Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton, and Commerce in the Atlantic World 9781478021377

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BLACK BODIES, WHITE GOLD

BL ACK B O D I E S, WHITE GOLD Art, Cotton, and Commerce in the Atlantic World

Anna Arabindan-­Kesson Duke University Press  ·  Durham and London

{  2021  }

© 2021 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper ∞ Project editor: Lisa Lawley Designed by Matthew Tauch Typeset in Portrait Text by Copperline Book Services Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Arabindan-­Kesson, Anna, author. Title: Black bodies, white gold : art, cotton, and commerce in the Atlantic world / Anna Arabindan-­Kesson. Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2020030916 (print) lccn 2020030917 (ebook) isbn 9781478011927 (hardcover) isbn 9781478014065 (paperback) isbn 9781478021377 (ebook) Subjects: lcsh: Cotton in art. | Slavery in art. | Cotton trade—Atlantic Ocean Region—History—19th century. | Slavery—Atlantic Ocean Region—History—19th century. | Cotton growing—Atlantic Ocean Region—History—19th century. | African diaspora in art. | Atlantic Ocean Region—Commerce—History—19th century. Classification: lcc n8217.c64 a733 2021 (print) | lcc n8217.c64 (ebook) | ddc 704.0396—dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020030916 lc ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020030917

Cover art: Hank Willis Thomas, Black Hands, White Cotton, 2014. Screen print and Carborundum on paper, 87.6 × 87.3 cm. (34 1/2 × 34 3/8 in.) © Hank Willis Thomas. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. This publication has been made possible through support from the Terra Foundation for American Art International Publication Program of CAA.

This publication is made possible in part with support from the Barr Ferree Foundation Fund for Publications, Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University.

For Thatha

Contents

Acknowledgments  ix  ·  Illustrations  xv

Introduction: Threads of Empire 1

1 · Circuits of Cotton 29

2 · Market Aesthetics: Color, Cloth, and Commerce 67

3 · Of Vision and Value: Landscape and Labor after Slavery 121

4 · Material Histories and Speculative Conditions 171

Coda: A Material with Memory 203

Notes  213  ·  Bibliography  247  ·  Index  285

Chapter One

{ viii }

Acknowledgments

My book tells a story about the formation of Blackness, primarily in the United States, and so, I am indebted to the Indigenous owners of the land on which the imperial project of the United States of America is being formed. As an immigrant settler I acknowledge that I live, write, research, and teach on unceded lands. In Princeton the land on which I live and work is part of the homeland and traditional territory of the Lenape people. I pay respect to Lenape peoples — past, present, and future — and to their continuing presence in the homeland and throughout the Lenape diaspora. (I adapted this statement from Many Voices, One Future: An Inclusive Princeton [https://inclusive .princeton.edu/node/1531].) I was able to write this book because of the generosity, labor, and love of others. And this is what I want acknowledge here. My art historical journey started years ago when I studied nursing. Under the guidance of lecturers at the Manukau Institute of Technology in Auckland I first learned how to observe and first understood how vision mediates the production of knowledge. It was as a nurse that I first grappled with critical theories of race, decolonization, and feminism and began to make connections between community, individual experience, and structural conditions. This circuitous route to the academy gave me the grounding, and the eyes, for what I now do. For their mentorship and teaching I thank my undergraduate professors at the University of Western Australia, especially Clarissa Ball, Ethan Blue, and Rob Stewart. Their belief in me gave me the grounding to move forward into this field, and I could not do without their supportive friendship now. At Yale, where I completed my doctorate in African American Studies and the History of Art, I was privileged to be advised by the dream team of professors Timothy Barringer and Hazel Carby. Not only did they put up with and allow me to work through my academic neurosis, they modeled an intellectual generosity, rigor, and empathy that will always inspire me. I am grateful to call them friends.

Whatever we do, we do because of those who have come before us, and the women who have paved the way in the field of Black diaspora art are fierce. Professor Deborah Willis is extraordinary. Thank you to Professor Celeste-­Marie Bernier, Professor Kirsten Pai Buick, Professor Cheryl Finley, Professor Nikki A. Greene, Professor Kellie Jones, Dr. Courtney J. Martin, Professor Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, and Professor Krista Thompson for writing the books and navigating the conditions of academia in ways that inspire and sustain others. The ongoing community of women I have gotten to know through the Women and Migration network — especially, but not only, Professor Sama Alshaibi, Professor Tiffany Gill, Professor Neelika Jeyawardene, Sarah Khan, and Dr. Kalia Brooks-­Nelson — continue to provide a space for profound care and care-­full creativity. Thanks also to Professor Eddie Chambers, Professor Huey Copeland, Dr. Roshini Kempadoo, Professor Ian McLean, Professor Alan Rice, Professor Tanya Sheehan, Dr. Sarah Thomas, and Dr. Caroline Turner for their intellectual work, their friendship, and their generosity. Graduate school was an uncomfortable yet important experience. I was lucky to find myself in a well-­resourced program that prepared me well to negotiate the dynamics of the academy. I will always be grateful to faculty, and former faculty, in Yale’s African American Studies and Art History departments, in particular, professors Elizabeth Alexander, Ned Cooke, Glenda Gilmore, Erica James, Kobena Mercer, Alondra Nelson, Alexander Nemerov, Sally Promey, Tamara Sears, and Robert Farris Thompson. Friends made at Yale, including Sarah Haley, Key Jo Lee, Julia Lum, Shana Redmond, David Stein, and Brandon Terry, continue to model what scholarship can do in the world. I learned much from colleagues in Art History including Meredith Gamer, Sylvia Houghteling, Nate Jones, Jennifer Nelson, Suzy Newbury (and the entire Newbury family), Sara Ryu, Alex Dika Seggerman, Holly Shaffer, Richard Teverson, and Pan Wendt. To work somewhere that sustains, supports, and values you is an immense privilege. The Department of African American Studies and the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University are such spaces. I am truly grateful to all my colleagues, faculty, and administrators for their friendship, generosity, and brilliance. Their thoughtful comments on this project have made it stronger. Their collegiality and community show me that new futures are possible. So too do my students. I am particularly thankful to Charmaine Branch, Tati Evans, Imani Ford, Mahishan Gnanaseharan, Jack Leahey, Janette Lu, Jamal Maddox, Bhavani Srinivas, Sydnae Taylor, Phoebe Warren, and Jessica Womack: your optimism, passion, and extraordinary insights keep me going. I owe an immense amount of gratitude in particular Acknowledgments

{ x }

to Imani and Charmaine, for their excellent research assistance. I received great encouragement from other colleagues who read segments of the manuscript or heard me give talks based upon it. Thank you to Monica Huerta and Nijah Cunningham. Sincere thanks to Alicia Walker at Bryn Mawr College, Siona Wilson at the Graduate Center, cuny, David Peters Corbett at the Courtauld Institute of Art, Tiffany Boyle at the Glasgow School of Art, and Petra Goedde at the Center for Humanities at Temple University. I am especially grateful for their invitations to share my work, and for the generous feedback I received. My research work has been supported by several fellowships. I have benefitted from generous awards from the Gilder Lehrman Center for Studies in Slavery at Yale, the Yale Center for British Art, and the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale. I was privileged to receive a Junior Research Fellowship from the Paul Mellon Center for Studies in British Art; a predoctoral fellowship from the Winterthur Library, Gardens, and Museum; and a Terra Foundation for American Art Predoctoral Fellowship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Research for this book has been supported by a Robert W. Wark Fellowship at the Hunt­ ington Library and by both a Summer Research Award and a Vice-­Provost for the Arts Grant Award from Temple University. This book’s publication has been made possible in part with support from the Barr Ferree Foundation Fund for Publications, Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University and by a Terra Foundation Publication Grant. Throughout my research I have found the generosity of curators, archivists, and colleagues to be astounding. Thanks go to Clare Sheridan and Diane Fagan Affleck at the American Textile History Museum, who talked me through the intricacies of cotton at the very beginning of this project. Dr. Linda Eaton at Winterthur patiently gave me a crash course in textile history while opening up the haptic world of cloth. Dr. Rosemary Crill at the Victoria and Albert Museum and Professor Chris Breward, Director of National Museums, Scotland, also gave me wonderful insights into textile studies and fashion history. At the British Museum, Jim Hamill and Helen Wolfe were very helpful in my quest for Manchester-­made trade textiles. Curators and archivists at the Smithsonian — Dr. Joshua Bell, Dr. Pete Daniels, Dr. Nancy Davis, Craig Orr, Dr. Fath Davis Ruffins, and Dr. Bill Truetner — were invaluable in their encouragement and assistance as I navigated the array of materials available to study. Special thanks also to 2011  –  2012 saam pre-­ doctoral and senior fellows Professor Alan Braddock, Seth Feman, Professor Patricia A. Johnston, Erin Pauwels, Alex Taylor, and James M. Thomas for insightful conversations and ongoing friendship. Acknowledgments

{ xi }

Thank you to Adele Nelson (+ Scott, Arthur, and Evelyn), who is family as well as an always engaging and brilliant scholar. Similarly, Mia Bagneris is a dream collaborator, dear friend, and sister. Esther Chadwick, thanks for a long friendship filled with tea, prosecco, optimism, beautiful music, and warm welcomes. Zoe Whitley, my style guru, always reminds dour academics like me that our work must have meaning in the world. Thanks to Naomi Safron-­Han for her fierce belief, and to Becky Conekin and Emily Orr for always being there. Horace Ballard brings all of us joy. Pam Franks and Lisa Hodermarsky gave me a home at Yale. I met Susan Hendricks and Barkley L. Hendricks in December 2017 during graduate school, and they both remain close to my heart. Thanks to Petrina Dacres, Martina Droth, Davinia Gregory, Claudia Hucke, Rivke Jaffe, Nick Mead (Henry), Wayne Modest, and Tatsiana Zhurialova for getting us through the New Haven years, and for their good counsel. To the extended Thomas-­Brooks family: thank you for taking us in, making us feel so welcomed and loved. This book was written between Australia, the United States, and the UK. This global village has provided me with so much care. These are the friends who have helped raise my kids, who keep me grounded, who are holiday companions, the ones I laugh and cry with, the ones I have known for decades. Thank you in abundance to Karen and John Alexander (Charlie, MJ, and Nomi), Larni and Jon Ashcroft (Amaya, Isumi), Holly Bass, Clare Corbauld (Alistair and Marcus), Tod Jones, Kate Croker (and Gabriel and Owen), Francis Flannagan and David Ritter (Josie and Rachel), Rick Haas and Grace Miller, Carrie and Jeff Hagen (Rae and Alec), Katy and Drew Leshko (Sage), Jo Lincolne, Cam and Ange Mackellar (Amalia and Noah), Richard McGlone and Tanya Gorowara-­McGlone (Aaria), Janell and Ryan Olah (Camper and Maybelle), Sam and Justin Owen (Alec and Alys), Anat Plocker and Raz Segall (Ella), Scott and Cathy Ralph (Kael, Ava, Jero), and Sarah Stolfa and Mike (Madie and Lincoln). My family sustains me: My grandfather, Azariah Jesudas, a Tamil civil servant who experienced the British rule in Sri Lanka, impressed on all of us the importance of reading critically. His ambivalence about the effects of colonization, the priority my family placed on education and debate, and our experiences of displacement and ethnic violence have shaped my relationship to, and critique of, everyday operations of power. In writing this book I felt his presence often. I am so grateful to my parents, Sugi and Peter Kossen, who always encouraged me to explore widely and think critically. I hope my father, Harry Kangadaren Arabindan, and my brother, Andrew Jonathan Arabindan — who left us years ago — would be happy to know I am doing this work. My beautiful sister Rebecca DeHaan is my forever inspiration; I aspire Acknowledgments

{ xii }

to her grace, gentleness, and resolve. I am so grateful for our deep friendship. My brother-­in-­law Evan and my gorgeous niece and nephew, Esie and Josh, are great company. My brothers, Daniel and Tim Kossen, always make me laugh and drive me crazy in turns. I love you and I’m glad to be your big sister. Emma and Donald Kesson are the best of parents-­in-­love. Thank you for your encouragement, for countless meals, for tea and cake. Thank you to all our families, including my brothers and sisters-­in-­law, Andrew and Ali Kesson (Daniel, Eleanor, Bea) and Joanna and Mark Drennan (Angus), for looking after our children while I completed this book. To the community who continue to care for our children across the world — the staff at By My Side, Bush Kids Australind, The Cub School Princeton, and ela Fishtown, as well as Malachi Benjamin, Ewelina Bernal, Benjamin Clay, Jen Dawson, Emma Docherty, Ineke Dreyfut, Trisha Luhar, Terri Simmons (the best community midwife in the world), Bhavani Srinivasan, Caitlin Updegrove, and Catherine Vonblanckensee — none of this would have been possible without you. To the artists who compelled this book in the first place: thank you to Hank Willis Thomas (and Ru) for your generosity, friendship, and profound interventions. Thank you to all at Jack Shainman Gallery. I am grateful to Yinka Shonibare cbe, Leonardo Drew, and their studios for their generosity and continued inspiration. To Lubaina Himid I owe more than I can say. Your work gives me the language to write, teach, and imagine. Thank you for your friendship, care, and interest: your art has inspired this project from start to finish. My editor, Ken Wissoker at Duke University Press, knew exactly what to say when I most needed to hear it; his patience, insight, and vision are staggering. I am so grateful. The readers who gave feedback on the manuscript were generous and constructive. I have tried to address their helpful suggestions, and any faults that remain are only mine. Thank you to Joshua Tranen, Maria Volpe, and Lisa Lawley for their patient shepherding of this project, especially through the uncertainties and sadness of the covid-­19 pandemic. Carrie Hagen dived in at the end of this project and provided wonderful editorial feedback and encouragement: for your clarity, your passion, and your care I will always be grateful. Thanks to Heather Dubnik for her work on the indexing of this book. And finally, without these three — Augie, Renzo, and Hugh — where would I be? This project tracked the birth of our two children, Augie and Renzo. You are still small, but already I see how you are making your own big paths — of wonder, of care, of imagination — through this world. You truly are the joys that fill my life, and every day, in small and wonderful ways, you show me how to dream, reorient my vision, think about my heart, and listen Acknowledgments

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to my body. Ultimately, though, this book owes everything to Hugh Kesson. He is my heart. His care is what I aspire to emulate; his voice is the one I listen out for amid the noise. For twenty years we have walked together, and not once has he ever stopped believing that this intellectual work is important. Thank you for putting your career on hold to support mine and care for our children. As my love, my friend, and my co-­parent, your labor, your generosity, your patience, above anyone’s, has sustained this project. I cannot imagine a life better shared, and although it is not much recompense, this book is always, and only, for you.

Acknowledgments

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Illustrations

2 4 4 5 9

Figure intro.1 Figure intro.2 Figure intro.3 Figure intro.4 Figure intro.5

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Hank Willis Thomas, Black Hands, White Cotton (2014) Lubaina Himid, Cotton.com (2002) Lubaina Himid, Cotton.com (2002) Yinka Shonibare, Scramble for Africa (2003) George Robertson, Spring Head of Roaring River Estate (1775) James Richard Barfoot, Progress of Cotton: #1 Cotton Plantation (1840) James Richard Barfoot, Progress of Cotton: #2 Willowing (1840) James Richard Barfoot, Progress of Cotton: #3 Lap-­Frame (1840) James Richard Barfoot, Progress of Cotton: #4 Carding (1840) James Richard Barfoot, Progress of Cotton: #5 Bobbing and Drawing Frames (1840) James Richard Barfoot, Progress of Cotton: #6 Spinning (1840) James Richard Barfoot, Progress of Cotton: #7 Bleaching (1840) James Richard Barfoot, Progress of Cotton: #8 Warping and Winding (1840) James Richard Barfoot, Progress of Cotton: #9  Reeding or Drawing In (1840) James Richard Barfoot, Progress of Cotton: #10 Weaving (1840) James Richard Barfoot, Progress of Cotton: #11 Dying (1840) James Richard Barfoot, Progress of Cotton: #12 Printing (1840)

30 37

Figure 1.1 Figure 1.2

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Figure 1.7 Figure 2.1 Figure 2.2 Figure 2.3

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Luther Terry, An Allegory of North and South (1858) William Henry Pyne (after George Morland), Women and Men Carrying Baskets or Bundles, or Walking with Children (1815) A sample of negro cloth, Peace Dale Manufacturing Company (1830s – 1840s) A sample of negro cloth, Peace Dale Manufacturing Company (1830s –18 40s) A sample of negro cloth, Peace Dale Manufacturing Company (1830s – 1840s) Edward Mitchell Bannister, The Mill in Knightsville (1896) Edward Mitchell Bannister, Hay Gatherers (1893) William Wyld, Manchester from Kersal Moor (1852) Letter from Townley and Jackson of Bahia (1827) Benjamin and John Bower textile sample book (1771) Benjamin and John Bower textile sample book (1771) Agostino Brunias, A Linen Market with a Linen-­Stall and Vegetable Seller in the West Indies (ca. 1780) Agostino Brunias, Linen Market, Dominica (ca. 1780) Johann Zoffany, The Family of Sir William Young (ca. 1767 – 69) William Henry Brooke, Sale of Estates, Pictures and Slaves in the Rotunda, New Orleans (1842) Slave Sale, Charleston, South Carolina, from a Sketch by Eyre Crowe (1856) Eugène Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People (1830) Eyre Crowe, In the Richmond Slave Auction (1893) Eyre Crowe, Slaves Waiting For Sale, Richmond, Virginia (1861) Eyre Crowe, The Charleston Slave Market (1893) Eyre Crowe, After the Sale: Slaves Going South from Richmond (1854) Theodore Russell Davis, A Slave Auction at the South (1861) Artist unknown, Slaves for Sale, a Scene in New Orleans (1861) i ll u s t r at i o n s

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102 102 104

Figure 2.17 Figure 2.18 Figure 2.19

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Joseph Nash, Machinery (1854) Joseph Nash, Cotton, Carriages (1854) Cheap cylinder print manufactured by Messrs. Devas, Minchener, and Routledge (1851) Prints for Brazil (1850) Strip-­woven cotton cloth, Cape Palmas, Liberia (1867) Lefevre James Cranstone, Slave Auction, Virginia (1861) Turkey red Swiss chintz velvet print (1851) William Griggs, plate no. 973 (1873 – 1888) Lubaina Himid, Naming the Money (2004) Our Cotton Campaign in South Carolina (1862) Henry P. Moore, Slaves of the Rebel General Thomas F. Drayton, Hilton Head (ca. 1862 – 1863) Timothy H. O’Sullivan, Beaufort, South Carolina. Negro Family Representing Several Generations. All Born on the Plantation of J. J. Smith (1862) Timothy H. O’Sullivan, Slaves, J. J. Smith’s Plantation, near Beaufort, South Carolina (1862) Timothy H. O’Sullivan, Port Royal Island, S.C. African Americans Preparing Cotton for the Gin on Smith’s Plantation (ca. 1861 – 1862) Henry P. Moore, Century Plant, 85 Years Old, Seabrook’s Plantation, also called John E. Seabrook’s Wharf, Century Plant, Drying Cotton (1862) Launey and Goebel, Cotton Picking No. 7 (ca. 1867 – 1890) Alfred R. Waud, Scenes on a Cotton Plantation (1867) William Johnson, The Cotton Market, Bombay (ca. 1855 – 1862) William Johnson, Lohannas (ca. 1855 – 1862) Thomas Nast, The Queen of Industry, or the New South (1882) William Aiken Walker, Cotton Pickers (ca. 1890) Edgar Degas, A Cotton Office in New Orleans (1873) Winslow Homer, The Cotton Pickers (1876) Jules Breton, The Reapers (1860) Winslow Homer, Upland Cotton (1875) W. E. B. Du Bois, Exhibit of the American Negroes at the Paris Exposition (1900) i ll u s t r at i o n s

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161

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W. E. B. Du Bois, Government Clerks Have Received Appointment as Clerks in Civil Service Departments United States Government through Competitive Examinations (1900) W. E. B. Du Bois,  [The Georgia Negro] Occupations of Negroes and Whites in Georgia (1900) Meta Warrick Fuller, Landing of First Twenty Slaves at Jamestown (1907; lost) Meta Warrick Fuller, Scene on a Slave Plantation (1907; lost) Clementine Hunter, Picking Cotton (1950s) William H. Johnson, Cotton Pickers (ca. 1940) Romare Bearden, Cotton (1964) Hank Willis Thomas, The Cotton Bowl (2011) Yinka Shonibare, Scramble for Africa (2003) Adalbert von Roessler, Kongokonferenz (The Congo Conference) (1884) Charles Turner (after Alfred Edward Chalon), Thomas Clarkson (1828) Strip of country cloth, Kpelle, Liberia (1893) Sample of Liberian cotton (1894) Loom, spindle, and cloth, Kpelle, Liberia (1893) Agricultural products from the African Collection, Philadelphia Commercial Museum (1910) Diorama of a West African weaver, Philadelphia Commercial Museum (1910) A. Bayot (after Charles Guillain), Young Mukomanga and Young Nyassa Men and Young Nyassa Girl and Makua Woman (1856) Alphonso Lisk-­Carew, Mandingo Women-­Traders of Manchester Cloth (1920) B. W. Kilburn, African Exhibit, Negro Building, Atlanta Exposition (1895) Elliott and Fry, Martha Ricks (1892) B. W. Kilburn,  Quilt Exhibit: Interior of the Negro Exhibit, Atlanta Exposition (1895) Leonardo Drew, Number 25 (1992) D’Ascenzo Studios, Cotton Field (1932; broken)

i ll u s t r at i o n s

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Introduction Threads of Empire

Two hands crossed at the wrists. Two fists full of cotton. A blurred thicket of stalks. These are the elements of Hank Willis Thomas’s (b. 1976) 2014 print Black Hands, White Cotton (figure Intro.1). This artwork’s subject, Black hands holding white cotton, immediately recalls a vast image bank that narrates the long, intertwined history of race and labor in the making of the Atlantic world. As if to emphasize this entanglement, the image has been cropped and pixelated to specifically draw our attention to the intimacies of fiber and flesh that literally expand its geographies. Lined skin on each hand is smoothed out so that we notice each ridge, crease, and fold. Veins form deep rivulets that straighten and then snake across the back of the laborer’s hand, joining wrist to finger. The vein ends where the side of the finger touches the cotton fiber, and its serpentine path beneath the skin recalls the carefully demarcated waterways, along which cotton bales flowed, that spread out across maps of the United States. The right palm faces down, and between the edges of thumb and forefinger cotton oozes out as if squeezed from the tightly closed palm. Its rounded edges follow the curve of the join between thumb and finger while its surface glistens like the rounded, worn-­smooth nub of the worker’s knuckle. By contrast, the open palm of the left hand is almost entirely covered by the tufts of cotton it holds. They bloom out and gather around the edges of the palm. The view we have leaves the bent fingers, crouching around the tufts of cot-

Figure intro.1  ·  Hank Willis Thomas (b. 1976), Black Hands, White Cotton, 2014. Screen print and Carborundum on paper, 87.6 × 87.3 cm (34 ½ × 34 ⅜ in.). © Hank Willis Thomas. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

ton, in shadow so that they resemble the sharp lobes of the cotton plant’s calyx from which the boll grows. The original photograph was printed on the record sleeve for a song of the same name, by a 1970s Memphis band called Butterscotch Caboose. Reworked by Thomas into a Carborundum print, this artwork centralizes the history of slavery and its relationship to the cotton trade as it developed across the Atlantic. As a manipulator of archival images, Thomas has always been interested in the currency of visual forms, in terms of how they are constructed and of how these constructions circulate to create meaning. In an image like this, historical meaning and contemporary legacies coincide. It is impossible to look and not see plantations and back-­breaking labor, not see Introduction

{ 2 }

centuries of racial exploitation and oppression, not see this history repeated in the carceral system, in police brutality, in the economic and legislative marginalization of African Americans. While this history remains central to how the United States was created, and how it continues to function, the refusal to acknowledge its ongoing implications creates the sense that it is a history hidden in plain sight. The print itself shows us only two things: hands and cotton. Because the hands are disconnected from the rest of the body, we inevitably come to focus on the cotton itself and its relationship to fingers, a relationship created through the contrasts of color. We notice the difference between focus and abstraction, the space between backdrop and foreground, the movement between surface and depth. The intensity of close looking in this print consistently returns us to the cotton itself, a reflexive gesture by Thomas that draws attention to the way cotton calls up images, memories, and meanings that are not, necessarily, right in front of us. It is both the visual ubiquity of cotton, as a material whose history frames the social relations that guide our present, and its material connotations that Thomas foregrounds here.1 Explaining this another way, the artist Leo­ nardo Drew, whose sculptures are often formed using found, and symbolic, materials — cotton, rust, paper — more explicitly states that “cotton is a material with memory.”2 As an object redolent with associations both political and cultural, cotton continues to exist in the present as an artifact charged with the traces of labor under slavery, the hardships of southern agriculture, the colonial expansion of Britain, and the endurance of Black Americans. In this context Thomas’s photograph seems to ask, How do memories accumulate in the material? And how have these material memories framed ways of seeing? In examining the representation of cotton in the long nineteenth century, my book sets out to explore some of these connections between materiality, memory, and ways of seeing. Contemporary artists including Hank Willis Thomas, Lubaina Himid (b. 1954), Yinka Shonibare CBE (b. 1962), and Leonardo Drew (b. 1961), who use and represent cotton in their artworks, first piqued my interest in the subject, and they have shaped my intellectual engagement with these questions. Indeed, their work has continually reminded me of the importance these associations hold not only historically but also in our present moment. In British artist Lubaina Himid’s large installation created in 2002, Cotton .com (figures Intro.2 and Intro.3), cotton fabric propels the component works’ meaning. She draws on the rhythmic repetition of the grid to establish a dynamic relationship between the places cotton moved. Arranging patterned, black-­and-­white paintings that simulate textiles along one wall with threads of empire

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Figure intro.2 Lubaina Himid (b. 1954), Cotton.com (detail), 2002. Acrylic on canvas and brass strips. Fabrications, installation view (2002), cube (Center for Urban Built Environment) Gallery, Manchester. Courtesy of the artist. Image courtesy of Denise Swanson.

Figure intro.3 Lubaina Himid (b. 1954), Cotton.com, 2002. Brass strips, 10 × 200 × 0.2 cm (4 × 78 ¾ × 1�16 in.). Lubaina Himid: Navigation Charts, installation view (2017), © Spike Island, Bristol.  Courtesy of the artist and Hollybush Gardens, Arts Council Collection. Photograph by Stuart Whipps.

Figure intro.4 Yinka Shonibare (b. 1962), Scramble for Africa, 2003. 14 life-­size fiberglass mannequins, 14 chairs, table, Dutch wax-­ printed cotton. The Pinnell Collection, Dallas, TX.

a commemorative text on the other, Himid traces the paradoxes of cotton’s circulation by engaging with its material implications. Drawing on the history that connected Manchester factory workers with the lives of enslaved cotton pickers in the American South, she foregrounds the experiences of these workers through their interaction with the commodity. The implications of these interactions and connections for shaping constructions of identity, meanings of consumption, experiences of labor, and modes of engagement — especially in the later nineteenth century — become particularly significant in the witty installations and “African” fabrics of Yinka Shonibare. In Scramble for Africa (figure Intro.4), produced in 2003, he draws on the history of European (and American) constructions — and divisions — of Africa as a site of speculation. But his work has a broader significance in its material conditions. Using fabric with complicated and circuitous origins, his work highlights the historically market-­driven contexts of cotton’s circulation, the complex moments of connection it shaped, and their legacies for our increasingly globalized present. These artists draw on the historical confluences shaped by the cotton trade to frame the formal composition of their artworks and drive its narrative substance. Each of these artists engage with the material and the social meanings of cotton in their work and use the culture of the commodity — not simply as subject but as a formal compositional element — to comment on the legacies of colonial and transnational histories in the present. Himid and Shonibare use the weblike structure of cotton’s production to chart associations between people and places across the globe, while Thomas and Drew work with the multiple iterations of cotton’s visual representation as it has framed Black labor, connecting the present with its past. In other words, these artists do not use cotton solely to represent these nineteenth-­century threads of empire

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histories: the materiality of cotton is what gives their work its form. Their work both highlights and uncovers the different “memories” of the material —  something that emerges from the interplay of historical sources and cultural associations — as it continues to exist in the present. These memories seem embedded in the material itself, and much like we might read a painting or print by analyzing and unpicking its layers of meaning, they do something similar with the materiality of cotton. My book is not an illustrated history of cotton, but — in drawing on these contemporary artists’ formulation of, and bearing toward, the past — it is particularly concerned with the visual and material associations between Blackness and cotton. And in each chapter my historical orientation is framed by the formal conditions of their artworks. In looking at their work, I have found new understandings of historical material, new methodologies for addressing archival loss, and new frameworks for reading the transnational meaning of objects. These artists have opened up art history for me, providing me with new ways of looking at nineteenth-­century visual and material culture, while also challenging the ways Black subjects are made legible now. All of these artists, in some way, restage the practice of archiving, both in their use of materials and in the narratives they articulate and stage. Materially, their use of objects such as cotton fiber or cloth recalls both what is present and what is absent from historical archives while calling attention to what is deeply embedded in, and can be gleaned, viewed, and remembered from, the discarded and disregarded materials of the past. They do not merely reiterate the official archives but approach them with a difference. In this case, working with what is absent from the official story is to work with both what is supplemental to and what cannot be held within the archive. From this interstitial space, they find ways to reorient and animate our view of the past, a form of redress that requires us to approach the temporal and spatial meanings of objects in new and sometimes surprising ways. This is why I take my cue from these artists. They compel us to see and think differently about our relationship to the past and challenge how we conceptualize its temporal and spatial edges and divides. They continue to materialize a historical imaginary that is both relational and haptic, in which the connection between objects and people and places is embodied, shaped by gestures, texture, and feeling as much as it is by figures and forms. Following their approach to reading objects and their historical meaning is to disassemble the relationship of vision, value, and materiality that framed (frames) Blackness, and to rehearse other potentialities expressed and experienced by Black communities.

Introduction

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The historical association between Blackness and cotton, foregrounded by their market equivalence, has been reified into a visual association that appears almost self-­evident in the United States. But, as Nicole Fleetwood points out, “the field of vision is a formation that renders racial marking, producing the viewing subject who is . . . inserted into systems of visual discourse that saw the world before the particular subject came into being.”3 She reminds us to ask both how and why racial referents become sutured to their signifiers, and how this suturing relies on an ambivalent conflation between the visible and visual. How is it, to quote Sara Ahmed, that “things get bound together”?4 Like Thomas, I am interested in the genealogies of this association. Thomas’s modified imagery reminds me of botanical drawings with their cross-­ sectional, multi-­angle views that revealed the various parts of a plant and its development. Botanical illustrations tracked a sequence of movements from the collection of a specimen, its visual codification, and its circulation thereafter.5 This sequential aspect of botanical illustration was particularly significant for descriptions of cotton, a plant whose scientific importance was always entwined with its commercial significance. The Scottish botanist George Watt (1851  –  1930) opens his classic treatise on cotton by saying “it would not be far from correct to describe Cotton as the central feature of the world’s modern commerce.”6 Documenting a cotton plant’s growth, structure, and development over time was to document the very properties that made it so significant. A cotton flower blooms about two to three months after planting; the bloom then withers away to a green pod from which the fluffy cotton fibers will burst. The flower, while pleasing to the eye, was the precursor to the lush white fiber that holds together Thomas’s print. To see cotton was to also look forward to its use as commodity. Speculation underpinned cotton production, and this book focuses on the crop’s production in the United States. Cotton had been grown in Asia, Africa, and the Americas for millennia; however, by the latter decades of the eighteenth century demand began to exceed supply.7 Up until the 1780s, British cotton manufacturers had relied on small-­scale suppliers located anywhere from the Ottoman Empire to the Caribbean. As the price of raw cotton increased, planters in the Caribbean expanded their plantation production, acquiring more land and requiring more slaves to do so. Planters in the United States had been growing the crop from as early as 1607 and had also been cultivating knowledge about the plant in other regions, including the Caribbean;, however, much of US production was for domestic consumption. The rapid expansion of cotton cultivation in the United States, as plant-

threads of empire

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ers noticed rising prices, was aided by the reduced supply from the Caribbean following the disruption, through rebellion, of cotton production in Saint-­ Domingue (later Haiti), once Europe’s most significant source of the fiber. With Eli Whitney’s patenting of the cotton gin in 1794, daily production of processed cotton — that is, the amount of cotton that enslaved people could pick and clean — grew exponentially: using the gin, a single enslaved person could, in a day, clean fifty pounds of cotton instead of only one pound.8 The result was a cotton rush as planters searched out more land and brought with them more slaves.9 Cotton was often likened to white gold. Planters moved first into the interiors of South Carolina and Georgia, and from the early nineteenth century they migrated south and west — to Ala­ bama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Texas. Cotton did not grow well in newly prepared soil, so planters were encouraged to grow crops such as corn for a season or two in order to prepare the soil before cotton planting could begin. Cotton was also a thirsty crop. In order to ensure efficient and adequate irrigation and drainage, the planting of crops, the digging of furrows, and the turning of the soil required careful organization and planning.10 However, to meet rising domestic and international consumption, planters and farmers eschewed crop rotation, focusing only on cotton cultivation. A planter from Putnam County, Georgia, wrote in 1833 that “we appear to have but one rule — that is to make as much cotton as we can, and wear out as much land as we can.”11 Overworking the land this way led to soil exhaustion, forcing planters to find new areas for cultivation while leaving behind depleted fields and irrigation systems.12 The “cotton rush” that enveloped planters, colonial administrators, factors, and industrialists shaped what I would call a speculative vision: a way of seeing the natural world through the lens of profit. This was materialized through environmental transformation. In practical terms, this meant land clearance, which took place in the displacement of Indigenous people and the clearing of dense vegetation to make way for agricultural use: the division of land and its management as plantations. As planters moved south and demand for the commodity grew, so too did the nation’s domestic slave trade.13 While I do not spend enough time on this relationship in this book, I am grateful to scholars Iyko Day and Tiffany Lethabo King, whose work traces how these acts of environmental violence, these “relations of conquest,” mediated the interaction of Native American and African American communities under colonialism, and in our present.14 The disposability of Native American communities correlates precisely with the usability of enslaved African Americans, who were forced to undertake this ecological clearing and would labor to harvest its profit.15 These historical formations Introduction

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Figure intro.5 · George Robertson (1748  –  1788), Spring Head of Roaring River Estate, 1775. Oil on canvas, 99.1 × 126.4 cm (39 × 49¾ in.). Collection of Wallace Campbell.

connect the projects of Native Studies and Black Studies, of decolonization and abo­lition. I want to emphasize, then, that the growth of cotton and its expansion in the Caribbean and the United States cannot be decoupled from the theft and expropriation of land inhabited by Indigenous peoples and from the expansion of the international slave trade. The speculative vision that this cotton rush shaped finds a visual corollary in certain aspects of landscape representation, in particular the imperial plantation. Made for plantation owners, works such as George Robertson’s (1748  –  1788) Spring Head of Roaring River (figure Intro.5), a painting from 1775 later published as an engraving by John Boydell, depicted colonial holdings in the Caribbean. In Robertson’s view the Jamaican plantation, of writer and art collector William Beckford is a site of potentiality.16 We do not see the full effects of human intervention — yet — but we can imagine them. These results are visualized in English lithographer James Richard Barfoot’s (1794 – 1863) Progress of Cotton (figures Intro.6  –  Intro.17), a series of prints from 1840 that begins with a frontal view of a plantation where a group of Black threads of empire

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Figure intro.6 · James Richard Barfoot (1794  –  1863), Progress of Cotton: #1 Cotton Plantation, 1840. No. 1 of a set of 12 lithographs with color sheet, 34.5 × 48.8 cm (139�16 × 19 3�16 in.). Mabel Brady Garvan Collection, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT. Figure intro.7 · James Richard Barfoot (1794  –  1863), Progress of Cotton: #2 Willowing, 1840. Lithograph with color sheet, 34.5 × 48.8 cm (139�16 × 19 3�16 in.). Mabel Brady Garvan Collection, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT.

Figure intro.8 ·  James Richard Barfoot (1794  –  1863), Progress of Cotton: #3 Lap-­Frame, 1840. Lithograph with color sheet, 34.5 × 48.8 cm (139�16 × 193�16 in.). Mabel Brady Garvan Collection, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT. Figure intro.9 · James Richard Barfoot (1794  –  1863), Progress of Cotton: #4 Carding, 1840. Lithograph with color sheet, 34.5 × 48.8 cm (139�16 × 193�16 in.). Mabel Brady Garvan Collection, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT.

Figure intro.10  ·  James Richard Barfoot, (1794  –  1863), Progress of Cotton: #5 Bobbing and Drawing Frames, 1840. Lithograph with color sheet, 34.5 × 48.8 cm (139�16 × 193�16 in.). Mabel Brady Garvan Collection, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT. Figure intro.11 · James Richard Barfoot (1794  –  1863), Progress of Cotton: #6 Spinning, 1840. Lithograph with color sheet, 34.5 × 48.8 cm (139�16 × 193�16 in.). Mabel Brady Garvan Collection, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT.

Figure intro.12 · James Richard Barfoot (1794  –  1863), Progress of Cotton: #7 Bleaching, 1840. Lithograph with color sheet, 34.5 × 48.8 cm (139�16 × 193�16 in.). Mabel Brady Garvan Collection, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT. Figure intro.13 · James Richard Barfoot (1794  –  1863), Progress of Cotton: #8 Warping and Winding, 1840. Lithograph with color sheet, 34.5 × 48.8 cm (139�16 × 193�16 in.). Mabel Brady Garvan Collection, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT.

Figure intro.14 · James Richard Barfoot (1794  –  1863), Progress of Cotton: #9 Reeding or Drawing In, 1840. Lithograph with color sheet, 34.5 × 48.8 cm (139�16 × 193�16 in.). Mabel Brady Garvan Collection, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT. Figure intro.15 · James Richard Barfoot (1794  –  1863), Progress of Cotton: #10 Weaving, 1840. Lithograph with color sheet, 34.5 × 48.8 cm (139�16 × 193�16 in.). Mabel Brady Garvan Collection, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT.

Figure intro.16 · James Richard Barfoot (1794  –  1863), Progress of Cotton: #11 Dying, 1840. Lithograph with color sheet, 34.5 × 48.8 cm (139�16 × 193�16 in.). Mabel Brady Garvan Collection, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT. Figure intro.17 · James Richard Barfoot (1794  –  1863), Progress of Cotton: #12 Printing, 1840. Lithograph with color sheet, 34.5 × 48.8 cm (139�16 × 193�16 in.). Mabel Brady Garvan Collection, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT.

enslaved workers picks cotton.17 Barfoot’s plantation scene reminds me of Solomon Northrup’s description of the visual effect of a cotton plantation: “There are few sights more pleasing to the eye than a wide cotton field when it is in full bloom. It presents an appearance of purity, like an immaculate expanse of light, new fallen snow.”18 Northrup’s description evokes the objective beauty of the crop but also reinforces another way that cotton’s natural beauty is tied to its commercial value. The visual appeal of the cotton plant appears here as magnification (a field in bloom, an expanse), beauty that comes from magnitude. Although we do not see the endless rows of cotton bolls softly swayed by gusts of wind, Thomas’s photograph evokes this scene. We have seen it over and over in our mind’s eye, reinforced by a century’s worth of imagery showing vast expanses of cotton, and (sometimes) the workers who pick them. In descriptions like Northrup’s and in those endless scenes of cotton plantations, the density of cotton threatens to obscure our vision of all else. Even the cotton itself starts to fade from sight; its sheer magnitude transforms it into something decorative, ornamental, a kind of ground cover. In these visual representations, the plantation is a place where human intervention — seen, or imagined, through landscaping, spatial organization, and crop cultivation — is translated into signs of a bountiful arcadia.19 As genre paintings or as landscape art signifying the domestication of the natural world, plantation representations functioned as an emblem of a planter’s status, providing an important social and economic marker of ownership and control. Viewers look over and across the plantation as we do in Barfoot’s first lithograph. Harnessing this speculative vision — which I unpack further in chapter 1 — representations of plantations as forms of imperial landscape mediated relationships between humans and the natural world, as expressions of “potentially limitless reserves of value.”20 I follow this gaze by following cotton’s movement and manufacture. As a highly profitable commodity, cotton had a market value — its exchangeability — that also mediated such a view of the natural world. Its growth was spurred by, and promoted, a speculative vision of the land that looked ahead to the profit that was to come. While we might say that most agricultural commodities mediate such a relationship to the land, cotton made this visible in a unique way because of its geographical movement and transformation from fiber to fabric. Growing cotton, planters looked ahead to its harvest. Harvesting cotton, they looked ahead to its sale to cotton merchants, who in turn, looked ahead to its manufacture and sale as cloth. Cotton was not simply a symbol of profit. It framed a sense of projection — based on desire for profit — that was materialized in its production. Looking at cotIntroduction

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ton was to also look through space, across time, to look into the distance and see potential value. These descriptions of cotton form part of its archival memory, and my book holds this speculative view that cotton signifies in tension with the relationality that its movement also materialized. Its movements can be traced from documents and ledgers, visualized in the sometimes surprising collections of cloth scattered across the globe. The movement of commodities has also come to frame a relational turn in several academic disciplines, connected to the urgency of contemporary forms of globalization. What does relationality allow us to see? For a start, I use cotton’s mobility to emphasize the entanglements of Indian Ocean and Atlantic Ocean trades. Cotton helped spur industrialization and design practices in Britain and the United States. Small-­scale imports of Indian raw cotton and textiles to Britain through the East India Company began in the seventeenth century.21 The textiles were used domestically, re-­exported to the British colonies, and traded for slaves in West Africa. Demand for Indian textiles grew in the eighteenth century, in turn spurring the development of a British cotton industry that sought to find ways of imitating Indian textiles. While this “import substitution” aimed to satisfy the domestic market for textiles, it was also the case that manufacturers used these textiles to gain greater control over the African slave trade.22 These developments were also connected to the increase in cotton exports from the United States and the expansion of its own domestic manufactures.23 The point here is that the development and growth of the Anglo-­American cotton trade, while emerging from a long set of commercial relations with India, was underpinned by the forcible transportation of Black enslaved people from West Africa in exchange for cotton cloth and their labor in American plantations: the market for cotton was an underlying economic factor in the trade in Black bodies.24 To centralize the relationship between these processes of the market and the “social life” of cotton (to paraphrase Arjun Appadurai) is to engage directly with the Black experience of capitalist processes of commodification.25 Enslaved men and women of African origin were, effectively, subject to the same market disciplines that shaped the trade in cotton as a commodity. Furthermore, as the artworks of Hank Willis Thomas, Lubaina Himid, and Yinka Shonibare all make clear, because cotton moved globally, bringing different places and people into contact with each other, the legacies of these historical relationships continue to inflect the representation, and experience, of people in the Black diaspora today.26 What does it mean, then, to think relationally in this instance, to “view” the plantation and factory as they were — connected within a global industhreads of empire

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trial complex — when the movement of enslaved Africans tracked that of cotton? First bought and sold in exchange for cotton cloth, the enslaved were shipped across the Atlantic. Then, bought and sold in relation to the price of cotton fiber, they were shipped along the Mississippi in ever-­increasing numbers to ensure that supplies of that commodity met demand.27 If cotton, historically, could be used to evoke something like a global imaginary, this imaginary could only take shape around the commodification of Black people. Increasingly in the field of art history, the mobility of objects is being used to reorient it beyond national frameworks or stylistic chronologies. But what does relationality as a methodology offer us when its routes are predicated on the operations of this racial (global) capitalism? As these nineteenth-­ century representations reveal, models of relationality do not always disassemble the existing hierarchies structured through their circulation. Examining these representations of the movement of cotton is, for me at least, to grapple with the relational imaginary of slavery itself — one that cuts across chronologies — and its particular optics: the burdened visuality of Black subjectivity. Mobility is a fraught term for scholars of the Black diaspora when, as Ian Baucom argues, enslaved people were themselves not just mobile commodities but also “a flexible, negotiable, transactable form of money.”28 It is in the archives that we most often encounter enslaved people in this fluid form, as we follow trails where Black life is numbered in ledgers and listed on bills of sale. Their lives are also embedded in the stock values of cotton, in the price of a cotton bale, and in the profits returned from its sale. What I trace in this book is how the economic equivalency, established through slavery, between Black people and white cotton was used as a visual modality to relegate Black lives to raw material. From these connections between archives, financial reports, and artworks, we have the outline of a visual framework through which Blackness could be constructed, speculatively, as indivisible from productivity and profits. These outlines bring into view what Saidiya Hartman has described as the “racial calculus” of Black life.29 It is part of what Christina Sharpe has written is a political and particular “arithmetic,” one that devalues Black life, turns flesh into figures, and holds these lives captive even as they became the most mobile of forms.30 Hank Willis Thomas formulates this market equivalency as an entanglement and shared intimacy in his print. He creates a tension between the highly pixelated glistening white of the cotton fiber and the finely grained Black skin as they bifurcate the animated background. There is no way of ignoring the effect of cotton. While the cotton might soften the image, it also hardens its meaning. Its effect — cloudlike, ethereal — is contrasted with Introduction

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the creased skin where softness is attenuated into a surface stretched tight. As the creases settle across palms and wrists, we might imagine the feel of skin so fragile it could split apart with a touch or, instead, roughened out like leather. The photograph is activated by these textures and holds them tightly, just as the hands hold tightly to the cotton. This sense of containment is reinforced by the careful placement of wrist over wrist, an action that evokes the binding of hands. With their hands and bodies bound and shackled, enslaved Africans were transported from slave forts in West Africa to the plantations of the New World. A simple gesture, Thomas uses crossed wrists here to also signal the ways Black Africans, enslaved and free, were bound up with and bound to cotton itself. But, seen from this perspective, perhaps it is not the hands that encapsulate the cotton so much as the cotton that is forcing its way through and onto the body. The hands might be a register of the effects of cotton: deep lines and furrows, raised ridges and creased joints, all of these providing physical evidence of the arduous labor of cultivating and picking the plant. Even as they hold the cotton up toward the surface, these working hands emulate the grip needed to pluck the fiber from its case. On the parts of the fingers we cannot see, perhaps there are calloused and darkened lines where the plant’s dry bolls have cut and pierced the skin. The glistening beauty of cotton is now contrasted with something else: a life bent in hard labor, perspiring in the heat of summer, abused by the plantation owner, the body lacerated. The photograph compels us to see how a body might grow around a plant, to imagine how its marks and its scars, its misshapen joints or the changed textures of its skin, might be read through the life cycle of labor and a cotton plant. The photograph pushes us to recognize not just the ways a market relationship connected Black lives and white cotton, but also how that relationship of equivalency was materialized, took physical shape, and conjoined enslaved (and, later, free) plantation workers with the cotton they worked. Thomas’s work revolves around archival memories, their relationship to vision, and the ways that the visual structures social life. Using and manipulating archival images, he reveals their continued currency in contemporary life to reinforce how ways of seeing are constructed through these historical forms. In foregrounding the equivalency between Black Americans and white cotton, Thomas is also highlighting the visual nature of this market relation and the role of images in constructing and maintaining its meaning. The weight of images like this is heavy. Their mass circulation — indeed, their ubiquity — underscores and perhaps reifies the relationship between Black people and white cotton. One question we are left with is, How do we threads of empire

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keep seeing what cannot be visualized, beyond this logic of projection and profit? My aim in this book is not to reinforce archival histories but, drawing from Hank Willis Thomas, to disassemble their optics. By emphasizing the visual implications of this market logic, my book makes space for another kind of speculative vision that Thomas evokes in the tension between what can be seen and what might be felt. This involves a rather speculative approach to archives themselves that moves between their categorizations and their containments to search for perhaps unexpected historical alignments. Looking through the archive as an ongoing site of memory reorients narratives as unfinished — reorients our view of history and its unfolding. For Thomas gestures toward what is enfolded in the very texture of cotton as an opening, as a fugitive space made legible through traces of touch and feeling. From the realm of the haptic he takes us toward a realm of experience, not to give voice to the enslaved but to “imagine what cannot be verified” and to “reckon with the precarious lives which are visible only in the moment of their disappearance.”31

Speculative Visions  ·  In choosing to focus specifically on the representation of African American people, I aim to emphasize the ways their historical association with cotton, first as enslaved workers and then, later, as free laborers, revolved around a speculative vision. The trade in cotton, from cultivation to manufacture, was animated by a series of transactions focused on cotton’s potential market profits. It is this speculative economic relationship that structures my reading of the ways cotton was used to shape constructions of Black people through their potential for productivity. In this sense my reading is closely aligned with Jennifer L. Morgan’s notion of “futurity.” Morgan uses this term to discuss the bequeathing of female slaves by North American plantation owners to family members or to pay debts because of Black women’s reproductive potential. Their value lay in the future capital they would bring to their owners through their productive and reproductive labors in enlarging their owners’ slave populations.32 She demonstrates the historical implications of market relations for the construction of race and gender.33 I draw on this analysis to further examine how this economic nexus gave rise to specific material conditions and visual relations for the framing, representation, and viewing of (Black) working bodies. Plantation owners speculated on cotton and enslaved people, for both could bring future profit. And as Frederick Douglass explained to his Introduction

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audiences, the future profit that an enslaved Black person might make for her or his owner was closely tied to the value of cotton; both were commodities, and their monetary value — in the first half of the nineteenth century —  was intimately connected.34 To speculate, in this context, describes an outlook that is always contingent: a way of seeing that relies on what is now visible to project future economic gains. I use the term speculative vision to both unpack this economic relationship between Blackness and white cotton and foreground its visual implications. To speculate is to assess. It requires a quantitative reading — what I call a “visual accounting” — that sustains the devaluation of Black life.35 In my chapters, and drawing especially on the insights of Christina Sharpe and the spatial politics of Black life theorized by Katherine McKittrick, I trace, and challenge, how these processes of assessment are manifested, produced, and staged through visual means that materialized Blackness as an expression of value and, more often, of future value.36 Throughout my book I also consider how this mode of assessment finds parallels in the commodity value of art itself and the speculative act of (aesthetic) valuation that rely on processes of abstraction: an elision of the presence of labor, the role of bodies, and the value of physical work. I focus on the concept of the speculative to deconstruct how vision can be constructed as a process of abstraction, drawing in part from Marx’s conceptualization of the effects of capital and the social relations of commodification. For the “spectral completion of commodity fetishism” is ultimately “human reification: where people appear to be no more than things.”37 And so my chapters examine the ways cotton, its uses, and its representation created conditions of viewership through which Blackness could be transformed into a commodity and Black lives into fungible objects. These ways of seeing as they cohered around the Black body had wider implications for the experience and representation of landscapes and people across the Atlantic. Excavating these material conditions leads us to follow the networks shaped by commodity culture. Black experience not only was central to the history of cotton’s cultivation and value; through their involvement in the cotton trade, Black laborers came into direct connection —  through the medium of the commodity — with a range of actors. In centralizing this market connection between Blackness and white cotton and tracking its post-­emancipation implications — not least the ways these economic relationships sustained by slavery continued to inflect colonial commerce — each chapter also examines how cotton moved in space, how it was transformed in shape, and how this mobility was represented and understood. These movements provide a representational paradigm for viewing threads of empire

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the transnational processes by which different bodies and landscapes are brought into conversation with each other, diachronically as well as synchronically. Drawing on, and inspired by, the expansive work of Lisa Lowe, I trace these dialogic associations as they were created between people, places, and things through networks of trade to materialize the relational aesthetics of transnational processes.38 On the one hand, this geography of cotton’s trade provides a way of tracing the visual relations encapsulated in the speculative vision framed by cotton. It allows me to struggle with the weight of archives filled with erasures and a public sphere oversaturated with images that reduce Blackness to a state of objecthood. However, to chart a way through these spaces, it is also possible — drawing on the work of artists like Lubaina Himid and Yinka Shonibare — to speculate in other ways. The art and material culture I examine provided a framework for visualizing Blackness, historically, as inherently speculative. On the other hand, I also approach these objects, inspired by Saidiya Hartman’s term “critical fabulation,” as speculative themselves: these objects are multifaceted.39 They can materialize different histories and therefore different futures, in which conceptions of value, and Blackness, can be imagined beyond the constraints of the market. I want to bring these other possibilities into view for readers, through my archival work, in order to destabilize and “displace the received or authorized account.”40 Similarly, in the networked history of cotton’s production and its material movements, it is possible to imagine other routes of connection, by which alternative historical conditions are brought into view that offer alternative conceptions of what our present could be.41

Black Bodies, White Gold: Vision, Value, and Form   · Through­ out this book, what I foreground is the commensurability constructed between cotton as commodity and Blackness to theorize an ontology of racial representation that I believe continues to influence the ways Blackness is recognized and understood in our contemporary moment. As commodity forms, cotton and Black bodies reflected each other: the value of Black labor was expressed through and on the material of cotton itself. In turn, cotton in its raw and material forms helped make Black lives legible as profitable property. I have learned much from Alessandra Raengo, Jasmine Nichole Cobb, Sarah E. Lewis, and Nicholas Mirzoeff as they investigate the relationship between race and representation in structuring our social sphere, particularly in the United States. They remind us of the foundational visual logic Introduction

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of slavery, reiterating how in its particular optics, forged through capitalism and captivity, the Black body — in particular the Black female body — comes into the visual field as a site of production.42 In my study, excavating — and challenging — this scopic regime is a through line. I argue that the market equivalence created between cotton and Black bodies galvanized a hermeneutics of the surface around Blackness that gave rise to a condition of viewership whereby Black bodies could (and had to) be read as embodiments of the commodity form. This ontological reading of the relationship between Blackness and visuality, shaped by the market for cotton, follows a roughly chronological trajectory from slavery to its abolition in the United States. In historicizing this condition of viewership I want to interrogate the operation of structures of racialization that interpret the visible Black body through a continued reliance on discourses of commodification and utility, even after the objectification of slavery had come to an end. I examine how these relationships of vision and value mediated the unfinished project of emancipation, the constrained nature of freedom, and the complicated nature of subjectivity for Black Americans.43 This trajectory also connects histories of slavery and colonialism more closely, and I show how these transactions and networks of commercial exchange and exploitation influenced the visual production and social meanings of Blackness beyond the United States. The afterlives of slavery in the visual production of Black artists, and in the visual construction of Blackness, are being provocatively theorized by scholars across disciplines. In particular, working between the contemporary and the historical, Krista A. Thompson’s mobilization of contemporary Black diaspora art as the framework for expanding our engagement with slavery’s archive, has reshaped the fields of Black Studies and Art History.44 Huey Copeland has examined how contemporary Black diaspora artists, following cultural and academic shifts in the 1960s, found “new possibilities for navigating slavery as a site of cultural production.”45 His study probes the implications of slavery’s visual resonance, tracing how its relationship to Blackness emerged in critical aesthetic spaces, as some Black artists themselves became more prominent in the mainstream US art world in the late twentieth century. Kimberly Juanita Brown’s study traces the erasure of the archive and the centrality of the visual to studies of the Black Atlantic. Holding these in tension, she engages contemporary artists whose work in restructuring Black women’s representation also restructure acts of seeing and, therefore, forms of living.46 Art historical readings of the representation of enslaved Africans and African Americans by Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw and Mia L. Bagneris show us how artworks, like portals, can open up threads of empire

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long-­held attachments of memory and material to alternative narratives of Black resilience.47 In gratitude for these scholars’ pathbreaking work, Black Bodies, White Gold holds eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century art and material culture in dialogue with contemporary artists’ varying, and material, responses to the history of slavery and the enslaved subject to construct an alternate historical methodology, an alternate historical imaginary. The contemporary artists I focus on here emphasize the importance of things — of materiality — in scripting our interaction with history, with knowledge production, and with place. Their methodology aligns with that of performance studies theorists who emphasize how objects perform and enact their presence on human actors.48 This is why I look closely both at how cotton is represented and at how it interacts with and acts on bodies. Similarly, when historicizing the objects that make up my case studies, I consider how their circulation today also scripts our own interactions with the past. These visual and material objects are not merely representational; they act on, and are acted upon within, the contexts in which they moved. Focusing on the haptic quality of these objects allows me to think relationally — not (only) representationally — and put seemingly disparate sources into dialogue together. Engaging with the haptic is also key to untangling the ways meaning comes to congeal in objects, as well as the way the intangible qualities of things take on material meanings. I employ a methodology of “thick description” borrowed from cultural anthropology.49 On the one hand, I explore the symbolic meanings of cotton, particularly in relation to ideas about progress, the workings of the market, and definitions around commerce. On the other hand, I also excavate the physical associations and resonances of the material itself, considering what it meant to work with, touch, or wear cotton, alongside attending to contexts of production and use. Each chapter draws on visual representation and written and material sources showing how, on the basis of the material associations of cotton, we can form a theoretical paradigm of representation in which the visual, the verbal, and the haptic intersect.

Chapter Summary  ·  In my first two chapters, I draw from Lubaina Himid’s Cotton.com to deal with the currency of cotton shaped by networks of colonial commerce and the transatlantic slave trade. In chapter 1, I focus on the production of “negro cloth,” its materialization of the Black body as commodity, and the ways it connected enslaved plantation laborers with factory operatives. I argue that these nineteenth-­century actors — both Black Introduction

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and white — drew on the haptic nature of cotton cloth to shape real, and imagined, correspondences between their lives and labors across antebellum America. While negro cloth materialized Blackness as a form of property, I also reflect on the embodied ways that Black enslaved workers responded to this regulation using the haptic qualities of cloth to reformat and reenvision these connections between cotton, Blackness, and value. I bring the chapter full circle with a discussion of African American artist Edward Mitchell Bannister’s painting of a New England textile factory. Chapter 2 moves us to the factories of Manchester, England. Focusing on paintings by Agostino Brunias (1730  –  1796) and Eyre Crowe (1824  –  1910), it traces another aspect of the relationship between cotton, visual culture, and slavery: the production of patterned cloth for African, African American, and Afro-­Caribbean communities in the late eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth. The chapter explores the relationship between color, cotton, and commodification in shaping what I call a market aesthetics. I use this term first to examine how markets, textiles, and circulating images connected various sites across the Atlantic Ocean. I unpack it further by analyzing Black people’s aestheticization as objects in the slave market as well as examining representations of these market scenes. The chapter draws a connection between the visual dynamics of the gaze encoded in art’s display and the transactional dynamics of the slave market to reflect on the ways Blackness was constructed as a speculative condition itself. In chapter 3 I turn to geography of labor on the plantation following emancipation. Drawing on Hank Willis Thomas’s print and its reflection on the fetishization of Blackness, this chapter explores the representation of the Black sharecropper. I move between a variety of objects here. I use photographs of self-­emancipated African Americans on the Sea Islands of South Carolina; printed and painted representations of cotton, plantations, and industrial labor in the postbellum era; and paintings by Edgar Degas (1834  –  1917) and Winslow Homer (1836  –  1910). Through these works I trace the physical, symbolic, and embodied associations between Black Americans and cotton in the context of emancipation and explore how these constructions about the value of Blackness inflected US culture after Reconstruction. In particular, I examine how these works materialized an ambivalence about the position of newly free Black Americans and articulate a way of seeing that desired proof that Black Americans could become productive citizens. This chapter ends with a brief overview of the ways Black intellectuals and artists — faced with constantly having to prove their value — defied these conditions to project narratives that expanded the limits of representation and constructions of value. threads of empire

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In my final chapter I use the work of Yinka Shonibare to bring this book to its conclusion. The chapter is framed historically by the cessation of the transatlantic slave trade, emancipation in the United States, and the implications of both for British and American colonial expansion. Bringing together the visual analysis I carried out in earlier chapters that connected commerce, cotton, and representations of landscape, here I focus on Shonibare’s tableau Scramble for Africa (2003), which is animated by the interconnected networks of the cotton trade and British and American commercial colonialism. By the end of the nineteenth century, the trade in cotton was used to frame a speculative vision of West Africa as a site for British and American colonial expansion. This commercial vision was demonstrated in museum and exhibition displays in the United States and Britain, whose history I briefly explore as I examine the ways West Africa was imagined as something like a new plantation and a new market for Anglo-­American cotton manufactures. This tableau also allows me to reflect on the speculative conditions that have shaped this book — the historical frameworks by which Black life has come to be imagined through the extractive logic of capital — and offer up others. I focus in particular on the textile histories and practices embedded in Shonibare’s work to consider the speculative imaginaries they materialize. Alongside this I discuss the ways textiles themselves become sites of material history in which the intimacies and entanglements of their production produce alternative imaginaries of how our present came to be. I end this book with the work of Leonardo Drew and reflect on his use of cotton as medium and subject, playing on the ways vision and social value continue to shape contemporary life. The continued relevance of these histories compel us to examine how these conceptions of Blackness came to be. Refusing and revising remind us that the work of excavating these histories is not complete; it remains an ongoing necessity. In its continued existence in the present, an object can never reflect its context fully; thus any historical narrative that emerges is only partial. I think of this relationship between past and present as something like an illumination by which, through careful and attentive exploration, the power of objects to open up onto the worlds they are part of might be understood.50 In creating the scope and trajectory of this project I recognize my own role in the (re)construction of the past. It is for this reason that I also consider the relationship between contemporary art practice and histories of colonialism to suggest that this kind of reconstruction might be a form of translation or dynamic encounter only emerging from an intensive engagement with the object itself. I have framed my historical scholarship through the Introduction

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work of contemporary artists because their artistic practice can enliven our understanding of the production of historical knowledge. These artists animate a history that materializes the intimacies between people, places, and things brought together by the slave trade and its aftermath in the Atlantic world. And I have crafted a study that uses the embedded meanings of objects to reveal these moments of entanglement.51 To historicize these expressions of interconnectedness is to account for their emergence from unequal distributions of power as much as their emergence through the material and visual qualities of the objects themselves. In general, then, the objects I analyze here rehearse what Amy Robinson argues is “the visual logic of commodity exchange,” framing the ways that, in an exchange-­based system, “social value, is also a problematic of visuality.”52 This relationship between vision and value is the central theme of the book. Asking how Black bodies and white cotton — white gold — achieved a kind of visual parity through their form, excavating the ways this relationship emerged from economies of exchange in which cotton and Blackness enhanced each other’s “appearance of value” as commodity forms, is not to fetishize the commodity and re-­objectify bodies already abstracted to their exchange value. Rather, it is to propose a method for uncovering an ontology of the surface, crucial to such economies of exchange, in which things come to appear as they are: —  as natural manifestations of an immaterial real, as something that goes without saying. When we think about the “value” of Blackness, then, it is crucial to understand not just how these surface aesthetics (continue to) shape racial representation but also how they came to be formulated through this comparative relationship, through this relationship of form, to begin with. It is important to return to these questions in a society where race continues to be read on and through the surface of the body, as an exteriorization of some kind of innate difference. I finished this book amid the deadly spring and summer of 2020. We watch the devastation of the covid-­19 pandemic as it lays bare the racial disparities in healthcare in the United States where Black (and Latinx and Indigenous) people are dying at far higher rates than white Americans. Still, in 2020, we watch continued, almost unchecked police brutality and the murders of Black people. We have witnessed the powerful and ongoing protests against the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and Elijah McClain. We have seen statues topple. I have written this book because I believe it is crucial to historicize these constructions of the value of Blackness in a nation where the disposability of Black and Brown lives continues to assail us from all sides. We need to understand these histories because their implications, their material effects, threads of empire

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their violence affect us all. They must be seen for what they are — central to the project of nation building — if we are to work for different futures. We need to dismantle in order to rebuild. I hope this book, in deconstructing these visual histories, will support the work of Black communities, particularly the work of Black women, who have always mobilized, to reimagine the conditions under which we all can live equitably and without oppression.53 That is why I have explored these relationships of form. I can only hope that the urgency of this subject matter might propel readers to a deeper and more active understanding of the material and affective meanings of the visual sphere as we use it to shape, reinforce, and challenge the ways Blackness has mattered — and continues to matter.

