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Chapter 5 concludes the book with a discussion of contemporary polemics regarding racial reinvention in the work of artists Betye Saar and Kara Walker. Saar and Walker more directly engage and critique racial caricature than Motley and his generation, using stereotype not only as a formal device but also as a subject for de- and re-construction. Through disparate methods, Saar and Walker assert the use of caricatured figuration of blackness as a method of confrontation and, for Saar, potential healing. While Saar, who came to the foreground of the feminist and black arts movements in the 1970s, appropriates and modifies racial caricature as a means of invalidating it, younger artist Kara Walker rejects the possibility of defeating this imagery. This chapter positions Motley’s work as a starting place for the continued refashioning of the black image, exploring the ways in which Motley’s generation provided the foundation for Saar’s and Walker’s attempts to address our culture’s malformed conceptions of blackness. Saar, Walker, and many others make clear that debates about racial representation and reinvention do not end with the Negro Renaissance; indeed, Old Negroes and New Negroes continue to evolve before a global audience.

The sixth chapter examines the role of inner and outer space in cultural productions of black post-blackness. Crawford develops a theory of black public interiority (a theory of black cultural movements’ ability to create a sense of shared interiority within the public space of the collective). She argues that the Black Arts Movement was aspiring for public art that could be experienced as both a black interior and an open space created by a collective. This chapter analyzes a range of installation art and other visual art, film, and letter writing that dramatize the black interior being experienced as the black outdoors. Crawford demonstrates that the BAM set in motion a vital process (that black aesthetics continue to engage) of refusing to allow black interiority to be defined as the province of the black bourgeoisie. The art examined includes installation art created by Kara Walker, outdoor murals, the film Night Catches Us, the letter writing of Carolyn Rodgers and Hoyt Fuller, and more.

By engaging interventionist art by women of color at two different scales—ephemeral body/earth art and monumental public art—this chapter supplements post-humanist theories of “deep time”—in particular, the temporality of the Anthropocene—with a concept of “dark time.” The intensive, alchemical, and obscure temporality of “dark time” is crucial to understanding black and brown feminist performance interventions against the violence of expropriative capitalism in the Americas. The chapter reads the art work of Kara Walker and Regina José Galindo through the poetry of Harryette Mullen and philosophy of Gilles Deleuze.

This chapter continues the investigation of visual art begun in the introduction, examining the charges lodged against artist Kara Walker in 1997 that her silhouette installations present “negative images” of black people. It conceives those claims about negative black images as a reaction against the principle of abstraction that clearly informs Walker’s figural depictions, and on which abstractionism itself necessarily depends. The chapter then considers the myriad ways in which abstraction has in fact historically been deployed to black people’s detriment, whether in social, political, or aesthetic terms, making it an understandable object of suspicion within African American culture. Maintaining that abstractionism is nevertheless a potentially powerful tool for African Americanist critique, the chapter concludes by outlining some of the historical reasons that visual art in particular is not especially hospitable to abstractionist strategies at this juncture, thereby clearing the way for a consideration of what other art forms promise in this regard.

This chapter focuses on the sculpted vulvas of Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party (1979) and Kara Walker’s A Subtlety (2014) in order to draw out some of the issues that underlie the representational politics that surround the black vulva. Though these installations diverge in many ways, this chapter argues that they enable a meditation on the possibility of Luce Irigaray’s permeable, dialogic selfhood—selves that illustrate the impossibility of a border between self and Other—rendering porosity and the labial as important for an ethics of mutual vulnerability. Yet this chapter also cautions against forgetting asymmetries of power. Reading across the installations and the controversy over Walker’s installation in particular forces us to acknowledge that the differences between pleasure in vulnerability and the sensation of racial violation are related to the differences between the structures of our epistemologies of gender and race. Dwelling on the sensuality that inheres in A Subtlety, however, offers a way to reorient porosity by thinking with the dimension of smell as one site of the installation’s excess. The scalar, in turn, allows us to imagine formulations of brown jouissance in relation to fleshiness that exceeds the individual in multiple directions.

Establishing and examining an archive of contemporary visual slave narratives—including Glenn Ligon’s Narratives and Runaways series (1993), Kara Walker’s Slavery! Slavery! (1997) and Narratives of a Negress (2003), and Ellen Driscoll’s TheLoophole of Retreat (1991)—this chapter reframes critical debates on the slave narrative around the visual stakes of the form and advances a new model of reading the slave narrative founded on attention to the historical and aesthetic dislocations and disjunctions accentuated in contemporary visual slave narratives. Concluding with an analysis of Frederick Douglass’s visual intervention in his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, specifically, his metaphorical assertion, “You have seen how a man was made a slave, you shall see how a slave was made a man,” the chapter argues that both contemporary artists and 19^th-century ex-slave narrators produce representational static to evade the racial constraints on their artistic production.

