Humane Insight: Looking at Images of African American Suffering and Death

Abstract

“Humane insight,” as defined by Courtney R. Baker, is a “kind of looking, one in which the onlooker's ethics are addressed by the spectacle of others' embodied suffering” (p. 5). Subtitled “Looking at Images of African American Suffering and Death,” Baker's book explores selected historic instances when a “mediated visible encounter,” usually photographic documentation, produced an understanding of shared humanity between collective viewers with wounded or murdered black bodies. Each of the work's five chapters concentrate on a “core scenario in which a subject's vision inspires awareness of another's subjectivity” (p. 2). Chapter 1, “Slavery's Suffering Brought to Light,” reexamines a horrific incident from 1834 in the New Orleans home of the slaveholders Dr. Louis Lalaurie and his wife, Delphine, that exposed their cruelty toward slaves. After a fire, started by the cook possibly signaling for help, seven burned bodies, marked from torture, were found chained upstairs. Preceding the advent of photography, this tragedy was graphically envisioned in local papers and in the abolitionist Liberator, where words, according to Baker, “brought sight of black bodies before readers' eyes” (p. 22). In a case of such brutality, humane insight provoked empathy in individual readers whose moral outrage also impacted politics within the broader society by advancing the abolitionist cause.