Meta Warrick Fuller

In repositioning Meta Warrick Fuller's Ethopia Awakening (1921) within a feminist context, I will draw on that critical Pan-Africanist text, Emancipation and the Freed in Sculpture (1916) by Freeman Murray. Murray's groundbreaking illustration of negative stereotype in visual art was an intellectual argument for black self-determination. Pan-African art criticism gained mass appeal during the Harlem Renaissance with the publishing of The New Negro (1925), by philosopher Alain Locke. In his book, he prescribed the reclamation of African culture for growing numbers of professional African American artists. Both Murray's and Locke's theories were closely associated with W.E.B. Du Bois' promotion of positive images of blacks. From their two perspectives Fuller's Ethopia Awakening was deemed the visual epitome of the "Talented Tenth" movement.

Mary Schmidt Campbell attributes the influence for Ethopia Awakening to Du Boisian philosophy, which "emphasized the Black Americans' common African heritage." Current scholarship by Richard Powell cites Judith Wilson's claim that the "utopian, Pan Africanist novel" Ethiopia Unbound (1911) by west African activist lawyer, J.E. Casely Hayford as Fuller's source of inspiration. In response, I strongly suggest that Ethopia Awakening was not the epitome of Du Boisian philosophy or any other Mr. Hayford's semi-autobiographical novel. Rather, it was the manifestation of Fuller's own Pan-Africanist feminism recognizing her collaboration with Garveyite feminist Adelaide Casely Hayford (J.E. Hayford's ex-wife) in 1920 to build an all girls school in Sierra Leone.

It makes sense that the initial inspiration for Ethopia Awakening was Fuller's understanding of Murray's call for an interventionist avant-garde. Fuller proposed to make her own version of an Africa figure after critically reading his manuscript, around 1915. Ethopia Awakening was a response to the pleas of the intelligentsia that proclaimed the spiritual and political relevance of Africa for African Americans. The sculpture also reiterated, for the entire black world, the elation and pride that the widely publicized Ethiopian victory over Italian colonial powers during the era. Murray's arguments, including supportive visual material, revealed that Daniel Chester French, and many other sculptors before him, created illusory and undesirable images to bear on black people. However, the discussion of feminism in this paper isolates three female statues of "Africa" to juxtapose another viable process in Ethopia Awakening, which is supported by contemporary Post-Colonial gender studies in art history.

Murray examined a number of sculpted female figures known as "Africa." during the American Renaissance (1865-1917), a period of Neo-classical revival in art. "Africa" figures were created specifically as tributes to the Emancipation Proclamation following the Civil War (1861-1864). These markers of freedom testified to the libertarian spirit of the founding fathers. At the same time that they celebrated a vision of independence, the figures represented Western paternalism and empire by illustrating Africa as naturally submissive, yielding, and uncultivated.

Ethopia Awakening (1863) by the American woman sculptor Anne Whitney, was an example of a pre-Emancipation "Africa" figure in chains. Whitney's, like other Orientalist paintings and sculptures about Africa, depicted a scantily clad, idyllic Odalisque in white marble. The glistening, decidedly non- African looking, "Africa," awakened from her sleep and lifted her veil to expose her body from a horizontal position. Whitney attributed classical beauty and symbolic enlightenment as a positive statement about the impending freedom of enslaved African Americans. It is important to note that although Whitney intended the white marble sculpture to allude to Africa, it was through the visual language of Greek myths.

Mary Livermore in Our Famous Women (1883) described Whitney's depiction of a slave as a representation of abolitionist goals. Livermore stated, she "listened with fear and wonder to the sound of broken chains and shackles falling around her." According to Livermore, Whitney's cause was so "legible and well-expressed that even the uninstructed in art throbbed in sympathy with it." Livermore added that the "recumbent . colossal" expressed the teeming luxuriance of the tropics in which she had her birth." Orientalist tropes were seamlessly constructed in Livermore' critique. The discussion of freedom for Africans in America was depicted by a woman upon whom a curiously seductive gaze was focused onto body and land. A reconfigured desire for power and possession is transmitted in such pronounced sexual overtones. The figure's denoted exoticism and eroticism conveyed the colonial voyeuristic tendencies in art and real life mistreatment of women in the colonies.

Contrary to Livermore's reading of Whitney's abolitionist aesthetics, the sculpture blurred the historical fact of American slavery and of black people. This image did not denounce slavery. It relied heavily on the subject of non-European slave holding traditions, such as harems, in which control over blacks and women were foreign or essential cultural traditions, to circumvent America's history. Moreover, Whitney's romanticism, with its emphasis on beauty and pleasure diverted from any re-examination of the horrible circumstances of slavery or of the remarkable contribution blacks made to the Industrial Revolution. Interesting to note, Whitney eventually destroyed the female figure and later carved a monument for the martyred abolitionist John Brown.

Daniel Chester French's "Africa" from his New York Customs House grouping of The Four Continents (1906) repeated the portrayal of the sleeping "Africa." In a comparison with the earlier grouping of nude caryatids done in France, known as Four Continents by the sculptor Jean Baptiste Carpeaux (1868-74), the American sculptor, French, reiterated a remarked imperialist view of Africa in America. In Carpeaux's coterie, "Africa" "Asia" "Europe" and "the Americas" represented all as equals. All were nude women; all subjects of colonialism on some level. The four standing figures, in contrast to delicate female representations, supported a globe with upswept arms of modeled muscle and sinew. Carpeaux wanted to patina stain the different skin tones, but ultimately showed race through details such "America's" feathered headdress and the broken shackle at "Africa's" ankle. Carpeaux rejected pictorial nudity, as well as palliated portrayal of Africans.