00,960 --> 00:45:07,620 culture projected by parts of the exhibit of American Negroes in the context between 375 00:45:07,620 --> 00:45:13,740 behavioural cues as a contest between behavioural cues linked with blackness. 376 00:45:13,740 --> 00:45:18,150 These projections in Paris were marked by paradoxical savvy. 377 00:45:18,150 --> 00:45:29,010 These competing ideas of innocence, primitive and incipient suggest the layers and ruptures in constructions of U.S. culture on the Parisian stage. 378 00:45:29,010 --> 00:45:34,470 The ways in which these projections of US black identities in Paris contradict each other. 379 00:45:34,470 --> 00:45:40,710 And yet still enforce a larger hole speaks to that complexity and ambivalence. 380 00:45:40,710 --> 00:45:43,170 The cases show how complex messages, 381 00:45:43,170 --> 00:45:53,100 building and dismantling racial hierarchies emerge from the dialogic spaces across the city in performance and exhibition spaces. 382 00:45:53,100 --> 00:45:55,500 And for further conversation on that. 383 00:45:55,500 --> 00:46:05,100 I hope that you will join the Birkbeck and Durham centres for nineteenth century studies on Friday at five p.m. for another roundtable about race, 384 00:46:05,100 --> 00:46:14,410 gender and intermedia art, practise in fantastical Paris and my torch colleagues will post the registration link in the chat bar. 385 00:46:14,410 --> 00:46:23,430 Now, while this competing set of cultural performances was largely bifurcated across these two groups in Paris, one individual, 386 00:46:23,430 --> 00:46:34,080 Agnes B. Moody, offers an exemplar of this innocence entanglements through her savvy adoption of identity markers in both spaces. 387 00:46:34,080 --> 00:46:44,940 Most days at the Paris Exposition in 19:00, one could find moody performing as an Aunt Jemima character serving corn cakes in the Corn Kitchen, 388 00:46:44,940 --> 00:46:52,440 a thick shawl perpetually wrapped around her shoulders. This lunch bar was located in the agricultural annexe, 389 00:46:52,440 --> 00:46:59,160 about 20 minutes on foot from the exhibit of American Negroes, offering free food made with corn. 390 00:46:59,160 --> 00:47:07,890 It was a ploy assertively trying to build a European export market for corn, then regarded largely as animal feed. 391 00:47:07,890 --> 00:47:14,880 The press circulated stories about it being Indian corn, in particular as a uniquely American product. 392 00:47:14,880 --> 00:47:18,270 Thus tracing a settler colonial export. 393 00:47:18,270 --> 00:47:25,440 It also more often circulated a fantasy image, which you see at left of what the mini pavilion could have looked like, 394 00:47:25,440 --> 00:47:28,590 rather than what the lunch counter looked like that was actually installed, 395 00:47:28,590 --> 00:47:35,370 which you see on the right discussions of the display cultivated ideas of Americans as naive. 396 00:47:35,370 --> 00:47:40,620 The Syracuse Evening Herald reported quote while predicting some quote Yankee trick 397 00:47:40,620 --> 00:47:45,960 the wily Parisian holds back while he warily watches his unsophisticated cousin, 398 00:47:45,960 --> 00:47:50,010 the provincial, who has boldly accepted the proffered food. 399 00:47:50,010 --> 00:47:56,100 But of course, in the article, the French become quote willing to learn a good thing from the barbarians. 400 00:47:56,100 --> 00:48:03,510 The Corn Kitchen simultaneously cohered and past native black and white Americans as primitive, 401 00:48:03,510 --> 00:48:09,420 moody and another unknown black woman representing the quote typical mammy from the South, 402 00:48:09,420 --> 00:48:15,480 as reported in the press, signified the agricultural labour so often centred in enslavement, 403 00:48:15,480 --> 00:48:22,500 as well as larger narratives of servitude as they acted in accordance with the stock minstrel character. 404 00:48:22,500 --> 00:48:29,340 Some newspaper articles caricatured Moody's dialect and her disinterest in the wonders of the exposition, 405 00:48:29,340 --> 00:48:34,200 filling out readers imaginations of her as a rural simpleton. 406 00:48:34,200 --> 00:48:40,950 But while Moody performed to stereotype in the Corn Kitchen, she was an activist, 407 00:48:40,950 --> 00:48:48,900 an intellectual and a member of various clubs seeking race equality born in enslavement in Hagerstown, Maryland. 