Mia L. Bagneris is Associate Professor of Art History and Africana studies and Director of the Africana Studies Program at Tulane University. Concentrating primarily on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and American visual culture, much of her scholarship explores the representation of race in the Anglo-American world and the place of images in the histories of slavery, colonialism, empire, and the construction of national identities.  While a fellow at the Hutchins Center, she will complete the manuscript for her next book project, Imagining the Oriental South: The Enslaved Mixed-Race Beauty in British Visual Culture, 1865-1900. This book analyses a pronounced and continued fascination with the beautiful, mixed-race American slave girl in Victorian culture. 

Considering works like John Bell’s sculpture The Octoroon (1868) and Robert Gavin’s painting The Quadroon Girl (1872), Imagining the Oriental South: The Enslaved Mixed-Race Beauty in British Visual Culture, 1865-1900 analyses a pronounced and continued fascination with the beautiful, mixed-race American slave girl in Victorian culture. Significantly, the enduring appeal of the figure—more popularly known as the “tragic” mulatto/quadroon/octoroon—persisted in Britain even, and especially, after the abolition of slavery in the United States in 1865 rendered its abolitionist utility obsolete. In aiming to trace and understand this phenomenon, Imagining the Oriental South explores marked visual and rhetorical resonances between representations of this figure and concurrent expressions of Orientalism.  Ultimately, the book argues that, against the perceived upright and respectable image of Victorian Britain, the U.S. South—and especially Catholic Louisiana—could be envisioned as a place of luxury, debauchery, and desire; in other words, a perfect echo to the so-called “Orient” in the British popular imagination—and one made stronger by the association of both regions with the traffic in racially “exotic” women as “sex slaves”.