Luis Vasquez La Roche, But the real ones, just like you, just like me (2021). Photo by Wendy Vasquez and Luis Vasquez.
In what ways do slavery-era visual practices continue to shape contemporary culture and politics?
| This interdisciplinary project builds on research conducted by the UChicago Working Group on Slavery and Visual Culture to help formalize the group’s contributions to scholarship about the histories of slavery and visuality. |
The Working Group on Slavery and Visual Culture is a transdisciplinary project that explores the relationships between visuality and regimes of racialization during slavery and its afterlives. Transhistorical and comparative in character, the project examines the visual imagining of slavery and the slave trade, the production and use of visual images and material objects by enslaved people and slaveholders, and the roles played by the visual logics of slavery in processes of self-fashioning and in the accumulation of (visual/cultural) capital.
Under the rubric Visual Regimes of Enslavement, during academic year 2020-2021 the project will investigate how visual practices fostered during the slaveholding era in the circum-Atlantic world have underwritten or organized contemporary modes of seeing Black bodies. The goal is, first, to study both the extent and the specific means by which historical visual regimes of enslavement have been foundational for the contemporary inscription of Blackness as hypervisible and invisible, and as a signifier of the criminal, the non-citizen, and the disposable in many post-slavery societies. Second, it will explore and bring to the fore the role played by publicly engaged Black visual cultures and technologies in the memorialization and preservation of histories of slavery and in the contestation of their logics of surveillance.
Three main themes, concentrated in successive quarters, organize this research agenda: 1) Fall 2020: On the Visual Afterlives of Slavery is devoted to contemporary practices of seeing Blackness, both with regard to policing and to aesthetic responses; 2) Winter 2021: Spectacles for/of Freedom: Black Bodies in the Age of Abolition is dedicated to exploring the ways in which Blackness was newly embodied in the nineteenth century through discourses of sentimentalism, biological degeneration, and criminality, and their echoes in contemporary modes of seeing Black bodies; and 3) Spring 2021: Slavery, Black Bodies, and Salvation will address the roles of religious practices in the visual figurations of Black bodies as entities of sin and potential redemption.
Assistant Professor of Latin American Literature
University of Chicago
Associate Professor, Department of Cinema and Media Studies and the College
University of Chicago
Associate Professor of Latin American Literature, Romance Languages and Literatures
University of Chicago
Neubauer Family Assistant Professor in Latin American Literature
University of Chicago
Associate Professor, English Language and Literature
University of Chicago
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This multi-day conference, organized by the Working Group on Slavery and Visual Culture, focused on "The Puerto Rican Case."
At this workshop, Mia Bagneris presented and elaborated on her paper on Simeon Solomon's The Mother of Moses.
This talk contended that the reception of Simeon Solomon's 'The Mother of Moses' revealed the contradictions of black experience in 1860's England.
Melanie White (Georgetown University) workshopped her paper "Envisioning the Miskitu Coast: Colonial Intimacies, Archives of Refusal."
The author of Capital of Free Women: Race, Legitimacy, and Liberty in Colonial Mexico discussed her book and current research.
This reading group met to discuss Noémie Ndiaye's new book, Scripts of Blackness.
At this lecture, Cécile Fromont discussed her new book, Images on a Mission in Early Modern Kongo and Angola (2022).
This was a guided gallery visit and conversation with Elizabeth McGoey, Associate Curator at the Art Institute of Chicago.
This daylong workshop featured a series of presentations on images related to slavery and the slave trade.
Carousel with 3 slides shown at a time. Use the Previous and Next buttons to navigate, or the slide dot buttons at the end to jump to slides.
This multi-day conference, organized by the Working Group on Slavery and Visual Culture, focused on "The Puerto Rican Case."
Carousel with 3 slides shown at a time. Use the Previous and Next buttons to navigate, or the slide dot buttons at the end to jump to slides.
At this workshop, Mia Bagneris presented and elaborated on her paper on Simeon Solomon's The Mother of Moses.
This talk contended that the reception of Simeon Solomon's 'The Mother of Moses' revealed the contradictions of black experience in 1860's England.
Carousel with 3 slides shown at a time. Use the Previous and Next buttons to navigate, or the slide dot buttons at the end to jump to slides.
Melanie White (Georgetown University) workshopped her paper "Envisioning the Miskitu Coast: Colonial Intimacies, Archives of Refusal."
This daylong workshop featured a series of presentations on images related to slavery and the slave trade.
Carousel with 3 slides shown at a time. Use the Previous and Next buttons to navigate, or the slide dot buttons at the end to jump to slides.
The author of Capital of Free Women: Race, Legitimacy, and Liberty in Colonial Mexico discussed her book and current research.
This reading group met to discuss Noémie Ndiaye's new book, Scripts of Blackness.
This was a guided gallery visit and conversation with Elizabeth McGoey, Associate Curator at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Carousel with 3 slides shown at a time. Use the Previous and Next buttons to navigate, or the slide dot buttons at the end to jump to slides.
At this lecture, Cécile Fromont discussed her new book, Images on a Mission in Early Modern Kongo and Angola (2022).
