Daguerreotyped Upon My Heart

In nineteenth-century Britain and Ireland, African American freedom fighters developed visual and literary strategies that exposed the realities of U.S. enslavement while contesting the white-supremacist narratives, images, and spaces that sustained it.Working across expansive lecturing circuits, they made visual and print culture integral to their political thought and practice, intervening in white-dominated arenas that marginalised Black presence. They challenged dehumanizing visual representations and reshaped how enslavement was seen and understood. In doing so, all activists faced racist attack and ridicule from hostile audiences, newspaper correspondents, and even white antislavery ‘allies’.This book examines the central role of visual culture – photography, panoramas, performance, print, and material objects – in Black antislavery activism. Moving across lecture halls, theatres, churches, and other public spaces, it shows how oratory, imagery, and embodied performance were combined to engage diverse audiences and to generate new ways of seeing, thinking, and arguing about U.S. enslavement.Placing family, love, and kinship at its heart, the study reveals how these visual practices functioned not only as political interventions but also as forms of remembrance and survival. In foregrounding the breadth of Black artistry, agency, and intellectual authority, it demonstrates how activists created and circulated imagery on their own terms, developing new discourses of freedom, citizenship, and identity while confronting the silences and distortions of the archive.By rethinking the relationship between art, activism, and transatlantic exchange, this book makes a major contribution to the study of Black visual culture, nineteenth-century Britain, and the global history of abolition.