408 00:48:48,900 --> 00:48:56,100 She escaped with her family to Canada in the early 1850s and spent much of her adult life in Chicago. 409 00:48:56,100 --> 00:49:04,260 She was a second vice president of the National Association of Coloured Women and was active in conversations to condemn lynching. 410 00:49:04,260 --> 00:49:10,920 After the year after the exposition, when other black intellectuals Calloway, Dubois, 411 00:49:10,920 --> 00:49:20,610 Cooper and the artist Fuller convened in the US Pavilion in August nineteen hundred for a dinner to celebrate Black Americans in Paris, 412 00:49:20,610 --> 00:49:25,440 Moody took her place amongst them, so she may have played primitive, 413 00:49:25,440 --> 00:49:33,420 but that social performance in white spaces effectively obscured the ways in which she was actually working for progress. 414 00:49:33,420 --> 00:49:46,230 Thank you for your attention, and I'd like to invite Joan Smalls to return to talk through this material. 415 00:49:46,230 --> 00:49:52,800 Thank you, Emily, for a really wonderful paper. 416 00:49:52,800 --> 00:49:59,670 And as you know, I have done research on minstrelsy and its reception in France, 417 00:49:59,670 --> 00:50:08,520 but not linking this American part of it, which I find very, very, extremely, extremely interesting. 418 00:50:08,520 --> 00:50:13,440 I was just wondering, I had a lot of questions as I was going through your your your talk. 419 00:50:13,440 --> 00:50:22,800 And one of them, one of those has to do with the idea of of the minstrel shows when the ape was were conducting them. 420 00:50:22,800 --> 00:50:31,290 Was there any sort of documentation of sort of the individual shows you, you know, in terms of someone writing about it? 421 00:50:31,290 --> 00:50:33,810 Or is it recorded in some way? 422 00:50:33,810 --> 00:50:40,800 And the reason I ask that is because I sort of parallel it with the, for example, in France later on with the fully Birger, 423 00:50:40,800 --> 00:50:50,190 when you have all of these things that these kinds of interesting shows that happen, but those were never really recorded. 424 00:50:50,190 --> 00:50:54,660 You know, no one was sitting there, actually, you know, giving critiques of them. 425 00:50:54,660 --> 00:51:02,220 So I was just wondering in terms of the context in which you're looking at, you know, think about the themes. 426 00:51:02,220 --> 00:51:09,600 I love the synergies and overlaps between our interest in minstrelsy in France, with your work on the bohemian spaces, 427 00:51:09,600 --> 00:51:19,050 especially in mathematics and then this kind of sort of sub community in another part of Paris happening simultaneously. 428 00:51:19,050 --> 00:51:24,330 And I think the American case is so interesting because it in many ways the U.S. 429 00:51:24,330 --> 00:51:29,910 artists community in Paris tries to separate itself from that bohemian culture. 430 00:51:29,910 --> 00:51:32,970 And so it's odd that there's this kind of synergy there. 431 00:51:32,970 --> 00:51:40,440 But to answer your question in terms of documentation, there isn't a kind of archives of the club in any one place. 432 00:51:40,440 --> 00:51:50,220 But since I've been working on this material, I've been assembling newspaper articles and also exhibition catalogues in individual artists papers. 433 00:51:50,220 --> 00:51:58,710 And that's how I've come to learn about the minstrel shows has been mainly through their reports in the newspapers, 434 00:51:58,710 --> 00:52:06,990 and I've been surprised to the extent to which people went through these kind of detailed discussions of actually what songs were performed, 435 00:52:06,990 --> 00:52:17,160 which members were participating. There's a kind of rich archive that is starting to emerge from those newspaper recordings that have kind 436 00:52:17,160 --> 00:52:24,180 of enabled me to to piece together in greater detail kind of what order things happened in and such. 437 00:52:24,180 --> 00:52:29,820 I also think that they may be linked with Colombia's Varsity Club. 438 00:52:29,820 --> 00:52:38,610 They started in 1894 to have an annual fundraiser show that wasn't necessarily minstrelsy, but just kind of theatrical performance. 