Introduction

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Circuits of Cotton

Cotton presented growers, buyers, and consumers with a way of organizing and perceiving the natural world that revolved around projected outcomes and potential profit. This mediation of space as a site of projection coincided with an expanding commercial system that brought with it new meanings of commerce.1 Writers in the United Kingdom and the United States described cotton as a fiber that bound, a thread that held places together, a material that passed through many hands. In 1846, Ralph Waldo Emerson used cotton as an allegory to describe national unity. He wrote in his journal, “Cotton thread holds the union together, we have patriotism for holidays and summer evenings, with music and rockets, [but] cotton thread is the Union.”2 Perhaps his imagery inspired Luther Terry (1813  –  1869), whose part-­historical, part-­allegorical painting An Allegory of North and South (figure 1.1) illustrates exactly this sentiment. Emerson’s entry and Terry’s painting suggest how by its very texture cotton called up a comprehensive web of linkages in which “local manifestations of [its] cultivation and manufacturing were ensnared in a global system.”3 Journalist T. B. Thorpe wrote that through the “ameliorating pursuits of commerce, cotton bound people and places.”4 J. R. Barfoot’s set of lithographs titled Progress of Cotton, which take us through the stages of cotton’s production, is but one example of a circulating body of print media in which the materiality and movement of cotton are used as evocative illustrations of the new ways that trade brought peo-

Figure 1.1 · Luther Terry (1813  –  1869), An Allegory of North and South, 1858. Oil on canvas, 127 × 177.8 cm (50 × 70 in.). Greenville County Museum of Art, Greenville, SC.

ple and places into new relations with each other. Seeing how commodities moved and physically connected different places gave nineteenth-­century audiences a way to understand their relationship to the market and to visualize their relationship to, and their place in, an ever-­changing world. These descriptions of cotton shaped a global imaginary.5 It is this imaginary that 2017 Turner Prize  –  winner Lubaina Himid harnesses in her installation Cotton.com as she re-­creates the coordinates of the nineteenth-­century Anglo-­American cotton trade. A key figure in the British Black Arts Movement, Himid has continued to explore in her work the silences and invisible histories that are embedded in the sociocultural landscape of Britain and have shaped the experiences of its Black and marginalized communities. First displayed in 2002, on the walls of the cube Gallery in Manchester, England, the installation then consisted of an expanded grid of about one hundred small black-­and-­white canvases juxtaposed with text engraved on a brass plaque that read: “He said I looked like a painting by Murillo as I carried water for the hoe gang, just because I balanced the bucket on my head.”6 Himid read the quote in a plantation overseer’s diary, but it is also found in Frederick Law Olmsted’s descriptions of plantation Chapter One

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life.7 Here he compares the slave women he saw with the sentimental female peasant scenes made by Spanish Baroque painter Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1617  –  1682). This quote, while evoking an artistic idealization and eroticization of the Black female slave, also suggests a certain kind of cultural refinement through its inscription in brass. It stands as a corollary perhaps to those eighteenth-­century portraits in which enslaved subjects functioned as decorative markers of wealth as they literally propped up, anchored, and made their slave owners’ status, wealth, and position possible.8 Provoked by this description of a Black enslaved woman’s labor by a white overseer, Himid decides to turn the gaze around so that we read the Black woman’s perspective on her position. The woman’s observation powerfully resists the aestheticization suggested in the comparison drawn by the overseer, an act that would turn her into an artwork, eroticize her, and elide the material realities of her enslavement. Instead, we are compelled to notice her physicality, not her sexuality, through the gestures she must perform: her upper-­body strength, her rigid balance, and her stamina as she transports water to those working in the fields. Her struggle against the elision of her body through its idealization as art object and the elision of her labor into a form of display is also a refusal of the physical erasure and commodification that underpinned the sexualized violence of slavery as it shaped the lives and labor — both physical and reproductive — of enslaved Black women. In contrast to the physicality evoked by the text, Himid’s canvases —  numbering one hundred — are painted with detailed patterns, each different in style, but similar in size. Throughout her career, Himid has drawn on the materiality of textiles, using various artistic mediums to do so. Her work is also often in conversation with art-­historical referents and archival sources: here the canvases replicate early nineteenth-­century textile samples that Himid found in museum archives as well as the geometric patterns of Islamic tiles seen so often in nineteenth-­century Orientalist painting.9 Their gridded arrangement recalls the organization of nineteenth-­century textile-­ pattern books. These books collated hundreds of small fabric samples into a precisely arranged gallery of wares. Hefty and stiff, the pattern books — like accounting ledgers — held only financially relevant information: pattern name, order number, and cost. In a rather extraordinary way, these sample books mirror the process of reification suggested in Himid’s accompanying text: on their pages the labor of production is elided into a form of commodified display. Juxtaposed against this gridded arrangement, then, the text in Cotton.com purposefully reasserts the presence of the body: here in particular the Black female body, resituating and re-­siting her labor within the development of a transatlantic industrial economy. It also centralizes and makes Circuits of Cotton

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visible the politics of the slave economy as it underpinned the development of industrial capitalism in the Anglo-­American world. As Himid herself has explained, “The point I am often exploring vis-­à-­vis the Black experience is that of being so very visible and different in the white western everyday yet so invisible and disregarded in the cultural, historical, political or economic record or history.”10 Himid takes the implications of mobility seriously. On the one hand, the piece directly interrogates the model of the supply chain, used to delineate and illustrate global connection. Constructing objects as transnational, as well as tracing transnational movements, continues to provide important methods for uncovering the broader dimensions of nationally oriented fields such as art history.11 On the other hand, Himid asks, What might be missed in all this movement? In answer to this question, she provides us with another approach that emerges from the piece’s horizontality, its focus on the dialogue between paintings and plaque, between pattern and print, between figure and form. Her interest is in the horizontal relationships of history, a horizontality that is often at odds with the archival arrangement of things. In the archive accounts from plantation ledgers, purchase orders from the East India Company and shipping receipts from Manchester warehouses remain discrete and disconnected. Yet, in fact, what these discrete categories hold reveals that these imperial processes existed alongside, and depended on, each other. Himid envisions the juxtaposition between image and text as a form of conversation between two geographies of the cotton trade and the people who inhabited them. The significance of a mobile commodity like cotton cannot be understood without seeing its dependence on the mobility of enslaved Africans and their descendants. Nor can it be disentangled from the exploitative systems of industry whose growth depended on cotton and the enslaved workers who picked the fiber. Looking at history from this perspective, Cotton.com does not simply mine the past but is rather more confrontational, asking us how we can look and not see this history. This artwork revolves around the currency of cotton as the central commodity in the antebellum transatlantic world, but it reveals that currency to be more than simply economics. As cotton moved, so too did enslaved Black people; and this dual circulation is what underpins the work’s momentum. In this chapter I use Cotton.com as a starting point from which to begin disassembling the intimacies of white cotton and Black Americans. The formal arrangement of the work — in its careful linkage of plantation and factory into a modern industrial system — has informed my own conception of the trade as organized through interdependent networks. And this conceptualization structures this chapter and the next; both are concerned with the Chapter One

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intertwined geographies of the cotton trade and the cloth that connected them. I draw specifically on Cotton.com’s centralizing of material linkages in these two chapters. The work maps out the coordinates of a trade to reveal how those enmeshed in its networks —   of commodification and exploitation—  were physically connected. So, while the text asserts the bodily presence of a Black enslaved woman, the canvases evoke another kind of physicality. Each canvas is slightly different and marked by scratches and scuffs that assert the matter of their making. Furthermore, painted in black and white they literally materialize the entanglements of Black and white bodies within networks of commerce, bodies whose lives were enmeshed with the white fiber of cotton. Himid herself notes that she imagined how, as they cleaned the cotton newly arrived in the warehouses, factory workers might find remains of the plantation landscape and the plantation workers caught in the cotton bales: pieces of dirt, leaves, or hair.12 The canvases — evoking the mobility of these cotton bales and the cloth they would eventually become — might then also be thought of as a communiqué of sorts. As she originally conceived of the project, the abstract patterns were actual conversations, and each one was going to have a text. She explains that “the different patterns represent the sound of conversation, like listening over a telephone exchange or reading lots of communicated email messages or text messages, but seeing them all at once.”13 Himid’s piece powerfully assembles the networks of the trade not as a supply chain of moving commodities, but as a site of connectedness in which cotton itself becomes the material of communication between enslaved plantation workers and factory laborers. Perhaps most strikingly in this work, Himid draws on forms of abstraction in order to articulate this powerful materiality. Organized through the structures of the grid and the semiotics of text, Cotton.com uses the mobility embedded in these histories to both disassemble and animate. On the one hand, it invokes the movement of cotton to collapse those distances, maintained by archival categorization. On the other hand, it envisions this movement as a material process created in the tangible interactions of people and objects. Both strategies serve to animate what is not seen, what has been elided or ignored, buried in hard to find places, or simply unlooked for. In the first two chapters of the book, which are framed by the movement of cotton from plantation to factory to market, my aim is not to simply retrace these operations; drawing on Himid’s framing, the chapters focus on their material connections. Cotton.com materializes the networks of cotton’s trade to construct a form of historical looking that is synchronic. And in this way it compels a simCircuits of Cotton

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ilar way of writing about that history. Himid’s form of historical looking juxtaposes the space of the plantation and factory by emphasizing the physical and affective implications of cotton’s movement. Tracing the movement of cotton from the antebellum southern plantation to the newly expanding textile factories in New England and Lancaster, England, the chapter maps out the connections of these two spaces. While I show how cotton connected regions in the antebellum United States, my aim is to also explain how this connection was made and physically experienced by those whose lives were ultimately circumscribed by and entangled with the networks of its trade — in particular, as experienced by enslaved African Americans. On these canvases — now made with cotton like the mobile commodity they signify — black and white paint stands in for the close, perhaps physical, connections created between Black enslaved workers and white factory operatives as they worked with cotton. But these colors are also profoundly symbolic of the way Black bodies and white cotton seemed almost enmeshed in the economic and visual registers of the first half of the nineteenth century. There is, then, an almost obvious reason why art provides us with such a powerful portal/mode of excavating this history. As a representational system, it engages in depicting history, but in its very structures and materiality that history remains embedded. In the intimacy of black-­ and-­white painted abstraction, we might also read the abstraction of Black enslaved people on which the trade in cotton relied. Himid’s marking of the surface is prescient. Black and white coalesce against a background that invokes the relationship between skin and fiber, skin and cloth encoded in this process of commodification. The abstraction of the slave woman into property is grounded in her Black body — she is forced to enact it through her gestures and movements in the course of picking and working with cotton. It is materialized across her skin as she is forced to wear, hold in place, the cloth that marks her subjection. It is on her body’s surface that white cotton marks her, and thereby provides a way to materialize the intangible: her status as object. There are two tensions between the material and visual that I will focus on. One revolves around cotton as a representational model for global connection. As cotton moved it connected, giving nineteenth-­century audiences a bird’s-­eye view of the networks that intersected and joined disparate places. Simultaneously, this bird’s-­eye view — a view that connotes mastery and control — belies its intimacies: the ways these movements of cotton brought tangible experiences of connection and disconnection to those who were involved in its production and use. The second visual relationship that we can draw out here relates to the framing of Blackness that hinges on the Chapter One

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market equivalence of white cotton and Black bodies. How was this relationship materialized and, more importantly, how was it refuted? Chapter 1 coheres around the interplay of images and textiles, using their symbolic meaning and material construction to trace these vantage points and juxtapositions as they connected southern US plantations and factories domestically and across the Atlantic.

Material Conditions  ·  Luther Terry’s painting An Allegory of North and South was created while he lived in Rome as the American Civil War approached. He uses well-­established allegorical tropes — the languid brunette, the energetic blonde, and the figure of America — to symbolize regional unity. The composition is held together by its horizonal axis — a connection between the three women that is reinforced by the spatial alignment of a slave on a plantation on the left and a factory town on the right. These are the coordinates and the foundation of American unity. Raw cotton from India, the Caribbean, Brazil, and the Levant supplied British cotton manufacturers well into the eighteenth century. However, as the process of cleaning slave-­grown cotton became more efficient — thanks to the cotton gin — more cotton could be exported from the United States, reorienting these earlier global trade routes.14 By 1830 the United States was Britain’s chief supplier of cotton. It produced 331 million pounds of cotton annually, with 70 percent of that exported to Britain, and overtook India’s production of the raw material.15 As the demand for American cotton grew, the plantation system also expanded and the domestic trade in slaves increased.16 The growth of the plantation system, government protectionism, and the constricted importation of British goods during the War of 1812 helped expand the American cotton industry and its factory-­based systems of production.17 The development of the Anglo-­American cotton trade, while emerging from a long set of commercial relations with India, was nevertheless underpinned by the forcible transportation of Black slaves from West Africa in exchange for cotton cloth and their labor in American plantations. Though it began in an age of mercantilism, by the first decades of the nineteenth century the Anglo-­American cotton trade “fostered mutual dependence that provided early indications of the free trade movement that would eventually emerge in the eighteen twenties.”18 Cotton factories relied on plantations, and the industrial revolution that cotton fueled depended on slavery. By 1850, New England housed 896 steam-­powered mills that consumed two million to three million pounds of slave-­grown cotton a year for Circuits of Cotton

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local, and some international, markets.19 Meanwhile, Britain’s cotton manufactures, also sustained by slave-­grown cotton, found markets in the Americas, Europe, and Asia.20 This interreliance, integrating the enslaved themselves into a system of commerce, holds Luther Terry’s painting together. Using clichéd vignettes —  an enslaved worker at rest, a closed factory — he creates a sense of enclosure that reinforces the links between the women in the foreground.21 J. R. Barfoot’s lithographs, on the other hand, illustrate the processes that sustained this connection between plantation and factory. But this linkage also rested on a different kind of integration or equivalence between cotton and Blackness. In February 1846 Frederick Douglass told an audience, “I will give you an invariable rule by which to ascertain the price of human flesh in the United States. When cotton rises in the market in England, the price of human flesh rises in the United States.”22 Douglass is talking here about the market relationship between Black Africans and the cotton they produced, which materializes the process of commodification that transforms human flesh — in the language of the law — into property. This market equivalency between fiber and flesh is reinforced in the speculative vision evoked in plantation imagery. Remember, for example, the overseer in J. R. Barfoot’s lithographic series, who monitors the productivity of the Black field hands — and whose line of sight is particularly taken up with the Black female slaves — also ensures that the promise they embody is brought to fruition. Here, the speculative logic of cotton frames labor itself as an expression of (future) market value, expressed in the production of cotton manufactures. Plantation paintings rarely showed the working enslaved, which is why Barfoot’s lithographs are interesting. Amid the blossoming rows of cotton, Barfoot has included dark figures who bend, pick, and fill sacks of cotton.23 His rendering of these Black bodies references the taxonomic drawings included in William Henry Pyne’s (1770  –  1843) manual from 1815, Etchings of Rustic Figures for the Embellishment of Landscape (figure 1.2).24 The slaves labor through a series of limited motions, hands raised at varying degrees, bodies curving softly or emerging comfortably above the blossoming cotton. Their work is gentle, expressed through subtle, repetitive movements that minimize the nature of their labor and render them as rustic figures within a premodern scene.25 As viewers our line of sight aligns with that of the plantation overseer so that we look out, and over time and space. Beyond the group of Black enslaved cotton pickers, the perspective shifts becoming slightly more expansive. We take in a small cabin, hills, and what looks to be the outline of a town in the distance. A faint glimmer from this distant view suggests the Chapter One

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Figure 1.2 William Henry Pyne (1770  –  1843), after George Morland, Women and Men Carrying Baskets or Bundles, or Walking with Children in Etchings of Rustic Figures for the Embellishment of Landscape, 1815. Etching, 28 × 18 cm (11 × 7⅛ in.). Art & Architecture Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, New York Public Library.

backdrop falls away to meet a waterway, on which steamers are waiting to transport bales of cleaned, pressed cotton. This feature is crucial, for it presents a conduit through which the enslaved, the cotton, and the plantation itself were inserted into a much larger circuit. Without illustrating cotton’s physical journey from plantations to American and English factories, Barfoot does depict its material transformation. His representation of factory laborers is almost ornamental, as they are arranged around the machinery in picturesque scenes that emphasize industrious order.26 The series ends with plate 12 (figure Intro.17), where the finished printed product is ready to be shipped out to waiting consumers across the world.27 The overall pictorial effect reveals a smooth process, creating a sense of how individual components — the stages of production, the machines, and the human labor — all work together. Progress provides the lithographs with both subject matter and narrative momentum. Moving Circuits of Cotton

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from plantation to factory, from agricultural to mechanized labor, we are encouraged to look forward to, and imagine cotton’s transformation from fiber into finished product and profit. Importantly, this projection, associated with the planter’s prospect, becomes the materialization and manifestation of his viewpoint. This view also obscures the physical realities of labor. Working bodies are shown as adjuncts of factory machinery, reinforcing the mechanized process being depicted. As cotton moved from hand to hand, the aim of production was to eventually strip away any trace of this handwork, leaving consumers with a uniformly standardized finished product. The process of refinement involved in cotton’s manufacture was illustrated by efficiency: the honing of technique, the rationalization of movement, the standardization of production. And while the value of labor was measured by the profit garnered in production, the mechanized process of production itself was ultimately a form of alienation, aimed at erasing those bodies and their material impact on the final product. In both Britain and the United States, conceptions of progress could emphasize the moral and social significance of labor as a collective basis for civic inclusion.28 We notice this particularly Victorian ideal in Barfoot’s lithographs.29 Through serialization’s formal relationship of the part to the whole, each phase of labor is given meaning through its position within a larger industrial process.30 In these lithographs, produced through the serialization of labor, trade is both a measure of national progress and the basis for the production of harmonious social relations.31 In this model of integration it is not the actual work of a body that is foregrounded. Rather, by creating a viewing position that emphasizes oversight and mastery, what is normalized is the ordered and disciplined relationship between bodies and the system in which they function. The trade’s international division of labor, cotton’s status as a global commodity, and that commodity’s important material and economic benefits made it a powerful symbol for the benefits of free trade in the United States and Britain.32 For pro-­slavery apologists, the human consequences of this intertwined relationship could be minimized because of the benefits that free trade provided. These views were, of course, based on racist frameworks that assumed the suitability of Black people for enslavement and endorsed slavery as a benevolent institution. Framing slavery as an inherently necessary institution, its economic necessity could be justified by its association with cotton, an internationally significant trade.33 Thus, the market relationship between cotton and slavery, the correlation between flesh and fiber, could be ameliorated somewhat as cotton came to symbolize — materially and Chapter One

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metaphorically — the importance of commerce in the early nineteenth century, and the dynamics of the market became a way to define mutually beneficial forms of international connection. A similar rhetoric defined British commercial interests. By the early decades of the nineteenth century, with a rapidly growing textile industry that seemed to have an almost inexhaustible supply of American-­produced cotton, British manufacturers lauded their position as a “workshop to the world.”34 As the fiber streamed into English and Scottish ports in quantities that surpassed those of the nation’s once dominant Indian colonies, Britain’s production of cotton goods flooded the markets of its colonies (particularly India) and other countries across the globe. The commercial benefits of cotton seemed clear: its low cost, its mass production, and its circulation made it a textile for the people, evidence of how trade and technological improvement could symbolize civilization’s progress, a cultural advance that could be shared with less-­developed nations.35 In a very real way, then, the speculative vision that cotton mediated between people, places, and things by reinforcing these political and moral economies also framed a mode of erasure. By framing a way of seeing that emphasized this sense of integration, workers could be visible yet remain unseen. Cotton’s symbolism provided a way of either justifying slavery — a “beneficial” institution — within an integrated system of trade or hiding it from view altogether. The equivalency between cotton and Blackness was not simply market driven but hinged on a particular set of optics.

Material Gestures  ·  Frederick Douglass’s description of the equivalence between cotton and slavery is a conscious dismantling of this political economy. His words break down the abstraction of commerce by insisting on its material effects. Himid also insists on the material aspects of production and labor. Her canvases unfurl the coordinates of trade but also orient us toward the material interactions between bodies and commodities. I want to take up a similar position, for it seems to me that while these metaphorical uses of cotton’s connectivity insist on eliding bodies, bodies still insist on being seen, or at least felt. In Barfoot’s written descriptions, despite the illustrative effects of ordered, disciplined bodies, we are always reminded of the “many hands” that cotton must pass through on its journey from fiber to cloth.36 A similar theme is described by Charles Knight in a series of articles called The History of a Cotton Gown published between 1832 and 1840.37 Fascinated by cotton’s material change from vegetation to Circuits of Cotton

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mechanically produced cloth, Knight uses cotton’s movement to show his readers they are embedded in a global network. He describes how cotton cloth not only materialized these processes but also brought its users into a closer physical connection with people who made the cloth and with its spaces of production. Using similar analogies, abolitionists urged their fellow citizens to abstain from the use of slave-­made goods.38 Not only did this perpetuate the trade, they argued; it physically involved consumers in maintaining and prolonging the suffering of the enslaved. Slave-­made goods were often described as tainted or polluted: to use them was to be stained by contact with slavery. Poems written by abolitionists evoked the pleasures of commodities like cotton (and sugar) before describing the violent and bloody institution from which they emerge. In her poem “Slave Produce,” Elizabeth Margaret Chandler writes: Look! They are robes from a foreign loom . . . Surely such a garment should fitting be For a woman’s softness and purity Yet fling them off from thy shrinking limb For sighs have render’d their brightness dim39 As these few lines suggest, cotton cloth was not only associated with the trade in slaves; abolitionists described how its physical dimensions were imbued with and created from the physical suffering of enslaved workers. In this conceptualization of the commodity, the bodies of the enslaved are more than just physically involved in transforming cotton from fiber to material; their physical labor remains embedded in the material such that it animates its texture, appearance, and meaning. These different descriptions all conceptualize the material of cotton cloth as a site of meaning, from which the traces of bodily experience — expressed through labor — might be gleaned. Like the remnants of hair or skin that Himid speculates were caught up in cotton fiber, these descriptions allow us to think more deeply about the embodied memories contained by cotton. These might be traces left by a body’s actions on the cloth itself (its finish, perhaps); however, they also encompass the gestures of a body, its position and movements, its affective expressions as they have accumulated on and about cotton itself (think of the bodies Barfoot has arranged around cotton in its various stages). A cohort of performance studies scholars has

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reminded us that gestures both fall short and are in excess of textual archives.40 Gestures do not operate as the whole story, but neither do they require the whole story to operate. They are a way of reckoning with the position, the endurance, and the potentiality of actors in ways that foreground their fragmented nature.41 This is why they are powerful: gestures connect the everyday to structures of power and in this way invite a certain kind of speculation while revealing something like an individual cultural imaginary. The positioning of the body — a wave, a wink, a raised arm — opens up onto a larger world of meaning and possibility. The gesture is thus both world-­ making and a decidedly visual device. A gesture is also ekphrastic, for it requires careful description in order to extrapolate and narrate the broader operations of power, feeling, and experience within which it is located. For these may otherwise not be visible, legible, or even describable. The gesture also reminds us of the limits of historical writing and historical knowledge. I am thinking here of Saidiya Hartman’s profound essay Venus in Two Acts, in which she reminds us that in writing the history of slavery, we must also contend with, and actually begin from, a sense of loss.42 While Taylor has theorized how gestures return us to the body as a cultural archive, here I take up the term as a way to address the bodily erasure bound up with the archiving of slavery.43 In the midst of this erasure, cotton cloth provides something both material and speculative, a tangible fragment of historical experiences that cannot be reconstructed in their entirety but can be remembered from the partial and the minute, from gestures embedded in and around and through cotton. In using cotton cloth as another kind of archive intricately connected to the lives and experiences of the enslaved, I am constantly reminded of what has been lost — and not just Black words or the physical presence of enslaved people; even the little we have to go by — pieces of cloth, numbers — reminds us of how Black lives have been made disposable through archival means. I think that, ethically, the only way we can address what slavery is and does is by being careful to also understand an enslaved person’s relationship to the operations of power within which she is subjected and a subject. Using and reading cotton cloth gesturally, then, provides an approach to this web of relations, that of bringing this world into view without eliding the ways enslaved African Americans positioned themselves within it. To read cotton cloth from this position is also to animate these archives so as to articulate what is not rhetorically visible yet is intangibly present. It is a way of addressing gaps and elisions, of working with what is lost from the record.

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The Progress of Cotton  ·  I want to turn here to the production of “negro cloth,” a form of cheap cotton, or cotton-­mix, textile whose production connected the plantation and the factory within a global industrial complex. In letter dated November 30, 1839, Jesse Beane, a slave owner from Cahaba, Alabama, sent the following order to the Peace Dale Manufacturing Company owned by the Hazard family, situated in Providence, Rhode Island.44 He wrote: “Dear Sir, the shoes and negro cloth reached me . . . by the first conveyance which our river has afforded and I herewith transmit to you a draft . . . for $139 . . . the amount of your bill undersigned. At anytime when it may suit your convenience (but I would prefer . . . before the . . . season ends in June) send me 150 yds of the same kind cloth (gdk) if not above 50 counts per yard and the same number of shoes . . . I find that I am too late when my things come by the fall boats. My slaves suffer, which gives me much unhappiness.”45 A few months later another purchase order was sent from Cahaba, this time by Philip Milhous on January 24, 1840.46 Milhous requests of R. G. Hazard that “when you ship anymore negro clothing to me ship sooner as the bale of goods you sent last year was not received until the first of the present month owing to its arriving in Mobile after the boats had stopped running in the summer and the low states of the river in the fall.”47 In another section of the letter, he includes a list of the ready-­made clothes he also requires for his slaves and, pointing out their availability in Mobile, asks for a discount in price. When cloth was not satisfactory — because it was too thin, arrived late, or seemed overpriced — southern planters complained. When slaves were left without the clothes they needed to shield them from the bitter winters and the harsh summers, some, like Jessie Beane, expressed sympathy. H. L. Lee from Lowndes County, Georgia, was also concerned about the delay in his shipment in the fall of 1839: “I very much hope they may have [been] sent as promised. . . . My negroes suffer often for their summer clothing.”48 When cloth did not meet his approval, a planter from Cuba sent his own sample back to the manufacturers: “I enclose you one of your samples, and another sample of cloth which is thinner and is more desirable than your pattern, can you furnish cloth like this?”49 Others, like Charles A. Poellnitz from Linden, Alabama, simply asked for the best quality of negro cloth available: “[Send] two hundred and fifty yards of negro cloth of the best quality . . . with little delay as possible.”50 These examples reveal the constrained intimacies, empathies, and economics of clothing that existed between plant-

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ers and slaves as they sought to balance protection, durability, and profit through their purchase of cloth. Many similar letters lie in the folders of the Peace Dale Manufacturing Company archive. Some include extensive requests with long lists of measurements and shoe sizes or the precise quantities of yardage needed. Others, from smaller plantations, contain modest demands, and several include the names of factors or merchants through whom the goods were to be shipped, and to whom payment was made.51 Comments about changing cotton prices or the quality of goods already bought inflect the letters with the frustrations of the planters over late shipments, rising prices, and their need to be cost-­effective. Often no longer than a sentence, or highlighted in an equation of price per yard, such inclusions reflect the tempestuous relationship of cotton and its market value. Cotton was essentially a speculative venture: it offered rich rewards and could bring about quick failures.52 These letters unfold the long-­distance view that cotton created. They illustrate the developing economic networks and transport systems linking cities and ports across the country and the environmental conditions (weather and water levels) shaping these structures.53 These letters, like the slaves and the cotton they describe, moved across the regions of the North and the South and crossed the Atlantic, reaching the ports of Liverpool and the warehouses of Manchester.54 Merchants and manufacturers were hopeful that planter satisfaction with the standard of their manufacture would consolidate and strengthen the commercial relationships being negotiated with the South.55 The letters detail planters’ concerns — their sorrow even — as they watch enslaved workers suffer in the elements. This needless suffering, due to the delay of shipments or quality of material, affected enslaved people’s ability to work and (needlessly) reduced profits. The linkages created by cotton here are also dependent on another kind of speculation: a calculated investment in an enslaved person’s projected physical capacity.56 These letters with their spindly handwriting and inked tallies, written on paper so fragile they must be held in plastic sleeves and touched only with white-­gloved hands, graphically demonstrate the operations of slavery. Here Black bodies appear only to disappear. They are reconfigured into, and recalled by, tallies of measurements, dates, and figures. The numerical data locate these enslaved workers as property; they transform Black life into raw material. But it is not only numerical data that these letters hold. Small samples of the cloth are sometimes attached to letters (figure 1.3). Carefully wrapped within thin sheets of stationery and inserted into sealed envelopes, the cloth was just the right size for the reader to ascertain its qualities — 

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Figure 1.3 Peace Dale Manufacturing Company, sample of negro cloth, 1830s–1840s. olvwork645680, Peace Dale Manufacturing Company Records. Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School, Boston, MA.

thickness, texture, color — by a quick touch and a quick glance. The samples of negro cloth sent between planters and manufacturers provided both parties with a tangible symbol of their economic connection, a sign of their continued faith and a promise of what was to come. From touching, rubbing, and looking, planters could get a sense of the value of the cloth, which was based on its coarseness and its strength. These samples provide us with a spectrum of feelings: from that of planters for their enslaved property to those of enslaved people themselves as they were compelled to work. Slave owners’ descriptions of the cloth and its transportation suggest how negro cloth facilitated a form of recognition: as slaves came into view both as bodily subjects and material objects, that is, as property. The plantation owners’ apparent concern for the suffering of enslaved field hands as they labored shows us this psychological work — the cognitive dissonance — at the heart of slavery.57 The cloth transformed Black people into a commodity form, but it did so by housing, covering, molding to their corporeal form. And in fact, the feeling of Black people was embedded in the creation of negro cloth, which was made specifically to be coarse, uncomfortable, and rough: a continual reminder to the wearers of their physical Chapter One

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condition. As slave owners illustrated this dualism, complaining about the suffering of their slaves, their expression of feeling also highlights just how slaveholders represented themselves by reference to their slaves, and how they wanted to be represented. These expressions of paternalistic benevolence were lauded in southern agricultural journals; sympathetic writers maintained that beneficent management, animated by a “synthesis of humanity and self-­interest,” would result in good harvests, contented slaves, and public recognition.58 Planters’ gestures toward their humanity can also be read as ultimately justifying the various forms of violence they enacted against enslaved workers — from their physical discomfort to their subjection — for eventually their suffering, when alleviated, would lead to the production of good workers.59 The captive body, as Hortense Spillers has shown, is marked by a process of reduction. In her foundational text Spillers articulates the distinction between flesh and body: the body refers to subject positions that can control the way meanings are imposed upon it; flesh refers to, and is, the terrain on which inhumane acts of violence take place, creating the distinction between captive and liberated subject positions.60 These acts of violence, “hieroglyphics of the flesh,” congeal into a marker of racial violence: skin color.61 As I show later, the flesh may also be a terrain in which this shared history allows for other feelings to emerge. The cargo hold is one such site where Black flesh is inserted and codified, chained, and packed as nameless cargo, like raw material. While the hold is most graphically illustrated in the belly of the slave ship, it is also an action that describes the containment of enslaved Black people and their violent transformation into commodities. Just as the hold is a space, it can also be understood as a process or an action that enfolds and contains, that enforces the subjection of enslaved people.62 What the letters concerning the orders for clothing catalogue, then, is the subjection of Black enslaved people through cotton, a material that, in marking their bodies, held them captive by moderating and modulating their bodies, reduced them to things. Negro cloth is another form of violence, one that molds flesh into the form of fungible bodies. Touch and texture are key components of negro cloth, a textile that powerfully materialized the economic immediacy of plantation and factory and regulated the labor and look of enslaved Black bodies. As a circuit within a circuit, negro cloth also illustrates just how much slavery underpinned the cotton trade. While its market value was dependent on the fluctuating price of both cotton fiber and enslaved labor, its use value was correlated to the labor of enslaved cotton pickers. Too flimsy and it provided ineffectual cover; too thick and enslaved workers overheated. Negro cloth had a direct effect Circuits of Cotton

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on the labor of those it clothed and demonstrates what lay at the center of this relationship between northern factories and southern plantations: the fact that Black slaves and white cotton were, in the eyes of the law, both commodities, connected via a market mechanism.63 As a material illustration of the entanglements of flesh and figures, negro cloth materializes the racial arithmetic of Black life.64

Made Especially for This Purpose  ·  In the letters I described earlier, negro cloth has its own semiotics.65 The semiotics of cloth can help us uncover ties and intimacies that are otherwise elided within commercial networks of trade and its visual representation. The term negro cloth as we use it now describes an ill-­defined category of textiles that varied in texture, color, and composition. In its early iterations, the types of cloth sent to plantations were probably chosen because of their durability and wear. But as production increased through mechanization, these attributes of texture took on other meanings. The rough materials were both cheaply made and made to look cheap. While the term negro cloth is hardly an exact one, the characteristics central to its production  — its durability, its plain weave, and particularly its texture — were important to its use as slave clothing. Cotton cloth always had a particular set of optics associated with it that relied on its feel and its look. In its early forms — handmade muslins and calicoes from India — it was the smooth finish, along with its color and patterning, that made it a luxury item in Britain.66 As industrialization expanded to allow for domestic imitation of these handmade goods, the manufacturing process transformed the rough cotton fibers into a smooth, soft material. But while most types of cotton cloth were valued for their smoothness, the production of negro cloth had the opposite aim: to create a material that was coarse to the touch and that was valued for this roughness.67 The look of negro cloth was very much connected to its texture: the way the cloth was used to frame the optics of Blackness was definitely connected to how it felt. Negro cloth made Black bodies legible by visualizing how it felt to be worn. But it is precisely in this register of affect, in exploring “touching feelings,” that we can disassemble these optics of legibility.68 Negro cloth was not simply clothing; it was a uniform, a type of material that marked the wearer as enslaved and as property. The cloth, and the ways it regulated and fashioned Black bodies, produced a form of visual accounting that made its Black wearers legible as a market value. To be seen wearing negro cloth meant being seen as an object, as a tally in a ledger. Chapter One

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Sumptuary laws required plantation owners to provide slaves with specific types of clothing, regulating the color, quality, and amount, revealing the correlation between the quality of the cloth and the status of its wearers. This correlation between use and nomenclature differs from a general pattern in eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century textile manufacture, in which cloth was often named for the region of its production.69 The South Carolina Slave Codes of 1740 (also called the Negro Act of 1740), Act 40, “regulates the apparel of slaves (except livery for men and boys) and prohibits them from wearing anything finer, other, or of greater value, than negro cloth, duffils, kerseys, osnaburgs, blue linens, check linen, or coarse garlix or calicoes, checked cottons or scotch plaids, and declares all garments of finer or other kind to be liable to seizure by a constable as forfeited.”70 In the early nineteenth century, a South Carolina grand jury responded to complaints by white residents about Black self-­expression with similar language: “Negroes should be permitted to dress only in coarse stuffs such as coarse woolens or worsted stuffs for winter — and coarse cotton stuffs for summer — felt hats and coarse cotton handkerchiefs . . . every distinction should be created between the whites and the negroes, calculated to make the latter feel the superiority of the former.” 71 Here the relationship between cloth and personal appearance is made clear: cloth was not simply about economy and functional use; it was also an important mode of visual signification, providing a clear distinction between races in the United States. Depending on where enslaved people worked, their age, and their gender, they received specific types of clothing or yards of cloth with which to cover themselves. In his descriptions of slave life on Caribbean plantations in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Barry Higman also notes that slave clothing was called osnaburg and took the form of both ready-­made items and bolts of cloth that were sewn into clothes on the plantation.72 This fabric, osnaburg, was named for the German town of Osnabrück, from which coarse linen and possibly woolen fabric were first exported to England in the seventeenth century. Even when cotton thread became more commonly used, the term continued to be used to describe coarser forms of cloth.73 By the middle of the eighteenth century, imitations of German-­produced osnaburg were being woven in Scotland. Demand for this material grew steadily among working-­class consumers and among plantation owners, as Scottish-­ made cloth was cheaper than the German varieties. As production of these cheap materials expanded in Britain, another description explained negro cloth as “a fabric composed of the same materials as kersey, to which it is very similar in appearance. It is usually made in dark colors and worn principally by the negroes of the Southern states from this fact it derives its name.”74 Circuits of Cotton

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By the beginning of the nineteenth century, negro cloth was also being manufactured domestically in the United States, and the cloth’s “grade,” or quality, was very much a product of the raw material it was spun from: American upland cotton. American upland cotton “was best suited for the production of the cheaper and intermediate yarns. . . . It was . . . easier to spin by machine than comparable varieties of Brazilian or West Indian cottons.”75 When Francis Cabot Lowell established the first power-­weaving factory in Massachusetts, he was interested in producing a single, uniform product: cheap, coarse cotton sheeting that could compete with the “yard wide goods of India” that were still being imported to the United States by Britain.76 Until the mid-­nineteenth century, New England factories, unlike their British counterparts, focused on producing cheaper cloth with less product differentiation.77 New England mills tended to use throstle spinning rather than mule spinning (which Barfoot shows in his plate 10; see figure Intro.15). While mule spinning required manual adjustments, throstle (or ring) spinning required only an operator to supervise the machines and increasingly came to be associated with women’s labor.78 As well as requiring less skilled labor, throstle spinning was also better suited to the production of lower-­ quality goods, including negro cloth. While the antebellum textile industry of the United States was not limited to New England, the region tended to produce more of the cheaper and coarser cotton cloth than the mills and hand weavers in the mid-­Atlantic regions of Pennsylvania and Delaware. The plain but durable cotton sheeting that was shipped out of New England in the antebellum era provided American consumers with a domestic alternative to foreign imports from England and India. By the 1840s, negro cloth formed a significant percentage of New England textile manufactures and was a significant link that connected the industrial economy of the North to the plantation economy of the South. In his description of slave life in the South, the journalist and landscape designer Frederick Law Olmsted (1822  –  1903) remarked that slave clothing was “mostly made especially for this purpose in Providence, R. I.” 79 Rhode Island was the main center for the production of negro cloth, and by the middle of the nineteenth century, 70 percent of Rhode Island mills were spinning the cloth, with goods shipped from Westerly or moved through Stonington, Connecticut.80 Rhode Island also produced ready-­made goods — shirts, dresses, coats — for plantation owners (as described in the kinds of letters discussed above), as well as supplying them with fabric that could then be sewn on the plantation. In Lowell, the center of textile production in Massachusetts, negro cloth was produced at the Lowell Manufacturing Company at least until 1845. Lowell cloth — possibly a variant of cotton shirting — is also Chapter One

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Figure 1.4 · Peace Dale Manufacturing Company, sample of negro cloth, 1830s–1840s. olvwork645681, Peace Dale Manufacturing Company Records. Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School, Boston, MA. Figure 1.5 · Peace Dale Manufacturing Company, sample of negro cloth, 1830s–1840s. olvwork645689, Peace Dale Manufacturing Company Records. Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School, Boston, MA.

mentioned in plantation accounts, suggesting that it may have also been categorized under the definition of negro cloth.81 Judging from slave narratives, plantation travel literature, and actual samples, the material appears to have often been an unbleached gray or brown, but it could also be striped or dyed either on the plantations or in the factory. On some plantations slaves had to clean, card, spin, and weave their own cloth in the nineteenth century, and had to make enough for the whole plantation. This process was time consuming and produced homespun cloths made from cotton, flax, wool, and hemp. Helen Bradley Foster has studied these plantation-­based industries, showing both their constraints and the ways they allowed enslaved communities to use and develop their artisanal skills and find forms of creative expression outside of the routinized fieldwork or domestic work. However, since I am focusing on slaves’ use of factory-­manufactured cloth, I do not examine these textile traditions here.82 In the many letters passed between New England textile manufacturers, agents, and southern buyers, the cloth was described variously as coarse, plain, striped, thick, and durable, blended of wool and cotton or made of cotton alone. In its composition, negro cloth is constructed from a plain weave in which the warp (the lengthwise set of yarn held in tension on the loom) and weft are aligned so they form a simple crisscross pattern. Each weft thread crosses the warp threads by going over and under them until one reaches the end of the row. The next weft thread goes under the warp threads that its neighbor went over, and vice versa. Plain weave often has a checkerboard pattern, and when used in a cotton/wool blend plain weave generally refers to a cotton warp and wool weft. Twill weave refers to a diagonal weave pattern in which the weft thread is passed over one warp thread and then under two or more warp threads.83 These two fundamental textile weaves are both used in the manufacture of strong, durable fabrics, and they make up the range of patterns used in the production of the coarse cloth described within the category of negro cloth. Planters sent long lists to manufacturers of the types of clothes they required. Rather than being made to measure, the clothes were bought in general sizes that may or may not have fit the contours of an individual’s body. Olmsted describes seeing slaves in Virginia dressed in “coarse gray negro-­ cloth that appeared as if made by contract without regard to the size of the particular individual to whom it had been allotted, like penitentiary uniforms.”84 The general aim of these clothes was not to adorn the Black body but to protect it from the elements. Frederick Douglass recalls being given “one pair of trousers for winter made of coarse negro cloth,”85 suggesting that the material offered some protection — given its thickness — during the Chapter One

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winter but probably little comfort in the heat of the summer. Inappropriate clothing would have made an already grueling task almost unbearable. Unsurprisingly, planters regularly asked for strong and durable cloth. The durability of negro cloth meant slaves could be clothed, cheaply, year round, in winter or summer. Protection from the elements meant an increase in productivity and an increase in profits for the plantation. A Mr. J. A. Ventress from Wilkinson County, Mississippi, wrote to the Peace Dale Manufacturing Company asking for “shirts and pantaloons for the men and boys and frocks for the women/girls made out of coarse, strong cotton cloth as I shall give my negroes three or four suits of clothes per annum.”86 Another planter, Jacqueline Taylor from Richmond, Virginia, asks for samples to be sent so as to “judge the quality and durability” and perhaps will enter into a regular arrangement with the company.87 The samples allowed planters to make the best — that is, the most economical — decision regarding how much cloth or how many shirts, dresses, and jackets would be needed to clothe slaves to maximize their economic performance. This insistence on the tangible assessment of negro cloth for value is provocative, calling to mind the complicated hapticality embedded in the optics of slavery. As they did with the cloth they bought, planters also assessed the slaves they acquired by basing their valuation on the projected profits of the labor provided. These projected profits were, in turn, mediated by the enslaved laborers’ ability to productively work, whether they were cold or hot or protected from the environment. Cotton’s industrial production in the antebellum period as a cheap, accessible commodity was materially — tangibly — connected to the value of the Black bodies who were bought and sold for its production. Beyond this, there is also the labor enslaved cotton pickers had to perform. Cotton plantations, while not necessarily requiring specialized techniques of cultivation, were managed with an industrial precision.88 Visitors to cotton plantations described the drab scenes of continuous furrows, and rows upon rows of the same white blossom. After the invention of the cotton gin, most cotton plantations also had a ginning room and a cotton press, machinery that was powered by mules, slaves, and, later, steam.89 Slave labor on a cotton plantation was directly related to the needs of the plant. Structured by the sound of a bell or a horn, the work of slaves on cotton plantations was backbreaking. The work went on all year, beginning with the preparation of the ground called “back furrowing,” which involved the digging of small beds or ridges.90 Then in March or April cotton was planted, and hoeing took place from April to July. August was harvesting time. Solomon Northup provides detailed accounts of the regimented labor required on a cotton plantation: Circuits of Cotton

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A plough drawn by one mule is run along the top of the ridge or center of the bed, making the drill, into which a girl usually drops the seed, which she carries in a bag hung round her neck. Behind her comes a mule and harrow, covering up the seed, so that two mules, three slaves, a plough and harrow, are employed in planting a row of cotton. . . . The cotton usually makes its appearance in a week. In the course of eight or ten days afterwards the first hoeing is commenced. This is performed in part, also, by the aid of the plough and mule. . . . Slaves follow with their hoes, cutting up the grass and cotton, leaving hills two feet and a half apart. This is called scraping cotton. In two weeks more commences the second hoeing. This time the furrow is thrown towards the cotton. Only one stalk, the largest, is now left standing in each hill. In another fortnight it is hoed the third time, throwing the furrow towards the cotton in the same manner as before, and killing all the grass between the rows. About the first of July, when it is a foot high or thereabouts, it is hoed the fourth and last time. Now the whole space between the rows is ploughed, leaving a deep water furrow in the center. During all these hoeings the overseer or driver follows the slaves on horseback with a whip, such as has been described. The faster hoer takes the lead row. He is usually about a rod in advance of his companions. If one of them passes him, he is whipped. If one falls behind or is a moment idle, he is whipped. In fact, the lash is flying from morning until night, the whole day long. . . . In the latter part of August begins the cotton picking season. At this time each slave is presented with a sack. A strap is fastened to it, which goes over the neck, holding the mouth of the sack breast high, while the bottom reaches nearly to the ground. Each one is also presented with a large basket that will hold about two barrels. This is to put the cotton in when the sack is filled. The baskets are carried to the field and placed at the beginning of the rows. When a new hand, one unaccustomed to the business, is sent for the first time into the field, he is whipped up smartly, and made for that day to pick as fast as he can possibly. At night it is weighed, so that his capability in cotton picking is known. He must bring in the same weight each night following. If it falls short, it is considered evidence that he has been laggard, and a greater or less number of lashes is the penalty. An ordinary day’s work is two hundred pounds.91

As Northup illustrates, cotton cultivation required specific movements. Slaves carried bags so that picking cotton and collecting it could be accomplished with one hand, in one swift motion. Men, women, and children had to pick nimbly to separate the lint from the bolls; they had to be careful that

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they did not dirty the cotton by letting it touch the ground; and they had to ensure it was ginned properly. If we look closely at the figures in Barfoot’s plate 1 (figure Intro.6), it is possible to see how bodies stoop, backs bend, legs tighten from the long hours of standing and walking, and arms lengthen, while fingers need to become like extending claws. These specific gestures of labor revolved not around hands so much as the correct type of handwork.92 With the growth of upland cotton, the use of the cotton gin, and the mechanization of the factory, cotton merchants looked for a particular texture and type of fiber, uniform in length and durability and best adapted to the conditions of the manufacturing process. Before cotton picking was mechanized in the twentieth century, “hand labor in the United States had to achieve levels of precision and productivity commensurate with the exact standards of mechanized mills.”93 Thus the labor of slaves on a cotton plantation revolved around adjusting their actions in line with this uniformity and speeding up their movements to ensure enough of the fiber was being processed. In reality on the plantation, the labor of hands — their movements, the pressure of the fingers, their actions — was systematized.94 The small samples of rough negro cloth shown in figures 1.4 and 1.5 offer us small glimpses of this labor, a mechanization of a body’s limbs that matched the routinization of its surface. The cloth magnified the corporeality of Black enslaved workers, who were often labeled “hands” or, according to their roles, as “hoes” or “ploughs.” Not only did the cloth transform its wearers into properties; it also turned them into tools, animated objects whose presence on the plantation was spatialized by their labor.95 In a sense then, negro cloth mapped Black slaves onto the landscape of the plantation. From the slaveholders’ letters, it is also clear that the cloth’s characteristics and colors were important for the types of bodies it covered and their particular roles on the plantation — as field hands or domestic slaves. While field hands tended to get plain or dull colors — grays, browns, or unbleached material —  for domestic slaves, planters often ordered patterned fabric and ready-­made clothes. H. L. Lee asks for “30 yards colored for my house servants”96 while J. P. Cosgrove of Magnolia Place asked for “good quality cloth for negro women, [in] some of the patterns sent me last year.”97 Perhaps some of these patterns looked like figure 1.5, which, although still coarse, is striped blue and white. Frederick Law Olmsted also notes that some slaves had a “better suit of coarse blue cloth, expressly made for them, evidently for Sunday clothes.”98 These observations and requests reveal the complicated relationships existing between planters and their slaves, relationships that highlight the material agency of enslaved men and women who expressed themselves through their self-­fashioning: a fashioning that also made an impression Circuits of Cotton

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on their owners. The letter requests also suggest that planters, when they could, might buy patterned or dyed cloth according to the preferences of their slaves. Ronald Bailey quotes a Richmond planter as saying, “Such as you color for this market for the future let them be large figures and lively colors as they are worn only by the mulattoes and blacks and they are fond of anything that is dashing.”99 While I have been unable to find samples that illustrate these lively colors, this reminds us of the ways Black Americans did fashion themselves through their constrained choices and preferences. Negro cloth’s function was primarily to protect labor and mitigate the effects of the environment: to ensure enslaved cotton pickers were able to continue planting, picking, ginning, and baling. Its purpose was to ensure profit, and its own production and market value were dependent on these processes, too. But if coarse and heavy, it would have added to the heat and exertion felt by those who wore it while they worked. Their perspiring bodies would reveal the toil of this labor, completed under the sun and under such heavy clothing. But perhaps in this contrast between the dull cloth and glistening bodies, overseers and planters could also read the value of the labor being enacted. Negro cloth not only marked Black people as property; it materialized their value both through its own materiality and in the ways it transformed Black bodies into legible surfaces. These surfaces were ultimately meant to reflect the value of the white plantation owners themselves. Helen Bradley Foster observes that sometimes enslaved workers in the house dressed in cloth of the same value, but not of the same appearance, described how their uniforms were cleaner and nicer looking, and had to be worn correctly, especially in front of company. These descriptions reveal enslaved people’s awareness that their clothes were meant to serve the purpose of the plantation owners: to convey their importance.100 In the case of negro cloth, this is particularly significant because its value was not attached solely to its market price; that value was also measured in the productivity of those forced to wear it. In essence, then, the cloth materialized the market both on and through the Black bodies it garbed. In its texture and its appearance, negro cloth unfurled a vision of social relations based on systems of exchange that were read against the Black enslaved workers forced to wear the material. The feel of the cloth and the constraints of being clothed in it are frequently mentioned in slave narratives, as well as in WPA interviews with former slaves.101 Recalling her years as a slave in North Carolina, Harriet Jacobs writes, “I have a vivid recollection of the dress given me every winter by Mrs. Flint. How I hated it! It was one of the badges of slavery.”102 Marked as property, these clothes marked the bodies in other ways, too. Both SoloChapter One

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mon Northup and Frederick Douglass — in their narratives of slavery — also discuss the “scanty” quality of the clothes they are given and the lack of protection those clothes afforded out in the fields.103 As Annie Hawkins recalls, “Our dresses was made out of coarse cloth like sacking and it sho’ lasted a long time. It ort to be called mule-­hide for it was about that tough.”104 Willis Winn from Louisiana remembers, “Us slaves didn’t wear nothing but white lowell cloth. The big folks wore the same outfit the year round. They didn’t care if you froze.”105 For Hanna Fambro, there was the memory of “de sunbonnets . . . dey tied undah de chin . . . ud make us so hot and keep off so much air dat we’d open de strings an’ tie em on top of our heads.”106 In these and other descriptions of clothes in the WPA narratives, women and men recollect the poor quality of the material, of it making them too hot in summer and too cold in winter, and how they labored unprotected. They sometimes mention the heavy dresses, rough shirts, or tied-­up tunics, and sometimes merge such references with descriptions of their labors. But this assertion of their bodies is also in itself a radical act that refuses the objectification embedded in this use of cloth.107 In telling how it feels to work in these clothes, Black women and men use the corporeality of cloth — its relationship to their bodies — to also explain, and analyze, their bodily alienation within the system of slavery.108 Not only did cotton shape their daily routine; it dictated their self-­fashioning, and thus it conditioned their existence marking them as commodities whose market value rested on their labor potential. Negro cloth made the body of a Black enslaved cotton picker legible. It drew attention to the surface, creating a visual correlation between Blackness as skin color and the unfinished coarseness of cloth. Negro cloth served to visualize Blackness as abject and alienated and to construct Black bodies without a subject position. It functioned as a hold, powerfully illustrating the logic of commodification that underpins slavery. And while, as Hanna Fambro notes, enslaved workers found ways of adapting their clothing, this came with other forms of regulation. Hanna goes on: “But ef we see de ole man comin we’d drop em [the strings of their sunbonnets] in a hurry ’cause he’d whip us ef he ketch dose tales [strings] up. You see he ’fraid to have us get brain fever.”109 Nevertheless, in indicating here the persistence of enslaved people’s attempts to “function as subjective beings,” it is significant to me that Black women and men use the very coarseness of negro cloth, a texture created to signify chattel status through its abrading of the skin, to materialize the pained workings of their bodies.110 They express the inhumane realities of their labor and resituate themselves beyond the conditions of value and productivity to which they are subjected. Circuits of Cotton

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These descriptions catalogue the experience of labor through its feelings on, in, and over the body itself. They create a spectrum of experiences that assert labor not as an operation of market relations but as an embodied activity formed from the movements of limbs and the material they push up against, carry, or hold. It is an activity timed in the workings of bones and ligaments and sinews, adjusting and readjusting to earth, sky, and vegetation. It is counted in rivulets of sweat, layers of sloughed cells, trickles of blood, and lines of scar tissue, and it is felt across a network of nerves that spread through the body, transforming physical movements into muscle memory, neurological meaning, and emotional experience. These descriptions refuse the alienation of commodification and return us to the corporeality of labor to express a constrained subjectivity. These descriptions move us beyond a surface reading of Blackness as value; in them the coarseness of the cloth takes on a fleshy hapticality through which a certain fugitivity could be expressed, as enslaved Black Americans felt for and with each other, and against the structures of their containment.111 In this fugitive space, the speculative logic of enslavement can be refused — if even for a short time. In the slaveholders’ letters, it is at the moment of contact with negro cloth that the bodies of enslaved African Americans disappear. However, a closer look at the materiality of the cloth shows it is also at this very moment that their bodies, feeling and felt, appear. Plantation clothing was not always in a ready-­made form, and it was not always made in factories. When planters ordered bales of negro cloth, rather than ready-­made clothing, the fashioning of clothes fell to slave women, who often also sewed clothes for the planters’ family. If the material needed alteration, these women would dye the cloth using different dyes and techniques to embellish, color, and pattern the material.112 Advertisements for slave auctions make special mention of Black Americans’ skills; having agricultural and carpentry experience was valued, as was being adept at sewing.113 From the cloth sent down to the plantations, these women would sew and format clothing for enslaved workers. They would also reformat clothes that were procured in other ways: bartered and exchanged through informal economies of trade, hand-­me-­downs or gifts that came from plantation owners. The descriptions of “fantastically dressed” enslaved populations found in travelogues and plantation accounts highlight how Black seamstresses and consumers worked together to challenge and revise these optics, to assert their visibility in ways that were not legible or recognizable within the logic of this speculative vision.114 These expressions of self-­styling represent forms of (albeit limited) individuality that also sustain a sense of communality. Perhaps most signifiChapter One

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cantly, the reuse of slave clothing in this way reformats the market dynamics encoded here, and suggests another kind of speculative vision. We might think of Black quilt making here, a powerful expression of Black artistry that brings together traditions carried across from West Africa and adapted to the conditions of the United States. Quilts served utilitarian and decorative purposes, but they are also a form of memory, a pictorial register of history as well as a mode of communication.115 Quilts made on the antebellum plantation were usually pieced together from discarded work clothes. Those pieces of clothing could form the top portion of a quilt, which was either plain, pieced, or appliquéd; they could also form the filling and perhaps the lining as well. For each of these layers, enslaved quilters and seamstresses reused materials where they could find them. This tradition of reusing work clothing continued into the twentieth century, most famously in the quilts produced by women from Gee’s Bend, Alabama.116 Coarse, perhaps discolored from heavy use, frayed, or blotched pieces of negro cloth became, in the space of a quilt, something else altogether. Quilts express an alternative vision of Black life. Made outside working hours, they materialize forms of Black work that emerge beyond the mechanisms of profit and valuation that regulated plantation rhythms. In their very formation, then, quilts are forms of handwork and embodied labor that express another set of values attached to Black life. Since they often were created in communal settings and created for multiple purposes within slave quarters, quilts were used as coverings and furnishings that restyled living arrangements. They were used to protect, comfort, create privacy, share traditions and skills, and communicate coded messages. They materialize a commonality, a shared feeling, sustained by and formed from women’s labor, that also envisions a way of Black life that is not subsumed to the brutality of the plantation. Created as they were from negro cloth, and literally whatever these women could find, they also reformat the function of negro cloth itself. Embedded within the material and symbolic layers of the quilt, negro cloth loses its legibility or its ability to render Black lives as things. Instead, it forms a register of feeling through which Black life is reimagined beyond the shadow of the market.

Intimate Distance  ·  As much as it signifies the commodification of Black life, negro cloth also provides a way of grappling with labor as an embodied practice in its insistence on the haptic. Indeed, it is this hapticality that Himid’s cotton canvases commemorate. The canvases function as maCircuits of Cotton

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terial communiqués, referencing the letters and financial support sent by Manchester cotton operatives to Abraham Lincoln in aid of emancipation despite the financial precarity they were facing due to the American Civil War. The shared feeling expressed in these archival documents inspired Himid to imagine cotton itself as a source of this feeling—a feeling that could be carried across the Atlantic through bits of skin or hair caught in its fibers. This is not necessarily only the stuff of the imagination. In 1901 the journalist T. Cuyler Smith writes that “a Manchester spinner discovered a dead negro boy crushed into a bale” (an event later traced back to a crime committed by a ginner).117 While it is unclear when this actually took place, the image it conjures — of Black death by cotton, of the boy’s body enmeshed and buried in the culmination of his labor — is both a haunting analogy of the relationship between Black bodies and the cotton they picked and the ways cotton connected factories, plantations, and those who labored there. This imagery of the violence of slavery haunting cotton in its progress from plantation to factory was drawn on frequently in abolitionist discourses and by factory operatives themselves. For writers like Herman Melville and the factory girl  –  poet Lucy Larcom, the extreme conditions of the factories signified a loss of control over the ownership of one’s body.118 Amid these debates the town of Lowell held an important place in the national imagination. Its industries were creating “an increasingly stratified dynamic of ownership and labor,”119 radically altering the New England social and geographic landscape. The industrialization of the northeastern United States and the “proletarianization” of labor threatened the most basic premises of republican ideology: “an independence secured by [a worker’s] possession of both his means of production and an array of people dependent upon him.”120 Moreover, the exploitations of industrial expansion seemed to threaten the very moral and social order of society, creating a situation where labor guaranteed only “the personal possession of a commoditized and alienable self.”121 As the factory so clearly exemplified, with its supervised labor, long hours, and division of tasks, free labor was no longer free; rather, it was contracted along a scale of coercion and discipline, which for some reflected the practices of slave labor, and came to be described by the terms wage slavery or factory slavery.122 New England factory girls spoke out against their poorly paid, long hours, and the first strike took place in the 1820s. They also expressed themselves through poetry and published (albeit less inflammatory) articles in the Lowell Offering. Many of these New England factory girls saw how their labor and that of enslaved cotton pickers combined to produce great wealth for northern industrialists. Often vociferous supporters of abolition, these women found an intimate economic connecChapter One

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tion between their labor and that of the enslaved, as industrialization increasingly came to be seen as exploitation.123 While New England factory girls wove cloth in freedom, their freedom was marked by its relationship to slavery, according to the poetry of Lucy Larcom (1826  –  1893), who was also editor of the Lowell Offering during her time as a factory girl. Larcom understood that her New England world of women, work, and cotton was connected to another world in the South, and she uses allegory to characterize this relationship in her poetic memoir, An Idyl of Work: When I’ve thought . . . what soil the cotton-­plant We weave is rooted in, what waters it —  The blood of souls in bondage — I have felt That I was sinning against the light to stay And turn the accursed fibre into cloth.124 In describing the economic complicity of northern industry in slavery through her personal actions, Larcom also sets up a material connection between her labor and that of enslaved women. Her hands touch and spin the thread that was once a cotton boll plucked by the fingers of an unnamed Black woman in the South. The cotton drips with blood, its fibers saturated with the physical suffering — a by-­product of the enslaved woman’s labor. In another poem, “Weaving,” Larcom graphically voices her own complicity in this system of brutality: “I weave, and weave, the livelong day: The woof is strong, the warp is good: I weave, to be my mother’s stay; I weave, to win my daily food, But ever as I weave,” saith she, “The world of women haunteth me.” 125 By depicting her own economic condition (“I weave, to win my daily food”), Larcom tries to explain the loss of ownership she feels over her own work, but also how this loss leaves her in an impossible position in relation to the continued exploitation of slave women — “The world of women haunteth me.”126 Her poem is a powerful critique of the industrial complex within

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which she and enslaved women are enmeshed. In underscoring both the limits of her freedom and its reliance on the enslavement of Black women, her poem illustrates that slavery underpinned industrialization. It also, remarkably, reveals the reorganization of labor at the heart of industrialization that transforms human workers into sites of extraction: it is this instrumentalization that Larcom recognizes connects her life and that of enslaved women. While her poem is a call for abolition, it also contains the seeds of a more radical vision that reimagines the very possibilities of labor as a social relation itself. Made famous by its inclusion in historian E. P. Thompson’s classic analysis of the English industrial revolution, the following statement by an anonymous cotton spinner makes a comparison between the experiences of Manchester cotton mill workers and African-­descended plantation workers. In An Address to the Public of Strike-­Bound Manchester from a Journeyman Cotton Spinner, he explains: The negro slave in the West Indies, if he works under a scorching sun, has probably a little breeze of air sometimes to fan him, he has a space of ground, and time allowed to cultivate it. The English spinner slave has no enjoyment of the atmosphere and breezes of heaven. Locked up in factories eight stories high, he has no relaxation till the ponderous engine stops and then he goes home to get refreshed for the next day; no time for sweet association with his family; they are all alike fatigued and exhausted.127

Manchester factory workers often contrasted the environmental conditions of the plantation with the cramped, humid conditions of a dark Manchester cotton factory. Like this journeyman spinner, they recognized how the mechanization of industry and its new relations of time and labor meant the “reduction of the man to the status of an instrument.”128 This reduction —  which Marx called alienation — was constructed as a parallel form of slavery, mirroring the anti-­industrial feeling that had also gained currency in New England.129 Despite the hyperbole of the quotation and its misunderstanding of the nature of enslavement, the implication is that both sites are connected within a global industrial complex. Manchester cotton workers petitioned against slavery in both the British colonies and the American South, recognizing that it was the exploitation of slavery and the accessibility of cheap cotton that allowed industrialists to maintain the oppressive conditions of factory labor.130 Like Lucy Larcom, British factory operatives also understood their part in the system. As one anonymous Mancunian wrote in 1843, “If we purchase American cotton,

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knowing that wretched system under which it is produced we become aiders and abettors of the American slaveholder and participators with him in the criminality of the system of American slavery.”131 Here too there is a sense not only that cotton connects through practices and processes and systems, but also that bodies are enmeshed together. The brutality of slavery was used by some Lancashire workers and reformers to dramatically call attention to their terrible working conditions. But for others the networks between plantations and factories created by cotton provided an evocative metaphor for articulating the correspondences of slavery and industrialization, for situating slavery at the heart of British industrial modernity, and for expressing forms of solidarity with enslaved African Americans. What can we make of these expressions? In both instances, New England and British factory operatives come to an understanding of the commodification of their labor through the imagined working of a representative Black enslaved cotton picker. In other words, the conditions that make white alienation visible here depend on an abstraction of Black life. Or to put it another way, the conditions of Black visibility seem (always) to be speculative. These expressions of correspondence are also responses to the changing physical conditions of industrial labor, its alienating effects on the body and its transformation of social relationships and experiences of space. As I explained earlier, cotton’s very materiality symbolized this paradox, as its production relied on the elision of labor while its materiality was a continual reminder of the many hands it passed through. So, might we see these expressions and metaphorical uses of cotton as the expression of ties of “intimate distance”? As Elizabeth Maddock Dillon explains, maintaining relations of intimacy across distance “required creating a sense of presence in the face of physical absence . . . a configuration . . . structured by the colonial relation — namely an ideology according to which race and geography subtend understandings of humanness, cultural intelligibility and political belonging.”132 Using cotton to express their connections with enslaved plantation workers, the factory operatives assert a radical spatial alliance that is structured by the networks of empire, yet imagines a form of connection beyond it by shifting attention back to the (Black) body as the locus and the center of production, while exposing the greed and exploitation that underpins industrial capitalism. These conditions were also used by Black abolitionists like Frederick Douglass, Ellen and William Craft, and Henry Box Brown to forge transatlantic solidarity with the labor movement in Britain.133 These lecturers often found receptive audiences among the working class of Britain, and Henry

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Box Brown, known for his touring panoramas, was highly popular at mechanics’ institutes and with northern factory workers, and was invited back to speak to the same audiences on multiple occasions. Brown, who freed himself by hiding in a box that was shipped north to Philadelphia (reformatting the circuits created by negro cloth moving south), emphasized the linked conditions of Black enslaved cotton pickers and factory operatives and their entanglement in a global system of trade and speculation, which he believed carried with it the seeds of its destruction.134 To highlight the ways Black enslaved cotton pickers and factory operatives were exploited figures in a global economic network was also to emphasize the implications of this correspondence. Abolitionists like Brown reminded audiences that their shared feelings went beyond understanding material linkages and mirrored exploitations. To be connected by cotton was also to be contained by the conditions of slavery; it was to recognize the limits of freedom shaped as it was by the bonds of enslavement. And it was to work for transformation. Black abolitionists, in other words, used the correspondences of plantation and factory formed by cotton’s trade to refigure meanings of freedom. It is this question of freedom that also emerges in Lucy Larcom’s poem. While cotton symbolized the violence of slavery, it also harbors space for the bleeding body of the unnamed woman. Her presence haunts the thread Larcom spins; it haunts her, and it delimits the nature of freedom itself. For Larcom, the construction of cotton — of the fiber and the cloth — as haunted works in two ways. It materializes the violence done to the enslaved, both as a product of coerced labor and as a commodity that obfuscates the nature of its cultivation. It is a site where Blackness is elided and yet most graphically brought to life, and this ghostliness defines Larcom’s own experience of freedom — which was no freedom at all, based as it was on the institution of slavery. Larcom is mounting a much broader critique of the ways slavery haunted the life of the antebellum North, and the nation itself, as the economic force driving industrial development and sustaining the nation’s production of cotton for the world. This paradoxical reading of cotton’s materiality reminds me of Avery Gordon’s description of haunting as a “tangled exchange of noisy silences and seething absences.”135 For Lucy Larcom cotton materializes and is, quite literally, the evidence of things not seen. For me it also materializes how we might perceive “the always unsettled relationship between what we see and what we know.”136 Reading Larcom’s poem via the speculative imagination of Himid allows a parallel reading of this materiality. Cotton provides space for fugitive expressions of Black corporeality — the droplet of blood

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or sweat — which, at best shadowy, offer the possibility of imagining beyond what we think is understandable.

