The Black wet nurse remains to this day one of the most romanticized representations of Brazilian slavery. Common to other slave societies, such as those in the US South, the idealization of the motherly, affectionate devotion of Black enslaved women not to their own children but to their white charges is inextricably linked to the forging of the symbolic figures of “Black mothers” or “mammies,” central to the imaginary of racially harmonious postslave societies.
The importance of this topic to understanding past and present race and gender social dynamics makes Kimberly Cleveland's book a timely contribution to the growing field on the intersections between race, visuality, and other social markers. Cleveland aims to analyze Black wet-nursing historically from the point of view of visual culture, centering images rather than taking them as complements to other discourses and sources. The author openly adopts a transdisciplinary approach in order to investigate paintings,...