439 00:52:38,610 --> 00:52:45,570 And Murchison, who I mentioned as playing Mr. Tambo in the 1898 show. 440 00:52:45,570 --> 00:52:55,950 He was a student at Columbia then, and he was a musician who often performed in those shows and was a member of the Banjo Club at Columbia. 441 00:52:55,950 --> 00:53:02,340 And so I think that he was really instrumental in offering to club leadership ideas 442 00:53:02,340 --> 00:53:10,460 about what they could include in the performance and kind of how to put it together. 443 00:53:10,460 --> 00:53:17,310 Great, that's that's really interesting. It's really, really interesting. I have a lot of questions, but I'm going to let other people question. 444 00:53:17,310 --> 00:53:27,320 I'm going to read from the questions that we have here. And I think the first question that you touched on it, but maybe you could elaborate on this. 445 00:53:27,320 --> 00:53:31,790 This is a question from Jane Gabel. She writes. 446 00:53:31,790 --> 00:53:39,290 Or. Yes. Jane writes, for instance, the American Girls Club turned away medivolve fuller. 447 00:53:39,290 --> 00:53:47,020 Was there a difference in the way Americans treated blacks and the way they were treated by the French? 448 00:53:47,020 --> 00:53:58,730 Yeah. Thank you, Jane. That's a great question. I did mention Fuller's kind of unwelcome at a girls club in 1899, and incidentally or not, 449 00:53:58,730 --> 00:54:07,250 actually who was the director as actually is documented as attending the AARP minstrel show a couple of months later. 450 00:54:07,250 --> 00:54:14,450 And I do think that those examples, the case of Harper and the case of Fuller, 451 00:54:14,450 --> 00:54:20,390 do you suggest that there was a difference in the kind of possibilities? 452 00:54:20,390 --> 00:54:22,850 Tanner's case is a really complicated one, 453 00:54:22,850 --> 00:54:31,370 because he there is another story that has been published a couple of times that Penny de Bois described Tanner 454 00:54:31,370 --> 00:54:39,080 wanting to have a position on a committee at an artist club in Paris and that nobody would vote for him. 455 00:54:39,080 --> 00:54:43,910 And this has always been assumed to be talking about the American Heart Association of Paris. 456 00:54:43,910 --> 00:54:48,050 And I always thought that that didn't make sense to me because of the ways in which he's, as I mentioned, 457 00:54:48,050 --> 00:54:54,980 so deeply integrated into that other club and exhibiting there, and he's also on committees there. 458 00:54:54,980 --> 00:55:02,030 And so what I think has happened is that to parse this comment is actually about the Paris Society of American Painters, 459 00:55:02,030 --> 00:55:09,890 which is another U.S. artist's club in Paris that was formed around a generation kind of earlier generation of ex-pat U.S. 460 00:55:09,890 --> 00:55:17,900 artists whose main goal was to try to control which American paintings would be in the international exhibitions in Europe. 461 00:55:17,900 --> 00:55:28,520 And Tanner joined that organisation. And I think that that's the space where he ultimately suffered racism in that way. 462 00:55:28,520 --> 00:55:36,140 And I think so. To get back to Jane's question, Tanner is also a really interesting figure because he has written some things 463 00:55:36,140 --> 00:55:42,470 that suggest that race did not make an impact on his art career in France. 464 00:55:42,470 --> 00:55:50,870 But then he also has written about the kind of effects of racism on his life and progress. 465 00:55:50,870 --> 00:55:59,540 And so it's kind of difficult to read between the lines, but certainly the fact that he expatriated to France and had his career there, 466 00:55:59,540 --> 00:56:11,880 I think, are tied to a sense of greater access in France in the art world than he would have had in the United States. 467 00:56:11,880 --> 00:56:19,530 Great, thanks. Thanks for that. Here's a question from Kwabena Slaughter. 468 00:56:19,530 --> 00:56:25,980 The question is Booker T. Washington is standing backstage in all of these stories. 469 00:56:25,980 --> 00:56:33,120 Why is his influence not being acknowledged? Its photo is on the wall in that image on the right. 