Orientalist painting coded class through skin color during European slavery debates

Evidence

When Muslim men are present in Orientalist paintings, they are violent, predatory, and cruel. The owner/seller is darker skinned and has Moorish features in contrast to the buyer and his retinue. While the buyer wears a grand green robe, the seller wears more modest clothing. In several Orientalist paintings, class is signified by skin color. In Delacroix’s Women of Algiers in Their Apartment (1834) and Gérôme’s Pool in a Harem (1876), black women are presented as servants who attend to the needs of the fair-skinned wives and concubines of the male patriarch. Thus we see race, class, and gender portrayed in particular ways in the context of European debates over Atlantic slavery and various projects of racial formation. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 305

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the vault’s claims about Islamophobia as racial formation; Kumar here shows Orientalist visual culture did the racial work of assigning dark skin to lower class/enslavement. — connects to: Orientalist paintings mapped skin color onto class position within the harem; Orientalist slavery paintings featured sympathetic fair-skinned female slaves; Racism against Europeans like the Irish predated color-based slavery (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Casta paintings mapped racial descent onto economic class position #exemplifies (0.80) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1109
• Mixed-light complexions gain economic and social status in colonial societies #exemplifies (0.80)
• Racism against Europeans like the Irish predated color-based slavery #complicates (0.75)
• Colonial racial categories were shuffled across visual and verbal criteria #corroborates (0.72) — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 228