Janet Neary
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780823272891
- eISBN:
- 9780823272945
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823272891.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Race and Ethnicity
Fugitive Testimony traces the African American slave narrative across the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries in order to rethink the epistemological limits of the form and to theorize the complicated ...
More
Fugitive Testimony traces the African American slave narrative across the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries in order to rethink the epistemological limits of the form and to theorize the complicated interplay between the visual and the literary throughout its history. Gathering an archive of ante- and post-bellum literary slave narratives and visual art, the book redraws the genealogy of the slave narrative in light of its emergence in contemporary art and brings visual and performance theory to bear on the genre’s central problematic: that the ex-slave narrator must be both object and subject of the narrative to provide an eyewitness account of his or her own enslavement. The book takes as its starting point the evocation of the slave narrative in works by a number of current-day visual artists, including Glenn Ligon, Kara Walker, and Ellen Driscoll, and uses the representational strategies of these artists to decode the visual work performed in 19th-century literary narratives by Elizabeth Keckley, Solomon Northup, William Craft, and Henry Box Brown. Focusing on slave narratives’ textual visuality and aspects of narrative performance, rather than the intermedial, semiotic traffic between images and text, the book argues that ex-slave narrators and the contemporary artists under consideration use the logic of the slave narrative form against itself to undermine the evidentiary epistemology of the genre and offer a model of visuality as intersubjective recognition rather than objective division.Less
Fugitive Testimony traces the African American slave narrative across the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries in order to rethink the epistemological limits of the form and to theorize the complicated interplay between the visual and the literary throughout its history. Gathering an archive of ante- and post-bellum literary slave narratives and visual art, the book redraws the genealogy of the slave narrative in light of its emergence in contemporary art and brings visual and performance theory to bear on the genre’s central problematic: that the ex-slave narrator must be both object and subject of the narrative to provide an eyewitness account of his or her own enslavement. The book takes as its starting point the evocation of the slave narrative in works by a number of current-day visual artists, including Glenn Ligon, Kara Walker, and Ellen Driscoll, and uses the representational strategies of these artists to decode the visual work performed in 19th-century literary narratives by Elizabeth Keckley, Solomon Northup, William Craft, and Henry Box Brown. Focusing on slave narratives’ textual visuality and aspects of narrative performance, rather than the intermedial, semiotic traffic between images and text, the book argues that ex-slave narrators and the contemporary artists under consideration use the logic of the slave narrative form against itself to undermine the evidentiary epistemology of the genre and offer a model of visuality as intersubjective recognition rather than objective division.
Janet Neary
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780823272891
- eISBN:
- 9780823272945
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823272891.003.0006
- Subject:
- Sociology, Race and Ethnicity
This chapter traces the various circuits—economic, narrative, performative—that structure black abolitionist textual production through the cultural work of Henry Box Brown. Building on Daphne ...
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This chapter traces the various circuits—economic, narrative, performative—that structure black abolitionist textual production through the cultural work of Henry Box Brown. Building on Daphne Brooks’s analysis of Brown’s texts in particular, this chapter argues that we should consider black abolitionist performance in tandem with narrative performance: the unruly narrative gestures uncontained by the slave narrative form or the expectations of its primarily white readership. While Brown’s use of illustration and panorama allow us to read the slave narrative anew, the chapter claims that ex-slave narrators utilized a similar recognition of the iconicity of the black body and visual savvy in their narratives, producing rhetorical performances that challenge the ideological containment of the slave narrative. In attending to the textual aspects of visual culture, the chapter brings to light Brown’s insurgent iconoclasm which emerges to disrupt the “discursively claustrophobic tone and form” of even his most constrained 1849 narrative.Less
This chapter traces the various circuits—economic, narrative, performative—that structure black abolitionist textual production through the cultural work of Henry Box Brown. Building on Daphne Brooks’s analysis of Brown’s texts in particular, this chapter argues that we should consider black abolitionist performance in tandem with narrative performance: the unruly narrative gestures uncontained by the slave narrative form or the expectations of its primarily white readership. While Brown’s use of illustration and panorama allow us to read the slave narrative anew, the chapter claims that ex-slave narrators utilized a similar recognition of the iconicity of the black body and visual savvy in their narratives, producing rhetorical performances that challenge the ideological containment of the slave narrative. In attending to the textual aspects of visual culture, the chapter brings to light Brown’s insurgent iconoclasm which emerges to disrupt the “discursively claustrophobic tone and form” of even his most constrained 1849 narrative.
