Illuminated Darkness

This is a metaphor of the cultural and psychological effects of slavery. In :Illuminated Darkness", Judith Fossett analyzes the shadow as a rhetorical and visual device deeply connected to slavery, race, and representations of the self in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe and the Americas. The shadow, she suggests, helps us understand the economic, cultural, and psychological effects of slavery. Combining literature, history, art history, and philosophy, Fossett assembles an archive of tropes that examine the shadow as a manifestation of the social death and invisibility engendered by slavery, as well as the repressed recognition of black humanity in the white racial unconscious.Through a series of critical readings of works by writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Thomas Dixon, W. E. B. DuBois, and William Faulkner, Fossett reveals how the shadowy specter of chattel slavery haunts American literature.
Relying on the close relationship of white and black, light and dark, the shadow powerfully represents the phenomenological force of race in American society, Fossett argues, and is perhaps the quintessential New World trope.