The image of the black in eighteenth-century Europe provides an important clue to the social and ideological structure of colonial practices that were being developed at the time.  For example, racial stereotypes of the black and their marginal positions in visual culture can be read as reflections of colonial exploitation.   

However, the black figure in images is not just a trace that testifies to the violence of the colonial power.  According to the post-colonial critic Homi Bhabha the presence of the colonial object is inherently ambivalent, since there is always a double desire on the part of the colonizer to both identify and dis-identify with the colonial object.  By calling attention to the ambivalence of colonial discourse, Bhabha suggests that agency is possible even in the most oppressive colonial situation.  

If recast and re-imagined for the black perspective, the black slave in illustrations for three eighteenth-century texts - J. G. Stedman’s Narrative, William Hogarth’s The Harlot’s Progress and Bernardin de Saint Pierre’s Paul and Virginie - would not just be a helpless victim, but a strange agency that unsettles the apparent narrative of the text and questions colonial authority, as in the case of the black slave Domingue in Charles-Melchoir Descourtis’ print, who mourns the death of his white mistress, yet whose powerful back view is also read as a rebellious gesture.