Emancipation Week Lecture

In a lecture entitled, “Male or Man?: American Slavery, Public Monuments, and the Containment of Black Manhood,” Dr. Charmaine A. Nelson will examine how Reconstruction Era sculptors marginalized and infantilized newly freed black men in their art.

Nelson is the founding director of Slavery North, a research initiative focused on slavery in Canada and the U.S. North, and a provost professor of art history for the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Emancipation Week events are sponsored by the Center for Studying Structures of Race.

Abstract

The strategic marginalization of black populations lay at the heart of Transatlantic Slavery. For black men this entailed a hyper-sexualization, criminalization, and animalization which sought to banish them from the category of manhood. To be owned and controlled by another – to be chattel – was as far away from western definitions of manhood as one could get. In the nineteenth century, how did this social, material, and political disenfranchisement impact their representation within the realm of neoclassical sculpture and within the landscape of American monuments?

This lecture explores how sculptors sought to immobilize and infantilize black male subjects depicting the newly freed (recently liberated, formerly enslaved people), through compositional and aesthetic strategies which, even within the realm of abolitionist representation, standardly depicted the black male as socially and physically impotent. This symbolic visual denigration occurred even when black males were depicted as fully-grown and physically powerful.

Through an exploration of the case studies of John Quincy Adams Ward’s Freedman (1863), Thomas Ball’s Lincoln Memorial (c. 1866), and Mary Edmonia Lewis’s Morning of Liberty/Forever Free (1867), this lecture examines whether any of these artists was able (or willing) to create sculptures which depicted enslaved black males gaining their freedom, as men. 

Bio

Charmaine A. Nelson has been a Provost Professor of Art History in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst since 2022. She is the Founding Director of Slavery North, an initiative that supports scholarship and research creation on Canadian Slavery and slavery in the US North. She is also the founder and editor-in chief of the award-winning Black Maple Magazine, one of the only national magazines or platforms directed at black Canadians.

Nelson has made ground-breaking contributions to the fields of the Visual Culture of Slavery, Race and Representation, and Black Canadian Studies. She has published nine books including The Color of Stone: Sculpting the Black Female Subject in Nineteenth-Century America (2007), Slavery, Geography, and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Marine Landscapes of Montreal and Jamaica (2016), The Precariousness of Freedom: Slave Resistance as Experience, Process, and Representation (2024), and Creolization and Transatlantic Blackness: The Visual and Material Cultures of Slavery.

Nelson has given over 330 lectures, papers, and talks across Canada, and the USA, and in Mexico, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Norway, Spain, the UK, Central America, and the Caribbean. She is also actively engaged with lay audiences through her media work including ABC, CBC, CNN, CTV, BBC One, and PBS. She has blogged for the Huffington Post Canada and written for The Walrus. Nelson has held several prestigious fellowships and appointments including a Caird Senior Research Fellowship, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, UK (2007) and a Fulbright Visiting Research Chair, University of California – Santa Barbara (2010).

She was the William Lyon Mackenzie King Visiting Professor of Canadian Studies at Harvard University (2017-2018) and a Fields of the Future Research Fellow at Bard Graduate Center in New York City (2021). In 2022, she was appointed a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a member of the American Antiquarian Society. She received the Lifetime Achievement award from the Universities Art Association of Canada in 2024.