Visualizing Equality: African American Rights and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth Century by Aston Gonzalez (review)

Abstract

for example, detailed discussion of the “scenes of parting” from loved ones represented in several slave narratives (264-65). This chapter in particular is a testament to how much white supremacy enveloped even arguments for personhood and “uplift,” severely circumscribing the kinds of print identities open to Black authors. Andrews is blunt about one of the book’s shortcomings, devoting most of the epilogue to the recognition that time and space prevent more than brief nods to slave narratives published after 1865; he ends the volume saying that “the testimony of this later generation of narrators awaits the hearing it deserves” (321). But the book leaves other questions, too. Certainly we should also study pre-1840 narratives, especially in the frames of the Black Atlantic world and the US’s break from Britain. Further, while Andrews considers the handful of women authors in a maledominated genre (with deep attention to Harriet Jacobs) as well as enslaved women who are discussed by male authors, gender does not often become a category of analysis here. (Andrews’s examples often suggest that enslaved women’s experiences of class may have been both different and more complex than those of many enslaved men.) And while the book is haunted by the recognition that enslaved people were legally chattel, it could say more about how enslaved people fashioned class and status when their commodified bodies served as markers of white enslavers’ class and status—topics raised by scholars from Walter Johnson to Daina Ramey Berry. Andrews is unrelenting in treating the texts as, per his subtitle, “testimony,” and, in this powerful echo of John Blassingame, he rightly reminds of whom we should listen to most when it comes to the historical record of slavery. Occasionally, though, this limits his discussion of slave narratives as built objects. Andrews notes, for example, that he does not follow authors’ class status outside of their narratives, and, beyond rich material in chapter one, he does not fully explore questions of class among nominally free African Americans. Most authors of slave narratives were writing while they were fashioning places for themselves in Northern spaces— and in communities whose class sensibilities have been explored by scholars from Julie Winch and Leslie Harris to Erica Armstrong Dunbar and Carla Peterson. Further, several narratives in Andrews’s study were enmeshed in the material culture and the business of antislavery—richly explored by Teresa Goddu. Apart from brief gestures in chapter four, we don’t learn much about how authors’ risky places as new Northerners may have shaped the kinds of testimony they chose—or were able—to offer. But each of these gaps would need another book—yea, books—to even introduce them adequately. Key among the wonders of Andrews’s volume is the grace with which he draws clear lines around what his single book can do and then gestures beyond those lines. I think we will be returning to Slavery and Class in the American South for a long time—not only for the field-changing work it does but also for the even more massive work it should compel all of us to do.