Delia's Tears

March 1, 2010
Photographs of slaves reveal much about the men who took them in this perceptive study of antebellum racial ideology. Historian Rogers examines a cache of daguerreotype portraits and nudes of South Carolina slaves made in 1850 for naturalist Louis Agassiz, which he displayed to buttress his theory that Africans were a distinct species unrelated to whites. She uses the pictures as a window into 19th-century racial science and its intersection with Southern economic interests, and tries to illuminate the perspective of the slaves by pairing their photos with short fictional vignettes written from their imagined viewpoints. Rogers is preoccupied with critical theory (“the idea that a photographic image conveys Truth is thus a highly unstable concept”), and her fictional epiphanies—“He did not wish to be on the ocean, but he wished to have it nearby so he could feel its movement on the air”—sometimes evoke a writers' workshop more than a plantation. Still, her well-researched history paints a rich panorama of the mental world of slavery—the slaves' anxiety and humiliation, the planters' callousness and hypocrisy, the corrupt pseudoscience that explained it all as natural law rather than human oppression. Photos.

June 15, 2010

Rogers, a British essayist on the history of photography and a creative writer, draws upon both of her fields in revealing why seven African American slaves from a plantation near Columbia, SC, were selected in 1850 for the first-ever anthropological photographs, delineated by daguerreotypist Joseph Zealey at the behest of Louis Agassiz, the earliest-known representations of identifiable American slaves. Using the intuitive insight that fact-based fiction can provide (here supplemented with 36 illustrations, a key to persons discussed, and endnotes), she imagines the backstory of the two women and five men--Delia, Drana, Jack, Renty, Jem, Alfred, and Fossena--mediating her thoughts through the words of African American contemporaries and later figures who reflected on the antebellum era and its lingering effects. Agassiz used these images for studies related to the race "science" of the day. They were rediscovered in an attic in Harvard's Peabody Museum in 1976, long after science moved beyond the discredited hierarchical theory of separate human origins, promoted as a rationalization for slavery. Rogers challenges the objectification of unique individuals as types and explains how the lenses of culture and intent influence what different people see when viewing the same images. VERDICT Although traditional historians might take issue with her decision to combine verifiable evidence with imagined dialog and speculation, Rogers proves the logic of her method with a nuanced book that will inform the general reader. Once used to justify exploitation, these images can now further the understanding of our common humanity.--Frederick J. Augustyn Jr., Lib. of Congress

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