Not Making Sense: The Invisibly Black Figure and Visual Art

From the early 19^th century to the opening decades of the 20^th, Anglo-American literary and visual culture is haunted by the spectral presence of the light-skinned figure of both African and European descent. Commonly known either as the “octoroon” or “quadroon”, such a figure threw the increasingly rigorous binary of Whiteness vs. Blackness into disarray, and therefore offered artists and writers a device for exploring the instability of “race” as a marker of human difference.

Cora Gilroy-Ware is Associate Professor in the History of Art at St Peter’s College, University of Oxford. In her publications, exhibitions and teaching, Cora Gilroy-Ware seeks to challenge the assumed universality of Western hegemonic perspectives. She is particularly interested in the fabrication of ideal beauty from the 17th century to the present day, and the role of classicising sculpture and pictorial art in the reification of “racial” difference. Her book The Classical Body in Romantic Britain was published in 2020 by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in association with Yale University Press. As an artist herself, Cora is also interested in projects that integrate theory and practice. She has recently edited a book on behalf of the artist Isaac Julien centred on Lessons of the Hour, Julien’s filmic portrait of the African American freedom fighter Frederick Douglass.