ABSTRACT
Through a contextual analysis of Robert Duncanson's View of Cincinnati, Ohio, from Covington, Kentucky, this chapter investigates the artist's understanding of broader social and intellectual trends regarding how persons of African descent were perceived to belong in the Americas, how their labor was indexed to their right to property and autonomy, and their refigurations of geographical notions through which whites understood the process of colonization. The conceptualizations Duncanson made of his practice are treated at length, particularly his ideas about the epistemological status of painting and photography and his late-career depictions of Canadian terrain as a site where Black artists might be free to explore the representation of Nature unencumbered by the ideal of Manifest Destiny.
