Description
Pictures and Power: Imaging and Imagining Frederick Douglass 1818-2018 is the results of decades of collaborations and conversations among academics, artists, and activists living and working in the United Kingdom and america. For the first time, contributors map Douglass’ eclectic and experimental visual archive across an array of aesthetic, social, political, cultural, historical, ideological, and philosophical contexts. Even as Douglass the activist, diplomat, statesman, politician, autobiographer, orator, essayist, historian, memoirist, correspondent, and philosopher have been the focal point of a scholarly industry over the decades, Douglass the art historian and the subject of photographs, paintings, prints, and sculpture let on my own mass visual culture has only begun to be explored. Across this volume, scholars share their groundbreaking research investigating Douglass’ significance as the subject of visual culture and as himself a self-reflexive image-maker and radical theorist.
Pictures and Power has come to life from a conviction endorsed by Douglass himself: the battleground against slavery and the fight for equal rights had many staging grounds and was once not at all restricted to the plantation, the antislavery podium, the legal court, the stump circuit, the campaign trail, or even the educational institution but relatively bled through each arena of imaginative, political and artistic life.