Fugitive Histories  · Unraveling the layers and the connections of negro cloth’s production has involved moving between multiple viewpoints and ranging across a wide terrain, geographically and materially. But I have done so with the express purpose of grappling with the lingering effects of a past that has not ended. This is why I have spent so long working through and describing the unseen processes of this fabric’s production, and why I have worked to visualize the materiality of the cloth itself in order to describe its affective register and consider its effects. As a symbol of the material conditions of enslavement, as a register of the value of Black life, as a fabric that illustrates a global network of industrial exploitation, negro cloth also materializes a history of transatlantic slavery whose legacies we have not yet managed to acknowledge, let alone negotiate fully. Following negro cloth as a historical source — as a material that traveled across time and space — has meant moving differently in the archives, following in Himid’s footsteps, so to speak, in order to work out of and through the spaces that lie between factory and plantation. While I have described these archival absences, I want to conclude with another: although abolitionists were vocal in their discussions of cotton, there are almost no depictions of cotton by African American visual artists in the nineteenth century. This is not surprising, given the history of cotton and its representation that I have charted here. This absence is another kind of speculative vision, a space imagined where the equivalence of Blackness and cotton does not exist. However, one painting by Edward Mitchell Bannister (1828  –  1901) — an African American artist born in Canada who later settled in Rhode Island —  remains an exception. Bannister largely avoided the representation of Black figures, perhaps because he had personally experienced the racist assumptions of white viewers and exhibition committees who saw his Blackness as evidence of his artistic inability.137 By the late 1840s, Bannister had moved to Boston, where he found artistic commissions and, along with his wife, Christiana Carteaux, was an active participant in abolitionist causes in the area. As race relations soured in Boston following the Civil War, the couple moved to Providence in 1869, where Bannister’s Barbizon-­inspired landscape style fully matured. Their move to Providence was at a time when the area was still characterized by remnants of large plantations, shipping businesses

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linked to the slave trade, and a textile industry reliant on southern cotton. Rhode Island was, of course, the center for negro cloth production and continued to maintain a thriving textile industry following the Civil War. Furthermore, Bannister’s network of patrons included the wealthy Sprague family, important cotton manufacturers in the area who commissioned at least one portrait from him and possibly others. For any American artist connected to abolitionist networks and situated in a major industrial center like Boston, the issue of slavery and race relations would have framed many aspects of social life.138 In Bannister’s case it also influenced his and Christina’s mobility. Importantly, Bannister moved between two central sites of northern textile production, allowing me to speculate briefly on how we may read some of his own work in relation to the entangled relations of commerce and commodification that cotton’s trade shaped.139 This seems most evident in The Mill in Knightsville (figure 1.6), in which Bannister depicts a scene of northern industry. Painted in 1896, it probably shows the Knightsville Textile Mill, which had been operating in the area for about fifty years and was partly owned by the Sprague family.140 The painting opens up a view that integrates industry and leisure within a rural landscape, showing a smoking textile mill next to a waterway on which figures are sailing small boats. Since the antebellum era, the plantation and the factory were used to reflect the nation’s interdependence. Even at the close of the nineteenth century, these depictions continued to have circulation, reflecting regional connection and the industrial modernity of the nation.141 The Mill thus returns us to those links between southern plantations and northern factories with which I began this book. While Bannister inhabited a complicated position as a Black artist painting for both white and Black audiences, in his northern landscapes he did not shy away from engaging with the legacies of the nation’s recent past. In discussing Hay Gatherers (figure 1.7), Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw and Juanita Marie Holland have both commented on how this work’s rare inclusion of Black figures, and depiction of areas associated with slavery, can also be read as subtle references to Rhode Island’s involvement in the trade.142 Having to submerge the matter of race may have been one way that Bannister negotiated the challenges of his role. The Mill is different from these earlier works in that the evocation of an unseen past in an idyllic present seems to take place without the presence of a Black body. It is also different in style. With its bold impasto technique, darker palette, and looser facture, the painting is flatter and more contained. Space has been read as a visual metaphor of spiritual transcendence in Bannister’s work, but here it is used less dynamically, to ground us in the scene. Chapter One

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Figure 1.6 · Edward Mitchell Bannister (1828  –  1901), The Mill in Knightsville, 1896. Oil on cardboard, 25.4 × 31.8 cm (10 × 12½ in.). Collection of Charles Coelho. Photograph by Charles Coelho. Figure 1.7 · Edward Mitchell Bannister (1828  –  1901), Hay Gatherers, 1893. Oil on canvas, 45.2 × 58.4 cm (17⅛ × 23 in.). Collection of Nicholas P. Bruno, MD. Photograph by Gilbert Stuart Birthplace and Museum, Saunderstown, RI.

The Mill’s focus is on the two industrial buildings in the background, which are distanced from the scenes of leisure taking place in the foreground. Bannister’s almost naive rendering of smoke and hedges connects the two, however — a connection repeated in the visual rhyming of the perpendicular axis of the sailboat’s mast and the chimney. This rhyming serves to emphasize the contours of the rising mill as a feature of the landscape. The river reinforces this, further grounding the classical lines of the mill into its surrounding natural space. Bannister’s use of waterways has sometimes been read as a metaphor for freedom, but here I wonder whether we could see the river as something more like a conduit.143 Just as it integrates the industrial and the natural world, this river also connects history to the present. The river would once have been the channel by which cotton, grown by slaves, entered the mills. Perhaps in 1896 it was still used to transport cotton, now grown by sharecroppers. Emphasizing the mill’s connection to the landscape around it, the river also becomes a material, and metaphorical, conduit between this landscape and slavery’s legacies in the South. Although it remains unclear if this work was commissioned, it is important to highlight here how Bannister submerges this history beneath the surface of his Barbizon school  –  derived palette.144 His struggles as a Black artist notwithstanding, Bannister was also invested in aesthetic and stylistic experimentation. The painting’s layered brushwork creates an impressionistic effect that could be read as evidence of his modern aesthetics. If the painting was meant for a patron, the harmonious relationship between industry and nature, and between leisure and labor, could also sublimate this other relation, once again pointing to the modernity of this scene. In a sense, then, one could read the excessive impasto and worked surface, which forecloses depth of field, as opening up a depth of perception. In this painting of a history just under the surface, so to speak, Bannister creates a visual metaphor for the kind of excavation he — like Himid — performs. By unearthing a specific history of commerce in the landscapes he saw around him, Bannister attests to the power of landscape to bear witness. Revealing his own burdened modernity in his artistic style, his work obliquely addresses the broader meanings of historical constructions of Blackness to the nation as a whole. He shows how economic and visual histories that take their meaning from the body of the slave congeal within even the most generic American landscape itself. In essence, then, this painting does not look forward but backward, suggesting, as does Himid’s work, that it is only by re-­viewing the past that we begin to imagine the future.

Chapter One

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Market Aesthetics Color, Cloth, and Commerce

A Good Style for the Coast of Africa  ·  In black and white, the painted canvases of Cotton.com visualize the networked nature of the cotton trade. They illustrate, for viewers, the threads that held fast a range of people and places. This is reinforced by the intersection of black and white paint, and their gridded arrangement stages the webs of exchange and correspondence that cotton shaped. As we look, we imagine the mobile fabric crisscrossing and connecting the globe, reconstructing the intersecting layers in our mind’s eye. This chapter continues to explore the materiality of cotton as a paradigm of representation, but here through the visual aesthetics and commercial registers of pattern. Following Himid’s work, I am interested in the ways patterned cotton cloth was used to market Black bodies. Examining these market aesthetics, and their uses in the market itself, I unravel the networks created in the production of patterned cloth to foreground its uses in framing and visualizing the commodification of Blackness. The chapter moves among, and sets up relationships between, textile samples, paintings by Agostino Brunias and Eyre Crowe, as well as prints depicting slave markets. Tracing these dialogic relationships between objects, similar to the ways cotton cloth moved between places and people, this chapter disassembles the aesthetic and commercial registers of pattern and the conditions of viewership they framed in the marketing of Black lives.

Figure 2.1 · William Wyld (1806  –  1869), Manchester from Kersal Moor, 1852. Watercolor with body color and gum arabic on paper, 39.9 × 49.1 cm (15¾ × 19⅛ in.). Royal Collection Trust, © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2019/Bridgeman Images.

We begin in Manchester, where Himid first installed Cotton.com to foreground the city’s commercial connections, shaped by its production of printed cotton cloth. The multiple meanings of pattern in this artwork emerge from the city’s industrial history. Manchester — or “Cottonopolis” —  had by the mid-­nineteenth century come to symbolize the industrial modernity associated with trade.1 In William Wyld’s (1806  –  1869) Manchester from Kersal Moor (figure 2.1) the city is depicted as a romantic vision.2 Commissioned by Queen Victoria following her visit there in 1851, the painting translates the rising smokestacks of the city into a picturesque scene that celebrates its industry.3 Wyld evokes the “distant prospect” convention, offering us a grand view of an industrial city, pushed far into the background.4 The chimneys stacked across the horizon appear like memorial columns, each one a symbol of industrial might. While other monumental buildings are visible — churches and spires mostly — the smoking chimneys and the rectangular warehouses made Manchester unique in relation to European cities, including London, whose skylines might be dominated by towers and domes.5 The city that emerges in the distance might be a projection of the future, shaped as it was Chapter two

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by the progress of industry.6 As one writer observed, “Manchester streets may be irregular, and its trading inscriptions pretentious, its smoke may be dense, and its mud ultra-­muddy, but not any or all of these things can prevent the image of a great city rising before us as the very symbol of civilization, foremost in the march of improvement, a grand incarnation of progress.”7 The warehouses and chimneys of Wyld’s painting — like the ordered mills and factories of New England — outlined a new topography at ground level.8 By the 1850s, Manchester had between two hundred and three hundred factories, all concerned with some aspect of cotton manufacture. Cotton was not only the central economic concern of Manchester; it also governed its planning and architecture. At the center of the city was the Cotton Exchange; around it were warehouses and factories positioned close to the river Irk; near the factories were the houses of workers. Merchants and manufacturers lived outside the center.9 Wyld’s landscape transforms these rhythms and physical changes into a panoramic view of industrial prowess. Yet the very reason the city was lauded also foregrounds its almost irresistible power. Industrial expansion, like the late afternoon light and deepening shadows, threatens to swallow up the landscape itself. Both Wyld’s painting and Himid’s installation examine the effects of the market, but in quite different ways. In one we see commerce through the effects of industry. In the other we view these effects through the material of cotton itself to visualize and recover what is left outside the frame. In other words, Himid’s installation visualizes in paint the networks that undergird Wyld’s industrial vision — a vision that reflects commonly held views of the time. There were, however, other positions on British industrial development that resonate with Himid’s project of recovery. The Black abolitionist Henry Highland Garnet traveled and lectured in Britain between 1848 and 1851 and then again in 1861. In his hugely successful lectures, he showed how the everyday act of wearing clothes or using sugar tied the lives of ordinary English and Americans into a global circuit of trade revolving around the buying and selling of bodies. As summarized by R. J. M. Blackett, Garnet explained to his audiences that there was “an integral relationship between the price of cotton in Britain and the value of slaves in America. An increase of one cent per pound of cotton in Britain raised the price of slaves in America by a hundred dollars. . . . Britain was participating therefore in an international system that promoted American slavery. While America built the ‘fleetest vessels’ . . . , ‘England wove the fabrics that were exchanged for the captive African and forged his chains.’”10 Himid’s use of patterned cloth makes specific reference to this network in which cotton fabric was exchanged for enslaved Africans and restages the Market Aesthetics

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dynamic circuit that cotton shaped between material objects, the value of Blackness, and forms of representation. We might consider Cotton.com as a market scene, then, with the cotton canvases unfurling the complex commercial routes that linked the market for cotton with a libidinal economy of desire expressed through conventions of taste. Although British involvement in the slave trade officially ended in 1807, historical records suggest that Manchester cloth continued to be used in the Atlantic slave trade well beyond that date.11 Excerpts of letters and cloth samples in the Pottiers Diary — held in the Winterthur Library — sent from Brazil to England in the first half of the nineteenth century reveal these connections.12 An excerpt of a letter sent from the English firm Townley and Jackson, which operated in Bahia, accompanies a swatch of brightly colored striped cotton in shades of yellow, red, black, blue, and green (figure 2.2).13 The patterns are multicolored and alternate between thick stripes and thin across four different swatches pasted into the book. The letter — sent from Bahia on December 21, 1827 — notes that the enclosed are patterns of stripes which we have selected and would be a good style for the coast of Africa with some alterations, first if they came out on more ordinary cloth and glazed. Prints for that market should never cost more than 5$ @ 5$500 p Ps these were sold at 7$ for the consumption of the City. These patt’s will give you a good idea of the taste for that quarter. If you should have any other new pattern of 1 or 2 colors in stripes you may assort them with some so as to make something new.14

From the description given, we can assume that African consumers of English-­made cotton appreciated its bright colors, looked for striped patterns of alternating thickness, and preferred lower-­quality cloth as it was cheaper to purchase. What a description like this also shows us — although perhaps not in so many words — is that these stylistic concerns were ultimately predicated on the value of Black flesh. Since at least the eleventh century ce, cotton textiles — manufactured locally or traded with Arab merchants — were in circulation on the West African coast.15 The sub-­ Saharan trade brought textiles into the region from looms farther north and east in India. When Portugal captured a portion of the lucrative trade between Arab merchants, Indian textile workers, and spice merchants, it established an alternative route around the Cape of Good Hope directly to Europe. Usurping the role of Arab traders, the Portuguese selected brightly colored Indian cotton cloth that they traded with spice merchants in the Malay Archipelago, and as they headed up the Guinea coast they also imported these textiles into West Africa in exchange for supplies.16 Salempores, Chapter two

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Figure 2.2 · Letter from Townley and Jackson of Bahia, December 21, 1827. Catering Collection, Potter’s Diary, 1827  –  1841, No. 5. Courtesy the Winterthur Library: Joseph Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera, Winterthur, DE.

guinea stuffs, and rumals are among the terms for these fabrics; also included were “red-­and-­white striped linens, Indian blue-­striped cotton fabric and dark cotton cloth made especially for the Africa trade.”17 As the Dutch and English entered the trade in the fifteenth century, they too were engaged in this trade of Indian cottons, for spices and for slaves.18 The importation of textiles did not directly impede the local production of cotton — at least not until the second half of the nineteenth century — but seemed to fit alongside it. Scholars of African history point out that the Indian-­made and then European-­made textiles imported by African traders had aesthetic similarities to certain kinds of locally produced cloth. One of the “earliest staples of the trade [between the Royal Africa Company and African buyers] was the striped loincloths called annabasses, which were an indispensable commodity in the cargo of every seventeenth-­century African trader.”19 These written descriptions indicate that these were similar to the blue-­and-­white quaqua or strip-­woven cloth produced locally. But it was the Market Aesthetics

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plain, dyed, or loom-­patterned cottons from India that were consistently in high demand by African consumers. The large fortunes to be made in the slave trade during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were crucial to the East India Company’s operations, weaving together the Indian and Atlantic Oceans.20 Even as late as 1791, the Commercial Department of the East India Company urged Bombay to “regularly ship cottons to England for the Africa trade in particular.”21 Designs and patterns varied, but records show that the majority of cloth shipped to Britain from India was “plain, checked or striped cotton for everyday use.”22 The cloth used in this trade varied in color and design, revealing both its varied uses and the unique semiotics of cloth for West African consumers. As Colleen Kriger has shown, oral traditions locate textiles firmly within these European-­African commercial transactions.23 And Cécile Fromont writes of how Kongo (elite) consumers repurposed and merged both imported and locally made cloth to interpret, express, and materialize their constructions of Christianity.24 The desire of African consumers for imported cloth was a generative factor of the slave trade, exploited by European nations as they created a transactional relationship between the conventions of taste and the value of Blackness. By taste, I mean the semiotics of what we might call cultural refinement: the ways in which material objects were used to adorn and enhance, to express particular social meanings and consolidate social class.25 This relationship between cloth and bodies is further reinforced by the fact that the shorthand term pieces came to be used by European traders to quantify the price of an enslaved person.26 Negro cloth marked Black enslaved people as property, drawing attention to their status as a commodity. Cloth used in the trade of Black Africans materialized their value. Both revolved around forms of speculation, but their uses framed different ways of visualizing Blackness. Because of the ubiquity and functional use of the textiles that were traded, they are not now found in many collections. However, a textile sample book sent from the Manchester cotton firm of Benjamin and John Bower to sales agents in New York City in 1771 gives us a sense of how these textiles might have looked (figures 2.3 and 2.4). Of the five hundred swatches of cloth, about 40 percent are checked and striped in a fashion similar to how the trade textiles sent to West Africa were described. Their varying shades — in particular, the use of red dye — is also a reminder of African consumers’ interest in specific colors as well as patterns.27 That these textiles were made in Manchester, rather than in India, means they also materialize another strand in the circuit of connection. As the English reliance on overseas markets for cotton fabric used in the slave trade became ever more pronounced, so too did the goal of “replacing Chapter two

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Figure 2.3 Benjamin and John Bower textile sample book, 1771. Paper, cloth binding, with attached samples of fustian (variety of warp and weft combinations in wool, silk, linen, and cotton); warp: cotton dyed in dark brown, spun and z twist/no ply, 30  –  32 per cm; warp: silk dyed in light blue, no visible twist/no ply, 12 per 0.1 cm; weft: silk dyed in pink, no visible twist/no ply, 28 per cm, 22.9 × 13.3 × 7 cm (9 × 5¼ × 2¾ in.). Bound pages: 21 × 11.7 cm (8¼ × 4⅝ in.). 156.4 t31. Rogers Fund, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Figure 2.4 Benjamin and John Bower textile sample book, 1771. Paper, cloth binding, with attached samples of fustian (variety of warp and weft combinations in wool, silk, linen, and cotton); warp: cotton dyed in dark brown, spun and z twist/no ply, 30  –  32 per cm; warp: silk dyed in light blue, no visible twist/no ply, 12 per 0.1 cm; weft: silk dyed in pink, no visible twist/no ply, 28 per cm, 22.9 × 13.3 × 7.0 cm (9 × 5¼ × 2¾ in.) Bound pages: 21 × 11.7 cm (8¼ × 4⅝ in.). 156.4 t31. Rogers Fund, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Indian cotton cloth with domestic production” for use in the African trade.28 The fact that these samples are linen/cotton mixes reveals the technological limitations of English cotton production, as manufacturers struggled to imitate both the texture and the look of Indian-­made cotton, a limitation of which African consumers were aware. A dispatch sent in the seventeenth century from the governor of Cape Coast Castle to the Royal Africa Company warned manufacturers that “East India goods only and not those imitated are saleable,” revealing that British imitations of Indian-­made cotton were not always successfully sold abroad.29 West African consumers had specific tastes and could easily identify the flaws of European imitations, even though European traders attempted a range of strategies to mitigate this problem, from imitating patterns and colors to exporting European-­made textiles under Indian names.30 By the mid-­eighteenth century, however, Britain was exporting about one-­third of its cotton cloth production, with 94 percent of all cotton cloth exports going to Africa and the Americas.31 The textile sample book also reflects this commercial route. Plantation records make clear that British-­made cottons took up a large amount of space on British ships heading to the Americas, ranging in texture from dyed and plain rough cotton/wool blends to printed and patterned cottons, variously listed as checks, printed cottons, and linen-­cotton mixes.32 While the confluence between the desire for cloth and the desire for Black bodies reveals much about African consumption, it is also important to understand this circuit in the context of British consumption and its relationship to aesthetic sensibility. While Indian-­made cotton fueled the African slave trade, these cottons also radically altered the fashion of British (and European) society. Even as the East India Company shipped Indian textiles for re-­export to North and West Africa, records show that by the mid-­seventeenth century these textiles were being sold to buyers in Britain. The influx of relatively new lighter and more colorful fabrics — which were called calico, a mispronunciation of Calicut, a port in Malabar on India’s west coast — had an enormous impact on the visual and material culture of seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­century Britain.33 To the European eye, what set these cottons apart was their lightness, breathability, and brightness. In their look and feel, they also materialized characteristics traditionally associated with elite fabrics such as silk. But unlike silks, these were more colorfast and durable, as well as more affordable and easier to wear.34 The incorporation of the newly available fabrics into British fashion was not instantaneous. Both calico and chintz — essentially a hand-­painted cotton — were first used for furnishings in Britain. By the 1680s, calico was a fashionable fabric across social classes, and chintz had become integrated Chapter two

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into popular women’s dress, first among working-­class women (who used cut-­down furnishing fabrics) and among the upper and middle classes. By the early eighteenth century, Indian-­made cottons, particularly calico, had become a significant element in the making of clothes.35 While domestic textile production in Britain was centered on linen, wool, and silk production at this time, the influx of Indian cottons certainly helped change first the look and then the fiber of British textile production. It was not until the late seventeenth century that Europeans began to gain advanced technical knowledge of coloring agents, dyeing, and textile printing, knowledge they gained from the Indian and Chinese textile manufacturers whose designs they sought to imitate.36 This began with block-­printing methods and led to copper-­cylinder printing toward the latter decades of the eighteenth century (the first cylinder machine was imported to Philadelphia in 1810), which greatly lowered costs, increased production, and resulted in lower prices for finished goods, making it more economical and stimulating demand among consumers.37 Alongside the development of printing technology, manufacturers also experimented with brighter and more durable dyes and colors to ensure that designs remained visible for longer. Similarly, manufacturers updated weaving production to create fabrics of similar texture because Indian cottons, also called cotton linens, were smoother than British-­produced linen and linen-­cotton blends. However, because these textile blends and English-­made prints on Indian-­made cotton cloth were suitable for the warmer climates of the Americas, they continued to be manufactured until the latter decades of the eighteenth century. The upshot of the innovations in textile production was that these printed cottons — both the “real” Indian-­made goods and their imitations — also became more affordable at home, coming to be the fabric of choice for working-­class women as well as those higher up in the social ranking.38 Although wealthier women might be able to afford Indian hand-­painted cottons, calico and its imitations produced by English mills offered “the middling and lower orders a cheap facsimile of the brocades and flowered silks favored by the aristocracy.”39 Thus, while cotton brought fashion to the people, it also became an important marker of social class (and its fluidity). Hand-­painted cotton goods might reinforce upper-­class identities, but calico and its imitations enabled people of lesser means and status the opportunity to mask their own identity, offering opportunities to be intentionally misread through an expression of seeming refinement. For a broad spectrum of social standing, cotton fabric mediated the relationship between consumption, self-­fashioning, and the culture of sensibility that defined eighteenth-­century Britain. Market Aesthetics

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The Market for Cotton  ·  The entanglements that cotton created between the economy of slavery and the registers of social and aesthetic refinement are brought to life in the paintings of Agostino Brunias (1728  –  1796), whose work emerges from the “complex commercial dance . . . [of] cotton from India, slaves from Africa and sugar from the Caribbean.”40 Under the patronage of Sir William Young, who had been appointed commissioner and receiver for sale of lands in the islands of Dominica, St. Vincent, and Tobago, Brunias traveled to the Caribbean between 1767 and 1770. Recently ceded to Britain as part of the settlement of the Seven Years’ War, the former French colony of Dominica supplied European centers with a variety of goods from fruits to sugar to cotton. Part of Young’s remit was to attract more British settlers to increase agricultural production and the British presence on the island. It is in this context that Brunias produced a large body of paintings depicting the social life of the island’s non-­European inhabitants prior to slavery’s official end in the British Empire.41 Although the artist depicts a variety of scenes, I want to look closely at his market scenes for the ways they create a connection between the visual logic of representation and the economic logic of commerce. What particularly interests me is the emphasis in these paintings on the Caribbean as a transactional space framed by a mobile economy. Brunias himself was caught up in commercial networks as a mobile artist traveling under the patronage of a colonial administrator and as a producer of paintings that circulated widely across Europe once they were engraved as prints.42 And his paintings emerge from another mobile economy, produced by a peripatetic artist from materials that came from disparate places used to represent the flow of goods connecting those disparate spaces.43 This mobility is most evident in the market scenes, which depict the products and social relations needed to sustain a sugar economy — cotton, slaves, and fresh produce. Agostino Brunias’s market scenes, as Mia Bagneris reminds us, are complicated (and complicating) objects that disrupt easy and unexamined categorizations of art, ethnography, and material culture.44 They also reflect the growing commercial modernity of the era and the visual interpretation to which it gave rise. Like the Dutch genre painters, or even William Hogarth with his bustling crowd scenes, the artist focuses on the relational nature of modern life, as it is lived in conjunction with the market. The paintings respond to the British colonies as sites of exotic difference and possibility by conflating the abundance of the land with the gaiety of Black, and not-­quite-­white, bodies. Land and bodies produce each other Chapter two

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Figure 2.5 · Agostino Brunias (1728  –  1796), A Linen Market with a Linen-­Stall and Vegetable Seller in the West Indies, ca. 1780. Oil on canvas, 55 × 76.2 cm (21⅝ × 30 in.). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. Photo: Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT.

with a promise of bounty, while the depiction of circulating objects materializes the workings of an economic system that was sustained by Europe’s Caribbean colonies.45 This artistic direction is particularly clear in Brunias’s A Linen Market with a Linen-­Stall and Vegetable Seller in the West Indies (figure 2.5) and Linen Market, Dominica (figure 2.6). In each scene the buying and selling of textiles takes center stage by visualizing the island through its commodities: people, animals, fruit, and vegetables. In turn these commodities — while seemingly localized in their shapes, colors, and tastes — are the very things that position these colonies within a global set of linkages. In Linen Market, Dominica (ca. 1780), we move from left to right watching groups of people buy, sell, and gaze at each other. The action is divided into three “scenes”: to our left three women seem to be haggling over a range of checked and striped textiles, while a caramel-­hued beauty engages the attentions of a portly gentleman. In the center a similar interaction takes place, this time between a light-­or white-­skinned woman (dressed almost in white herself ), watched by a well-­dressed older man, a sailor, and a chocolate-­ Market Aesthetics

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Figure 2.6 · Agostino Brunias (1728  –  1796), Linen Market, Dominica, ca. 1780. Oil on canvas, 50 × 69 cm (19⅝ × 27 in.). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. Photo: Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT.

colored woman who sells white muslin as well as various striped textiles. As a transaction between the two women appears to take place, we are encouraged to consider the relationship that might exist between the light-­ skinned woman and her male companion. The final scene takes place to our right, where a group of men and women of varying hues buy and sell vegetables and fruit. Unlike the fair-­skinned women, these figures are most likely enslaved, given their simpler dress and darker skin color. The ambiguity of their status is heightened by the fact that the lightest of them all, a woman in a yellow-­striped apron and a red-­striped head wrap, stands near a recently arrived sailor. These transactional moments, both economic and sexual in nature, are broken down into various instances of looking that take place on the canvas and outside of it and are finally connected by the arrangements of bodies and gesturing limbs. In this way Brunias creates a dynamic circuit of visual links that replicate the economic currents underpinning the negotiations on view. The inclusion and repetition of the buying and selling of cloth in the market scenes reenacts the performance of markets elsewhere. These other perChapter two

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formances, where enslaved Africans were bought and sold for fabric, take place alongside Brunias’s pictures, even as they produced them. By reading the market scenes as visual surrogates for these other commercial sites, I regard his inclusion of fabrics as an important device for disassembling the transactional dynamics of a mobile economy through which Black Africans circulated as objects of desire.46 In this way Brunias’s paintings connect two seemingly incompatible spheres: the political economy of slavery and the register of cultural refinement. This connection, I would argue, is materialized by cotton cloth itself and the ways it frames the gaze both within and beyond the frame. By incorporating in his paintings such a significant amount of patterned cloth, both for sale and being worn, Brunias’s artworks might be an advertisement for eighteenth-­century consumption. Although he calls the material linen, it is not unlikely that these fabrics were similar to the linen/cotton blends included in the Bower textile pattern book. For contemporary British viewers of the paintings, these textiles would have been recognizable both as trade textiles, given how important a foreign market the Americas were for printed fabric, and as textiles that were popular in the domestic market.47 The detail incorporated in Brunias’s paintings requires a remarkable optical agility on the part of the viewer: that is, we must look closely to fully appreciate the materials on display and the technical ability of the artist. His closely observed fabrics signal the changing nature of color technology in Europe on a number of levels. In A Linen Market with a Linen-­Stall and Vegetable Seller in the West Indies, for example, Brunias repeatedly draws our attention to the use of red textiles. The bright red handkerchief worn by the dark-­skinned Indigenous man on the left is enhanced by the deep red trousers of a kneeling market seller in the painting’s foreground and then echoed in the red jackets of colonial soldiers on the right-­hand side. In the center of this triangular composition are four women of varying skin color, with red or red-­striped bandannas twisted around their heads or covering their shoulders. These fabrics reference, fairly directly, the use of new dyeing techniques in British textile production, thanks to the importation of cochineal and the development of madder techniques that could imitate Indian and Turkey red.48 Anne Lafont has argued that Brunias’s attention to detail and color also reflects developments in printmaking. The growing circulation and diversification of Indian textiles in French society caused an adaptation in printmaking to incorporate better use of color (in particular, skin color) and picturesque scenes that reflected a changing social aesthetic. Her point is that these textiles fueled in European society “the desire . . . for colorful and exotic imaginary worlds.”49 Market Aesthetics

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This desire for visual exoticism was certainly visible in contemporaneous travel narratives in Britain. In 1774 Janet Schaw, traveling through Antigua and St. Christopher, described the Black people she saw going to the market: They were universally clad in white muslin; the men in loose drawers and waistcoats, the women in jackets and petticoats; the men wore black caps, the women had handkerchiefs of gauze or silk which they wore in the fashion of turbans. Both men and women carried neat white wicker-­baskets on their heads, which they balanced as our milk maids do their pails. . . . These contained the various articles for market. . . . In one a little kid raised its head from amongst flowers of every hue, here a lamb . . . or a pig all covered up in the same elegant manner . . . while others had their baskets filled with fruit, pine-­apples, grapes dangling over . . . oranges . . . pomegranates . . . with twenty others, whose names I forget.50

This market scene is a heady assault on the senses, an effect that emerges from the detailed list of items on display. We are shown color, allowed to imagine taste and texture, hear sounds, and can almost smell the assortment of goods on sale. But the picturesque charm of Schaw’s description, characteristic of contemporaneous travel accounts of similar scenes, might also be foreshadowing both Brunias’s market scenes and the description of the enslaved water carrier contained in Cotton.com through her transformation of the transactional relations of the market into a series of pictures recognizable to herself and her British audience. First, she uses the description of dress, naming the types of cloth, their styles, and their colors. Such attention to detail recalls the composition of fashion illustrations in readily accessible print forms that “disseminated a concise, formal apprehension of the wider fashion system that was reordering modern commercial society.”51 It is significant that Schaw incorporates this observation into a market scene, another popular subject in print culture that was used to satirize social convention through the observation of fashion and manners. The list of the clothing worn by the Black market-­goers reminds us of the social meaning that clothing held for eighteenth-­century audiences. Along with urban fashion illustrations, ethnographic images depicting forms of dress worn by people across the world and across the nation engaged audiences. Like cotton, these prints offered something amounting to a global imaginary, while also differentiating human variety. The prints also made the social worlds of Britain a little more legible, giving viewers, among other things, the opportunity to negotiate and codify the increasingly fluid social interactions between different classes. Cotton was, of course, one factor in this fluidity. Cotton literally needed to be seen through, and as a symbol of commerce its Chapter two

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incorporation into everyday life, like the social dynamics of a market scene, reflected the effects of commercialization and consumption in an expanding public sphere. Schaw shifts to another mode of popular print in her description, the genre of Street Cries. First appearing in Paris in 1500, the Cries became an established genre that used socially liminal figures — street vendors — to materialize commercial networks that were reshaping urban space. Such figures symbolized the modernity of new commercial routes and its effects on the urban, public sphere, yet they were also outcasts of this very modernity.52 The figure of the milkmaid was a particularly potent symbol of social change, as she was an elusive figure picturesquely evoking rural simplicity while also erotically provocative in selling her wares and, in effect, herself. The inclusion of this dynamic of desire in Schaw’s market scene culminates in the final portion of the description, where we turn to the wares on sale. Here is the Caribbean in all its exotic possibilities, ready to be consumed, and her ekphrasis emulates the pictorial elements of still-­life painting.53 The textual arrangement of animals and fruits drip with color and texture, evocative of those gleaming surfaces that materialized the global routes of eighteenth-­ century commerce. These registers of aesthetic description oscillate between the commercial and the erotic, highlighting the plentiful resources of the Caribbean and Britain’s appropriation of them, along with the plentiful possibilities of those forced to work colonial lands for British benefit. Both land and people become objects of desire. Using these art-­historical registers, Schaw refines the Black figures she sees into aesthetic objects. Their picturesque charm becomes the means for their labor and pain to be abstracted away. Through the richness of visual imagery, the Black market­ goers are refined from being enslaved laborers into (legible) images of exotic beauty. Like Schaw, Agostino Brunias uses picture making to convert conquest into sweetness. Compositionally, his scenes reference the detailed genre scenes popular in Dutch painting and created as mementos for British travelers on the Grand Tour through Italy.54 The bustling figures, colorful and conversational, also recall the popularization of crowd scenes in eighteenth-­ century British art in their careful delineation of social groups.55 But unlike those scenes that often satirized everyday life, Brunias’s vivid color and figural grouping emphasizes beauty and elides the exploitation of labor that underlies these scenes. Where we do see delineation is through color and clothing, which works to establish a racial hierarchy and create a certain amount of legibility, even as this makes the Caribbean into a kind of contact zone, a term that Mary Louise Pratt uses to refer to asymmetrical “soMarket Aesthetics

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Figure 2.7 · Johann Zoffany (1733  –  1810), The Family of Sir William Young, ca. 1767  –  1769. Oil on canvas, 114.3 × 167.8 cm (45 × 66 in.). Walker Art Gallery, National Museums Liverpool/Bridgeman Images.

cial spaces where cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other.”56 The creolized space of the Caribbean is fully materialized by the bodies on view, whose skin color tells the story of forced intimacies between white slavers, plantation owners, and Black bodies.57 It is this libidinal economy, created in the confluence of aesthetic registers and the logic of the market, that also creates a direct connection between Brunias’s paintings and the polite parlors and estates of portraits and conversation pieces — such as Johann Zoffany’s (1733  –  1810) painting of Brunias’s patron, Family of Sir William Young (figure 2.7). In Zoffany’s theatrical portrait, the family is shown arranged in polite groups around Young and his wife, who play musical instruments. The harmonious insertion of John Brooks, their young Black servant, who assists Young’s son, highlights the family’s Caribbean imperial interests and illustrates the painting’s racial hierarchy. But staged in the polite setting of an English estate, underpinned by the profits of the plantation, the harsh materiality of slavery can be distanced through the invocation of taste.58 While such paintings might gesture toward a connection between Britain and its colonies, here commodities signify refinement, without manifesting the sitters’ relationship to the Chapter two

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workings of the market, thereby keeping colonial metropoles and peripheries firmly apart. Brunias’s paintings coincide with the development of the Caribbean into a major cotton-­producing territory for the British Empire. Islands like Jamaica, Dominica, and Grenada produced about four million pounds a year, and the plantations on Barbados produced about half of that amount in one year.59 What allowed Caribbean planters to expand their cotton-­growing activities so quickly was their access to fresh land and continually renewable sources of labor, which had led to the decimation of the Indigenous population and promoted the transatlantic slave trade. The transfiguring of the landscape through the coercion of bodies gave shape to the “expansive and elastic global cotton supply network necessary for the Industrial Revolution,” fostering what historians have called “second slavery,” which “was tightly linked to the intensity and profits of industrial capitalism.”60 After 1780, “slavery’s future was . . . firmly attached to the industrial capitalism it had enabled.”61 Rather than convey the disembodied, fragmentary connection between colony and metropole created through cultural forms like “it narratives,” which focused on the movement of commodities from one place to another, the market scenes in the style of Brunias made the entanglements of empire humanly visible.62 In these scenes it is (cotton) cloth that intimately connects private spaces of imperial life — the drawing room and the parlor, for example — with the public and more commercial spaces of imperial labor. White middle-­class merchants in Britain had themselves painted surrounded by signs of international trade to fix their position in an increasingly mobile class system. In Brunias’s paintings, these “signs” of trade also anchor a colonial social structure, but in another way. Although we never see agricultural labor in the paintings, we see its results — particularly in the cloth being circulated through markets and in the clothing that clearly differentiates social groups. Records show that most of the cloth shipped to Britain from India were “plain, checked or striped cotton for everyday use.”63 And, as I suggested earlier, the fabrics on display in Dominica were also probably being worn on British streets. Although not set in the urban metropolis of London, Brunias’s market scenes — conducted in the shade of trees or under the windows of colonial buildings — can also be read as reflections of the modern world of consumption, a world given shape by things in motion. As if to reinforce this entanglement with a world beyond the frame, Brunias includes in the background large ships that are moored beyond the shallows while smaller boats move between the vessels and the shore carrying items for trade. Market Aesthetics

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The market scenes reveal the “overseas sustenance” needed to maintain British provincial worlds and their cultural representations, for in these pictures commodities materialize the intimacies, rather than the distances, between colony and metropole.64 To see Brunias’s market scenes is to also see the sedate parlors of the British gentry, and vice versa. And we can thereby read the intimacies between the refinement of British “taste” and the “refinement” of British colonization, a process of transplantation and extraction.65 It is this process of refinement that cotton fabrics also mediated. While Brunias uses textiles to materialize the commercial routes that have shaped the Caribbean, their dazzling colors and geographical references reinforce the multiple art-­ historical registers at work here. By connecting fabric to skin, he makes these bodies legible in the manner of circulating print culture: the paintings move between market scenes and still life to fashion plates and street cries or ethnographic prints. The varying colors and patterns also reinforce the human variety on display, encoded in the multiple shades of skin color recalling the codification of casta paintings that Ilona Katzew has shown deploy the interplay of fabric and skin to decode this human difference while promoting the abundant variety of colonial life.66 In this sense, while the textiles symbolize the market relations at work here, they also frame our gaze in such a way as to materialize the value of these figures and their location, both aesthetically and economically. Brunias uses color, pattern, and skin to enhance the visual appeal — the charm and picturesque nature — of free and unfree communities. The textiles codify bodies while also literally converting (refining) them into objects of desire. Using the textiles to mirror the aestheticization of art itself, we might read this relationship between fabric, skin, and the gaze as another process of refinement that ultimately mirrors the way cloth was used to convert enslaved people into commodities. My point is that we can read a dynamic set of linkages between commercial and visual registers in the dynamic circuits of exchange that compose Brunias’s market scenes. There is a startling connection here between the visual conversion of colonial exploitation into refined objects of desire and the ways cotton fabric framed the market value of Black bodies. The textiles function to mediate, and guide, the gaze as Black Africans are pictured as objects of desire.

The Aesthetics of the Market  ·  The production of cotton cloth was a process of refinement. Through picking, cleaning, and weaving, fiber was transformed into smooth fabric, a primed and ready surface. As a finChapter two

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ished product, cotton cloth made a wonderfully adaptable surface: it could be covered in all manner of colors and patterns, and it could project a range of possible meanings as it was used to decorate, adorn, and, indeed, refine those who used it. While its exchangeability with enslaved Africans was directly related to their market value, what I am thinking of here is how this transactional relationship—converting enslaved Africans into desired commodities — is also contingent on a form of aestheticization. The textiles in Brunias’s paintings enhance the picturesqueness of its wearers, registering their transformation into a picture. This process is also portrayed in Cotton.com, as the unnamed Black woman turns a sidelong glance back at her observers. Rather than reify the objectifying gaze portrayed in the quote (“He said I looked like a painting by Murillo as I carried water for the hoe gang, just because I balanced the bucket on my head”), Himid gives us the opportunity to disassemble its art-­historical registers. The reference to Spanish Baroque artist Bartolemé Esteban Murillo is significant. He is best known for a figurative painting style that, while ranging in color palette and tone, softly molded the human figure into sympathetic and descriptive forms. His idealized genre scenes, often depicting young women and girls, are both highly realist and emotionally charged. Despite their similarities to genre painting of the mid-­nineteenth century, Murillo’s urban scenes fell out of favor as realism and its urban subjects were radically transformed.67 However, the quote by Olmsted and its reference to Murillo reveal the writer’s own refinement — his access to fine art — for by invoking Murillo, Olmsted also colloquially refers to what his readers would have understood as the attributes of a good painting. On one level, then, Olmsted’s words remind us of how overseers and plantation owners —  like Sir William Young — used the profits of slavery to materialize their own refinement, taste, and gentility. They highlight the intimate entanglements of aesthetics and commerce, revealing the networks of patronage that slavery helped finance and the libraries, collections, and museums that slavery helped build.68 But, in referencing a painting to describe the picturesque appeal of an enslaved women, Olmsted also evokes the uneasy relationship between human suffering and the history of art. It recalls other categories of figurative subjects, not just picturesque urban genre scenes but also repeated tropes of working women, flower girls, and water carriers. Their representation was often coded, a cluster of blooms or a vessel balanced on the head hinting at their sexual availability. Their idealization in paint transformed them into surfaces for the projection of (male) desire.69 The quote, then, describes both the aestheticization and sexualization of the unnamed woman, for the work of enslaved Black women was not carried out only amid the furMarket Aesthetics

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rowed rows of the plantation; it was also extracted through sexual exploitation and rape.70 While the description draws on a real scene from plantation life, its romanticization of an enslaved woman into an art object links the physicality of plantation labor with that of sexual labor, highlighting the libidinal economy that under slavery ultimately connects the two, and through which Black enslaved women are produced as objects of desire. The forms of aestheticization mediated by the currency of printed cotton and its use to clothe Black enslaved people in the slave market is a corollary of this system. It is a form of abstraction through which the effects and the experience of labor and misery are elided and Black bodies become desired as objects for consumption. This transactional relationship of cotton and slavery revolves around the transformation of Blackness into a surface onto which value can be projected. In this sense, Blackness itself becomes speculative, a form of the appearance of value that must be, constantly, converted into and demonstrated as real value. Underlying the quotation referencing Murillo is a correlation between the act of connoisseurship and the racialized gaze, confirming the intimate entanglements of art history and the visual logic of slavery. This point is graphically visualized in a print that James Silk Buckingham includes in his book The Slave States of America (1842). Engraved by J. M. Starling after an illustration by the artist William Henry Brooke (1772  –  1860), the picture is called Sale of Estates, Pictures and Slaves in the Rotunda, New Orleans (figure 2.8). Natural light streams through the rotunda of the St. Louis Hotel, with its “beautiful and lofty dome with a finely ornamented ceiling and variegated marble pavement.” In the rotunda, Buckingham explains to his readers, “pictures are exhibited and auctions are held for every description of goods.” 71 In a manner that recalls illustrations of classical Italian architecture popular in nineteenth-­century Anglo-­American print culture, rays of light are attenuated, like long thin strips of cotton, to create a sense of expanded space highlighting the action taking place across the print. Against the elaborate Beaux-­Arts architecture of the St. Louis Hotel, which lines the walls and extends upward toward the cupola, amid the neoclassical refinement signified by this room in New Orleans, a drama of debasement unfolds. In his book, Buckingham describes the scene he had observed: “At the time of our visit, there were half a dozen auctioneers, each endeavoring to drown every voice but his own, and all straining their lungs and distorting their countenances in a hideous manner. One was selling pictures and dwelling on their merits; another was disposing of ground-­lots in embryo cities and expatiating on their capacities; and another was disposing of some slaves. These consisted of an unhappy negro family. . . . Their good qualities Chapter two

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Figure 2.8 · William Henry Brooke (1772  –  1860), Sale of Estates, Pictures and Slaves in the Rotunda, New Orleans, engraved by J. M. Starling, 1842. Engraving with watercolor, 9.7 × 12.9 cm (3¾ × 5 in.). Historic New Orleans Collection/Bridgeman Images.

were enumerated in English and in French, and their persons were carefully examined.” 72 Simon Gikandi’s observation that the institution of slavery and cultures of refinement are intricately enmeshed is brought to vivid life here.73 In Starling’s engraving, a grouping of Black figures takes center stage. A man and a woman, one of them holding a child, and semi-­naked, stand in front of an auctioneer with a raised gravel. Their dark bodies contrast with the crisp white cloth that wraps around their waists. Between the adults, another child is curled up with emotion. To our left, the auctioneer points to a heavily framed painting of a woman in profile. She looks, directly, at another Black man who strains to hold onto her painted form and is one third of a trio who are positioned, easel-­like, as supports for the display of this heavy object. While two Black men form the horizontal axis of this arrangement, a white man stands above and (somehow) behind the painting, pulling its top edge straight. As they do so, the auctioneers continue to point to the objects for sale while describing their qualities. Market Aesthetics

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Drawing on abolitionist imagery, Buckingham shows his reader in no uncertain terms what slavery does. The family’s commodification is emphasized in the visual correlation created between their bodies and the sale of the painting and property deeds taking place on either side of them. Not only are they all forms of property — chattel — the speculative nature of this transaction is materialized in the way they are displayed, with the merits of each carefully detailed. The sale of deeds reinforces this, for they are all sales of speculative ventures, their value now predicated on the projection of future profit. In each scenario, buyers assess the object — a surface on which they both project their desire and ascertain its value. As the Black slaves are transformed into objects of value and desirable commodities, they also become interchangeable with the pictures on view alongside them, and the pictures in which they are circulated. As we see how the gaze becomes an apparatus for the projection of desire and the attribution of value, the aesthetics of connoisseurship and the dynamics of the racialized gaze are shown to be connected by the speculative logic of the market. Buckingham and Starling seem to use these scenarios both to critique the culture of refinement — these are the very objects that mark owners with status and taste — and materialize the mechanics of the market, in the picturing of Black slaves as property.

Slaves for Sale  ·  In the immediate background, through the narrow vista afforded by the opening in the “Atlantic Wharf ” you notice a cotton-­laden ship, probably waiting till the tide is sufficiently up to waft its freight across the bar seawards.

 — Eyre Crowe, “Sales of Slaves at Charleston, South Carolina” (1856)

Scanning the article from which the epigraph is taken, a reader of the Illustrated London News in November 1856 may have paused to examine more closely the illustration that it accompanied, Slave Sale, Charleston, South Carolina, from a Sketch by Eyre Crowe (figure 2.9). In following the narrow vista that Eyre Crowe (1824  –  1910) describes, readers would first have to take in the activity in the foreground: here a group of people congregates around a raised platform, creating a clear division between events on the platform and the spectators on the ground. The crowd spreads out. On the left, we see a Black man seated on a horse next to several white men in top hats. To their right, other men, Black and white, stand or sit. Between them are two Black children, three or four white men looking in different directions, and a black

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bollard that marks an empty space just wide enough for the viewer to be comfortably located. From here we have a direct view of the group of men, women, and children standing on the auction block while the top-­hatted auctioneer calls out for bids. Crowe spent time refining his technique in Paris between 1839 and 1843, and this composition recalls the heroic formation of Eugène Delacroix’s (1798  –  1863) Liberty Leading the People (figure 2.10). Crowe has the auctioneer stand in a similar position to Liberty, emerging out of the mound of bodies around him, his raised arm aligned with a leaning flagpole. In Delacroix’s painting, the flag is raised triumphantly, the symbol of the new French republic.74 In Crowe’s sketch, the flag — a location marker for slave auctions that helped buyers navigate their way to the spectacle of bondage —  represents freedom’s opposite. Next to the auctioneer, and where Liberty — in Delacroix’s painting — is accompanied by the emblematic urban worker, stands a woman holding a young child: emblematic figures in nineteenth-­century abolitionist material whose possible imminent separation encapsulated the horror and brutality of the slave trade.75 The child looks up at a white man who points at her while the mother looks across at a heavily caricatured man with an angular jaw who has raised a forefinger to bid. This transaction is offset by another taking place to the left. A man in a top hat examines an open-­shirted Black man: he is checking for potential physical deficiencies. Above them, a group of enslaved figures — caricaturized with heavy lips and wide eyes in the tradition of blackface minstrelsy — stands waiting. They wear striped hats, shirts, jackets, and trousers and seem to be jostling and moving about behind the auctioneer. Their activity is contrasted with the Black men and children who watch them: one man is suited up (could he also be waiting to be sold?) and sits on a horse and another sits in front of a gate while the children play quietly in the foreground. Behind the platform, a hazy Black figure appears out from under the palm tree with a white attendant. In Crowe’s small, yet detailed, sketch, the activity, figures, and sight lines are all connected in a series of visual and compositional relationships that create a triangular formation. Not only does this give the viewer a way of entering the scene; it creates a kind of dynamism, as if the viewer were really there, as events progress in all directions. Notice too that the auction flagpole and the spar of the ship in the distance sit at identical angles, while the mast and rigging roughly mirror the apex of the ballooning group of Black enslaved figures on the platform. Moreover, the wooden shop front facing the enslaved group’s backs and the overhanging, framing palm tree narrow

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Figure 2.9 · Slave Sale, Charleston, South Carolina, from a Sketch by Eyre Crowe. Engraving, 35 × 25 cm (13¾ × 9¾ in.). Illustrated London News, November 29, 1856. Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, New York Public Library.

the space around the main action, lending the scene a curved shape vaguely reminiscent of a ship’s deck. The effect is an immediacy of sorts: the ship in the distance is never out of our sight as we look at the auction; indeed, it hovers over and inserts itself into the main scene. Looking at one scene, we also see another. In this arrangement, Crowe creates a final balancing act: he juxtaposes a trade in one commodity with a trade in another, and he centralizes the slave trade within the network of global trade signified by the “cotton-­laden” ship mentioned in the article.76 Eyre Crowe completed this sketch when he visited Charleston while accompanying the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray on his North American travels in 1853. At this stage of his life, Crowe, barely thirty, had not met with much success in England. His memoir of the journey, collected in the book With Thackeray in America, is full of sketches and annotations written in his spindly hand. They reveal his great interest in American customs, manners, and daily life, and they show his acute observation. They would also provide him with source material for later artistic and journalistic work.

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Figure 2.10 · Eugène Delacroix (1798  –  1863), Liberty Leading the People, 1830. Oil on canvas, 259.1 × 325.1 cm (102 × 128 in.). Musée du Louvre, Paris/Bridgeman Images.

Having read Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin during his time in the United States, Crowe was especially sympathetic to the position of African Americans.77 Given his sympathies, Crowe was surely aware of the popu­ larity of Stowe’s novel and the heightened focus in Britain on the United States.78 As a country that decried slavery, Britain nevertheless allowed slave-­ grown cotton to sustain a significant part of its domestic industry. The cotton-­laden ship was almost certainly on its way to Manchester. It had probably made the transatlantic journey from Liverpool to New York, where it would have unloaded cargo. Having sailed down from New York, it was now en route to Europe, via the cotton ports of the South.79 These shipping routes — packet lines — are another way of materializing the invisible networks of trade that connected the Victorian world. At the first international Industrial Exposition — the Great Exhibition — held in London in 1851, organizers displayed manufactured objects to symbolize the actual routes and relations of the market through the language of supply, demand, manufacture, and consumption. The cotton-­laden ship, on the other hand, with

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its busy masts crisscrossed with rigging, ballasts, spars, and sails, unfurls the invisible and intersecting routes of transport and travel that underpinned networks of commercial exchange.80 The print also marks points of exchange within systems of trade: the actual moments of buying and selling that in turn directed the contours — the webs — of cotton’s transnational movement across the world. Crowe’s sketch conflates slavery and cotton as two mutually intertwined commercial systems.81 In depicting a slave auction, rather than a plantation or slaves at work, Crowe shows not only how Black people supplied the labor to produce cotton but also how that labor was conditioned by the fluctuations of the market. Depicting slavery as a transactional system rather than as only a system of labor, Crowe shows the moment that Black lives were turned into a commodity, like the cotton they picked and baled.82

Auction Scenes  ·  On the morning of March 3, 1853, while eating breakfast in Richmond, Virginia, Crowe noticed a particularly intriguing advertisement in the local newspaper: slave auctions were to take place that morning at 11 am. He later noted that “ideas of a possibly dramatic subject for pictorial illustration flitted across my mind; so with small newspaper and pencil, I went thither, inquiring my way to the auction rooms.”83 The sketches of the sale he witnessed, published in With Thackeray in America, were called “In the Richmond Slave Auction” (figure 2.11) and would serve as the basis of his emotional and vivid painting Slaves Waiting for Sale, Richmond, Virginia (figure 2.12). Crowe included another slave auction scene in his travel memoir (figure 2.13, an earlier version of The Charleston Slave Market) and also painted After the Sale: Slaves Going South from Richmond (figure 2.14).84 Together, this body of work traces the movements of enslaved people through the slave market, from the auction itself to the “exodus of Negro slaves [further] South.”85 Crowe reported on his visit to the slave auction in at least two other publications besides With Thackeray in America, the Illustrated London News and Charles Dickens’s journal Household Words.86 Theodore Russell Davis (1840  –  1894), a British artist who accompanied journalist W. H. Russell to the American South, also composed a remarkably similar scene to Crowe’s sketch of Charleston. In A Slave Auction at the South (figure 2.15), the flag — a Confederate flag — signals the political changes of the time. As Maurie D. McInnis has shown, the circulating imagery of slave auction scenes in Britain and the United States tended to follow a similar compositional Chapter two

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format — the raised platform, an auctioneer with a raised arm, a crowd congregating around the base of the image — which emphasized the theatrical nature of the transaction.87 They also included written accounts that verified the immediacy of the action. As Sarah Thomas has shown, circulating images of slave auctions were often described as “on the spot” observations in order to convey the “epistemological authority” of the artists.88 Correlating these images with written accounts, viewers were given sensorial descriptions that helped them to imagine the sounds of the market, the jostle of bodies, and perhaps even the smells of human bodies and the humid air. In his authoritative study of the visual culture of slavery, Marcus Wood notes that one of the problems facing artists and producers of abolitionist imagery was the question of how to overcome the “omnipresence of racial codification.”89 If the slave body is black, “then it is immediately separated from white experience through racially coded psychic reflex. How can a white audience get beyond the acculturated sense that they are looking at skin that appears different from their own, and which consequently must be assumed to respond to pain differently?”90 Although Crowe’s depictions do not specifically show slave torture and punishment — which Wood was referring to — they are nonetheless concerned with evoking sympathetic concern for those less fortunate. This “culture of sensibility” was inspired by the moral philosophy of John Locke, and it may help to explain how the theatrical nature of slave-­market scenes provided (white) viewers with a way of “getting beyond” the racial codification of skin color.91 They offered viewers a spectacle, but also drew viewers into the spectacle. It is precisely the lack of such spectacle that might strike a viewer when first looking at Crowe’s Slaves Waiting for Sale, Richmond, Virginia (figure 2.12). Displayed in 1861 at the Royal Academy, the painting renders the theatricality of the slave auction as pathos. Rather than depict the active — or rustic — bodies of plantation slaves that we saw in chapter 1 and that were circulated as popular images of southern life, Crowe chooses a scene of inactivity, but one full of psychological drama. The women and men sit quietly waiting in a room that lies between the street and the auction block. Notice the doorway and glimmer of light to the right of the women, a doorway through which buyers could inspect prospective purchases. Notice, too, the faint outline of a door to the left in the background, beyond which buyers could throng in anticipation of making their purchases. The painting was described by the critic for the Art Journal as “one of the most important pictures of the exhibition.”92 A small painting, about three feet wide, it hung near works by other associates of the Royal Academy, including Thomas Faed and James McNeill Whistler.93 Market Aesthetics

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Figure 2.11 · Eyre Crowe (1824  –  1910), In the Richmond Slave Auction. Engraving. In Crowe, With Thackeray in America, 1893. 132, 2005-­1310n. Special Collections  –  Morris L. Parrish Collection of Victorian Novelists, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. Courtesy of Princeton University Library, Princeton, NJ. Figure 2.12 · Eyre Crowe (1824  –  1910), Slaves Waiting For Sale, Richmond, Virginia, 1861. Oil on canvas, 74 × 99.1 cm (29 × 39 in.). Heinz Family Collection.

Figure 2.13 · Eyre Crowe (1824  –  1910), The Charleston Slave Market. Engraving. In Crowe, With Thackeray in America, 1893. 153, 2005-­1310n. Special Collections  –  Morris L. Parrish Collection of Victorian Novelists, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. Courtesy of Princeton University Library, Princeton, NJ. Figure 2.14 · Eyre Crowe (1824  –  1910), After the Sale: Slaves Going South from Richmond, 1854. Oil on canvas, 68.9 × 91.8 cm (27⅛ × 36⅛ in.). ichi-­066786, Chicago History Museum.

Figure 2.15 · Theodore Russell Davis (1840  –  1894), A Slave Auction at the South. Harper’s Weekly, July 13, 1861. Wood engraving. Private Collection/Bridgeman Images.

This was the second slave-­auction painting that Crowe had exhibited in Britain; the first, in 1854, was entitled A Slave Sale in Charlestone [sic], South Carolina, According to contemporaneous accounts, it resembled the print he later published in the Illustrated London News (figure 2.9).94 While the painting was accepted by the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh, its whereabouts now are unknown. In 1854 he also submitted After the Sale: A Sketch from Slave Life in America (which he later changed to After the Sale: Slaves going South from Richmond) to the Society for British Artists. In a feature on Crowe in the Art Journal about a decade later, the latter painting is discussed as “full of bustle but not the kind that is pleasant to look upon.”95 However, keen to uphold the sanctity of fine art, Art Journal went on to argue that not only were people of African descent unworthy subjects for academic painting, but that slavery was too abhorrent to be rendered in an acceptable manner for an English audience.96 By the time Crowe painted Slaves Waiting for Sale and then presented it to the Royal Academy in 1861, the Civil War had reanimated British interest in American slavery.97 Crowe surely was capitalizing on this by publishing images and articles from his trip to the American South and by choosing to send this particular painting to the Royal Academy. The room Crowe paints Chapter two

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is low roofed and dark, just as he records: “I went . . . inquiring my way to the auction rooms. They consisted of . . . low rooms, roughly white-­washed with worn and dirty flooring, open . . . to the street, which they lined in succession. . . . The sale was announced by hanging out a small red flag on a pole from the doorway.”98 In the painting, a small red flag ripples just to the edge of the arched entrance to the room, where a group of men, dressed in suits and hats, confer. One of the men points to a scrap of paper he holds; perhaps it is the advertisement about the sale. A shaft of light enters the space with them and settles across the roughly surfaced floor. The group waiting to be sold is well lit. They form a semicircle around a single potbelly stove that warms the room, while a man standing at the back of the room, on what could be the auction block, is ready to begin the sale. As the buyers and traders confer with each other, two of the women, along with the auctioneer, watch them carefully while the others look elsewhere. Crowe has carefully depicted the features of each individual — the inscrutable expression of the shorter woman on the left has its counterpart in the brooding glare of the Black man, whose slightly hunched frame smolders with resentment. The four women arranged between them look around the room or at their children; they sit elegantly, with straight backs and carefully folded hands. Gold flashes from their ears brightening the starched white of their neat pinafores. By arranging the women so that their bodies, clothes, and gestures change slightly with each figure, Crowe magnifies the emotional significance of the event while emphasizing the individuality of each enslaved woman. We see anxiety, a studied lack of interest, love for a child, the pain of anticipated separation. The psychological drama of this waiting room is registered across their faces.

