{"id":358,"date":"2026-09-10T11:15:09","date_gmt":"2026-09-10T16:15:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/exhibitions.library.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbiltreadingseries\/?post_type=item&#038;p=358"},"modified":"2026-09-10T11:59:53","modified_gmt":"2026-09-10T16:59:53","slug":"fugitive-negatives","status":"publish","type":"item","link":"https:\/\/exhibitions.library.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbiltreadingseries\/item\/fugitive-negatives\/","title":{"rendered":"Fugitive Negatives"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In the &#8220;Photography&#8221; section in Trethewey&#8217;s poem &#8220;Storyville Diary,&#8221; the speaker describes a photographic negative: &#8220;the whole world reverses, my black dress turned \/ white, my skin blackened to pitch. <em>Inside out, \/ <\/em>I said, thinking of what I&#8217;ve tried to hide.&#8221; In Natasha Trethewey&#8217;s poem &#8220;Pastoral,&#8221; the speaker poses for a photograph with Vanderbilt&#8217;s Fugitive Poets, many of whom wrote essays for <em>I&#8217;ll Take My Stand, <\/em>a book promoting racial segregation. In the uneasy dream of the poem, the photographer tells his subjects to &#8220;say &#8216;race,'&#8221; and the speaker tries to connect with the Fugitives by telling them that her father is &#8220;white . . . and rural.&#8221; Black and white are reversed in these negatives of Fugitive photographs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":199,"featured_media":359,"menu_order":0,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"section":[17],"class_list":["post-358","item","type-item","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","section-natashatrethewey"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhibitions.library.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbiltreadingseries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/item\/358","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhibitions.library.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbiltreadingseries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/item"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhibitions.library.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbiltreadingseries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/item"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhibitions.library.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbiltreadingseries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/199"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/exhibitions.library.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbiltreadingseries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/item\/358\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":372,"href":"https:\/\/exhibitions.library.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbiltreadingseries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/item\/358\/revisions\/372"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhibitions.library.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbiltreadingseries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/359"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhibitions.library.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbiltreadingseries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"section","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhibitions.library.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbiltreadingseries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/section?post=358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}