Larissa Brewer-García
Research Project
Slavery and Visual Culture
Project Team:
2020 – 2023
Luis Vasquez La Roche, But the real ones, just like you, just like me (2021). Photo by Wendy Vasquez and Luis Vasquez.
Key Question
In what ways do slavery-era visual practices continue to shape contemporary culture and politics?
Project Summary
| 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.
Topics
Research Team
Allyson Nadia Field
Allyson Nadia Field
Associate Professor, Department of Cinema and Media Studies and the College
University of Chicago
Agnes Lugo-Ortiz
Agnes Lugo-Ortiz
Associate Professor of Latin American Literature, Romance Languages and Literatures
University of Chicago
Danielle Roper
Danielle Roper
Neubauer Family Assistant Professor in Latin American Literature
University of Chicago
Christopher Taylor
Project Narrative
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.
Visual Regimes of Enslavement and Their Afterlives in the Caribbean
Conference
Visual Regimes of Enslavement and Their Afterlives in the Caribbean
This multi-day conference, organized by the Working Group on Slavery and Visual Culture, focused on "The Puerto Rican Case."
Lady, While You Are Young and Beautiful, Forget Not the Slave: Finding Black Feminist Art in Abolitionist’s Friendship Album
Workshop
Lady, While You Are Young and Beautiful, Forget Not the Slave: Finding Black Feminist Art in Abolitionist’s Friendship Album
At this workshop, Mia Bagneris presented and elaborated on her paper on Simeon Solomon's The Mother of Moses.
Seeing Double: Fanny Eaton and the Specter of Blackness in Simeon Solomon’s Mother of Moses
Lecture
Seeing Double: Fanny Eaton and the Specter of Blackness in Simeon Solomon’s 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.
Workshop with Melanie White
Workshop
Workshop with Melanie White
Melanie White (Georgetown University) workshopped her paper "Envisioning the Miskitu Coast: Colonial Intimacies, Archives of Refusal."
Book Talk with Danielle Terrazas Williams
Book Talk with Danielle Terrazas Williams
The author of Capital of Free Women: Race, Legitimacy, and Liberty in Colonial Mexico discussed her book and current research.
Reading Group for Noémie Ndiaye’s Scripts of Blackness
Discussion
Reading Group for Noémie Ndiaye’s Scripts of Blackness
This reading group met to discuss Noémie Ndiaye's new book, Scripts of Blackness.
Images on a Mission
Lecture
Images on a Mission
At this lecture, Cécile Fromont discussed her new book, Images on a Mission in Early Modern Kongo and Angola (2022).
Seeing David Drake’s Ceramics
Discussion
Seeing David Drake’s Ceramics
This was a guided gallery visit and conversation with Elizabeth McGoey, Associate Curator at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Visual Afterlives of Enslavement
Workshop
Visual Afterlives of Enslavement
This daylong workshop featured a series of presentations on images related to slavery and the slave trade.
Visualizing/Performing Blackness in the Afterlives of Slavery: Conversatorio en español
Discussion
Visualizing/Performing Blackness in the Afterlives of Slavery: Conversatorio en español
On April 19, the Working Group on Slavery and Visual Culture launched its first digital exhibit, Visualizing/Performing Blackness in the Afterlives of Slavery: A Caribbean Archive, curated by ...
Visualizing/Performing Blackness in the Afterlives of Slavery: Roundtable (in English)
Discussion
Visualizing/Performing Blackness in the Afterlives of Slavery: Roundtable (in English)
On April 19, the Working Group on Slavery and Visual Culture launched its first digital exhibit, Visualizing/Performing Blackness in the Afterlives of Slavery: A Caribbean Archive, curated by ...
Afterlives of Slavery Digital Platform Launches
Afterlives of Slavery Digital Platform Launches
The "Afterlives of Slavery" digital archive investigates the relationship (and endurance) of visual practices fostered during the slaveholding era in the circum-Atlantic world and contemporary modes ...
