The palimpsests in this room examine the racialization of labor in slaveholding societies, which did not end with abolition. Depictions of domestic as well as physical work still tend to center on Afrodescendant subjects, reinforcing the association between Blackness and “unskilled” labor. Nonetheless, images often carry in themselves the potential for refusal. Here, refusal appears either in the bodies of the workers themselves or in artistic interventions in plantation images that make explicit the connection between slave labor and racial capitalism.