Dressed for Sale  ·  Crowe created a theatrical scene not unlike the way slave auctions were described. A key element was dress, which both Walter Johnson and Maurie McInnis, in their extensive studies of the slave market and its culture, have identified as an “essential part of the theatre of the slave auction.”99 Notice that in Crowe’s sketch In the Richmond Slave Auction (figure 2.11) the Black man is shown wearing a jacket, with a hat on the floor beside him. This outfit would not have been an uncommon sight at the slave market, where slaves were carefully dressed for sale. As Solomon Northup recalled, “We were . . . furnished with a new suit each. . . . The men had hat, coat, shirt, pants and shoes; the women frocks of calico and handkerchiefs to bind about their heads.”100 Traders specifically catered to this marMarket Aesthetics

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Figure 2.16 · Artist unknown, Slaves for Sale, a Scene in New Orleans. Engraving, 17 × 25 cm (6¾ × 9 ½ in.). Illustrated London News vol. 38 (January  –  June 1861). Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, New York Public Library.

ket, advertising their merchandise as “Negro clothing.” Some slave traders sent their slaves straight to “dressing rooms” in the shops where ready-­made outfits were kept in all shapes and sizes. Slaves needed to be dressed well, as traders had to display their stock as best they could, and planters were willing to spend a large amount on these fittings in the hope they would realize a sizable profit.101 An illustration and description of a slave market published in the Illustrated London News in 1861 (figure 2.16) (the illustration was also republished in 1863 in Harper’s Weekly) highlights the sartorial approach that was taken: “The men and woman are well clothed, in their Sunday best — the men in blue cloth of good quality with beaver hats; and the woman in calico dresses of more or less brilliancy, with silk bandanna handkerchiefs bound around their heads. . . . They look heavy, perhaps a little sad, but not altogether unhappy.”102 At slave auctions, dressed up, rather than dressed in rough and coarse negro cloth, enslaved people were forced to look the part. Yet to be dressed up, in the shadow of the market, was also to be laid bare: to dress for sale was also to reveal oneself as an object, an available commodity to be bought. Outside the slave auctions and pens of Crowe’s paintings and prints, a thriving trade in “fancy clothes” took place in the antebellum South.103 Such Chapter two

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clothes were of slightly better quality and more ornamental, made to make their wearers more attractive. While the adjective “fancy” might describe a very specific gendered category, it also describes, more generally, what these types of clothing were meant to do, which was to make Black bodies as appealing as possible. Fancy apparel enhanced the picturesqueness of those on sale, drawing viewers’ attention to the arrangement of a body, to its form, features, and color. We might say fancy cloth turned its wearers into a picture of profit through color and pattern, cut and shape. This process of objectification requires attention to the body’s surface, with the attributes of the clothes needing to relate to the color, shape, and size of the person. Body and fabric had to fit, to create a well-­formed figure. A cruel irony compelled enslaved African Americans to replace their usual coarse garb with clothes that signified refinement at the very moment when they became commodities put up for sale. Through the use of colorful and bright clothes, Black enslaved people gained an optical value that indicated the commercial value they already had, or might acquire, on the market. Thinking back to the market aesthetics shown in Starling’s New Orleans slave auction (where unusually, the enslaved figures are in states of undress), to the way Brunias depicts his picturesque figures, and finally to the unnamed Black woman in Cotton.com, there is a connection between the aestheticizing function of clothing and the aestheticizing work of an artist. Fancy cloth raised the value of Black enslaved people by turning them into objects of desire. And slave buyers were aware of this correlation between the aesthetic and the commercial appeal of slaves. Walter Johnson has shown how the word fancy came from the verb “to fancy,” and buyers often explained their purchases by describing how they took “a fancy to” particular enslaved people, making a charged connection between their desire and the visual appeal of those they wished to buy, as well as between the dynamics of the market and the aesthetics of the gaze.104 On the auction block enslaved people became carefully arranged surfaces onto which buyers could project their desire. Although Crowe’s painting would have been read as a genre painting, the work of fancy cloth here also draws connections between the aesthetics of the slave market and the aesthetics of “fancy” pictures. These sentimental paintings (whose genealogy included artists like Murillo), popular in the eighteenth century, depicted scenes of everyday life infused with elements of imagination or storytelling. Fancy pictures were a kind of fantasy, incorporating idealized figures or invented settings: their aim was, above all, “to please the viewer.”105 Popular scenes included pretty flower girls or street vendors whose offerings were fantasized as a commodification of themselves.106 Market Aesthetics

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In the slave market, the commodification of bodies was not a fantasy, and it is not surprising that Crowe has chosen to include more women than men in his scene, for the sale of Black women — whose value to a buyer rested on her physical and reproductive labor — was a powerful metaphor for what was on offer at a slave auction. The sexual exploitation of enslaved women (and men and children) was invoked by many abolitionists to underscore the degradation and inhumanity of the institution. Crowe would have been aware of this discourse, and he seems to reference this connection, at least implicitly. Each woman is dressed differently: at least two of the women wear patterned calico dresses while the others are clothed in plain colors, and the woman who sits farthest from the door is shown in an elaborate dress with gathered sleeves and full skirts. Four of the women also wear gold jewelry and ornamentation that could be a sign these women were “fancy girls” — “young, attractive mulatto women who brought more money at auction than the most skilled male slaves.”107 The fate of the mulatto, or quadroon, was another frequently repeated narrative, bound up with sentimentalized narratives around whiteness and sexuality that had also been popularized in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.108 Having read the book, Crowe, as an abolitionist, may have deliberately included this reference. Either way, the overall effect of this scene of being dressed up is to leave viewers with a profound understanding of the aesthetics of the market, as these women and men display their future value in the immediate arrangement of their bodies.109 Fancy clothes had to transform Black enslaved people into something like a fancy picture, an object required to please its viewer. Enslaved people had to be shown in such a way as to catch a buyer’s fancy, and they did so, as Crowe reveals here, by being forced to draw attention to the surface of their bodies. In this way slave markets traded on the desirability of those for sale, and enslaved people were dressed to both project a fantasy and promise its materialization. But this was not only about future profits. Dressed up in fancy cloth, enslaved Black people also, as Johnson suggests, embodied other meanings associated with conventions of refinement and luxury, for the word fancy also marked notions of taste and cultivation encoded in constructions of whiteness that were bound up with the ability to buy and sell Black people on the market. Dressed for sale, enslaved Black people also became surfaces on which white buyers and owners could see their own value reflected.110 The connection I am making between the aestheticization of enslaved people and their marketability is heightened by Crowe’s composition. In the viewing space that Crowe provides in Slaves Waiting for Sale — a space he himself may have stood in while he sketched the group of figures — we too watch Chapter two

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and assess. This representation of a viewing, before purchase, also mirrors in some way the work of the painting as it might have hung in the Royal Academy in 1861, an institution that was both an arbiter and a symbol of social (and moral) refinement. The painting and the bodies it depicts were both commodities, shaped by the fluctuations and tastes of the market. It is startling: not only would viewers in front of this painting stand almost opposite the buyers and the auctioneers; their movements in looking — conferring with each other perhaps, heads angled to examine some aspect in more detail —  would have also mirrored the actions of the buyers. The painting stands in for the bodies of the enslaved and the Royal Academy for the slave market; in both cases, there is intersection of an aesthetic and erotic economy with an economy of labor and capital. Critics who saw Crowe’s painting in 1861 were generally positive and responded well to its emotional appeal. However, the limited definitions of what constituted fine art and what constituted acceptable subjects for the Royal Academy in Britain at the time were difficult boundaries to negotiate. While slavery was a topic of popular illustration and the graphic arts, transforming it into painting required a different sensibility altogether. Critics, McInnis argues, wanted to be “touched but not pained.”111 Crowe’s authority as someone who had visited the scene seemed to help in this regard, for critics felt the painting’s veracity could be read in the careful, detailed figuration. As one critic wrote in the Examiner, “It secures sympathy without being the work of a dull transcriber.”112 Crowe’s depiction of this liminal space — the waiting room — might have presented a more palatable version of the trade than spectacular scenes of auction blocks. But in positioning viewers almost in correspondence with the buyers, he brings the entanglements of aesthetics with the structures of racial capitalism — slavery, imperialism — into full view.113 As art viewers reveal their refinement through their tasteful viewership, they also become consumers and active participants in a circuit of commodification that underpinned the political and cultural economy of Britain.

Patterns of Trade  ·  In making this reading, I am positioning Crowe’s painting against, and also within, a network of spatialized relations mediated by cotton. From this standpoint, we might read this painting as the underlayer to those polite private spaces I described earlier. In those parlors and estates, conceptions of taste and civility, materialized by the fetishism of colonial commodities, became bound up with the rhetoric of liberal progress and free enterprise, that were in turn brought to life in public spaces like Market Aesthetics

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Figure 2.17  ·  Joseph Nash (1808 – 1878), Machinery, 1851. Color lithograph. In Dickinsons’ Comprehensive Pictures of the Great Exhibition of 1851, 1854. Private Collection. The Stapleton Collection/Bridgeman Images. Figure 2.18 · Joseph Nash (1808  –  1878), Cotton, Carriages. Color lithograph. In Dickinsons’ Comprehensive Pictures of the Great Exhibition of 1851, 1854. © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved/Bridgeman Images.

World’s Industrial Fairs. Just a decade earlier, in 1851, the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations was constructed in the emporium-­ like surroundings of London’s Crystal Palace. Here another market scene, not disconnected from that depicted by Crowe, was materialized through a panoply of commodities.114 While Barfoot illustrated cotton’s progress from raw material to finished product, at the Exhibition samples and finished goods were used to demonstrate its progress and materialize the benefits of industrialization and commerce. Britain was positioned as a “workshop to the world” and Manchester as the center of its production.115 At the Great Exhibition, discourses on trade by men like Edward Baines and Andrew Ure and the mechanization of industry illustrated by artists like J. R. Barfoot were brought to life (figures 2.17 and 2.18). Such displays reinforced Britain’s imperial power through its appropriation of space by the manufacture of commodities while also projecting a liberal economic vision of the market that celebrated industries that relied on slavery for their fundamental raw material.116 These narrative descriptions of trade traced the transformation of raw material into manufactured goods, while they simply could not describe the enslaved body. Crowe visualizes exactly what they cannot, which is that enslaved Africans were neither raw material nor manufacture, but both labor and commodity.117 A painting like Crowe’s animates the intimacies and the entanglements of British ideologies of liberal nationalism with the colonial commerce of slavery. It reveals the racial capitalism at the heart of the British Empire and Western modernity. It was precisely the entanglement between the local and the global that abolitionists also reiterated. For abolitionists like Henry Highland Garnet, the solution to ending slavery was to boycott American cotton altogether and develop alternative sources in West Africa and Jamaica. He argued that producing cotton by free labor was, ultimately, cheaper than producing it through slavery.118 Abolitionists also materialized the workings and movements of trade through another relationship of correspondence. As we saw in chapter 1, Garnet and others used the language of the market — a language evoked in Crowe’s sketch and his painting — to illustrate the way British consumption and American slavery mutually constituted each other. Constructing what we might call a moral economy of cotton, they showed their audiences how to read another kind of value in the production of cotton cloth. By foregrounding how human labor and human bodies were translated into monetary value in the circulation of cotton, they inserted their audiences — as consumers — into this network of commerce. Crowe’s careful composition insinuates the viewer into the market dynamics taking place on the canvas, mirroring this abolitionist position, one Market Aesthetics

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Figure 2.19 Cheap cylinder print manufactured by Messrs. Devas, Minchener, and Routledge. Journal of Design and Manufactures, September 1851. Courtesy of the Winterthur Library, Printed Book and Periodical Collection, Winterthur, DE.

that foregrounded the symbiotic relationship created by commerce between British constructions of progress, taste, and aesthetics and the horrors of slavery. It is a viewing position that leads us back to the politics of pattern with which I began this chapter. In the circuit of commodification connecting African slaves and cotton, patterns narrate moments of entanglement emerging from the competing desires of consumer and manufacturer. At the Crystal Palace Exhibition, while patterns became another illustration of the connective threads of the market, they also brought together the aesthetics of ornament and the economics of value, revealing themselves to be politicized objects in Victorian debates around the social meanings of art, design, and taste in Britain.119 Disassociating the British cotton industry from the implications of its global sources of raw material, the exhibition celebrated the innovation of British manufacture including for its imitation and appropriation of Chapter two

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Indian-­made cotton goods. Examples of British-­made, often Lancaster-­or Manchester-­produced patterned cloth were displayed to educate viewers on the advances of British textile manufacture and to raise the aesthetic sensibilities of the lower and middle classes. Raising the standard of design and the standard of consumers’ taste was very much connected to constructions of British national progress and links between character, class, and cultural sensibility. It also had something to do with the changing legibility of printed cotton itself. Whereas calico had once been a symbol of status and careful choice, by the second quarter of the nineteenth century calico was now the name given to mass-­produced, cheap cotton cloth, and was associated with changeable fashion and novelty. Its production reflected manufacturers’ continual search for new and more attractive designs to meet the demands of the market, while its price made it readily available across the social strata.120 A cotton sample illustrating a “cheap cylinder print” was included in the September 31, 1851, issue of the Journal of Design and Manufactures (figure 2.19), a publication that circulated between 1849 and 1852 with the aim of improving British industrial design and educating public taste.121 With its simple floral design and bright color, its clear distinction between background and foreground, and its lack of naturalistic detail, the pattern was apparently suited to the less sophisticated, easily changeable tastes of its working-­class consumers.122 In its monthly review of patterns shown at the Great Exhibition, the Journal of Design and Manufactures described another sample by the well-­known Manchester firm Schwabe, Salis and Company (figure 2.20). It was made “expressly for a foreign market and belong[s] to the class of cheap goods exported to suit dark skinned purchasers. The Negro and Indian taste for colour is too well known to need much comment nor are we at all disposed to condemn it since it must be evident to any one who has considered the subject that the dark complexioned races can bear far greater fullness of colour in their garments than is suitable for the delicacy of the European complexion.”123 The Journal of Design and Manufactures, as did the Great Exhibition, used patterns to categorize and make legible forms of social and national difference. From cheap cylinder prints for the working class to prints for overseas consumers such as those made for Brazil, the Journal outlined and reinforced a relationship between design, pattern, and skin color.124 This correlation reflected wider discourses. For example, in his lecture Calico Printing as an Art Manufacture, the printer Edmund Potter describes a “negro print” of indigo stripes, perhaps similar to a strip-­woven cloth sample held in the Smithsonian (figure 2.21), as the “lowest specimen of printing and art manufacture I have been able to obtain.” Despite its primitiveness, Potter nevertheless Market Aesthetics

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Figure 2.20 Print for Brazil. Journal of Design and Manufactures, March 1850. Courtesy of the Winterthur Library, Printed Book and Periodical Collection, Winterthur, DE.

points out that to cultivate successful trade relations, British merchants must supply the African trader “with something as near as possible to his own production.”125 Potter’s description of this trade textile coincides with other ethnographic discourses such as Owen Jones’s Grammar of Ornament. Such texts emphasized the ethnographic importance of non-­Western objects for understanding human difference through modes of production and the aesthetics of design. But their ethnographic meaning had a commercial significance, too, for they gave (European) designers the raw material that they could translate (through imitation) into salable commodities.126 We can see in these politics of pattern how, by the middle of the nineteenth century, histories of design and ornament coalesced with pseudoscientific theories of racial difference. Patterns informed a mode of seeing that emphasized surface readings; theories of racial difference also emphasized this mode of seeing, connecting surface-­level traits to immutable difference.127 In the context of patterned cloth’s use as currency for enslaved Africans, this added layer of meaning around pattern becomes particularly Chapter two

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Figure 2.21 · Strip-­woven cotton cloth, Cape Palmas, Liberia, collected by R. R. Gurley, ca. 1867. 107 × 68.8 cm (42⅛ × 27⅛ in.). e4496a, Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Photograph by James Di Loreto and Kate D. Sherwood.

significant. In these discourses, pattern is used to create a commensurability between vision and the surface of Black skin as if to reinforce an economy of vision in which seeing is equated with knowing. This relationship is powerfully portrayed in the slave-­auction scene of another British abolitionist, artist Lefevre James Cranstone (1822  –  1893), who painted Slave Auction, Virginia (figure 2.22) after visiting the United States in 1859  –  1860. Cranstone’s painting foregrounds a material relationship between the aesthetics of pattern and the commercial value of enslaved African Americans. We are shown the workings of a slave auction, with activity taking place across the canvas. A woman being sold stands on an auction block wearing a green and gold thickly striped dress. The mother with a child facing us is shown in a bright dress of orange and pink stripes interspersed with purple and green dots. Across from her sits another woman who wears a long, vertically striped yellow, green, and white dress. Only the woman farthest to the right is shown in something different: her upper body is covered in a horizontal arrangement of purple, gray, and green stripes.128 In a reconfiguration of Brunias’s market scenes, Cranstone uses color and pattern to draw us through the painting and its various transactions. The range of patterns foregrounds the range of individuals on sale and the varying shades of skin tone. Reflecting on the scene, the artist wrote: “Here is every shade of complexion. . . . Black field hands, yellow beauties, stout fellows; if the buyer wishes bright eyed, smooth of skin, supple of form, full chested, clean limbed creatures, culinary prodigies, deft temptresses, deMarket Aesthetics

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Figure 2.22 · Lefevre James Cranstone (1822  –  1893), Slave Auction, Virginia, 1861. Oil on canvas, 29.8 × 49.53 cm (11¾ × 19½ in.). Virginia Historical Society, Richmond.

lightful washerwomen, charioteers, unrivalled, the very treasures of Christianity; the only adequate components of Virginian wealth and enterprise.”129 In a description that evokes the aestheticization of Olmsted’s observations on a southern plantation, Cranstone reveals the libidinous economy of the slave market in the desirability of these Black women. They are desired for their labor, for their sexuality, and for their materialization of a slave owner’s status. From the vivid pinks and maroons of the two slave women in the center to the thick stripes and patterns, the red madras-­style handkerchiefs, and the bright head wraps, Cranstone is careful to show how Black people were dressed to catch a buyer’s fancy. His painting emphasizes color and pattern; perhaps having recently been greased by the slave traders, as was often done before slaves were put up for sale, Cranstone’s Black figures shine in a way that draws our attention, like that of the buyers, to the surface of their bodies.130 Patterned cloth enhanced the value of Black people awaiting sale by making them more appealing. By reinforcing racial difference, it also transformed Blackness into a readable surface. My attention to the surface is indebted to Krista Thompson’s expansive study of light, sheen, and shine in the Black diaspora and her consideration of John Berger’s idea of surfacism — a way of seeing bound up with the market economy.131 In Cranstone’s painting we see this as Black women are produced for assessment, inspection, and fondling. Chapter two

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In the slave market, surface appearances were everything, for the visual appeal of enslaved people needed to occlude and deflect any potential impediments to purchase — scars or imperfections, for example. Their appearance had to create a veneer of health and pliancy that could be reflected — and read — on the surface of their skin. Patterned textiles bolstered the surface appearance of enslaved people by forming another layer of this veneer, while validating for buyers the visual and commercial value of Blackness. But surfacism also reinforces the objectification of these women: their visual appeal heightened their legibility as commodities. Here visually defined as property, they are also sealed into a “crushing objecthood.”132 This crushing objecthood brings us back to Crowe’s quiet scene. His figures are dressed neatly, their head wraps and pinafores, gold earrings, and red bows recalling Janet Schaw’s picturesque descriptions or even Brunias’s market scenes. Using gradations of color and chiaroscuro, Crowe has been careful to emphasize folds and ruffles, as if to show us how this clothing takes form around the bodies encased within it. While the dull tones of the buyers fade into the background of the painting, the group of Black women and men emerge from the canvas. Crowe’s handling of texture and color draws focus to the relationship between fabric and form in a way that challenges the readability of these figures. It is true that the colors and patterns may have been readable to viewers as those associated with the “tastes” of Black consumers. However, the careful detailing of texture — we notice the folds of the head wraps, the ruffled sleeves and gathered waists, the creased skirts, the lined trouser legs — returns us to the material effects of fabric and the body itself. There is an emphasis on constraint here that is particularly apparent in the figure of the Black man. He scowls with his arms crossed, and he sits apart from the rest of the group as if to show his defiance, asserting a form of self-­expression that most depictions of enslaved figures and slave markets did not show. Across from this man, the turbaned woman at the far left seems to have little interest in the proceedings; her dejection is a counterbalance to his emotional features. The two women — one with a yellow turban and another sitting nearest the man — looking at the white buyers at the door are perhaps trying to decide how to present themselves and so assert some control over their surroundings. As Walter Johnson has shown, through looks, actions, and gestures, slaves could and did express their feelings about proceedings.133 These assertions of the body are not merely a matter of agency, and I do not wish to propose the facile argument that in highlighting such forms of agency we return Black people’s humanity to the issue of slavery (as if it were slave owners’ misrecogMarket Aesthetics

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nition of this that somehow led them to enslave Black people in the first place). No, my reading of negro cloth in chapter 1 shows — quite clearly — that slave owners understood the shared humanity of the enslaved, even as they perpetuated the violence of slavery. But this moment does suggest something of the way enslaved people refused the structures of commodification that undergirded these processes. The familial group in the center of Crowe’s painting — a mother nursing her infant, with a slightly older boy seated next to her — plays deliberately on abolitionist sentiments concerning slavery and its separation of families. Yet, while flagging the horror of separation, these three figures remind us of the forms of kinship and connection that enslaved people could create and deploy. The bodily expressions of the women assert forms of connection among each other that serve as a categorical rejection of the terms of their commodification and status as chattel.134 In such moments enslaved African Americans refused to be legible, refused to become a surface from which value could be read, and refused to mediate the fulfilment of white desire.

A Market Imaginary  ·  We often talk of empire and its networks in similes. Imperialism is like a wheel, a center from which many spokes circulate outward. It is like a center attached to a periphery. In this sense, Agostino Brunias’s market scenes are an evocative illustration of the circulations of this imperial imaginary. But perhaps another simile might be in order, for as we have seen, British imperialists also envisaged their empire to be like a market, connected by a supply chain of commerce and manufacture. Here, then, we return to Manchester, which as the hub of British textile production was at the center of these connections.135 When the historian and writer Henry Adams visited Manchester in February 1861, he was taken to a large warehouse for printed goods, which included a library of print samples and cotton fibers. This library, he recorded in his diary, “furnished a volume of human nature. . . . In one book were . . . sober patterns for India; a third and fourth contained the tastes of South America and Africa.”136 In September 1851, the Journal of Design and Manufactures included a Turkey red chintz design by the Glaswegian company Stirling and Sons (figure 2.23). The entry describes it as “a class of goods chiefly produced for the Indian market, it presents the natives with repetitions of their ancient designs at moderate prices.”137 No longer an exporter of raw cotton, India, by the mid-­ nineteenth century, had become an importer of British mass-­produced cotton cloth.138 Here we see firsthand the ideal that Edmund Potter advocated Chapter two

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Figure 2.23 Turkey red Swiss chintz velvet print. Journal of Design and Manufactures, September 1851. Courtesy of Winterthur Library, Printed Book and Periodical Collection, Winterthur, DE.

of creating “something as near as possible to [their] own production” to meet market demand. 139 Patterns were a mode of translation that revolved around an act of reading: drawing on local knowledge and local designs, British designers had to produce new patterns that would better meet consumers’ tastes at home and abroad, and thereby solidify British imperial concerns. The Journal stressed the vagaries of the market and advocated for well-­ made designs as a means to control these fluctuations in demand and produce a more refined (domestic) consumer. But the colonial imperative of these commercial relations could also be ameliorated by the language of aesthetics: designers and colonial officials spoke of seeking to educate and raise the aesthetic standards of non-­Western buyers by making incremental adjustments in the composition of the patterns they produced for export.140 As the editors wrote in 1850, “It has been a source of much satisfaction to us to Market Aesthetics

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Figure 2.24 William Griggs (1832  –  1911), plate no. 973. Color illustration of cotton textile sample, 35 × 45 cm (13¾ × 1711/16 in.). In John Forbes Watson, Collection of Specimens and Illustrations of the Textile Manufactures of India, vol. 9, 1873. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Thomas J. Watson Library (ts1403 .w38 1873), New York. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY.

observe, that from year to year not only in the goods manufactured for our own markets but also in those prepared expressly for exportation, a decided improvement in design is apparent.”141 The commercial possibilities associated with the imitation of design that I am describing here began with the currency of cotton used to buy and sell Black Africans. In the mid-­nineteenth century, these strategies were reused to consolidate British interests in South Asia, which — once a supplier of raw cotton — had become a principal market for British exports. This commercial interest underpinned John Forbes Watson’s effort to survey, collect, and publish an encylopedic collection of textile samples from India.142 Intended as a textile index (figure 2.24), it aimed to clarify and communicate the commercial and aesthetic needs of Indian consumers to British designers.143 Watson’s Chapter two

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eighteen-­volume set of fabric samples compiled from 1873 to 1880 contained samples of South Asian textiles — cotton, wool, and silk — selected from collections of the India Museum (assembled by the East India Company) and the South Kensington Museum. It was aimed at educating British manufacturers in the types, patterns, and uses of cloth, with the idea that they could emulate and export these materials. The volumes mapped out the regions of India according to their production and consumption of cloth. Watson envisaged that the samples could then be imitated by British manufacturers. The act of translation involved in reading, absorbing, and producing these patterns emerges in the convergence of “native” tastes and British perceptions of those tastes. As they produced patterned cloth for an expanded market, British manufacturers produced textile designs that were effectively hybrid forms. Perhaps we might read this as a reversal of Homi Bhabha’s notion of hybridity as it emerges from postcolonial subjects’ mimicry of colonial forms.144 Created through the conflation of non-­Western tastes and British perceptions about the needs of their colonial subjects, their hybridity, or the hybridity these sources signify in their textile descriptions, is another form of commodification. These descriptions and codifications of pattern highlight the conflation of a number of different concerns that have been running through this chapter. On the one hand, they reveal the uneasy relationship between industrial and aesthetic innovation. When parsed through the discursive formulations of taste and refinement by intellectual elites — being able to appreciate quality (goods, art, fashion), the importance of originality versus the vagaries of market demand — these tensions could be subsumed into a rhetoric of national progress as it was disseminated among a broader public. On the other hand, because these patterns materialize the entanglements of slavery, colonialism, and British social life, we see how this emphasis on taste was also a way to reinscribe racial and national difference, thereby eliding the material implications of market connections. What these samples and paintings also show us is that cotton shaped the construction of imagined geographies in nineteenth-­century Britain.145 Henry Adams’s experiences in Manchester, Watson’s index of textiles, and the Journal of Design and Manufactures reveal how the globalizing market for English printed cottons presented British designers and manufacturers with a mode of visualizing people and places through the aesthetics of design. If we think of these textiles as transnational spaces themselves, materializing a complex network of connections between the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, we need to also understand how these conceptions emerge from a set of abstract relations between bodies, market, and consumption. The function of Market Aesthetics

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printed cotton in the slave market, where it visually transforms people into products, informs its use to symbolize empire as a mutually beneficial commercial enterprise. I have focused on market scenes and the relationship they evoke between pattern and enslaved African people because it allows us to address the centrality of slavery to the global network of trade formed by cotton production. While I applaud the ways commodity histories, with their expansive view of historical modes of connection, have influenced a global turn in the field of art history, I am also aware that these new forms of inquiry can sometimes emphasize the networks of empire as avenues of anticolonial agency without fully addressing the commodification of Black lives that underpinned colonial consumption and forms of production. We need to keep in view, in other words, the racial capitalism that underpins the aesthetic, institutional, and material pasts of art history itself. Centralizing slavery within these networks of imperial production provides an important viewpoint. It shows how the possibilities of resistance materialized through the intimacies of colonial commerce are also embedded in its violent elisions. Importantly, then, as the global turn in art history often focuses on the global circuits of colonialism, we need to keep in view that the relational possibilities of colonial commerce — and the art histories and institutions it has, and can, give rise to — were embedded in the circulation and commodification of enslaved Africans. To look relationally, to see how one aspect is dependent on another, reveals both the tragedy at the heart of any historical constructions of a global imaginary and the speculative possibilities that histories of imperialism present. It is these relational politics that Lubaina Himid also draws on as she works through the entanglements of Blackness, textiles, and value. From these entanglements we can see how commerce and aesthetics intersected to shape ideas around, and project images of, non-­Western bodies in the first half of the nineteenth century. To argue that we cannot view the market for textiles without understanding the other markets they illustrate is to emphasize historical forms of confluence and the intimacies and interdependencies created through circuits of production and consumption that are often absent from the official record. As Lisa Lowe has so emphatically argued, by examining the material conditions of textile production, artistic production, and people as property, we can address these relationships. We can work through them, not necessarily to fill in the gaps, but to understand how and what these absences make possible.146 The intimacies between slave markets, textile production, and colonial markets also reorient the global imaginary that J. R. Barfoot depicts, or the Chapter two

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supply-­chain model of the Great Exhibition. What can it mean for us, now, to see how imperial networks were shaped not just by colonial administrators and their commerce, but also by the consumption, commodification, and commerce of the colonized? Inserting these different, and overlapping, networks into this chapter — of Indian Ocean trade and Atlantic Ocean consumption — I have tried to foreground their significance to the ways we think of colonialism as a form of global connection. I have attempted to show how imperialism took shape around the lives of those whose labor it abstracted. Attending to these navigations provides one way of excavating the speculative kinships that were imagined or constructed between those whose experiences were unduly and brutally affected by the moves and operations of colonial commerce. Speculative kinships is what drew Himid to this project. Materializing the connections between factory operatives and enslaved cotton pickers offers a different viewpoint from which to construct and engage with historical documents and sources. It requires a method of historical excavation that moves beyond working through the categorizations and boundaries of archives. Cotton.com is itself a form of speculation, for it must work with and through the absences of the archive. As Himid has explained, “The point I am often exploring vis-­à-­vis the Black experience is that of being so very visible and different in the White Western everyday yet so invisible and disregarded in the cultural, historical, political or economic record or history.”147 So, Cotton.com is constructed through, and works with, the visual absence that Saidiya Hartman has shown rests in archival constructions of slavery.148 Himid’s concern here is how to respond, materialize, and resituate these incomplete histories in the present. In Cotton.com, words and images mark geographical contours, and between them stands the viewer, who is left to plot a dynamic web of exchange and correspondence from the arrangement of intersecting commercial relationships and patterns of trade across the Atlantic. Drawing on archival memory, the work re-­creates a space of dialogue for the unseen bodies enmeshed in the networks; triangulating the exploitations of enslavement and factory labor with the wealth of Manchester’s cotton industrialists. In different ways, all of these actors shaped the city itself. Himid therefore finds a way of resituating the present: she returns the absent narratives and networks of exchange and association that connected people and regions in the nineteenth-­century Atlantic world back to Manchester’s urban landscape. Cotton.com’s first iteration in Manchester materialized a new landscape for the city, formed from the topography of Manchester’s textile production and its reliance on the exploitation of enslaved Black Americans. Cotton.com reMarket Aesthetics

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vealed an alternative, subterranean geography of industrialization by excavating what was hidden beneath the nation’s foundations and what lay beneath the city’s landmarks. As part of the 2002 exhibition Fabrications, this piece worked through the structuring logic of absence in the city’s organization and in the organization of public memory. Foregrounding materiality is a way to wrestle with absent histories and their implications; it literally fills in the gaps. In challenging constructions of global history that do not focus on the local manifestations of global commerce, Himid’s excavation of hidden histories is not just about a form of historical truth-­telling. As one of the leading British artists of her generation, she has long been working to make space for the artistic work, and the presence, of Black women in Britain and within the art world more broadly. It is significant, then, that Cotton.com centralizes the experience of an unnamed Black woman in her work. She not only underscores her commodification within the network of trade mapped here, but she also shows how this process materializes the visual logic of the economics of slavery. Furthermore, by working through Himid’s own speculative imaginings, we are directed toward the speculative logic that connects the aesthetic registers of artistic production with the transactional dynamics of the market. What holds this piece together, beyond the material of cotton itself, is the logic of the racialized gaze. In the case of the unnamed Black woman, to be seen was to be misunderstood, to have her body filtered through layers of imagery, all of which served to re-­present her physical form. In this circuit of re-­presentation, what is missed is her labor; her exhausted body becomes merely a codified image formed for the pleasure of a viewer’s eyes. It is significant that this moment of abstraction disguised as aestheticization faces off with the carefully painted canvases. On these carefully painted canvases, Himid inserts her own body. The task she set herself — painting one hundred canvases — involved close scrutiny. They are rather like specimens in their size and layout, and Himid spent long hours peering at textile specimens so she could copy them. The painting itself required a high degree of accuracy. Each pattern had to be original; nothing could be repeated. The painted lines, checks, and dots are closely detailed; they do not bleed into each other or stray; they are technical in their formation: like a printed pattern itself. The canvases include a range of designs and motifs: stripes and checks, but also bows, buttons, loops, chains, globes, diamonds, rays of light, wheels, and shells. These canvases mirror the repetitious work of enslaved cotton pickers and factory operatives. And, as traces of Himid’s work, they are also documents of her own laborious performance. In Cotton.com there is, then, a continual emphasis on material presence. The cotton of the canvas, the brass of the plaque, which is shiny and metallic Chapter two

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Figure 2.25 · Lubaina Himid (b. 1954), Naming the Money, 2004. 100 cut-­out figures, acrylic paint on wood. Courtesy of the artist, Hollybush Gardens, and National Museums Liverpool, International Slavery Museum. Image courtesy of Stuart Whipps and Spike Island.

and the site of the work’s subject, evoke the glassy finished surfaces of conversation pieces of the past, in which precious and exotic objects and people are featured as material emblems of white British wealth. While eighteenth-­ century conversation pieces depict Black figures, those figures are shown as little more than objects, even as their labor underpins the wealth and status of the white families they serve. These paintings that hide Blackness in plain sight mirror the art-­historical canon more broadly in their silencing of Black subjects. As such, they contribute to an important extent to the production of a national history that downplays its reliance on the institution of slavery. Cotton.com overturns past conventions and disrupts their foundations. The figure of the unnamed woman, whom we are encouraged to imagine through romanticized fantasies of art-­historical peasants, illustrates how art functions as a form of veiling. What can be seen, to be remembered? What can be seen, to be forgotten? In another work, Naming the Money (figure 2.25), Himid made one hundred life-­size cut-­out figures. Each was shown representing an activity that enslaved Africans may have undertaken. Dressed in colorful patterned garMarket Aesthetics

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ments, each figure had a small piece of paper affixed to their back, a page from an accounting ledger, a balance sheet with its transactional columns still legible. On these sheets, Himid had written short autobiographical poems that described the figures’ birth names, occupations, and new anglicized names imposed after enslavement. These small labels, like the speech act in Cotton.com, are sites of individual memory and agency. They describe the figures’ reclamation of subjectivity while also bearing witness to their subjection under slavery. At the first installation of Naming the Money, in Newcastle-­upon-­Tyne, viewers walked into a room where they stood silent while they listened to a looped soundtrack of Himid reading out the poem for each figure. Pointing out the profit-­driven nature of slavery and abolition —  the trade in people only stopped because profits decreased — Himid reverses the visual accounting of enslavement that both Eyre Crowe and Lefevre Cranstone depict. Here enslaved men and women reclaim their labor as expressions of their individuality, not as expressions of their potential. In later iterations the figures were installed in other museums, including in the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2007 to commemorate the abolition of slavery. Posed within rooms that were staged to represent historical parlors and libraries, forming a presence alongside the paintings, furniture, and decorative arts of wealthy British families, Himid’s figures vividly materialized British reliance on the trade in bodies, sugar, cotton, and tobacco. Their presence not only foregrounded the absence of slavery from the official institutional histories and displays; it showed how this forgetting was veiled even as its material presence permeated the museum. The continued significance of Cotton.com lies precisely in this tension between the invisibility of certain histories and their ongoing concealment through public acts of memory. Asserting the traces of handwork and labor through her carefully organized canvases, Himid inserts them into the public eye and returns them to a national landscape that is marked by the legacies of exploitation and commodification. It is not simply that the histories behind that heritage are silenced, or absent, from constructions of nationhood. Himid’s broader point is that their absence is not merely forgotten; it is concealed by the nature of public discourse and the formation of public history. The unnamed, unseen woman in Cotton.com visualizes this in a number of ways. Her presence can only be called up by artistic conventions that work to objectify and idealize certain bodies. These conventions, in turn, shape the ways we view and locate historical subjects. And the historical elisions inform and are reinforced in the construction of art-­historical canons whose relationship to the framing of public histories continues to influence

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the ways art and nationalism intersect. In its interrogation of public memory and its construction, Cotton.com also raises questions about whose voices and whose faces we hear and see. In the exhibition Fabrications, for example, Himid was the only Black woman asked to participate. Her choice to center the voice of a Black woman — as a representative of the labor of other unseen Black women and as the figure who, in speaking back, imagines an alternative terrain of historical experience — is significant in a number of ways. Not only does it document the unseen labor of Black women and its centrality to the city of Manchester; her invisibility also mirrors Himid’s own experiences within the art world, in which Black women have been perpetually sidelined, ignored, or tokenized. This absence structures the construction of public memory and maintains the disparity within contemporary art worlds where Black women are silenced, or only called on to speak on behalf of those who cannot be seen. Thus Cotton.com reveals how these erasures, even when concealed, are needed to form part of the narrative itself. Himid does not provide space for us to feel along with the unnamed woman, or to empathize with her suffering. Cotton.com is an act of space-­ making that creates a dialogue between unseen historical Black women’s labor and the unseen labor of Black women now. For Himid, this correlation in particular sheds further light on the marginalization of Black women artists. The struggle to be seen as an artist, to be respected as a creative agent, certainly shares something with the experience of the unnamed woman, who can only ever be mis-­seen.149 In giving the unnamed woman a voice, Himid also carefully avoids returning us to the physical body of this Black woman and of her own, thus obviating the need for a Black body to stand in and bear the weight of its representation. This refusal of the figure has particular significance in regard to the work’s digital handle, Cotton.com, which, in our contemporary context, evokes the increasingly visible presence of Black lives and their objectification in new ways. The proliferation of images of Black women circulated across various social media platforms often cruelly reinforces their continued invisibility and the ongoing violence they face. We have seen this most recently in the senseless murder of Breonna Taylor by members of the Louisville Metro Police Department. We see it too in the less-­publicized violence that is increasingly directed against Black trans women. Black women are overworked and underpaid in American society; their bodies have supported the development of medical knowledge, even as they have been routinely ignored by health professionals.150 Cotton .com powerfully reveals this dialectic of “callous neglect and corporeal sur-

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veillance” while reinforcing the urgency of hashtags such as #SayHerName and social movements that work to materially counter this violent erasure of Black women in public and digital life.151 Using pattern as a mode of connection and a materialization of the traces of those who are forgotten is a powerful disruption of the circuits of silencing and objectification, circuits that rely on the dispossession and dislocation of Black lives. The pattern here materializes these lives as traces, registered visually in paint. As a result, the patterns materialize a certain kind of relationality, a form of dialogue. They connote a form of language, which to decipher requires a visual (and historical) literacy. It is poetic in its form, laborious in its organization, and striking in its effects. It consists of layered meanings: it requires working from the ground up and working through various modes of symbolism. It relies on a certain kind of hypervisibility that adapts and transforms circulating visual codes and registers. As canvases displayed to create a sense of digital communication, this language of pattern also mimics the coded language of emails or texts, the hyperlinks and emoticons by which meanings and alliances are transmitted. Such digital modes of communication remain crucial to the organizing of #Black LivesMatter protests — for example, in response to ongoing police murders of men and women, such as Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor. While historically cotton’s circulation and its patterned communication relied on the elision of Black lives to create a global network, Himid’s work disrupts that logic. She pauses those global histories of connection shaped by cotton in order to draw out what they obscure. Not only does she make space for invisible lives, she reimagines alternative forms of connection forged from the overload of violent histories and their persistence in anti-­Black legacies. Her work trades on a different kind of speculative logic as these patterns materialize the radical imaginaries of Black people and their allies, based on the material traces of their labor and lives, in forging new platforms of solidarity and new forms of visibility that resist the objectification and extraction of Black lives and labor in the service of so-­called global forms of connection.

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Of Vision and Value Landscape and Labor after Slavery

The Sharecropper  ·  The artwork with which I began this book, Black Hands, White Cotton by Hank Willis Thomas, draws its symbolic and visual power from the histories that it unravels. It draws on tropes, on a way of seeing that seems to go without saying, in which color, form, and function — Black hands holding white cotton — each inform the meaning of the other. The image is deeply evocative, it tells a story about Blackness in the United States that appears to require no words, and this is exactly the point. By foregrounding the appearance of meaning, the artist also foregrounds the problematic connection between Blackness and visuality: “the expectation that signs of Blackness are transparent renderings of Black bodies and lives.”1 This expectation stems from the ways the value of Black lives, under slavery, was read and visualized on the surface of individual bodies. This valuation was mediated by cotton, both in its exchangeability with Black lives and the ways it could materialize those lives as commodities. Thomas’s print foregrounds a reality in which “the visuality of the Black body is always already flickering between the human form and the commodity form.”2 He locates us within a circuit of referentiality: a twenty-­first-­century image that resembles imagery from the nineteenth century depicting the economic equivalence between what were once two commodities. In this way the image’s iconicity also foregrounds the logic of exchangeability that is tied up with the corporealization of Black lives.

This is reinforced, somewhat, by the fact that Thomas has adapted a historical photograph to turn it into a Carborundum print, a process he developed with printmaker Erik Hougen from the Lower East Side Printshop. This style of printmaking involves the creation of an image directly on the plate and then applying an abrasive grit (Carborundum).3 As Thomas explains, this gives the print a fragile texture — almost like sand — while amplifying its coloration so that it sparkles in the light.4 The photograph was used on the record sleeve for a song called “Black Hands, White Cotton,” written and performed by the band Butterscotch Caboose (also called The Caboose).5 Thomas found an advertisement for the record, with the image, in the August 1970 issue of Cash Box magazine. In the song, the lead singer ventriloquizes the voice of a “field worker” as he describes a Black man’s prayers during a drought, in the context of changing racial relations in the South. The song also includes recognizable phrases — “Glory, glory, Hallelujah!” —  from the army marching song, written by Julia Ward Howe, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” (popular in the postwar South).6 Described as a “pop group with possibilities” by Billboard magazine in 1971, in their style of music The Caboose seems to express admiration for the musical forms of the blues and funk and sympathy for exploited Black workers.7 Listening now, however, this particular song, which only made it to No. 79 on the charts, sounds like a glib satire or caricature of Gospel music. The white singer, attempting to imitate the voice of a Black sharecropper (it is clear from the video footage that the lead singer is attempting to “sound” Black) through style and lyrics, fetishizes Blackness and, more specifically, Black labor. White creativity emerges here through the extraction of Black labor, a relationship of commodification that the song mirrors in its celebration of the Black sharecropper, a figure whose hypervisibility in postbellum American visual culture I turn to in this chapter. The abraded yet polished surface created by the Carborundum process activates this precarious history. As with so many of Thomas’s archival adaptations, the referentiality of Black Hands, White Cotton challenges, rather than reiterates, the visual economy in which Black life appears, as always, commodified. Its materiality offers another viewing position from which we can imagine other histories of, and for, Blackness. Drawing on Hank Willis Thomas’s framing, this chapter focuses on the relationship of vision, value, and labor signified by the Black sharecropper in the aftermath of emancipation and the end of the American Civil War. The sheer magnitude of images depicting Black sharecroppers remind us, among other things, of the ongoing significance of cotton, as commodity and symbol, both during and after the Civil War. In disassembling this visual economy, I trace both how cotton Chapter three

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framed speculative conceptions of Black freedom and the ways Black Americans used these projections to assert their value as subjects, not as objects of speculation. We begin with the “rehearsal for Reconstruction” in Port Royal, South Carolina, where photographic representations of plantation labor were read as “rehearsals” for freedom.8 Then I turn to the circulation of these photographic constructions across print media and painting to examine how the figure of the Black sharecropper was used to mediate anxious constructions of whiteness, masculinity, and citizenship in the postbellum era. My chapter responds to these optics with a rereading of the Port Royal photographs, tracing how they can articulate alternative geographies in response to regimes of “spatial domination.”9 As fugitive expressions of freedom, they present alternative Black futures that I connect to the projects of Black self-­determination in displays created by W. E. B. Du Bois and Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller. Finally, I offer a brief genealogy of the sharecropper in the twentieth and twenty-­first centuries. Here I reflect on Black artists’ use of this figure to rework historical conditions of visibility and spectatorship, even as the terms of the commodification of Blackness continue to shift in our contemporary moment.

The Occupied Plantation  ·  “W’en gun fust shoot on Hilton Head Island, I been 22 year old,” Lucretia Heyward explained to a wpa interviewer, Chlotilde R. Martin.10 At ninety-­six, she was recalling events that had taken place some sixty years before on Hilton Head, one of the South Carolina Sea Islands and onetime capital of the Union-­occupied South.11 The gunshots she heard took place on the morning of November 7, 1861. Union warships gathered at the mouth of Port Royal Sound and sailed straight on, firing first at Fort Beauregard at Bay Point, St. Phillips Island to the east, and then, to the west, at Fort Walker on Hilton Head Island. Known locally as “The Big Gun Shoot,” the Battle of Port Royal lasted only a few hours before both forts were captured. The sound of cannons signaled the time for evacuation. As enslaved people returned to the plantation house from the fields, they found white owners in flight or already gone. Nearby, on Lady’s Island, located on the opposite side of the sound from Hilton Head and just north of Port Royal, Sam Mitchell, a young enslaved man, remembered seeing his former owner, John Chapin, hurriedly return to his yard in his carriage. Ordering out the flatboats to take his family to Charleston, he demanded several of his enO f V i s i o n a n d Va l u e

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slaved workers — Sam’s father included — to row the boats. Sam recalls his mother shouting, “You ain’t gonna row no boat to Charleston, you go out dat back door and keep a-­going.” When Sam thought he heard thunder, she told him, “Son, dat ain’t no t’under, dat Yankee come to gib you Freedom.”12 Heyward described the Union invasion of Port Royal in the late fall of 1861 in a similar way: “W’en Yankee been come de Blunts leab Beaufort.”13 But Heyward and the family of Sam Mitchell decided to stay. Choosing to disregard the demands of their former owners, thousands of Black Americans chose freedom: they liberated themselves by remaining on their abandoned plantations. Not only were the Sea Islands home to many of the Confederate leaders, its plantations were profitable enterprises: since well before the Civil War, Sea Island cotton grown on the islands was a prime commodity.14 And so the occupation of the area gave the Union army control of a Confederate stronghold, the coastal waterways of the southeastern coast, and access to its agricultural resources.15 As the conquest took place about a year before Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, however, the status of Black subjects remained in limbo. Within the framework of current practice, the African Americans left on the Sea Islands were neither enslaved nor free but confiscated property of the enemy categorized as “contraband.”16 What we see of Port Royal now mostly comes to us through the gaze of those who traveled to the area: the Union army, photographers, industrialists, missionaries, and educators. As the Civil War began, northern industrialists like Edward Atkinson began promoting the idea of “free labor cotton” as an alternative to slave-­grown cotton.17 Showing that slavery was an economically unviable system because it was dependent on the price of slaves, they argued that employing free Black workers was more cost-­effective and would inculcate in them the values of hardworking free citizens. In essence, free-­market principles — the ethos of hard work — would effect a transformation, turning chattel slaves into compliant laborers and, eventually, citizens. Port Royal was then also an experiment in free labor, both in the sense of emancipation and as a political ideology. The continued cultivation of cotton, crucial to the Union campaign and its control of the area, became a strategy for instilling in Black Americans the obligations of freedom, a mode of educating them into “order, industry, economy and self-­reliance.”18 The Sea Islands and their African American inhabitants were understood, in opportunistic terms, as works in progress. Press reports documented the construction in the area of a military base while also noting the agricultural management taking place, the profits of which funded Union army maneuvers throughout the war.19 Chapter three

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The assertion that plantation work would continue as it did before, despite the war, gives us an insight into how northerners envisioned the transition from slavery to freedom. This is dutifully illustrated in an engraving titled Our Cotton Campaign in South Carolina (figure 3.1), published in the February 15, 1862, issue of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. The engraving depicts the various stages of cotton cultivation — from plantation to export — taking place on the Sea Islands. We see the various stages of work performed by Black plantation laborers, and those stages mark their progress toward becoming productive citizens, a process managed by white Union soldiers.20 These views do not show an area in which Black residents had lived for generations; they depict, as Dana Byrd has observed, an “occupied plantation.”21 The thousands of African American slaves who remained on the island outstripped the numbers of Union soldiers who had arrived. In photographs like Henry P. Moore’s (1835  –  1911) Slaves of the Rebel General Thomas F. Drayton, Hilton Head (figure 3.2), this imbalance is formatted into a more familiar relationship: that of an overseer and (his) workers.22 A bearded army officer stands to the left of a group of Black workers, looking out toward the photographer. An arrangement like this emphasizes a new relationship of, if not ownership, then supervision of Black Americans by the Union and the illustration of northern models of management. To reinforce this, the group stands in front, and some of the men perch on top, of a cotton gin as if they have been temporarily disrupted in their labor, pulled from the work of cotton cleaning and arranged for the camera. The soldier is framed by Black men and women in a variety of poses, some of whom look directly at the camera while others look preoccupied. His dark uniform stands out among the assorted clothing worn by those around him. The men are in loose trousers and shirts, the plantation “uniform.” The women wear variously textured and patterned skirts, and almost all wear handkerchiefs twisted around their heads. Behind the group we see more evidence of their working life: work buildings, tools, and wagons ready to haul the cotton away. Notice in Moore’s photograph the way the cotton is scattered around the Black women. It borders their bodies on the large mat, like flower petals, and spills onto the ground like crumbs at a picnic. Cotton lint can be seen closer to the foreground, scattered across the earth like clumps of dirt. White dust clings to some women’s dresses, and small tufts clump on the surface of clothes. These imprints of the raw fiber on the bodies of the workers materialize the visual connections depicted here between cotton cultivation and newly free Black Americans. As cotton seems to metastasize across the ground, it also overflows from a basket carefully balanced on a woman’s head O f V i s i o n a n d Va l u e

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Figure 3.1 Our Cotton Campaign in South Carolina —  gathering, ginning, packing and shipping the cotton crops of the Sea Islands, Port Royal, by the Federal Army, under General Sherman, from sketches by our special artist accompanying the expedition. Wood engraving. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, February 15, 1862. lc-­usz62-­116585 and lc-­usz62-­116586, Illus. in ap2.l52 1862 Case y, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

Figure 3.2 · Henry P. Moore (1835  –  1911), Slaves of the Rebel General Thomas F. Drayton, Hilton Head, ca. 1862  –  1863. Albumen silver print, 13 × 20.8 cm (5⅛ × 83�16 in.). 84.xm.483.25, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

in the center of the photograph. The basket may be made of coiled sweetgrass, a West African craft tradition that enslaved Africans brought with them to American plantations.23 Generally used for rice preparation, it was adapted for cotton cultivation, just as here the photograph reinforces how these free southerners were “adapting” to the demands of freedom. However, the tufts of cotton that grip tightly to the workers’ clothes and legs and arms also materialize how vestiges of slavery continued to cling to these early depictions, and perceptions, of emancipation. Other photographers, including Timothy O’ Sullivan (1840  –  1882), traveled to Port Royal and took similar group scenes.24 O’Sullivan depicts formerly enslaved African Americans in ways that reinforce their relationship to the space of the plantation (figures 3.3 and 3.4). They are dressed in a variety of styles and shown with the implements of their daily plantation life. The family grouping also has an ethnographic quality to it. Arranged, and ordered, they reveal something unique: a formerly enslaved family, intact. Unearthing plantation life, these photographs provide viewers with fragments of what once was while also encouraging speculation as to what will be. In another photograph, captioned (after the fact) Port Royal Island, S.C. African Americans preparing cotton for the gin on Smith’s Plantation (figure 3.5), Chapter three

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O’Sullivan depicts a scene of cotton preparation, locating his viewers in the role of overseer. The architecture of the buildings suggests we are in the (former) slave quarters, accentuated by the central group in the foreground, who hold our attention. The four women, with their head wraps, are seated in a vee formation amid piles of cotton fiber. The figure on the very left of the group is a blur, her actions frozen by the photograph’s exposure. The others look down and around, their attention caught by the sea of cotton and their surroundings. Cleaning cotton involved sifting and checking the fibers after the harvest was brought in from the fields. Cotton sticks to their sleeves, and it is impossible to see their hands working. But we can imagine them moving in and out across the piles, their pincer-­like fingers picking at leaves, sticks, or dirt caught in the fibers. It is possible to imagine their arms pushing through the mounds of cotton like those of a swimmer as they shuffle from one side of the square mat to the other. They are submerged in cotton. The several men sit or stand around the women, their stillness a contrast to the active work in the foreground. Two engage in conversation in front of the cabin. Its front window has a coat lying across the sill; the door stands open. This could be the ginning shed, where cotton would be cleaned again before being baled and transported off the plantation. Wearing a white shirt that reflects the brightness of the cotton, a man in a black hat looks down at the white fiber. He, along with the truncated tree stump behind him, frames and directs our view to the symbols of plantation activity, which create a dislocating temporal effect as they recall a plantation past to frame the bodies at work. This photograph remains ambiguous about the status of its subjects and their relationship to the land. Not looking back at the photographer, the people are thoroughly absorbed in their activities. In mimicking the visual dynamics of a slave plantation — wherein Black people were often barred from looking back at their white owners — the photograph heightens the sense of activity taking place and its careful surveillance. By substituting audience and photographer for the overseer, the indexicality of the photograph is authenticated through a recognizable visual register. While these figures may no longer be “property,” their visual construction as (free) workers is made legible in the relationship of labor, race, and management embedded in, and emerging out of, the plantation regime. The Black workers reveal their compliancy and usefulness through their work, while the profits of their labor signal their potential to become productive citizens. Cotton, in these photographs, is a symbol of both the capacity and potential of free Black workers. Underscoring the transition being depicted here, cotton also provides measurable proof of Black productivity, materializing how these communities might be incorporated into the nation as citizens. O f V i s i o n a n d Va l u e

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Figure 3.3 Timothy H. O’Sullivan (1840  –  1882), Beaufort, South Carolina. Negro Family Representing Several Generations. All Born on the Plantation of J. J. Smith, 1862. Glass, stereograph, wet collodion. lot 4205, Civil War photographs, 1861  –  1865, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

Figure 3.4 · Timothy H. O’Sullivan (1840  –  1882), Slaves, J. J. Smith’s Plantation, near Beaufort, South Carolina, 1862. Albumen silver print, 21.4 × 27.3 cm (87/16 × 10¾ in). 84.xm.484.39. J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

Figure 3.5 · Timothy H. O’Sullivan (1840  –  1882), Port Royal Island, S.C. African Americans Preparing Cotton for the Gin on Smith’s Plantation, 1862. Stereograph, glass, wet collodion. lc-­b811-­159 [p&p] lot 4205, Civil War photographs, 1861  –  62, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

In Moore’s photograph, cotton clumps metastasize from limbs, while cotton dust creates another epidermal layer over workers’ bodies. In O’Sullivan’s photographs, cotton is the foundation from which these women emerge. It anchors and encases them. Like the cotton they clean, these bodies are also being refined, transformed from raw material into finished products. Here, then, cotton structures and defines the corporeality of Blackness: it turns flesh into bodies and transforms Blackness into a site of white projection. In the contrast of black and white that marks these photographs’ indexicality, their truthfulness is reinforced. These shades also make the reflexivity of these photographs legible by signaling how the image came into existence as light captured on a dark surface. Similarly, in the interplay of skin and fiber O f V i s i o n a n d Va l u e

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they depict, Blackness is ontologized by white cotton to make legible and circumscribe meanings of Black freedom in the social imaginary. Photographs of the Sea Islands gave viewers an intimate portrayal of the inner workings of the (plantation) South and an intimate portrayal of slave life. Offering the impression of veracity, they depicted people who were both relics of a soon-­to-­be past and symbols of a yet-­to-­materialize future. O’Sullivan’s photographs were included in Matthew Brady’s 1862 Photographic Views of the War, the “earliest effort to organize . . . to present, even as the war progressed and images piled up, the entire mass as a single whole, an emergent totality.”25 These photographs allowed northerners unprecedented access to the war itself: there were photographs of military operations and occupied lands, of prisoners of war and rebels, all of which served to reinforce the idea that the South was essentially a foreign country, requiring northern control and management. Moore sold his photographs from his New Hampshire studio, singly and in groups. As souvenirs, collectibles, or keepsakes, housed in albums or displayed on furniture, they gave viewers “firsthand” information that inspired sympathy or horror while also providing a form of touristic entertainment.26 What these photographers (along with the soldiers, educators, and industrialists who traveled to the Sea Islands) faced was the challenge of visualizing freedom as a reality that could be sustained beyond the domain of slavery. How to picture something that did not yet exist? And how, by picturing it, could such a future be materialized? How, in other words, could Blackness be brought into view under these new conditions? These images use the indexicality of photography to foreground the evidentiary nature of the Black body. As a measure of their potential to be productive citizen subjects, cotton mediates this. As wads of cotton fiber stick to clothing and encase workers, so too do referents of slavery adhere to these photographs, providing a framework through which viewers can approach them. Through this materiality — to riff on Barthes’s notion of the punctum — Blackness is figured as a surface, a site of spectatorship, from which white viewers might imagine and project their own hopes for the future.27

The New South  ·  These depictions of Black cotton workers must also be understood in relation to perceptions of the South. In Century Plant, 85 Years Old, Seabrook’s Plantation (figure 3.6), also called John E. Seabrook’s Wharf, Century Plant, Drying Cotton, we stand immediately in front of the plantation house. Two African Americans with rakes walk across the lawn in the proChapter three

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FigURE 3.6 · Henry P. Moore (1833  –  1911), Century Plant, 85 Years Old, Seabrook’s Plantation, also called John E. Seabrook’s Wharf, Century Plant, Drying Cotton, 1862. Photographic print on card mount, 15.5 × 20.5 cm (6⅛ × 81�16 in.); on mount 27 × 34.5 cm (10⅝ × 13⅝ in.). lot 14024, lc-­dig-­ppmsca-­11374, William Gladstone Collection of African American Photographs, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

cess of drying out cotton. They turn the fiber over and push it into larger piles. They are positioned so as to depict this laborious process, which begins with the man and ends with the woman. Facing them are soldiers arranged across a wooden platform that points toward the moored U.S.S. Pocahontas, vaguely visible in the distance. However, our gaze is directed at the Black figures. The cotton spreads around them, across the ground like a carpet. In between the two workers is a century plant (agave). It rises from the earth with an “air of solemn repose and immobility,” as one geographer described the plant.28 Found only in the warmer climates of the West Coast and the southern states, the plant symbolizes both the bounty and the tropicality of the South — its heat, its indolence, its sensuality — popular tropes used to describe the region.29 Moore has created a careful resonance between the figures of the two workers and the agave, whose spiked leaves rhyme with their long-­handled rakes. These visual lines of connection incorporate the Black O f V i s i o n a n d Va l u e

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figures into a narrative of abundance, while also reinforcing their connection to the land. Like the plant and the cotton that covers the earth, these workers are constructed as natives, their labor conflated with the fertility of the plantation South and natural to it.30 Looking out from the house toward the long wharf, the waterway, and the seafaring vessels, we are also reminded that these sites were not geographically isolated but deeply embedded in an extensive economic network. The wharf connects the plantation with the military ship — a symbol of Union occupation — and the waterway, literally mapping the process of southern reintegration. The Union army had set up a naval blockade around the ports of the South to cut off the Confederacy’s overseas exports of cotton and place a stranglehold on its international funding.31 Gaining control of the Sea Islands, and of more southern plantations, offered the United States government a way to rebuild the cotton trade and regain a foothold in the international market. In this context we can read the photograph as signaling a form of southern rebuilding that depicts the route by which it could “reenter” the nation, and by which the nation could regain its international significance. In Moore’s photograph we see, then, that it was not only the formerly enslaved who were “in transition.” Port Royal was itself an interstitial space experiencing its own transformation. Its transition from plantation to military encampment was a form of colonization — or at least of domestication — an occupation of enemy territory that was also a metonymic signifier for the future incorporation of the South into the nation. What these photographs reinforce is the fundamental importance of free Black laborers to this process. Their labor was not only a signal of their (future) potential as productive citizens; it also represented the potential of the South. The Union victory was often constructed through imperial analogies, as a form of territorial acquisition and political domination shored up by a civilizing mission to resituate the region within the nation.32 The photographic depictions of the occupied plantation also present us with an image of US imperialism. As Jennifer Rae Greeson shows, the physical partitioning of the South under the first Reconstruction Act of 1867 — imposing new boundaries and overruling the organization of local inhabitants — relied heavily on European imperial practices that “would reach [their] peak with the partition of the entire continent of Africa after the Berlin Conference of 1880.”33 In this context the figure of the sharecropper took on an iconicity of its own. Following the end of the Civil War, and well into the late nineteenth century, stereoscopic views of cotton fields and views of plantation life intertwined fantasy with a tangible reality (figures 3.7 and 3.8).34 Nostalgically recuperatChapter three

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ing slavery, they also reimagined the South as a conquered colony, “a sort of domestic Africa for the United States, a site upon which the nation [could] prove its civilizing might equal to that of Europe.”35 The notion of the South as a domestic Africa within the United States certainly had to do with the African origins of much of its population. The Black sharecropper, like the cotton they picked, materialized these resources and helped northern viewers visualize the potentiality of the South, locating it within a global imperial order as a site for colonization. The Port Royal photographs also can be compared to similar visual documents that circulated in Britain in the 1850s and 1860s. As Britain looked to its colonies and other sources for cotton following the Union blockade of the South, photographs showing compliant workers and abundant resources in India reinforced a similar narrative.36 The cotton workers in William Johnson’s Photographs of Western India highlight Bombay’s importance as the center of Indian cotton processing and export while foregrounding the colony’s significance as a source of raw material, market for British exports, and site of compliant labor (figures 3.9 and 3.10).37 In a similar vein, I think the Port Royal photographs also colonize the bodies of free Black sharecroppers, transforming them into apparently submissive, compliant workers, a resource that, like the South, underpinned the nation’s growth. In their representation of freedom, these photographs “render free African descendants as part of the U.S. landscape and translate their belonging for dominant culture.”38 The photographs, along with other popular imagery of sharecroppers, conflate Black Americans’ potential to become productive citizens with the potential of the South to be a site of regional and national revitalization. But they also allay the threat of Black freedom. If emancipation threatened the fundamental association between whiteness and manhood as the “norms of liberal equality,” then here we see what Sai­ diya Hartman has called the “double bind of freedom”: in these images, the Black workers are free yet indebted, liberated yet burdened subjects.39 As sharecropping became entrenched in the south, Black sharecroppers were bound to the soil through a planter-­controlled credit system that was a form of debt peonage.40 If freedom meant the right of self-­ownership and the right to enter into rational relations of exchange, these associations between labor, citizenship, and emancipation did not hold true for Black subjects.41 Furthermore, as we know, despite the 1875 Civil Rights Act, Black rights were slowly whittled away as federal support for Reconstruction petered out.42 In this light, the meaning, texture, and possibilities of freedom for Black Americans — signaled in these images — appear increasingly fragile and increasingly harder to define. O f V i s i o n a n d Va l u e

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Figure 3.7 · Launey and Goebel Photographers, Savannah, GA, Cotton Picking No. 7, ca. 1867  –  1890. Stereograph, 17.7 × 10.2 cm (7 × 4 in.). Randolph Linsly Simpson African-­ American Collection, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT. Figure 3.8 · Alfred R. Waud (1828  –  1891), Scenes on a Cotton Plantation. Wood engraving. Harper’s Weekly, February 2, 1867. lc-­usz62-­116622, lc-­usz62-­116623, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

Figure 3.9 William Johnson (b. 18??  –  d. 18??), The Cotton Market, Bombay, ca. 1855  – 1862. Albumen print, 20 × 26 cm (7⅞ × 10¼ in.) on mount 35 × 42 cm (13¾ × 16 ½ in.). Ag2002.1407x, Photographs of Western India, DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX.

Figure 3.10 · William Johnson (b. 18??  –  d. 18??), Lohannas, ca. 1855  –  1862. Albumen print, 20 × 26 cm (7⅞ × 10¼ in.) on mount 35 × 42 cm (13¾ × 16½ in.). Ag2002.1407, Photographs of Western India, DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX.

The Port Royal photographs ultimately articulate what Henry Ward Beecher described this way: “The freedmen must take their march. . . . If they have the stamina to undergo the hardships which every uncivilized people has undergone in its upward progress, they will in due time take their place among us.”43 These Black cotton workers labor to prove their potential as citizens, their compliant bodies expressing both their usefulness and their willingness to assimilate into the social life of the nation. Conflating productivity with profit, then, the photographs reveal the burdened obligations facing Black Americans, who, even in freedom, were required to perform their value to the nation. The visual equivalence of Black bodies and white cotton under slavery signified the logic of the plantation arranged so as to transform captive Black flesh into commodified bodies.44 Through the ongoing post-­slavery visual conjunction of Black lives and white cotton, a potent signifier of that “naturalized” containment of racialized subjects, the postbellum political landscape was reanimated by the biopolitics of the plantation.45 This was brought to life in the 1881 Atlanta International Cotton Exposition, which opened in Oglethorpe Park, a wooded area northwest of downtown Atlanta. Organized to demonstrate and strengthen national unity through commerce, it would also demonstrate the industrial progress of the United States to the world.46 Cotton featured heavily in the industrial products on display, but also functioned as a symbol of the national unity, based on industrialization, that the exposition hoped to showcase.47 The main building of the fair was constructed in a diagonal-­cross shape, with the central hall housing displays and machinery related to cotton manufacture.48 Outside this hall, visitors could wander through cotton plantations, rice fields, and sugar crops and watch laborers at work: it was, according to Harper’s Weekly, one of the exposition’s “most original features.”49 When viewers wandered the exposition’s plantations, they watched Black southerners picking crops while, in the Hall of Manufactures, they watched white workers (usually women) operating the industrial machinery. On one of the days, viewers were treated to a special event in which they could watch cotton being picked, then woven into clothing, and finally worn by one of the exposition’s dignitaries.50 Viewers followed cotton’s progress from raw material to industrial commodity, allowing them to experience the benefits of industrial development and the material transformation of the South from rural interior to industrial producer — the progress of the nation. But, most particularly, viewers gained a way to visualize a future and the place of free Black southerners. Positioned as a kind of raw material themselves, these workers were viewed as a work in progress, even while their labor remained crucial to national development. Chapter three

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Figure 3.11 Thomas Nast (1840  –  1902), The Queen of Industry, or the New South. Wood engraving. Harper’s Weekly, January 14, 1882. ap2.h32 1882 (Case y) [p&p], lc-­dig-­ds-­04225, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

This is clearly illustrated in an engraving (figure 3.11) by Thomas Nast (1840  –  1902), published a year after the Atlanta International Cotton Exposition in Harper’s Weekly. In the center, a classically draped woman operates a threading machine. She symbolizes the New South, and above her we see the march of time from 1861 to 1882, showing the South’s progress and industrialization. Beneath this scene, beneath the date 1882 and bringing this tableau to its close, we look out onto a plantation where a long line of Black southerners carrying baskets of cotton marches toward the entrance. Behind them the triangular structure of a cotton gin mirrors the triangular apex of the industrial buildings above them. Not only do these Black southerners remain — literally — outside; their labor compositionally holds up the image of the industrial South above. While Nast’s engraving also raises important questions about the role of white women — particularly white female factory operatives — as symbolic and actual workers in the production of the modern nation, I want to foreground here how this print suggests, at least O f V i s i o n a n d Va l u e

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in the (white) public imagination, that the Black sharecroppers, no matter their potential, remained firmly outside modernity. Like the Port Royal photographs, this image, along with the exposition, conflates the productivity of Black lives with the productivity of the land to project an image of a nation united. The correlation of white cotton and Black workers reveals the United States to be a racialized geography. The transformation of the South, as well as of these formerly enslaved workers, is ultimately a testament to whiteness, a whiteness symbolically manifested in cotton itself. Amid the white space of the South, and by extension the nation, Black Americans remained excluded from full participation as citizens.

