Slavery & Visual Culture

I am taking a short look at the literature on slavery and visual culture. Part of this is inspired by the Slavery and Visual Culture Working Group’s new Digital Exhibit on the Visual Idioms of Enslavement in the Nineteenth Century and their Afterlives. It is a provocative exhibit, one that continues to send me to questions about what is seen, and why. As Sara Johnson observed in her remarkable new book Encyclopédie Noire: The Making of Moreau de Saint-Méry's Intellectual World “the aesthetic is an inherently political process of choosing what to make visible or invisible” (87).

Of course all of this work comes in a historiographic tradition, and so I’ve returned to my notes on some of my favorite works on slavery and visual culture, three of which are in the photograph:

Aston Gonzalez, Visualizing Equality: African American Rights and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth Century (UNC Press, 2020)

Matthew Fox-Amato, Exposing Slavery: Photography, Human Bondage, and the Birth of Modern Visual Politics in America (Oxford University Press, 2019)

Deborah Willis and Barbara Krauthamer, Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery (Temple University Press, 2012).

Simon Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste (Princeton University Press, 2011).

Up next for me is to read Matthew Francis Rarey’s new book, Insignificant Things (2023) on art and survival in the Black Atlantic, and to return to the genuinely stunning project, Visionary Aponte.