ABSTRACT
François Malépart de Beaucourt’s Portrait of a Negro Slave (1786; Figure 1.1), a rare visual document of a slave in early New France, has a special place in the Canadian art canon. As the artist’s most cited and reproduced work, it is often discussed in terms of the artist’s professionalization, his travels to “exotic” locations or his potential sexual relationship with the anonymous sitter. However, within the politics of a socially engaged New Art History, solely biographical and formal analysis becomes problematic in its inability to address the critical issues of race, sex and social status in eighteenth-century New France and early Canadian portraiture. As I argued in Chapter 3 of this volume, the colonial limits of Art History and its inability to include and legitimize issues of race and colonialism have hampered the possibility of alternative readings of this portrait. In particular, postcolonial or black feminist readings of the work, ones that could accommodate queries into the formulation and deployment of racial and sexual identity as simultaneous and indeed inextricable, have been invalidated by traditional Art Histories, which have insisted upon the singular validity of formalistic, biographical and connoisseurship concerns above other social and cultural issues.
