The visual records and visual legacies of slavery

Often, images included in works of historical (and other) scholarship are not integral to the argument proposed. For instance, we are all familiar with the seemingly random images inserted into historical and, especially, anthropological writing, with little or no direct reference in the text. When there is a reference to the image, it is often the case that images are captioned or are discussed in such a way that the “image illustrates the sentence” (Berger, 1972: 28). In such treatments, the image is subordinated to the text. Moreover, the status of the image is further undermined by publication protocols that demand that images be collected together, as a continuous sheaf of pages, inserted into a text. Such an approach is partially evident in one of my favorite books, Sidney Mintz’s justly famous Sweetness and Power (1986), that includes three such sets of collations of images, accompanied by captions, though with little direct elaboration in the text. We see a different approach in Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother (2007) and her more recent Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2020). In these texts, images are not clubbed together as a continuous sheaf, but are interspersed, often without captions, through the text and serve as documentary evidence that enables the argument. Sometimes, this takes the form of interpretation; on other occasions, the images temper the need for extended textual elaboration, even as the text provides a context for one way to apprehend the images.

In Reconstructing the Landscapes of Slavery: A Visual History of the Plantation in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World, Dale Tomich, Rafael de Bivar Marquese, Reinaldo Funes Monzote, and Carlos Venegas Fornias adopt an approach more akin to Hartman’s to provide a fresh perspective on Atlantic slavery through the use of a stunning visual record. Images in Reconstructing do not simply illustrate or amplify the argument; nor are they mere supplements to the argument. Rather, the images serve as documentary evidence that drives the argument. Indeed, the project of the book is to ask what an analysis of visual sources can tell us about plantation space and to explore how visual techniques were central to the organization of the landscapes of slavery. The authors use the term “landscape” advisedly, carefully distinguishing their approach from those pursued in either art history or geography, the disciplines that, in different ways, are authorized to make statements on landscapes (Tomich et al., 2021: 3–6, 145–147). For art historians, an analysis of landscape – or, rather, of images of landscapes – can privilege aesthetic criteria, restrict analysis to formal characteristics, and neglect to move outside the image to consider the historical and social relations that produce a landscape (including the so-called pristine, “natural” landscape). Alternatively, the conventions that structure the representation of landscape can be understood, in rote fashion, as simply an expression of domination, with insufficient attention to the specificities of the practices of domination. Geographers, on the other hand, look not to images of landscapes, but attempt to describe and analyze material landscapes, using varied methods that foreground different aspects. While attentive to what art history and geography can teach us, Tomich et al. here draw on Raymond Williams’s notion of “working landscapes,” that are the product of the interaction of human activity and of nature, simultaneously the site of and subject to multiple activities and agencies (Tomich et al., 2021: 6). Of course, in this sense, all landscapes are “working landscapes.” Thus, the task becomes to examine the interaction between different environments and human and non-human agencies, in order, both, to specify how different working landscapes are produced and to detail their distinctive characteristics. Specifying the landscapes of slavery, with a focus on analyses of visual sources, is the task Reconstructing undertakes. Visual sources here are analyzed to not only illuminate how the landscapes of slavery were formed; more importantly, the book shows how myriad visual techniques and practices – particularly maps and diagrams – were critical to rationalizing space, the agricultural process, and the labor regime, and thus to producing the landscapes of slavery.

Reconstructing does not offer an analysis that points to a generic landscape of slavery, indistinguishable across time and space. Rather, through a focus on cotton production in the American south, sugar production in Cuba, and coffee production in Brazil, it elaborates three distinct plantation economies and landscapes of slavery “to understand the relation of global political economic processes and local histories, the differentiation and interrelation of zones of slave production, and the diverse ways that slave labor was reconstituted within the specific historical conjuncture of the nineteenth-century world-economy” (Tomich et al., 2021: 9). Each of the three commodity frontiers under consideration became the leading producer of its respective crop and commodity, and, for each, Reconstructing focuses on the largest and most productive plantation during what Tomich (2004) has characterized as the “second slavery.” Covering the period roughly between the late-eighteenth and the late-nineteenth centuries and referring to “the systemic redeployment and expansion of Atlantic slavery” (Tomich and Zueske, 2008: 91), the notion of the “second slavery” challenges the still-widespread view that slavery was incompatible with industrial capitalism and political liberalism, that are frequently thought to necessitate a labor regime characterized by “free labor.” In other words, the notion of the second slavery is indispensable to questioning the teleological narrative of a gradual progression from slavery to freedom and to understanding the development of historical capitalism. For instance, despite the British abolition of slavery in 1834, Britain remained dependent upon and tightly integrated with a slave economy, with the United States supplying some 70 to 80 percent of raw materials for cotton manufactures in Britain (Tomich et al., 2021: 16). Similarly, despite Emancipation, the United States remained tethered to slave economies in Cuba and Brazil, through vast imports of both sugar and coffee (Tomich et al., 2021: 16).