Janet Neary
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780823272891
- eISBN:
- 9780823272945
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823272891.003.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Race and Ethnicity
Using contemporary artwork as a lens onto the textual visuality of 19th-century slave narratives, this introduction to Fugitive Testimony works backwards historically to excavate ex-slave narrators’ ...
More
Using contemporary artwork as a lens onto the textual visuality of 19th-century slave narratives, this introduction to Fugitive Testimony works backwards historically to excavate ex-slave narrators’ challenge to authenticating conventions, and therefore their challenge to the assumptions motivating racial classification itself. The introduction argues that the book’s unique focus on the recursive nature of the slave narrative form unifies what have been three distinct phases of the genre’s criticism within the academy—historical, literary, and cultural studies approaches—and contributes to the historiographical contours of Atlantic studies. Drawing on literary analysis, art history, and visual and performance theory, the book connects vital early literary critical accounts of the slave narrative that examine the genre’s conventions of authentication and issues of literacy with later cultural studies approaches, including those advanced by Lindon Barrett, Saidiya Hartman, Fred Moten, Daphne Brooks, and Michael Chaney.Less
Using contemporary artwork as a lens onto the textual visuality of 19th-century slave narratives, this introduction to Fugitive Testimony works backwards historically to excavate ex-slave narrators’ challenge to authenticating conventions, and therefore their challenge to the assumptions motivating racial classification itself. The introduction argues that the book’s unique focus on the recursive nature of the slave narrative form unifies what have been three distinct phases of the genre’s criticism within the academy—historical, literary, and cultural studies approaches—and contributes to the historiographical contours of Atlantic studies. Drawing on literary analysis, art history, and visual and performance theory, the book connects vital early literary critical accounts of the slave narrative that examine the genre’s conventions of authentication and issues of literacy with later cultural studies approaches, including those advanced by Lindon Barrett, Saidiya Hartman, Fred Moten, Daphne Brooks, and Michael Chaney.
Janet Neary
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780823272891
- eISBN:
- 9780823272945
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823272891.003.0002
- Subject:
- Sociology, Race and Ethnicity
Establishing and examining an archive of contemporary visual slave narratives—including Glenn Ligon’s Narratives and Runaways series (1993), Kara Walker’s Slavery! Slavery! (1997) and Narratives of a ...
More
Establishing and examining an archive of contemporary visual slave narratives—including Glenn Ligon’s Narratives and Runaways series (1993), Kara Walker’s Slavery! Slavery! (1997) and Narratives of a Negress (2003), and Ellen Driscoll’s TheLoophole of Retreat (1991)—this chapter reframes critical debates on the slave narrative around the visual stakes of the form and advances a new model of reading the slave narrative founded on attention to the historical and aesthetic dislocations and disjunctions accentuated in contemporary visual slave narratives. Concluding with an analysis of Frederick Douglass’s visual intervention in his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, specifically, his metaphorical assertion, “You have seen how a man was made a slave, you shall see how a slave was made a man,” the chapter argues that both contemporary artists and 19th-century ex-slave narrators produce representational static to evade the racial constraints on their artistic production.Less
Establishing and examining an archive of contemporary visual slave narratives—including Glenn Ligon’s Narratives and Runaways series (1993), Kara Walker’s Slavery! Slavery! (1997) and Narratives of a Negress (2003), and Ellen Driscoll’s TheLoophole of Retreat (1991)—this chapter reframes critical debates on the slave narrative around the visual stakes of the form and advances a new model of reading the slave narrative founded on attention to the historical and aesthetic dislocations and disjunctions accentuated in contemporary visual slave narratives. Concluding with an analysis of Frederick Douglass’s visual intervention in his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, specifically, his metaphorical assertion, “You have seen how a man was made a slave, you shall see how a slave was made a man,” the chapter argues that both contemporary artists and 19th-century ex-slave narrators produce representational static to evade the racial constraints on their artistic production.
