Analyzing the impact of black abolitionist iconography on early blackliterature and the formation of black identity, Fugitive Vision examines thewritings of Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, William and Ellen Craft, Harriet Jacobs, and the slave potter David Drake. Juxtaposing pictorial and literaryrepresentations, the book argues that the visual offered an alternative to literacyfor current and former slaves, whose works mobilize forms of illustration thatsubvert dominant representations of slavery by both apologists and abolitionists.From a portrait of Douglass's mother as Ramses to the incised snatches of proverband prophesy on Dave the Potter's ceramics, the book identifies a "fugitive vision"that reforms our notions of antebellum black identity, literature, and culturalproduction.