Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America

by Marcus Wood

Throughout this important volume, the author underscores two vital themes: one, that visual presentation of slavery in England and America has been utterly dishonest to its subject, and the other a meditation on whether the ruptures of the slave experience - middle passage, bondage, and torture -- can be adequately represented and remembered.

Genres: History, Art

400 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1999

Reviews

[Leigh · Rating 2 out of 5]

3 stars for the images, 1 star for the misleading (if not just plain wrong) conceptualizion of memory.

[cj · Rating 4 out of 5]

Marcus Wood focuses on a range of materials and genres from four “sites” which purport to describe the experience of slavery: the middle passage, slave flight/escape, imagery from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and the punishment and torture of slaves. By selecting images based on their cultural influence, longevity and popularity, he aims to dissect the “semiotic core of Western responses to slavery.” Woods adapts Holocaust studies’ focus on the impossibility of describing end-limit experiences to his interest in the paradox of trying to make beautiful or see beauty in acts of inhumanity that transgress traditional notions of art’s ideals. Noting that “all human suffering exists beyond the vulgarity of the simulacrum,” he charts useful approaches to working with a visual record plagued by “irony, paradox, voyeurism and erasure.” Although representation can never adequately capture the lived traumas of oppressive systems, Woods concludes that Art [emphasis added:] “can make the blind see” by inviting a deeper exploration of the irreconcilable. Among the few works that Wood credits with accomplishing such a feat is J.M.W. Turner’s "Slavers throwing overboard the Dead and Dying - Typhon coming on (The Slave Ship)" (1840).