Race in the Antebellum Landscape: Reframing the Great Dismal Swamp as a Critical Black Geography

• In Event: Materialities of Earthwork Cultural Landscapes in the Black Atlantic: Technologies, Architectures, and Cosmologies

Description for Program

In 1849, Henry “Box” Brown emancipated himself from slavery by climbing into a cargo crate, where he spent twenty-seven hours being shipped from Virginia to Pennsylvania. After his arrival upon “free” soil, Brown became involved in the antislavery community as a speaker and performer. He produced Mirror of Slavery, a semi-autobiographical moving panorama about the trans-Atlantic slave trade that took theaters on a proto-cinematic journey from the shores of Africa through the United States before concluding with an imagined future of universal emancipation. However, Brown’s panorama was not a simple reflection of white abolitionist politics. Rather, he structured a narrative of freedom around Black fugitive protagonists. Although this canvas is lost, textual descriptions reveal that Mirror of Slavery presented a sequence of scenes copied from print media, including landscapes intended for white consumers. This paper is an art historical consideration of his re-presentation of the Great Dismal Swamp, a wetland that was known for harboring maroon communities yet paradoxically existed in white imagination as an inhospitable environment. I analyze popular depictions of the Dismal in the context of moving panoramas, which often organized American space as a geotemporal progression along a river, to consider how nineteenth-century landscape conventions invalidated Black claims to space. I argue that Brown’s appropriation of these pictorial strategies ultimately refracted white conceptions of national territory by insisting on the swamp as a critical Black geography defined by enslaved, African, and indigenous bodies of knowledge.

Author

• Rachel Burke