New Directions in Art History: “The Chinese Lady” and the Black Atlantic

Over the course of the 1830s and 1840s, a young woman known by the name of Afong Moy traveled along eastern seaboard and the Gulf of Mexico, alighting in cities including New York, New Orleans, Mobile, and Havana. Known to publics as “the Chinese lady,” Moy had been brought from Guangzhou to the United States by white American merchants, who put her on display to promote their traveling exhibition of Chinese export art and wares. This paper considers how these exhibitions unfolded in relation to matters of racial formation and racial capitalism in the Black Atlantic before the abolition of slavery. In so doing it ultimately seeks to understand how the racialization and objectification of Moy as “Chinese lady” was not incidentalto but rather inseparable from understandings of race, labor, and unfreedom that shaped both African and Asian diasporas in the Atlantic world.