Imaging Slavery - Professor Celeste-Marie Bernier
Arts Centre Lecture Theatre, Room A30, Thursday 11 October, 6:30pm
(Followed by a reception)
Summary:
“Dead men, women, and children tell no tales.” This lecture comes to grips with staggering statistics: six thousand slave narratives versus millions of Black men, women, and children living in slavery in the United States by the mid-nineteenth century. Working with the conviction that the extant textual archive represents fraught terrain given the horrifying reality that enslaved individuals were forbidden to read or write on pain of torture and/or death, this lecture gets to the heart of the vast outpouring not only of first-person testimonies but of a vastly under-researched visual arts tradition consisting of murals, drawings, talismanic artefacts, paintings, daguerreotypes, quilts, sculptures, lithographs, and woodcuts, among many other diverse works. Engaging in acts and arts of self-making and self-representation as an aesthetic no less than a political, social, cultural, and intellectual necessity, self-emancipated writers and artists defied white mainstream attempts to commodify, appropriate, and otherwise annihilate black histories, narratives, and traditions of art-making. Refusing to exhibit their bodies and souls as proofs, Black writers and artists rejected their circulation within the living death that was official “chattel records.” Rather, they fought to breath fresh life into dominant sites and sights of memory by developing a radical and revisionist lexicon and iconography within which to transform images of slavery into images of freedom. Working with “living parchments” rather than “iron arguments,” theirs was the fight for the right not only to polemical proselytising but to a belief in art for arts sake as they vouchsafed their “liberty or death” commitment to the transcendental possibilities not of bodies as evidence but as “works of art.”