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Greek Drama and Africana Receptions: Class 25 (Spring 2020)
April 21, 2020 @ 8:40 am - 10:00 am
Margaret Garner by Thomas Satterwhite Noble
Oil on canvas
1867
(H: 50.8 x 40.6 cm)
In 1867 the American artist Thomas Satterwhite Noble (1835-1907) portrayed a notorious incident in the history of American slavery-the discovery of the fugitive slave Margaret Garner in Cincinnati in 1856, moments after she had murdered one of her children and attempted to kill the others. In depicting the recapture of a runaway slave and the aftermath of her desperate act of infanticide, the artist indicted the practice of slavery; indeed, the cruelty of slavery is the principal meaning of his picture, according to art historians Albert Boime and James Birchfield. Yet the image is more ambiguous than it first appears. Rather than sustaining a monolithic narrative on the evils of slavery, the painting seems to oscillate between two discourses, one exposing the horrors of slavery and the other heightening the spectacular horror of Garner’s act itself (from Leslie Furth, “‘The Modern Medea’ and Race Matters: Thomas Satterwhite Noble’s ‘Margaret Garner,'” American Art 12 (1998): 36-57).
In the collection of Proctor and Gamble Company, Cincinnati, Ohio
Reading
Edris Cooper, There are Women Waiting: The Tragedy of Medea Jackson (1992)
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Discussion
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