In the Shadow of Cotton and Blood: Black Women, Photography, and the Echoes of Slavery

Abstract

Abstract: This essay examines Black women’s photography as a form of intellectual history, ethical practice, and visual sovereignty through a close analysis of Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe’s Daufuskie Island and the author’s own photographic series Down in the Delta . Grounded in Black feminist theory, Black geographies, and the afterlife of slavery, the work situates photography as a mode of theoretical production rather than a supplementary illustration of historical narratives. Tracing a reverse migratory journey from St. Louis to the Mississippi Delta, the essay reframes the rural South as an epistemic site where memory, labor, and care converge. Drawing on the frameworks of wake work, critical fabulation, and Black feminist visual epistemology, it argues that Black women photographers operate as chroniclers, theorists, and archivists whose images challenge linear temporality and dominant historiographies. Through sustained attention to land, embodiment, and intergenerational continuity, these photographic practices confront archival silences while asserting relational ethics rooted in consent, care, and accountability. By foregrounding photography as a method of historical inquiry and intellectual labor, the essay expands prevailing definitions of Black women’s thought and insists upon the visual as a legitimate and necessary site of knowledge production within Black feminist intellectual traditions.