Jumping scale in the Black Atlantic: Critical visuality in the archives of slavery

Abstract

This article considers the historical relationship between the production of scale and Blackness in the visual archives of slavery. Building on recent work in Black geographies that intervenes in debates over the horizontal versus hierarchical perspectives on scale, I argue that “Black scale” attends to the co-constitution of race and scale. Working through the critical frameworks of speculation and visual analysis, I explore the ways in which two visual artifacts mediated and produced scale and Blackness in the 19th century. The first, price current newspapers, visually abstracts and obscures the labor power of enslaved laborers on 19th century sugar plantations. The other, an amateur watercolor depicting an enslaved man carrying a torch, depicts the visual technology of illumination used to produce Blackness and surveil Black people. In both cases, the visual artifacts under investigation functioned to (1) trace the geographic arc of economic relationships that were founded and reproduced through racialized dispossession and enslavement, and (2) represent visual technologies that worked to produce Blackness. As a hermeneutical practice, “Black scale” engages with speculative methods and visual analysis as critical approaches to better understand the relationship between race, visuality, uneven development, and spatial production in historical terms.