"A free woman... carved from life": uncovering the embodied lived, networks, and identities in the Bust of Nora August
Date
2023
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
This thesis centers on the Bust of Nora August from St. Simons Island, Georgia. Carved in 1865 by an unknown maker, this large ivory bust is an unusual rendering of a young Black woman celebrating the moment of her emancipation. The Bust of Nora August is an archive within an object, offering clues about broad global connections and individual histories alike. The thesis unpacks this object’s relationship to nineteenth-century artistic, material, and social exchange networks and places the object within historical racial discourses surrounding Black agency and emancipation. ☐ This analysis draws on decades of historical, art historical, literary, and archival studies in order to offer a first step towards a holistic understanding of the object and its networks. The paper is divided into three sections that analyze the object as archive, as narrative, and as relic. The first section uses the bust as a window into the interconnected material and personal worlds of the coastal South during the post-emancipation period. It reflects on the bust as “archive within an object” and as a material repository for individual and collective memory of emancipation and enslavement. The second section argues that the Bust of Nora August is a material slave narrative that uses a potent combination of text and likeness to convey Nora’s story. Blending the visual, haptic, and textual languages of the slave narrative and portrait bust genres, the bust acted as a material extension of Nora’s being and offered a tool to seek connection and belonging amid a deeply uncertain political and social climate. Finally, the third section analyzes the role of the bust on present-day St. Simons Island. It assesses how the island’s privatized objects and landscapes of historical memory have impacted the ways in which historical narratives are conveyed. Ultimately, the Bust of Nora August is an important artifact that complicates scholarly assumptions about Civil War-era material and social networks. Its evocative appearance demands a deeper examination of the lasting impacts of transatlantic slavery on art, commerce, and global ecologies.
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Keywords
Black woman, Historical memory, Material repository, Social networks, Emancipation