Speculative Realism: Painting for the Cotton Market  ·  The sharecropper was repeatedly used to project a narrative about the position of Black Americans in the postbellum national order. It was also a trope that sutured together multiple visual realms, a repetitive image projected through black-­and-­white exposure, pressed into lines on paper, and colored onto canvas. The Port Royal laborers who became Nast’s Black southerners were also transported to saccharine plantation scenes (see figure 3.12) such as those produced by the South Carolinian traveling artist William Aiken Walker (1839  –  1921). However, if sharecroppers could be used to imagine the modernity of industrialization, commerce, and their shared rhetoric of national progress, they were also figures who revealed its limits. Cotton paintings like Walker’s, often painted on commission or for specific men of commerce, like those conversation pieces I describe in chapter 2, established their owners’ social status and cultural refinement. They commemorated their owners’ industry and source of wealth while signifying a form of consumption whose worth rested on, yet was also above, the value of money.51 Of course, in mediating these networks of consumption and patronage, paintings like this also foregrounded both their patron’s and the nation’s continued reliance on the backs of Black Americans. Arguably, the speculative logic associated with these representations aimed to defer questions about who actually relied upon whom in private offices and within the public sphere. By centering white viewers as benevolent agents (look what we have done for you, we are waiting for you to show your potential) and simultaneously divesting them of their role in this parasitic relationship, it is Black people who are expected to visualize — to prove — their value. We all know this is how white supremacy works, after all, and so it is worth unpacking this relationship a little more. Chapter three

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Figure 3.12 · William Aiken Walker (1838  –  1921), Cotton Pickers, ca. 1890. Oil on academy board, 17.15 × 29.85 cm (6¾ × 11¾ in.). Los Angeles County Museum of Art, USA/Bridgeman Images.

American and European artists produced far more painted visions of the domesticated people and plantations of the postbellum South than I can discuss here.52 But two canonical figures in nineteenth-­century artistic production, French artist Edgar Degas (1834  –  1917) and American artist Winslow Homer (1836  –  1910), found in cotton a subject both aesthetically interesting and marketable. Because they remain central to the creation of a field of art-­ historical scholarship, and to a body of knowledge about the conditions of viewership in the United States and Europe, their work can magnify some of the visual implications raised by these representations of the Black sharecropper. Their paintings present a way to trace the speculative logic framing Blackness in the social sphere as a condition of an emerging visual order and in modernizing postbellum America. The two paintings I want to briefly examine here are Degas’s A Cotton Office in New Orleans (figure 3.13) and Homer’s The Cotton Pickers (figure 3.14). In them cotton, through the conventions of realism, connects the realms of popular culture, commercial trade, and fine art.53 These paintings, with their “labored realism,” were made specifically for commercial patrons, or in the hopes of finding one.54 Their detailed surfaces reveal an intensive labor of representation favored by the new middle-­class collectors. For this reason, I think of Degas’s and Homer’s paintings, drawing on Marilyn Brown’s insights, as a form of “artistic futures.”55 Degas hoped his cotton picture would O f V i s i o n a n d Va l u e

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Figure 3.13 · Edgar Degas (1834  –  1917), A Cotton Office in New Orleans, 1873. Oil on canvas, 73 × 92 cm (29 × 39 in.). Musée des Beaux-­Arts, Pau, France/Bridgeman Images. Figure 3.14 · Winslow Homer (1836  –  1910), The Cotton Pickers, 1876. Oil on canvas, 61.1 × 96.8 cm. (241�16 × 38⅛ in.). Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

appeal to a cotton merchant in Manchester, for he faced severe financial difficulties and he wanted to catch the attention of British art dealer William Agnew so he could broker its sale.56 Degas was unsuccessful. Homer, with his excellent business acumen, capitalized on the popularity of plantation scenes and Black cotton pickers and made The Cotton Pickers after a series of visits to Petersburg, Virginia, in the early 1870s.57 One astute observer noted the remarkable commercial value of the painting: “Here is a picture that a cotton millionaire or say the Cotton Exchange ought to buy as a graceful tribute to the plant which has made so many fortunes.”58 The painting sold to an unnamed wealthy English cotton industrialist almost immediately.59 It is this intentionality, this decision to carefully and laboriously represent a scene that would be immediately recognizable and valuable to a buyer, that interests me. In reading Degas’s and Homer’s paintings in this way, I think we can also see how they share similar concerns about labor and value raised by the Port Royal photographs. Here these concerns are deployed differently, for in the transactional conditions of these artworks’ creation, we can see how the artists’ labored realism is also an effort to prove, and affix, their paintings’ value to the very surface of the canvas itself. Both paintings raise the relationship of cotton and Blackness to express broader concerns about the increasingly transactional and market-­driven nature of modern life. In harnessing this correlation, Degas’s and Homer’s labored realism gives way to a speculative realism, where finished surfaces and gestural qualities of paint must constantly defer the inevitable: the dematerialization of artistic labor. Importantly, however, in drawing viewers into a sustained act of connoisseurship that reenacts the operations of the market, these paintings ultimately rely on Blackness itself as a site of speculation. And it is in the relationship between Black lives and white cotton that the potential value of the artist is finally materialized. In New Orleans, a city that was the home of his mother and stamped by the presence of cotton, Degas takes for his subject men of commerce.60 The painting is set in the cotton brokerage firm partly owned by his uncle, Michel Musson. Musson, Prentidge and Company, located along Factors Row on Carondelet Street, was facing bankruptcy.61 Degas alludes to this instability in the tension he creates between the solid corporeality of his figures and the gestural whiteness of cotton, foregrounding his concerns with the dematerialization of labor and the vagaries of commerce.62 While two clerks attend to correspondence in a small anteroom, our attention is focused on the main room. Here, Degas’s two brothers, also employed by the firm, are shown. Achille leans against the wall, surveying the room while his brother René reads a newspaper in the center of the room, checking the prices of cotO f V i s i o n a n d Va l u e

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ton on the stock market. The accountants to the right quantify the pricing taking place, recording it in their ledgers, while the men in the background, like us, gather around to watch the process unfold. What is unfolding is the classing (grading) of cotton: by Musson in the foreground, while in the center James Prentidge examines cotton fiber with potential buyers. The classing of cotton was sometimes described as an aesthetic process: “Classing . . . is not a mechanical art. . . . It is a matter of the eye and the judgment. . . . All good classers are in a way artists.”63 Perhaps Degas had heard such comparisons in the city, for as paint swirls thickly in the billowing cotton, it is as if the artist has inserted himself into this network of commerce. In the close examination of the cotton we can also recognize the work of assessing and buying a painting. In compelling us to observe the laborious work of his brush, Degas harnesses the value of his work to something more measurable and therefore profitable.64 And, as Marilyn Brown suggests, depicting the speculative economy of cotton trading, he self-­reflexively raises concerns about the assessment and value of his own artistic labors.65 But what Degas has buried deep within this painting is that the value of both artist and factors depends on another figure of speculation: the Black sharecropper. Although Black cotton workers are invisible in this painting, it is their labor that underpins this scene, their labor that is being assessed in the classing and valuation of the cotton. In Winslow Homer’s painting, the relationship between artistic labor and Black labor is figured in the two Black women, who are painted with a degree of monumentality unseen in any of Homer’s other works. As one woman reaches to pick cotton from a boll, the other looks distantly beyond the frame, evoking the pathos of the French painter Jules Breton (1827  –  1906), who, in paintings like The Reapers (figure 3.15), used the figure of the female peasant as a nostalgic symbol to critique the alienation of mid-­nineteenth-­ century industrialization.66 Like Breton, Homer has created a connection between the women he portrays through a pyramidal grouping that stabilizes them within the field.67 Their pairing creates a rhythm through their contrasting actions of work and reverie. The woman on the left-­hand side of the painting effects a “chiastic pose” — she is positioned toward the right while her shoulders extend upward and left — which emphasizes her powerful movement toward the cotton.68 The face of her companion is slightly shrouded by her bonnet, imbuing her with some mystery. Cotton catches her apron, but her gaze is directed elsewhere, as if she were suddenly aware of a larger existence beyond her.69 The two women are enmeshed in the field, their sculptural presence contrasted with the blossoming abundance of cotton. Closely pressed Chapter three

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Figure 3.15 · Jules Breton (1827  –  1906), The Reapers, 1860. Oil on canvas, 74.9 × 111.7 cm. (29½ × 44 in.). Art Gallery and Museum, Kelvingrove, Glasgow, Scotland. © csg cic Glasgow Museums Collection/Bridgeman Images.

into the canvas’s foreground, they look out onto a landscape in which their place seems uncertain. Homer has staged a carefully modulated interaction between the figures’ autumnal tones and the scumbled white of the cotton. This movement un-­grounds the painting; as the women look beyond and through the cotton, they become less contained, and more isolated. Not quite static yet not quite in motion, they seem disjointed despite their close arrangement. They seem to move forward, but we wonder, To where? Their lives, here, appear to be marked out by the alienating and repetitive acts of time-­consuming labor involved in accumulating baskets and sacks of cotton. For them freedom, now something to be earned, has created new terms of economic obligation and bondage.70 However ambiguous Homer’s painting might seem to us now, its display at the Century Club in New York and at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia brought it great acclaim.71 Homer also painted another cotton-­ themed painting, the larger Upland Cotton (figure 3.16), which remained unsold at the time of his death. On its closely observed surface, two women are depicted with sculptural precision, their undeniable toil as laborers boldly foregrounded.72 Scumbled bursts of paint move into and against each other, transforming the cotton plant into a tangled, ornamental pattern that seems O f V i s i o n a n d Va l u e

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Figure 3.16 Winslow Homer (1836  –  1910), Upland Cotton, 1875. Oil on canvas, 125.1 × 76.8 cm. (49¼ × 30¼ in.). Private Collection/ Bridgeman Images.

to move beyond pure representation into the realm of the decorative. In both paintings cotton is transformed from vegetation into commodity. In The Cotton Pickers, the basket holds rounded clumps of cotton that become shapeless, forming an amorphous mass that froths out from under the cotton picker’s arm and forces itself through the sides of the basket. From the sack, cotton oozes like thickly plastered paint, and in front of this woman the rows of cotton that reach the painting’s edge seem to bleed into each other, leaving behind small streaks along the surface of the canvas. In stark contrast to the solidity of the cotton pickers, the cotton — the material of their labor — dissipates into a melting mesh of white, foregrounding the logic of commodification and its abstraction of labor.

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The result is that we are compelled to move closer to the surface. As we look more directly at these bolls of pure white, held up by the thick stalks or pushed outward into a hazy background, we notice their shape, their delicacy, their form, and their sheer number.73 In this breakdown of form — wispy threads and small swirls of paint — Homer has found a way to materialize his own artistic labor. Just as the cotton marks the labor and value of the working women, the labored-­over surface is evidence of Homer’s corporeal work, marking his artistic value in the commercial art market of bourgeois patronage and collecting.74 Yet, while Homer’s brush might leave a trace, connecting his body and his creativity to the finished product, the women’s work — time-­consuming, repetitive, and exhausting — leaves no mark at all; the value of their labor is lost among the swirling fibers of cotton. As we look closely and interpret the materiality of paint, our gaze transforms labor into (expected) exchange value, as if to replicate the operations of the market. And this dematerialization of (Black) labor, inscribed in the whiteness of cotton, seems to mark for Homer and Degas an anxiety about the changing social relations of industrialization that belies a deeper ambivalence about the implications of Black freedom. Both of these processes troubled constructions of white masculinity, based as it was on the economic autonomy and political agency once maintained by the exclusion of Black Americans. Homer raises the tensions surrounding emancipation and the new social position of African Americans, as if to suggest that we read these Black women’s (apparent) lack of agency and self-­determination as a stand-­in for the erosion of his own. Reinforcing this reality in another way are the relationships of anti-­Black violence that inscribe the whiteness of Degas’s painting. Despite what we know, now, of Degas’s own familial connections to the free Black community in the city, the unseen presence of Black sharecroppers in his painting cannot be decoupled from his family members’ anti-­ Black politics or the violence they perpetrated against Black communities in New Orleans as members of the white paramilitary group called the White League.75 It is significant, then, that in the speculative conditions of viewership constructed in these paintings, it is the erasure of Black labor — both explicitly and implicitly — that also offers a space from which the body (and the labor) of the white artist, and by extension white masculinity, can be materialized. Importantly, in their domestication and elision of Black labor, these paintings visualize the paradoxical nature of racial capitalism that underpins American social relations. In a society maintained by the labor of Black people, Degas’s and Homer’s images both deny this reality and translate it into a

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way of seeing Blackness as a site of extraction and a space of projection. The circulating figurations of the Black sharecropper, like negro cloth, emptied Blackness of Black life.76 So, the invisible Black laborers in Degas’s painting mark a logical endpoint in the visual order framed by the hypervisible trope of the sharecropper that Homer foregrounds. For, as with negro cloth, in the figure of the Black sharecropper an economic relationship coalesces into a visual order where Black lives could be hidden in plain sight. And this is how a visual order scaffolds the social, providing the grounds for the violent negation of Black life to be performed again and again.77

Locating Freedom  ·  Despite the clear differences between Homer’s painting and the popular culture he references, in both the Black sharecropper is an affective visual trope for expressing anxieties and concerns about a reconfigured social order in which the superiority and supremacy of whiteness was at stake. The scrutiny of Black lives in postbellum photographs and stereographs tells us how white image-­makers and their audiences saw and conceived of emancipation. Ultimately, the threat of Black freedom was its challenge to the foundations of whiteness as they were bound up with citizenship as a form of self-­determination expressed through labor, both signifying forms of individual agency. Here that threat is subdued and Black freedom imagined as distinct from the social equality or political parity of citizenship. In the fetishized figure of the sharecropper, we find the speculative nature of Blackness corporealized as a condition of Black visibility. In these images, Black bodies take on the “appearance of value” expressed and measured, now through the liberal ideology of the social contract and the appearance of the productive citizen.78 Degas’s and Homer’s paintings, and the photographs preceding them, connect race and place, naturalizing Blackness, locating it amid the landscape of the plantation and within the South. But in their evocations of Black freedom as a threat to white (male) subjectivity, they also reinforce for viewers the whiteness of the United States, sustaining a white supremacist vision of the nation. In this way these images maintain what Katherine McKittrick has called “plantation futures” — “the ways the plantation is an ongoing locus of antiblack violence and death” — not least because they reiterate its visual logic, materializing the dispossession of Black lives in the context of emancipation.79 However, McKittrick also finds, within this geography, possibilities for expressing new forms of human life. She reads Black dispossession as a “question mark” that punctures and recasts our readings Chapter three

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of slave, and post-­slave, violence, providing an analytic ground for the creation of new modes of being, modes that confront the violent relations of power and domination from which they emerge without being relegated to marginalization.80 In other words, within this context of normalized violence and brutality, resistance and collective futures are imaginable. With McKittrick’s reading in mind, I want to return to the Port Royal photographs and grapple with them as objects that foreground the mutually constitutive nature of freedom and dispossession. The photographs, in other words, are not the whole story. In particular, I want to focus on how these images depict a liminal space to offer a more relational vision of Blackness. We should remember that both Sam Mitchell’s mother and Lucretia Heyward emphasize that it was their decision to remain on the islands following the Confederates’ defeat. The Union occupation of the area signaled freedom from the violent coercion of planters and their families. Although we do not know all the stories of the women, men, and children in Moore’s and O’Sullivan’s photographs, we know they chose to remain on the plantations, and did so with purpose. For those who stayed on the plantation while white owners fled, those who refused to row white slaveholders out in their flatboats, those who ran out of the door and did not return, their choices were both gestures of refusal and the foundations of alternative futures. Black Americans did not wait peacefully for their freedom. They acted to ensure it. Union soldiers described how some African Americans broke cotton gins, symbolically and emphatically releasing themselves from the commodity that kept them in bondage.81 This physical act is powerfully emblematic, for it is an act of creation as much as of destruction, through which alternative possibilities of life, labor, and experience come into view. The cotton gin was not only a symbol of enslavement; it was also an instrument of capitalist gain, the means by which plantation profits could rapidly accrue. It signifies, then, both the exploitation and the greed that underpinned plantation economies. Destroying the master’s tools transformed the social relations of labor, revealing the workers’ insight into the ways race operated, as Ruha Benjamin reminds us, as a technology, ineluctably binding them with the economy of cotton and its means of production.82 Their racial difference dehumanized them as instruments of production under slavery, their bodies functioning like the cotton gin, as tools for profit. But importantly, too, these acts show that if planters, the Union army, and northern viewers may not have seen work under slavery as work itself, Black Americans certainly did. In this context, Henry Moore’s group scene on Drayton’s plantation on Hilton Head, discussed earlier, takes on another level of symbolism. StagO f V i s i o n a n d Va l u e

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ing workers around a cotton gin may have been a way of assuaging concerns about acts of sabotage, but it also reminds us that the Union army was reliant on its Black residents for its cotton cultivation. While the soldier looks on in the Drayton scene, and while we oversee O’Sullivan’s cotton cleaners, these photographs cannot hide the fact that the Port Royal experiment was only possible because Black workers knew their part and how to play it. Their labor and their specialized knowledge was crucial to the campaign, just as it would be crucial to the Reconstruction of the Union. In wpa interviews with southern sharecroppers, the interviewees often describe the conditions of their freedom through their labor. Although free, as sharecroppers their lives remained precarious. Frances Fluker from Edmondson, Arkansas, explains how cotton caused her physical injury: “What I think it was give me rheumatism was I picked cotton, broke it off frozen two weeks on the sleet. I picked two hundred pounds a day. I got numb and fell and they come by and got a doctor. He said it was from overwork. I got over that but I had rheumatism ever since.”83 Being overworked was, it seems, a condition of freedom experienced by many Black sharecroppers. Letha Wright DeCoursey, whose family worked for the Traxler family in Florida, was born in 1899. She remembers watching her mother and siblings work at the cotton gin and in the fields. While she was slow — only able to pick about ninety pounds a day — her uncles and aunts could pick two to three hundred pounds a day. She asserts, “They never made a cotton picker out of me.”84 For many sharecroppers, work materialized a new kind of bondage: Richard Crump from Little Rock, Arkansas, remembers being underpaid by white property owners for their cotton and corn crops: “They didn’t pay everything they promised. They taken a lot of it away from us. They said figures don’t lie.”85 As Mose Evans, also from Little Rock, explains, “It’s a lot easier to get behind than it is to catch up . . . I sort of lost my health and then I had to sell my stock.”86 The threat of losing one’s livelihood, land, and home were ever present. Lydia Parrish describes a song, “Five Fingers in the Boll,” that expresses both the sheer physical exhaustion of cotton picking and the insecurity it created for free Black southerners. The song references different types of cotton bolls that were recognizable to cotton pickers — a five-­fingered boll refers to the compartments of a stalk that holds the white fiber — and their understanding of which parts of the crop were the best areas to harvest.87 It is not clear when the song emerged in the Sea Islands but Parrish, who traveled to the area in 1912 and spent two decades compiling her study, suggests that songs like this one were passed down among families. They also trav-

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eled across states, for Letha DeCoursey remembers hearing them sung while her family worked. The song revolves around repetition and begins with the couplet “Way down in the bottom-­whah the cotton boll’s a rotten / Won’ get my hundud all day.” Sung twice, it is then followed by “Befo’e I’ll be beated — befo’e I’ll be cheated / I’ll leave five finguhs in the boll,” which is also repeated twice before ending emphatically, “Black man beat me — white man cheat me / Won’ get my hundud all day.”88 The repetition creates a rhythm that may have kept time with the movements of cotton picking. A sonic form, it creates space for the body to feel its way across a row of cotton while also communicating —  perhaps to less experienced cotton pickers — important technical instructions. The repeated phrase is also a measure of labor: referring as it does to the fact that a hundred pounds was considered the minimum amount a cotton picker (or field hand) should pick. The anticipation of productivity here is framed both in terms of labor’s effect on the body and in relation to the constant threat of violence. Labor is shown as a form of coercion, a reduction, not an extension, of life. All of this is expressed through an aural register that is both protective (keeping time so that workers could keep up) and communal (sharing knowledge). It is an expression of bodily feeling, formed in the rhythms of work but not contained by them, that is ultimately an articulation of desire. Above all it is an expression of a movement — a back and forth, a call and response, but also a circling to and from bodies, terrain, and the commodity itself — that stages the effects of the speculative logic framing Black visibility while overriding its alienation. I do find this sonic register helpful in reframing the photographs’ meanings beyond the visual scrutiny and fetishization of Black life from which they emerge.89 Approaching them in this way, I wonder how they might also exist as spaces of Black habitation. For example, Lucretia Heyward describes the newfound mobility of freedom: “W’en Yankee been come de Blunts leab Beaufort, and I walk out house and go back to Parris Island. De Yankee tell we to go en Buckra corn house and git w’at we want for eat.”90 Her mobility provides more immediate access to resources and control over time, while it rearranges her relationship with the spatial limits of the plantation. Walking out and going back to Parris Island probably also meant Heyward could return to kin she had been forced to leave behind. As other formerly enslaved workers said in interviews, when planters fled and the Union army approached, they took routes back to family members, and fellow family members traveled to return to them. In Heyward’s mobility, we read a form of spatialization that sustained her, nutritionally and socially. Expressed as

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a familiarity with walkways and roads, it establishes her connection to the land. Under the scrutiny of a photographer’s eye, how did this spatiality emerge? If we think of these new — unsupervised — forms of mobility as establishing or plotting alternative meanings between people and their experience of space, then we might think of the new social realities that could form through the reestablishment of family bonds or kinship networks after the damages of slavery. The intergenerational arrangement of women and children in Moore’s photographs and O’Sullivan’s depiction of a formerly enslaved family provide two different accounts of the familial bonds created and maintained by Black Americans. Not all of these relationships may have been based around blood relatives, but they depict the ways kinship was organized, formed, and maintained geographically as well as psychologically. In Moore’s group photograph, for example, women sit with, and care for, children who may not necessarily be their own, as Black women have often done. As Dana Byrd has shown, the construction of a free community in Hilton Head, called Mitchelville, revolved around the “extended families” by which these communities organized themselves.91 Families did not have to signify a nuclear arrangement. They may have been organized according to the plantations they fled, for example, but these arrangements shaped the architectural organization of Mitchelville, as houses were clustered according to kinship networks. And while both O’Sullivan and Moore depict their subjects in front of buildings that recall the arrangement of the plantation (work spaces/slave quarters), in Mitchelville freed people built their homes in styles that looked nothing like the slave cabins they had come from. These arrangements reflect how the conditions that sustained slavery also created the means by which alternative possibilities for human life might be nurtured after slavery. Moore’s and O’Sullivan’s photographs depict aspects of work culture and plantation life — associated with slavery — that would have been readable to viewers through anything from abolitionist imagery to caricatures of Black life. However, even in their instrumentalization of Black subjects, these photographs also reveal the ways kinships could be created and re-­created. We do not see the work songs, foodways, and stories that might have been shared and passed between people as they labored, after they returned from the fields, as they endured the everyday violence of plantation labor. But kinships flourished in all sorts of ways and influenced how Black people experienced the rhythms of the plantation, how they moved through and between its spaces. What Lucretia Heyward reminds us is that

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these affinities were also created from spatial relationships, and so they also materialize Black southerners’ place within the land itself. The photographs present the possibility of alternative geographies — even if they are below the surface — of Black resilience that manifest as a form of groundedness. This groundedness contrasts with the liminality that a term like contraband evokes or the liminality of Blackness framed by a speculative project like Port Royal. It denotes not a fixed location but the ability to possess a sense of location that remains connected to place. I see this groundedness in the blurred figures whose movement disrupts the arrangement of these photographs, whose movements remind us of their familiarity with this space, their existence beyond what the camera shows. I see it in the movements of Black workers across and between plantations in the Sea Islands that disrupted the seemingly ordered narratives of transition described by photographers and northerners. Within these photographs, within these movements across fields and between towns and vacated plantations, another future is harbored and conjured that is neither wholly defined by the limits of slavery nor normalized by its abolition. These are also descriptions of a kind of itinerancy that manifests as fugitivity, marking the radical expressions of Black life under slavery (the circles of escape and return, the work songs that drifted across the air between one plantation to the next, the covert messages that were sent between plantations) and now spill over into the new conditions of post-­slave existence. The very acts of sneaking away to find lost kin and creating forms of family to sustain community life reveal a sense of feeling that cannot be registered on the surface but congeals bodies to each other. This hapticality is the obverse of Barthes’s “referent [that] adheres” because it connotes a feeling that does not necessarily take visual form.92 Moore’s photograph highlights this for me. I am struck by the cotton that sticks to the subjects’ clothes, a reminder of both their labor and their (social) value. Cotton also binds them to each other; they probably wear it, like the negro cloth, as a symbol of the shipped, of being in the hold. To be in the hold is to “feel through others, for others to feel through you.” It is “to feel for each other.”93 This photograph — showing bodies pushed together, boxed into an arrangement, held together by the frame and plate and chemical solution of the photograph — is also an image in which bodies touch and hold each other. I am taken by the ways women and men and children seem to adhere together, their skin and clothing forming attachments between them. Discordant in its arrangement yet coherent, this photograph to me symbolizes a form of feeling that is insurgent, a commonality, yet neither collective nor settled. It is a connection and a sen-

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timent, formed from being thrown together, formed from a place where no connection and sentiment was thought to exist. In the multivalent nature of these photographs, we find other modes of habituating freedom beyond that of labor and productivity. Both Moore’s group photograph and Eyre Crowe’s auction scene in different ways represent how Black life came under the scrutiny of a racialized gaze in the mid-­ nineteenth century. Both also reveal that different operations of Black life were formed within these conditions. If the kinship networks and the insurgent hapticality they evoke tell us anything, it is that while Black life may be constituted through this speculative vision, it is not subsumed by it. While it can exist within the social operations of conjecture, vision, and value that frame the optics of speculation, it emanates alternative forms of being and value. My point is that free Black Americans understood the complex position they inhabited in relation to this ongoing visual scrutiny, and played a role in forming their images. In Moore’s photograph (figure 3.02), we might notice the ways the workers are careful to emphasize their individuality. While the women’s dresses vary in color and pattern, they are dusted with cotton or bear the imprint of labor in some way. The women’s wraps also take different forms, some closely woven around their hair, others strapped around the chin or tied bandanna-­style around the back of the head.94 The cloth they use is probably cheaply made cotton fabric and is patterned and plain, echoing the picturesque embellishments in Brunias’s and Crowe’s market scenes. But these head wraps are also a consequence of labor practices. They are highly practical and cooler than the sun bonnets that planters often forced enslaved workers to wear, the long tails of which flapped uncomfortably against the neck.95 Furthermore, the head wrap, a form of embellishment that was taken up by West African women after European colonial interactions and was brought to the United States via the Caribbean, served multiple goals. The head wrap could keep hair clean, protect it, and also expediently cover it when it was unpresentable. As scholars have noted, too, the head wrap focuses the gaze on the statuesque and immobile head, recalling West African figural sculpture and sartorial style in which embellishments of the head — as a site of order and decision-­making — emphasize respect for the wearer. And so the different ways Black women could rework and revise their head wraps could also, at times, allow for coded forms of resistance and a signifier of a homeland beyond the fields.96 So, while these items of clothing might function as a badge of enslavement, they could also function as a “uniform of communal identity.”97 The head wraps materialize an alternative vision

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of Black life, experienced in the relationship between bodies, as cloth and memory congeal beneath the surface. It is also significant that these stylistic differences are reflected in the necklaces and earrings worn by several of the women. Archaeological findings from the area reveal the prevalence of beads owned and kept by Black enslaved communities, and these necklaces may have been made from beads or shells.98 As they hang in front of their chests held and touched by their wearers, the necklaces immediately draw our attention and, as Stephanie Camp has shown, reveal their wearer’s attention to self-­representation.99 While jewelry plays a role in beautifying the body, it also has associations with protection in West African cultures. As scholars have observed, given the strength of African retentions in the Sea Islands among the Gullah people, perhaps the conspicuous display of these ornaments symbolizes a belief in the power of objects to ward off harm.100 Cotton cloth, while allowing white women to reproduce their gendered identity, was used to ungender Black women by reducing them to units of labor. The figure of the sharecropper reproduces this visual logic; it reproduces forms of affiliation based on the relations of property accumulation and capitalist production. We might read, then, these women’s production of gender as another way in which things — here, textiles and jewelry — can perform expressions of social affiliation beyond the bareness of labor. The men are shown in a variety of hats and suits that may have been passed down via plantation owners but reinforce their individuality. While some are in nondescript work wear, others have chosen cravats and waistcoats. A man in the center, who stands with hands jauntily tucked into his pockets, legs akimbo, stares directly back at the camera, distinguishing himself from the group. He is watched by a white man behind him, but his strong stance and piercing gaze are mirrored by the woman to his left. She is the central figure in the scene, with a basket of cotton balanced on her head. Her arms are crossed; her face is unreadable. Both their postures emphasize a certain amount of defiance, which is contrasted with the squinted, hunched position of the overseeing soldier. The photographer has tried to soften the woman’s triangulated stance by referencing the bounty of the Plantation Mammy (perhaps exaggerated by the overflowing basket). Her position behind her fellow working women, however, also puts her in direct confrontation with the viewer, whose (white) gaze she holds. As she confronts us, her significance seems to be amplified by the rows of women around her. Her posture reinforces the base of the triangular-­shaped arrangement of the women who spread out across the tarpaulin, which reaches its apex in the

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foreground of the picture. The cotton overflowing from her basket draws attention to the coiled basket, which also highlights a heritage beyond that of enslavement. Baskets like these were woven by artisans on plantations, materializing genealogies of production and agricultural cultivation carried with enslaved communities from West Africa to the Americas and passed down to the following generations.101 These internal dynamics of self-­presentation and cultural production evoke for me the interiority of Moore’s photograph, the inner life it materializes beneath the surface. Here is a life formed from the materials of domination and violence, but whose texture reveals other forms of feeling through its practices. This is reinforced by the repetition of dress patterns and the congealed cotton that connects the seated group of women and children. Their presence is, of course, a reminder of the key role that Black women played on the cotton plantation under slavery and the back-­breaking labor they continued to perform after its demise. Newly freed Black Americans were hard to locate within national conceptions of race and class. And free Black women, as historian Tera Hunter has shown, were doubly displaced by their race and the history of their economic and reproductive labor, a position they continued to challenge following the end of Reconstruction.102 Moore clearly draws our attention to these women, perhaps to also conflate the abundance of land and the productivity of labor, materializing the place of the South through the Black female cotton picker. They are impassive for the most part, their gazes approaching or looking away from the camera, contained by the cotton that clings to them. But even with this conflation, these women reveal a network of intimacies between each other, from the ways bodies touch or do not, the ways backs and eyes angle toward and away from each other, the ways women and children hold onto each other. These forms of connection, below the surface, break up the surface readings of Black value that such photographs aimed to produce. We might read, then, from these photographs ways that Black Sea Islanders inhabited these spaces not as productive workers but as Black women, men, and children whose small acts of individuality and kinship marked their place and marked out their future, neither wholly dissident, nor subsumed, to the scrutiny of a speculative vision. As I have reread them, these photographs help materialize something of the way freedom was imagined and worked through by African Americans. They give freedom a shape and provide a view of how it was practiced through feelings and actions both under and beyond the scrutiny of supervision. From the destruction of cotton gins to forms of display to fugitive mobility, I have tried to show how Black Sea Islanders imagined and exerChapter three

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cised their freedom outside the narrow constraints of labor. The destruction of cotton gins is, however, an apt metaphor for what freedom meant to many Black southerners after emancipation. For them, the difference between slavery and freedom was not to be marked simply by different conditions of labor but through decisions made beyond slavery’s shadow, beyond even the obligations of wage work. Saidiya Hartman’s reading of the manuals of self-­help published by northern missionaries and the Freedmen’s Bureau reveals their fixation on industry, the correlations they made between labor and free will, and their belief that free Black southerners were incapable of productivity without forms of (nonviolent) coercion. In these texts, criticism is directed toward women and men who chose other commitments over their work obligations, who chose leisure time over labor, or who chose to dress in unbecoming (excessive) ways.103 These texts worked to “fashion obligation” through the means of volition, self-­will, and character development.104 In doing so they also reveal how Black southerners chose to express their freedom in ways that did not (always) involve the public demonstration of their productive value but materialized forms of relation and activity not predicated on the ideals of the market. Similarly, I have worked back through these photographs to examine what lies beneath their surface, not to show Black humanity but to excavate the ways Black freedwomen and men imagined and created new social relations through and outside labor. The paradox facing Black Americans after emancipation was this: to be Black was to be under continual assessment. To be Black was to continually (re)produce and prove your value and your worth to society and the nation, to become citizens. Blackness emerges, in this correlation between productivity and value, as Barthes narrates in his elegy on photography, as a form of absence.105 I do not want to suggest that expressions of freedom and self-­ determination were created only or as mere responses to this projection of absence. Black people living under and after slavery expressed themselves for themselves. What I am trying to grapple with is how alternative imaginaries of Black freedom were constituted through, and despite, forms of visual scrutiny. If Blackness is a way of seeing and being seen, what does it mean to represent Blackness under freedom in the public sphere? Asserting their attachment to place, habituating and registering freedom beyond the limits of the speculative, these free Black women and men constructed a place for themselves within the nation. They did so in terms that destabilized the racialized geography and constrained terms of citizenship framed by these images. We can read these fugitive acts as attempts to redefine the terrain on which the nation can even be imagined. They are measures that lay bare the connection between race, place, and O f V i s i o n a n d Va l u e

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citizenship underpinning constructions of the United States. Nineteenth-­ century Black intellectuals also took up this project, although in varying ways. From different viewpoints, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and W. E. B. Du Bois all expressed their belief in the significance of visual representation for advancing the race and reshaping the nation, and took great care when framing their visibility in the public eye.106 They understood the paradox of recognition and misrecognition embedded in the politics of visibility — which is to say, they were as invested in the nature of spectatorship as they were in the construction of radical visual aesthetics. To be recognized, outside the frames of racist caricatures and speculative logics, could set the stage for a more public and political recognition. These Black activists did not use pictures merely to assert their humanity; they found in visual representation ways to assert collective forms of public and private life that connected Black and white Americans. On an international stage, the paradox regarding recognition was addressed by the sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois (1868  –  1963) and the artist Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller (1877  –  1968). Du Bois and Thomas J. Calloway’s multimedia display Exhibit of the American Negroes (figure 3.17) was shown at the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle. Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller met both men at the exposition while she was studying in Paris. A few years later, Calloway commissioned her to create a series of dioramas exploring Black history from slavery to the present for the 1907 Jamestown Tercentennial Exposition, which commemorated the three hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Jamestown colonial settlement.107 Both Du Bois’s and Fuller’s projects formulated an alternative view of Blackness from within the racially charged layout of these colonial exhibition spaces. Using photography, statistical data, artifacts, art, and literature (figures 3.18 and 3.19), Du Bois’s display provided a portrait of a collective Black experience that reconceptualized the notion of “value” embedded in the speculative vision I have described above. Although evidential on one level, it also visualized, as Shawn Michelle Smith and others have shown, Black self-­determination on its own terms.108 Similarly, Fuller’s diorama chronicled a Black history that began with the landing of the first captive Africans in Jamestown and ended with contemporaneous examples of modern Black progress and uplift. Each tableau was highly detailed and accompanied with sociological data. The figures reached twenty-­two feet, were made out of plaster, and were housed in a specially lit, “carefully constructed subway.”109 Only grainy images of her production remain as illustrations in one of the exhibition’s commemorative souvenir books, The Industrial History of the Negro Race, by Giles B. Jackson and D. Webster Davis.110 Chapter three

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As the artistic highlight of the Negro Building, Fuller’s diorama and its illustrations (see figure 3.20 and 3.21), while offering a problematic vision of progress as racial uplift, also asserted that African Americans had always been contributors to the American nation. Describing how the tableaux negotiated both the expectations of a Black community and the speculative visions of public discourse, both W. Fitzhugh Brundage and Renée Ater have produced detailed examinations of the dioramas, showing how Fuller’s work “yoke[d] together techniques of perceptual modernization to the representation of Black history.”111 Reconstructing national histories, the dioramas centralized the history of slavery as one that need not define Black futures but remains a defining feature of the United States. In different ways, Du Bois’s and Fuller’s displays raised the question of misrecognition to reveal the value gap in American society: the fact that society places more value on white Americans than Black.112 Their exhibits offered evidence of the racial oppression and exploitation that had shaped the terrible conditions facing African Americans (and Blacks around the world), rather than the failure of Black communities to assume the full responsibilities and possibilities of freedom.113 By incorporating multiple forms of visual information and creating alternative modes of display, Du Bois and Fuller turned the gaze toward the viewer, reorienting the conditions of spectatorship itself. In the conjectures of vision and value that the figure of the Black sharecropper raised, Blackness flickers back and forth, unfixed and malleable, like a raw material always in the process of being refined. Du Bois’s and Fuller’s displays addressed the speculative logic that underpinned those constructions by redefining the “progress” made by Black people, showcasing their survival and resilience. Eschewing narratives that emphasized Black people as citizens in progress, the displays located and stabilized Black lives as modern, self-­determined subjects. The problem, they showed, did not lie with Black Americans but with their marginalization by white America. Directing criticism back toward the structural conditions shaping the lives of Black Americans, the displays reoriented the speculative logic of the racialized gaze, piercing the myth of equality and freedom embedded in constructions of the nation itself. Realigning the gaze, they revealed and critiqued the racialized geography of the United States that had been shaped by the biopolitics of the plantation. In response to past visual histories, displays like these redefined the terms of debate. They illustrated how white America’s fetishization of Blackness masked the invisibility, and centrality, of Black life within the nation.

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Figure 3.17 opposite W. E. B. Du Bois (1868  –  1963), Exhibit of the American Negroes at the Paris Exposition. Photomechanical print halftone. American Monthly Review of Reviews, November 1900. lc-­dig-­ppmsc-­04826, lc-­usz62-­132752, Illus. in ap2.r4 1900, General Collections, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

Figure 3.18 W. E. B. Du Bois (1868  –  1963), Government Clerks Have Received Appointment as Clerks in Civil Service Departments United States Government through Competitive Examinations, 1900. Photographic prints on board, 71.1 × 55.9 cm. (28 × 22 in.). lc-­dig-­ ppmsca-­33932, lot 11931, no. 70, Daniel Murray Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

Figure 3.19 W. E. B. Du Bois (1868  –  1963), [The Georgia Negro] Occupations of Negroes and Whites in Georgia, 1900. Ink and watercolor on board, 71.1 × 55.9 cm. (28 × 22 in.). lc-­dig-­ppmsca-­33889, lc-­dig-­ppmsca-­08993, lot 11931, no. 27, Daniel Murray Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

Figure 3.20 ·  Meta Warrick Fuller (1877  –  1968), Landing of First Twenty Slaves at Jamestown (lost), 1907. In Jackson and Davis, The Industrial History of the Negro Race of the United States, 1908. Eng 20 61973, ctsn, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. Courtesy of Princeton University Library, Princeton, NJ. Figure 3.21 · Meta Warrick Fuller (1877  –  1968), Scene on a Slave Plantation (lost), 1907. In Jackson and Davis, The Industrial History of the Negro Race of the United States, 1908. Eng 20 61973, ctsn, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. Courtesy of Princeton University Library, Princeton, NJ.

The Sharecropper’s Afterlives  ·  Sharecroppers do not emerge as a subject of African American art until the twentieth century, when they become a politically charged symbol of social inequality, economic uncertainty, and resistance. But briefly here I want to consider the work of three African American artists whose work draws specifically on the life and labor of the sharecropper. Born on a plantation in New Orleans toward the end of the nineteenth century, the self-­taught artist Clementine Hunter (1885  –  1988), reformats the connection between vision and value, presenting a counter-­history to the erasure and commodification of the cotton plantation. Hunter’s work is particularly powerful because of its connection to personal memories from which she reframes cotton picking both as an emblem of her community’s earthly striving and as a recollection of her own physical connection to place. In Picking Cotton (figure 3.22), the sacks are laden, emphasizing the women’s labor while also grounding them. The sacks drag behind, heavy, while physically connecting them to the land. They are measurements of labor, illustrating its routinization. As the sacks angle away from the bodies who lean toward the cotton, the resulting dissonance also breaks up the uniformity of work, allowing Hunter to highlight the individuality of her workers, which is further accentuated by color and skin tone. What we are shown is a community of women, an emphasis that runs through Hunter’s works, underpinning her approach to painting. This scene of plantation work interrupts the dehumanizing containment of the plantation arrangement signified in those generic scenes of Black sharecroppers. Most powerfully, Hunter decouples the linkages between race and geography, contained in the plantation, and the equivalence between cotton and Blackness, as commodities, as resources, as objects of speculation, by creating space for other intimacies of plantation life. Notice the color that infuses the painting — the vibrant blues and fleshy pinks — alongside the variously colored women. The scene flashes into our view, its vibrancy reinforcing its existence both in a particular place and outside of time. This sense of timelessness is strengthened as the women bend close to the cotton bolls, the cadence and their gestures taking on the form of ritual. The scene is imbued with a sense of the sacred, by which I mean it offers viewers a sense of transcendence, taking us beyond the limited vision of Black labor, and Black lives, that I have already described. Here, labor becomes the means of a relational connection, of solidarity and community building, a means of commemorating place and sustaining memory. O f V i s i o n a n d Va l u e

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Figure 3.22 · Clementine Hunter (1885  –  1988), Picking Cotton, 1950s. Oil on board, 50.8 × 61 cm (20 × 24 in.). Ethel Morrison Van Derlip Fund, 91.88.1, Minneapolis Institute of Art. Photograph courtesy of Minneapolis Institute of Art.

Her landscape reterritorializes the bodily management and objectification of cotton picking and plantation life to harness alternative constructions of value that center on the work and experience of Black women. As we have already seen, it was the futurity of Black women that was central to the economic and visual equivalence between Blackness and cotton. It was around their bodies and their lives that plantation labor, and its reproduction, cohered. Hunter herself was born on a plantation: these arrangements shaped her life. In her scene of plantation life, the rhythms of Black women’s labor physically situate them in this space, without being contained by its limitations. Their labor is both the grounds of struggle and a source of something else: kinship, memory, transformation. I think that is why her flashing colors are so powerful. Not only do they reflect her careful attention to form and detail, but they also register her labor and her presence, her unique vision. The colors take us beyond what is merely there: the plants, furrows, and ground that form the topography of a plantation. They take us beyond the spatial control of the plantation, in which Black lives are disbarred from spatial (self-)possession, to an experiential, psychic imagChapter three

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Figure 3.23 · William H. Johnson (1901  –  1970), Cotton Pickers, ca. 1940. Watercolor and pencil on paper, 27.3 × 29.2 cm (10¾ × 11 ½ in.). Gift of the Harmon Foundation, 1967.59.108, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC.

inary. Here an alternative Black geography takes shape: a careful, loving articulation of Black life and labor, a vision both capacious and transformative, formed from the terrain of Black women’s lives. For William H. Johnson (1901  –  1970) the plantation was also a site of personal memory. The son of sharecroppers from Florence, South Carolina, Johnson’s interest in the life of rural Black workers is part of a broader effort in African American intellectual circles to excavate, document, and depict the authentic experience of rural and folk lives. His rural depictions also overlap with the aims of American Scene Painting of the 1920s  –  1940s, guided by the intention of chronicling the life of small-­town America. Johnson’s Cotton Pickers (figure 3.23) demonstrates his dynamic figuration. A watercolor study, the scene focuses on the ungainly labor of cotton work and the life it supports. Several workers are grouped in the center, their bodies O f V i s i o n a n d Va l u e

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laden with cotton or bent over double in picking the crop. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Johnson, after traveling in Europe and experimenting with a gamut of modernist styles, focused his attention on religious themes, with African American subjects.114 Here the figures are grouped to lead us toward a tree in the background, which stands cross-­like where the chancel might be found in a church nave. Imbued with this religious iconography, which also maintains the vertical axis of the painting, the scene has as its horizontal axis the small house and the large bag of cotton. The painting reveals its foundations — labor, religion, and family — as those of Black rural life itself. Once again, it is worth noting that cotton picking is the foundation of a life forged in community. Johnson’s flat, naïve style, which brings together elements of fauvism, expressionism, and collage, emphasizes the strength and resilience of his workers without idealizing their experience of labor. Their large hands and feet, which grip the earth and grasp the cotton, reveal the drudgery of this repetitive work without sacrificing its dignity. The naïve styling also produces a dreamlike effect, as if we were seeing a thought image from the artist’s own memory. Johnson has positioned the family of workers in an expansive landscape, a fact he accentuates through the rows of cotton, the fading shades of green landscape, and his use of scale: things get smaller as they move back. As the figures in the foreground look back at us, we realize there is no one looking over them. In the context of plantation imagery, I find this to be significant because, like Hunter, Johnson has reimagined the landscape of the plantation, and by extension the South, as one that sustains Black lives. Moreover, the scene’s religious iconography also connects the gestures of work with the gestures of spiritual expression, transforming labor itself into an act of place-­making. Place-­making is an important feature in Romare Bearden’s (1911  –  1988) syncopated collage Cotton (figure 3.24), created in 1964.115 The artwork reclaims the agricultural South as a site of Black community and innovation by memorializing these experiences. The abstracted, dreamlike composition does not hide the painful history of plantation slavery but defamiliarizes it as only the site of Black negation and elision. This reterritorialization takes place both through Bearden’s subject and his technique. His collage is formed from quotidian materials, a juxtaposition of familiar images and shapes that breaks our line of vision and creates alternative relationships of scale. The dissonance of the individual images arranged across the canvas also evokes the aesthetic of quilts whose surfaces, while revealing their production, are collected forms of memory. In its fragmented texture, Bearden’s collage is like memory itself. It calls forth a history of Black experience, resilience, and survival that draws its own aesthetic inspiration from the Black Chapter three

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Figure 3.24 · Romare Bearden (1911  –  1988), Cotton, 1964. Photostat on fiberboard, edition of 6 (unrealized), 99.1 × 124.5 cm (39 × 49 in.). © Romare Bearden Foundation. Courtesy of DC Moore Gallery, New York.

cultural expression it memorializes. I think of this collage as something like a history painting, for in commemorating Black history it also deconstructs myths of nationhood. Its destabilizing terrain dislocates the regimentation of the plantation; its visual disjunctions disrupt the ways Black bodies were objectified through their labor; and its perspectival shifts materialize the ways Black Americans continually interrupt the conditions of their containment. The abstraction at play here maneuvers beyond speculative frames of objectification to propel an alternative vision of Black life while redirecting our attention to the racialized landscape of the United States. Reterritorializing the plantation, harnessing it as a Black geography, all three artists foreground the limitations of the social constructs encoded through the racialization of difference. For Blackness to be viewed as speculative, for it to be objectified, reveals the narrow conditions of terms like human, freedom, and citizen. To view Black life on its own terms, to take the possibility of a Black geography seriously, is to throw open and abolish the O f V i s i o n a n d Va l u e

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categories of value we ascribe to racialized subjects. It is to recognize the uneven hierarchies that frame where and how people are located. Black geographies interrupt the dominant narratives of racial capital. They redraw the very foundations of our social relations, so that we can reimagine humanity beyond the limited terms of racial categorization.116 The work of Hunter, Johnson, and Bearden provides a different viewing position that draws on cultures of cotton and the figure of the sharecropper to imagine — and speculate on — alternative futures in which the refigured relationship of race, place, and national identity is animated through forms of aesthetic innovation, new readings of the past, and collective forms of sociality. In many ways Hank Willis Thomas continues this visual project and its emphasis on spectatorship. Which is to say, Thomas is invested in working through — and unraveling — the ideologies and frameworks that limit how we see, whom we see, and how we act. The politics of vision has, for him, everything to do with how forms of affiliation are expressed, how social relations shape political participation, and how citizenship is experienced. Because archival work is so central to Thomas’s practice, he is able to move beyond leaving us with only a sense of visual images’ ideological function. Rather, he returns us to their material implications by breaking down the ways images reinforce the conjecture that constructs Blackness as speculative. I have tried to follow his lead in this chapter to show how the image of the sharecropper located and transformed the Black body from subject to object and from a corporeal form into a speculative idea. Black Hands, White Cotton emphasizes the speculative logic by which Black lives are viewed in American society, a logic that demands of Black Americans that they consistently prove both their worth and their compliancy. What makes Thomas’s print so powerful is that it reveals how this logic is entrenched in popular discourse. The work disassembles the commodity fetishism of popular and public discourse, pointing toward the economic relations that structure not only social interactions but also the ways we see and perceive each other. While we often talk about the legacies of historical forms of representation or their aftereffects, such as the ways blackface minstrelsy is reiterated in Halloween costumes, Thomas takes this further. He splices the visual economies of archival representation with the operations of labor and its framing of social relations, showing that visual representation and economic relations are always entangled. In response to these forms of visual objectification, Thomas offers us the possibility of breaking down their conjecture by outlining their continued relevance. In The Cotton Bowl (figure 3.25), for example, he draws out a visual genealogy as a sharecropper faces off with a football player. The title alludes Chapter three

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Figure 3.25 · Hank Willis Thomas (b. 1976), The Cotton Bowl, 2011. Digital c-­print, 127 × 185.4 cm. (50 × 73 in.). © Hank Willis Thomas. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

to US college and professional football and hallowed settings for postseason games, such as the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California, and the Dallas stadium called the Cotton Bowl. The title is also a pun on the advertising extravaganza that is the end-­of-­season championship game in professional football, the Super Bowl. Thomas’s photographs are focused on uncovering the ways visual processes mirror and maintain the social relations of commodification within capitalism. We see how Black labor continues to be extracted, commodified, and exploited in professional and college sports, and we know how the sport itself trades on the potential of Black players who themselves are traded for their future value, measured in tackles, touchdowns, passes, and yards. The Cotton Bowl evokes the glossiness and surface appeal of advertisements (which are, of course, commodities themselves), whose surface “reflects” their value. Like advertisements, the value of Blackness (along with its meaning) is also imagined to be read on the surface. Social value is materialized here as a function of visuality. Furthermore, in The Cotton Bowl Thomas has purposely depicted two iconic images of Blackness, conflating the commodity logic that connects this artwork with the subjects it depicts. O f V i s i o n a n d Va l u e

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We see here two commodity forms looking back at each other.117 Black Hands, White Cotton is also a highly finished surface, almost brilliant in its effect because of the applied Carborundum, which makes it shimmer. The emphasis on the surface in both these images materializes the surface effect of Black skin, in which assumptions of value are congealed. Not only does The Cotton Bowl evoke the sheen and shine of the marketplace, it reminds us again of the ways Blackness must take on an appearance of value and the ways Blackness must always “appear” in order for Black lives to have meaning at all. The Cotton Bowl extends what Black Hands, White Cotton reveals: that visual production and ways of seeing — or in this case, not seeing — structure social relations. Hank Willis Thomas shows us what we refuse to see: how Blackness operates in American, and global, culture as a resource for extraction. His photographs and prints reveal the disassociation of labor that takes place in the fetishization of Black bodies and materializes a haunting truth: under capitalism we do not seem to be able to view labor, to visualize it, and to value it outside the racialized relations of production and exchange. His work materializes how the economic relations of racial capitalism are a condition of vision itself. Visual culture does not just represent, or mirror, these economic operations nor is it simply a product of them, but it forms part of the economic structures that commodified, and still commodify, Blackness. The visual objectification of Blackness mirrors the social relations under which the labor of Black people continues to be exploitatively extracted, revealing the plantation futures of contemporary society: the prison industrial complex, housing insecurity, broken windows policing, voter suppression, the devastation of the covid-­19 pandemic. Thomas’s archival referentiality leaves us with a clearer vision, for it not only provides a better understanding of how visual perception is constituted by market relations, but it also asks, How can you look at this and not see?

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Material Histories and Speculative Conditions

Cotton Imaginaries  ·  The white fiber held in the hands of the iconic sharecropper, the thread into which it was wound and twisted, the cloth that it became: these were all highly imaginative materials that unfurled — for audiences — a way of seeing. Cast your mind back to the progress of cotton with which we began, or think of how its progress illustrated a narrative of industrial modernity at the 1881 International Cotton Exposition in Atlanta. Remember how negro cloth seemed to transform the people it clothed into property, or how the fancy cloth translated skin, bones, and muscle into profit. This cotton imaginary, speculative and anticipatory, framed the conditions of Black life in the United States in the nineteenth century, and the ways it could be viewed. It also aided audiences in envisioning geographies, both white and Black, for as I explain in chapter 1, the speculative vision framing perceptions of Blackness cannot be decoupled from colonial expansion and territorial acquisition. The construction of colonial topographies is both a precondition and a legacy of a speculative logic that renders Black lives and their “attendant geographies, ungeographic.”1 In this final chapter, I examine the entanglements of transatlantic slavery and colonialism as they shaped British and American colonial interests in Africa. Tracing these constructions of Africa, I consider how the movement of cotton facilitated a perception of space — empty, ready for the taking — that rested on a relation-

ship between vision and value through which bodies of Black and Brown subjects were forms of extraction. The racialization of people of African descent and the geographies they left behind during the Middle Passage have always formed part of the backdrop to this book’s narrative arc. However, Africa also reappears in different ways within British and American colonial imaginaries in the aftermath of slavery’s end. A few years after the 1881 International Cotton Exposition in Atlanta discussed in chapter 3, another exposition was held in New Orleans. There, in 1884, at the World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition, Mary Townsend published a poem celebrating the fair, envisioning a global empire, with the United States at its center, connected by cotton: Cotton, that ruler of each hemisphere . . . Creeping, creeping . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Gently across the hemisphere it trod . . . While all the world assents . . . Hangs its white banner — over the Continents 2 The poem’s rhetoric emerges from the domestic colonialism I described in the previous chapter, whereby the South was considered a kind of domestic Africa, resource rich and ready for extraction. In Mary Townsend’s vision, the South also embodies the center of a new American empire. Reflecting new directions in American commercial interests, Townsend imagines “exotic lands” as markets for American manufacture and sources of raw materials. Her poetic vision articulates the ideals of a free-­trade imperialism that was emerging alongside “a new stage in the evolution of the Atlantic-­ centered economic system which had matured in the nineteenth century.”3 Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the network of trade connecting farmers, brokers, manufacturers, and merchants across the world — a network of minimum regulation that revolved around speculating on cotton futures — had begun to break down.4 Furthermore, as American production of cotton decreased in the early twentieth century, new solutions to an impending cotton crisis were required. In Africa, Britain and the United States found both a new source of cotton and a market for their cotton manufactures. Using this imperial outlook as a backdrop, my chapter probes the ways cotton framed the language of colonial expansion used by Britain and the United States to expand their African commercial interests. I trace how Chapter four

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Figure 4.1 · Yinka Shonibare (b. 1962), Scramble for Africa, 2003. 14 life-­size fiberglass mannequins, 14 chairs, table, Dutch wax-­printed cotton. The Pinnell Collection, Dallas, TX.

cotton was used to frame the continent, bringing it into view through the coordinates of European and American commerce, and how that viewing position reframed Black bodies and white gold into sources of colonial speculation after the end of slavery. Methodologically, this chapter draws on the work of British Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare (b. 1961), whose tableau Scramble for Africa (figure 4.1), created in 2003, brilliantly parodies these historical entanglements. This particular work consists of fourteen headless heads of state seated around a large, rectangular wooden table where Africa is shown as an “imagined geography” placed at the centerpiece of the table for consumption.5 The fiberglass mannequins are life-­size, making the whole installation one that disrupts traditional boundaries distancing space between viewer and object. The scale of the work allows its meaning and affective experience to emerge through our interaction with it: it is a tableau that we may walk around and look closely at. The figures project themselves into the viewers’ space as they forcefully communicate through outstretched arms, pointed fingers, and folded arms. We feel like intruders, caught eavesdropping on a conversation even though our interaction is an illusion, existing only at the level of the imagination. M at e r i a l H i s t o r i e s a n d Sp e c u l at i v e C o n d i t i o n s

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Figure 4.2 · Adalbert von Roessler (1853  –  1922), Kongokonferenz (The Congo Conference), 1884. Uber Land und Meer: Allgemeine Illustrierte Zeitung, 7 (1884): 1233. Courtesy Picture Alliance/Bridgeman Images.

Always aware of the artistic possibilities of the pun, Shonibare puts Africa on the table, a shorthand for its centrality in the minds of European powers toward the end of the nineteenth century. We can almost see the historical scene unfolding because the installation directly references nineteenth-­ century illustrations of the Berlin Conference of 1884, also known as the Congo Congress (see figure 4.2). Scramble for Africa foregrounds the speculative nature of this colonial division: it contrasts the full, life-­size figures with the flattened surface and the simple map parodying the way paper and pen were used to redraw the continent into man-­made regional divisions.6 Its animation of a two-­dimensional image conflates the staging of the colonial division of land with the assembly of the artwork itself: both are, essentially, acts of fabrication.7 As these headless bodies appear to discuss what is on the table, the empty map gets filled. Thus, the speculative nature of these colonial interests illustrates the absurdity of the colonial project itself. In line with Homi Bhabha’s notion of mimicry, the installation produces a destabilization: a familiarity that is simultaneously a form of alterity.8 In this act

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of emulation, Shonibare also constructs the space from which to imagine —  speculate on — alternative histories. We live in a moment where the global flows of things and people seem to be continually misread as an illusory kind of freedom. In Lisa Lowe’s words, we have arrived at a moment “replete with assumptions that freedom is made universal through liberal political enfranchisement and the globalization of capitalism.”9 These assumptions resonate too closely with supply-­ chain narratives of progress that rest on the fluid transformation of Black lives into commodities. The global flows elide their historical connection to the foreclosure of Black lives, formed from the extractive logic of racial capitalism. Like Lubaina Himid’s Cotton.com, Scramble for Africa engages with the contemporary implications, and elisions, of colonial networks. While Himid used painted canvases to materialize the abstracted space of movement and create the grounds from which to envision alternative networks of connection, Shonibare chooses textiles to represent and animate these flows and movements. The fabrics he incorporates trace a material geography that emerges from the interstices of colonial spatial production but is also formed through convergences that lie unnoticed within these networks. It is this material geography that I trace, and follow, in this chapter. To begin, I work through some of the material constructions of Africa as a site of speculation evoked by Scramble for Africa. I am interested here in the ontic significance of objects, and of textiles in particular. I examine how their hapticality was used to shape colonial forms of knowledge production that visualized racialized geographies while displacing the bodies within those spaces. Here, I move from Thomas Clarkson’s wooden chest to the development of the Philadelphia Commercial Museum, a narrative that traces the ways Africa, and people of African descent, came to be understood, imagined, and visualized through the promise of the commodity. In other chapters I draw on the haptic quality of objects to destabilize the anticipatory logic of speculation. Here, I want to approach these material histories, a little more speculatively, without reiterating their visual logic. I draw on the “dense materiality” of the textiles Shonibare uses to animate processes of colonial consumption.10 As recognizable symbols of West African fashion, these textiles unfurl a complex historical memory and are provocative expressions of an archive, or what an archive could be if we approached it not as a cohesive historical narrative but as a point of departure. The textiles’ hybridized process of design and manufacture was not only a response to the desires of West African consumers but also a reflection of European and British interests in the commercial possibilities of West Af-

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rica in the context of the global cotton trade.11 Formed from the speculative conditions of European colonialism and the aesthetic demands of West African commercial consumption, the textiles materialize the multivalent nature of the term speculative itself, sustaining conflicted expressions of value simultaneously. The material histories of Shonibare’s textiles, formed from the entanglements of Atlantic and Indian Ocean histories, provide the representational paradigm that underpins the rest of this chapter. Each section is woven together from the confluence of histories of transatlantic slavery and colonial expansion to materialize a historical imaginary that can exist beyond them. I examine the production of American-­and British-­made textiles for African consumers in the nineteenth century to foreground other historical connections that exist beyond the racialized geographies framed by this colonial commerce. These networks are not some kind of uninscribed “outside” to the colonial relations represented here but emerge from and exist alongside them. So, I hold these histories in tension to speculatively call up modes of entanglement and affiliation that reformat the (speculative) visual logic framing Blackness underpinning transatlantic slavery and colonialism. I do this to reorient our understanding of the past and the ways we can image our future. Next, I focus on merikani — an American-­made trade textile for Zanzibar —  and consider its circuits of production. Negro cloth revealed the intimate connections between the North and the South in the United States, and merikani’s production foregrounds how antebellum expressions of taste and social status also emerged as a by-­product of an African trade. Following on from this, I continue to explore how these trade textiles materialize what Elizabeth Maddock Dillon has called the “intimate distance” of colonial relations.12 Here I focus on the speculative vision framing British and European imitations of Indian Ocean trade textiles, a circuit of production I began exploring in chapter 2. British and European manufacturers were reliant on local African consumers’ tastes but often did not understand them. The very materials that made Black bodies “legible” as (desired) sites of extraction also sustained constructions of Blackness as fundamentally illegible. Disassembling this relationship, I foreground how imitation spurred British industrialization and constructions of modernity. Furthermore, these textiles, as afterlives of African-­Asian intimacies, allow us to see, and imagine, other constructions of value and expressions of aesthetic affiliation that exceeded the bounds of colonial market dynamics. Finally, I briefly focus on the construction of Africa in the African American imaginary of the late nineteenth century. I foreground the ways texChapter four

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tiles — particularly, quilts — were used in these constructions. Examining quilt making as a mode of historical production, I consider how quilts functioned to materialize forms of affiliation and value beyond the speculative vision of Anglo-­American colonial hierarchies in the late nineteenth century.

