Lara Langer Cohen, Going Underground: Race, Space, and the Subterranean in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Ship holds, attic spaces, and packing crates, inaccessible wastes and hush harbors, holes dug hastily in the ground: the record of Black struggle and resistance is studded with striking images of spatial confinement and release.The source of these images could not be more concrete: Harriet Jacobs's garret nearly destroyed her body, and Nat Turner's hiding holes saved his life, until they didn't.These spaces have an uncanny power to pull free of their concrete coordinates to become figures, metaphors, magnets for ethical and interpretive elaboration, and sometimes sinkholes of trauma.Look at the fold-out engraving of the slave ship Brooks that Thomas Clarkson included in The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-trade by the British Parliament (1808): it is impossible to separate the concrete from the abstract-the bodies from the grid-and equally impossible to confuse them.The slaver's hold is the site of the hideous abstraction of real bodies and the equally terrifying concretion of an abstract calculation.