Thinking with(in) the Hold: The Slave Ship & Its Afterlives in Nineteenth-Century Black Literary and Print Reproduction
Research Poster Arts & Humanities 2025 Graduate ExhibitionPresentation by Courtney Murray Ross
Exhibition Number 17
Abstract
My research focuses on the afterlives of slavery in African American literature and print culture. In my current work, I argue that nineteenth-century Black editors, writers, and readers used the iconic figure of the slave ship to imagine counter-intuitive yet liberatory forms of Black diasporic identities and communities. Although the icon of the slave ship was often associated with white-led abolitionist movements, I have tracked a vast and varied body of writing and print culture in Black newspapers, narratives, and conventions that drew on the slave ship as a device to challenge nationalist myths and to seek prohibited forms of diasporic belonging. My work spans some of the most well-known writers, such as Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Jacobs, along with vital writers such as William Still, Hannah Crafts, Henry Box Brown, and more. These writers saw the holds of slave ships persisting in other confined spaces such as boxes, closets, and attics and used these spaces to experiment with alternative modes of self-fashioning and rebirth. Those modes would become foundational themes in African American literary history.
Importance
This project contributes to early African American literature, Gender and Sexuality studies, and Black Print Culture. I complicate how we theorize and where we locate the origins of Black femme spatial and environmental resistance during and after the Transatlantic Slave Trade. I assert that a Black feminist lens is necessary to understand how the hold has theoretical potential when studying Black metaphysical and creative expression in the face of enclosure. I bridge existing Black feminist approaches to gender and sexuality studies to foreground how Black gender can reconceptualize standard understandings of space, place, and identity. I use this attention to gender to further highlight alternative ways that early African American writers were innovatively attentive to print’s theoretical and rhetorical power.