Oppressive Ownership of Art: The Perpetuation of a Legal System Unsympathetic to Repairing the Trauma of Slavery

By Esme Merrill

Edited by Owen Andrews, Cecilia Murphy, and Lauren Watts 

Art’s association with feeling and humanity makes it a useful medium through which to engage in the unseen traumas of slavery. Photography in particular has a quality of deep subjectivity. Daguerreotypes of enslaved people were created non-consensually by Professor Louis Agassiz in 1850. The cruelty and hostility associated with them continues to resonate as modern descendants deal with the generational emotional impact that the ongoing horror of slavery imposes on the lives of Black people in America. The dismissal of a descendant’s legal claims to these daguerreotypes in Tamera Lanier v. President & Fellows of Harvard College (2022) elucidates the absence of a legal framework through which Black Americans can access tangible reparations for the emotional traumas of slavery.