ABSTRACT

This article explores the risks and dangers of redemptive readings of JMW Turner’s (in)famous 1840 painting, Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying – Typhon Coming on) that assume that we cannot be complicit in anything other than abolition and deliberately forget and disavow the underlying structures and continuing dispossessions of slave racial capitalism. The paper reads the painting as an intervention in an important set of nineteenth-century debates around slavery and the slave trade, and as a key element in the war over representations over slavery. How should we incorporate black death and white abolitionism into our stories, self-understandings and conceptions of justice? Turner’s painting brings us all into a space of temporal entanglement, and leaves us to question the history of modernity and the meaning of freedom both in the past and in the present.

摘要

本文探讨了JMW Turner于1840年着名绘画《奴隶之船》（奴隶投掷到死者和垂死者– Typhon来袭）上赎回读书的风险和危险。假设我们除了废除奴隶制外不能参与其他任何事情，并故意忘记和否认奴隶种族资本主义的基本结构和持续剥夺。该论文将这幅画读作是对19世纪有关奴隶制和奴隶贸易的一系列重要辩论的干预，并且是争夺奴隶制代表权战争的关键要素。我们应如何将黑人死亡和废除白人纳入我们的故事，自我理解和正义观念中？特纳的绘画将我们带入了一个时间纠缠的空间，让我们质疑过去和现在的现代性历史和自由的含义。