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Part of
A Comparative Literary History of Modern Slavery: The Atlantic world and beyond
Edited by Karen-Margrethe Simonsen, Madeleine Dobie and Mads Anders Baggesgaard
[Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages XXXVII] 2025
► pp. 131–148

Chapter 8
Looking at black bodies in pain

In March 2017 a painting by Dana Schutz sparked a hot discussion on cultural appropriation and censorship, but the real issue was the racial politics and epistemology of black pain on display. My chapter deals with the current circulation of images of enslaved black bodies in pain that is central to the contemporary rememorying of slavery, investigating the possibility of a counter-visuality of the black body in the context of the history of spectacularity of black pain. It analyzes strategies by contemporary artists who narrate the past as an incomplete project of freedom, through works that speak to and of the present, revisiting the visual archive of slavery in order to transform it into “the no-place of a utopia” (Foster 2004).
Keywords: visual culture, representation, race, blackness, slavery, racial violence, black pain, spectacle, memory of slavery, archive
Article outline
  • Who owns black pain?
  • The visuality of black suffering
  • Suffering on display
  • The cultural configuration of black pain
  • Afterimages and the ocular grammar of slavery
  • Coda
  • Author queries
  • Notes
  • References
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References (65)
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