470 00:56:33,120 --> 00:56:37,590 Right now, it's what? Yes. Yes. Thank you for your question. 471 00:56:37,590 --> 00:56:48,330 Yeah, no. So Washington is appears in the exhibition, and he also was involved in facilitating the Tuskegee display that is in the exhibition space. 472 00:56:48,330 --> 00:56:55,110 And certainly, his influence and ideas are underscored in many of the parts of the display. 473 00:56:55,110 --> 00:57:02,970 But in terms of the kind of official organisation the figures were Callaway and Dubois and Murray, 474 00:57:02,970 --> 00:57:09,810 and they're the ones who are listed in the kind of fair records the official reports of the fair. 475 00:57:09,810 --> 00:57:18,090 And your question gets at one of the kinds of nuances across the exhibition that scholars have traced, 476 00:57:18,090 --> 00:57:26,460 which is that there is a kind of emergent tension between Washington and Dubois that becomes clear in this movement. 477 00:57:26,460 --> 00:57:33,690 They both see education as crucial to the development of progress for African-American culture. 478 00:57:33,690 --> 00:57:45,600 But for Washington, he is invested in industrial schools that are teaching skills like manual skills that can be kind of wielded and taught. 479 00:57:45,600 --> 00:57:54,930 Whereas Dubois is much more interested in promoting a kind of liberal arts education model where students are studying in all fields. 480 00:57:54,930 --> 00:57:59,820 And I think that what happens in the parts of the exhibition and scholars have traced 481 00:57:59,820 --> 00:58:07,620 this in greater detail and between the materials related to Tuskegee and the materials, 482 00:58:07,620 --> 00:58:18,360 for instance, from Atlanta, are that you end up with like two very different ideas about education and labour and kind of mental labour, 483 00:58:18,360 --> 00:58:24,220 physical and mental labour. Thank you for your great question. 484 00:58:24,220 --> 00:58:28,600 And this is another question that relates to what you were just saying. 485 00:58:28,600 --> 00:58:32,470 It's a question from Amanda Burden, Amanda says. 486 00:58:32,470 --> 00:58:41,050 I suspect the Tuskegee dioramas are rooted in the models for which you are searching. 487 00:58:41,050 --> 00:58:45,460 That's an interesting question, and I'd like to talk to you more, Amanda, about that. 488 00:58:45,460 --> 00:58:55,030 So the Tuskegee photographs, there are five of them that were made by William Shepherd, 489 00:58:55,030 --> 00:59:00,700 who was from Minnesota, and there's only two of them digitised at the Library of Congress website. 490 00:59:00,700 --> 00:59:09,490 But I've seen all of them. And one of my students this semester is working on her paper on those photographs in particular, 491 00:59:09,490 --> 00:59:16,300 and those are most of the photographs are representations of kind of industry. 492 00:59:16,300 --> 00:59:23,680 There's a lot of photographs of black labourers in the fields. And I think kind of stylistically, 493 00:59:23,680 --> 00:59:31,090 they seem really interesting because they're basically a photograph of a bunch of photographs that are overlaying each other. 494 00:59:31,090 --> 00:59:36,700 And so there's a kind of collage effect that really differentiates those from the rest. 495 00:59:36,700 --> 00:59:42,610 But the models that I mentioned were made in Washington, D.C. by the End Street School, 496 00:59:42,610 --> 00:59:54,940 and the narrative that emerges there is more based on this kind of progress from like the cabin to a kind of smaller home to the the school itself. 497 00:59:54,940 --> 01:00:07,210 And I think about those models as more tied with DuBose's ideals of furthering a kind of broader liberal arts education for black individuals. 498 01:00:07,210 --> 01:00:08,950 And I cut this for time. 499 01:00:08,950 --> 01:00:18,190 But Myra Fuller actually was asked by a Calloway to repair those models, which were damaged in transit to Paris, which she did. 500 01:00:18,190 --> 01:00:25,150 And in 1987, she produced her own set of models for the Jamestown Exposition. 501 01:00:25,150 --> 01:00:32,320 And there's actually 16 models, and they share some elements with Hunter's models. 