Committed to Memory: The Art of the Slave Ship Icon

Abstract

Cheryl Finley's brilliant book is a chronological and international visual genealogy of the slave ship icon from its inception as a schematic engraving by the Plymouth Committee of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade in England, Plan of an African Ship's Lower Deck with Negroes in the Proportion of Only One to a Ton (1788) to the work of contemporary black artists and their allies who “interrogate, redeploy, and imagine” it (p. 10). Finley convincingly asserts that the enduring icon galvanized African diaspora identity formation and aesthetic practice in the late twentieth century through “mnemonic aesthetics,” a ritualized politics of remembering (p. 9). The book's first part, “Sources/Roots,” establishes the slave ship icon as the preeminent abolitionist image in its historical and political contexts. Finley deftly examines how and why the London committee changed the icon's initial iteration into Description of a Slave Ship (1789), the most widely disseminated version (at least 8,700 copies were distributed). Abolitionists used it variously for slave trade regulation, abolition, and suppression, African colonization, and chattel slavery abolition. Finley's analysis is so meticulous that it is perplexing how she calculated 297 slaves in the Plymouth print when there are actually 294 (120 men, 84 women, 90 children), as she enumerates (p. 34). The plate represents sailing records of the Brooks ship of Liverpool, at 297 tons' burden, or cargo capacity, yet the pamphlet states “in the proportion of not quite one to a ton” (p. 24). The book's design, with images sometimes distant from related text (e.g., discussion of one image occurs on page 27, but the image does not appear until page 56), hampers reading-viewing, as does the lack of sufficiently enlarged close-ups. Further, the author refers to many images that are not reproduced in the book.