Description: From a portrait of Douglass's mother as Ramses to the incised snatches of proverb and prophecy on Dave the Potter's ceramics, the book identifies a "fugitive visionthat reforms our notions of antebellum black identity, literature, and cultural production.
Review Quotes:
"[T]his startlingly original, meticulously researched study opens up new ways of considering the acts of self-representation in visual objects and literary texts by African Americans."--Susan Belasco, American Literature
". . . the scholarship is excellent . . . Chaney's readings are exhaustive, persuasive, and murkily brilliant."--Journal of American History
". . . emphasizes the relationship between the literary character of slave narratives and the iconic images that often accompanied those narratives in the form of frontispieces, illustrations, or panoramas. [The author's] attention to both the visual and the verbal elements of African American culture challenges and complicates the now-classic studies of slave narrative that tend to highlight the mastery of literacy as the key to self-mastery and, thus, liberty.vol. 9 no. 4.5 Sept. 2009"--Corey Capers, University of Illinois, Chicago
"Fugitive Vision [is] an important and well-researched study . . . Michael A. Chaney makes a distinct contribution to the literature about slave-born men and women who were dedicated to the permanent liberation of minds and bodies."--American Studies
"An eye-opening analysis of major sites, figures, and figurations of African American authorship."--Ezra Greenspan, Southern Methodist University