Rachel Burke

In 1849, to escape enslavement, Henry “Box” Brown folded himself inside a cargo crate and blindly jostled across the mid-Atlantic terrain for twenty-seven hours until he was delivered to “free” northern soil. In Massachusetts he performed his moving panorama, Mirror of Slavery, before the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act placed him on tenuous ground once again. The law voided Brown’s self-emancipation by authorizing the jurisdiction of the South, where he was still legally enslaved in Virginia, to supersede his new legal protections. The act revealed how white supremacy destabilized relationships to land: because of his race, Brown was subject to a geographic logic that was decoupled from his actual physical location. Territorial affiliation was critical for nineteenth-century American identity formation, and the appetite for landscape images reflects how the environment was also mobilized as a metaphorical common ground. Brown, as a panoramist, was familiar with these conventions, but his personal experience of the land challenges the strictly affirmative value of landscape representations. Indeed, Mirror of Slavery insists on land as moving and inherently uncertain. Through an analysis of Brown’s landscape imagery, my dissertation foregrounds the destabilizing potential of land and considers how nineteenth-century landscape practices register the spatial valences of race in America.

This project will be the first study of Mirror of Slavery within the context of American landscape representations. I support my analysis with an art historical account informed by methodologies from media archaeology, performance studies, and Black cultural geography. These interventions confront perceptions of the natural world as stable and visually knowable, thus opening up the traditionally white canon of nineteenth-century landscape practice for inquiry into how relationships to land and claims to American subjecthood are visualized through landscape motifs across media.