The newly created Working Group on Slavery and Visual Culture at the University of Chicago has been formed to provide an interdisciplinary forum for the discussion of research on the visual imagining of slavery and the slave trade as well as on the production and usage of images and material objects by enslaved peoples and slaveholders. Our goal is to explore the multivalent relationships between slavery and visuality, investigating themes such as the mechanics and disruptions of the disciplinary gaze in slave societies and societies with slaves; trans-historical comparative approaches to the study of visuality under slavery; visual culture and its connections to regimes of racialized enslavement in modernity; and the roles played by the visual logics of slavery in processes of self-fashioning and the accumulation of (visual/cultural) capital.

This group is sponsored by several units at the University of Chicago: the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture, the Franke Institute for the Humanities, the Center for Latin American Studies, the France Chicago Center, and the Departments of Art History, History, and Romance Languages and Literatures.

It is organized by Larissa Brewer-Garcia, Cecile Fromont, and Agnes Lugo-Ortiz