how media conjured a racio-visual logic in support of slavery. Thinking through visual culture as a “generative” site for the deployment of slaving ideologies, I describe the runaway and the mediation of the runaway as distinct, but interrelated, examples of slavery’s visual assumptions.8 Whereas media supporting slavery helped proliferate the visual construction of race, the runaway forcibly destabilized these presumptions.
Media in support of slavery points to the runaway as a distinctive problem, but I collect these reclamations of freedom under the rubric of fugitivity. While slavery alone was enough to initiate a perpetual state of “not belonging” for people of African descent, the fugitive conditions of homelessness and obscurity also correspond to exhibitions of freedom in the context of slavery. Whites often curiously regarded demonstrations of freedom among Black people in the context of slavery, receiving such displays as out of place. Even someone like Freeman might have been somewhat of a mystery to Whites, both in her ability to manipulate the visual terms of slavery in the Ashley house as well as in her demonstration of freedom through portraiture. Yet, the confounding nature of Black freedom in the context of slavery did not result from the “fugitive vision” of exceptional Black people who transformed from unfree to free cultural producers, but from the way in which slavery intertwined race and visuality.9 I argue that displays of Black freedom took up the questions of legibility and home that defined fugitivity and haunted the transatlantic. The idea and the image of the Black fugitive symbolized insurgence against both a specific master who properly “owned” the runaway, and against the state, which depended upon Black people’s compliance with slavery as the rule of law. Blacks who ran away were fugitives from justice but also fugitives from an evolving conception of the Atlantic world as home. While slavery constructed people of African descent as legible and comprehensible, freedom and fugitive freedom took up illegibility as permanent conditions that countered the parlor’s reliance on slavery.
Even the juridical demand for freedom took up the issue of fugitivity in the face of the transatlantic slave trade. Freeman’s reclamation of liberty explicitly proposed questions about home and belonging in a transatlantic landscape. Freeman managed both local and large-scale notions of domesticity in the process of resisting slavery. She was one of the first people of African descent to sue for liberation in the United States, filing one of the earliest “freedom suits” in the state of Massachusetts in 1781.10 In Sedgwick’s narrative of Freeman’s life, she reports on Freeman’s experience of hearing a public reading of the Declaration of Independence in Sheffield, Massachusetts, from which Freeman discerned that U.S. Americans’ right to liberty from England translated to her right to freedom from Whites and from slavery. On hearing “that paper read yesterday that says ‘all men are born equal—&, that every man has a right to freedom,’” Freeman asked, “‘wont the law give me my freedom?’”11 Freeman’s idea that the Declaration of Independence applied to her is indicative of her notion of a transatlantic belonging as a precedent to U.S. national identity. Her pursuit of emancipation was not yet about her right to U.S. citizenship, but about her right to the freedom to which people in the colonial United States were entitled in the Atlantic world.
My interest is about how the fugitive element of exhibitions of freedom in the context of slavery called attention to the ways in which people of African descent confronted the visual conditions of slavery by acting outside its institutional presets of interracial interactions. Spectacular exhibitions of freedom problematized and abraded the visual culture of slavery. Fugitive free Blacks reveal that the enslaved might outwardly appear resigned even while calculating escape. Fugitive free people of African descent masterfully understood assumptions about race, vision, and visuality, and then used this knowledge to steal themselves and upend the foundational assumptions of slavery’s visual culture. The ascertainment of freedom by way of fugitivity suggested a calculated incongruence between the outward appearance of the Black body and the internal perceptions of the unfree person. Freeman’s commitment to her sister may have made running away a less likely choice for her—a notion consistent with the fact that most runaways were men.12 Nonetheless, her method of achieving liberty still conjured questions of domestic belonging and an opaque display of freedom meant to torment her abuser. My description of slavery’s peculiar visual culture is meant to situate early exhibitions of freedom within a fraught and domineering context for reception. This chapter explains the visual culture of slavery as one undergirded by an unreliable praxis that depended on “visible” signifiers of race to conflate seeing and subjectivity, to racialize the eye/I. Whereas the practices of transatlantic slavery institutionalized a visual construction of race and racial ways of seeing, late-eighteenth-century assertions of Black freedom offered interruption.
A Peculiar Ocularity
Slavery functioned as a peculiarly “ocular” institution. Its daily execution thrived in a racio-visual economy that determined ways of seeing and ways of being seen according to racial difference. In trying to imagine the visual culture of slavery, one might most immediately consider the routine monitoring of bondspersons’ behavior on plantations since this was central to slavery’s policing tactics. C. Riley Snorton asserts that “plantation governance schemes” and the role of the overseer, in particular, were chief among slavery’s practices of visual domination.13 Additionally, the whole process of chattel slavery relied heavily upon visual culture wherein the idea of the eye was a matter of racialization. Indeed, to possess both the eye and an “I” was a matter of raciality in the context of slavery. The divisions of social power into White or Black also parsed the faculty of sight into discrete racial categories. More specifically, slavery organized an omniscient White eye/I to police and manage Black bodies, constructing sight as a racially distinct experience, and as the sovereign domain of Whiteness. Summarily, slavery parsed visibility along racial lines as well, distinguishing and racializing people of African descent from Whites through the presumption of an innate visibility. Whereas practices of enslavement relied on the eye within social encounters, the visual culture of slavery constructed race and racialized the act of seeing.
But slavery’s peculiar ocularity was more than the mere visual habits that made slavery possible. By slavery’s peculiar ocularity, I mean the very specific visual idiosyncrasies and contradictions utilized within the visual logics of slavery that were at once contrary and commonplace in early U.S. life. These visual logics of racial decorum were irrational, unreliable, and often collided with one another, even as they were crucial to enslavement philosophies. For example, while Whites exercised visual authority over Blacks, there were also numerous instances of Black overseers or “drivers”; these Black overseers could be as cruel or more benign than their White counterparts, but their race meant that their authority was limited by law. Black slave drivers existed somewhere between official White overseers and enslaved Blacks in this peculiar visual culture.14 To think of slavery as a peculiarly ocular institution is to think of how systemic bondage fetishized a connection between vision and race in ways that were simultaneously nonsensical and naturalized. Slavery entailed a tautological, and thus self-sustaining, visual rationale. The peculiar visual practices of slavery happened in the day-to-day processes of enslavement that inconsistently used the eye to determine signifiers of race, and thereby determine social, economic, political, and visual possibilities. Slavery organized a strange approach to race that emphasized sight and intertwined raciality with visuality. The hegemony of slavery’s peculiar ocularity relied on visibility to enslave, and relied on invisibility to carry out slavery with feigned innocence. Slavery coded Black raciality as visible, and thus associated the denial of freedom with racial perceptibility. Not only did the sight of persons of African descent first suggest they should be enslaved, but, more importantly, the habitation of an observable racial identity coincided with enslavement, over time. This kind of racio-visual logic persisted, making it necessary for free Black people to furnish paperwork to prove their freedom to random Whites in northern U.S. states, and for all persons of African descent to live under the suppressive scrutiny of various “codes” to legislate proper behavior.15
Saidiya Hartman’s canonic text offers up the term “scenes of subjection” as language useful for thinking through the overdetermination of Blackness in the field of vision, or hypervisibility, where forced displays of jubilee and the sight of the
