Imagining and Imagined Sites, Sights, and Sounds of Slavery

Abstract

Imagining and Imagined Sites, Sights, and Sounds of Slavery Celia E. Naylor (bio) Within academia and related publishing venues, we have witnessed the burgeoning fields of digital humanities, digital scholarship, digital pedagogy, and digital liberal arts. The recent launching of the William and Mary Quarterly's first born-digital article published via the OI Reader app constitutes, as Quarterly editor Josh Piker announced, "a significant milestone for the Quarterly."1 It is also quite telling that the inaugural born-digital article for the journal is Simon P. Newman's essay entitled "Hidden in Plain Sight: Escaped Slaves in Late Eighteenth-and Early Nineteenth-Century Jamaica." In this article Newman employs "sound and video recordings as well as enhanced eighteenth- and nineteenth-century artwork and maps, all in digital format … [to] challenge readers to think about Jamaican society in new ways." He attempts to "explore how white men saw and experienced the island and its population in order to enhance our understanding of how enslaved men, women, and children who attempted long-term escapes were able to achieve varying degrees of liberty and self-determination at the heart of Britain's largest slave society."2 Through the use of various mediums (literature, music, visual culture, etc.) and media (newspapers, digital media, etc.), Newman creates opportunities for twenty-first-century readers to consider the multidimensional and multisensory aspects of eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century Jamaican society. He provides pointed examples of how white artists' images represented Jamaica as idyllic, with pastoral scenes that essentially erased the physical and [End Page 25] energetic presence of blacks; such pictures simultaneously removed all traces of the quotidian experiences of enslaved and free people of color, including the violence deeply embedded within the Jamaican slavocracy. English architectural draftsman James Hakewill's picturesque illustrations of Jamaica from 1820–21 represent one demonstration of such visual depictions. Newman also discusses the similar intentions and representations in the numerous pencil sketches and watercolors of Jamaica by English artist William Berryman, as well as the more limited Ten Views painted by Scottish artist William Clark. Even Clark's depiction of enslaved people at work in Antigua, Holeing a Cane-Piece, still presented an easy, bucolic scene of subjugation.3 One of the strategies Newman employs in order to illustrate the problematic nature of selected early nineteenth-century artistic renditions is to digitally enhance two of Hakewill's prints by repopulating these images of public spaces with more figures of enslaved and free people of color in Kingston's Harbour Street and in King's Square, Saint Jago de la Vega.4 These digitally enhanced images not only offer a necessary correction of skewed, contrived views of Jamaican settings but also (re)integrate the actual physical, corporeal presence of enslaved and free people of color who lived and labored in order for Jamaican society to function at all levels. Using these scenes from specific Jamaican sites becomes not only a process of portraying a more accurate historical view of such public spaces in Jamaica but also a digital portal for humanizing black bodies within these venues. Even as Newman clearly recognizes that "eighteenth-century and modern media present their own interpretive challenges," his article underscores "the problems inherent in historical sources while also considering the merits and weaknesses of modern pictorial, aural, and video materials."5 Just as it is crucial to point out the deliberate erasure (and racialist characterizations) of enslaved and free people of color in the work of Hakewill and other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century white artists, we must also interrogate twenty-first-century decisions made in reimagining these digitally enhanced scenes. Newman states that the figures used to repopulate these images were originally from the artwork of European artists, including eighteenth-century London-based Italian painter Agostino Brunias, as well as nineteenth-century artists Berryman, Clark, and Hakewill.6 The decision to enhance these images with other racialist artistic representations of people of color crafted by white artists introduces other problematic layers of (re)presentation and interpretation. Given all of the resources available in the twenty-first century, perhaps it would have been fruitful to create new artistic, though still [End Page 26] historically centered, renditions...