Visualising Slavery

Celeste-Marie Bernier is Professor of United States and Atlantic Studies, University of Edinburgh. Hannah Durkin is Lecturer in Literature and Film, School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, Newcastle University.

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgementsIntroduction: ‘Inside the Invisible’: African Diasporic Artists Visualise Transatlantic Slavery - Celeste-Marie Bernier and Hannah DurkinPart I Slavery and Memory in Contemporary African Diasporic Art1. Lost and Found at the Swop-Meet: Betye Saar, the Everyday Object and the Work of Lubaina Himid - Lubaina Himid2. Preserves - Debra Priestly3. What Goes without Saying - Hank Willis Thomas4. Spectres in the Postcolonies: Re-imagining Violence and Resistance - Roshini Kempadoo5. Strategic Remembering and Tactical Forgetfulness in Depicting the Plantation: A Personal Account - Keith PiperPart II Historical Iconography and Visualising Transatlantic Slavery6. The Chattel Record: Visualising the Archive in Diasporan Art - Fionnghuala Sweeney7. Henry Box Brown, African Atlantic Artists and Radical Interventions - Alan Rice8. Uncle Tom and the Problem of ‘Soft’ Resistance to Slavery - David Bindman9. The After-Image: Frederick Douglass in Visual Culture - Zoe TroddPart III African Diasporic Monuments and Memorialisation10. Siting the Circum-Atlantic: Nelson in a Bottle in Trafalgar Square - Geoffrey Quilley11. Art and Caribbean Slavery: Modern Visions of the 1763 Guyana Rebellion - Leon Wainwright12. ‘The Greatest Negro Monuments on Earth’: Richmond Barthé’s Memorials to Toussaint Louverture andJean-Jacques Dessalines - Hannah DurkinPart IV Contemporary Legacies in African Diasporic Art13. We Might Not Be Surprised: Visualising Slavery and the Slave Ship in the Works of Charles Campbell and Mary Evans - Eddie Chambers14. ‘X is for X Ray, X Slave, X Colony’: A ‘Lexicon of Liberation’ versus ‘My Slave History’ in the Paintings, Installations and Sketchbooks of Donald Rodney - Celeste-Marie Bernier15. Reconfiguring African Trade Beads: The Most Beautiful, Bountiful and Marginalised Sculptural Legacy to have Survivedthe Middle Passage - Marcus WoodAfterword: Against the Grain: Contingency and Found Objects - Nathan GrantNotes on ContributorsIndex

Reviews'This diverse and finely nuanced collection of essays adds significantly to debates about slavery and visual culture in the Anglophone world. By interweaving new work by the major art-historical scholars in the field with essays by artists whose work reflects upon, and draws creative power from, the trauma of slavery, this book presents a lively new conspectus of an important area of study that has come into its own in recent years. This book rightly refuses to consign slavery safely to the past, but rather insists on its ‘nonsynchronous contemporaneity’. Slavery’s presence, mediated by memory and present through its many legacies, is presented here as a key force in contemporary visual culture – and indeed in culture at large.' Professor Tim Barringer, Yale University