File:“Why Born Enslaved!” Metropolitan Museum of Art.jpg

English: Carpeaux portrays the agony of oppression in this bust of an enslaved woman straining against the twisting ropes that bind her. The figure's defiant, uplifted gaze and furrowed brow impart her bitter struggle and longing for self-expression. Although the sculpture's inscription, translated "Why Born Enslaved!, communicates a powerful antislavery protest, Carpeaux completed the sculpture twenty years after France freed enslaved Africans throughout the empire. Debuted at the 1869 Paris Salon under the racial epithet "Négresse," this work appears to both condemn and rehearse the brutal history of enslavement through its sexualized depiction. The sculpture's mixed messages are characteristic of the period, when antislavery sentiment coincided with violent colonialism.