Since the beginning of the new millennium there has been a noticeable upsurge in critical work on the visual archive of Atlantic slavery, resulting in a host of important studies. While most of these contributions are weighted towards images created during the era of slavery itself, some have adopted a more historically far-reaching approach, exploring the ways in which such images live on beyond the original context of their production, circulation and consumption, returning imaginatively in different forms at different times and in different places. A signal instance of this latter trend is Cheryl Finley's Committed to Memory: The Art of the Slave Ship Icon (2018), a dazzling tour de force which examines how Description of a Slave Ship (1789), the abolitionist schema of the Liverpool slaver the Brookes, has been extensively reinterpreted and reinvented in ‘the creative work of black artists and their allies in the twentieth century and today’, as they slot into a ‘visual genealogy’ and practise what Finley dubs a ‘mnemonic aesthetics’ (5). The present book shares this fascination with the afterlives which such visual materials have accrued to themselves, but places the critical accent on how that posterity has occurred and evolved in the context not of art but of literature. The book's focus, in specific terms, is on the transactions between a diverse selection of texts written between the mid-1990s and 2020 and a range of images that belong (with one exception) to British and American traditions. These images are taken from a period (between c. 1779 and 1939) which is of considerable historical significance, witnessing, as it did, several landmark events in the intertwined transatlantic histories of slavery and race – from the campaign for the abolition of the slave trade (1787–1807) to the American Civil War (1861–5) to the Harlem Renaissance (1919–c. 1934). Many of the images are well-known – the diagram of the Brookes itself, for instance – but, with the obvious exception of David Dabydeen's ‘Turner’ (1994), the textual responses they have elicited are largely to be found languishing on the outskirts of the canon, having to date received little or no critical analysis. Yet whatever the status and degree of critical recognition conferred on them, these responses, taken together, are of vital moment as a means of identifying and analysing the ways in which slavery's visual culture continues to resonate within the realms of contemporary literary production.