Lawsuits against Harvard University have kept the school's race relations in the news lately. During the fall and winter, a case alleging that Harvard discriminated against Asians in its admissions dominated national headlines for months. In a more recent, and less reported, case, an African American woman named Tamara Lanier has sued the university to reclaim photographs of her enslaved relatives and for “unspecified punitive and emotional damages.” The photographs in question were part of the personal collection of Louis Agassiz. Agassiz, one of the most important naturalists of the nineteenth century and founder of Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, was also an advocate for the scientific hypothesis that people of color are inferior to whites.
Harvard rediscovered the daguerreotypes in its archives in the mid-1970s. The images, taken around 1850, are some of the earliest photographs of enslaved people in the United States, which also makes them some of the earliest portrait photographs. Unforgettable are the startled, horrified, desperate, and deeply arresting gazes of the sitters. The images are so remarkable that artist Carrie Mae Weems used them for her blistering series From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995). In response, Harvard threatened to sue Weems for copyright infringement (in a surprise resolution, the university instead acquired Weems's series). Legal issues of ownership aside, Lanier's most arresting claim is that she and her family, as descendants of the enslaved people depicted in the photos, have been violated by the images—as have their ancestors, who bodies have been kept in a kind of perpetual exposure, a permanent state of trauma. This echoes Saidiya Hartman's claim, in Scenes of Subjection (1997), that the circulation of depictions of slavery reproduce its abjection, and that as a result the dead are never safe from the living. When I learned that Lanier's lawyer represented Trayvon Martin's family, my mind went immediately to another murdered black teenager, Michael Brown: to the way that his body was photographed and filmed dead on the ground with no one shielding him and few demanding that the image-making stop. Lanier's case is based on her status as a descendant of enslaved people, but by extension it is also about the continued violations, humiliations, and violence U.S. visual culture reigns down on black bodies.
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