Fugitive Testimony

On the Visual Logic of Slave Narratives

Janet Neary

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780823272907, 9780823272891
• eBook ISBN: 9780823272914
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

Fugitive Testimony traces the long arc of the African American slave narrative from the eighteenth century to the present 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 postbellum literary slave narratives as well as contemporary visual art, Janet Neary 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 his or her own testimony.Taking works by current-day visual artists, including Glenn Ligon, Kara Walker, and Ellen Driscoll, Neary employs their representational strategies to decode the visual work performed in nineteenth-century literary narratives by Elizabeth Keckley, Solomon Northup, William Craft, Henry Box Brown, and others. She focuses on the textual visuality of these narratives to illustrate how their authors use the logic of the slave narrative against itself as a way to undermine the epistemology of the genre and to offer a model of visuality as intersubjective recognition rather than objective division.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Epigraph
• Introduction: Representational Static
• 1. Sight Unseen: Contemporary Visual Slave Narratives
• 2. Behind the Scenes and Inside Out: Elizabeth Keckly’s Use of the Slave Narrative Form
• 3. Optical Allusions: Textual Visuality in Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom
• 4. “The Shadow of the Cloud”: Racial Speculation and Cultural Vision in Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave
• 5. Gestures Against Movements: Henry Box Brown and Economies of Narrative Performance
• Epilogue. Racial Violence, Racial Capitalism, and Reading Revolution: Harriet Jacobs, John Jones, Kerry James Marshall, and Kyle Baker
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index