Within this larger framework, that elucidates the tight interconnections of the world economy and the racialized division of international labor, Reconstructing analyzes (and reproduces in the text) a rich archive of visual sources – including sketches, paintings, lithographs, engravings, daguerreotypes, photographs, maps, and diagrams – to detail the specificities of the landscapes of the second slavery. The excellent quality of the color images and the high production value of the text ensure that readers do not struggle with deciphering blurry images and deserve special mention. As I have noted earlier, the images are not illustrations of an already-known textual argument; rather, they drive the analysis. (Thus, in a certain way, it is difficult to do justice to Reconstructing without reproducing the visual evidence provided in the text.) For instance, we learn how visual practices of mapping ordered the land, taking distinct forms in the Mississippi valley, the Cuban prairie, and the Paraíba valley in Brazil; how each landscape witnessed large-scale environmental destruction to ready the land for intensive monoculture; how each saw particular modes of cultivation and practices of slave labor; how, depending on the physical attributes of the terrain, each developed specific transportation infrastructures to get their commodities to the world market – with shipping, the railroad, and a complex system of mule trains emerging as the dominant transportation infrastructure in the Mississippi valley, Cuba, and Brazil, respectively; how, in each setting, processes of rationalization were made possible through visual techniques, such that the “simplified and ordered productive landscape was translatable into abstract and schematic instruments such as maps, diagrams, and tables that allowed activities to be controlled and coordinated over the entire landscape in order to maximize the surplus product” (Tomich et al., 2021: 63–64); how, in each, distinct spatiotemporal rhythms, articulated to the requirements of the crop and the commodity, were minutely calculated and reorganized slave life; how the visual organization of work patterns, labor inputs and outputs, entered into tables and ledgers, facilitated the intensification of work discipline; how various changes, such as technological innovations, or a new hybrid strain of a crop, or the spatial reconfiguration of crop planting (Tomich et al., 2021: 128), transformed the agricultural and the production process; and how, even though the architectural features and spatial plan of plantations at each site differed (Tomich et al., 2021: 67), in each, the power of plantation elites was consolidated through aestheticized representations of plantation houses and bucolic plantation life, that belied the industrial character and the extreme depredations of slave labor.

I want to dwell briefly on the last point above, regarding the bucolic, romanticized images of plantation landscapes, with reference to two registers: first, in terms of the argument of the text and, second, in terms of the place that plantations occupy within the visual economy of the twenty-first century world, specifically in the US. The authors note that the visual documents they use in Reconstructing “are generally biased toward the perspective of slaveholding elites” (Tomich et al., 2021: 11) and marginalize the laboring population. As they write:

Most often, the enslaved are not depicted at all. If work is represented, the scale of activity is typically reduced, and the scenes appear almost pastoral. Other representations of the enslaved are domesticated and portray an unequal but harmonious community under the benevolent care of the master. Thus, there is an ongoing tension between what is visible and what is invisible in each image. The visually pacified landscape image expresses property, prestige, and power as it masks regulation, exploitation, contestation, negotiation, resistance. In this way, it serves to legitimate a paternalistic social order and agrarian civilization (Tomich et al., 2021: 11–12).

In Reconstructing, the images that include depictions of the enslaved certainly embody the ongoing tensions the authors identify. Whether engaged in tasks related to the processing of crops in production houses and factories (e.g., Tomich et al., 2021: 92; 99; 104; 106; 114; 127; 141) or, especially, in the fields (e.g., Tomich et al., 2021: 136–138), the working population appears as diminutive; work and life appear slow-paced and harmonious; and the images do not incorporate a representation of the corporeal ravages of slavery. But Reconstructing also does not include images that overtly signify the ravages of slavery, for instance of the instruments and technologies of discipline and outright torture, be they stocks or manacles. I am in two minds about this choice, since I think one can make a case both for their inclusion and for their exclusion. On the one hand, the practices of punishment and torture – that are erased in the pastoral representations of the plantation – were also achieved, in part, through the visual representation of the instruments of torture in diagrams that specified how to construct and use them in the service of ensuring work discipline. Thus, an inclusion of such images could have opened an avenue for a more extended discussion of the specificities of slave labor at the different sites and of how the rationalization of the production process in the second slavery is distinct from forms of rationalization in non-slave economies. However, on the other hand, there is also merit in excluding such images, to focus our attention on the industrial character of the second slavery – a singularly important contribution of Reconstructing. Such images could easily have become the “most important” in the book, detracting from its larger arguments and contributing to the pronounced tendency (particularly in scholarship less attentive to historical specificity) to flatten slavery into the same phenomenon, at all sites and at all times. Hence, in many ways, to do justice to such images and to not understand slavery as constituted by the same set of practices and logics, across space and time, one would require a different book. One focused on regimes of work discipline, that could elucidate and contextualize the development and use of instruments of torture, acutely attentive to their specific spatiotemporal patterns, changes, forms of dissemination, in much the way that Reconstructing attends to the transformations in the working landscapes of the second slavery.

