Picturing Slavery: Photography and the U.S. Slave Narrative, 1831-1920.

Abstract

In my dissertation, Picturing Slavery: Photography and the U.S. Slave Narrative, 1831-1920, I argue that photography—the single most revolutionary visual technology of the nineteenth century—transformed the formal structures and circulation practices of the U.S. slave narrative.

Picturing Slavery illustrates how photography—its processes, effects, and cultural histories—changed the structure and purpose of nineteenth-century narratives of slavery and freedom. Via extensive archival research and close readings of both written and visual texts, I uncover the ways in which abolitionists’ desires for visual impressions of slavery—representations of the former slave’s experiences as images or “pictures”—shifted the written slave narrative to a form self-consciously in dialogue with new and emerging visual technologies. In their attempts “to tell [slavery’s] story to the eye,” Black and White writers embraced the photograph as a structural model for a new kind of narrative. In Picturing Slavery, I highlight the photographic reference points for visual and written texts as diverse as Civil war era photo albums, Frederick Douglass’s The Heroic Slave, Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches, Elizabeth Keckley’s Behind the Scenes, and Paul Laurence Dunbar’s photographically illustrated poems.

In bringing these new forms to light, I call for a radical shift in how we imagine not only the slave narrative, but also the literary traditions that it shaped over the course of the nineteenth-century and into the twentieth.