| The Illustrated Slave From the 1787 Wedgwood antislavery medallion featuring the image of an enchained and pleading black body to Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained (2012) and Steve McQueen's Twelve Years a Slave (2013), slavery as a system of torture and bondage has fascinated the optical imagination of the transatlantic world. Scholars have examined various aspects of the visual culture that was slavery, including its painting, sculpture, pamphlet campaigns, and artwork. Yet an important piece of this visual culture has gone unexamined: the popular and frequently reprinted antislavery illustrated books published prior to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) that were utilized extensively by the antislavery movement in the first half of the nineteenth century. MARTHA J. CUTTER is a professor of English and Africana studies at the University of Connecticut. She is the author of Lost and Found in Translation: Contemporary Ethnic American Writing and the Politics of Language Diversity and Unruly Tongue: Identity and Voice in American Women's Writing, 1850-1930 . |