The long shadow of history: The paradoxes of iconographic reiteration in anti-slavery advocacy

Abstract

This article analyzes the structure and functioning of the iconography employed by the contemporary anti-slavery movement to alert Euro-American publics about ongoing instances of enslavement around the world and to mobilize these publics against such instances. The first part of the article unearths the iconographic repertoire present in current representations of slavery, which are derived from three visual conventions originating during the trans-Atlantic slave trade: personification, massification and rescue. In the article’s second section, I turn to an examination of the key cultural mechanism through which visual material produced and circulated by anti-slavery advocacy today is made effective, namely, historically reiterative and symbolically mediated analogical juxtaposition, which enables contemporary images of slavery to amplify their moral and political impact through their referential ties to the universalized sacred evil of the slave trade. Finally, the third part of the article discusses the paradoxical effects of anti-slavery groups’ reliance upon this mechanism of historically reiterative juxtaposition for their visually based campaigns, a mechanism that constitutes their most potent symbolic device as well as the source of their struggles to establish a more presentist iconography making a moral and political case against existing forms of slavery on its own terms.