Imaging Separation in Tom Feelings' The Middle Passage: White Ships / Black Cargo and Toni Morrison's Beloved

Abstract

Graphic artist Tom Feelings and novelist Toni Morrison face similar challenges in representing the Atlantic slave trade. Feelings' The Middle Passage: White Ships / Black Cargo tells a wordless narrative in pictures. Morrison's Beloved portrays in contemporary narrative form, the devastating effects of forced transnational migration. Both artists confront conventional silences surrounding this aspect of slavery by presenting displaced Africans on their way to the Americas. Their texts both define Black literature of the late twentieth century, and trouble the status quo as experiments in aesthetic expression. Their works demonstrate the way a legacy of trauma is written into the fabric of US culture. I put forth a comparative methodology of representations of the Middle Passage in word and image, by examining the self-definition of a genre and the collapse of conventional medial distinctions between graphic, linguistic and musical expression. Feelings employs overt symbolism and more subtle modes of signifying in his treatment of individuals in crisis, forced into new subject positions when enslaved. Likewise, Morrison critiques identity formation while in bondage by stylising her language for particular effects. Parallel structures in word and image signify resistance to convention as African American literature makes its way into the broader realm of world literature.