502 01:00:32,320 --> 01:00:44,170 And but interestingly, the origin point that she chooses is actually 16 19 instead of 1865, which is Hunter's choice. 503 01:00:44,170 --> 01:00:53,880 So I hope that that answers your question, but I'm happy to talk further with you about Tuskegee and the DC models. 504 01:00:53,880 --> 01:01:02,790 Right. I have some information here that Amanda was talking specifically about the 1940s dioramas, the 1940s. 505 01:01:02,790 --> 01:01:08,250 Yes. Yes. OK, I'll have to check on that. 506 01:01:08,250 --> 01:01:21,170 Problem. So, Emily, so this this topic, it's really actually quite large, and I'm sure that you're discovering things all the time or are you I mean, 507 01:01:21,170 --> 01:01:32,600 are you still on the lookout for more and more information and imagery from this sort of cultural transplantation? 508 01:01:32,600 --> 01:01:37,160 And it's sort of reception and it's. 509 01:01:37,160 --> 01:01:44,570 Yeah, I mean, it just seems wonderfully rich in terms of wonderfully expansive. 510 01:01:44,570 --> 01:01:51,050 Even though it's a part of your project, it seems like it's a whole project in and of itself that could develop even even further. 511 01:01:51,050 --> 01:01:58,100 Yes, this happens to me all the time, James. Every project seems to mushroom into what could be its own book, for sure. 512 01:01:58,100 --> 01:02:01,340 One of the things that I've been trying really hard to do with this material, 513 01:02:01,340 --> 01:02:05,870 especially because there's been so much written about the exhibition of American Negroes, 514 01:02:05,870 --> 01:02:12,020 is to try to kind of pull the threads that that are kind of thread that hasn't yet been addressed. 515 01:02:12,020 --> 01:02:18,500 And to kind of put it in closer dialogue with the U.S. colony in Paris in this way through through minstrelsy. 516 01:02:18,500 --> 01:02:23,990 But yes, I'm still looking for kind of references to the minstrel shows. 517 01:02:23,990 --> 01:02:32,480 And then, as I was working on this chapter again recently was when I came across the figure of Agnes Moody, 518 01:02:32,480 --> 01:02:42,290 who kind of emerged in both the literature on the dinner that was held in August in the pavilion. 519 01:02:42,290 --> 01:02:49,730 And I was initially kind of surprised that she was there because I had recognised her name from reading about the Corn Kitchen. 520 01:02:49,730 --> 01:02:52,370 And so that kind of led me to try to learn more about her. 521 01:02:52,370 --> 01:03:03,050 And I think that she's a kind of iconic figure for the ways in which she is using these stereotypes in really effective and savvy ways. 522 01:03:03,050 --> 01:03:10,740 And so I think she's also someone I'd like to learn more about. I'm really glad you said that because I was wanting more. 523 01:03:10,740 --> 01:03:18,390 When you when you gave your your paper on that, so that's wonderful to to to know that you're you're interested in expanding that. 524 01:03:18,390 --> 01:03:26,640 I think that's a really rich and wonderful topic as well. So I think we're close to time here. 525 01:03:26,640 --> 01:03:32,670 And so I want to thank everyone out there for sending us your questions. 526 01:03:32,670 --> 01:03:39,300 And I'm sorry if we were not able to get you to answer all your questions. 527 01:03:39,300 --> 01:03:51,450 I also want to take this opportunity to thank Emily for her thought provoking lecture this evening and also talked for hosting our event today. 528 01:03:51,450 --> 01:04:02,070 Set the evening for you as the afternoon for me, but thank you also to all our viewers at home for watching as well. 529 01:04:02,070 --> 01:04:05,760 And please join us next for next week's event, 530 01:04:05,760 --> 01:04:17,790 which is the fourth and final and the terror lecture series on Wednesday, March 10th at five p.m. That's GMT UK time. 531 01:04:17,790 --> 01:04:27,900 And Emily will be joined by Alastair Wright, associate professor in the history of Art at the University of Oxford, affiliated with St John's College. 532 01:04:27,900 --> 01:04:35,280 So we hope you will be able to join us then. And so thank you once again for joining us. 533 01:04:35,280 --> 01:05:20,016 Have a good day, the rest of the day. By.