A Brief History of an Object Lesson  ·  In the next paragraphs I briefly examine how cotton framed perceptions of race and space within the context of Atlantic colonial commerce in ways that sustained the market equivalence of Black lives and white cotton and furthered British and American colonial commerce at the end of the nineteenth century. I begin with the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson (1760  –  1846), who brought to life another process of colonial consumption using cotton (and other objects) to dramatically stage both the horrors of the slave trade and the possibilities of free trade with Africa in the late eighteenth century. A portrait of Clarkson (figure 4.3) shows him seated next to a table with a folded map of Africa. The chest next to him stands open, and we can see loose folds of checked and striped fabric, along with other ethnographical implements, tools, and objects of curiosity.13 Behind him two busts — of the abolitionists Granville Sharp and William Wilberforce — stand on the mantlepiece. As Marcus Wood has pointed out, Wilberforce, Clarkson, and the chest are conjoined in a diagonal that moves from Wilberforce’s gaze through Clarkson’s heart and onto the chest, expressing a “powerful statement . . . of the power of material objects to affect political change.”14 Clarkson toured with his chest throughout Britain, while images like this circulated across the Atlantic to the United States, where the chest was known as the “Cabinet of Freedom” and was “intended to demonstrate slavery was not an inevitable or even necessary aspect of future European mercantile expansion within Africa.”15 Africa spills out of Clarkson’s chest in the most remarkable ways, filling in the empty spaces on Shonibare’s table and presenting a material cartography and taxonomy through which Africa can be envisioned as a site of extraction. Clarkson’s chest is a call to imagine the humanity of Black enslaved Africans with the potential to become compliant, civilized colonial subjects. Black lives are materialized here through the shared relations of trade. Through Clarkson’s objects, audience members could sensationally imagine both the plight of the enslaved and an alternative to the trade. That alternative was bound up in cotton. The objects Clarkson included in his chest were carefully selected to develop interest in the British colony of Sierra Leone. The colony, called the “Province of FreeM at e r i a l H i s t o r i e s a n d Sp e c u l at i v e C o n d i t i o n s

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Figure 4.3 Charles Turner (1774  –  1857), after Alfred Edward Chalon (1780  –  1860), Thomas Clarkson, 1828. Mezzotint, 64.7 × 49 cm (25½ × 19¼ in). d33313, © National Portrait Gallery, London.

dom,” was formed in 1787 to resettle some of London’s Black poor, mostly the Black soldiers and sailors who had fought for Britain in the American Revolutionary War. After the colony failed, a group of evangelical businessmen formed a joint stock company, the Sierra Leone Company, in order to try again. Clarkson was one of these businessmen. The directors hoped to prove “the economic efficiency of wage labor and the potential of the West African market for non-­slave goods.”16 They hoped that if the colony were successful it would convince Parliament to abolish the slave trade. Clarke’s display of goods materialized something of his hopes for the colony, too. He envisaged Sierra Leone as a market for African goods, a market surrounded by fields of well-­maintained crops, tended to by industrious Blacks and African Americans. A key component of this plan was the production of cotton, and the directors hoped to show that free-­labor cotton could be grown in West Africa in enough quantity to undercut British reliance on slave-­grown cotton from the United States.17 In the context of a new world economy, in which capitalism and colonialism structured new forms of belonging and dispossession, Clarkson’s chest expressed (his) faith in the market as a mode of sociality, through which perhaps a colonial public sphere could be reimagined, and unified through, the flow of commodities.18 Chapter four

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Cotton in Liberia  ·  Clarkson’s market imaginary had a long afterlife, influencing the American Colonization Society (acs) and the ideology of its founder, the Philadelphian Quaker Benjamin Coates. Through their efforts, Liberia was established in 1824 as a privately owned colony and became a sovereign nation in 1847, officially recognized by Britain a year later and by the United States after the Civil War. In his widely read Cotton Cultivation in Africa (1858), Coates argued that “cotton production in Liberia would make slave labor more expensive, reduce the slave trade among Africans, and strain the South’s monopoly on the commodity.”19 These ideas were materialized in a range of object-­oriented exhibitions and displays throughout the nineteenth century, using samples of the commodity — as fiber and textiles, and in looms — to promote the work of emigrationist movements and constructing Liberia as the symbol of what Africa could become (figures 4.4, 4.5, and 4.6).20 Reports and letters from missionaries and in print media eagerly described the progress of cotton cultivation, offering their readers a picture, through Liberia, of the continent’s potential. Liberia was, according to a writer in the African Repository, “a bright spot upon a dark continent,” and its industrial development offered a promise of what could take place across the continent.21 The cultivation of cotton and the progress of a people were closely linked, and over the next decade, Liberian exhibits continued to emphasize the important role of cotton in transforming the nation economically and socially.22 This rhetoric continued at least into the early twentieth century. The chairman of the British Cotton Growing Association, J. A. Hutton, cast Africa, the “Dark Continent,” as a plantation waiting to be cultivated. With Africa’s vast lands and many inhabitants in mind, Hutton imagined the economic benefits of producing cotton on the continent.23 British officials worked actively to bring this image into reality by undercutting local textile industries to create a ready supply of cheap labor to cultivate cotton on British-­owned plantations in West Africa.24 Emphasizing cotton cultivation, British colonists — like their predecessors — found ways to materially recast land, communities, and their social relations through the arrangements of the plantation.

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Figure 4.4 · Strip of country cloth, Kpelle, Liberia, donated by Prof. Orator F. Cook Jr., 1893. e168055, Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Photograph by James Di Loreto and Kate D. Sherwood.

Figure 4.5 Sample of Liberian cotton, donated by Africa Colonization Society, 1894. e168892, Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Photograph by James Di Loreto and Kate D. Sherwood.

Figure 4.6 · Loom, spindle, and cloth, Kpelle, Liberia, donated by Prof. Orator F. Cook Jr., 1893. e167982, Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Photograph by James Di Loreto and Kate D. Sherwood.

Colonial Commerce  · The object-­centered narratives that framed colonial interests in Africa also underpinned the free-­trade imperialism displayed at industrial fairs and the commercial museums that were built later in the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. A writer visiting the Philadelphia Commercial Museum summed up the institution’s entire mission in this way: “Is it an American manufacturer of textiles who seeks to invade Central Africa? At the museum he will find samples of cloth made by the natives on hand looms.”25 Promoting the improving benefits of commerce, the institution was the brainchild of botanist William P. Wilson and opened in 1897, with objects culled from the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition, as well as fairs in Liberia and Guatemala and the Paris Exposition of 1900.26 Housing examples of foreign-­manufactured goods, raw materials, and ethnological objects (figures 4.7 and 4.8), Wilson’s ambitious enterprise was constructed to foster American commercial expansion by teaching American merchants and manufacturers how to navigate foreign trade.27 A Brazilian delegate to the Museum’s International Congress in 1897 described it this way: “What I admire . . . is the very great conquest which you have made on this occasion. While Europe is . . . sending soldiers to Africa . . . to acquire new colonies, this great country makes the same conquest by promoting peace . . . , rendering the interchange of commerce of real and practical value by means of friendship.”28 The museum visualized a world ready and waiting for American commercial (and colonial) expansion.29 It was a mode of display that drew on what Tony Bennett has explained was the “exhibitionary complex” of industrial fairs and exhibitions. Bennett describes the essence of this model as a form of public persuasion transforming the public into subjects who “identif [ied] with power . . . made manifest not in its ability to inflict pain but by its ability to organize and coordinate an order of things and to produce a place for the people in relation to that order.”30 Displays of textiles and specimens and dioramas of “natives” at work played an important part in the first international industrial exhibition of 1851 in London, at which several of the samples of cloth discussed in chapter 2 were displayed. Here, too, samples of African textiles, sent by importer James Hutton (1826  –  1890), father of the British Cotton Growing Association chairman mentioned earlier, were carefully arranged and inventoried: “Cotton cloth made by the slaves of the king of Dahomey at Abomey 90 miles in the interior of Africa. . . . Cotton cloths made at Popoe on the Slave Coast of Africa and at St Andrew’s West. Grass cloths for wearing round the loins. Cotton cloths from the banks of the river M at e r i a l H i s t o r i e s a n d Sp e c u l at i v e C o n d i t i o n s

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Figure 4.7 · Agricultural products from the African Collection in photo scrapbook of the Philadelphia Commercial Museum, 1910. Image courtesy of Independent Seaport Museum, Philadelphia, PA. Figure 4.8 · Diorama of a West African weaver in photo scrapbook of the Philadelphia Commercial Museum, 1910. Image courtesy of Independent Seaport Museum, Philadelphia, PA.

Gambia. Baskets from Popoe. The cotton of these manufactures is grown and spun in Africa by the natives; all the dyes are native, except the red.”31 Textiles played a particularly instrumental role in the “ideological economies” communicating these constructions.32 At the industrial fairs, viewers were given new, material ways to experience, and produce meaning about, space.33 They not only were dazzled by the (seemingly) endless variety, but the materiality of textiles also allowed for different modes of interaction with the ontic nature of cloth itself. Viewers could see its production; they could touch and feel different textures; they could see its varied uses. In these ways the material of cloth was more than an exemplary product of industrial development: it formed a spatial imaginary through which the rhetoric of imperialism, the distinction of being a subject or an object of power, could be registered and physically experienced. In and on cloth, viewers were encouraged to recognize the visual characteristics that differentiated regional geographies according to a colonial relation. The material of cloth could be harnessed to perform that relation by emphasizing the cultural distance between peoples, who were brought closer through the nodes and networks of commerce. The “Scramble for Africa” that Shonibare portrays took multiple forms in the nineteenth century, underpinned by the economic logic of the transatlantic slave trade, its organization of human geographies, its networks of connection, and its forms of dispossession. In the speculative logic of these industrial displays we see how Africa is conceived as a source for extraction and thus is revealed to be an imaginary space, an imag(in)ed place. And, of course, these empty dreams of colonial possession that I have traced continue to sustain the production of national histories and imperial nostalgia. Shonibare both animates and parodies these historical displays and their fabrications of power by showing the project of empire to be ultimately a project of desire. These processes are magnified through his use of fabrics. While historically their production emerged from the libidinous circuits of colonial consumption, he also uses them as a means of seeing through these commercial imaginaries. It is to the entangled intimacies of these textiles that I now turn, entanglements that complicate the speculative conditions by which Blackness and its attendant geographies have sustained the project of a colonial modernity.

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Material Histories  ·  Shonibare’s installations animate viewers’ experiences of historical production and geographical meaning so as to offer an alternative way of imagining what could, might, and may be. In the colonial narratives I just described, the tactility, texture, and display of textiles are used to demonstrate meaning: they project — and are the surfaces on which viewers could project — meaning. These readings of textiles all suggest a certain kind of translucence: they allow us to see through time and see into space. Shonibare approaches textiles rather like paint, as both a ground and a surface. Instead of foregrounding their diaphanous quality, Shonibare relies on the thickness of fabric, the ways its surface is formed from carefully built-­up layers, and this materiality opens up new worlds of experience. They represent spaces full of possibility. The textiles Shonibare uses create the grounds for a different kind of speculation, one that is not anticipatory but contingent and ultimately relational. Drawing on his multivalent understanding of fabrics made for the African market, I now examine the overlapping materiality of several trade textiles that emerge from the intertwined histories of transatlantic slavery and colonialism. Rather than merely illustrating the transnational networks of the Atlantic world, the textiles I follow are, in their very creation, transnational spaces.34 The textiles that were manufactured to expand Anglo-­ American colonial commercial interests in Africa also reveal other meanings of value and affiliation. By tracing their movement, I show how these meanings accumulate in the materiality of their production, foregrounding their significance as sites of convergence and contradiction.35 By juxtaposing their different circulations — like two contrasting slides in an art history lecture — I signal the intimacies formed through their colonial networks, and find a line of sight that looks with, rather than resolves, their relational currents. I started this book with a discussion of negro cloth, produced in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, for the regulation of Black enslaved workers on southern plantations. But as negro cloth traveled south, bales of cloth traveled east, bringing New England into an oceanic network of trade that revolved around the tastes and sensibilities of East African consumers.36 From as early as 1826, there was an established trade in textiles and resin between Salem, Massachusetts, and Zanzibar. American merchants sailed to Zanzibar, on the East African coast, where they traded a coarse, unbleached calico called merikani (Swahili for “American”) for a variety of commodities, including gum copal, embedding them in a network of commerce that traversed the Indian Ocean.37 Merikani’s production emerges from the plantation inChapter four

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dustrial complex, and, as was true of negro cloth, its value cannot be decoupled from the valuation of enslaved African Americans. The circuits of this textile history materialize the connection between networks of transatlantic slavery and Indian Ocean slavery. The commodification of Black life remains central to these interconnected material histories and their production of value, but in the material production of merikani we see a little more clearly how the aesthetics and economics of antebellum American social relations were formed from, and reliant on, the commerce and tastes of Black consumers. Merikani was an export that imitated, and quickly outsold, British-­made textiles and the Indian-­made cloth kiniki (kaniki), which had been a staple in a long-­standing Indian Ocean network of trade.38 East African buyers were careful and deliberate consumers, ascertaining the authenticity of a fabric through its texture and even its smell.39 A key symbol of merikani’s authenticity was the American manufacturer’s stamp, and the cloth was often worn with this stamp on the exterior, giving the wearer a certain form of prestige. Because of its adaptability, the textile was used in multiple ways on the East Coast of Africa, but played an important role in framing social status in the sultanate of Zanzibar, a stopping point on the Indian Ocean slave route.40 Enslaved people, brought to the island from the interior before being traded to the clove and coconut plantations of the sultanate, Persia, the Ottoman Empire, and Egypt, were often clothed in the fabric.41 The plainer and less generous the cloth, the lower the status of the wearer. Male and female captives generally wore one piece of cloth wrapped around their bodies, with women tying the cloth under their armpits and men keeping it wrapped around their waists (figure 4.9). Because of the strict monitoring of slave clothing, freeborn Swahilis who used the cloth were careful to wear it in ways that differentiated them from those who were enslaved.42 Outside its use among enslaved populations, the material was dyed, tailored, printed, and adapted in a number of ways that may have included the imitation of Indian dyed textiles — before being resold in Zanzibar and farther into the interior. The cloth was valued for its “Americanness,” authenticated by its commercial stamp and its endless adaptability, allowing East Africans to reformat, recolor, and rework it to create entirely new social meanings.43 While negro cloth’s unique materiality allowed it to reinforce the commodity status of enslaved African Americans, merikani’s adaptability offered a way of fashioning forms of individual and communal identity. But as a symbol of social status or prestige, merikani also mirrors the uses of gum copal (a tropical tree resin) in Salem and elsewhere in New England. Transformed into varnish and lacquer, the use of these resM at e r i a l H i s t o r i e s a n d Sp e c u l at i v e C o n d i t i o n s

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Figure 4.9 · A. Bayot (1810  –  1866), after Charles Guillain (1808  –  1875), Young Mukomanga and Young Nyassa Men; Young Nyassa Girl and Makua Woman. Lithograph. In Guillain, Voyage à la côte orientale d’Afrique, 1856. Courtesy of the Smithsonian Libraries, Washington, DC.

ins in manufacturing directly mediated the production of antebellum American expressions of taste, refinement, and social status. With their various shades and protective capabilities, the resins were crucial to the furniture-­ and carriage-­making industries of the area. Such commodities were the polished symbols of social refinement and status that we now see inserted into nineteenth-­century paintings or installed in museum galleries. In the fact that merikani was manufactured in anticipation of the requirements of African consumers, we see the emergence of a speculative vision that directly frames the commercial colonialism displayed by institutions like the Philadelphia Commercial Museum later in the century. Yet, by anticipating the desires of Black consumers, New England textile manufacturers were also able to meet the desires of American consumers who sought to project their own social worth. In its production merikani reveals the coalescence of the desires of American and African consumers. Did manufacturers and merchants see a connection? Did they understand their mutual reliance? As with negro cloth, merikani shows us how Black consumers used trade textiles to produce meanings and value that fall outside the register of commodification encoded by their mobility. If we hold the adaptations of negro cloth in dialogue with these forms of stylization, might we think of the different textiles as enfolded practices of resilience and transformation? Chapter four

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And can we also see in these practices the entangled desires and aesthetic forms used to underscore constructions of (white) American, or British, refinement, artistic meaning, and social value? So, these textile histories raise questions about and provide new perspectives on the construction of Anglo-­ American colonial commercial interests, materializing how the forms of aesthetic identity that take shape from the networks involved can also subtly shift, even dislocate, their dynamics of power. Seeing these kinds of intimacies must necessarily also reconfigure our conception of genealogies of nineteenth-­century aesthetics and the cultures of consumption and production they influenced. We need to reconsider how we demarcate and categorize these historical relationships between art, national identity, and value, as we grapple with the ways constructions of antebellum American identity, along with the decorative and fine arts that shaped them, emerged in dialogue with networks of Atlantic and Indian Ocean slavery.

The Afterlives of Imitation  ·  With these questions in mind, I want to take a closer look at the enfolded affiliations embedded in the medium of wax-­printed fabric used in Scramble for Africa. Yinka Shonibare intentionally uses textiles that are afterlives of Indian Ocean and Atlantic networks connecting Africa with a longer history and geography of trade with Asia. While I cannot describe these networks in detail, I continue to look at material histories side by side, to hold these embedded layers of relation in dialogue with British imitations of Indian textiles for the African market. This section examines the textiles in Scramble for Africa, and the textiles used to buy and sell Black lives, in the context of the Afro-­Asian intimacies they materialize. As afterlives of this interwoven global trade, they connect histories of transatlantic slavery, colonial commerce, and Indian Ocean slavery. But, given that trade textiles served to mediate British and European colonial desire for Blackness as a site of extraction, the textiles used by Shonibare also disassemble this speculative vision and compel us to consider how British and European constructions of modernity itself emerge from Indian Ocean and Atlantic histories of material production. The textiles in many of Shonibare’s installations are (now) widely recognizable as Dutch wax-­printed fabric and associated with West African fashion aesthetics.44 These textiles were introduced to West Africa by the Dutch in the late nineteenth century, but their manufacture began in Dutch-­ occupied Java with its renowned handmade batik production. Colonial Dutch manufacturers, by mechanizing batik production, had turned the isM at e r i a l H i s t o r i e s a n d Sp e c u l at i v e C o n d i t i o n s

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land into a market for Dutch-­produced goods. By the late nineteenth century, a new method of applying wax resin to both sides of the cloth using a French banknote-­printing machine had been developed. While the wax-­ printed batiks produced using this method were not well received by Javanese buyers, they were popular with consumers on the Gold Coast.45 The uneven colors and misaligned designs, produced by inefficient Dutch printing methods that were distasteful to Javanese consumers, created the exact “unique visual effect, or sparkle” that made the fabric popular with West African consumers (where batik and tie-­dyeing have a long history).46 Revealing on their surface what Nina Sylvanus calls their “aesthetics of imperfection,” these textiles were made until the early twentieth century by the Haarlem Cotton Company and are now known as the products made by the Dutch manufacturer Vlisco.47 British involvement in the trade developed quickly. By 1909, Lancaster had produced its first wax print, and by the 1920s similar processes were being used in Switzerland, France, and Japan. Today, the fabrics still reveal their globality and imitative capacity, incorporating a plethora of influences from Indian cottons to European prints, Javanese batiks, and motifs popularized in locally made West African textiles.48 These textiles’ history of mimicry emerged from the aesthetic, commercial, and sartorial sensibilities of Indian, Indonesian, and African merchants, traders, and consumers. These Indian Ocean circulations of patterned cloth prefigured and also influenced European and British traders’ involvement in the Atlantic Ocean trade, leading to an industry of imitations.49 As with textiles used for the slave trade, the wax-­printed fabrics used by Shonibare are also tied to European and British speculation about the profitability of Black labor, consumption, and life. The impetus to improve production and manufacture cloth that would sell in African markets sustained a desire for profit that cannot be decoupled from the ways Blackness became codified as a form of property. Here I am both thinking of the way these patterns transformed Black lives into commodities and alluding to the ways these textiles reveal how white manufacturers, artists, and merchants understood Blackness itself as a site of profit.50 It is this rationalization that drove the slave trade, and that connects the material processes of this book’s earlier chapters with the material histories that Shonibare stages. As in the case of wax-­printed fabric, African consumers also made specific demands of Indian-­made cotton cloth, in terms of color, pattern, and texture, that resonated with aspects of local textile production. In order to produce textiles that met the sophisticated needs of West African consumers, British manufacturers relied on a range of methods. They collected local textile samples for imitation but also relied on the intelligence of local Chapter four

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agents and artists who sent information back. The design styles were then imitated “in house” by local draftsmen and printers. This chain of reference began very early on in the trade and lasted well into the mid-­twentieth century.51 These textiles were included in the pattern books that Henry Adams described and in sample books that were shipped from West Africa to Manchester factories, or with the textiles of Africa displayed at industrial fairs. Their descriptions always foreground the paradox of colonial relations, creating a sense of both proximity and disavowal, simultaneity and detachment. The process of their imitation generated spaces of erasure for the physical intimacies they contain. Even as they met the demands of African consumers, British officials in Africa and printers and manufacturers in Britain continually demeaned the tastes of their African consumers as primitive, gaudy, and simplistic. African consumers’ tastes were often described in terms that emphasized the belatedness of non-­Western aesthetic sensibilities, reinforcing a construction of Blackness as out of time and ungeographic.52 It seems important to observe that these descriptive registers converged with the formalization of art history as a discipline.53 As I describe in chapter 2, in The Grammar of Ornament (1856), Owen Jones describes non-­Western design elements alongside those of the West as a means of reinvigorating British design and encouraging designers to move away from market-­dominated production. In the Grammar, designs are conflated with the geographical varieties of skin color, materializing the premodernity of these spaces. Surface design is used to design geographical space, demarcating those regions awaiting colonial possession. Looking at these textiles now, and the contexts of their production, reveals the anachronism of a Western modernity formed from the speculative project of colonial desire. For whether discussed in colonial and commercial correspondence or in design histories, these textiles reveal the discriminating and assiduous tastes of non-­Western subjects, whose aesthetic modernity spurred European and British industrial innovation, effectively sustaining the Industrial Revolution and the development of Western modernity.54 We saw this relationship of desire and belatedness in another way in the Americas. Planters denigrated Black subjects’ sartorial and aesthetic tastes when they chose not to be attired in regulation dress.55 Yet when slaves were dressed up for sale, the very materials deemed undesirable mediated, and satisfied, white colonial desire. Just as these “fancy” clothes made their wearers legible on the auction block to white plantation owners, the imitations of Indian- (and Indonesian)-­made textiles made Black bodies legible as sites of extraction, while emphasizing their outmodedness as commodities and consumers. In staging this temporal disjuncture between planter and enslaved, and consumer and manufacM at e r i a l H i s t o r i e s a n d Sp e c u l at i v e C o n d i t i o n s

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turer, these textiles, in their very production, materialize how Blackness was both imagined and desired. By the end of the nineteenth century, British manufacturers were also finding ways to imitate African-­made textiles. This spurred new innovations in the British textile industry. Mechanized looms in the North of England were used to mimic the strip-­woven loom textiles common to West Africa. Just as they had in their imitation of Indian-­made fabric, manufacturers had to develop new techniques for imitating the dyeing methods of West African production, to create bleeding and tie-­dye effects.56 British responses to their West African consumers’ tastes oscillated. One Lancashire printer wrote, “The ebony damsels of the Gold Coast’s tastes lie in material as nearly akin to ugliness as the calico printer can bring his mind to produce.”57 Another correspondent in the mid-­twentieth century noted that “the peoples of . . . West African territories have a highly developed sense of design, color and quality. . . . They know what they want . . . and will always buy as high a quality as they can afford.”58 On the other hand, in ethnographies such as the “British Empire in Africa,” British writers bemoaned the decline of local West African textile production in the face of cheaply made Manchester imitations.59 Hamilton Fyfe, a journalist, includes in his article a photograph from 1910 or 1911, taken by the photographer Alphonso Lisk-­Carew (1887  –  1969), a middle-­class Creole photographer from Sierra Leone.60 Titled Mandingo Women-­Traders of Manchester Cottons, it shows three women, bare breasted, in a studio (figure 4.10). They wear ornate and elaborate lappas — the name in Krio for a length of cloth worn wrapped around the waist — while holding up different trade textiles. We see the checks of madras cloth, a ruffled fabric that could be plain muslin, and on the right a sample of what may be “Gambia cloth.”61 The photograph uses these women’s bodies to imagine Sierra Leone as a kind of marketplace for British goods (similar to the way Clarkson imagined the country). They are exoticized yet domesticated, their “African-­ness” fabricated through these market relations. Yet, as with the earlier descriptions that I have noted, they are also shown to be astute consumers and traders in their own right. If their premodernity is produced by colonial relations, then these colonial relations must also reframe our understanding of British modernity. Consider this photograph alongside another archival moment. In 1933 a reviewer visited the Manchester City Art Gallery to view an exhibition of West African textiles collected by the textile manufacturer Charles Beving Sr. The reviewer described the collection (donated by his son to the British Museum in 1934) as primitive art, in this way: “The exhibition should be of great interest to Manchester for these textiles have for many years proChapter four

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Figure 4.10 · Alphonso Lisk-­Carew (1887  –  1969), Mandingo Women-­Traders of Manchester Cloth. In Fyfe, “The British Empire in Africa,” 1920. Courtesy The McKinley Collection, New York.

vided a basis for a whole class of machine-­made goods . . . which are produced for exportation and sale to . . . the original native whose untutored mind has given the Manchester designers their inspiration.”62 This description invokes a discourse of primitivism that I cannot fully unpack here. However, others have done so and continue to show how Western modernity and modernist aesthetics need to be reframed through an understanding of their reliance on, and appropriation of, global circuits of reference.63 For example, in the case of African textiles collected by colonial administrators and manufacturers, Nicola Stylianou has suggested that these, and others held at the Victoria and Albert Museum, may have been M at e r i a l H i s t o r i e s a n d Sp e c u l at i v e C o n d i t i o n s

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used in regional art schools to teach students about the aesthetic principles of modernism in design.64 We might then view these textile collections — afterlives of these circuits of reference — as both material productions of colonial difference and aesthetic productions of a colonial modernity. I have highlighted here discourses of referentiality, imitation, and consumption because they are paradoxical: while they might reinscribe the colonial relations of their production, the objects and subjects they describe exceed those terms. Used to frame constructions of colonial “Africa” and “Africans,” the descriptions are unable to contain these definitions entirely. While manufacturers misread and demeaned African consumers’ tastes and aesthetic sensibilities, we can also read from these archival moments how consumers used the fabrics they bought to articulate a different politics of spectatorship, outside the realm of colonial valuation. Shonibare’s intentional use of material histories and circuits of consumption remind us that colonial manufacturers were drawing from a much longer history of design and production to make particular textiles desirable to West African consumers. These textiles materialized modes of identification and sociality that, while illegible on one level, had to be understood on another in order for colonial agents to profit. As they scrambled to meet their African consumers’ desires, manufacturers and colonial agents relied on a semiotics of value that always exceeded the narrow speculations of colonial commerce. I am not suggesting here that the experience of Black consumers on the continent of Africa and in the Americas was the same; rather, I am trying to materialize how these textiles disassemble the very grounds of their colonial production. The historical circuits of referentiality embedded in them shows us that Blackness could never wholly be constituted by colonial market relations on the continent or in the Americas, but was constructed, lived, expressed, and fabricated always beyond its limits. Furthermore, in reinforcing the speculative nature of Western modernity itself, the production of these textiles reminds us that the relevant geographies of relations, and the hierarchies they sustain, are themselves afterlives of other aesthetics of value, formed from the sensibilities shared by Black and Brown communities across the Indian and Atlantic Oceans. In particular, the Afro-­Asian intimacies sustained by these fabrics also reimagine the continent of Africa as a site of African-­Asian-­Islamic exchange. Within the context of a work like Scramble for Africa, this line of vision actively reframes the continent’s inscription into existence as the site of European colonial desire. I foreground these networks not to undercut the significance of the Atlantic histories I have already described but to bring into view other historical futures that might reformat the intersection of vision and value deChapter four

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scribed here, which are yet to be fully realized. They require us to grapple with uneven systems of power and domination as they have determined the conditions of our present. Challenging a project of liberal democracy that imagines social transformation only from within the framework of racial capitalism, these reorientations pave the way for new forms of solidarity and understanding across geopolitical boundaries because they remind us of the contingency of our present. The historical imaginaries they allow, formed in entanglements of Black and Brown aesthetic expression, might then enable us to materialize forms of affiliation, meanings, and workings of human and other relations that present “a more complicated set of stories about the emergence of the now.”65

Patterns of Affiliation  ·  I now want to briefly examine one more set of affiliations called up by Shonibare’s installation and the layered surfaces of his textiles. This chapter is composed of sections woven together to materialize something like a historical imaginary. Here I examine how African Americans used textiles, and their production, to create something like a material imaginary through which to disassemble the speculative conditions framing Blackness in late nineteenth-­century United States and call up other expressions of Black modern subjecthood. I consider how Africa was imagined by (some) African Americans, in the context of late nineteenth-­ century Anglo-­American colonial expansion and racial segregation, by centralizing the production of quilts. As forms of assemblage, quilts visualize some of the entangled, multilayered connections embedded in the material histories I have already described. I focus on the production of two women, Martha Ann Erskine Ricks (1817  –  1901) and Harriet Powers (1837  –  1910), to consider how their works, materializing a connection to Africa, also provided a terrain from which to assert a diasporic identity that exceeded the narrow parameters of colonial hierarchies and white supremacist discourse in and beyond the United States. Briefly I must return to the afterlives of the plantation regime that sustained the colonial commercial interests in Africa with which I began this chapter. Mary Townsend’s poetic vision of cotton as an empire builder recalled Thomas Clarkson’s arguments against slavery and the American Colonization Society’s (acs) projection of a view of African development that had cotton at its center. Throughout the nineteenth century, both Black and White emigrationists emphasized the special “fitness” of Black Americans for cultivating cotton.66 These correlations underpinned various ventures M at e r i a l H i s t o r i e s a n d Sp e c u l at i v e C o n d i t i o n s

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led by white missionaries and Black abolitionists and leaders to aid African Americans returning to Africa and to support the development of independent African cotton producers who could break the monopoly of American-­ grown cotton supplies to Europe.67 White merchants and proponents of the acs saw cotton cultivation in West Africa as a way of advancing Christian civilization, ending slavery, and meeting the needs of merchants and manufacturers at home.68 For Black abolitionists and travelers such as Martin Delany and Henry Highland Garnett, however, Africa’s regeneration could only come into fruition through African Americans. As “descendants of Africa,” they not only possessed the same physical characteristics as Africans, but they could also bring with them the civilizing influences of the West.69 Plans to return African Americans to Africa often drew on the civilizationist rhetoric and speculative vision that cotton symbolized. As well as a homeland, and a future, Africa was constructed as a space of commercial potential because of the fertility of the land and the labor of its people.70 As these discourses continued into the late nineteenth century, Black Americans were incorporated into a colonizing vision as the figures of modernity who, in bringing the benefits of industry, agriculture, and civilization to West Africans, would also expand the commercial endeavors of the United States and Britain. In other words, through cotton cultivation in West Africa, African Americans could aid the transformation of Black Africans from primitive to modern subjects.71 These ideas of transformation and change also coincided with the educator, writer, and orator Booker T. Washington’s (1856  –  1914) concept of racial uplift, and its emphasis on self-­improvement through education, in particular industrial and vocational education.72 Washington’s narrative aligned itself well with the aims of European cotton imperialism. In 1900 he was invited by the German government to assist in the development of cotton plantations in its African colonies. Washington’s involvement with the German administration was to bring a “Tuskegee Model” of agricultural education to the German Empire’s African colonies that emphasized a scientific approach to agricultural cultivation.73 Teaching Africans to grow cotton in the most efficient way would reduce economic costs, lessen German reliance on American cotton, and, in Washington’s eyes, develop African self-­ sustainability through the civilizing benefits of industrial improvement.74 Others believed that only in Africa would African Americans find full and true self-­possession. Bishop Henry McNeal Turner (1834  –  1915), a leading pan-­Africanist, was one such figure. The failures of Reconstruction made clear to Turner that the United States could never be a home for Black Americans. He helped settle three groups of migrants in Liberia and opened Chapter four

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Figure 4.11 · B. W. Kilburn (1827  –  1909), African Exhibit, Negro Building, Atlanta Exposition, 1895. Stereograph. lot 11962, no. 10439-­107.98, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

ame churches in both Liberia and Sierra Leone. For Turner, Liberia offered the possibility of a “distinct black nationality that would cure the evils under which blacks labor.”75 In their differing constructions of what Africa could be, and despite the civilizationist rhetoric that often underpinned these projects, the conceptions of Africa as an imagined past and the symbol of an anticipated future are also critiques of the confabulations of Black life I have discussed here. These competing and often colonial visions of Africa emerge from the very real disenfranchisement of Black Americans within American society during slavery and Reconstruction. In opposition to constructions that positioned Black Americans as marginal and maintained structures of racial discrimination, they offered narratives of Black self-­determination and attacked the inequality underpinning American society while also narrating new possibilities for Black assimilation. In different ways, these approaches aimed to project alternative views of Blackness altogether. They sought to reshape the history and the future of their people — in the eyes of the American nation — and create social transformation. These conceptions of Africa reveal the complicated and often contradictory nature of decoupling the nexus of vision and value framing Blackness in the United States. Black commentators, writers, and artists had to radically alter the frameworks of vision itself, even while making these alterations legible to white viewers. One public example of this emerges in the 1895 Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition, the same exposition at which Booker T. Washington delivered the speech proposing the Atlanta M at e r i a l H i s t o r i e s a n d Sp e c u l at i v e C o n d i t i o n s

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Compromise. In a photograph taken during the exposition, Bishop Turner is shown sitting in a display housed in the Negro Building’s exhibit (figure 4.11), which had been organized by Black Americans to demonstrate the immense potential of Black wage labor in the New South and to show how far they had moved away from their plantation past.76 In keeping with the social and political frameworks of its time, the interior layout of the building carefully moved through an evolutionary ascent of racial development so as to emphasize progress.77 Bishop Turner’s display, part of the Georgia section, is titled “Uncivilized Africans Exhibit (Hands Off ).” 78 The stereograph shows a small alcove in which Africa is represented through a series of objects, reflecting the commercial histories with which I began this chapter. While the display demonstrates the continent’s primitive productions, it also pro­ jects it as a site of possibility. There is a remarkable visual resonance between Turner’s exhibit and Thomas Clarkson’s chest, each relying on objects, particularly textiles, to materialize space. Behind Bishop Turner, an ornate tapestry, its centerpiece a tree with falling leaves, is the focus of our view. A cloth bag and a striped textile hang nearby, a low table is covered in cloth patterned with dark and light stripes and thick checks, which is possibly an example of West African strip weaving. On a shelf there is an assortment of horns, calabashes, and baskets. Against the far-­left wall hang various types of ceremonial clothing, and small white labels are noticeable, perhaps narrating the exhibit for viewers. Descriptions of the exhibit by Black and white viewers varied. One visitor wrote, “Bishop Turner’s African exhibition of instruments of war, native cotton, baskets, heads, and cloth woven by the natives, is a curiosity.” 79 Another observed, “Bishop H. M. Turner has brought direct from Africa a large collection of curios . . . from the natives of Monrovia and Sierra Leone. Some of these specimens . . . are really works of art. . . . While all are interesting [they] prove that even the natives have artistic talents lying dormant for the want of their proper development.”80 While the exhibit and its goods materialized Africa — and more specifically, Liberia and Sierra Leone — as a site of potential, using objects as examples of the “raw” material of both space and people, the exhibit also offers us another narrative of transatlantic affiliation. As Mabel O. Wilson has suggested, the beauty of these objects —  acknowledged by some reviewers and misread by others — “illustrate[s] Turner’s belief that if one examined black history, tracing it back to Africa, one would discover that blacks had always been industrious, especially as skilled slaves who built plantation homes, furniture, ironwork and woodwork.”81 In this exhibit, then, Turner illustrated a vital historical legacy for African Americans, beginning before slavery, that critiques the accommodationist Chapter four

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Figure 4.12 Elliott and Fry, Martha Ricks, July 18, 1892. Albumen cabinet card, 14.9 × 10.5 cm (5⅞ × 4⅛ in.). npg x38887, Photograph Collection, © National Portrait Gallery, London.

framework of the Negro Building. The organization of the entire display reinforced the value of African Americans to the American nation through the limited scope of profit and productivity. Turner’s exhibit reformatted those conceptions of value. Emphasizing that Black American subjecthood emerges from this longer genealogy of historical production and aesthetic expression, it stressed the possibilities of economic and political independence outside and beyond the nationalist rhetoric of the Negro Building. Special attention was given to the quilt that hangs behind Turner in the stereograph. It was made by Mrs. Martha Ann Erskine Ricks (figure 4.12), born a slave in Tennessee but who emigrated with her family to Liberia in 1830. Ricks’s father was an agent for the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions and the family a founding contributor to the new settlement’s social and economic life. Ricks became a farmer, married twice, and was known for her needlework: a skill she most likely learned from her mother while living on the plantation. Bringing these skills with her to Liberia, Ricks enM at e r i a l H i s t o r i e s a n d Sp e c u l at i v e C o n d i t i o n s

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tered various samples of her needlework in local fairs in Liberia. She probably grew, spun, and wove the cotton with which the quilt on display in Turner’s exhibit was made. The Coffee Tree quilt, as it was called, was handmade from cotton and silk. The design shows a flowering Liberian coffee tree, an important symbol of prosperity and commerce in the nation. Ricks hand-­delivered her original version of the quilt to Queen Victoria in 1892. The replica that she made is the one we see behind Bishop Turner. The quilt’s design is ornate and consists of more than three hundred pieces of pointed and scalloped green leaves and bright red coffee beans, which were appliquéd by hand onto a white background with a central tree trunk extending through the center. Four quadrants are attached to this central form, and to each quadrant Ricks added appliquéd leaves and berries.82 In its entirety the quilt is a complex layering of textiles (and textures), pieced together to form a shimmering and wholly new vision of place. Ricks’s quilt, and her biography, perfectly illustrated the vision of Liberia that Turner himself believed in. A symbol of Liberian prosperity, the quilt also materializes the (re)construction of a nation out of the multiple strands of slavery, colonialism, and commerce. This seems to have been what the quilt symbolized for many who saw it. A journalist in Atlanta described it as made by a “civilized African native Mme Ricks. This specimen of needlework is made of red, white and green silk, representing the coffee tree in bloom and is the facsimile of one made by the same person and presented to Queen Victoria.”83 After its presentation to Victoria, the quilt was shown at the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition as an example of Liberian production and then displayed in the United Kingdom. For white viewers, who misread Ricks’s biography and her quilt, she embodied the possibilities of the civilizing mission of colonial commerce. In the descriptions of both the quilt and Ricks, her history of having been a slave is rarely mentioned. Descriptions of Ricks’s quilt foreground it as a symbol of her progress, and the progress of Africa more generally. The quilt’s commercial symbolism is recognizable to viewers, showing how Ricks actively drew on narratives of modernity and progress framing conceptions of Liberia. Offering the quilt to Queen Victoria as a (colonial) subject, she also carefully framed a position for herself within colonial relations. While it signified the “evolution” of people of African descent — both in the United States and beyond — the quilt also reflects Ricks’s own modernity, through her role in transforming Liberia, as a colonial actor. The quilt thus centralizes her position, as a woman and as a Black woman, in the network of relations that shaped the modern nation. Ricks’s quilting techniques and her design materialize her diasporic identity, asserting her affiliation with both colonial Africa and the colonial Chapter four

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imaginaries of Britain and the United States. Yet the quilt’s symbolism — its evocation of Liberia as a site of commercial significance — also reveals the very intimacies of Britain, America, and Africa that the narratives of progress and racial hierarchy work to elide. It is further embedded in these entanglements through its production, formed as it was with the technical skills that Ricks brought with her to Liberia. Ricks’s biography and the quilt’s materiality trace a lineage of cultural expression that emerges directly from the extractive logic of racial capitalism; looking at it another way, we might also see it as a symbol of how Black lives and geographies sustained colonial relations. Like Turner himself, whose genealogy of African expression materializes a history and future that exists outside the limitations of the American state, the visual symbolism of Ricks’s quilt is shaped by colonial relations but also exists beyond them. In Ricks’s artistic production and in Turner’s African Exhibit, we might see how the intersecting and competing colonial narratives created the terms of a limited, colonial cosmopolitanism. At the Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition, Ricks’s quilt was only a few steps away from another exhibit showcasing work by (former) “slaves” that apparently reflected their progress. The emphasis in this display was on artisanal production. There were examples of furniture making, weaving, and a cotton spread made entirely of twine — and a stunning Bible Quilt by Harriet Powers (figure 4.13), a former slave who became a sharecropper. These objects were used to reinforce the narrative of progress encoded in the Negro Building but also emphasize this ideology through comparison. The apparent simplicity of Harriet Powers’s quilt is implicitly compared to the complexity of Ricks’s, which is “recognizable” to the viewer as a symbol of civilizationist rhetoric. And yet we only have Powers’s quilt now because she sold it, during a period of financial difficulty, to Jennie Smith. Smith was a white woman who first saw the quilt at an industrial fair in Athens, Georgia. She was fascinated by its originality and saw Powers as an exception to general nineteenth-­century constructions of Black inferiority.84 This is not how a writer in the Chicago Tribune felt. Having described the ingenuity of Ricks earlier in the article, they move onto Powers’s quilt in quite a different tone: The question asked by the exhibitor in charge of each interested spectator is “Have you seen the Biblical quilt?” It seems to be her especial pride and the admiration of all the colored visitors. It was made long ago by a poor ignorant slave who could not read and whose only knowledge of the Bible was the stories told her by others more fortunate. Each square represents one of these stories and the result would be amusing if it were not curious as a study

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Figure 4.13 · B. W. Kilburn (1827  –  1909), Quilt Exhibit: Interior of the Negro Exhibit, Atlanta Exposition, 1895, with Bible Quilt by Harriet Powers. Stereograph. lot 11962, no. 10439-­10798, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

of the impressions of an unenlightened mind when told of things she cannot understand.85

For this journalist, the quilt’s illegibility and apparent primitiveness are illustrated by Powers’s stylistic forms, which seem to make her translation of biblical narratives look like a series of misunderstandings. Narratives about Powers’s creativity, or lack of it, continue to shape the quilt’s presence in the archive, the museum, and the broader public sphere, which is why I am interested in this description of the quilt’s “illegibility.” Ricks’s quilt, legible to white audiences as a symbol of colonial Africa, seemed to hold its transnational entanglements — or at least the implications of those — under the surface. Powers’s elongated figures, syncopated blocks of color, and abstracted form of storytelling, on the other hand, form into a surface that seemed unrecognizable to this particular writer. She utilizes an appliqué technique that links the narrative content of the figures (an American art form) with textile traditions used by the Fon people of Dahomey, including her use of animals as proverbial characters and her remediation of oral narratives into visual language.86 It is the very abstraction, syncopation, and evocation of West African visual techniques — dismissed by this journalist — that illustrate, for us now, both Powers’s modernity and her cosmopolitan identity. They demonstrate how Powers reformatted the trans­ national and local spaces she inhabited to materialize the multiple and various kinships she was connected to. Chapter four

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In referencing West African textile and figural techniques, Powers’s quilt revises narratives of American aesthetic and religious ideology and repositions the United States itself within a network of transatlantic relations. The quilt constructs an alternative history of Black Americans’ identity, one that centralizes their position within the nation and produces meanings and expressions of value that also refute the teleology of progress produced in the broader Negro Building exhibit. In a sense, her quilt foregrounds how America (as experienced in the United States) and its racialized formations emerged in tandem with constructions of Africa itself. Perhaps this is why the quilt remained so unreadable to white viewers. Black viewers, on the other hand, seemed to recognize that Powers had found a way to visualize an expression of life and labor, fugitive in nature but dislocated from extractive logics of value.87 She materialized a space to work from the unlooked-­for conditions of the past and so build a ground for the future. In the Negro Building, the similarities between Powers and Ricks — both born enslaved, both farmers (a sharecropper, in Powers’s case), both needle­ workers — were refigured into a narrative of progress coordinated by the spatial relations of capital. And so, this very brief discussion of their work reinforces how the speculative logic of Blackness continued to shape the experiences of African Americans, in different ways, after the end of slavery. The quilts, the African Exhibit, and the Negro Building itself remind us of how Blackness was understood in protean terms, as raw material, as always in progress. But quilting, as a form of material history, offers another way of thinking about the speculative, for quilting is an artistic practice that holds, at its core, the reformatting of material.88 Quilting is a form of fabrication; it is the ground on which new imaginaries and new histories emerge from a practice of assemblage and the reassociation of materials and their meanings. Quilts embody a speculative materiality, a terrain through which alternative forms of communing can be expressed as they are imagined, even within the constrained conditions of the plantation’s afterlives. Ricks and Powers used their quilts to interrupt, reformat, and unravel the conceptions of vision and value that I have followed in this book. In place of those conceptions, they speculatively materialized other modes of affiliation and belonging. Their artworks even now offer ways of envisioning forms of kinship and self-­possession that can sustain Black life beyond the limited means of our present. Rather than simply narrating a history, Yinka Shonibare stages the conditions — and perhaps the limits — of our interaction with the past.89 His use of textiles draws something from the process of quilting, which is why I conclude this book with two material histories of the craft. Quilts hold multiple M at e r i a l H i s t o r i e s a n d Sp e c u l at i v e C o n d i t i o n s

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meanings in contention; they are formed from multiple layers and circuits of reference. Similarly, in this chapter I have woven together a historical narrative that recalls the nature of a quilt’s making. As with the multivalent meanings of both Ricks’s and Powers’s quilts, I have drawn on the possibilities of working within, and from, contradiction to position us within various circuits of power and production, using their multiplicity to disorient the anticipatory logic narrated in this book, which situates Blackness, itself, as a site of profit. Assembling them alongside each other, I have tried to materialize how these simultaneously existing histories produce each other and expand our engagement with the past, to find ways to imagine, and speculate on, modes of (global) interaction that can better frame our present and its futures.

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Coda A Material with Memory

By developing this study as something like an “imaginative geography,” I have attempted to negotiate between the material of cotton itself and its emblematic meanings.1 The artists I have interacted with in the preceding chapters have informed my own scholarly movements, movements that mirror the continual oscillations across time and space incorporated within any discussion or exploration of the transnational. In the back and forth between contemporary art and historical archive, between material and metaphor, between document and image, between one place and another, this book has attempted to create its own kind of historical looking. A historical looking, rigorously detailed and materially grounded, formed in a conscious attempt to return some elided meanings to our understanding of the past’s continued significance in the present. Consciously or not, we in the United States carry with us an image bank that complements but more often extends the histories we know. This bank is composed of a multiverse of imagery. Its images may be framed and hang in galleries. They may be fraying, faded, and blurred, having been kept in albums or hidden in attics. They may not even be two-­dimensional, but formed from other materials and hung, shelved, or carefully sheltered in the last place you would think to look. I imagine this bank of images like a virtual filing system, a repository lodged deeply in the shared collective memory of a nation. This does not mean that each of its images carries the

Figure coda.1 · Leonardo Drew (b. 1961), Number 25, 1992. Cotton, 274.3 × 304.8 × 116 cm (108 × 120 × 46 in.). © Leonardo Drew. Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.

same meaning to all those who access them. And not all meanings carry equal weight. These images are not merely illustrative of histories, although they certainly may include portraits of, or monuments to, specific people or events. Image banks have immense power, as recent and ongoing debates around monuments remind us, to challenge, change, or reinforce the narratives we tell ourselves. Cotton is a material with memory. Which is how artist Leonardo Drew describes both the archival nature of the commodity and its ongoing presence in contemporary society. In Number 25 (figure Coda.1), Drew turns that memory into a memorial, creating a huge cotton bale out of multiple smaller ones stacked together. The bale — that symbol of cotton’s status as a mobile commodity and a signifier of profit — is cotton plucked, cleaned, and pressed, an image of labor extracted, devoid of any human trace. Drew amplifies this in his sculpture where the material obscures our ability to see its construction clearly. Its surface is continually disrupted by stray fibers and threads that push their way toward the viewer. At eight feet tall and thirteen feet long, the work is nothing if not imposing, and it must be walked around C o da

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in order for us to look at it closely and distinguish its different pieces. It is divided into nine rows of cotton blocks arranged into seven columns. The stacked blocks are glued together with melted wax, and arranged into a gridded structure, they create an underlying sense of stability but one that is offset slightly by its surface. Cotton escapes in thin, straggly strands that droop and swirl and drip unevenly from the straight-­edged lines of the grid. Not quite flat, the slightly uneven columns create a gradated, animated surface that gives this blank wall of whiteness a vibrant immediacy. Using material usually thought of as detritus — rust, paper, wires — is part of Drew’s practice. It stems from his broader interest in the beauty of waste and decay and in the aesthetic possibilities of industrial material. Developing his craft in the late 1980s and early ’90s, he moved into abstraction and the aesthetics of ruin to connect his artistic process with his personal experiences of growing up in the deindustrialized spaces of Bridgeport, Connecticut. As an artist concerned with the organic and ideological meanings of materials, Drew explores the ways content can be reintroduced into an abstract sculptural language and how materials are infused with sentiment, both personal and cultural. It is this representational strategy and understanding of cotton as both subject and form that I want, in conclusion, to explore and historicize further. By forcing us to stand, literally, in the shadow of a history of industrialization, Drew has created a viewing position from which we must confront both how we see ourselves in relation to this history and how we imagine our relationship to its contemporary implications. Rather than foreclose any nonmaterial readings of Drew’s work, I suggest that our reading emerges from its oscillation between abstract and material concerns as it requires us to physically participate in the unfolding of aesthetic experience. Number 25 reminds us, I think, of the way cotton overshadows the history of the Black Atlantic and is perhaps a material whose meanings are, in some way, overdetermined. For, although the work eschews the figure, it nevertheless recalls a host of corporeal visions through which Drew mediates the historic and contemporary implications of cotton’s symbolism. It is monumental in size, and we are used to thinking of the monumental as a visual equivalent or a manifestation of achievement and accomplishment. But what is being memorialized here? Or perhaps the question to ask is, How is the work scripting our interactions with memory? Evoking both the practices of slavery and those of industrialization, the huge composite bale takes its form from the aesthetics of the ruin rather than from the coherence of the monument. Less a structure of remembrance, it is one of rumination, in which the decay of its material provides an underlying fragility to the piece. A M at e r i a l w i t h M e m o ry

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This fragility is what gives us pause, I think, and makes us understand that Drew is not creating a memorial to history — a unified narrative — but exploring its debris. Dealing with a material with memory requires dealing with its baggage, for Drew’s sculpture reminds us of the ways cotton both haunts and animates our present. This book is one attempt to grapple with these memories to narrativize the histories that are embedded and at times obscured by cotton’s immediacy and ubiquity in everyday life. While he refuses the figure, his work is filled with traces of the body, and Drew’s refusal to depict the Black body is telling. Whether in the form of representation or as a commodity, cotton calls up a host of associations and reinforces particular meanings about race, labor, and nationhood. In creating a sculpture that in some ways evokes the surface of a blank wall, or a blank canvas, Drew allows viewers to project their own images onto his cotton bale while also compelling us to work through its meanings slowly and methodically. We are compelled, in other words, to look at ourselves and what we see: Who is it that we project here? Bales are the site of Lubaina Himid’s speculative imagination, serving as a conduit as well as an expression of Black fugitivity. In Drew’s installation, the bale becomes a space where the operations of vision and value are most fully materialized. The work’s physicality evokes the traces of labor-­ intensive handwork in its own making. As we engage with it on a multi-­ sensorial level through this repertoire of gestures, we think through and call up the experiences, meanings, and bodies that might not otherwise be remembered. In using cotton to summon up histories of the plantation and all its attendant significations, alongside its immobility and abstracted form, the piece does not simply return us to the body of the slave. It returns us to the complicated conditions of viewership that the abstracted body of the slave and the material forms of its production bring into view. This sculpture underlines the material’s relationship to conditions of human labor and their valuation through the market. And while this notion of value is given meaning and is most powerfully exemplified by slavery, the implication is that the effects of this relationship affect both Black and white bodies. In Drew’s work, cotton becomes a site of projection in which the “human condition within the capitalist mode of production — reification — becomes externalized and historicized.”2 In Number 25 our eyes function, as Laura Marks has described, “as metaphorical organs of touch.”3 In this tactile way of seeing, our understanding of the work — as material and object — is ultimately mediated through a prolonged engagement with its surface. As we read the meaning of the art object C o da

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through color, composition, and texture, we also read the materiality of cotton itself. Drew’s work recalls, in many ways, the visual dynamics of Degas’s scenes from a cotton office. Both are concerned with formal considerations, such as the meaning of surface, the value of material, the politics of object-­ hood. But in different ways they also bring these formal concerns into being through the economics of vision. They connect an artwork’s aesthetic value with the market dynamics that underpin conditions of viewership. Number 25 is a form of artistic abstraction, one that urges us to consider what abstraction can mean as a register of social relations. The work’s surface is dynamic and static, a surface on which the gestures of art making — swirls and lines and strokes — accrete into a white wall. Yet its tactility also plays on our own physicality. We have to walk around it: the thick knots of cotton and straggly threads beg to be felt as they disrupt the surface. Our visual engagement is continually distracted by its changes from dull ivory and beige to moments of brilliant white. The surface bulges, as layers of cotton herniate and disrupt any attempt at smoothness. Its texture is uneven — both tightly compressed with wax and seemingly bursting at the seams. While the work’s whiteness invokes and perhaps parodies terms such as the “white cube” of the gallery, it certainly heightens the whiteness of the museum industrial complex and the racialized optics that continue to mediate our understanding of art. But the abstraction of Number 25 does more than that, for it challenges us to see its formal qualities through its labor, shifting our attention to the meaning and value of labor itself. The creation of an artwork that is a commodity reconstructing a commodity as an artwork is a powerful and troubling way of addressing the relations of commodification and capitalism that structure the circuits of the art world. At the same time, it reinforces the complicated conditions of Black artistic labor and the work that is required of Black artists’ bodies. In addressing these visual optics — optics that frame the meaning of representation and the possibilities of labor — Drew’s work amplifies the histories I have worked through here. In more powerful ways, however, his use of abstraction also provides a way of returning us to the material implications of cotton’s trade, reminding us of how these histories provide the terms of reference for understanding contemporary manifestations — or elisions — and meanings that trade, textiles, materials, and their production have in our lives today.4 By drawing on wide-­ranging sources and creating connections between sometimes disparate places and objects, I have tried to closely chart the way associations between cotton and Blackness were constructed, and what these associations meant for the people and places that were connected by the Anglo-­American cotton trade. A M at e r i a l w i t h M e m o ry

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Cotton and its representations were used to illustrate, express, and materialize their connection to a circulating economy of people and things. From the cotton serialized in the lithographs of J. R. Barfoot to the haptic meanings of negro cloth, from the marketability of print design to the assembling and arrangement of cotton samples at international exhibitions, these sources were understood to be self-­reflexively mobile, and their mobility was seemingly embedded in their very production. By following where and how things moved, we see how these objects and the labor that produced them gave shape to racialized constructions of space.5 But central to — even propelling — these constructions of movement, mobility, and space is the speculative vision that emerged from the association of cotton, commerce, and colonialism, which had specific implications for meanings and representations of Blackness.6 I was again reminded of the currency of these associations — and the images they conjure up — when I showed a PowerPoint slide of Drew’s installation at an academic talk I gave in 2015. Looking at the ways the material encroaches onto the physical presence of a viewer, a colleague of mine interpreted it as something like a sense of suffocation. It became, for her, a powerful symbol of the smothering history of racism that is embedded in the United States. With its blank wall of white cotton — though mediated by a projector screen — the piece created a form of historical asphyxiation, reminding her of Eric Garner’s words as he struggled to break free from a policeman’s choke hold: “I can’t breathe.” The struggle to break free from the choke hold of white supremacist terror that Drew’s work evoked for my Princeton colleague strikes me as a powerful, heartbreaking, and crucial component of why cotton, and its representation, remains such an important visual symbol. It is a material saturated with association: of race and slavery, exploitation and terror. It is an image that saturates our view of the past, and saturates our view of Blackness — as an idea, as a subject position, as what it means to be Black. The historical narratives I have followed in this book show how other meanings of value and forms of visual expression emerge. I have tried to offer alternative conceptions of what a speculative imaginary might provide and how it might materialize; these, however, have been offered to point toward new possibilities of scholarship that I acknowledge I have been unable to fully pursue here. I offer this book as the grounds from which, I hope, other imaginaries and material histories might emerge. As I completed this monograph, news stories filtered through social media of cotton’s continued use to demean, hurt, and terrorize Black people. But one story has stayed with

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me, both for its immense courage and because it succinctly illustrates what I hope my book might begin to do. It is common knowledge that one of Yale’s undergraduate colleges, Grace Hopper College, named in honor of the first female computer scientist, was previously named for John Calhoun, a nineteenth-­century American statesman and former vice president from South Carolina who was an enthusiastic advocate of slavery. As a graduate student, I frequently ate in the dining halls of that college, never bothering to look up and notice the suite of stained-­ glass windows, designed by the highly successful Philadelphia-­based D’Ascenzo Studio (figure Coda.2). The windows were installed in the 1930s when the college was built. Calhoun was a plantation owner, and these windows illustrated plantation life to commemorate him — and his world. We would call them kitschy, but they are also symbols of the “Lost Cause” ideology that portrayed the Confederacy and its cause as essentially noble and promoted an image of benevolent enslavement.7 In the center of the suite of windows was a plantation scene. Two African American figures stand amid rows of cotton. They both balance large cotton baskets on their heads, and the cotton is barely knee-­high. The figures, who are neatly dressed, look as if they are in a garden. Behind them in the distance, tall trees shade a plantation manor. The image recalls the rustic tropes of J. R. Barfoot’s plantation imagery or the small plantation vignette included in Luther Terry’s Allegory of North and South. One of those ubiquitous plantation scenes, it transforms the vicious brutality of chattel slavery into an ornamental motif; here cotton-­picking enslaved workers are transformed into decorative tropes. They are in their place and, like cotton, objects to be sourced. I never looked up and saw those windows, and so I never wondered what it must have been like to work under them, let alone dine communally. But Corey Menafee did. His job located him in that dining hall for long hours, and as he recounted, he said to himself, “You know, it’s coming down today.” So, one summer day in 2016 Menafee climbed on top of a chair holding a broomstick in his hand. He then took that broomstick and shattered the faux medieval stained glass across the tables below. When I read about Corey Menafee’s act of civil protest, I was both surprised (at my own ignorance) and impressed by his courage. Menafee was initially charged with reckless endangerment and criminal mischief. He resigned from his job but was later reinstated. What remained with me was his explanation of his actions: “No employee should be subject to coming to work and seeing slave portraits on a daily basis.”8 As Menafee’s statement suggests, the ubiquitous nature of this

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Figure coda.2 · D’Ascenzo Studios, Philadelphia, Cotton Field (broken), 1932. Vitreous enamel on plate glass, 30.5 × 23.5 cm (12 × 9¼ in.). Courtesy Grace Hopper College, Yale University, New Haven, CT.

kind of imagery is what makes it seem almost invisible, and what also makes it so insidious. His actions powerfully revealed both the banality of such imagery and its material effects on the bodies and minds of those it purports to represent. But Menafee’s actions force us to also ask, “How can any of us look at this?” This object, along with the history it directly represents, is not just about an African American experience; it tells an institutional and national (even transnational) story that implicates us all. The historical impetus for this book and its close visual analysis of seemingly ephemeral objects is one way of addressing these narratives. I have not sought just to decode stereotypes and iconographical compositions; I have also explained how these objects (still) act on the people and places they moved through and around. In the process I have attempted to explain how it is that we have looked at these objects historically, how these kinds of objects — and their imagery — have gained such traction and what they have helped viewers understand, in the hope that we might start to see things differently. This is my act of dismantling to clear space for new modes of vision through which we can build new forms of relation.9 Corey Menafee’s act of smashing the stained-­glass window with a broomstick is not just a profound act of protest, but is also a metaphor for the kinds of actions needed now to challenge and radically transform the politics of vision that shape this nation.

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Notes

Introduction: Threads of Empire 1. Prown, Art as Evidence, 255. I am thinking here of Prown’s discussion of an artifact as “an historical event, something that happened in the past. But unlike other historical events, it continues to exist in the present and can be re-­experienced and studied as primary and authentic evidence surviving from the past.” 2. Enwezor, “Artefacts of Memory,” 47. 3. Fleetwood, Troubling Vision, 7. 4. Ahmed, “Affective Economies,” 118. 5. Bleichmar, “Painting as Exploration,” 81  –  104; Schiebinger, Plants and Empire, 23  –  72. 6. Watt, Wild and Cultivated Cotton Plants of the World, 10. 7. Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 85  –  97. Because cotton was cheaper and less labor intensive than sugar, Caribbean planters could produce millions of pounds of cotton, but to do so they needed greater swathes of land and more and more slaves. The rapid expansion of cotton in the United States followed a similar pattern. 8. Lakwete, Inventing the Cotton Gin; Temin, Engines of Enterprise. 9. Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 98  –  120. 10. Barbee, Cotton Question, 26  –  85. 11. Ruffin, “Planting in Georgia,” 490. 12. Saikku, This Delta, This Land, 85  –  100. 13. Deyle, Carry Me Back, 209  –  44; W. Johnson, River of Dark Dreams. 14. T. King, Black Shoals, xi, 74  –  110. 15. Day, Alien Capital, 27  –  29. 16. See especially Bagneris, Coloring the Caribbean, 92  –  136. 17. According to the collector J. R. Abbey, The Progress of Cotton was a “pictorial account of the cotton industry for the instruction of children, apparently young

children, the type being large and black and the words restricted to two syllables.” Abbey, Life in England, 300. 18. Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, 166. 19. For more on the representation of plantations and its relationship to the genre of landscape, see Mack and Hoffius, Landscape of Slavery; Andrews, Landscape and Western Art. 20. Mitchell, “Imperial Landscape,” 5. 21. Riello, Cotton, 87  –  110; Lemire, Fashion’s Favourite, 10  –  30. 22. Inikori, “Slavery and the Revolution,” 344; Inikori and Engerman, Atlantic Slave Trade, 152  –  55; Riello, Cotton, 211  –  38. African trade with India for cotton textiles had been taking place since at least the early modern period. Raw cotton from India, the Caribbean, Brazil, and the Levant supplied British cotton manufacturers, until the invention of the cotton gin. Makepeace, “English Traders”; Alpern, “What Africans Got”; Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture; Lakwete, Inventing the Cotton Gin. 23. In the United States, the growth of the plantation system, government protectionism, and the constriction of British imports during the War of 1812 also helped boost its cotton industry and its factory-­based systems of production. By 1850 the New England textile industry was well established. Deyle, Carry Me Back, 15  –  63; W. Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, 1  –  73; J. Rosenbloom, “Path Dependence,” 5; Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture; Temin, “Industrialization of New England.” 24. Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 98  –  136. 25. Appadurai, Social Life of Things. 26. Eltis and Engerman, “Importance of Slavery”; Morris and Vaughan, Trade and Empire; Rice, “Cotton That Connects”; Barringer, Before and After Modernism. 27. W. Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, 74  –  96. 28. Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic, 62. 29. Hartman, Lose Your Mother, 6. 30. Hartman, Lose Your Mother, 6; Sharpe, In the Wake, 1  –  25. 31. Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” 2. 32. J. Morgan, Laboring Women, 69  –  143. 33. J. Morgan, Laboring Women, 166  –  96. 34. Douglass, Narrative of the Life, 237. 35. I borrow this term from the essay by Paul Staiti, “Accounting for Copley.” 36. Sharpe, In the Wake and Monstrous Intimacies; McKittrick, Demonic Grounds and “Mathematics Black Life.” 37. Curry-­Machado, Global Histories, Imperial Commodities; Marx and Engels, Das Kapital, chap. 1 (“Commodification”); Balibar, Philosophy of Marx, 58; B. Brown, “Reification, Reanimation.”

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38. For more on the dialogic, see Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination. See also Mercer, “Art History and the Dialogics”; Lowe, Intimacies of Four Continents. 39. Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” 11 40. Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” 11. 41. Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 15. I am thinking here, in particular, about Michel-­ Rolph Trouillot’s conception of “pastness” — as a relationship to history and the production of historical narratives. 42. Raengo, On the Sleeve; Cobb, Picture Freedom; Mirzoeff, Right to Look; Lewis, “Vision and Justice.” 43. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 115  –  25. 44. K. Thompson, Eye for the Tropics and Shine. 45. Copeland, Bound to Appear, 16. 46. K. Brown, Repeating Body. 47. Bagneris, Coloring the Caribbean; Bagneris, “Miscegenation in Marble”; Shaw, Seeing the Unspeakable; Shaw, Portraits of a People. 48. See, for example, Bernstein, “Dances with Things”; Taylor, Archive and the Repertoire, 1  –  53. 49. Geertz, Interpretation of Cultures, 13. As Geertz explains, this involves “fit[ting] lumps and fragments, objects and images . . . in relation to each other.” 50. Benjamin, Illuminations, 300  –  305. 51. See especially Lowe, Intimacies of Four Continents; W. Johnson, River of Dark Dreams; Barringer, Forrester, and Martinez-­Ruiz, Art and Emancipation in Jamaica. 52. A. Robinson, “Forms of Appearance of Value,” 248. 53. I am thinking here particularly of the work of the Combahee River Collective, whose members have laid the groundwork for the kinds of activist work and political change — both in terms of social justice work and academic scholarship (although the two, to my mind, are always entangled) — taking place through movements such as #BlackLivesMatter, #RhodesMustFall, #NoDAPL, #8toAbolition and #museums arenotneutral. See especially Combahee River Collective, Combahee River Collective Statement, 12; K.-­Y. Taylor, How We Get Free.

Chapter 1. Circuits of Cotton 1. Mitchell, “Imperial Landscape,” 21  –  30. 2. O’Connor, Lords of the Loom, 67; Emerson, Essays and English Traits, 145. 3. Beckert, “Emancipation and Empire,” 1407. 4. Thorpe, “Cotton and Its Cultivation,” 447.

