Research Seminars @ Illinois

In this talk, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas will explore visual representations of the Middle Passage in children’s picture books and comics, re-envisioning the slave ship as a metaphorical floating “dark forest.” The dark forest, a recurring motif in speculative fiction and fairy tales, is reinforced as a space of terror, transformation and transmission in The Middle Passage (Feelings), Ebony Sea (Smalls/Lockard), and Born on the Water (Hannah-Jones/Watson/Smith). Through representations of trees, timber and wood - materials and symbols - used to construct the schooners that transported enslaved people, the layered meaning of commodification of the arboreal, natural resources, and human bodies are conjoined with mythological and folkloric associations of trees as sites of punishment, refuge and transformation.