Chapter Four, “Along Enlightenment’s Cast Shadows,” begins with melancholy and the shadow of the object that falls across the ego. I elaborate how technologies of light projection to create shadow pictures form a foundational and persistent part of the history of projection technologies as both colonial regulatory devices for the production of the disembodied subject of reason and as machines haunted by other ways of knowing and becoming. The chapter begins with a reconsideration of the physiognomic silhouette. Taking seriously Lavater’s ambivalent assertion that what he calls the “shade” may assist the promotion of human understanding and love, the chapter turns to the beginnings of photography and William Henry Fox-Talbot’s alternate naming: “skiagraphy,” or shadow writing. The chapter argues that setting the early history of photography back into the dark room of devices for drawing with shadow allows us to bring out photography’s relation not to only to identitarian fixity but also to volatility, desire, and transformation. The final section focuses on the work of contemporary artist Kara Walker’s use of the technology of shadow projection to reconsider the institution of the photographic archive and its regulatory effects on the body. Thinking through shadow projection enables us to see the body in ways that revolatilize the hardened differences of race and sexuality as well as galvanize the transformative instability in the universal pretensions of enlightenment technologies--namely, the fact that we all cast a black shadow.

This concluding chapter presents the work of Kara Walker to probe the relationship between black women and the flesh. Her study shows that understandings of masochism can be shaped by particular framings of sexuality, subjectivity, and agency and addresses how people might think otherwise. The remainder of the chapter recapitulates the study of the book. By placing flesh and difference at the center of knowledge production and circulation, the book opens alternate modes of understanding circuits of power. It investigates the notion of sensation to look at how people experience power and subordination in a variety of disciplinary situations. Hence, the text is about how difference is made material through the particular understandings of sexuality, subjectivity, as well as agency.

In their book The Black Female Body: A Photographic History, Deborah Willis and Carla Williams take readers through four ways of perceiving black women’s bodies in photography: as colonized bodies, as cultural bodies, as beautiful bodies, and finally as reclaimed bodies. Some of the photos present black women as agents exercising autonomy, while others present their bodies as objects of sexual desire. This chapter shifts attention away from the content of these photographic images of the black female body and back to the white gaze that is behind the photographic lens. From this starting point, the chapter examines the work of artist Kara Walker. Walker’s use of black silhouettes on white walls offers a counter-aesthetic to the white male gaze. Underneath the eroticization of the black female body, she exposes the history of sexual and racial violence that accompanies it.

This chapter explores the collision of sugar economies, sex, and legal personhood in Kara Walker’s sculptural art installation A Subtlety, Edwidge Dan¬ticat’s short story “A Wall of Fire Rising,” and Rosario Ferré’s novella Sweet Diamond Dust (Maldito Amor). These writers and artists reimagine modes of romance that underwrite the legal fictions of sugar plantation economies in the mainland United States, Haiti, and the U.S. colony of Puerto Rico. The chapter identifies aesthetic strategies for grappling with sugar’s legacies, in which legacy is not merely a metaphor for cultural heritage but also refers literally to legal inheritance. It examines how narrative modes of romance and tragedy in fiction and historiography operate to legitimate or discredit family genealo-gies, manage racialized and gendered populations through anti-prostitution laws, and shape narratives of anti-colonial revolution, imperial occupation, and economic globalization.

This chapter explores the tension between the association of the Lincoln Memorial with the civil rights movement and the continued prevalence—during and after the movement itself—of the rhetoric of imperial ruination in African American political discourse and cultural production. The chapter considers this rhetoric in the writings of Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, and Martin Luther King Jr., before turning to Kara Walker’s art installation A Subtlety. Walker’s sculpture of an African American woman, molded out of refined white sugar in the shape of an Egyptian sphinx, was arguably the most prominent public monument ever constructed to enslaved people in America; but it also aligned with a long tradition through which African American writers and artists have refigured Thomas Jefferson’s exceptional “empire for liberty” as merely another iteration of what Henry Highland Garnet called the “empire of slavery,” inexorably devolving into an “empire of ruin.”

This introduction situates the study within the fields of classical receptions, black classicism, and African American cultural studies. Drawing on postcolonial critical insights into classical tradition as a mechanism of imperial power, as well as work elaborating black classicism in the United States, the introduction sets the framework for a dialectical reading of African American cultural production in relation to dominant American cultures of classical monumentalism and public historiography. It establishes the relevance of the study to debates about theories of temporality and historical periodization within African American literary studies. It is bookended by discussions of the September 11 Memorial Museum and Kara Walker’s installation A Subtlety, a pairing that emblematizes how narrative and counternarrative unfold across US history in an ongoing contest, and which reveals black classicism as a force so significant that classical history and literature can never be deployed in public discourse without conjuring their own dialectical undoing.

The New Sensibility did not end in the 1970s, with the downturn in the American economy. It had by then been incorporated fully into our culture. First, focusing on the continuing challenge of John Cage, Lou Reed’s work in a Cage mode, and the rise of punk, this chapter shows the vitality of the New Sensibility in the 1970s, and continues the examination through the 1980s to the present. Today, a culture of excess, with attention riveted on madness, violence, sexuality, confession, confusion of realms between high and low culture, and liberation, has become pervasive. The argument here is that the New Sensibility, when it is allowed freedom to breathe, and when it is cognizant of the essential tension between “liberation and limits,” to use a phrase offered by historian Roger Shattuck, can continue to resonate in the most valuable fashion. This type of success is demonstrated by Kara Walker’s monumental work of art A Subtlety.