Images of enslaved people function as continued property in their likenesses

Evidence

“Slavery was abolished one hundred and fifty-six years ago, but Renty and Delia remain enslaved in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Their images, like their bodies before, remain subject to control and appropriation by the powerful, and their familial identities denied to them,” Mike said at one of many meetings. — Tamara Lanier, From These Roots, 803

Categorization

• DEFINE: This is the conceptual pivot of the whole case: property law applied to an enslaved person’s photographic image, the afterlife of slavery operationalized as an ongoing legal relationship.
• DEEPTHINKING: If anything in this chapter warrants reflective sitting, it is the transposition of chattel slavery’s legal control onto the photographic image across 170 years.
• STORYSTEM: The idea of an image functioning as continued enslavement is a genuinely eerie premise that could seed speculative or literary fiction about what is owned when likeness is owned.