Unseeing the Unspeakable: Visualizing Artistry, Authority and the Anti-Slave Narrative in Bill Traylor's Drawings (1939–1942)

Abstract

As a formerly enslaved labourer turned artist, Bill Traylor's prolific outpouring of between 1200 and 1500 drawings during 1939–1942 represents a ground-breaking exploration of the memory and history of transatlantic slavery. As I argue, Traylor's autobiographically inspired and imaginative ‘storytelling pictures’ defy white mainstream determinations to fix his visual archive according to prescriptive categorizations or monolithic designations. Far from representing an uncut, unmediated and seemingly authentic and transparent lens through which to examine the lives and deaths of black men, women and children, Traylor's drawings constitute experimental works of art. His extensive body of work bears witness to his coming to consciousness of that which I theorize as a self-made visual language by which he breathed fresh life into an array of black experiences and memories which have remained, at worst, undramatized and unimagined within white mainstream art histories or, at best, narrated via indirection and understatement within the parallel literary tradition of the white western originated, hybrid and far from static genre of the slave narrative. Cutting to the heart of Traylor's thought-provoking, shocking, uncensored and even traumatizing vignettes, this article analyzes the extent to which his vast body of work and interrelated series of visual anti-slave narratives have had a defining impact upon the development of twentieth-century African-American visual cultures.