Abstract This paper analyzes imperial Russian images of Black captivity from the mid-nineteenth century. I am concerned foremost with Karl Briullov’s formal techniques for picturing the deferential figure of the Moor. A deracinated, mobile signifier of wealth and sovereignty, the Moor depicts captivity through ornamentality: an aesthetic procedure that attests to the figure’s taming, domestication, and attempted assimilation within the narrative of Russian imperial ascendancy. The Moor belongs to everywhere and everyone yet is made to project national fealty whenever it appears. Of course, to designate a single image or figuration of the Black as “captive” is tautological: within theories of the Black’s interfacing with performance, visual, and media technologies, the compulsion to act, show, and be seen restates captivity, spectacularity, and death as preconditions for the representation of embodied Black life. I argue that in its perspectival alienation on the Russian canvas, the Moor—a generic image of the Black—both materializes Russia’s construction of a racial imaginary and alerts us to its place in global regimes of race-making.
Mina Magda (Wed,) studied this question.