Picture Freedom. Jasmine Nichole Cobb
within the conceptual space of the parlor or its indispensable notions of domesticity.
Nonetheless, in the United States, a small number of free Black people maintained parlors, against the prerequisites of middle-class belonging. Emma Lapsansky explains that the economic demand for Black women’s labor distinguished their “middle-class” identities from White women who were meant “to be dependent [and] self-effacing.”57 While well-off White women readily married influential White men, Black women who married important Black leaders remained restricted within the limited degree of power enjoyed by their husbands. Many free women of color who enjoyed fine parlor items like pianos and clocks simultaneously represented a diverse range of financial stability, from those who housed boarders for extra income to those who hired their own domestic live-in servants.58 These Black women were especially noticeable and especially problematic in a context uncomfortable with free Blackness within middle-class spaces.
In Picture Freedom, I mobilize the parlor as a metaphor for thinking through projects of domesticity and domestication that took place through the visual cultures of this interior space. Specifically, I offer the notion of the transatlantic parlor to discuss pictures of freedom as tools of sense making that helped reorient parlor dwellers to changing conceptions of the nation and the Atlantic world, each as representative of home. Parlors served as settings for what Simon Gikandi describes as the “culture of taste,” supporting the “conceptual gap [that] separated the leisure of drinking coffee or tea from the brutality of slavery.”59 By referring to the transatlantic parlor I mean to call attention to the idyllic global home that traversed the Atlantic, simultaneously providing solace to constituents of empires, and terror to those subjected to domination. The transatlantic parlor represents a site of leisure and sense making, a place of reprieve and rehearsal, where both Whites and Blacks turned to deal with transformations happening around them. The transatlantic parlor serves as a metaphor and an analytic that underscores the spatial commitments of display that were significant for understanding Black freedom in the slave era. The transatlantic parlor is a place of multiple domesticities: the Atlantic world as a unified home of slaving empires and a place for domesticating presumably uncivilized Africans through enslavement.
I offer the transatlantic parlor as “one single, complex unit of analysis,” much like the ships that Paul Gilroy uses to discuss slavery and its reverberations in a transnational and intercultural perspective.60 Similar to the “living means” by which Gilroy imagines the enjoining of disparate points across the Atlantic Ocean, I use the transatlantic parlor to emphasize the issues of display and spatial belonging that influenced interpretations of emancipation.61 While the figurative slave ship traveled the sea to create a sense of transient nationalism for people of African descent, the parlor represents the space where Whites and Blacks retired to reconcile that aftermath. Rather than the mobility symbolized in the slave ship, the parlor provided a rigid setting for disciplining Black freedom into belonging through visual practices. A transatlantic parlor made more luxurious because of the sailing ships that Gilroy describes, rife with more opulence and decoration through capitalistic exploitation, also represents a place where Whites and Blacks collectively experimented with the free Black body and visions of national inclusion. I reimagine the stagnant (but not static) parlor, overrun with the items picturing Others, to discuss the transformational notions about Black belonging. Picturing freedom functioned as a method to assuage anxieties about Blackness and its place within the transatlantic. The parlor—a very dark, heavy, and overly ornamental domestic space, often overrun with tokens of exoticism—was itself tied to slavery in that the refined home dwelling was meant to counter everything happening outside of the space. The parlor protected its inhabitants from the chaos of the exterior world, including colonial expansion, and thus becomes particularly important as a space for thinking about how viewers staged early notions of Black freedom as at home within the empire.
The parlor as metaphor calls upon the messiness of “manifest domesticity,” as Amy Kaplan describes it, “the imperial project of civilizing” as it happens through the idea of the home and determinations of the foreign.62 The metaphor of the parlor makes it possible to think about how the centrality of Whiteness, gender norms, and middle-class status heavily relied upon the palpability of Otherness, rendered through physical objects and pictures. Moreover, the domesticating work that took shape in the parlor acted on Whites and Blacks alike, helping viewers to intensify visualizations of belonging as was necessary to the formation of a nation and the contemplation of emancipation. The parlor as a private-public space remained open to international influence via the incorporation of material cultures, but it also signifies attempts to close off the home to foreign interests through the enactment of geographic borders. Across these various needs, parlor occupants anxiously considered issues of belonging, both international and domestic, as they were destabilized by the question of Black freedom. Parlor dwellers variously read prints, handled material cultures, and turned to the visual to contemplate a new positionality for people of African descent within a multifaceted home. These items helped people figure Blackness as permanently situated throughout the Atlantic world, outside the experience of slavery. Whereas the parlor simultaneously addressed issues of colonial relationships and transatlantic belonging, it presents an opportunity to think about how parlor activities helped the developing United States fit into the larger transatlantic as a cohesive space.
The potential for emancipation to make room for Black people within the parlor, visible as guests and owners rather than invisible facilitators, threatened to disrupt still-fragile notions of Whiteness and nationhood structured within the very idea of the space. Whereas the structural domain of the parlor meant to exclude the living Black body, invitations for printed Blacks to appear in this space offer up an interesting counterpoint. The proliferation of critical and complimentary images of free people of African descent amid the earliest legislative enactments of abolition queries issues of production, circulation, and function. How did the printed, free, Black body belong within the parlor when the animate Black body did not? Did the print culture existence of Black freedom within the parlor of the home make way for Black bodies to physically exist there in the larger cultural imaginary? To picture freedom in the context of slavery was to imagine empire without slavery, inasmuch as it was about reconceptualizing people of African descent. Free Black communities posed a number of questions in their very existence, causing Whites to query issues of permanence and national identity. What should slaving empires do about free Black people? Where do free Black people belong? Most important, how did viewers of the Atlantic world incorporate and exclude free Blackness, simultaneously?
The Archive of Freedom
Slavery and its corresponding philosophies of the visual have marred the antebellum archive of Black visuality. A specifically nineteenth-century desire for “coherence, accuracy, and completion” in representations of race meant limited variation among illustrations of Black freedom before the photograph.63 The preemancipation archive of Black freedom is rampant with reluctance to depict the Black body as interested in or prepared for the act of picturing. Stephen Best points out the “emptiness” in the “visual archive of slavery,” where there are no visual equivalents to the slave narrative in early U.S. history; whereas “slaves [were] not the subject of the visual imagination,” but instead “its object,” Best points to a foreclosed visual imagination among unfree Blacks that does not appear in the archives.64 Such an observation might seem hard to fathom given the ubiquity of Black representations in archives of the early United States, beginning in the late eighteenth century. However, recent scholarship further reveals the complexity scholars face in parsing Blackness in the visual culture of the nineteenth century. The archive demonstrates Black visuality as a utility, often a source of revelation; the visual occurs as a productive site where African Americans demonstrated fitness for citizenship or divulged the ruthlessness of slavery.65 Questions about visual imagination, especially outside the confines of propaganda, become difficult to trace. People who lived, loved, worked, played, and resisted a multitude of atrocities every day are noticeably absent in pictorial representations before the middle of the nineteenth century. Before the daguerreotype, images of the runaway, the eugenicists’ sketches of scientific racism, and the pervasive caricatured renditions of Africanness collectively constitute early conceptualizations of Black freedom.
The preemancipation archive of Black freedom also features critical portrayals of free Black communities,