Black Milk is the first in-depth analysis of the visual arts that effloresced around slavery in Brazil and North America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Exploring prints, photographs, paintings, sculptures, ceramics, and ephemera, it will change everything we knew, or thought we knew, about the visual archive of Atlantic slavery.

• Introduction


• 1: Slavery and the Romantic Sketch: Brazilian cornucopia, American aporia


• 2: Slavery, American Graphic Culture and Print Satire


• 3: Angelo Agostini and Brazilian Graphic satires of slavery


• 4: Photography and slavery in America and Brazil


• 5: Abstraction or Immersion? American Museums and the representation of slavery and trauma


• 6: Brazil, Slavery and the limits of institutional display from Lina Bo Bardi to Escrava Anastácia

Marcus Wood is a painter, performance artist, film maker, and a Professor of English at the University of Sussex. For the last thirty years he has been writing books and making art about the ways in which the traumatic memory of slavery and colonisation has been encoded across the cultures of the slave Diaspora. His books include Blind Memory Slavery and Visual Representation in England and America (Manchester UP and Routledge, 2000) and The Horrible Gift of Freedom Atlantic Slavery and the Representation of Emancipation (University of Georgia Press, 2010). He is currently finishing two books: Exploding Archives: Meditations on the Living Legacies of Slavery in Brazil and America and Slavery and Literary Sensibility in Brazil and America 1850-2000. His film 'Stick', which features the adventures of a giant hockey stick as it moves through various sacred spaces of Hindu culture in India, has just been released, and he is working on a film of the life of Henry Box Brown.