Fugitive Vision: Slave Image and Black Identity to Antebellum Narrative (review)

In six compelling chapters evenly distributed across two sections, Michael A. Chaney delivers a "smart" interdisciplinary study focusing on African American productions—books, crafts, panoramas, and illustrations—of visual fugitivity. "Whether through citation to an unexpected portrait, appropriation of traditional visual technologies, or proximity to illustration, the intertexts of Fugitive Vision," writes Chaney, "require a critical sensibility open to an aesthetics based on experiences of oppression that challenge a hermeneutics of accessibility, rationality, and correspondence."(211) The introduction, "Look Beyond and Through the Fugitive Icon," solicits deconstruction of popular advertisements showing absconders carrying bundles of necessities across their shoulders.

Willing readers envision what the well-known Frederick Douglass, William Craft, Ellen Craft, Henry Bibb, William Wells Brown, and Harriet Jacobs alongside the less-well known Dave, a South Carolina potter, saw or thought as freedom seekers. Such an alternative mapping of historical interstices and intertextual spaces leads to revisioning, hybridity, and competing interpretations. To advance that agenda, Fugitive Visions employs the social and historical construction of race and gender along with literature, art history, film criticism, and psychoanalytical theories.

The fugitives shared the commonalities of slave birth and resentment of the same, yet their insurgencies varied widely. They appropriated commonly accepted visual and verbal representations and refashioned them. Frederick Douglass, for example, refers to a drawing of Ramses when describing his own mother. Significantly, Chaney writes:

Douglass may have chosen an illustration so unlike a nineteenth-century reader's image of an enslaved woman in order to critique white preconceptions of blackness to alter and destroy the colonial gaze, to register his refusal to internalize racializing depictions of blackness, and to supplant the colonizing gaze that only sees blackness with his own alternative of seeing, a form of black looking that sees mental endowment, nobility, and heritage without the stigma of color.

(46)

Chaney's analyses of the Crafts' wardrobes for freedom flights and Harriet Jacobs' hiding place hoax, like Douglass's Ramses, reflect the imagination and creativity of unlimited minds within bound bodies.

In a similar vein, Chaney unveils the sophisticated thought behind William Wells Brown's 1850 Original Panoramic Views of Slavery. Brown's technical production shifts the gaze from the peaceful splendor of the slaveholders' idyllic Mississippi Valley to heart-wrenching scenes in the lives of enslaved men, women, and their children. Brown's introduction of a material object, the iron collar, prods viewers to question the heights and depths of American civilization.

Finally, chapter six, "Throwing Identity in the Poetry-Pottery of Dave the Potter," chronicles fugitivity through "contraband inscriptions" on clay pots. In florid phrases or terse verses, Dave resists dehumanization and commodification. Seemingly nonplused, he writes, "I wonder where is all my relations" on one side of a pot. When spun around, viewers see "Friendship to all and every nation" on the opposite side. Dave notes that his people are scattered throughout the diaspora where they may or may not be visible but are remembered.

Dave's craft, literacy, and individuality replete with wit and guile, liberated him from many of slavery's boundaries. In that sense, he was estranged from a system that seems applicable to him in name only. Therefore, the nom de plume, "Dave, the Potter," is more appropriate and meaningful than "Dave, the Slave."

Fugitive Vision, an important and well-researched study, differs from Nell Irving Painter's thoughtful treatment of the cartes-de visite in Sojourner Truth by interrogating a greater variety of verbal and visual productions by rebellious blacks. And, in the process, Michael A. Chaney makes a distinct contribution to the literature about slave-born men and women who were dedicated to the permanent liberation of minds and bodies.