Variations on a Raft and Serializing Anti-Slavery Content

Abstract

Abstract:Henry Savigny and Alexander Corréard’s sensational memoir Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal in 1816 published news of what would turn out to be one of the nineteenth century’s most harrowing and infamous shipwrecks. Inspiring Théodore Géricault’s monumental The Raft of the Medusa (1818–19), the story spawned a vast series of transmedia adaptations—literary, visual, auditory—cultivating an aesthetic ecosystem of competing and contradictory afterlives as painting, melodrama, satire, panorama, film, and sculpture. This essay proposes that these variations of the story gain richer significance when read adaptively and serially—adaptively as fitted to specific cultural needs and serially as in dialogue with their antecedents. Whereas each iteration seems to master the human misery of the 1816 event in affective modalities that revise the horror of story’s initial tellings, thinking about them all together in dialogue with each other allows us to see a consistent political radicalism: anxiety about African enslavement’s endurance and legacy.