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5. For more on the relationship between commodities, popular culture, and constructions of the global, see especially Bellamy, “It Narratives and Circulation,” 117  –  46. 6. In more recent exhibitions — Navigation Charts at Spike Island, Bristol, UK (January 20  –  March 26, 2017) and Lubaina Himid Warp and Weft at Firstsite, Colchester, UK (July 1  –  October 1, 2017) — Himid has used a smaller number of canvases in her installation. See Eyene, “Lubaina Himid: Navigation Charts”; “Lubaina Himid Navigation Charts.” The most recent and most comprehensive account of Himid’s work was published late in 2019. See Bernier, Rice, Durkin, and Himid, Inside the Invisible. 7. Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom, 178. 8. Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste, 173  –  74; Himid, Naming the Money. 9. Rice, “The Cotton That Connects”; Himid, Naming the Money; Crinson, “Fragments of Collapsing Space.” 10. “Lubaina Himid, “Modern Art Oxford.” 11. For more on this issue, see Amor et al., “Liminalities,” 29  –  49; D’Souza and Casid, Art History in the Wake; Sims and King-­Hammond, Global Africa Project; Davidson, “Woven Webs,” 1  –  21; Crang and Ashmore, “Transnational Spaces of Things,” 655  –  78; Kaufmann, Dossin, and Joyeux-­Prunel, Circulations in the Global History. 12. Rice, “Exploring inside the Invisible,” 23  –  24 13. Rice, “Exploring inside the Invisible,” 24. 14. Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture; Lakwete, Inventing the Cotton Gin. 15. Bailey, “Other Side of Slavery,” 35; Dumbell, “Early Liverpool Cotton Imports”; Jeremy, Technology and Power; Eltis and Engerman, “Importance of Slavery”; S. Good­ rich, Enterprise, Industry and Art of Man, 323. S. G. Goodrich gives his readers these figures: “In 1792, the whole crop of the country (United States) was only 138,328 lbs.; in 1795, it was 6,276,300 lbs.; and in 1842, it was 783,221,800 lbs.” 16. Deyle, Carry Me Back, 15  –  63; W. Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, 1  –  73. 17. J. Rosenbloom, “Path Dependence,” 5; Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture; Temin, “Industrialization of New England.” 18. Schoen, Fragile Fabric of Union, 175. K. Morgan, “Mercantilism and the British Empire.” 19. See Arabindan-­Kesson, “From Zanzibar to Plantations South,” 288  –  302. 20. Gross, Course of Industrial Decline; Eltis and Engerman, “Importance of Slavery,” 123  –  33. 21. Terry draws on a symbolic geography of American regionalism with a long history and one that was repeated in texts from school geography books to newspapers. See Abrams, Pilgrims and Pocahontas; Conforti, Imagining New England; Manthorne, “Plantation Pictures in the Americas,” 317  –  53. 22. Sturge, American Slavery, 11.

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23. With a plantation scene in which Black bodies are at work, Barfoot’s picturesque style references William Clark’s (1770  –  1838) quasi-­industrial Ten Views on the Island of Antigua (1823), made during his stay on the island. For more on Clark, see Barringer, “Picturesque Prospects”; Thomas, “ ‘On the Spot.’ ” 24. A manual produced during Britain’s war with France, it carried a patriotic subtext, “demonstrating Britain’s economic power and work ethic.” Barringer, Forrester, and Martinez-­Ruiz, Art and Emancipation in Jamaica, 404; Barrell, “Visualizing the Division of Labour.” 25. For more on the relationship between the English landscape and the effects of mercantile interests and industrialization, see Barringer, “Picturesque Prospects,” 41  –  64; Barringer, Forrester, and Martinez-­Ruiz, Art and Emancipation in Jamaica, 404. Anne Bermingham describes the process of enclosure as a fundamental shift in relationships between class, land, and aesthetics in the late eighteenth century. She highlights how the rustic tradition of landscape developed alongside this social change, in which the meanings of the word natural were altered and class differences realigned. Landscape painting, she argues, helped register these socioeconomic conflicts, often by eliding them into a visual register of the rustic that could cover over, enclose, and challenge the aesthetics of bourgeois culture. Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology, 63  –  87. 26. For more examples of similar illustrations, whose conventions Barfoot references, see Reynolds’s Pictorial Atlas; Rees, Cyclopædia; Baines, History of the Cotton Manufacture. 27. This phase of cotton’s manufacture and distribution will be discussed in chapter 2. For a firsthand account of the extent of the international markets for British printed cottons, see in particular Silver, “Henry Adams’ ‘Diary’ ”; S. D. Chapman, “Quantity versus Quality”; Montgomery, Printed Textiles; Floud, “Origins of English Calico Printing”; Nieto-­Galan, “Calico Printing and Chemical Knowledge”; Potter, Calico Printing; Wadsworth and Mann, Cotton Trade and Industrial Lancashire. 28. Sewell, Work and Revolution in France, 65. 29. Payne, Reenchantment of Nineteenth-­Century Fiction, 44 – 68. 30. For more on serialization, see Payne, Reenchantment of Nineteenth-­Century Fiction; Steiner, “Authenticity, Repetition.” 31. While free trade remained the ideal principle for commerce, tariffs and protectionism — within the United States and Britain — were, in reality, still in place, particularly to offset competition in finding markets for low-­quality plain and printed cotton goods. See Howe, “Free Trade and Global Order,” 26  –  46; Raguet, Principles of Free Trade; Martineau, Illustrations of Political Economy; O’Rourke and Williamson, “When Did Globalisation Begin?”; Howe, Free Trade and Liberal England; Nye, “Myth of Free-­Trade Britain.” 32. Riello, Cotton, 187  –  211; Trentmann, “National Identity and Consumer Politics,” 215  –  45. 33. Christy, Cotton Is King. 34. Baines and Herford, “History of the County Palatine,” 358.

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35. Baines, History of the Cotton Manufacture, 9  –  15. 36. “What a great number of hands the cotton must pass through before it appears in the form of cloth. . . . What a large amount of labour, skill and care, must be bestowed upon it!” Barfoot, Progress of Cotton, plate 10, “Weaving.” 37. Knight’s series of articles was published in Penny Magazine between 1832 and 1840, Penny Magazine was an inexpensive pictorial miscellany and one of the first magazines to popularize knowledge about art as well as socializing the English worker. Both Knight’s article and Barfoot’s lithographs might also be read in tandem with narratives that — like the “it” narratives of the eighteenth century — traced the social lives of a commodity, by following its manufacture from raw material to finished product. See P. Anderson, Printed Image and “Pictures for the People,” 133  –  40. 38. Blackett, Divided Hearts; Holcomb, Moral Commerce; Vaughan-­Kett, “Quaker Women.” 39. Chandler, “Slave Produce,” 111. 40. See, for example, D. Taylor, Archive and the Repertoire, 1  –  53; Roach, Cities of the Dead. See also Brecht, “On Gestic Music.” 41. For a useful description of the genealogy of the term, see Reckson, “Gesture.” 42. Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts.” 43. Taylor, Archive and the Repertoire, 1  –  53. 44. Walther, William Lowndes Yancey. Jesse Beane was a politician and lawyer, and in 1839 he became president of the Alabama senate. Cahaba was located in the heart of what was called the Black Belt of Alabama — a curved swath of land running from the Mississippi border to Georgia. Cahaba and its neighboring county grew quickly with the rising interest in cotton cultivation. In 1820 the county had a population of 6,003, and in 1830 it had grown to 14,017, with slaves barely outnumbering whites. By 1840, whites numbered 7,922, while the black population had skyrocketed to 17,277. 45. “Letter from J. Beane,” November 30, 1839. 46. Phillip Milhous (1804  –  1857) was a prominent planter and politician in the Dallas County area of Alabama. The 1866 Colored Census of Dallas County lists sixteen women and men as part of the estate of Phillip Milhous. “1866 Colored Census, Dallas Co., AL_4/5.” 47. “Letter from P. Milhous,” January 24, 1840. 48. “Letter from H. L. Lee,” March 29, 1840. 49. “Letter to R. G. Hazard, name of letter sender unreadable,” October 29, 1844. 50. “Letter from Charles H. Poellnitz to R. G. Hazard,” October 28, 1839. 51. For more on the role of factors and merchants, see Batchelder, Introduction and Early Progress; O’Connor, Lords of the Loom; Abbott, Cotton and Capital; Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture.

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52. Callender, Selections from the Economic History; Wright, Political Economy of the Cotton South; Wright and Kunreuther, “Cotton, Corn and Risk.” 53. For more, see M. Rose, Firms, Networks, and Business Values; Downey, Planting a Capitalist South. 54. Dumbell, “Early Liverpool Cotton Imports”; M. Rose, Lancashire Cotton Industry; Ellison, Cotton Trade of Great Britain; G. Daniels, “American Cotton Trade with Liverpool.” 55. White and Woodbury, Memoir of Samuel Slater; J. Rosenbloom, “Path Dependence,” 5  –  20; Stachiw, “ ‘For the Sake of Commerce.’” 56. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery, 33  –  65. 57. Best, “Neither Lost nor Found.” 58. W. Johnson, Soul by Soul, 86. 59. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 50  –  52. 60. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 64  –  81. 61. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 67. 62. Harney and Moten, Undercommons, 84  –  100. 63. W. Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, 47  –  93. 64. McKittrick, “Mathematics Black Life,” 6  –  28; Sharpe, In the Wake, 1  –  25. 65. Many scholars of dress, fashion, and textiles have written about the social and symbolic meanings of cloth. My reading of cloth as a text emerges from some of these works, including Cordwell and Schwarz, Fabrics of Culture, 1  –  4; Schneider, “Anthropology of Cloth”; Kruger, Weaving the Word; Carlyle, Sartor Resartus; Keenan, Dressed to Impress, 1  –  25; Kriger, Cloth in West African History; Breward, Culture of Fashion and Fashion; Kwint, Breward, and Aynsley, Material Memories; Küchler and Miller, Clothing as Material Culture. 66. For a deeper history, see especially Lemire, Fashion’s Favourite and “Domesticating the Exotic,” 64  –  85. 67. J. Rosenbloom, “Path Dependence.” I am grateful to Dr. Ruth Barnes for pointing out this important difference in the production of negro cloth. Conversation with Dr. Ruth Barnes, Curator of Textiles, Yale University Art Gallery, March 10, 2010. 68. Harney and Moten, Undercommons, 84  –  100. 69. Montgomery, Printed Textiles, 1  –  30. 70. No. 670: “An Act for the Better Ordering and Governing of Negroes and Other Slaves in this Province,” xl, in Cooper and McCord, Statutes at Large of South Carolina, 7:397. 71. “Effects of Negro Plots on Public Sentiment,” in Commons et al., Documentary History, 113. 72. Higman, Slave Populations of the British, 223  –  24, 257.

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73. Montgomery, Printed Textiles, 150; Beck, Draper’s Dictionary, 170, 338. 74. C. Brown, Scissors and Yardstick, 152. See also Montgomery, Printed Textiles, 152; R. Campbell, Empire for Slavery, 139; Brackman, Facts and Fabrications, 75; Katz-­ Hyman and Rice, World of a Slave, 352. 75. M. Edwards, Growth of the British Cotton, 93. See also Ellison, Cotton Trade of Great Britain, 85. 76. Appleton, Introduction of the Power Loom, 11  –  12. See also Vatter, “Industrial Borrowing.” 77. J. Rosenbloom, “Path Dependence,” 10. 78. Greenlees, Female Labour Power, 34. The choice between mule and throstle spinning is not clear: mule spinning required more construction, more technical expertise, and, initially, a higher cost. Since New England factories did not produce a range of goods, throstle spinning was adequate. The gendered division of labor may also have been a factor, and throstle spinning became associated with female laborers and mule spinning with male (as Barfoot shows in his print). Textile producers in Pennsylvania tended to make finer quality finished goods. For more on the different types of cloth production across the northern states, see Shelton, Mills of Manayunk; Scranton, Endless Novelty; Hood, Weaver’s Craft. There was also a small water-­powered textile industry in the South, clustered mostly in the Piedmont area due to its efficient energy sources. The mills there also produced cheap, coarse material and were often operated with slave labor. They likely produced material for plantation owners, but their output hardly matched that of the New England regions. Since I am focusing on objects that use the cotton trade to reimagine the connections of the north and south of the United States, I do not examine the limited textile production of these factories here. See Wares, “Dress of the African American”; Rowan, Negro in the Textile Industry. 79. Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom, 105. 80. Oba, “ ‘Mostly Made’ ”; Stachiw, “ ‘For the Sake of Commerce,’ ” 1  –  13. 81. Blatt and Roediger, Meaning of Slavery. A particularly significant manufacturer of negro cloth was the Peace Dale Manufacturing Company, formed by Rowland Hazard (1763  –  1835) at the beginning of the nineteenth century with his sons Isaac Peace Hazard (1794  –  1879), Rowland Gibson Hazard (1801  –  1888) and Joseph Peace Hazard (1807  –  1894), who took control of the firm in 1829. Two companies in Massachusetts, the Ware Manufacturing Company and the Lowell Manufacturing Company, included the production of negro cloth in their records and in letters written between their treasurer, the anti-­abolitionist Lewis Tappan, and their agents. See American Textile History Museum, Ware Manufacturing Company Records, mss 312; and Center for Lowell History, University of Massachusetts Lowell Library, Lowell Manufacturing Company Records. Discussions with textile curators Dianne L. Fagan-­Affleck from the American Textile History Museum (April 2011) and Linda Eaton (Winterthur Museum, July 2012) suggest that while negro cloth was coarse and probably a woolen warp and cotton weft, Lowell cloth was possibly a thinner

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material, used for the summer and more like what we now call muslin. A significant study of Negro cloth is also being carried out by Seth Rockman. See Rockman, “Negro Cloth,” 170  –  94. 82. Foster, New Raiments of Self; Foster’s sources are the wpa slave narratives in which, she argues, there is little mention of factory-­made cloth being used on the plantations. Furthermore, William Dosité Postell asserts that “on the whole the cloth from which the clothes were made for slaves was manufactured in the North and the East.” Postell, Health of Slaves, 40. Other accounts of plantation life also mention the use of factory-­made cloth. However, it was also the case that cloth was purchased from factories, and then slaves made their own clothes on the plantation. 83. Albers, On Weaving, 38  –  59. 84. Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom, 46. 85. Douglass, Narrative of the Life, 22. 86. “Letter from J. A. Ventress to R. G. Hazard,” August 30, 1836. 87. “Letter from Jacqueline Tayler to R. G. Hazard” n.d. 88. Cotton Supply Association, Cultivation of Orleans Staple Cotton; Mallet, Cotton; Thorpe, “Cotton and Its Cultivation,” 447  –  63. 89. Lakwete, Inventing the Cotton Gin; Kemble, Journal of a Residence; Vlach, By the Work, 124  –  25. 90. Cotton Supply Association, Cultivation of Orleans Staple Cotton, 13; Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, 162. 91. Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, 164  –  66. 92. Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa, 30  –  31. Zimmerman includes a series of photographs taken from a twentieth-­century cotton-­grading manual that demonstrate how to best move and arrange and use one’s fingers to assess a strand of cotton; the series is titled “The Kinaesthetic Process.” It is from this practical demonstration that I have constructed the term handwork. 93. Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa, 32. 94. Baines, History of the Cotton Manufacture, 288  –  301; Thorpe, “Cotton and Its Cultivation”; Cloud, “Memoir.” 95. W. Johnson, Soul by Soul, 78  –  135. 96. “Letter from H. L. Lee,” March 29, 1840. 97. “Letter from J. P. Cosgrove to H. G. Hazard,” June 30, 1838. 98. Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom, 46. 99. Bailey, “Other Side of Slavery,” 48; Kirkland, History of American Economic Life, 221. 100. Foster, New Raiments of Self, 137  –  38. 101. See, for example, Foster, New Raiments of Self, 34  –  53; “Born in Slavery”; Davis and Gates, Slave’s Narrative.

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102. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life, 20. 103. Douglass, Narrative of the Life, 16; Northup, Twelve Years a Slave. 118. 104. Rawick, American Slave, 7:1, 132. 105. “Interview with Willis Winn,” 202. 106. Rawick, American Slave, 16:336. 107. I am thinking here specifically of Fred Moten’s conception of the “resistance of the object” in Moten, In the Break, 233  –  55. 108. Foster, New Raiments of Self, 35  –  50. 109. Rawick, American Slave, 16:336. 110. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery, 122. 111. Harney and Moten, Undercommons, 84  –  100. 112. Foster, New Raiments of Self, 136  –  50. 113. Foster, New Raiments of Self, 117  –  35; Desrochers, “Slave-­for-­Sale Advertisements,” 623  –  64. 114. Tower, Slavery Unmasked, 274, 279; Knowles, “Fashioning Slavery”; Sanders, “Politics of Textiles.” 115. Blum and Lindsey, “Nineteenth-­Century Appliqué Quilts,” 1  –  45; Brackman, Facts and Fabrications; Cash, “Kinship and Quilting,” 30  –  41. 116. Klassen, “Representations of African American Quiltmaking,” 297  –  334; Witzling, “Quilt Language,” 619  –  37; Arnett et al., Quilts of Gee’s Bend. 117. C. Smith, “Realm of Cotton,” 127. 118. Selden, Mill Girls; Larcom, New England Girlhood, 30  –  60; Melville, “Paradise of Bachelors”; Cahir, Solitude and Society, 102. 119. Wardrop, Emily Dickinson, 77; Scoresby, American Factories. 120. Greeson, Our South, 117, 17. The connections between the “wage slavery” of proletarianization and chattel slavery were made by several writers and were often noted in the antislavery publication The Liberator. The antislavery campaigner William Lloyd Garrison made comparisons between southern slavery and northern industrialization, positioning the vices of the plantation as an analogue to the vices of the new industrial metropolis. However, by avoiding an economic analysis of the coercion of chattel slavery and the exploitation of industry, Garrison avoided any real critique of industrial expansion. Rather, the conditions of wage labor could be reasserted as “freedom” and the plantation as a site that required northern, rather than southern, intervention to change. 121. Greeson, Our South, 117  –  20. 122. E. Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, xviii; David A. Zonderman, Aspirations and Anxieties, 116; P. Foner, History of the Labor Movement, 1:275.

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123. Eno, Cotton Was King; Grindrod, Slaves of the Needle; Larcom, “Weaving”; Selden, Mill Girls, 65; David Roediger, “Race, Labor and Gender”; Wardrop, Emily Dickinson, 10  –  79. 124. Larcom, Idyl of Work , 136. 125. Larcom, “Weaving.” 126. Larcom, “Weaving.” 127. Quoted in E. Thompson, Making of the English, 201. 128. E. Thompson, Making of the English, 203. 129. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. In the section of the 1844 Manuscripts titled “Estranged Labor,” Marx writes, “The devaluation of the world of men is in direct proportion to the increasing value of the world of things. Labor produces not only commodities; it produces itself and the worker as a commodity — and this at the same rate at which it produces commodities in general. This fact expresses merely that the object which labor produces — labor’s product — confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. All these consequences are implied in the statement that the worker is related to the product of labor as to an alien object . . . Labor’s realization is its objectification. Under these economic conditions this realization of labor appears as loss of realization for the workers; objectification as loss of the object and bondage to it; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation. . . . For on this premise it is clear that the more the worker spends himself, the more powerful becomes the alien world of objects which he creates over and against himself, the poorer he himself — his inner world — becomes, the less belongs to him as his own.” See also Balibar, Philosophy of Marx, 42  –  80. 130. Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall, 137. 131. “Reasons for Withdrawing,” 50. 132. Dillon, New World Drama , 16. 133. Blackett, Divided Hearts; H. Brown, Narrative of the Life; Craft, Running a Thousand Miles; Brooks, Bodies in Dissent, 66  –  131. 134. Rusert, Fugitive Science, 113  –  49. 135. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 199. 136. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 195. 137. Driskell, Cosby, and Hanks, Other Side of Color, 20  –  21. Bannister was awarded the Bronze Medal — the highest award for painting — at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia for his now-­lost painting Under the Oaks. When he went to inquire about the award, he was told a mistake had been made; he was turned away, not permitted to receive his award in ceremony, an honor that would have been accorded a white artist. He was eventually allowed to claim his award after a review, but the incident left him angry and humiliated. 138. Yellin and Van Horne, Abolitionist Sisterhood; Cutter, Illustrated Slave.

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139. The most comprehensive source for Bannister’s life and work is Holland, Life and Work of Edward Mitchell Bannister; other important sources are Bearden, History of African-­American Artists, 51; Bannister Gallery (Rhode Island College) and Rhode Island Black Heritage Society, 4 from Providence. See also a more recent work: Costa, “Edward Mitchell Bannister.” 140. B. Knight, History of the Sprague Families. 141. Conforti, Imagining New England; See also Kulik, Parks, and Penn, New England Mill Village. 142. Shaw, “Landscapes of Labor,” 59  –  73; Holland, Life and Work. 143. Shaw, “Landscapes of Labor,” 110  –  38. 144. Bannister Gallery (Rhode Island College) and Rhode Island Black Heritage Society, 4 from Providence, 4; Shaw, “Landscapes of Labor”; Holland, Life and Work; Costa, “Edward Mitchell Bannister.”

Chapter 2. Market Aesthetics 1. This was a widely used term for the city during this period. See Baines, History of the Cotton Manufacture; Gaskell, Cottonopolis; Lloyd-­Jones and Lewis, Manchester and the Age. 2. For more on landscape and the industrial city, see Hemingway, Landscape Imagery and Urban Culture; S. Daniels, Fields of Vision; Arscott, Pollock, and Wolff, “Partial View.” 3. Treuherz, Victorian Painting; Pointon, Bonington, Francia and Wyld; E. Johnson, “Victorian Artists and the Urban.” 4. For more on the distant prospect, see Arscott, Pollock, and Wolff, “Partial View,” 218  –  21. 5. Briggs, Victorian Cities, 88  –  139. 6. For a discussion of landscape as a mode of projection, see Mitchell, Landscape and Power, 5  –  35. 7. Chambers and Chambers, “City of Men,” 251. 8. For detailed accounts of this new topography, see Parkinson-­Bailey, Manchester; M. Williams, Cotton Mills in Greater Manchester; Dyos and Wolff, Victorian City. 9. Parkinson-­Bailey, Manchester, 33  –  47. 10. Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall, 120. 11. Sherwood, After Abolition; Hall et al., Legacies of British Slave-­Ownership; Walvin, Slavery and British Society. 12. The diary was probably compiled by a warehouse owner based in Britain and “engaged in the consignment of goods through a variety of locally placed firms.” Parks, “Britain, Brazil, and the Trade,” 8.

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13. For more on British merchants in Brazil, see Guenther, British Merchants; Heaton, “Merchant Adventurer in Brazil.” 14. “Letter from Townley and Jackson of Bahia”; see also Parks, “Britain, Brazil, and the Trade.” 15. Kriger, “Mapping the History of Cotton,” 87  –  116, and “ ‘Guinea Cloth,’” 105  –  27. 16. Kobayashi, Indian Cotton Textiles; Evenson, “Role of the Middleman.” 17. Fromont, Art of Conversion, 133. 18. Evenson, “Indian Madras Plaids”; Kriger, “ ‘Guinea Cloth.’” 19. Kriger, “Mapping the History of Cotton,” 95. 20. Kriger, “Mapping the History of Cotton,” 107; Inikori, “Slavery and the Revolution.” Joseph Inikori also suggests that at various times — for example, in Benin in the late eighteenth century — merchants’ records show that European printed textiles such as chintz were also popular. 21. Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 52. 22. Crill, Chintz, 11. 23. Kriger, Cloth in West African History. 24. Fromont, Art of Conversion, 109  –  73. 25. Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste, 1  –  50; Styles and Vickery, Gender, Taste, and Material Culture; Kriz, Slavery, Sugar. 26. Isichei, History of African Societies, 336. 27. Padilla and Anderson, Red Like No Other; Phipps, Cochineal Red. 28. Crill, Chintz, 11. 29. Wadsworth and Mann, Cotton Trade and Industrial Lancashire, 151. 30. Kobayashi, Indian Cotton Textiles in West Africa, 81  –  127. 31. By 1797 there were nine hundred cotton factories in the country as outputs of cotton textiles grew by 14 percent in a decade. Wadsworth and Mann, Cotton Trade and Industrial Lancashire, 170. 32. McDonald, Economy and Material Culture, 111  –  26. 33. Crill, Chintz, 10  –  20. 34. Mukerji, From Graven Images, 192  –  94. 35. Crill, Chintz; Crill, Textiles from India. 36. Crill, Chintz; Riello and Roy, How India Clothed the World; Turnbull, History of the Calico, 77. 37. Young, American Cotton Industry; Turnbull, History of the Calico, 100. 38. Crill, Chintz. 39. Styles, Dress of the People, 109.

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40. Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 46. 41. Kriz, Slavery, Sugar, 37. 42. The most in-­depth account of Brunias’s work can be found in Bagneris, Coloring the Caribbean. After Brunias traveled to London in the late 1770s, several of his Dominica pictures were exhibited at the Royal Academy and engraved. After returning to the West Indies in the 1780s, he seems to have remained there until his death in 1796. 43. Lafont, “How Skin Color Became” and “Fabric, Skin, Color.” 44. Bagneris, Coloring the Caribbean, 1  –  39. 45. Bagneris, Coloring the Caribbean, 92  –  136. 46. I am thinking here of Joseph Roach’s notion of surrogation as a mechanism for reproducing collective social memory in the circum-­Atlantic world, particularly through the performances of a disavowed minority that in effect reinforces hegemony. See Roach, Cities of the Dead, 33  –  68. 47. DuPont, “Captives of Colored Cloth,” 177  –  83. 48. Phipps, Cochineal Red; Padilla and Anderson, Red Like No Other; Feeser, Goggin, and Tobin, Materiality of Color; Arthur, Seeing Red. 49. Lafont, “Fabric, Skin, Color,” 133. 50. Schaw, Journal of a Lady of Quality, 107. 51. T. Campbell, Historical Style, 11. See also Styles, Dress of the People; B. Johnson, Lady of Fashion; Arnold, Patterns of Fashion; Lemire, Fashion’s Favourite; McNeil, “Macaroni Masculinities.” 52. Shesgreen, Images of the Outcast. 53. Alpers, Art of Describing. 54. Yeazell, Art of the Everyday. 55. Solkin, Painting for Money. 56. Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” 34; Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 8. 57. Bagneris, Coloring the Caribbean, 182  –  215; Beckles and Shepherd, Caribbean; Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power; Bohls, Slavery and the Politics; S. Hall, “Creolité and the Process of Creolization.” My use of creole here refers to these forced intimacies; the broader connotations of the word refer to cultural practices and performances that slip between categories such as white/African/indigenous. Creole was also a term used by colonial society to refer to Black and white individuals born in the Caribbean. 58. Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture, 187. 59. Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 89  –  90. 60. Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 92. 61. Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 93. 62. For more on this, see Blackwell, Secret Life of Things. Notes to Chapter two

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63. Crill, Chintz, 11. 64. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 62. 65. For more on this relationship of commodities, culture, and aesthetic refinement, see Kriz, Slavery, Sugar, 2008. 66. Katzew, Casta Painting. 67. Stratton, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo. 68. Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture. 69. Nead, Female Nude; Pollock, Differencing the Canon; Pinder, Race-­Ing Art History. 70. See Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow; Morgan, Laboring Women. 71. Buckingham, Slave States of America, 333. 72. Buckingham, Slave States of America, 334. 73. Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture. 74. For more on Delacroix and the significance of this painting and his work, see Bryson, Tradition and Desire; Jobert, Delacroix; D. Johnson, David to Delacroix. 75. For more on the visual iconography of slavery, see Thomas, “ ‘On the Spot’ ” and Witnessing Slavery; Wood, Blind Memory. 76. Crowe, “Sales of Slaves at Charleston, South Carolina, 554.” 77. Crowe, With Thackeray in America, 100. 78. Blackett, Divided Hearts, 1  –  30; Meer, Uncle Tom Mania, 1  –  51. 79. McKay, South Street; Blume, Historical Dictionary, 69. 80. For more on how these connections between colony and British landscapes can be made in British art, see Quilley, “Pastoral Plantations.” 81. Abolitionists focused on this relationship in different ways in the United Kingdom. See Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall; Katz-­Hyman, “Doing Good While Doing Well.” 82. W. Johnson, Soul by Soul, 117  –  89; Deyle, Carry Me Back; Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 17  –  49. 83. Crowe, With Thackeray in America, 133. 84. This painting was exhibited at the Society of British artists with the title Going South: A Sketch from Life in America. McInnis, Slaves Waiting for Sale, 8. 85. Crowe, With Thackeray in America, 136. 86. McInnis, Slaves Waiting for Sale, 175  –  207. 87. McInnis, Slaves Waiting for Sale, 175  –  207. 88. Thomas, “ ‘On the Spot,’” 213. 89. Wood, Blind Memory, 281. 90. Wood, Blind Memory, 281.

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91. Halttunen, “Humanitarianism and the Pornography,” 303; Thomas, “ ‘On the Spot,’” 228. 92. “Exhibition of the Royal Academy”; McInnis, Slaves Waiting for Sale, 206. 93. McInnis, Slaves Waiting for Sale, 7. 94. McInnis, Slaves Waiting for Sale, 74  –  75. 95. “British Artists: Their Style and Character. With Engraved Illustrations. No. lxxiii. Eyre Crowe,” Art Journal 26 (June 1864), quoted in McInnis, Slaves Waiting for Sale, 174. 96. McInnis, Slaves Waiting for Sale, 174  –  76. 97. McInnis, Slaves Waiting for Sale, 201. 98. Crowe, With Thackeray in America, 131. 99. McInnis, Slaves Waiting for Sale, 137; W. Johnson, Soul by Soul, 117  –  35. 100. Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, 79. 101. W. Johnson, Soul by Soul, 117  –  35. 102. “Slaves Awaiting Sale, New Orleans.” 103. McInnis, Slaves Waiting for Sale, 80; W. Johnson, Soul by Soul, 113. 104. W. Johnson, Soul by Soul, 180; Baptist, “ ‘Cuffy,’ ‘Fancy Maids.’” 105. Postle, Angels and Urchins, 5. 106. Egenolf, Art of Political Fiction, 82. 107. McInnis, Slaves Waiting for Sale, 139. 108. Manganelli, Transatlantic Spectacles of Race; Winters, Mulatta Concubine; Meer, Uncle Tom Mania. 109. For more on abolitionists and descriptions of the trade in “fancy girls,” see Yellin and Van Horne, Abolitionist Sisterhood; Manganelli, Transatlantic Spectacles of Race. 110. W. Johnson, Soul by Soul, 113  –  16. 111. McInnis, Slaves Waiting for Sale, 188. 112. “Fine Arts: The Pictures of the Year.” 113. I am thinking here of Cedric Robinson’s term racial capitalism. As a world system, racial capitalism describes how capitalism is entwined with and extends forms of racial oppression, allowing value and capital to accumulate from the exploitation, and commodification, of racialized others. C. Robinson, Black Marxism, 9  –  29. 114. Auerbach, Great Exhibition of 1851, 91  –  128. 115. Baines and Herford, History of the County Palatine, 357. 116. For more on the relationship between manufacture, commodities, and imperialism, see Baird and Ionescu, Eighteenth-­Century Thing Theory; B. Brown, “Reification, Reanimation”; Hoffenberg, Empire on Display.

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117. I am grateful to Professor Tim Barringer for highlighting this comparative reading, email message, January 28, 2014. See also J. Morgan, Laboring Women; W. Johnson, Soul by Soul. 118. For more on this, see Lapsansky-­Werner and Bacon, Back to Africa; Coates, Cotton Cultivation in Africa; Adeleke, UnAfrican Americans, 31  –  70. 119. For more on the politics of pattern and design as it relates to printed objects, see Kriegel, “Narrating the Subcontinent in 1851”; Crang and Ashmore, “Transnational Spaces of Things”; Adamson, Riello, and Teasley, Global Design History; Mukerji, From Graven Images, 1  –  10. 120. Kriegel, Grand Designs, 52  –  85; Potter, Calico Printing as an Art; Turnbull, History of the Calico; Riello, Cotton, 160  –  87. 121. For more on art and design education in Britain and key figures involved in its development, see Bonython and Burton, Great Exhibitor; Anthony Burton, Vision and Accident; Purbrick, Great Exhibition of 1851; Kriegel, Grand Designs, 86  –  126. 122. “Cheap Cylinder Print.” 123. Schwabe, Salis and Co., Journal of Design and Manufactures; For more on Schwabe, Salis and Co., a prominent Manchester firm, see S. Chapman, Merchant Enterprise in Britain, 147  –  48; Redford, Manchester Merchants and Foreign Trade, 108  –  26. 124. “Schwabe, Salis and Co.” 125. Potter, Calico Printing as an Art Manufacture, 36  –  37. 126. O. Jones, Grammar of Ornament; Crang and Ashmore, “Transnational Spaces of Things,” 655  –  78. 127. Mirzoeff, Visual Culture Reader; Gissis, “Visualizing ‘Race,’” 41  –  103; Werner, “Curman’s Skull,” 154  –  72; Gilman, Difference and Pathology. 128. D. Smith, Lefevre James Cranstone; McInnis, Slaves Waiting for Sale, 140. 129. Lefevre James Cranstone, “Letter to Hemel Hemstead Gazette,” December 29, 1860, quoted in D. Smith, Lefevre James Cranstone, 134. 130. Berry, Price for Their Pound, 79. 131. I take my reading of surfacism from Krista Thompson and her paraphrasing of John Berger. See Berger, Ways of Seeing, 86  –  87; K. Thompson, Shine, 225  –  29. 132. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 109. 133. W. Johnson, Soul by Soul, 135  –  89. 134. W. Johnson, Soul by Soul, 117  –  35. I am also extremely grateful to Professor Jennifer L. Morgan for her insights into the ways enslaved women refused structures of commodification through acts of kinship creation. She considers these acts as the origin point for Cedric Robinson’s conception of the Black Radical Tradition, for they occur at the moment of “transport and sale when the fullest understanding of the relationship between capitalism and kinship is laid bare.” Paper given by Jenni-

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fer Morgan, nyu Gender and Migrations Workshop, Villa La Pietra, Florence, June 27  –  28, 2017. See also C. Robinson, Black Marxism, 130 – 40. 135. According to the Directory, “Almost every nation possessing any degree of civilization and commerce, has its individual representatives in Manchester. There are several large houses connected with the American trade of course, and many English houses who export Manchester goods to every part of the vast continents of the western hemisphere. But of all classes of foreign residents, the Germans and Greeks are the most numerous. The close-­buying of foreigners, and their enormous profits, has frequently been a subject of much speculation and remark. Accordingly, we find that now that our export trade is principally conducted by foreigners, very few of the calico printers will work for stock. They take their orders from the foreign houses, who buy their cloth of the manufacturers, and then forward it to the print works to receive the desired pattern; and which being executed, they are packed at the various warehouses and dispatched to the different ports for shipment to their destinations. The Germans make their shipments principally to Germany, France, and other parts of the European continent; some of them, however, export largely to other parts of the world, but the Greeks principally confine their shipments to Turkey, South Russia, the whole of Asia Minor, Persia, Egypt, Arabia, and the East. Other houses export largely to India, China, Australia, the Eastern Archipelago, and the islands of the Pacific.” Whellan and Co., New Alphabetical and Classi.ed Directory, 27 – 28. 136. Henry Adams, “A Visit to Manchester, Extracts from a Diary,” Boston Daily Courier, December 16, 1861, quoted in Silver, “Henry Adams’ ‘Diary,’” 84  –  85. 137. “Turkey Red Swiss Chintz Velvet Print.” Cloth like this may have reached middle-­class buyers as other types of British-­produced cotton — especially patterns with a red background with yellow flowers — were also able to be purchased by lower castes and classes. Because these prints were generally considered cheap trade textiles they were not often collected by museums, and I have found it difficult to find samples of these materials. My knowledge of these textiles has come through conversations with textile curators including Dr. Rosemary Crill (Victoria and Albert Museum) and Dr. Philip Sykas (Manchester Metropolitan University). See Sykas, Secret Life of Textiles; Meller, Elffers, and Croner, Textile Designs; Crill, Chintz, 10  –  40; Tarlo, Clothing Matters, 1  –  62; Brown, Gandhi’s Spinning Wheel. 138. Haywood, India as a Source; Silver, Manchester Men and Indian Cotton; Chapman, Merchant Enterprise, 109  –  27. 139. Potter, Calico Printing as an Art, 36. 140. Kriegel, Grand Designs, 52  –  125; Harvey and Press, “John Ruskin and the Ethical Foundations”; Burton, Vision and Accident; Baker and Richardson, Grand Design; MacDonald, History and Philosophy, 73  –  116; Ashmore and Driver, “Mobile Museum,” 356; Jones, Grammar of Ornament. By appropriating non-­Western material to reinvigorate British design, Jones aimed to show designers how to absorb, master, and

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deploy these designs in a British context. By using the language of universality, he sought to encourage designers to move away from market-­dominated production. 141. Schwabe, Salis and Co., Journal of Design and Manufactures. 142. Watson, Collection of Specimens; Swallow, “India Museum,” 29  –  45. 143. Swallow, “India Museum,” 35; Traditional Industry, 99. 144. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man”; Bhabha, “Signs Taken for Wonders.” 145. Driver, “ ‘Imaginative Geographies,’” 144  –  45. 146. Lowe, Intimacies of Four Continents, 99. 147. Rice, “Exploring inside the Invisible,” 21. 148. These absences have been the subject of several recent articles and exhibitions, and are important to the work of contemporary artists including Fred Wilson (b. 1961) and Kara Walker (b. 1969). Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts”; Best and Hartman, “Fugitive Justice.” 149. Pollock, “ ‘How the Political World Crashes.’ ” 150. D. Roberts, Killing the Black Body, 1999. 151. Nelson, “Longue Durée of Black Lives,” 1737.

Chapter 3. Of Vision and Value 1. Raengo, On the Sleeve of the Visual, 117. 2. Raengo, On the Sleeve of the Visual, 115. 3. Griffiths, Prints and Printmaking, 139. 4. Hank Willis Thomas, email to author, January 15, 2019. 5. Caboose, “Black Hands, White Cotton.” 6. I am extremely grateful to Lisa Lawley for highlighting this important point for me. Stauffer and Soskis, Battle Hymn of the Republic. 7. Ovens, “Billboard Album Review,” 43. 8. W. Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction. 9. McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, xix. 10. Slave Narratives 14:2, 279. 11. Slave Narratives 14:2, 280. Prior to her move there, Heyward had spent time in Beaufort and then Parris Island, located north of Hilton Head just across the Harbor River among the Sea Islands of South Carolina. Heyward’s mother, Venus Mc­ Knight, had belonged to Joe Eddings, a plantation owner on Parris Island. Eventually she had been bought by Edward Blunt, an overseer on the same plantation, whom

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Lucretia Heyward described as “poor white trash.” Able to save enough money to purchase slaves, he had then moved with them to a house in Beaufort, next to a Baptist church, on the adjoining island of Port Royal. 12. Slave Narratives 14:3, unpaginated. 13. Slave Narratives 14:2, 280. 14. Between 1820 and 1870, Sea Island cotton was a highly valued commodity: its long, fine, silky fibers were more desirable in the production of better-­quality, luxury textiles than the more commonly grown upland cotton. As a result, Sea Island cotton was often worth at least double that of cotton grown inland and brought enormous profit to plantation owners. While upland cotton plantations focused on quantity, planters growing Sea Island cotton focused on quality, taking measures to cultivate the best seeds and improve planting and production methods. Stephens, “Origin of Sea Island Cotton.” 15. For more on the Battle of Port Royal, see F. Miller, Photographic History of the Civil War, 357  –  59; Carse, Department of the South. 16. W. Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction, 15: “Northern merchants and officers were well aware that the Civil War was not being fought solely on military terms, but also on financial terms . . . [if] confiscating slave property as ‘contraband’ would help win the war quickly, leaders of trade would not object.” 17. Atkinson, Cheap Cotton by Free Labor. 18. Abbott, Cotton and Capital, 88. 19. “Government Buildings for ‘Contrabands’ Erected.” 20. W. Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction, 31; Forten, “Life on the Sea Islands, Part 1” and “Life on the Sea Islands, Part 2.” 21. Byrd, “Tracing Transformations,” 21, and “Northern Vision, Southern Land,” 15  –  30. 22. A New Hampshire native, Moore spent his early career as a landscape lithographer, a background that certainly infused his later Civil War scenes. He traveled south accompanying the Third New Hampshire Volunteers to the Sea Islands to take photographs of soldiers and sailors. The photographs would have been produced in makeshift field studios, with equipment — camera, wet-­plate holder, chemicals, and the facilities for developing negatives — being transported by wagon. McCaslin, Photographic History of South Carolina, 23; Willis and Krauthamer, Envisioning Emancipation, 61  –  62. 23. Coakley, Sweetgrass Baskets; Rosengarten, Row upon Row. 24. For more on O’Sullivan and the circulation of his Civil War photographs, see Dingus, Photographic Artifacts; Kelsey, “Viewing the Archive”; Savas, Brady’s Civil War Journal. 25. Trachtenberg, “Albums of War,” 3. 26. Willis and Krauthamer, Envisioning Emancipation; Byrd, “Northern Vision, Southern Land,” 15  –  30; Trachtenberg, “Albums of War,” 1  –  32.

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27. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 42  –  47; Raengo, On the Sleeve, 44  –  51; Moten, In the Break, 202  –  3; Beller, “Camera Obscura After All.” 28. Warren, Elementary Treatise on Physical Geography, 72. 29. O’Brien, Intellectual Life. This particular composition also evokes a scene from Alfred Tennyson’s poem “The Lotos-­Eaters,” published in 1832. In it, the mariners —  after they have eaten the lotos flowers — are in a drugged state lounging on the shores of an exotic tropical land and being served by Indigenous natives. In 1861 the African American artist Robert S. Duncanson painted his own version of this scene and went on tour with the painting through Europe. The painting Land of the Lotus Eaters has often been read as an allegory of the US Civil War and the excesses of the South. For more, see Ketner, Emergence of the African-­American Artist. 30. My understanding of this conflation of landscape with bodies and the naturalization of Black workers through photography draws from K. Thompson, Eye for the Tropics, 27  –  91. 31. Lebergott, “Through the Blockade,” 867  –  88; Hussey, Cruisers, Cotton and Confederates; Ayers, “American Civil War,” 54  –  61. 32. Whipple, “Reconstruction and Negro Suffrage.” 33. Greeson, Our South, 227 – 51. 34. Blight, Race and Reunion; Hillyer, Designing Dixie. 35. Greeson, Our South, 236. 36. Beckert, Empire of Cotton; Grant, Bombay Cotton and Indian Railways; F. Brown, Supply of Cotton from India; Mehta, Cotton Mills of India; Silver, Manchester Men and Indian Cotton. 37. A founding member of the Bombay Photographic Society, William Johnson was a colonial clerk and photographer who published between 1855 and 1862. His multivolume album forms part of a large body of ethnographic work organized and commissioned by British colonial authorities in the years following the 1857 Indian Rebellion. These surveys incorporated visual and scientific information that conveyed all aspects of India’s political, social, economic, and geographical topography. Their system of categorization organized, codified, and interpreted the colony and its economic potential for a British audience. Johnson’s albums include a range of information about India, from architectural features to the delineation of caste, occupation, and religion. For more, see Pinney, Camera Indica; Falconer, India. While photography was a significant medium for these surveys because of its indexicality, reading them now enables us to understand their circulation within the bureaucracy of the British colonial administration and their effects on local agricultural production. Dutta, Bureaucracy of Beauty; Bagchi, Colonialism and Indian Economy; Hazareesingh, “Cotton, Climate and Colonialism.” 38. Cobb, Picture Freedom, 4. 39. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 118, 117  –  18.

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40. Beckert, Sven, “Emancipation and Empire,” 1415. 41. A. Stanley, From Bondage to Contract, 1  –  60. 42. Foner and Mahoney, America’s Reconstruction, 121  –  26. 43. Beecher, Henry Ward Beecher’s “Cleveland Letters.” 44. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe.” 45. Rusert, “Naturalizing Coercion,” 41. 46. As Edward Atkinson himself explained, the manufacturing displays should begin with a “nigger hoe and a bull-­tongue plough — the simplest technology and agricultural products — and so mark out the advances of both Southern and Northern life.” Atkinson, Address of Edward Atkinson, 14. 47. Edward Atkinson described it this way: “The strands of cotton one end of which is now held by the freeman who tills the soil of the south, the other by the spinner and weaver in the northern factory though it may contain but a few fibres [sic], can never again be broken by any power with or without the limits of this nation.” Atkinson, “Cotton Exhibition.” Edward Atkinson in a letter to Rolfe S. Sanders, quoted in Prince, “Rebel Yell for Yankee Doodle,” 343. 48. The Hall of Manufactures became a fully functioning mill — the Exposition Cotton Mills — after the Exposition ended. Glenn, Exposition Cotton Mills Company; Shingleton, Richard Peters. 49. “Atlanta Fair,” 699. 50. According to a journalist, “Such is the apparent completeness of this industrial exhibition, that with the raw material growing, and perfected machinery being in running order in the building, it is proposed that on the morning of a certain day the cotton bolls shall be plucked from the plant, ginned, made into thread, and then woven, so that within the twelve hours a complete suit can be fashioned of cotton material, to be worn by Senator Brown. “Atlanta Fair,” 699. 51. Some of Walker’s patrons included textile mill owner Stephen Weld and Charleston cotton broker Edward L. Wells. See Trovaioli and Toledano, William Aiken Walker, 80  –  82; Seibels, Sunny South; Vlach, “Perpetuating the Past,” 16  –  30. 52. Arabindan-­Kesson and Bagneris, “Spirit of Louisiana,” 81  –  109; Harris, “Blind Memory and Old Resentments,” 140  –  58; Vlach, “Perpetuating the Past,” 16  –  30. 53. By the second half of the nineteenth century, the naturalistic detail of realism and the gestural fluidity of movements like Impressionism were both deployed to capture the increasingly transient nature of modern life. Byerly, Realism, Representation, and the Arts; Shiff, “Art History”; Treuherz and Casteras, Hard Times. 54. Macleod, Art and the Victorian, 123. According to Mcleod, canvases with such a high degree of finish seemed to materialize their patrons’ (Protestant) attitudes toward work, industry, and reward, reflecting back to these industrialists the sources of their success. 55. M. Brown, Degas and the Business of Art, 16.

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56. Degas may have heard of art collectors such as William Cottrill, a Manchester cotton spinner whose firm, Cottrill and Company, ran the large Britannia Mills in Pendleton, an area just outside of the city. Cottrill’s collection was featured in several articles in Art Journal between 1870 and 1872, highlighting his deep passion for art collecting and detailing the subjects in his collection. See, for example, “Visits to Private Galleries.” 57. Like most of Homer’s paintings, it was also finished in his studio, where he sometimes even invited Black people he had met on the street to be his models in order to complete a scene. Downes, Life and Works, 88. The Cotton Pickers is detailed in a way that was rare for depictions of Black Americans during this time, and it eschews the type of caricature that Homer included in both his paintings and newspaper illustrations. For more on this, see especially Wood and Dalton, Winslow Homer’s Images of Blacks. 58. “Preparing the Pictures.” 59. Critics applauded Homer for being one of the first American artists — if not the first — to be a “serious interpreter” of the picturesque qualities of “negro traits and aspects”: “Mr. Homer’s own turn for picturesqueness finds an excellent ally in the almost aggressive picturesqueness of negro traits and aspects, and if it is singular that this should have been so long neglected, it is fortunate that it should have found its first serious interpreter in him.” “Fine Arts: National Academy of Design,” 295. See also Calo, “Winslow Homer’s Visits to Virginia,” 14; Downes, Life and Works of Winslow Homer, 85  –  99. 60. “Cotton stamps a town which would otherwise resemble some decayed but still otherwise luxurious European center, with a commercial aspect.” King, The Great South, 50. In a letter to fellow artist James Tissot, Degas explained, “I have set to work on a fairly vigorous picture which is destined for Agnew and which he should place in Manchester; for if a spinner ever wished to find his painter, he really ought to snap me up.” Degas, Letters, 29  –  30, quoted in M. Brown, Degas and the Business, 17. 61. M. Brown, Degas and the Business, 15  –  59. New Orleans was losing its antebellum position as the center of the international cotton market in the South, and increasingly the work of cotton factors, who mediated sales between planters and manufacturers, was becoming irrelevant. See Campanella, Time and Place in New Orleans; Coleman, Historical Sketch Book; Boyle, Cotton and the New Orleans; Marler, “Merchants and the Political Economy,” 584  –  90. 62. Interestingly, Degas shows us the moment when “all that is solid melts into air” as we trace cotton’s transformation from material to commodity. See Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, 11. See also Marx and Engels, Das Kapital, chaps. 1  –  3 (“Commodities,” “Exchange,” and “Money or the Circulation of Commodities”). For more on Degas’s role in Impressionism and its relationship to the transitory nature of modernity, see Armstrong, Odd Man Out; Callen, Art of Impressionism. 63. T. Miller, American Cotton System, 45. 64. Cultural critics such as John Ruskin sought to dismantle these forms of commercial valuation and decouple the meaning of labor from its exchange value and

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the principles of supply and demand that underpinned the “selfish” illusions of commerce. Ironically, perhaps, like many industrialists Ruskin also emphasized the importance of naturalism and labored detail. It was through these forms of veracity that art and artistic labor surpassed mere economic value. With such truthfulness to nature, the aesthetic value — for Ruskin the highest value — of art emerged, through which viewers, and society at large, could be moved to new forms of awareness, and the meaning of labor itself could be transformed. Ruskin, “Unto This Last,” 36; Farnie, English Cotton Industry; Larson, Market Revolution in America, 98  –  141; Lipartito, “New York Cotton Exchange.” 65. M. Brown, Degas and the Business of Art, 15  –  21. 66. Quick, “Homer in Virginia,” 72. Lacouture, Jules Breton. 67. Quick, “Homer in Virginia,” 74. Quick also traces the development of Homer’s compositional affinity with the arrangement of two figures in his paintings prior to the production of The Cotton Pickers. 68. Quick, “Homer in Virginia,” 76. 69. Michael Quick has argued that the composition revolves around the idea of an awakening. Against the expansive sky and expanding field symbolizing their entrapment, these figures have experienced a “dawning awareness of a life beyond [their] sheltered world.” Quick, “Homer in Virginia,” 76. 70. E. Foner, Nothing but Freedom, 74  –  110. 71. Critics saw in it a sympathetic rendering that eased the sociopolitical tensions of emancipation while providing viewers with a glimpse of the South that turned on the picturesque traits of African Americans, whom they recognized to be otherwise marginalized in American art. Calo, “Winslow Homer’s Visits to Virginia,” 2. 72. Calo, “Winslow Homer’s Visits to Virginia,” 22. While critics were impressed by its flatness, emphasized by its tripartite paneling and his engagement with Japanism, they found the placement of the figures to be awkward. One critic wrote in the Art Journal: “ ‘Upland-­Cotton’ . . . is a remarkable penetration of Japanese thought into American expression. The cotton plants are straggling across a footpath, on which stand two negro women, with their heavy, Oriental figures clad in strong rich colors. One woman stands upright, with her turbaned head swung back, outlined against a thin, hot sky. The other woman is stooping over and gathering the cotton-­pods, and her rounded back seems to bear all the toil of her race.” “Academy Exhibition,” 158. According to Lloyd Goodrich, the painting was found in Homer’s studio after having been altered by the artist at least twice — perhaps to appeal to other buyers — and the sky had been painted over, covering the figures and leaving only the cotton plant. Goodrich also suggests that this was the last of the alterations and was done in the early 1900s. Although the figures have been restored, their original placement is unclear. See Goodrich, “Upland Cotton.” Clearly Homer was willing to make alterations to work to attract buyers. For more on this, see Murphy, “Painting for Money.”

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73. As scholars have noted, in the years prior to painting The Cotton Pickers, Homer had embraced a number of stylistic techniques that influenced his genre paintings of the period. His facility with watercolor, his membership in the Tile Club (a group of American artists who promoted decorative arts, painted on tiles, and were influenced by the English Arts and Craft movement), and his interest in aestheticism were important aspects of his formal development during the 1870s. See Johns, Winslow Homer, 83; Pisano, Tile Club and the Aesthetic; Cikovsky and Kelly, Winslow Homer 1836  –  1910, 101. 74. For more on the idea of handwork, corporeality, and labor, see especially Huneault, Difficult Subjects, 10. 75. Benfey, Degas in New Orleans, 122  –  40, 171  –  97; M. Brown, “ ‘Miss La La’s’ Teeth,’” 738  –  65. 76. I am thinking here of the ways tropes, while mediating the changing meaning of form, approach a certain hypervisibility and, in doing so, thicken into stereotype. For more on this, see Fleetwood, Troubling Vision; Gilman, Difference and Pathology. 77. I am thinking here particularly of lynching and its particular relationship to visuality. For more on this, see Goldsby, Spectacular Secret. 78. Raengo, On the Sleeve of the Visual, 95; Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 118. 79. McKittrick, “Plantation Futures,” 3. 80. McKittrick, “Plantation Futures,” 5. 81. E. Foner, Reconstruction, 35  –  77. 82. R. Benjamin, Race After Technology, 1  –  32. 83. “Interview with Frances Fluker.” 84. Cauthen, Southern Comforts, 25. 85. “Interview with Richard Crump.” 86. “Interview with Mose Evans.” 87. Parrish, Slave Songs, 247. 88. Parrish, Slave Songs, 247. 89. Moten, In the Break, 192  –  232. 90. Slave Narratives 14:2, 280. 91. Byrd, “Tracing Transformations,” 16. See also J. Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow. 92. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 18. 93. Harney and Moten, Undercommons, 98. 94. For more on head wraps, see Buckridge, Language of Dress; Foster, New Raiments of Self. 95. Foster, New Raiments of Self, 257.

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96. Foster, New Raiments of Self, 293; Wares, “Dress of the African American Woman.” 97. Foster, New Raiments of Self, 293. 98. Campo, Trinkley, and Hacker, Plantation Landscape, 181; McKenzie et al., Ecological Characterization. 99. McKenzie et al., Ecological Characterization; Reitz, Gibbs, and Rathbun, “Archaeological Evidence for Subsistence,” 163  –  95. 100. Collins, “Visualizing Culture,” 52  –  55; Pollitzer, Gullah People; Holloway, “Sacred World of the Gullahs,” 187  –  223. 101. Coakley, Sweetgrass Baskets. 102. Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom. 103. Manuals such as Isaac Brinkerhoff ’s Advice to Freedmen emphasized the importance of industriousness and the obligation to work — both as a symbol of self-­ ­possession (the choice to work or not) and as a bulwark against dependence. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 145. 104. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 115  –  64. 105. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 73; S. Smith, At the Edge of Sight, 23  –  39. 106. Painter, Sojourner Truth; Grigsby, Enduring Truths; Stauffer et al., Picturing Frederick Douglass; Douglass, “Pictures and Progress”; Shaw, Portraits of a People; S. Smith, Photography on the Color Line; Willis and Krauthamer, Envisioning Emancipation; Rusert and Battle-­Baptiste, W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits. 107. Ater, Remaking Race and History, 24. Renée Ater observes that this commission brought a change in Fuller’s artistic focus, as she took up Du Bois’s advice on subject matter. See also Wilson, Negro Building, 73  –  76. 108. Wilson, Negro Building, 74; S. Smith, Photography on the Color Line; Willis, “W. E. B. Du Bois and the Paris Exposition.” 109. Brundage, “Meta Warrick’s 1907 ‘Negro Tableaux,’” 1378. 110. Brundage, “Meta Warrick’s 1907 ‘Negro Tableaux’ ”; Jackson and Davis, Industrial History of the Negro. Beginning with the monogenic origins of Africans and including a discussion of the ethnographical differences between Blacks and whites to emphasize their equality, Jackson and Davis’s book narrates the progress of African Americans. It shows Black involvement in national events, depicts their contributions to the nation, and discusses their current state as of the early 1900s. Interspersed through the text are illustrations of Fuller’s fourteen almost life-­size historical dioramas. In their textual organization, the dioramas are given meaning through the narrative of the text compiled to provide both a visual and discursive history of Black life in the United States. The narrative of racial uplift developed in the text is brought to life by the inclusion of the illustrations, which show the progress of Blacks from their initial transport to Jamestown onward, ending with a scene of a college commencement. Jackson, a lawyer and lobbyist, was also the former slave of Confederate General Fitzhugh Lee, who had become president of the Jamestown

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Exposition Company and offered Jackson the position of president of the Negro Development and Exposition Company. Although Jackson spent three years preparing for the event, Fuller only received her commission a few months before the exposition was due to open. Perhaps because of this, she left little information about her process, feelings, or aims for the work. Fuller’s tableaux represented the most comprehensive image of racial uplift on display and reinforced the trajectory of Black progress set out in the building’s organization. Both in the fair, and as illustrations in Davis and Jackson’s souvenir book, the diorama demonstrated Booker T. Washington’s ideas (and the address he made at the fair) on racial uplift and Black progress. The Negro Building was opened on July 4, 1907. On “Negro Day” — August 3 — Booker T. Washington was invited to make an address, in which he spoke of the strides of progress Blacks were making from their days of enslavement (which, he pointed out, began in Jamestown) to their present state of freedom. Visitors were impressed. One writer observed, “No one could look at the product of Negro brain and hand in the Negro Building at the Jamestown Exposition without realizing what a remarkable showing has been made after forty year’s [sic] effort, not only indicative of accomplishment, but full of promise.” Tucker, “Negro Building and Exhibit.” See also Wilson, Negro Building, 74; R. Thompson, “Negro Exhibit at Jamestown,” 26; 111. Brundage, “Meta Warrick’s 1907 ‘Negro Tableaux,’” 1378. 112. My understanding and use of the term value gap is drawn from Eddie Glaude’s theorization of this concept in Democracy in Black, 6  –  7. 113. Wilson, “Cartography of W. E. B. Du Bois’s Color Line,” 38. 114. Powell, Homecoming, 183. 115. For a comprehensive account of Bearden’s work, see especially Fine and Francis, Romare Bearden. 116. My thinking on how Black geographies are constructed and their relationship to normative relations of space and belonging is drawn especially from Katherine McKittrick and her reflections on Sylvia Wynter. See McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, 1  –  36, and Sylvia Wynter. See also Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality,” 257  –  337. 117. For more on how Thomas makes the human and commodity forms interchangeable in other artworks, see especially Raengo, “©amouflage,” 150  –  58.

Chapter 4. Material Histories and Speculative Conditions 1. McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, x  –  xi. 2. Townsend, World’s Cotton Centennial Exposition, 7. 3. Robins, Cotton and Race, 5. 4. Robins, Cotton and Race, 5  –  29. 5. Driver, “ ‘Imaginative Geographies.’”

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6. Landau and Kaspin, Images and Empires, 1  –  30; Driver, Geography Militant. 7. Pennycook, Language as a Local Practice, 38. 8. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man.” 9. Lowe, Intimacies of Four Continents, 175. 10. With regard to “dense materiality,” see Sylvanus, Patterns in Circulation, 51. 11. Hynes and Picton, “Yinka Shonibare”; Nielsen, “Wax-­Printed Textiles”; Launert, “Notes on the Manchester.” 12. Dillon, New World Drama, 16. 13. Two-­handled, like a miniature coffin, the box consists of four layered trays or drawers, which are subdivided into several compartments. Each layer held different items celebrating African productivity and creativity to promote the possibility of commercial growth and trade with Europe, but not all of these items remain in the box, which is housed at the Wisbech and Fenland Museum, Cambridge, England. In its original state the first layer held wood samples. The second held ivory, spices, gum, and specimens of herbs with medicinal value. In the third tray is an African loom, a spindle, and cotton cloths of various kinds showing different aspects of dyeing practices and textile production on the continent; along with cotton bags, ornaments, and leather goods, this tray demonstrated African artisanal and manufacturing processes. The fourth tray contains shackles, neck collars, and instruments of torture to illustrate the brutality of the slave trade and create a contrast between the productivity of African communities and the dehumanization of slavery. The implements most recognizable here, although not all still survive, are daggers and knives as well as a loom, a gris-­gris, a sword blade, and a bow. Devenish, “Slave Trade.” 14. See Wood, “Packaging Liberty and Marketing,” 220. 15. Wood, “Packaging Liberty and Marketing,” 218. 16. Scanlan, Freedom’s Debtors, 30. 17. Ratcliffe, “Cotton Imperialism”; Richardson, Tibbles, and Schwarz, Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery; J. White, West Africa; M. Edwards, Growth of the British, 75  –  85. 18. For more on the relationship between colonial expansion and the creation of a colonial public sphere, see Dillon, New World Drama, 1  –  60. 19. McIlhenny, “Review of Back to Africa,” 772. See also Coates, Cotton Cultivation in Africa, 6 – 10. 20. Although it is not always clear where these samples traveled next, we know that, at least early in the nineteenth century, they were displayed in house museums and missionary museums, to encourage donations and member subscription; later in the century they were a part of displays at industrial fairs and larger museums. For more, see B. Stanley, “ ‘Commerce and Christianity,’” 1  –  94; Burris, Exhibiting Religion, 1  –  40; Henare, Museums, Anthropology and Imperial Exchange, 31  –  90; Hughson and Reid, Walks Through London, 68; Murray, Museums, Their History, 347.

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Some objects used by the American Colonization Society and other missionary groups to sustain support for Liberian settlements were eventually acquired by institutions such as the Smithsonian. For example, Ralph Gurley, a Connecticut clergyman who was the general agent of the American Colonization Society between 1830 and 1840, sent a box of objects from Liberia that included lengths of cotton cloth to supporters in the United States. These samples were loaned to John Varden for his Washington City Museum, which opened at his home in 1840. Eventually acquired by what was then the Smithsonian Museum, Varden’s collection is now housed in the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History’s anthropology archives. It is possible that the loom in figure 4.6 may have arrived in the United States as early as 1827, when examples of West African spinning tools made their way to the United States via an acs shipment of “Liberian Curiosities” — which included cloth, a spindle, and descriptions of the spinning process — collected by its first general agent, Jehudi Ashmun. For a detailed discussion of key figures in the movement, see Staudenraus, “History of the American Colonization Society.” Information on Ralph Gurley and John Varden comes from curatorial notes attached to Sample of Liberian Cotton (figure 4.5). See also Hart, “Early-­Nineteenth-­Century Chiefs’ Horns,” 62  –  96; Rockwell, “Sketches of Foreign Travel,” 273  –  86. 21. “Bright Spot Upon a Dark.” Another observer wrote: “To Commercial men of every country, Liberia presents itself as a theatre of extensive and lucrative business operations. . . . [It] is the gate of Africa, and we believe is not only destined to develop the agricultural and commercial resources of that mighty continent, but be the means of regenerating her benighted millions.” H. Knight, Africa Redeemed, ix, xv. 22. For example, the Liberia Exhibit at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial International Exposition included “a little loom weighing one pound fourteen ounces, with yards of African cloth woven thereon in strips three inches wide.” Next to the loom, as the article describes, was a hand-­turned cotton gin invented by Edward S. Morris, a Philadelphian Quaker who had traveled to Liberia in 1862 to develop its coffee industry and foster the nation’s industrial development. The gin would be used to educate Liberians and aid in more efficient cotton production. E. Morris, “Liberia’s Products,” 81  –  82. 23. Hutton, “Work of the British.” 24. M. Johnson, “Cotton Imperialism in West Africa,” 184. See also Johnston, Liberia. 25. Lopez, “First Aid for the Exporter,” 9. 26. Conn, Do Museums Still Need Objects?, 174. 27. History and commerce were the museum’s framing narratives. Exhibits were arranged geographically and according to commodities. Others carefully described the history and development of commerce. Viewers could observe the resources of a particular country alongside a comparative display of the varying regional uses of a particular commodity. For a more detailed description of the Commercial Museum, see Conn, Do Museums Still Need Objects?, 172  –  97. 28. Report of the Proceedings, 87.

