ABSTRACT
This chapter offers some representations of 'the slave ship' as a technology of power, both physical and discursive. The slave ship was a machine that transported and transformed; in transporting the bodies of Africans across the Atlantic, it transformed them into slaves. Aesthetics is a discourse of white power-bloc alliances, and Du Bois was presumably quite confident of his Black readers' ability to deconstruct it, and recover the Black meanings that Ruskin repressed. The predatory intentions of Turner's fish are unmistakable, but he was no biological illustrator and the fish themselves do not much resemble sharks. Olaudah Equiano was a slave who published his autobiography in 1789, and although his discourse is clearly that of the white other which he has learned, traces of the Black experience remain within it. The alliances of power-bloc interests were not formed around racial axes alone, but by articulations of class or economic ones with race.
