Fugitive Vision: Slave Image and Black Identity in Antebellum NarrativePosted in Books, History, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Monographs, Slavery, United States on 2009-12-26 01:18Z by Steven |
Fugitive Vision: Slave Image and Black Identity in Antebellum Narrative
Indiana University Press
2007-12-04
272 pages
30 b&w photos, 6.125 x 9.25
ISBN-13: 978-0-253-34944-6
ISBN: 0-253-34944-3
Michael A. Chaney, Associate Professor of English
Dartmouth College
Analyzing the impact of black abolitionist iconography on early black literature and the formation of black identity, Fugitive Vision examines the writings of Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, William and Ellen Craft, Harriet Jacobs, and the slave potter David Drake. Juxtaposing pictorial and literary representations, the book argues that the visual offered an alternative to literacy for current and former slaves, whose works mobilize forms of illustration that subvert dominant representations of slavery by both apologists and abolitionists. From a portrait of Douglass’s mother as Ramses to the incised snatches of proverb and prophesy on Dave the Potter‘s ceramics, the book identifies a “fugitive vision” that reforms our notions of antebellum black identity, literature, and cultural production.
Table of Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Looking Beyond and Through the Fugitive Icon
- Part 1. Fugitive Gender: Black Mothers, White Faces, Sanguine Sons
- Racing and Erasing the Slave Mother: Frederick Douglass, Parodic Looks, and Ethnographic Illustration
- Looking for Slavery at the Crystal Palace: William Wells Brown and the Politics of Exhibition(ism)
- The Uses in Seeing: Mobilizing the Portrait in Drag in Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom
- Part 2. Still Moving: Revamped Technologies of Surveillance
- Panoramic Bodies: From Banvard‘s Mississippi to Brown’s Iron Collar
- The Mulatta in the Camera: Harriet Jacobs’s Historicist Gazing and Dion Boucicault‘s Mulatta Obscura
- Throwing Identity in the Poetry-Pottery of Dave the Potter
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index