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
Larissa Brewer-García specializes in colonial Latin American studies, with a focus on cultural productions of the Caribbean, the Andes, and the African diaspora. Within these areas, her interests include gender studies, literature and law, genealogies of race and racism, humanism and...
Associate Professor, Department of Cinema and Media Studies and the College
University of Chicago
Allyson Nadia Field’s scholarship contributes to evolving areas of study that investigate the functioning of race and representation in interdisciplinary contexts surrounding cinema. Her primary research interest is in African American film, both silent era cinema and more contemporary...
Associate Professor of Latin American Literature, Romance Languages and Literatures
University of Chicago
Agnes Lugo-Ortiz is a specialist in nineteenth-century Latin American literature, and in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Caribbean cultural history. Her work focuses on questions concerning the relationships between cultural production and the formation of modern socio-political identities....
Neubauer Family Assistant Professor in Latin American Literature
University of Chicago
Danielle Roper specializes in contemporary racial and queer performance, racial formation, feminist activism, and visual culture in the Hemispheric Americas. Her work on Caribbean feminism, mestizaje, queer art, and racial impersonation has appeared in Latin American Research Review,...
Associate Professor, English Language and Literature
University of Chicago
Christopher Taylor's research and teaching focus on the hemispheric Americas in the nineteenth century. While the British West Indies is his primary area of focus, he is interested in how these islands were linked to worlds beyond the boundaries of the British Empire. Working at the edges of...
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."
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.
On April 19, the Working Group on Slavery and Visual Culture launched its first digital exhibit,...
On April 19, the Working Group on Slavery and Visual Culture launched its first digital exhibit,...
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...
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.
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...
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.
On April 19, the Working Group on Slavery and Visual Culture launched its first digital exhibit,...
On April 19, the Working Group on Slavery and Visual Culture launched its first digital exhibit,...
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).
