Slavery In Art And Literature

Slavery, both in its historical and modern forms, continues to be a matter of undiminished political and social relevance. This is mirrored by an increasing interest in scholarly research as well as by critical statements from within the field of contemporary art. The present volume is designed to bring together artists and scholars from various fields of study discussing trauma and visuality, or more precisely, memory and denial of traumatic history within visual discourses. The purpose of this project is to put the phenomenon of contemporary art production dealing with the issue of slavery into a wider, interdisciplinary and transcultural context. The book covers current case studies focusing on different media and including visual, literary and performative approaches of dealing with the history of slavery in West-African, American and European cultures.

Art historian Henry M. Sayre traces the origins of the term “value” in art criticism, revealing the politics that define Manet’s art. How did art critics come to speak of light and dark as, respectively, “high in value” and “low in value”? Henry M. Sayre traces the origin of this usage to one of art history’s most famous and racially charged paintings, Édouard Manet’s Olympia. Art critics once described light and dark in painting in terms of musical metaphor—higher and lower tones, notes, and scales. Sayre shows that it was Émile Zola who introduced the new “law of values” in an 1867 essay on Manet. Unpacking the intricate contexts of Zola’s essay and of several related paintings by Manet, Sayre argues that Zola’s usage of value was intentionally double coded—an economic metaphor for the political economy of slavery. In Manet’s painting, Olympia and her maid represent objects of exchange, a commentary on the French Empire’s complicity in the ongoing slave trade in the Americas. Expertly researched and argued, this bold study reveals the extraordinary weight of history and politics that Manet’s painting bears. Locating the presence of slavery at modernism’s roots, Value in Art is a surprising and necessary intervention in our understanding of art history.

This book studies literary and visual representations of the many and diverse forms of slavery in Britain produced by globalisation since the early 1990s. It focuses on a wide range of works, from Ruth Rendell's pioneering crime novel Simisola through to the many authors who concentrated on Britain's new slaves in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Starting with an overview of the sociological and political analyses on the issue, the book develops critical paradigms in the field of cultural and literary studies in order to read the phenomenon of Britain's new slaveries. In doing so, it combines post-colonial and Holocaust studies in an original twin perspective that employs, as interpretive models, the recurrent tropes of the ghost and the concentration camp, whose manifold shapes populate the contemporary British landscape. The volume argues that approaching a topical issue such as new slaveries brings to the fore new, fertile directions for the future of both post-colonial and Holocaust studies, seen here as mutually enriching. This innovative study includes works by novelists and crime writers (Chris Abani, Chris Cleave, Marina Lewycka, Ian Rankin), film directors (Nick Broomfield), photographers (Dana Popa), playwrights (Clare Bayley, Cora Bissett and Stef Smith, Abi Morgan, Lucy Kirkwood) and dystopian artists such as Alfonso Cuarón, PD James and Salman Rushdie. It will therefore appeal to a variety of students and scholars in English, postcolonial, Holocaust, globalisation and slavery studies.

Through eighty-nine color plates and six thematic essays, this collection examines depictions of plantations, plantation views, and related slave imagery in the context of the history of landscape painting in America, while addressing the impact of these images on US race relations.

Seven noted scholars examine slave narratives and the topic of slavery in American literature, from Frederick Douglass's Narrative (1845)-- treated in chapters by James Olney and William L. Andrews-- to Sheley Anne William's "Dessa Rose" (1984). Among the contributors, Arnold Rampersad reads W.E.B. DuBois's classic work "The Souls of Black Folk" (1903) as a response to Booker T. Washington's "Up from Slavery" (1901). Hazel V. Carby examines novels of slavery and novels of sharecropping and questions the critical tendency to conflate the two, thereby also conflating the nineteenth century with the twentieth, the rural with the urban.

From the ancient world through to modern times the bodies of slaves have been represented in literature, documentary and personal narrative writing, and in art. This volume presents evidence of the past sins of mankind in both art and literature.