Visiting Artist and Scholar Lecture Series: Professor Emily Burns: 'Primitivism' and its Counters: Blackness, Cultural Youth, and Innocence in 'American-Paris'

In the late nineteenth century, Blackness was avidly performed in Paris, from blackface minstrelsy to Caribbean performers, like Rafael Padilla “Chocolat,” who appeared on the Paris stage. An artist club for American art students in Paris hosted annual blackface minstrel shows, capitalizing on race caricature to shape Parisian perceptions of US culture as more “primitive” than European society. Professor Burns will analyze how representations—from sheet music covers to photographs and ephemera from these displays—leveraged offensive stereotypes. Such racial antics did not go uncontested. In 1900, the “Exhibit of American Negroes,” curated by W.E.B. DuBois and other Black intellectuals for the Paris Universal Exposition, countered racialized primitivism and contested caricatures of Blackness. Professor Burns explores how visual culture and performance in the American colony in Paris both produced and contested stereotypes of Americanness and of Blackness in Paris.

Emily C. Burns is Director of the Charles M. Russell Center for the Study of Art of the American West and Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Oklahoma. Burns is a scholar of transnational nineteenth-century art history; in her interdisciplinary research, she analyzes artists and works of art moving through space and between cultures, focusing on relationships between U.S. and Native American artists and between French, U.S., and Native American artists. She wrote Transnational Frontiers: The American West in France (Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 2018) and co-edited Mapping Impressionist Painting in Transnational Contexts (Routledge, 2021) and the Routledge Companion to Art and Empire: Imperialism and Aesthetics, 1800-1950 (Routledge, 2024).

Discussant: Professor Lois Brown holds an endowed professorship as Foundation Professor of English and is Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy.  She is a literary and public historian and published scholar of African American literature and culture. Her books include Black Daughter of the Revolution: A Literary Biography of Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, Memoir of James Jackson, The Attentive and Obedient Scholar, and Encyclopedia of the Harlem Literary Renaissance. Professor Brown’s current projects include biographies of influential but understudied 19th-century African American women, African Americans in 18th- and 19th-century Concord, Massachusetts, and a collection of essays on race, place, and history in 19th- and early 20th-century Arizona.  Professor Brown was featured on the acclaimed PBS documentary The Abolitionists and has curated and collaborated on exhibitions for the Museum of African American History in Boston and the Boston Public Library.

Image: Photograph, Exhibit of the American Negroes, 1900 Paris Exposition from The American Monthly Review of Reviews 22.130 (1900): 576.