Literature, Art and Slavery
Ekphrastic Visions
- A focus on texts that (with the obvious exception of David Dabydeen’s ‘Turner’ [1994]) exist at the critical and canonical margin
- An emphasis on Black Atlantic writers, designed to counter the bias in much ekphrastic criticism towards white authors
- Location of African American literature in conversation with African American as well as white American art
Since around 2000, there has been a noticeable upsurge in critical work on the visual archive of Atlantic slavery, resulting in a host of important studies. While most of these contributions are weighted towards images created during the era of slavery itself, some critics have adopted a more historically far-reaching approach, exploring the ways in which such images live on beyond the original context of their production, circulation and consumption, returning imaginatively in different forms at different times and in different places. This book shares the fascination with the afterlives which such visual materials have enjoyed, but places the accent on how that posterity has evolved in the realms of literature, especially poetry. It focuses on transactions between texts written between the mid-1990s and 2020 and images of slavery that belong to British, American and (in one case) French traditions, as produced between c. 1779 and 1939.
List of Figures
Series Editors' Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Reframing Ekphrasis
1. Adding to the Picture: New Perspectives on David Dabydeen’s ‘Turner’
2. Looking beyond ‘Turner’: William B. Patrick’s ‘The Slave Ship’
3. ‘Slave-Ships on Fantastic Seas’: The Art of Abolition
4. The Secret Afterlives of Dido Elizabeth Belle
5. African-American Ekphrasis and the ‘Peculiar Institution’
6. Icon-versations: F. Douglas Brown, Jacob Lawrence and Frederick Douglass
Bibliography
Index
In this ingenious study, Carl Plasa examines how visual images of slavery from the last three centuries reverberate in contemporary literary works, ranging from David Dabydeen’s "Turner" to F. Douglas Brown's Icon. While the horrors of the slave trade have often been suppressed by historians, Plasa shows how this suppression has been challenged by influential (and less familiar) artworks and their eloquent afterlives in literature.
