how did viewers of the Atlantic world incorporate and exclude free Blackness, simultaneously?
The Archive of Freedom
Slavery and its corresponding philosophies of the visual have marred the antebellum archive of Black visuality. A specifically nineteenth-century desire for “coherence, accuracy, and completion” in representations of race meant limited variation among illustrations of Black freedom before the photograph.63 The preemancipation archive of Black freedom is rampant with reluctance to depict the Black body as interested in or prepared for the act of picturing. Stephen Best points out the “emptiness” in the “visual archive of slavery,” where there are no visual equivalents to the slave narrative in early U.S. history; whereas “slaves [were] not the subject of the visual imagination,” but instead “its object,” Best points to a foreclosed visual imagination among unfree Blacks that does not appear in the archives.64 Such an observation might seem hard to fathom given the ubiquity of Black representations in archives of the early United States, beginning in the late eighteenth century. However, recent scholarship further reveals the complexity scholars face in parsing Blackness in the visual culture of the nineteenth century. The archive demonstrates Black visuality as a utility, often a source of revelation; the visual occurs as a productive site where African Americans demonstrated fitness for citizenship or divulged the ruthlessness of slavery.65 Questions about visual imagination, especially outside the confines of propaganda, become difficult to trace. People who lived, loved, worked, played, and resisted a multitude of atrocities every day are noticeably absent in pictorial representations before the middle of the nineteenth century. Before the daguerreotype, images of the runaway, the eugenicists’ sketches of scientific racism, and the pervasive caricatured renditions of Africanness collectively constitute early conceptualizations of Black freedom.
The preemancipation archive of Black freedom also features critical portrayals of free Black communities, items that do the double work of representing people of African descent who actually existed, but also reveal contemptuous White attitudes toward Black emancipation. My triangulation of artifacts, even those in conflict with one another, offers a contextualization of the meanings in circulation as free people took to the streets of northern cities. Caricatures (which I discuss in chapter 3) are part of my larger attempt to make the very fleeting moment of sight palpable for the sake of critique. Since seeing is a disappearing practice, difficult to pin down and examine some centuries after the fact, I trace a complex web of transient interactions through both the cheap prints produced to comment on emancipation and in the “high culture” iterations of freedom in other formats. The cadre of characters discussed in Picture Freedom signify often conflicting approaches to Black visuality, symbolizing the complicated ways in which viewers across race grappled with the projected end of slavery. While Whites who were hostile to abolition used print to disparage the idea of Black freedom and national identity, free Black people and cultural producers carefully transformed their relationships to the visual.
Many of the Black people I explore in this study were quite dogmatic culture producers, insistent about racial propriety and representation. Consequently, their preoccupations with the “respectable” shaped an archive with few images of free Black bodies produced by people of African descent. They documented Black freedom in ways intended to avoid “negative stigmas and caricatures,” treating Black publicity in the slave era in ways that suggest a “deliberate concession to mainstream societal values.”66 Indeed, before the emergence of daguerreotype and the expansion of Black portraiture, people of African descent infrequently reproduced the Black body on the page. Prominent activists such as Frederick Douglass advocated for “the transformation of dominant conventions” around representations of Black people, but Black elites largely avoided picturing freedom in the quotidian formats of popular culture.67 While their parlors included a plethora of books and newspapers, their records primarily focused on the textual at the expense of a more picturesque archive. Similarly, free Black abolitionists who were active in the antislavery movement did not appear in its bastion of material culture and imagistic propaganda; much of abolitionist propaganda promoted the end of slavery with depictions of the unfree.68 Far less obvious than caricature’s abrasiveness, Black archiving of the visual emerges in the invisible. It is what does not appear on the page—including explicit racialization—that gives us insight into what Black visuality meant to those fortunate enough to be free, but who also remained unsafe and marginal in the early republic.
I have construed an archive that draws on a variety of items to discern the landscape of Black visuality and visualizations of Black freedom in the early nineteenth century. I piece together racial caricatures, lithographs, abolitionist newspaper writings, runaway notices, sentimental literatures, joke books, and scenic wallpaper to create a more robust depiction of Black freedom in the transatlantic imaginary. Picture Freedom seeks to bring the emergent appearance of Black freedom into sharper relief by excavating the ways in which Black people presented themselves as free within a visual culture built upon a perverse concept of Black visuality. It asks and answers questions about how formerly enslaved people of African descent reformulated notions of vision and visuality to present themselves as free to a hostile public. At the same time, this text considers how White viewers evolved practices of looking to cope with the chaos set in motion by the emergence of Black freedom. Through a critical cultural analysis of pictures, performances, looking practices, and plays on spectacularity, I explore the ways in which Whites and Blacks engaged Black freedom in preparation for abolition.
Overview
The people and pictures in this book reveal various postures toward the idea of Black freedom. They present early cultural experiments with vision and visibility, as well as new engagements with Black raciality. Rather than a chronological order, the organization of Picture Freedom mimics the movement of antebellum visual cultures as the emergence of emancipation restructured racial ways of seeing. The chapter order foregrounds the visual culture of slavery as the context for the earliest pictures of freedom, and proceeds to describe how viewers in Black homes and White homes variously used print to address the visual problems associated with Black freedom. I discuss evolving considerations of domesticity with a reflection on the parlor across chapters. Picture Freedom considers life on the street, race in the home, and Blackness within the northern United States and in the transforming Atlantic.
Chapter 1, “A Peculiarly ‘Ocular’ Institution,” theorizes the visual underpinnings of slavery in order to contextualize the cultural crisis represented by free Black people at the end of the eighteenth century. I take up the various ways in which slavery established a visual logic of race in order to underscore the emergence of Black freedom as a spectacular occurrence. I offer the language of the “peculiarly ‘ocular’ institution” to describe the visual practices of slavery as foundational and unwavering; it is from this established way of seeing race and visuality that questions about seeing Black freedom became complicated. I theorize the institutionalization of slavery’s visual culture through unique methods of social interaction and the circulation of “slaving media”—items such as the runaway notice that captured Blackness on the page or supported the system of slavery.
The remaining chapters examine various methods for picturing freedom in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, against a backdrop of slavery’s visual logics. Chapter 2, “Optics of Respectability: Women, Vision, and the Black Private Sphere” explores emergent visual practices developed by elite free Black women within the confines of Black parlors. This chapter critiques free Black women’s friendship albums, a popular form of sentimental print culture usually produced for middle-class White women, to explore how notable Black abolitionist women cultivated critical looking practices and subversively engaged perceptions of free Black womanhood.69 I use the friendship album as a basis for imagining the parlor and the production of privacy (such as interiority) in the lives of Black women who cultivated new self-perceptions in these spaces to coincide with experiences of freedom. Different from historical analyses of the friendship album, this chapter considers theories of feminist spectatorship to treat the album as a media artifact and to think about private practices of visual culture among free women in the slave era. I read the use and circulation
