James Smalls is Associate Professor of Art History and Theory at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. His research and publications address the overlay of race, gender and sexuality issues in nineteenth-century French art and in modern and postmodern art of the black diaspora. He is the author of Homosexuality in Art (Parkstone Press, New York, 2003), and is completing the manuscript Public Face, Private Thought: Race and Homoerotic Desire in the Photography of Carl van Vechten, 1932-1964 (forthcoming, Temple University Press). Currently, he is also working on a long-term project focused on the historical and theoretical dynamics of race and visual representation in nineteenth-century French art. The present essay constitutes one line of inquiry from that study. |