Harvard paid to license descended-artist images it considers its own property

Evidence

Instead of suing Weems, Harvard purchased the rights to her images and would go on to collaborate with her, using these pictures in future books and exhibits. Reading that stopped me cold, just as seeing Renty as a backdrop in the Radcliffe auditorium had: it occurred to me in a flash that nothing had changed since the 1850s, when these photos were taken. It also made me ponder the question Murray asks in her essay, “Who owns the rights to the violent events of the past?” Just as Ta-Nehisi Coates’s presentation helped me understand that the daguerreotypes were the plunder of slavery, Murray articulated the legal issue that had been nagging at me since the conference: “More fundamentally, did Harvard indeed own the daguerreotypes, which would clinch their copyright and contract claims? And if they did, should they own images of enslaved people that Agassiz won through violent coercion? Or should we regard these relics as cultural property belonging to African-Americans, which should be returned to the descendants of African-born enslaved people?” — Tamara Lanier, From These Roots, 662

Categorization

• XREF: Mirrors the graft/trees framework (ADDENDUM) of institutions recycling stolen material under their own authorship; also echoes the immodesty article’s theme of institutions controlling narratives about bodies.