Contact Information
Biography Information
Mia L. Bagneris is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University whose primary field of study is the history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European and American art. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University with an A.B. in Women’s Studies and African American Studies in 1999; as an undergraduate she participated in the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program and was winner of the African American Studies Department’s Alain Locke Prize. As a graduate student, she has taught for a number of courses in both African American Studies and the History of Art including a course in interracial literature and, with Deborah Willis, a course analyzing race and gender in photography and film for which she won a Derek Bok Center Certificate of Distinction in Teaching. This year she was honored to be one of the five recipients of a Mellon Mays University Fellows Dissertation Grant and to spend time as a fellow at the Yale Center for British Art. Her dissertation, Local Colors: Images of Interracial Sexuality and the Mixed-Race Body in the Caribbean Canvases of Agostino Brunias, represents the culmination of the exploration of interracial themes in art and visual culture that has been the primary focus of her graduate study.
Project Description
This dissertation explores interracial themes in the work of Agostino Brunias, a little known but fascinating Italian artist who painted for British patrons in the late-eighteenth-century colonial Caribbean. Brunias came to the Caribbean around 1770 in the employ of Sir William Young, a British aristocrat who had recently been appointed governor of the West Indian islands ceded to Britain from France at the conclusion of the Seven Years War. For the next twenty-five years the prolific artist created romanticized images of communities of color including native Caribs, enslaved Africans, and free mulattoes that obscured the horrors of colonial domination and plantation slavery. Instead of slave markets or sugar plantations, Brunias’s canvases offered picturesque market scenes, lively dances, and outdoor fantasies tinged with rococo naughtiness that selectively recorded the life of the colonized for the eye of the colonizer. Local Colors explores Brunias’s use of interracial sexuality, mixed-race bodies, and racial ambiguity in creating this selective visual record, aiming to discover why the bodies of mixed-race women in particular made such perfect canvases for mapping out the colonial desires of British patriarchs. The project also explores how Brunias’s work might be understood as simultaneously participating in and subtly, but significantly, troubling the solidification of racial classification of the eighteenth-century.