ABSTRACT
On a cotton banner, almost six feet long and only eighteen inches high, Pedro Tovookan Parris recorded his experience of the transatlantic slave trade in three watercolor vignettes. An image of Rio de Janeiro where the enslaved ten-year-old arrived from Africa in 1845 is followed by an American ship—one that perhaps escorted him to New England to testify in a trial against the ship’s captain for slaving. The banner ends with a view of Boston, Massachusetts and of the western Maine farm where Pedro Tovookan lived out the rest of his short life. This pictorial narrative provides a rare opportunity to interrogate the intersection of visual images and cultural landscapes in the life of an ordinary person facing extraordinary circumstances. To represent the trauma of the transatlantic slave trade, Pedro Tovookan drew on popular print images and adopted the format of a moving panorama—a commercial entertainment that told a story through a series of images. With its depiction of movement through time and space, the panorama format matched Pedro Tovookan’s own circulation through the Atlantic world while the banner’s imagery and its presentation to antislavery audiences in Massachusetts, both normalized and critiqued the United States’ slavery-fueled, imperialist ambitions.
