Gestures Against Movements: Henry Box Brown and Economies of Narrative Performance

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janet Neary
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Black Body ◽  
Cultural Work ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
Textual Production ◽  
Narrative Performance

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.

Fugitive Testimony

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janet Neary
Keyword(s):  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
Visual Artists ◽  
Elizabeth Keckley ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Narrative Performance ◽  
Kara Walker ◽  
Glenn Ligon

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.

Look, blackness in Brazil!: Disrupting the grotesquerie of racial representation in Brazilian visual culture

2012 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Andrea Dos Santos Soares
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Black People ◽  
Black Studies ◽  
Black Feminism ◽  
Black Body ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Racial Representation ◽  
Racial Domination ◽  
And Performance

This article experiments with collage to explore the visual representation of black people in Brazilian media, popular culture and politics, examining how these representations constitute statements regarding dynamics of racial domination. The work proposes that the introduction of disruptive elements into the very images that objectify the black body could create the necessary conditions for a valuable criticism of how blackness is disposed within the nation’s formation. The articulation with black studies in visual culture and performance, black feminism, African diaspora and post-colonial theories intends to develop analytical frames to examine the interconnection between the representational process of ‘stereotyping’, symbolic violence and anti-black ideologies in the context of the national formation narratives. Methodologically, the articulation of these fields of inquiry intends to provide tools able to highlight and disrupt the regimes of racial representation circulating in Brazilian popular culture.

Capital of Pleasure

2020 ◽  
pp. 119-136
Author(s):  
Rohan McWilliam
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Sheet Glass ◽  
Cultural Work ◽  
Artificial Light ◽  
The West ◽  
The Senses ◽  
The Way

This chapter decodes some of the pleasures of the West End and analyses its different forms of cultural work. To do this, it explores its appeal to the senses: sight, touch, smell, taste, orality. Pleasure districts trade on forms of hyper-stimulation. This helps locate the West End in terms of visual culture. The chapter argues that the West End was the product of artificial light, embodied in the deployment of gas-light and sheet glass. The chapter then explores the West End in terms of the production of images of glamour and sexuality: further examples of the sensory appeal of the district. This is then contrasted with the way prostitutes became a notorious feature of the West End evident both on the streets and in the night houses (nightclubs) around the Haymarket.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Hurricane Katrina ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Black Body ◽  
Past Century ◽  
Racial Equity ◽  
Human Identity ◽  
The Past ◽  
Abolitionist Movement ◽  
Elemental Component

This book traces the lineage of humane insight and spectacles of black suffering and death in the past century and a half, from the abolitionist movement to the murder of Emmett Tilland and the devastation of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina. Humane insight refers to a kind of looking in which the onlooker's ethics are addressed by the spectacle of others' embodied suffering. It is an ethics- based look that turns a benevolent eye, recognizes violations of human dignity, and bestows or articulates the desire for actual protection. This book investigates incidents in African American visual culture that depend upon the recognition of humanity as an elemental component of human identity to be sought and secured. It examines how the image of the mortal, wounded, and dead black body grounds a politics of racial equity and justice in the language of pathos. By focusing on how pain and even death among African Americans are rendered discussable, the book reveals how black pain has been made to make sense.

scholarly journals Imperial (S)Kin: The Orthography of the Wake in Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black

2020 ◽  
Vol 55 (s2) ◽  
pp. 465-494
Author(s):  
Rūta Šlapkauskaitė
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Institutional Racism ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Dysfunctional Family ◽  
Hot Air ◽  
Epistemic Violence ◽  
Scientific Laboratory ◽  
Narrative Performance ◽  
Black Critical Theory

Abstract The publication of Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black has placed the novel among other works of history and art, which recall the material and epistemic violence of institutional racism and the lasting trauma of its legacy. Thus by interlacing, within the context of black critical theory, Yogita Goyal’s and Laura T. Murphy’s examining of the neo-slave narrative with Christina Sharpe’s conceptualization of the wake and Alexander G. Weheliye’s notion of habeas viscus as critical frames for the discussion of racialized subjectivity, I consider how Edugyan’s use of the conventions of Victorian adventure literature and the slave narrative rethinks the entanglements between the imperial commodification of life and the scientific agenda of natural history. Given how the narrative emphasizes the somatic register and its epidermal terms as a scene of meaning, I bring together Frantz Fanon’s idea of epidermalization, Steven Connor’s phenomenological reading of the skin, and Calvin L. Warren’s reasoning about blackness in an attempt to highlight the metalepsis resulting from the novel’s use of the hot air-balloon and the octopus as dermatropes that cast the empire as simultaneously a dysfunctional family and a scientific laboratory. Loaded into the skin as a master trope is the conceptual cross-over between consciousness and conscience, whose narrative performance in the novel nourishes the affective labour of its reader as an agent of memory.

Comparative Anatomies

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Britt Rusert
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Comparative Anatomy ◽  
Visual Representations ◽  
Black Body ◽  
Visual Cultures

This chapter examines how Black and Afro-Native ethnologies published in the 1830s and early 1840s resisted the racist visual cultures of comparative anatomy, including craniology and ethnology. The ethnologies of Robert Benjamin Lewis, Hosea Easton, and James W. C. Pennington challenged the tethering of the black body to visual representations of pathology in both science and popular culture through the production of a counter-archive of visual culture, as well as through ekphrastic re-visions of the Black, Native American, and Afro-Native body.

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