Janet Leary's Fugitive Testimony: On the Visual Logic of Slave Narratives offers a thoughtful meditation on the epistemological and methodological links between the ex-slave narratives of Harriet Jacobs, Fredrick Douglass, Solomon Northup, and Henry Box Brown (among others) and the representational strategies of contemporary visual artists Kara Walker, Glenn Ligon, and Ellen Driscoll. Leary argues that ex-slave narrators employed strategies of both literary and visual resistance to undermine the central contradictory logic of the conventions of the slave narrative as form – specifically, as a literary form that demands the authentication of the author's humanity (by a white audience) while simultaneously asserting individual black subjectivity.

Central to Leary's characterization of ex-slave narrators’ strategies of resistance to the racialized logic of the slave narrative form is a device that she terms “representational static” (5). In order to define “representational static,” she analyzes antebellum and postbellum ex-slave narratives through the lens of contemporary visual artists’ juxtapositions of literary and visual discourses of race to expose their rupture. In so doing, Leary shows the ways in which the ex-slave narrators actually employed these tactics themselves to undermine and destabilize the conventions of authenticity of the slave narrative form itself. Leary's transhistorical approach emphasizes parallels between ex-slave narrators’ use of “representational static” and contemporary artists’ appropriation of such tactics to underscore discursive constructions of blackness in our racial past and present. As Leary asserts, her focus on the visual stems from the fact that “racial slavery depended on the confluence of visual speculation, linguistic determination, and social performance, which resulted in a literal investment in racialized subjectivity increasingly articulated along the axis of the visual” (16). Further, citing art historian Huey Copeland, Leary notes that the “speculative gaze demarcating black subjects has only grown stronger” (17). As such, for Leary, visual artists’ use of nineteenth-century slave narrative's incongruous conventions of authentication reveal the ways in which discursive (in both literary and visual forms) constructions of blackness persist in the contemporary moment.

In chapter 1, Leary focusses most directly on the intersections between contemporary artists and ex-slave narrators. In subsequent chapters, Leary turns her attention to the ways in which ex-slave narrators have employed this representational logic in their text. In this sense, Leary's initial analysis of contemporary visual art in chapter 1 functions as a springboard from which to jump into the past and recognize the patterns of resistance already employed by ex-slave narrators. For example, in her analysis of artist Glenn Ligon's 1993 Narratives series, Leary notes that Ligon uses nineteenth-century abolitionist slave narrative book frontispieces as his mold, accompanied with text drawn from white journalist John Howard Griffith's Black Like Me (1961) parody, and his own autobiographical information. The title of the text reads, “Black Like Me or The Authentic Narrative of Glenn Ligon, A Black Man, To Which is added testimonials from individuals and institutions on the veracity of his account” (2). Beneath this title, additional “authenticating” text notes that the account was “Prepared from a Statement of Facts Taken from His Own Lips … Yours, Very, Very Truly, A White Person” (2). As Leary asserts, Ligon's strategic play with who constitutes the racialized speaking subject (Ligon as himself, Ligon appropriating Griffith who was appropriating a black man, or any white person) complicates any easy claims of an authentic, fixed, and singular historical actor. Further, the iconographic and textual parallels – in typeface, spacing, and language – between the nineteenth-century slave narrative forms and Ligon's lithograph prints in his Narratives series powerfully highlight the ways in which Ligon's citational strategy of the ex-slave narrative is a performative process of surrogation (in Joe Roach's sense).

For Leary, the historical persistence of the “visual objectification of African American cultural producers” requires that we utilize and engage the language of visuality and ways of seeing as a critical means through which to reimagine the slave narrative form (25). It is important to note that while Leary's close readings of contemporary visual art are careful and compelling, they nevertheless function as a means through which to recognize the strategies of resistance always already at play in ex-slave narratives. As a result, it strikes me that these visual analyses read as a lens through which to see the other artistic form that is her primary concern (slave narratives) rather than sustained examinations of the artworks in their own right. That said, Leary's book deftly interweaves art-historical and literary analysis while bringing performance and critical race theory to bear on the slave narrative tradition to create a rich, interdisciplinary work on the importance of the visual (and indeed visual literacy) on racialized systems of knowledge production.