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.
Visual Regimes of Enslavement and Their Afterlives in the Caribbean
Conference
Visual Regimes of Enslavement and Their Afterlives in the Caribbean
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.
Lady, While You Are Young and Beautiful, Forget Not the Slave: Finding Black Feminist Art in Abolitionist’s Friendship Album
Workshop
Lady, While You Are Young and Beautiful, Forget Not the Slave: Finding Black Feminist Art in Abolitionist’s Friendship Album
At this workshop, Mia Bagneris presented and elaborated on her paper on Simeon Solomon's The Mother of Moses.
Seeing Double: Fanny Eaton and the Specter of Blackness in Simeon Solomon’s Mother of Moses
Lecture
Seeing Double: Fanny Eaton and the Specter of Blackness in Simeon Solomon’s 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.
Afterlives of Slavery Digital Platform Launches
Afterlives of Slavery Digital Platform Launches
The "Afterlives of Slavery" digital archive investigates the relationship (and endurance) of visual practices fostered during the slaveholding era in the circum-Atlantic world and contemporary modes ...
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.
Workshop with Melanie White
Workshop
Workshop with Melanie White
Melanie White (Georgetown University) workshopped her paper "Envisioning the Miskitu Coast: Colonial Intimacies, Archives of Refusal."
Visual Afterlives of Enslavement
Workshop
Visual Afterlives of Enslavement
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.
Book Talk with Danielle Terrazas Williams
Book Talk with Danielle Terrazas Williams
The author of Capital of Free Women: Race, Legitimacy, and Liberty in Colonial Mexico discussed her book and current research.
Reading Group for Noémie Ndiaye’s Scripts of Blackness
Discussion
Reading Group for Noémie Ndiaye’s Scripts of Blackness
This reading group met to discuss Noémie Ndiaye's new book, Scripts of Blackness.
Seeing David Drake’s Ceramics
Discussion
Seeing David Drake’s Ceramics
This was a guided gallery visit and conversation with Elizabeth McGoey, Associate Curator at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Visualizing/Performing Blackness in the Afterlives of Slavery: Conversatorio en español
Discussion
Visualizing/Performing Blackness in the Afterlives of Slavery: Conversatorio en español
On April 19, the Working Group on Slavery and Visual Culture launched its first digital exhibit, Visualizing/Performing Blackness in the Afterlives of Slavery: A Caribbean Archive, curated by ...
Visualizing/Performing Blackness in the Afterlives of Slavery: Roundtable (in English)
Discussion
Visualizing/Performing Blackness in the Afterlives of Slavery: Roundtable (in English)
On April 19, the Working Group on Slavery and Visual Culture launched its first digital exhibit, Visualizing/Performing Blackness in the Afterlives of Slavery: A Caribbean Archive, curated by ...
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.
Images on a Mission
Lecture
Images on a Mission
At this lecture, Cécile Fromont discussed her new book, Images on a Mission in Early Modern Kongo and Angola (2022).
Reading List
Bennett, Herman
African Kings and Black Slaves: Sovereignty and Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019 ReadBoisseron, Bénédicte
Afro-dog: Blackness and the Animal Question NY: Columbia University Press, 2018 ReadBrooks, Daphne
Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performance of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910 Durham: Duke University Press, 2006 ReadFinley, Cheryl
Committed to Memory: The Art of the Slave Ship Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019 ReadFracchia, Carmen
"Black but Human": Slavery and Visual Arts in Hapsburg Spain, 1480-1700 Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019 ReadHartman, Saidiya
Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-century America Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997 ReadLane, Jill
Blackface Cuba Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005 ReadLugo-Ortiz, Agnes and Angela Rosenthal
Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013 ReadSharpe, Christina
In the Wake: On Blackness and Being Durham: Duke University Press, 2016 ReadThomas, Sarah
Witnessing Slavery: Art and Travel in the Age of Abolition New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019 ReadExplore