Let me turn, by way of conclusion, to the second aspect I noted above: how the pastoral representations of plantations work within the visual economy of the twenty-first century world, specifically in the US. (The same might – or might not – be the case in Cuba and Brazil.) This includes how images of plantations, as gracious home signalling a gracious past, saturate the US cultural landscape in myriad ways. There was, for instance, the March 2021 televised footage of the governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, signing a voting restriction Act with a painting, in the background, of precisely the kind of bucolic, pastoral plantation Reconstructing analyzes. Since it was in Georgia, the image was not from Natchez, Mississippi, that Reconstructing studies; however, it could well have been Natchez. As reported by CNN (Lemon, 2021), a Black viewer was stunned to see an image of the Callaway Plantation, where her father had worked after Emancipation, as the backdrop for the continuing racial assault on Black people via the voting restriction Act. Of course, many viewers (both Black and otherwise), might not have noticed the painting in the background; for those who did notice it, the image might well have evoked precisely the kind of dangerous pastoral nostalgia Reconstructing asks us to challenge and undo. While provoking much media coverage, in this case, we can understand the image of the plantation-as-backdrop as mundane.

But the plantation, as physical site, also serves as extraordinary backdrop, deliberately selected as a venue for important celebrations, especially weddings, precisely due to the kinds of (photographic) images, signifying romance and grandeur, that it makes possible. With the ubiquity of the smartphone – equipped with high-resolution cameras, combined with what is, for many, the imperative to post and widely share their visual record through multiple apps – our current sociocultural milieu is dominated by the photographic image. People select what they do and how they do it with an acute, unprecedented attention to the photographic record to which it lends itself. Within this visual economy, the plantation has become – or remains – a sought-after venue for weddings, a practice that is increasingly contentious. For instance, in 2012, the Hollywood megastars, Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds selected a plantation as the venue for their nuptials. With the practice of plantation weddings under scrutiny, they explain that they were captivated by images of the South Carolina Boon Hall Plantation on Pinterest, a popular image-sharing platform. They have since re-evaluated their decision, apologizing for their ignorance and for succumbing to the lure of the image (Ringen, 2020). But Lively and Reynolds are not alone in being lured by the image of the plantation house as an idealized space representing romance, glamor, grandeur, rather than repelled by the plantation as a site of enslavement and violence and as part of a working landscape. In 2019, even before the national reckoning in the US with the legacies of racial slavery, platforms like Pinterest and various sites that specialize in weddings pledged to stop advertising “plantation weddings” (Murphy, 2019).

However, despite platforms pledging to not promote plantation weddings and despite what seemed like a national reckoning in the summer of 2020, the practice continues, as was evident in a recent letter to “The Ethicist” in The New York Times (Appiah, 2021). The ethical dilemma for the letter writer is what do to in the face of an invitation for a destination wedding at a plantation. Both, the ethicist for the Times – none other than noted postcolonial scholar and philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah – as well as many of the more than fifteen hundred comment writers are astonished at the willful blindness of the couple and their macabre decision to hold a wedding at a plantation. While we cannot know what prompted their decision, I cannot shake the thought that the visual representation to which the plantation lends itself, as romantic and romanticized site, denuded of all violence, would have been a large part of it. There is, in fact, little difference between the elite, idealized representations of the slave plantation from the antebellum South and those represented, a hundred and fifty years later, in images of plantation weddings. In many ways, the dominant visual economy surrounding the plantation has remained relatively stable, replicating what Tomich et al. describe as a “visually pacified landscape image [that] expresses property, prestige, and power [even] as it masks regulation, exploitation, contestation, negotiation, resistance.” Reconstructing, with its focus on visual sources, challenges this dominant visual economy to present a different account of the landscapes of slavery. In an era dominated by the image, it could not be a more timely and valuable text.