Changing Images of Slave Ship Revolts

This paper examines images of slave ship revolts over the past two centuries and how their usage has changed over time. Specifically, it is concerned with exploring the ways in which iconography reveals as well as silences African agency during the Atlantic Slave Trade. It is divided into three sections. Part one analyzes contemporary images of slave ship revolts and what they ignore. For instance, the images are overwhelmingly of male rebels, yet slave women were often described as participating in shipboard revolts. Why and what was the significance of the oversight? Part two analyzes images of slave ship revolts in historical literature on the Atlantic Slave Trade from the 1960s through the 1990s. This historiography draws upon a rich iconography of dour slave ships and shackled slaves, much of it produced as part of the transatlantic abolitionist campaign. But this generation of studies included few images of slave ship revolts. Why was this and what were the consequences? The concluding section examines the usage of these images in more recent studies and electronic representations and how they repeat older misrepresentations as well as create new ones. The paper topic is significant for three reasons. It provides the first detailed examination of slave ship revolt images. It contributes promiscuous representations of the irrepresentable. Finally, it seeks to both explain change as well as change some of the predominant views of transoceanic slave trade studies.