Literature, Art and Slavery

Examines a range of literary responses to images drawn from the transatlantic slave trade and its aftermath

A focus on texts that (with the obvious exception of David Dabydeen's 'Turner' [1994]) exist at the critical and canonical margin
An emphasis on Black Atlantic writers, designed to counter the bias in much ekphrastic criticism towards white authors
Location of African American literature in conversation with African American as well as white American art

Since around 2000, there has been a noticeable upsurge in critical work on the visual archive of Atlantic slavery, resulting in a host of important studies. While most of these contributions are weighted towards images created during the era of slavery itself, some critics have adopted a more historically far-reaching approach, exploring the ways in which such images live on beyond the original context of their production, circulation and consumption, returning imaginatively in different forms at different times and in different places. This book shares the fascination with the afterlives which such visual materials have enjoyed, but places the accent on how that posterity has evolved in the realms of literature, especially poetry. It focuses on transactions between texts written between the mid-1990s and 2020 and images of slavery that belong to British, American and (in one case) French traditions, as produced between c. 1779 and 1939.