Twelfth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

In the visual culture wars, black womanhood, black motherhood, and black femininity more broadly, the pervasive and persuasive image of the “Black Mammy” figure may be one of the best examples of the South losing the Civil War but winning the narratives about how African American women will be represented and therefore how African American women will be remembered. My scholarly focus on African American women holding white babies in domestic portraiture includes portraits of black women holding white babies in Brazil and the Caribbean. My work addresses this relationship as the most complex and also most misunderstood interracial relationship. This is an inter-racial relationship represented in numerous examples of domestic portraiture; the portraits allow us to consider this historic and troubling relationship in a new light. The portraits in my study reveal unique and intriguing aspects of the black mammy/ white charge relationship. The portraits demonstrate the power of the photographic images to support and enforce specific ideologies about race, gender, and labor within a domestic setting. In portraying a black woman and white child and by marking that woman as a slave or a domestic servant through the use of uniforms, aprons, or through the poses and postures that we see in these portraits: the nanny and child portrait indicates the family’s economic status.