Description
Book SynopsisFugitive Testimony examines African American slave narratives in light of contemporary artists’ use of the genre within their visual art at the end of the twentieth century. It identifies a sustained representational strategy employed by black cultural producers across time to challenge the racial presumptions that manifest as artistic constraints.
Trade Review"In this original book Janet Neary views nineteenth-century slave narratives through the lens of contemporary art. This innovative strategy enables her to bring into focus the visual work of slave narratives and their resistance to the conventions of authentication. This is an important book that demonstrates how literature participates in the concerns of visual culture and how nineteenth-century problems of race and representation persist in the present." -- -Shawn Michelle Smith School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Fugitive Testimony Chapter 1: Sight Unseen: Contemporary Visual Slave Narratives Chapter 2: Behind the Scenes and Inside Out: Elizabeth Keckly's Use of the Slave Narrative Form Chapter 3: Optical Allusions: Textual Visuality in Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom Chapter 4: "The Shadow of the Cloud": Racial Speculation and Cultural Vision in Solomon Northup's Twelve Years a Slave Chapter 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 Index
