In Picture Freedom, I consider Black visuality through various sense making mechanisms associated with the eye, and rather than as a specific thing or a single instance, I theorize Black visuality within a complicated interplay between subjectivity, social context, and cultural representations as circumscribed by the trauma of slavery. With my approach, I mean to deconstruct the still–a priori organization of Blackness as Other or as a thing first seen before becoming a subject who looks at others—a residual effect of slavery’s visual logics. Black visuality is a complicated quest to reveal, to make visible, the themes of subjectivity that lie at the other end of the visual encounter. It is about the ways in which the racialized object, in fact, has eyes, casts a gaze, and consciously construes a way of being visible. At the same time, Black visuality is also about the ways in which people of African descent lived within the shroud of invisibility and reveled in it as a nascent element of a Black experience. Often denoted in situations of its absence or a “mostly invisible black visuality,” this notion is about the unseen elements of the visual encounter.23 Slavery’s emphasis on the visible markers of Black raciality, such as hair texture and skin color, failed to attend to the unseen aspects of visual culture. Just as the perpetual surveillance of the Black body in slavery and the forced spectacle of the coffle are foundational to theorizations of Black visuality in the early republic, so, too, are the subversive measures and invisible methods of undermining these visual logics.
The visual theorist Nicole Fleetwood describes Blackness as a “troubling vision” where the visible Black body poses an enduring nuisance to the very scopic regimes that rendered it problematic and locates this foundation in “captivity and capitalism.”24 Picture Freedom builds on this work to explicate the extent to which slavery zeroed in on the Black body as a site of production, and as a way of life, proliferated through a racialized visual order with which early demonstrations of freedom needed to contend. When persons of African descent acted outside of this order, via the flicker of a glance or a disingenuous presentation of self, they revealed slavery’s visual logics of race as fallible. Thus, we might think of the troubling nature of Blackness in the field of vision as masterfully contrived, initiated in the ways in which the fugitive free decisively troubled slavery’s ocularity as a means of resistance. The genius of fugitivity (which I discuss in chapter 1) was that it revealed to Whites that Black visuality was not simply Black visibility—that the social fact of Blackness in the visual field entailed surprising complications. Black visuality—the entire sum of the visual as experienced by people of African descent—helped to undermine slavery’s visual codes. Psychic and subjective, Black visuality as shaped by the experience of slavery pertains to the Black figure’s awareness of how she was perceived, and the sense of possession she felt toward her own body that allowed her to master and manipulate outward constructions of her visibility.
Picture Freedom is related to, but distinct from, an art history of free Black people during slavery because it focuses on popular culture, specifically. Popular cultures offer an opportunity to think about the everyday experience of living among images of Black freedom, and not just questions of negative or positive publicity.25 Print media supported the minstrel performances that invited Whites to imitate “perceived Blackness.”26 Through Jim Crow plays, Blackface performances in traveling circuses, and racial ephemera in the home, Blackness came to instantiate what would become U.S. popular culture. The materials of everyday life that variously “pictured” Black freedom in its earliest conceptualizations offered a coping mechanism for transatlantic audiences trying to interpret the significance of free Black populations and mass resistance to slavery. Through depicting Blackness as foreign to itself, as hypervisible but lacking critical awareness or visual capacity, images discouraging emancipation settled into the cultural fabric of the nation and offered routes through which White viewers could accept abolition much later in the century. Significant volumes such as the Image of the Black in Western Art are, at least in part, revisionist efforts to illuminate the history of Black representations as far more lengthy and complex than the Middle Passage.27 Such treatments rally against the idea of slavery as an inception for explorations of Black life, especially because slavery ignited a host of unflattering portrayals of Black people. However, slavery remains an important, even if controversial site for considering revolutions relevant to Black visuality because of its indelible mark on the way in which people of African descent resisted its limited conceptualizations of racial difference. African-descended peoples existed within slavery’s complicated visual culture and were consistent forces in its maintenance and deconstruction. Early ruminations on freedom during slavery offer up another moment in which to explore Leigh Raiford’s charge that Black visuality “is inextricable from African American movement efforts to change the conditions of black people’s lives.”28 Slavery’s visual organization of Black raciality represented an exigency for the performance of freedom, and thus it remains essential to historical cultural analyses of how Black people re-presented themselves apart from bondage.
My exploration of Black visuality draws upon mediated and unmediated modes for reconceptualizing Blackness as free when such a notion was most disruptive. Practices of picturing freedom among people of African descent were more complex than a single mediated moment, but instead existed as day-to-day methods of survival, submission, and resistance to the prevailing codes of looking. In this study, I parse Black visuality through the silent, but dialogic, visual interactions across difference that rendered Blackness as representable. Picture Freedom explores Blackness as both visual and visible along with the complex web of cultural practices. The emergent and cohesive Atlantic world taking shape outside the home was one of instability and unsustainability, hastening demands for an unchanging parlor anchored by symbols of empire.
The Transatlantic Parlor
The issue of Black freedom in the context of slavery is an inherently transatlantic concern.29 British slavery helped compel U.S. slavery, and whether by profitability or morality as a motive, British abolition inspired U.S. activists to suppress the slave trade.30 Moreover, Black people who asserted their freedom in the wake of imperial wars, and apart from organized antislavery efforts, simultaneously declared their own transatlanticism. For example, a number of Black Loyalists, who supported the British Crown against the United States in the Revolutionary War, fought for freedom through movement from Virginia, to Canada, and ultimately, Sierra Leone.31 Enslaved Black people in bondage throughout the Americas were aware of the stakes associated with changing imperial relations, whether in the United States or in the European colonies.32 The interdependent Atlantic world linked through bondage and colonialism meant that the corollary violent resistance to slavery by unfree Blacks was also internationally relevant. When people of African descent rebelled against slavery in Saint-Domingue in 1791—giving way to the emergence of independent Haiti in 1804—their uprising unnerved supporters of slavery and inspired Black people throughout the Atlantic world. The Haitian Revolution unsettled practices of enslavement not only under French rule, but throughout the Americas, as news of the insurrection inspired resistance in other locales.33 Whereas the Atlantic world served as a setting for cycles of human chattel and imported goods, it was also host to contemplation about the meaning of freedom. The Atlantic world functioned as what Mary Louis Pratt calls the “contact zone,” a space of clashing and combining “asymmetrical relations of power,” to include both slavery and its abolition.34 Laws such as the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade passed by British Parliament in 1807 attempted to maintain an interconnected Atlantic world through suppressing the transportation of Africans across the Atlantic Ocean.
Just like Britain and France, the U.S. scenario for slavery carried with it specific attributes that were relevant to the Atlantic world as a contact zone. First, unfree Blacks and White slavers lived together in the domestic confines of the nation, and thus White lawmakers could not geographically disaggregate the question of Black freedom, such as was the case for European metropoles and colonies. European visitors to colonial America gave “particular attention” to U.S. slavery, since there was no “European equivalent of the plantation slave system as it existed in the American South.”35 In this context, Black freedom in the United States posed immediate questions relating to home and nationality. Under what conditions do people of African descent belong within the United States? Second, and related to this, lawmakers decided the judicial abolition of slavery on a state-by-state basis in the United States, making the early republic “a