Enslaved Runners: Reading/Seeing Fugitive Slave Advertisements as Unauthorized Portraiture
When: Wednesday, February 26th, 2025; 12:00pm (CT)
Where: Moudy North 132, Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, USA
What: Annual Stuck Lecture: “Enslaved Runners: Reading/Seeing Fugitive Slave Advertisements as Unauthorized Portraiture”
Cost: Free
Organizer: Colin Young
Contact & Registration: colin.young@tcu.edu
Abstract: Portraiture has been a revered genre of western “high” art for thousands of years. However, to the extent that it has been a vehicle for the representation of society’s elites, it became a domain through which wealthy and powerful white people – emperors, kings and queens, prime ministers, presidents, corporate leaders, and celebrities – consolidated and flaunted their power. The economic relationship, structured as a commission between artist and patron, is a linchpin of the genre, asserting pressure on the portraitist to create not just a likeness of the sitter, but a flattering one. The use of portraiture by white enslavers served to amplify their colonial reach and celebrate their whiteness. Such images are characterized by enslaved sitters represented as aesthetically inferior, compositionally marginal, and subservient in action, attitude, dress, and pose. Clearly then, slavery (or the representation of enslaved people as “high” art portrait sitters) disrupted or remade the traditional relationships and meanings of portraiture. This talk uses an understanding of the representation of enslaved people in historical western “high” art portraiture as a jumping off point for the contemplation of fugitive slave advertisements as a popular, “low” art form of portraiture. Fugitive or runaway slave advertisements became ubiquitous across the Americas and in Europe and were produced in newspapers and as broadsides wherever slavery coincided with the printing press. These printed advertisements were typically placed by enslavers or their surrogates (like overseers, sheriffs, and jailers) to hunt and re-enslave freedom-seekers who resisted through flight. Sometimes containing standardized icons, the advertisements were mainly comprised of unauthorized textual descriptions of enslaved runners (not sitters), which required visual translation by readers to identify the enslaved fugitive. Illuminating the stakes of this conceptual reframing, the talk explores the eighteenth-century case study of an enslaved African-born man called Joe who became the pressman of the Quebec City printing office of William Brown and Thomas Gilmore, the printers of the Quebec Gazette newspaper. What does it mean that Joe, who was hunted in a series of six fugitive advertisements published for five escapes across nine years (1777-1786) was also forced to print such notices in his unpaid labour as the Gazette’s pressman?