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29. Conn, Do Museums Still Need Objects?, 55. 30. T. Bennett, Birth of the Museum, 67. 31. Nworah, “West African Operations,” 315; Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue, 955. 32. Bennett, Birth of the Museum, 67. 33. Other kinds of industrial fairs influenced the development of industrial exhibitions, such as those organized by mechanics institutes. The difference between the earlier fairs and industrial exhibitions is that the latter emphasized objects rather than the processes of manufacture that were on display in the other venues. The emphasis in industrial exhibitions was on the product of manufacture, “divested of the marks of its makings.” T. Bennett, Birth of the Museum, 81. 34. Ashmore and Driver, “Mobile Museum.” 35. Barnes, Textiles in Indian Ocean Societies, 8. 36. Rivard, New Order of Things; J. Rosenbloom, “Path Dependence.” 37. Descriptions of Salem, both before and after the Civil War, foreground its position as a gateway to the world, and American interest in Zanzibar lay in its position as a commercial center for the eastern region of the African continent. Although trade with the area was greatly affected by the Civil War, American merchants continued their business interests there at least up until the last few decades of the nineteenth century. With the opening of the Suez Canal and the development of steam-­powered ships, a reduction in time and costs of European shipping meant American sales could be undercut, forcing these merchants out of business. Duignan and Gann, United States and Africa, 140. 38. Between 1855 and the American Civil War, East Africans consumed about twenty-­ nine million yards of the material. Prestholdt, Domesticating the World, 65. See also Barnes, Textiles in Indian Ocean Societies; Davidson, “Woven Webs”; Das Gupta, World of the Indian Ocean; Beatty, “Lowells of the South”; P. Edwards, “Southern Industrialization.” 39. Bennett and Brooks, New England Merchants in Africa, 220  –  21. 40. Duignan and Gann, United States and Africa, 78. 41. G. Campbell, Structure of Slavery in Indian Ocean. 42. Fair, “Dressing Up.” 43. Fair, “Dressing Up.” 44. Gott and Loughran, Contemporary African Fashion; Hynes and Picton, “Yinka Shonibare.” 45. The material connections between West African and Javanese textile consumers mediated by Dutch colonial interests probably begins somewhat earlier. The so-­called Dutch West and East India companies had trading posts along the Gold Coast, meaning Javanese-­made textiles may have reached the area much earlier. Sylvanus, Patterns in Circulation, 51  –  55.

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46. Sylvanus, Patterns in Circulation, 59. 47. Sylvanus, Patterns in Circulation, 59. 48. LaGamma and Giuntini, Essential Art of African Textiles, 20  –  21. 49. Kriger, “ ‘Guinea Cloth’ ”; DuPont, “Captives of Colored Cloth.” 50. My understanding of these material histories as “processes” of extraction and commodification has been shaped by Alexander Weheliye’s work on racial categorizations and their uses in disciplining, and defining, the boundaries of what constitutes Black life in relation to the category of the human in western modernity. See especially Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 17  –  32, 74  –  88. 51. Sykas, Secret Life of Textiles, 29; Launert, “Notes on the Manchester”; Steiner, “Another Image of Africa,” 91  –  97. Archival material relating to the Paterson Zochonis Manufacturing Firm from 1960, currently held at the Museum of Science and Industry, Manchester, includes interviews with calico printers who mention that artists were sent to West Africa to find, and send back, the latest information on African design tastes. Paterson Zochonis Textile Samples, MS0424/28 TS 5/4, Box 28. See also S. Chapman, Merchant Enterprise in Britain. 52. Steiner, “Another Image of Africa,” 91  –  110; Nielsen, “Wax-­Printed Textiles,” 467  –  99; Picton, Art of African Textiles. 53. Papapetros, “World Ornament”; Schoefert and Papapetros, “On the Formal Principles”; Semper, Style in the Technical. 54. These innovations also influenced domestic aesthetic sensibilities and expressions of sociality and status within British society. Lemire, “Domesticating the Exotic”; Lemire, Fashion’s Favourite; Styles and Vickery, Gender, Taste, and Material Culture; Roberts, “Guinée Cloth”; Inikori and Engerman, Atlantic Slave Trade. 55. Kemble, Journal of a Residence; Carmichael, Five Years in Trinidad; Olmsted, Journeys and Explorations. 56. Sykas, Secret Life of Textiles, 30. 57. “Calico and Capital.” 58. “Manchester’s African Trade.” 59. Fyfe, “British Empire in Africa,” 586. 60. For more on Lisk-­Carew, see Crooks, “Alphonso Lisk-­Carew: Early Photography” and “Alphonso Lisk-­Carew: Imaging Sierra Leone”; Viditz-­Ward, “Alphonso Lisk-­Carew.” 61. Mill, International Geography, 63; Alldridge, Transformed Colony, 30. Gambia cloth is a fine cotton fabric produced in Gambia and popular in Sierra Leone as a marker of style and social standing. It is often sold by female traders. Discussion with Dr. Julie Crook, March 28, 2019. 62. Launert, “Notes on the Manchester,” 7.

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63. Okeke-­Agulu, Postcolonial Modernism; Mercer, Cosmopolitan Modernisms; Mathur, Migrant’s Time; Mitter, Triumph of Modernism; Nuttall, African and Diaspora Aesthetics. 64. Stylianou, “Producing and Collecting for Empire.” 65. Lowe, Intimacies of Four Continents, 175. 66. J. Campbell, Middle Passages, 90. 67. Mjagkij, Organizing Black America, 164, 395  –  97; J. Thompson, Constitution of the African Civilization; Adeleke, Without Regard to Race. 68. J. Campbell, Middle Passages, 83  –  90; Adeleke, UnAfrican Americans, 31  –  70. 69. Delany, Official Report of the Niger Valley, 20. The explorer Martin Delany (1812  –   1885) traveled to Liberia to explore possibilities for expansion into Yorubaland. Henry Highland Garnet (1815  –  1882) founded the African Civilization Society, which aimed to end the international slave trade. Adeleke, UnAfrican Americans, 1  –  20. 70. Koivunen, Visualizing Africa; Ramamurthy, Imperial Persuaders; Robins, Cotton and Race Across the Atlantic. 71. Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa; Adeleke, UnAfrican Americans. 72. Moore, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois; Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa. 73. Radcliffe, “Tuskegee-­Togo Cotton Scheme,” 10, 7. 74. Beckert, “From Tuskegee to Togo.” See also Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa, 112  –  72. 75. Adeleke, UnAfrican Americans, 95. 76. Wilson, Negro Building, 61. 77. The exhibit “represented a visual narrative and spatial logic that buttressed Washington’s accommodationist sentiments on race relations. . . . [Its] location within the fairgrounds symbolized, but more importantly spatialized, the position of the Negro in society and in the city as separate and at some comfortable distance from whites.” Wilson, Negro Building, 73. 78. For more on Turner, see Angell, Bishop Henry McNeal Turner; Turner, African Letters; Adeleke, UnAfrican Americans, 92  –  109. 79. Gray, “Negro at Atlanta Exposition,” 10. 80. Jemison, “Exhibit of the Negroes.” 81. Wilson, Negro Building, 74. 82. Hicks, “Coffee Tree Quilt.” 83. Jemison, “Exhibit of the Negroes.” 84. Frye, “Harriet Powers” 11  –  16. 85. Jemison, “Exhibit of the Negroes.” 86. Frye, “Harriet Powers.” 87. Gray, “Negro at Atlanta Exposition,” 10.

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88. Cash, “Kinship and Quilting,” 30  –  41; Witzling, “Quilt Language,” 619  –  37. 89. I am thinking here of the idea of emplotment that Hayden White pioneered. See H. White, Metahistory, 1  –  43.

Coda: A Material with Memory 1. Driver, “ ‘Imaginative Geographies’ ”; Drew, Eden, and Oliver, Leonardo Drew. 2. B. Brown, “Reification, Reanimation,” 187. 3. Marks, Skin of the Film, 162. 4. Bernier, “ ‘Speculation and the Imagination’ ”; Copeland and Thompson, “Perpetual Returns”; Bernier and Newman, “Public Art, Artefacts.” 5. Driver, “ ‘Imaginative Geographies’ ”; Said, Orientalism. 6. Bernier, “ ‘Speculation and the Imagination’ ”; Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter. 7. Blight, Race and Reunion. 8. “Employee Rehired.” 9. I have been particularly inspired to think of this project as an act of dismantling and remaking thanks to Adom Getachew, “Colonialism Made the Modern World.”

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Index

Page numbers in italics indicate figures. Abbey, J. R., 213n17, 217n29 abolition, 9, 23, 58, 59, 93 abolitionists, 40, 61–62, 69, 89, 100, 103, 177, 178, 194, 244n69 abstraction, 21, 205, 206, 207 activism, 120, 215n53 Adams, Henry, 110, 113, 189 An Address to the Public of Strike-­Bound Manchester from a Journeyman Cotton Spinner (anonymous), 60 advertising, 169–70 aesthetics, 67–75, 114; in Britain, 84, 243n54; capitalism and, 101; class and, 105; colonialism and, 185–87; commerce and, 67–121; consumption and, 74; market aesthetics, 25, 67–121; modernist aesthetics, 191–92; racial capitalism and, 101; relational aesthetics of transnational progress, 22; slavery and, 76; slave trade and, 84–88; value and, 104 affiliation, 168, 176, 177; narrative of, 196; patterns of, 193–202. See also kinship Africa: in African American imaginary, 176–77, 193–202; British colonies in, 179; British cotton cloth exports and, 74; in colonial imaginaries, 172–73; colonial visions of, 195; cotton and, 7, 172–73, 179; cotton cultivation in, 193–94; diasporic identity and, 193; plans to return African Americans to, 193–95; as site of extraction, 177, 183; as source for extraction, 183; as space

of commercial potential, 194; trade and, 72. See also specific locations African Americans. See Black Americans African-­Asian-­Islamic exchange, 192–93 African Civilization Society, 243n69 African consumers, of British-­made cotton, 70–71, 74 African Repository (journal), 179 African textiles, imitation of, 187–93 agency, 147 Agnew, William, 143, 235n60 agricultural education, “Tuskeegee Model” of, 194 agriculture, southern, 3 Ahmed, Sara, 7 Alabama, 8; Black Belt of, 218n44; cotton and, 8 American Colonization Society (acs), 179, 193, 194, 240–41n20 Americas, British cotton cloth exports and, 74 annabasses, 71 anti-­Black violence, 147 Antigua, 80 Appadurai, Arjun, 17 Arab traders, 70 Arbery, Ahmaud, 27 archives, 18, 22; archival memories, 19–20; erasure of, 23; speculative approach to, 20 archiving, practice of, 6 Arkansas, 8

art, 18, 22, 23–24, 24, 104; class and, 141–42; commodity value of, 21; consumption of, 140–41; owners of, 140–41. See also specific artists art history, 23, 86, 114, 189 artistic labor: Black labor and, 144–45, 207; representation of, 144–47 Art Journal, 93, 96 Asia, cotton and, 7. See also specific locations assessment, processes of, 21. See also valuation Ater, Renée, 159 Athens (Georgia), 199 Atkinson, Edward, 124, 234n46, 234n47 Atlanta, Georgia, 138, 171 Atlanta Compromise, 195–96 Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition (1895), 195–96, 195, 199, 200; Negro Building, 159, 195, 196, 197, 199, 201, 238–39n110, 244n77 Atlanta International Cotton Exposition of 1881, 138, 139–40, 234n46, 234n48, 234n50; Hall of Manufactures, 234n48 Atlantic Ocean trade, 17, 115, 176, 177, 185, 188 “Atlantic Wharf,” 88 Bagneris, Mia L., 23–24, 76 Bahia, Brazil, 70 Bailey, Ronald, 54 Baines, Edward, 103 bales, 204–6, 204 Bannister, Edward Mitchell, 25, 63–64, 223n137, 224n139; Barbizon school and, 63, 66; Hay Gatherers, 64, 65; Mill in Knightsville, The, 64, 65, 66; Under the Oaks, 223n137; painting for black and white audiences, 64; painting of new England textile factory, 25 Barbados, cotton producer for British Empire, 83 Barbizon school, 66 Barfoot, James Richard, 9–14, 16, 36–39, 48, 114–15, 208, 209, 216–17n23, 218n37; cotton production images, 9, 10–15, 16, 29–30, 37–38, 103; Progress of Cotton, 9, 10–15, 16, 29–30, 213n17, 217n29; Progress of Cotton, #1 Cotton Plantation, 10, 53; Progress of Cotton, #2 Willowing, 10; Progress of Cotton, #3 Lap-­

Frame, 11; Progress of Cotton, #4 Carding, 11; Progress of Cotton, #5 Bobbing and Drawing Frames, 12; Progress of Cotton, #6 Spinning, 12; Progress of Cotton, #7 Bleaching, 13; Progress of Cotton, #8 Warping and Winding, 13; Progress of Cotton, #9 Reeding or Drawing In, 14; Progress of Cotton, #10 Weaving, 14; Progress of Cotton, #11 Dying, 15; Progress of Cotton, #12 Printing, 15, 37 Barnes, Ruth, 219n67 Barringer, Tim, 229n117 Barthes, Roland, 132, 153, 157 batik, 187–88 Battle of Port Royal, 123–24 Baucom, Ian, 18 Bayot, A.( after Charles Guillain), Young Mukomanga and Young Nyassa Men; Young Nyassa Girl and Makua Woman, 186 beads, 155 Beane, Jesse, 42, 218n44 Bearden, Romare, 168; Cotton, 166–67, 167 Beaufort, South Carolina, 130, 231–32n11 Beckford, William, 9 Beecher, Henry Ward, 138 Benjamin, Ruha, 149 Benjamin and John Bower (Manchester cotton firm), 72; textile sample books, 73 Bennett, Tony, 181 Berlin Conference of 1884, 174, 174 Bermingham, Anne, 217n25 Bhabha, Homi, 174 “The Big Gun Shoot” (battle), 123–24 Billboard (magazine), 122 Black abolitionists, 61–62, 69, 194 Black Africans, 18; cloth used in trade of, 72; commodification of, 36; as objects of desire, 84 Black Atlantic, centrality of the visual to studies of, 23 Black Americans, 2, 3, 8–9, 19, 20–22, 23, 25, 54, 91, 99; alternative history of Black American identity, 201; assertion of value as subjects rather than objects of speculation, 123; Black American subjecthood; disenfranchisement during Reconstruction and slavery, 195; exclusion of, 147; fa-

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milial bonds and, 152; “fitness” for cultivating cotton, 193–94; as free laborers, 20–21; instilling obligations of freedom in, 124; marginalization of, 3, 159; police brutality against, 27; representation of, 20–21; self-­ emancipated, 25; status in postbellum national order, 140–48; subjectivity and, 23, 123, 197, 201. See also Black enslaved people Black artistry, 57 Black artists, 23, 25, 63. See also specific artists Black athletes, 168–70, 169 Black bodies, 22–35, 74, 84, 107, 207; commodification of, 20–25, 92, 121–22, 138, 148, 169–70, 206; corporealization of, 62; desire for, 74; evidentiary nature of, 132; exploitation of, 169–70, 172 (see also slavery); female, 23; negro cloth and (see negro cloth); objectification of, 169–70 Black communities, 8–9, 28 Black consumers, 184–87, 188–89; African consumers, 70–72, 74, 184, 185, 186, 187–93, 242n38, 242n45; of British-­made cotton, 70–71, 74; colonialism and, 187–93; East African consumers, 184–86, 242n38; Kongo consumers, 72; tastes of, 189, 190; West African consumers, 74, 187–93, 242n45 Black diaspora, 17, 22–24 Black diaspora art, 23 Black enslaved people, 8–9, 16–18, 20–25, 32, 34, 38, 43, 72, 104, 106–7, 114–15; aestheticization of, 100; aestheticization as objects, 25, 86; called hoes or plows, 53; clothing and, 46–57, 97–100, 185 (see also negro cloth); commodification of, 17–18, 46, 88; cotton cloth traded for, 79, 85; factory workers and, 57–63; fancy clothes and, 100; framing of, 20–21; humanity of, 177; rape and, 86; reproductive potential of, 20–21, 23, 156, 164; resistance to commodification, 229–30; sexual exploitation and, 86, 100; status in limbo during Civil War, 124; viewing of, 20–21; women, 20–21, 23, 33, 85, 86, 100, 152, 155–56, 164 Blackett, R. J. M., 69 Black figures, as aesthetic objects, 81 Black freedom, 138; ambivalence about, 147;

constrained nature of, 23; “double bind of,” 135; expressions of, 157; framed speculative conceptions of, 123; locating, 148–59; meaning of, 132; myth of, 159; obligations of, 138, 157, 238n103; “rehearsal for,” 123; threat of, 135, 148; trade and, 174; visualizing, 132; “wage slavery” and, 222n120; white subjectivity and, 148–49 Black history, 158 Black intellectuals, 25 Black labor, 22; artistic, 144–45, 207; athletes, 168–70, 169; cotton and, 5, 21, 140; erasure of, 147–48; fetishization of, 122; framing of, 20–21; post-­slavery plantation workers, 123–32; representation of, 20–21, 163–65, 196; viewing of, 20–21; white masculinity and, 147–48 Black laborers. See Black enslaved people; Black labor Black life, 32; alternative visions of, 152–53, 155; colonialism and, 199; commodification of, 114, 174, 185, 188; corporealization of, 121; devaluation of, 18, 21, 27–28; erasure of, 159; the gaze and, 154; imagination of through logic of capital, 26; modernity and, 243n50; racial arithmetic of, 46; spatial politics of, 21; trade and, 177–78; value of, 121 black nationality, 195 Blackness, 6–7, 18, 27, 34, 56, 62, 69–70, 72, 86, 138, 143, 207–9; alternative visions of, 158, 195; commodification of, 21–22, 24–25, 27, 123; conceptions of, 22, 26; construction of, 23–24, 25, 66, 176, 189; corporealized, 131, 148; extraction and, 120, 148, 172, 176, 187, 189; fetishization of, 25, 122, 159; as a form of absence, 157; as form of property, 24–25; future value and, 21; hermeneutics of the surface around, 23; meaning of, 23, 208; naturalization of, 148–49; ontologization of, 132; as property, 25; relational vision of, 149; as site of spectatorship, 132; as site of white projection, 131; social meanings of, 23; as speculative condition, 25; as surface, 132; textiles and, 114; value and, 21, 24–25, 27–28, 113–14, 157–59, 167–68, 195; visuality and, 22, 23–24, 72, 121, 195–96

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Black people, 18; aestheticization as objects, 25; clothing of, 80; construction of, 20; police brutality and, 27; resilience of, 24, 153; value of, 140 – 41. See also specific groups Black radical tradition, 229 – 30 Black Sea Islanders, 123 – 32, 148 – 57 Black sharecroppers. See sharecroppers Black Studies, 9, 23 Black subjectivity, 135, 208; instrumentalization of, 152 – 53; status in limbo during Civil War, 124, 129; textiles and, 193 – 202; transformation of, 194; visuality of, 18 Black visibility, 61 Black women, 28, 85, 99; in American society, 119; as art objects, 86; in Britain, 116; enslaved, 20 – 21, 23, 85, 86, 100, 152, 155, 156, 164; kinship and, 152; rape and, 86; reduced to units of labor, 155; representation of, 23, 163 – 65; reproductive potential of, 20 – 21, 23, 156, 164; resistance to commodification, 229 – 30; as seamstresses, 56; sexual exploitation and, 86, 100; trans, 119 Bland, Sandra, 120 block printing, 75 Blunt, Edward, 231 – 32n11 bodies, 24; captive, 45; non-­Western, 114; objectification of, 27; representation of, 20 – 21; role of, 21. See also Black bodies Bombay, India, 72 Bombay Photographic Society, 233n37 Boston, Massachusetts, 63 – 64 botanical illustrations, 7 Boydell, John, 9 Brady, Matthew: Photographic Views of the War, 132 Brazil, 35, 70, 105, 214n22 Breton, Jules: The Reapers, 144, 145 Brinkerhoff, Isaac: Advice to Freedmen, 238n103 Britain, 26, 74, 103, 135; aesthetics in, 84, 243n54; African commercial interests and, 172 – 73, 175 – 76, 184, 194; American slavery and, 69, 80, 91, 96; circulating imagery of slave auction scenes in, 92; class in, 243n54; colonialism and, 3, 26, 82, 199; commercial interests of, 39, 172 – 73, 175 – 76, 184, 194; consumption in, 74, 103;

cotton manufacturing, 7, 17, 36, 46, 74, 104; design practices in, 17; fashion in, 74 – 75; imports to, 214n23; industrialization in, 17; modernity in, 190 – 91; sociality in, 243n54; social life in, 113; taste in, 84; US slavery and, 103. See also specific locations British Black Arts Movement, 30 British Cotton Growing Association, 179, 181, 183 British cotton manufacturers, 7, 26, 35, 39, 70 – 75, 190, 214n22 British Empire, 3, 17, 26, 60, 76, 82, 83, 84, 103, 179, 199. See also specific colonies British labor movement, 61 British-­made cotton, 7, 26, 35, 39, 70 – 75, 113, 190, 214n22. See also British textile production British textile production, 25, 39, 41, 60, 69 – 75, 105, 110, 190, 214n22 Brooke, William Henry, 86; Sale of Estates, Pictures and Slaves in the Rotunda, New Orleans (Starling [engraver]), 86, 87, 99, 100 Brooks, John, 82 Brown, Henry Box, 61 – 62 Brown, Kimberly Juanita, 23 Brown, Marilyn, 144 Brown, Michael, 120 Brown bodies, exploitation of, 172 Brundage, W. Fitzhugh, 159 Brunias, Agostino, 25, 67, 76, 80, 81, 83 – 84, 85, 99, 107, 154, 226n42; Linen Market, Dominica, 77 – 79, 78; A Linen Market with a Linen-­ Stall and Vegetable Seller in the West Indies, 77, 77, 79 Buckingham, James Silk, 86; critique of slavery in, 88; The Slave States of America, 86 Butterscotch Caboose, “Black Hands, White Cotton,” 2, 122 Byrd, Dana, 125, 152 “Cabinet of Freedom,” 177 Caboose, The. See Butterscotch Caboose. Cahaba, Alabama, 42, 218n44 Calcutta, India, 74 Calhoun, John, 209 calico, 74, 75, 97, 105

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Calloway, Thomas J.: Exhibit of the American Negroes, 158 Camp, Stephanie, 155 Cape Coast Castle, 74 Cape of Good Hope, 70 capital: effects of, 21; spatial relations of, 201 capitalism, 168 – 70, 178; aesthetics and, 101; globalization and, 174; industrial, 32, 83; racial, 18, 101, 114, 147 – 48, 174, 193, 199, 228n11 Carborundum printmaking process, 122, 170 carceral system, 3 Caribbean, cotton production in, 7 – 8, 9, 35, 76, 81, 82, 83, 213n7, 214n22 Carteaux, Christina, 63 – 64 Cash Box (magazine), 122 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, 1876, 145, 223n137 Century Club, 145 Chandler, Elizabeth Margaret, 40; “Slave Produce,” 40 Chapin, John, 123 – 24 Chicago, Illinois, 181, 198 Chicago Tribune, 199 Chinese textiles, 75 chintz, 74 Christianity, 72 citizenship, 123, 135, 148, 157 – 58, 168 Civil Rights Act of 1875, 135 Civil War, 35, 58, 63, 96, 134; Battle of Port Royal, 123 – 24; press coverage of, 124; representation of, 232n22; sharecroppers after, 122 Clark, William: Ten Views on the Island of Antigua, 216 – 17n23 Clarkson, Thomas, 175, 177, 178, 179, 193, 196, 240n13 class, 72, 156; aesthetics and, 105; art and, 141 – 42; in Britain, 243n54; cloth and, 74 – 75, 80; conceptions of, 156; design and, 105; fashion and, 75; landscapes and, 217n25; mobility and, 83 cloth, 25, 48, 67, 184 – 87, 188 – 89; Black consumers of, 25, 70 – 71, 72, 74, 184 – 93, 242n38, 242n45; class and, 74 – 75, 80; colonialism and, 187 – 93; colored, 70; cultural distance and, 183; desire for, 74; enslaved

Africans and, 69 – 70; Kongo consumers of, 72; Lancaster-­produced, 105; made to suit “dark skinned purchasers,” 105; Manchester-­produced, 105; non-­western market for, 111; patterned, 25, 54, 67 – 75, 70, 105, 106, 108, 109, 111, 230n137; samples attached to letters, 42; social and symbolic meanings of, 72, 219n65. See also specific types of cloth clothing, 154 – 56; “fancy clothes,” 98 – 99; identity and, 154 – 55; individuality and, 155 – 56; “Negro clothing,” 98; of slaves, 46 – 57, 97 – 100, 185, 221n82 (see also negro cloth); slave trade and, 69; sumptuary laws and, 47; Sunday clothes, 53; in wpa narratives, 54 Coates, Benjamin, 179; Cotton Cultivation in Africa, 179 Cobb, Jasmine Nichole, 22 colonialism, 21 – 22, 115, 176, 178, 181 – 83, 208; aesthetic identity and, 185 – 87; Africa in colonial imaginaries, 172; Black American communities and, 8; Black consumers and, 187 – 93; Black life and, 199; Britain and, 3, 26, 82, 199 (see also British Empire; specific colonies); cessation of slave trade and, 26; colonial cosmopolitanism, 199; commerce and, 21 – 22, 24 – 26, 110 – 20, 171 – 202, 181 – 93; consumption and, 115; cotton trade and, 26, 172 – 73; emancipation and, 26; extraction and, 84; Indigenous communities and, 8; “intimate distance” of colonial relations, 176; knowledge production and, 175; slavery and, 23, 24 – 25, 113, 171 – 202; spatiality and, 175; trade networks and, 110 – 20, 171 – 202 color, 25, 188. See also dyeing methods Combahee River Collective, 215n53 commerce, 26, 140, 141, 208; abolitionists and, 103; aesthetics and, 67 – 121; Black life and, 177 – 78; colonialism and, 21 – 22, 24 – 25, 110 – 20, 171 – 202; cultural distance and, 183; freedom and, 174; ideas about, 24; networks and transactions of commercial exchange, 23; slavery and, 103. See also trade networks

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commercial museums, 181 commodification, 25, 27, 121, 169 – 70, 175, 178, 223n129; capitalist processes of, 17 – 18, 20 – 23; color and, 25; commodity culture, 21; consumption and, 115; resistance to, 229 – 30; social relations of, 21 commodity exchange, visual logic of, 27 Confederacy, 124, 134, 149, 209 Congo Conference, 174 consumption, 5, 81, 83, 86, 111 – 15, 188, 192; aesthetics and, 74; British, 74, 103, 113; circuits of, 114, 140, 187 – 93; discourses of, 91, 192; self-­ fashioning and, 74. See also Black consumers Copeland, Huey, 23 Cosgrove, J. P., 53 cosmopolitanism, 199, 200 cotton, 3, 6 – 7, 18, 20 – 21, 24 – 25, 27 – 35, 51, 75, 84 – 86, 116, 143; Africa and, 172 – 73, 179; as allegory, 29; archival memory of, 17; associations and resonances of, 24; bodies and, 24; botanical studies of, 7; as both subject and form, 205; boycott of American, 103; Brazilian, 48; circuits of, 29 – 66; color and, 25; commodification and, 22 – 23, 25, 27; compared to white gold, 8; cotton imaginaries, 171 – 77; “free labor cotton,” 124, 125, 129, 132 – 40; free trade and, 38 – 39; Indian raw, 17; international consumption of, 8; market for, 22, 38, 76 – 84, 113, 122 – 23; market value of, 16 – 17; materiality of, 6; meaning of, 24, 35 – 39, 122 – 23, 133, 203 – 11; memory and, 6, 203 – 11; metaphorical use of for connection, 34, 61; mobility and, 29 – 35, 171 – 72; moral economy of, 103; optics of, 46; planting of, 8; printed, 75, 80, 86, 113 (see also patterns); progress and, 37 – 38, 42 – 46, 171, 179; shipping, 91; slavery and, 20 – 21, 25, 36, 38, 39 – 41, 58, 62, 69, 112; “social life” of, 17; speculative vision and, 9, 16 – 17, 22; tactility and, 24 – 25; “thick description” of, 24; Upland cotton, 232n14; US domestic consumption of, 7, 8; valuation of, 144; value and, 21, 24 – 25; visual culture and, 3, 25; West Indian, 48. See also cotton cultivation; cotton manufacturing; cotton plantations

cotton cultivation, 21, 124, 125, 179; in Africa, 193 – 94; Black Americans’ “fitness” for, 193 – 94; expansion of, 7 – 8, 213n7; on Sea Islands, South Carolina, 124 – 25, 232n14; specific movements required for, 52 – 53 cotton gins, 8, 35, 51, 53, 241n22; destruction of, 149, 156 – 57; invention of, 214n22; symbolic meanings of, 149 – 50 cotton manufacturing, 7, 16 – 17, 26, 35, 39, 70 – 75, 190, 214n22 cotton market, painting for the, 140 – 48 cotton picking, 51, 52 cotton plant, botanical illustrations of, 7 cotton production, 5 – 6, 51; expansion of, 16 – 17; images of, 37 – 38, 103 (see also specific artists); mobility and, 22; networked history of, 22; speculation and, 7 – 9. See also cotton cultivation; cotton manufacturing cotton rush, 8 – 9, 16 cotton textiles, 70, 74, 75, 80. See also specific textiles cotton trade, 5 – 6, 26, 29 – 35, 76 – 84, 214n22; Anglo-­American, 17, 30, 35; Black bodies and, 21 – 22; Black diaspora and, 17, 22 – 24; Black laborers and, 21; colonialism and, 26; geographies of, 21, 22; India and, 17; material implications of, 207; mobility and, 21 – 22; relational imaginary of, 18; representation of, 18; slave trade and, 9, 17 – 25; speculative vision and, 20 – 21 Cottrill, William, 235n56 counter-­history, 163 covid-­19 pandemic, 27, 170 Craft, Ellen, 61 Cranstone, Lefevre James, 107 – 8, 118; Slave Auction, Virginia, 107, 108 creole, 226n57 Crowe, Eyre, 25, 67, 88 – 93, 96 – 101, 103, 109, 118, 154; abolition and, 100; After the Sale: Slaves Going South from Richmond, 92, 95, 96; The Charleston Slave Market, 92, 95, 109 – 10; In the Richmond Slave Auction, 94, 97; “In the Richmond Slave Auction,” 92; “Sale of Slaves at Charleston, South Carolina,” 88; scenes of American slavery, 97; Slave Sale, Charleston, South Carolina (print from

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a sketch by Eyre Crowe), 88, 90, 91; A Slave Sale in Charlestone [sic], South Carolina, 96; Slaves Waiting for Sale, Richmond, Virginia, 92, 93, 94, 96, 100, 101; With Thackeray in America (journal), 90, 92, 94, 95 Crump, Richard, 150 Crystal Palace, London, 103, 104 cube Gallery, Manchester, England, 30 cylinder printing, 75, 104, 105 Dahomey, 200 D’Ascenzo Studio: Cotton Field, 209, 210 Davis, Daniel Webster, 238 – 39n110 Davis, D. Webster, 158 Davis, Theodore Russell, 92; “A Slave Auction at the South,” 92, 96, 96 Day, Iyko, 8 debt peonage, 135 decolonization, 9 DeCoursey, Letha Wright, 150, 151 Degas, Achille, 143

ican Negroes, 158; Exhibit of the American Negroes at the Paris Exposition, 160, 161; Government Clerks Have Received Appointment as Clerks in Civil Service Departments United States Government through Competitive Examinations, 161; Occupations of Negroes and Whites in Georgia, 161 Duncanson, Robert S., 233n29 Dutch colonial interests, 242n45 Dutch fabric, 187 – 88 Dutch genre painters, 76, 81 Dutch West and East India Companies, 242n45 dyeing methods, 75, 188, 190 East African consumers, 184, 185, 186, 242n38 East India Company, 17, 32, 72, 74, 113

Degas, Edgar, 25, 141, 147 – 48, 235n56, 235n60, 235n62; A Cotton Office in New Orleans, 141, 142, 143 – 44, 207 Degas, René, 143 Delacroix, Eugène, 89; Liberty Leading the People, 89, 91 Delany, Martin, 194, 243n69 design, 104; class and, 105 design practices, 17, 189, 208, 230 – 31n140. See also color; pattern desire: belatedness and, 189 diasporic identity, 193, 198 – 99. See also Black diaspora Dickens, Charles: Household Words, 92 Dillon, Elizabeth Maddock, 61, 176 dioramas, 158, 159, 181, 238 – 39n110 dispossession, 120, 148 – 49, 178, 183 domination, 193 Dominica: as cotton producer for British Empire, 76, 83 Douglass, Frederick, 20 – 21, 36, 39, 50, 55, 61, 158 Drew, Leonardo, 3, 5 – 6, 26, 208; Number 25, 204 – 7, 204 Du Bois, W. E. B., 123, 158; Exhibit of the Amer-

Eddings, Joe, 231 – 32n11 Elliot and Fry: Martha Ricks, 197 emancipation, 21, 23, 25, 26, 58, 124, 135; early depictions of, 128; sharecroppers after, 122; supported by Manchester cotton mill workers, 58, 60; tensions surrounding reconfigured social order after, 147, 148 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 29 enclosure, process of, 217n25 Engels, Friedrich, 235n62 environmental transformation, 8 – 9, 16 equality, myth of, 159 erasures, 22 Europe, 70, 72, 74, 175 – 76. See also specific countries Examiner (newspaper), 101 exchangeability, logic of, 121 exhibition displays, 26, 208, 216n6, 234n46, 240 – 41n20, 242n33 exploitation, 23, 159. See also labor; slavery Exposition Cotton Mills, 234n48 “extended families,” 152 extraction, 243n50; Blackness and, 120, 148, 172, 176, 187, 189; colonialism and, 84; labor and, 60, 122; material histories and, 243n50 fabric. See cloth Fabrications (exhibition), 116, 119

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factories, 17–18, 34, 64; factory workers, 57–63; in Manchester, England, 25; slavery and, 24–25, 57–63 Faed, Thomas, 93 Fambro, Hanna, 55 fashion, class and, 75 financial reports, 18 fine art, 141 “Five Fingers in the Boll” (song), 150–51 Fleetwood, Nicole, 7 Floyd, George, 27, 120 Fluker, Frances, 150 Fon people, 200 former slaves, wpa interviews of, 54–55 Fort Beauregard, 123 Fort Walker, 123 Foster, Helen Bradley, 50, 54, 221n82 Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper: “Our Cotton Campaign in South Carolina,” 125, 126–27 free Black Americans, 25; post-­slavery, 123–32; representation of, 132–40 free Black labor, 129, 134 Freedmen’s Bureau, 157 freedom. See Black freedom “free labor cotton,” 124, 125, 129, 132–40 free-­market principles, 124. See also free trade free trade, 177, 217n31; in Britain, 38; cotton as symbol for, 38–39; movement, 35; in US, 38 free will, labor and, 157 Fromont, Cécile, 72 fugitivity, 153, 156, 157, 206 Fuller, Meta Vaux Warrick, 123, 158, 159, 238–39n110; Landing of First Twenty Slaves at Jamestown, 162; Scene on a Slave Plantation, 162 futures, alternative, 123, 152–53 future value, Blackness and, 21 “futurity,” 20–21, 123, 152–53 Fyfe, Hamilton, 190 Gambia cloth, 190, 243n61 Garner, Eric, 120, 208 Garnet, Henry Highland, 69, 103, 194, 243n69

Garrison, William Lloyd, 222n120 gaze, the, 25, 154, 159 Gee’s Bend, Alabama, 57 gender, construction of, 20–21, 155 geographies: alternative, 123, 153, 167–68; Black, 239n116; of cotton trade, 21, 22; imaginative, 203; of labor, 25; of plantation labor, 25; racialized, 140, 175; symbolic, 216n21 Georgia, 8 German Empire, 194 gestures, 40–41 Getachew, Adom, 245n9 Gikandi, Simon, 87 Glaude, Eddie, 239n112 globalization, 17–18, 174 Goodrich, Lloyd, 236n72 Gordon, Avery, 62 Grace Hopper College, 209, 210, 211 Grand Tour, 81 Great Exhibition, 91 Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, 103, 105, 115 Greeson, Jennifer Rae, 134 Grenada, 83 Griggs, William: color illustration of cotton textile sample, 112 groundedness: vs. liminality, 153 Guatemala, 181 Guillain, Charles, Young Mukomanga and Young Nyassa Men; Young Nyassa Girl and Makua Woman, 186 Guinea Coast, 70 guinea stuffs, 71 Gullah people, 155 Gurley, Ralph, 240–41n20 Haarlem Cotton Company, 188 Haghe, Louis: Dickinsons’ Comprehensive Pictures of the Great Exhibition of 1851, 102, 103 handwork, 53, 221n92 haptic, the, 24, 206–7. See also tactility Harper’s Weekly (magazine), 98, 138–40, 139 Hartman, Saidiya, 18, 22, 115, 135, 157 Hawkins, Annie, 55 Hazard, Joseph Peace, 220–21n81

index

{ 292 }

Hazard, Rowland, 220–21n81 Hazard, Rowland Gibson, 42, 220–21n81 Hazard family, 42, 220–21n81 head wraps: identity and, 154–55 healthcare: racial disparities in, 27 Heyward, Lucretia, 123, 124, 149, 150, 151–53, 231–32n11 Higman, Barry, 47 Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, 123–24, 152 Himid, Lubaina, 3, 17, 21–22, 30, 34, 39–40, 62–63, 114, 206; abstraction and, 33; cotton and shared feeling, 58; cotton canvases, 57–58; Cotton.com, 3, 4, 5, 24–25, 31–33, 67–70, 80, 85, 99, 115–19, 174; exhibitions of, 216n6; Lubaina Himid Warp and Weft (exhibition), 216n6; Naming the Money, 117–18, 117; Navigation Charts (exhibition), 4, 216n6;

imperialism, 83, 181, 183, 194–95; entanglements of, 83 import substitution, 17 India, 17, 35, 70, 74, 110, 233n37, 214n22 India Museum, 113 Indian cotton textiles, 17, 35, 70, 71, 74–75, 104, 112, 214n22 Indian Ocean trade, 17, 115, 176, 185, 187–93 indigenous people, 8–9, 83 individuality, clothing and, 155–56 Industrial Exposition, London, 91 industrial fairs, 181, 183, 240–41n20, 242n33 industrialists, 234n54, 235–36n64 industrialization, 17–18, 25; 103, 138, 140; anxiety about social relations of, 147; in Britain, 17, 69; critiques of, 144; exploitation and, 58–59, 222n120; landscapes and, 217n25; slavery and, 222n120; in United

patterned cloth and, 69 histories: alternative methodology, 24; historical imaginary, 193; historical looking, 203; material histories, 35–39, 171, 184–87, 192, 243n50; production of, 27; representation of, 63–66. See also art history Hogarth, William, 76 Holland, Juanita Marie, 64 Homer, Winslow, 25, 141, 147–48, 235n57, 235n59, 236n69, 236n71; The Cotton Pickers, 141, 142, 143, 144–46, 235n57, 237n73; Upland Cotton, 145–47, 146, 236n72 Hopper, Grace, 209 Hougen, Erik, 122 Howe, Julia Ward: “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” 122 Hunter, Clementine, 163, 168; Picking Cotton, 163–65, 164 Hunter, Tera, 156 Hutton, J. A., 179 Hutton, James, 181, 183

States, 58, 214n23. See also factories; labor Industrial Revolution, 35, 83; English, 60 industriousness, 238n103 inequality, 195 International Cotton Exposition (1881), 171, 172 irrigation, 8 Islamic tiles, 31 Italy, 81

identity: clothing and, 154–55; constructions of, 5; head wraps and, 154–55 Illustrated London News, 88, 92, 96, 98 images: circulating, 25; meaning of, 203–4. See also art; visuality imitation: afterlives of, 187–93

Jackson, Giles B., 158, 238–39n110 Jacobs, Harriet, 54 Jamaica: as cotton-­producer for British Empire, 83, 103 Jamestown, 158, 238–39n110 Jamestown Exposition Company, 238–39n110 Jamestown Tercentennial Exposition (1907), 158 Java, 187–88 Javanese consumers, 242n45 jewelry, 155 Johnson, Walter, 97, 99, 109 Johnson, William, 168, 233n37; The Cotton Marker, Bombay, 137; Cotton Pickers, 165–66, 165; Lohannas, 137; Photographs of Western India, 135 Jones, Owen, 106; The Grammar of Ornament, 106, 189

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Journal of Design and Manufactures, 104 – 6, 110, 111, 113 Katzew, Ilona, 84 kersey, 47. See also negro cloth Kilburn, B. W.: African Exhibit, Negro Building, Atlanta Exposition, 195; Quilt Exhibit, 200 King, Tiffany Lethabo, 8 kiniki (kaniki), 185 kinship, 152 – 53, 166, 229 – 30 Knight, Charles, 39 – 40; The History of a Cotton Gown, 39; lithographs of, 218n37 Knightsville Textile Mill, 64 knowledge production, 24, 175 Kongo consumers, 72 Kpelle, Liberia, 180 Kriger, Colleen, 72 labor, 1 – 2, 3, 5, 21, 38, 61, 129, 151, 166, 238n103; alienation of, 223n129; in Britain, 38; experience of, 5, 56; extraction and, 60, 122; free will and, 157; geographies of, 25; labor practices, 154; post-­slavery, 121 – 70; value of, 9, 17 – 24, 21, 27, 121, 140, 235 – 36n64; work culture, 152 – 53 Lady’s Island, 123 Lafont, Anne, 79 Lancaster, England: textile factories in, 34 land: expropriation of, 8 – 9 landscapes: class and, 217n25; industrialization and, 217n25; mercantilism and, 217n25; post-­slavery, 121 – 70; representation of, 9, 16, 21, 26, 63 – 66, 217n25, 232n22 landscaping, 16 lappas, 190 Larcom, Lucy, 58 – 60, 62; Black women and, 59 – 60; critique of slavery, 62; An Idyl of Work, 59; poetry of, 59; “Weaving,” 59 Launey and Goebel Photographers: Cotton Picking No. 7, 136 Lee, Fitzhugh, 238 – 39n110 Lee, H. L., 42, 53 Levant, the: cotton from, 35, 214n22 Lewis, Sarah E., 22 Liberator, The (newspaper), 222n120 Liberia, 179, 181, 196, 197 – 99, 243n69; ame

churches in, 195; cotton from, in Liberia, 179, 180, 240 – 41n20; settlements in, 194 – 95, 240 – 41n20; as site of commercial significance, 199 liminality: vs. groundedness, 153 Lincoln, Abraham, 58; Emancipation Proclamation, 124 Linden, Alabama, 42 linen, 75 Lisk-­Carew, Alphonso: Mandingo Women-­ Traders of Manchester Cottons, 190, 191 Liverpool, England, 41 living, forms of, 23 Locke, John, 93 London, 68 looms, 180, 190, 241n22 “Lost Cause” ideology, 209 Louisiana, 8 Louisville Metro Police Department, 119 Lowe, Lisa, 22, 114, 174 Lowell, Francis Cabot, 48 Lowell, Massachusetts, 58 Lowell cloth, 48 – 49, 220 – 21n81 Lowell Manufacturing Company, 48, 220 – 21n81 Lowell Offering (magazine), 58, 59 Lowndes County, Georgia, 42 Machinery (Nash), 102 Macleod, Dianne Sachko, 234n54 Magnolia Place, 53 Malabar, 74 Malay Archipelago, 70 management, northern models of, 125, 129 Manchester, England, 32, 69, 103, 115, 119, 190 – 91, 230n135, 243n51; Atlantic slave trade and, 70; British textile production in, 25, 41, 60, 69 – 70, 110; cotton mill workers in, 58, 60; “Cottonopolis,” 68; factories in, 25 Manchester City Art Gallery, 190 – 91 market aesthetics, 25, 67 – 121; pattern and, 67 – 75 market equivalency: between Black labor and cotton, 9, 17 – 24, 27, 121, 140 markets, 24, 25; market imaginary, 110 – 20;

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visual implications of market logic, 19 – 20. See also free-­market principles Marks, Laura, 206 – 7 Martin, Chlotilde R., 123 Marx, Karl, 21, 60, 223n129, 235n62 masculinity: postbellum construction of, 123; whiteness and, 135, 147 – 48 Massachusetts, 48, 184, 185 material culture, 22, 23 – 24 material histories, 35 – 39, 171, 184 – 87, 192, 243n50; 243n50 McClain, Elijah, 27 McInnis, Maurie D., 92, 97, 101 McKittrick, Katherine, 21, 148 – 49, 239n116 McKnight, Venus, 231 – 32n11 Melville, Herman, 58 memory, 6, 24, 203 – 11, 226n46 Menafee, Corey, 209, 211 mercantilism, 35, 217n25 merikani, 176, 184 – 87, 242n38 Middle Passage, 172 Milhous, Philip, 42, 218n46 mimicry, textiles and, 187 – 93 Mirzoeff, Nicholas, 22 misrecognition, 158, 159 missionaries, 157, 194 Mississippi, 8, 18 Mitchell, Sam, 123 – 24, 149 Mitchelville, South Carolina, 152 mobility, 17, 18, 21 – 22, 29 – 35, 83, 151 – 53, 156, 175, 208 modernist aesthetics, 191 – 92 modernity, 103, 194, 198, 200; Black life and, 243n50; industrial, 171; narrative of, 171; primitivism and, 190 – 92; representation of, 234n53; speculative nature of, 192 – 93 Moore, Henry P., 131, 132, 149, 153 – 54, 232n22; Century Plant, 85 Years Old, Seabrook’s Plantation, 132 – 34, 133; John E. Seabrook’s Wharf, Century Plant, Drying Cotton, 132 – 34, 133; Slaves of the Rebel General Thomas F. Drayton, Hilton Head, 125, 128, 149 – 50, 154 – 56 Moreland, George, 37 Morgan, Jennifer L., 20, 229 – 30 Morris, Edward S., 241n22 mulattos, 54, 100

mule spinning, 48, 220n78 Murillo, Bartolomé Esteban, 30 – 31, 85 – 86, 99 museum displays, 26, 181, 182, 183 Musson, Michel, 143, 144 Musson, Prentidge and Company, 143 – 44 narrative, 25 Nash, Joseph: Cotton, Carriages, 102, 102; Dickinsons’ Comprehensive Pictures of the Great Exhibition of 1851, 102, 103 Nast, Thomas, 140; The Queen of Industry, or the New South, 139, 139 national identity, 167, 168 nationalism, 103 nation building, 28 Native Studies, 9 negro cloth, 24 – 25, 45 – 46, 63, 72, 110, 171, 176, 184 – 86, 208, 219n67; Blackness and, 54 – 55, 57; descriptions of, 50; manufacturers of, 220 – 21n81; New England textile mills and, 48, 63; production of, 63; samples of, 44, 49, 53 – 54; semiotics of, 46 – 57; tactility and, 45 – 46; in US, 48, 51, 63. See also kersey Negro Development and Exposition Company, 238 – 39n110 Newcastle-­upon-­Tyne, England, 118 New England, 48; factories of, 69; textile mills and, 34 – 36, 48, 50. See also specific locations New Orleans, Louisiana, 86, 143 – 44, 147, 172, 235n31 New South, the: perceptions of, 132 – 40; potentiality of, 134 – 35 New York, 72 North, the (US), 62, 64, 176. See also specific locations Northup, Solomon, 16, 51 – 52, 54 – 55, 97 objects: embedded meanings of, 27; expressions of social affiliation and, 154 – 55; haptic quality of, 24, 175; multifaceted, 22; ontic significance of, 175; performance of, 24 Oglethorpe Park, 138 Olmsted, Frederick Law, 30 – 31, 48, 50, 53, 85, 108 optics, 207 – 8

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Orientalist painting, 31 Osnabrück (German town), 47 osnaburg (slave clothing), 47. See also negro cloth O’Sullivan, Timothy, 128,152 – 53, 149, 150; Beaufort, South Carolina. Negro Family Representing Several Generations. All Born on the Plantation of J. J. Smith, 130; Port Royal Island, S.C. African Americans Preparing Cotton for the Gin on Smith’s Plantation, 128 – 29, 131; Slaves, J. J. Smith’s Plantation, near Beaufort, South Carolina, 130 Ottoman Empire, 7 “Our Cotton Campaign in South Carolina”: Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 125, 126 – 27 paintings: for the cotton market, 140 – 48. See also specific painters and schools Paris, France, 81, 158, 181 Paris Exposition Universelle (1900), 158, 181 Parrish, Lydia, 150 – 51 Parris Island, 151 – 52, 231 – 32n11 past, the: reconstruction of, 26 – 27. See also histories) “pastness,” 215n41 paternalistic benevolence, 44 Paterson Zochonis Manufacturing Firm, 243n51 patterns, 25, 54, 67 – 75, 105 – 6, 108 – 9, 111, 230n137; market aesthetics and, 67 – 75; politics of, 67, 104; slave trade and, 188 Peace Dale Manufacturing Company, 41 – 43, 51, 220 – 21n81; sample of negro cloth, 44, 49 Penny Magazine, 218n37 performance studies theorists, 24, 40 – 41 Petersburg, Virginia, 143 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 62, 75 Philadelphia Commercial Museum, 175, 181, 182, 186, 241n27; Liberia Exhibit at, 241n22 photography. See specific photographers pieces, 72 place, 24, 157 – 58, 166, 168 plain weave, 50 Plantation Mammy, 155

plantations, 17 – 18, 34, 35, 60, 64, 128, 152 – 53; biopolitics of, 138; Caribbean, 9, 47; cotton factories and, 35; factories and, 57 – 63, 64; geographies of, 25; occupied, 123 – 32; owners of, 20; plantation clothing, 56; “plantation futures,” 148; post-­slavery, 123 – 32; representation of, 9, 16, 25, 123 – 32, 140, 209, 210, 211, 216 – 17n23, 221n82; reterritorialization of, 163 – 68; slave labor and, 51 – 52; social relations and, 179 plantation system: growth of, 35, 214n23 plantation travel literature, 50 Poellnitz, Charles, 42 police brutality, 3 popular culture, 141 Port Royal, South Carolina, 123 –35, 138, 140, 150, 153; photographs of, 123 – 32, 149; Union invasion of, 123 – 24 Portugal, 70 Postell, William Dosité, 221n82 Potter, Edmund, 110; Calico Printing as an Art Manufacture (lecture), 105; “negro print,” 105 Potters Diary, cloth samples, 70 power, 183, 193 Powers, Harriet, 193; Bible Quilt, 199 – 202 Pratt, Mary Louise, 81 Prentidge, James, 144 Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions, 197 primitivism, discourse of, 190 – 92, 196 print culture and technology, 75, 86. See also specific artists print for Brazil (textile sample), 106 prison industrial complex, 170 progress, 198; cotton and, 37 – 38; ideas about, 24; narrative of, 199, 201; narratives of, 199; as racial uplift, 159; rhetoric of, 140; Ricks’s quilt as symbol of, 198 – 99 protectionism, 214n23, 217n31 Providence, Rhode Island, 42, 48, 63 “Province of Freedom” (colony), 177 – 78 Prown, Jules David, 213n1 Putnam County, Georgia, 8 Pyne, William Henry, 36 – 37; Etchings of Rustic Figures for the Embellishment of Landscape, 36; Women and Men Carrying Baskets or Bundles,

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of Walking with Children in Etchings of Rustic Figures for the Embellishment of Landscape, 37 quadroon, 100 Queen Victoria, 68 Quick, Michael, 236n69 quilts, 57, 176 – 77, 193 – 202 race, 1 – 2, 129, 156, 157 – 58, 168, 177; conceptions of, 156; construction of, 20 – 21; narratives of racial hierarchy, 199; racial categorizations, 243n50; racial codification, 93; racial exploitation, 3; racial marking, 7; representation and, 22 – 23 racial capitalism, 18, 101, 114, 147 – 48, 174, 193, 199, 228n113 racialization, 23, 172 racial oppression, 3, 27 – 28, 159 racial uplift, 159, 194 – 95, 238 – 39n110; progress as, 159 Raengo, Alessandra, 22 realism, 141, 234n53, 235 – 36n64; “labored realism,” 141, 143 recognition, 158 Reconstruction, 25, 150, 156; disenfranchisement during, 195; failures of, 194 – 95; federal support for, 135; “rehearsal for,” 123 – 32 Reconstruction Act of 1867, 134 referentiality: archival, 122, 170; circuits of, 121, 192; discourses of, 192 regionalism, 216n21 relational aesthetics: of transnational processes, 22 relationality, 17; as methodology, 18; models of, 18 religion, 166 representation, 21; limits of, 25; race and, 22 – 23 resistance: kinship and, 229 – 30 Rhode Island, 48, 63, 184 Ricks, Martha Ann Erskine, 193, 197 – 99, 197; Coffee Tree Quilt, 198 – 99, 200, 201, 202 Roach, Joseph, 226n46 Roberts, David, Dickinsons’ Comprehensive Pictures of the Great Exhibition of 1851, 102, 103

Robertson, George, 9; Spring Head of Roaring River Estate, 9, 9 Robinson, Amy, 27 Robinson, Cedric, 228n113, 229 – 30 Roessler, Adalbert von, Kongokonferenz (The Congo Conference), 174, 174 Royal Academy (Britain), 93, 96, 101 Royal Africa Company, 71, 74 Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, 96 rumals, 71 Ruskin, John, 235 – 36n64 Russell, W. H., 92 St. Christopher, 80 Saint-­Domingue, 8 St. Louis Hotel, 86 St. Phillips Island, 123 St. Vincent, 76 Salem, Massachusetts, 184, 185, 242n37 salempores, 70 – 71 Schaw, Janet, 80 – 81, 109 Schwabe, Salis, and Company, 105 Scotland, 47 Sea Islands, South Carolina, 25, 123 – 24, 132 – 34, 231 – 32n11; cotton cultivation on, 124 – 25, 232n14; photographs of, 123 – 32; representation of, 148 – 57, 232n22; West African culture in, 154 – 55 “second slavery,” 83 seeing: acts of, 23 self-­determination, 123, 147, 148, 157, 158, 159, 195 self-­fashioning: consumption and, 74 self-­help manuals, 157 self-­presentation, 155 – 56 self-­representation, 155 self-­styling, 56 – 57 Seven Years’ War, 76 sharecroppers, 121 – 23, 159, 199; afterlives of, 163 – 70; colonization of, 135; fetishized image of, 148; genealogy of, 123; iconicity of, 134 – 35, 139 – 40; representation of, 25, 140 – 48, 159, 163; symbolic meanings of, 163; wpa interviews of, 123, 150 Sharp, Granville, 177 Sharpe, Christina, 18, 21

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Shaw, Gwendolyn DuBois, 23–24, 64 shells, 155 Shonibare, Yinka cbe, 3, 17, 21–22; Scramble for Africa, 4, 5, 5, 26, 173–77, 173, 183–84, 187–93 Sierra Leone, 177–78, 190–91, 195, 196, 243n61 Sierra Leone Company, 178 slave auctions, 89, 92, 107; clothing and, 97–100; representation of, 92–100; sewing skill and, 56 slave economy: politics of, 32 slave hands: female, 36 slave markets, 25, 100. See also slave auctions slave narratives, 50 slaveowners, 44 slavery, 3, 7, 23, 88; aesthetics and, 76; afterlives of, 23–24; archive of, 23; art history and, 114; Black women’s desirability and, 108; cessation of slave trade and, 172; chattel slavery, 222n120; colonialism and, 23, 24–25, 113, 171–202; commerce and, 7,

Society for British Artists, 96 the South, 60, 64; antebellum, 98; as conquered colony, 134–35; negro cloth and, 176; the New South, 132–40; partitioning of, 134–35. See also plantations; specific locations South Asia, 112, 113 South Carolina, 8, 25, 123–32. See also specific locations South Carolina Slave Codes of 1740, Act 40, 47 South Kensington Museum, 113 space/spatiality, 151–52, 171–72, 177; colonialism and, 175; kinship and, 152–53; racialized constructions of, 208; “spatial domination,” 123; spatial organization, 16; textiles and, 183. See also place spectatorship, 123, 132, 159, 168, 192 speculation, 188; anticipatory logic of, 175; cotton production and, 7–9; cotton rush and, 16

24–25, 39–41, 45, 92, 103, 114; entanglements of, 171–202; factories and, 24–25, 57–63; histories of, 63, 159; industrialization and, 222n120; objectification of, 23; relational imaginary of, 18; as site of cultural production, 23; social relations and, 113; visual culture and, 22–23, 25; visual logic of, 86; in visual production of Black artists, 23–24. See also Black enslaved people; slave trade Slaves for Sale, a Scene in New Orleans (artist unknown), 98 slave trade, 8, 9, 26–27, 63, 88–92; abolition of, 178, 243n69; aestheticization of, 84–88; Britain and, 70, 72, 74, 83, 178; cessation of, 26; cotton trade and, 9, 17–25; economic logic of, 183; entanglements of, 171–202; patterns and, 188. See also slave auctions Smith, Jennie, 199 Smith, Shawn Michelle, 158 Smith, T. Cuyler, 58 Smithsonian, 105 Smithsonian Museum, 240–41n20 social relations, 113, 168, 170, 179, 243n54 social value, 26, 27, 169–70

speculative conditions, 171 speculative imaginaries, 26 speculative realism, 140–48 speculative vision, 9, 16–17, 20–22, 26, 208 Spillers, Hortense, 45 spindles, 180 spinning, 48, 220n78 Sprague family, 63–64 Starling, J. M., 87, 87, 99; critique of slavery in, 88; Sale of Estates, Pictures and Slaves in the Rotunda, New Orleans (Brooke; Starling [engraver]), 86–87, 99–100 Stirling and Sons, 110 Stonington, Connecticut, 48 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 91, 100 Street Cries, 81 strip-­woven cotton cloth, Cape Palmas, Liberia (fabric sample), 107 Stylianou, Nicola, 191–92 subjectivity: Black Americans and, 23; Black modern subjectivity, 193–202; Black subjectivity, 18, 124, 129, 135, 152–53, 193–202, 208; racialized, 138; white subjectivity and, 148–49 sugar, slave trade and, 69 surface, the, 27, 147, 206–7

index

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surrogation, 226n46 Sylvanus, Nina, 188 tableaux, 158 – 59, 238 – 39n110 tactility, 45 – 46, 184, 206 – 7. See also the haptic Tappan, Lewis, 220 – 21n81 taste, 104, 189 Taylor, Breonna, 27, 119, 120 Taylor, Jacqueline, 51 Terry, Luther, 29, 35 – 36, 216n21; An Allegory of North and South, 29, 30, 35 – 36, 209 Texas, 8 textile industry, 34; antebellum, 48; “proletarianization” of labor, 58; representation of, 63 – 66; slave trade and, 69 textile mills, representation of, 63 – 66 textiles, 25, 176 – 77; Black modern subjecthood and, 193 – 202; displays of, 181, 182, 183, 184, 186; European-­made, 71; importation of, 71 – 72; Indian-­made, 71; Indian Ocean trade and, 187 – 93; material imaginary and, 193 – 202; mimicry and, 187 – 93; ontic significance of, 175, 183; as sites of material history, 26, 184 – 87; space and, 183; value and, 113. See also cloth; specific kinds of textiles texture, 188 Thackeray, William Makepeace, North American travels, 90 “thick description,” 24 Thomas, Hank Willis, 1 – 3, 5 – 6, 16 – 18, 17, 20, 25; archival “adaptations” of, 122; Black Americans and white cotton, 19; Black Hands, White Cotton, 1 – 3, 2, 3, 7, 16, 18 – 20, 25, 121 – 23, 168 – 70; The Cotton Bowl, 168 – 70, 169 Thomas, Sarah, 93 Thompson, E. P., 60 Thompson, Krista A., 23, 108 Thorpe, T. B., 29 throstle spinning, 48, 220n78 tie-­dye, 190 Tissot, James, 235n60 Tobago, 76 Townley and Jackson of Bahia, 70, 71 Townsend, Mary, 172, 193 trade networks, 22, 101 – 20, 171 – 202. See also commerce

transatlantic affiliation, narrative of, 196 transatlantic relations, 201 transnational processes, relational aesthetics of, 22 Traxler family, 150 Trouillot, Michel-­Rolph, 215n41 Truth, Sojourner, 158 Turkey red Swiss chintz velvet print, 111 Turner, Charles (after Edward Chalon), Thomas Clarkson, 178, 240n13 Turner, Henry McNeal, 194 – 95, 196, 198, 199; “Uncivilized Africans Exhibit (Hands Off ),” 196 – 97 Turner Prize 2017, 30 twill weave, 50 Union Army, 123 – 24, 134, 149, 150; on Sea Islands, 123 – 25; victory depicted as colonization/imperialism, 134 – 35 United States, 26; African commercial interests and, 172 – 73, 176, 184, 194; antebellum, 34; boycott of American cotton and, 103; colonial expansion of, 26; colonial imaginaries of, 199; cotton exports from, 17, 35; emancipation in, 26; industrialization in, 214n23; plantation system in, 214n23; race and, 22, 27; racial healthcare disparities, 27; slave auction scenes and, 92; slavery in (see slavery). See also specific locations upland cotton, 48, 232n14 Ure, Andrew, 103 US cotton manufacturers, 26, 35 US cotton production, 7 – 9, 17, 26, 35, 39, 213n7, 214n23 US textile industry, 7 – 9, 17, 35, 39, 48, 213n7, 214n23 valuation: labor and, 235 – 36n64; speculative act of, 21 value, 177; aesthetics and, 104; Blackness and, 21, 24 – 25, 27 – 28, 113 – 14, 121, 123, 140 – 41, 157 – 59, 167 – 68, 195, 206; commodity value of art, 21; conceptions of, 22; construction of, 25; cotton and, 16 – 17, 21, 24 – 25; future value, 21; of labor, 9, 17 – 24, 27, 121, 140;

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value (continued) market equivalency between Black labor and cotton, 9, 17 – 24, 27, 121, 140; meaning of, 208; social value, 26, 27, 169 – 70; textiles and, 113; vision and, 23, 121 – 70, 172 Varden, John, 240 – 41n20 Ventress, J. A., 50 Victoria, Queen, 198 Victoria and Albert Museum, 118, 191 – 92 viewership, 23, 147 – 48. See also spectatorship visibility, 123, 158 vision, 26, 121 – 70, 206; speculative, 9, 16 – 17, 20 – 22, 26, 208; value and, 23, 172 visual, the: centrality of, 23 “visual accounting,” 21 visual culture: cotton and, 25; slavery and, 25 visuality: Blackness and, 23, 121; social value and, 27, 169 – 70 Vlisco, 188 voter suppression, 170 wage slavery, 58, 222n120 Walker, William Aikens, 140; Cotton Pickers, 141 Ware Manufacturing Company, 220 – 21n81 War of 1812, 35, 214n23 Washington, Booker T., 194 – 95, 238 – 39n110 Washington City Museum, 240 – 41n20 Watson, John Forbes, 112; fabric samples, 112 – 13; index of textiles, 113 Watt, George, 7 Waud, Alfred R.: Scenes on a Cotton Plantation, 136 wax-­printed fabric, 188 – 89 ways of seeing, social relations and, 170 weaving production, 75 Weheliye, Alexander, 243n50 West Africa, 17, 35, 72, 74, 103, 187 – 93, 242n45; American colonial expansion, 26; artistic traditions of, 57; British colonial expansion, 26; enslaved black people from, 17; speculative vision of, 26; trade textiles and, 72 West African consumers, 74, 187 – 93, 242n45 West African culture, 154 – 56; fashion and, 187 – 93; figural techniques, 200; representation of, 154 – 56; in Sea Islands, South

Carolina, 154 – 55; textiles, 173 – 76, 173, 200; visual techniques, 200 Westerly, Rhode Island, 48 Whistler, James McNeill, 93 White, Hayden, 245n89 white alienation: Black life and, 61 white America: fetishization of Blackness by, 159 white bodies: value and, 206 white cotton: Black bodies and, 34; as commodities, 46 White League, 147 white masculinity: Black labor and, 147 – 48 whiteness, 207; masculinity and, 135, 147 – 48; postbellum construction of, 123 white subjectivity: Black freedom and, 148 – 49 white supremacy, 140, 147, 148 Whitney, Eli, 8 Wilberforce, William, 177 Wilson, Mabel O., 196 Wilson, William P., 181 Winn, Willis, 55 Winterthur Library, 70 Wood, Marcus, 93, 177 working bodies: representation of, 20 – 21. See also labor Works Progress Administration (wpa): interviews of former slaves, 54 – 55; narratives of, 55; slave narratives and, 54 World’s Columbian Exposition, 181, 198 World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition, 1884, 172 World’s Industrial Fairs, 103 wpa interviews, 54 – 55, 123, 150 wpa slave narratives, 221n82 Wyld, William, 68 – 69; Manchester from Kersal Moor, 68 – 69, 68 Wynter, Sylvia, 239n116 Yale University, 209, 210, 211 Yorubaland, 243n69 Young, Sir William, 76, 82, 85 Zanzibar, 176, 184, 185, 242n37 Zimmerman, Andrew, 221n92 Zoffany, Johan, 82; The Family of Sir William Young, 82

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