Picture Freedom. Jasmine Nichole Cobb

      Figure I.2. Edward Williams Clay, “Is Miss Dinah at Home?,” 1828, “Life in Philadelphia” series. (Courtesy of The Library Company of Philadelphia)

      Women and Black Visuality

      Black women, and Black feminist visual practices, are central to Picture Freedom for what each reveals about the relationship between visuality and domestic belonging near the end of the transatlantic slave trade. Black women were essential to the maintenance of slave societies in the Atlantic world because they replenished a stolen labor force through giving birth. Laws about the matrilineal nature of slavery determined the slave status of children based upon the status of their mothers.11 In slavery, Black female bodies served as sites for sexual violence as well as labor production, beginning as early as the initial disembarkation of the transatlantic voyage. Many African women suffered rape onboard slave ships before arriving in the “Americas,” where their lives were “characterized, above all, by incessant work.”12 Accordingly, early visual portrayals of Black women’s bodies represent them as unique emblems of exploitation. Image captures of slavery, such as Louis Agassiz’s infamous nude daguerreotypes, reflect how evidence of nursing and whipping written on Black women’s bodies were fascinating to White spectators.13 Yet, in these images of unfree people, Black women who “calmly reveal their breasts” also offer “detached, unemotional, and workmanlike” attitudes toward the camera.14 Mythologies of Black women’s bodies were essential to slavery, but when constructed for the purposes of representation, unfree Black women managed to organize means of distancing an inner self from the material body that appeared before the lens. The “emancipatory” parsing of the body from the flesh that “enabled the slaves and their descendants” to organize a “countermemory” to dominant organizations of the body, making slavery part, but not the sum, of Black women’s experiences, describes this important distinction.15 Conceptualizations of Black female bodies were entirely relevant to discourses of visibility, even as the histories of Black women’s flesh are dissimilar across designations of free and unfree.

      Free Black women provide the most robust examples of the cultural work required to imagine freedom during slavery. Despite their relative privilege, freedom for African descendants, in the context of slavery, was a “fragile” determination, according to Erica Armstrong Dunbar, even for elite or upper-class Blacks.16 Free Black people, and especially women, also suffered from the peculiar racial decorum that proliferated during slavery, even as the law did not consign them to masters on paper. While Black men contended with the fact that freedom required “the non-traditional political activities and education of their wives, sisters, and daughters,” free and elite Black women remained entangled in discourses of Black visibility and demands for their public activism to buttress a larger Black community.17 For these reasons, my determination of Black freedom is not limited to political and civic frameworks of citizenship, although ensuing ideals of self-possession and property are relevant to this study. I am interested in what it meant to make freedom visually manifest in the context of slavery. How did people of African descent make freedom visually evident? Accordingly, my discussion focuses on Black women, and Black people, whom I variously, even if controversially, consider free for the purpose of illustration. I read the image of freedom through items pertaining to fugitives and manumitted persons as well as Black people who were “born” free to mothers who were not enslaved. Black freedom as a problem of imagination was not limited to the juridical notions of “free,” as realized in numerous accounts of Black people who behaved as free, despite having “owners.” Orlando Patterson offers the idea of a “tripartite” freedom—personal, sovereign, and civic—to discuss a continuum of individual and social autonomy.18 Picture Freedom considers Black freedom in popular imaginaries, which in many instances superseded or ignored the lawful determinations of liberty, but reveal freedom as something demonstrable and as a posture toward visual discourses. Not to be discounted in the context of slavery, the cultural underpinnings of Black freedom were indeed political, even if they were different from juridical conceptions of autonomy. The unlikely examples I discuss demonstrate that “freedom is active and creative.”19 The trajectory of this argument does not conflate enslavement with freedom or assign complicity to the unfree; instead, by including diverse examples of “free,” my aim is to consider the array of concepts relevant to imagining Black freedom in its earliest relevance to the Atlantic.

      Picture Freedom considers efforts to imagine both Black men and Black women as free in the context of slavery, but as a study in Black feminist visual theory, the analysis simultaneously considers “the black female body and the gaze” rather than treating each as a distinct entity.20 I emphasize the ways in which Black women’s bodies were particularly important to imagining freedom and to accepting free people of African descent into the folds of empires. In Picture Freedom, free Black women’s bodies are not simply passive victims of dominant scopic regimes but are also disruptive vessels that Black women manipulated to evidence a female gaze. My approach to early-nineteenth-century visual culture employs feminist theories of spectatorship and explores Black women’s early contributions to shaping Black visuality. Picture Freedom considers Black women as visual theorists whose contributions to the historical evolution of visual praxis in U.S. Black culture are easily overshadowed by those of the Black men who produced nationally circulated print media in the nineteenth century. Black women help accentuate the way in which slavery also required people of African descent to develop multivalent self-concepts, to manage both inward understandings of Black raciality and outward displays of regard for public concepts of racial caste.

      Although I often turn to images to think through freedom in the visual culture of slavery, my focus in this study is on the issue of Black visuality. Visibility is central to this concern, as the way one is seen in the eyes of others is relevant to larger conceptualizations of what the visual means. However, Black visuality as taken up in recent scholarship does the important work of turning scholarly attention away from questions of authenticity and propriety, to focus instead on the ways in which the issue of race within the field of vision is far more complex than surface-level appearances. Visuality, “a problem of the conceptual scheme of modernity and representation,” is best understood through the act of picturing as a tactile reference to diminished visual encounters.21 Explorations of Black visuality broaden the context for understanding Black life, drawing on a wider array of visual evidence to think through questions of culture. Likewise, an examination of Black visuality also moves beyond individuated concerns about vision or spectatorship. Hal Foster’s canonic text couples vision and visuality but specifies the latter “as a social fact” that “involved the body and the psyche.”22 The sociality of the visual draws in issues of vision but traffics in so much more than the fickle thing of sight. Black visuality is a complex notion because