Finley offers provocative new insights into the works of Amiri Baraka, Romare Bearden, Betye Saar, and many others. Committed to Memory provides the first in-depth look at how this artifact of the fight against slavery became an enduring symbol of black resistance, identity, and remembrance.įinley traces how the slave ship icon became a powerful tool in the hands of British and American abolitionists, and how its radical potential was rediscovered in the twentieth century by black artists, activists, writers, filmmakers, and curators.
Printed as handbills and broadsides, the image Cheryl Finley has termed the "slave ship icon" was easily reproduced, and by the end of the eighteenth century it was circulating by the tens of thousands around the Atlantic rim. First published by British abolitionists in 1788, it exposed this widespread commercial practice for what it really was-shocking, immoral, barbaric, unimaginable. One of the most iconic images of slavery is a schematic wood engraving depicting the human cargo hold of a slave ship. How an eighteenth-century engraving of a slave ship became a cultural icon of black resistance, identity, and remembrance
0 kommentar(er)
