| "Bricks and Blood. The Dialectical Image of the Black Atlantic in the Colonial Metropolis" is an interdisciplinary dissertation that examines how the architecture and visual culture of early modern London manifested modernity's uneasy relationship with slavery in the Americas. Using Walter Benjamin's concept of the dialectical image, Karl Marx's description of the commodity fetish and Gilles Deleuze's notion of the virtual, this project examined how this taint of violence – present but not visible – saturated luxury goods, public buildings, royal pageants, poetic metaphor and everyday life in the colonial metropolis.;This dissertation deconstructs five spatial motifs associated with the discourse of European modernity in order to explore their complicity with trans-Atlantic slavery and territorial conquest. Chapter 1, "Modernity as Sea Change" traces the nautical imagery associated with the British Empire to its earlier dependence on the triangular trade. Chapter 2, "Heaven and Hell" connects Charles Baudelaire's description of the modern city as Hell, with the motif of the sea voyage as hellish in its cargo of slaves shipped in the previous century. Chapter 3, "Measures of Control" links the nineteenth-century panopticon and methods of surveillance with the practices of land surveying and the control of slave labour on colonial plantations. Chapter 4, "From Theatre to Spectacle" compares the wanderings of the flâneur to public spectacles and city planning in London, arguing that they were both performances that served to create a metropolitan identity by exoticizing the colonized outsider. Chapter 5, "Virtual Topographies" explores the relationship between embodiment, the middle passage and contemporaneous media arts representations of this period. This chapter considers the necessity of interdisciplinary historical accounts to account for silences within the archive. |
