Seminar And Unit Connections
During Feisal’s seminar it was important for me to find a way to present resistance from an emancipatory lens—that was not rooted exclusively in this history of pain and sacrifice. This was not an easy feat as most of the seminar content from my perspective was framed as adversarial. A deficit perspective that calls for transformation in the form of defiance and revolt. I believe I found a moment of liberation at the Yale University Art Gallery while on a guided tour. Our first stop was an installation titled New France, which featured decorative objects representative of regions settled by craftspeople who immigrated from France and its colonies. Among the displayed works was an oil painting of Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Louverture, created in 1877 by Louis Riguad (11). This piece stood out because the accompanying plaque offered little contextual information to help visitors interpret the painting on its own. As a result, the experience underscored the importance of developing a visual literacy that extends beyond surface-level observation (12).
Although our seminar participants had some background knowledge of Toussaint Louverture — it became evident that interacting with this exhibit absent explicit guidance required some calibration towards analysis and interpretation. The DCPS 5 Encounters of Close Study (Fig. 1) is a classroom activity that I will use with students throughout this unit. I will preview a few encounters and apply them to the Toussaint Louverture painting by Rigaud. It calls the viewer to develop an interpretation through observation before seeking outside information. Encounter 1: Initial Responses & General Understanding guided me to carefully study the painting noticing elements such as Louverture’s upright posture, formal military uniform, side-profiled pose, facial expression, and the use of color and light in the background. While visually documenting these elements in my mind, I heard cohort members respond to Louverture’s five stars on his sash and receding hairline. At this stage, there are no wrong answers. The encounter is meant to create an environment of discourse that values personal opinions. Encounter 2: Key Details focuses on elements in the work that support observations and conjure an inquiry about what might be happening in the work. Why did Riguard illustrate Louverture in profile view instead of straight on? These key details and visual evidence can be readily identified by the eye—like his uniform which symbolizes leadership. Whether engaging with historical or contemporary imagery, viewers benefit from having the critical language and analytical tools needed to interpret visual works in a deeper and more meaningful way—ways that are also inclusive of joy, and inclusion, as a form of resistance.
To accomplish this, I brought ancillary works, including On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life by Sara Ahmed and Race and Art Education by Amelia Kraehe and Joni Acuff into conversation with selected seminar material to develop a coherent unit that did not need to be labeled with a trigger warning. Ahmed argues that diversity work exposes the institutional mechanisms that maintain inequality even as they profess inclusion, while Kraehe and Acuff call for abolitionist approaches that move beyond superficial inclusion toward dismantling the structures that reproduce racial injustice in educational spaces. Together these perspectives provide a lens for interpretating the historical narrative of Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution, not only as a struggle for liberation but also as a challenge to dominant systems of knowledge and representation. The significance of Louis Riguad, a Haitian artist, painting Louverture’s portrait lies in its rejection of colonial visual culture and European standards of beauty (13). Rigaud’s portrait, along with Jacob Lawrence’s series, reclaimed the narrative of Louverture’s poise, intellect, and command that demonstrates how artistic representation can function as a form of resistance against colonial narratives while affirming Black agency and historical memory.
This framework also examines resistance through the visual language of Sandro Botticelli’s The Story of Lucretia (14), interpreted using a teaching strategy in my classroom called the Five Encounters of Close Study. The first encounter invites careful observation of the painting’s narrative structure, revealing multiple moments from Lucretia’s story within a single work, that guides the viewers to notice gestures, architecture, expressions, and relative location of content before assigning meaning. The second encounter situates the work within its historical and cultural context, connecting key details from Renaissance Florence’s interest in republican virtue with the story of Lucretia and the political backlash of Tarquin’s abuse of royal power. The third encounter expands interpretation by considering Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece, where Tarquin’s violence represents resistance to authority not through physical victory but through Lucrece’s moral refusal to surrender her integrity even though she was overpowered (15). The fourth encounter asks whose perspectives are centered or marginalized, inviting critical questions about gender, power, silence, and voice while encouraging comparison to Louverture’s visual representation. Just as Rigaud challenges colonial portrayals of Black leadership, Boticelli’s painting can be read as a visual warning on the costs of tyranny and the transformative nature of witnessing injustice and calling it out by name (16). Finally, the fifth encounter encourages students to synthesize these observations by connecting historical narratives to contemporary questions of resistance. Lucrece’s public testimony challenges the cultural expectation that survivors remain silent, transforming personal trauma into a collective political action while Louverture’s revolutionary leadership demonstrates resistance as a common struggle against systems of oppression. Read alongside Ahmed’s critique of institutional inclusion and Kraehe and Acuff’s call for abolitionist art education, both works invite students to question who has historically been authorized to represent resistance, whose stories have been legitimized, re-storied, or excluded, and how works of art can function as sites for interrogating institutional power, recovering marginalized histories, and imagining more inclusive futures.
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