| Summary: | This article examines the visual culture of the twenty-first century antislavery movement,
arguing that it adapts four main icons of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century abolitionism
for its contemporary campaigns against global slavery and human trafficking: the ‘Am I
Not a Man and a Brother’ icon, the diagram of the ‘Brookes’ slave ship, the ‘Scourged
Back’ photograph and the auction-block detail from the Liberator masthead. Finding
some of the same limitations of paternalism, dehumanisation and sensationalism as
dominated much of the first antislavery movement’s visual culture, the article nonetheless
identifies a liberatory aesthetic and a protest memory in the antislavery imagery of several
contemporary artists, including Charles Campbell and Romuald Hazoume`.
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