Making Whiteness: Art, Luxury, and Race in Eighteenth-Century France

The article presents a study of whiteness in the scholarship on eighteenth-century French art and material culture. Topics discussed include the efforts to promote the abolition of slavery through the design of a fashionable accessory; developments in material culture and artisanal technologies encouraged an alliance between whiteness and the skin color of the dominant, enslaving class, and the dominant role of Chinese and Japanese porcelain in the fetishization of the color.