Met Publications | Exhibition Catalogues*The Met Store Fictions of Emancipation: Carpeaux’s Why Born Enslaved! Reconsidered

Edited by Elyse Nelson and Wendy S. Walters

This critical reexamination of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s iconic bust Why BornEnslaved! unpacks the sculpture’s complex and sometimes contradictoryengagement with an antislavery discourse. Noted art historians and writersdiscuss how categories of racial difference grew in popularity in the nineteenthcentury alongside a crescendo in cultural production in France during theSecond Empire. By focusing on Why Born Enslaved! and comparing it to works by Carpeaux’s contemporaries on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as to objects by twenty-first-century artists Kara Walker and Kehinde Wiley, this volume explores such key themes as the portrayal of Black enslavement and emancipation; the commodification of images of Black figures; the…See More