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1 results

  • Chapter 12 - Visual Insubordination within Early African American Portraiture and Illustrated Books

  • from Part IV - Illustration and the Narrative Form
  • Edited by Jasmine Nichole Cobb, Duke University, North Carolina
  • Book:
    African American Literature in Transition, 1800–1830
    Published online:
    11 March 2021
    Print publication:
    13 May 2021, pp 316-343

  • Summary

    This chapter scrutinizes early frontispieces contained within books by Phillis Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano and then proceeds to examine the illustrated antislavery books of Moses Roper and Henry Bibb (both of which also contain frontispieces as well as other types of illustrations). Although Roper’s book was published in 1837 and Bibb’s in 1849, this chapter argues that both men (being born in 1815 and having participated in the antislavery movement) were responding to the abject treatment of the enslaved in earlier antislavery materials. The words of the text interact with its visual optic to interpellate the reader and envision a figurative mode of agency and self-possession for the enslaved body and the freed Black subject. The chapter concludes with a forward glance at artworks by Kara Walker and Glen Ligon that also attempt to excavate (although in a more abstract way) the trace of a resistant visual tradition within African American literature and US visual culture.