Phoebe Wolfskill
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780252041143
- eISBN:
- 9780252099700
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252041143.003.0005
- Subject:
- Sociology, Race and Ethnicity
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Margo Natalie Crawford
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780252041006
- eISBN:
- 9780252099557
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5406/illinois/9780252041006.003.0007
- Subject:
- Sociology, Race and Ethnicity
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Tavia Nyong'o
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781479856275
- eISBN:
- 9781479806386
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479856275.003.0005
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gay and Lesbian Studies
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Phillip Brian Harper
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781479865437
- eISBN:
- 9781479808878
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479865437.003.0002
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Amber Jamilla Musser
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781479807031
- eISBN:
- 9781479845491
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479807031.003.0002
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gay and Lesbian Studies
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Janet Neary
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780823272891
- eISBN:
- 9780823272945
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823272891.003.0002
- Subject:
- Sociology, Race and Ethnicity
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 ...
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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 19th-century ex-slave narrators produce representational static to evade the racial constraints on their artistic production.Less
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 19th-century ex-slave narrators produce representational static to evade the racial constraints on their artistic production.
Jill H. Casid
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816646692
- eISBN:
- 9781452945934
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816646692.003.0005
- Subject:
- Art, Art History
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Amber Jamilla Musser
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- March 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781479891818
- eISBN:
- 9781479891405
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479891818.003.0006
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gay and Lesbian Studies
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Maria del Guadalupe Davidson
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780198716778
- eISBN:
- 9780191785351
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198716778.003.0002
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Aesthetics, Feminist Philosophy
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, ...
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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.Less
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.
Angela Naimou
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- September 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780823264766
- eISBN:
- 9780823266616
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823264766.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Janet Neary
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780823272891
- eISBN:
- 9780823272945
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823272891.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Race and Ethnicity
Fugitive Testimony traces the African American slave narrative across the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries in order to rethink the epistemological limits of the form and to theorize the complicated ...
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Fugitive Testimony traces the African American slave narrative across the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries in order to rethink the epistemological limits of the form and to theorize the complicated interplay between the visual and the literary throughout its history. Gathering an archive of ante- and post-bellum literary slave narratives and visual art, the book redraws the genealogy of the slave narrative in light of its emergence in contemporary art and brings visual and performance theory to bear on the genre’s central problematic: that the ex-slave narrator must be both object and subject of the narrative to provide an eyewitness account of his or her own enslavement. The book takes as its starting point the evocation of the slave narrative in works by a number of current-day visual artists, including Glenn Ligon, Kara Walker, and Ellen Driscoll, and uses the representational strategies of these artists to decode the visual work performed in 19th-century literary narratives by Elizabeth Keckley, Solomon Northup, William Craft, and Henry Box Brown. Focusing on slave narratives’ textual visuality and aspects of narrative performance, rather than the intermedial, semiotic traffic between images and text, the book argues that ex-slave narrators and the contemporary artists under consideration use the logic of the slave narrative form against itself to undermine the evidentiary epistemology of the genre and offer a model of visuality as intersubjective recognition rather than objective division.Less
Fugitive Testimony traces the African American slave narrative across the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries in order to rethink the epistemological limits of the form and to theorize the complicated interplay between the visual and the literary throughout its history. Gathering an archive of ante- and post-bellum literary slave narratives and visual art, the book redraws the genealogy of the slave narrative in light of its emergence in contemporary art and brings visual and performance theory to bear on the genre’s central problematic: that the ex-slave narrator must be both object and subject of the narrative to provide an eyewitness account of his or her own enslavement. The book takes as its starting point the evocation of the slave narrative in works by a number of current-day visual artists, including Glenn Ligon, Kara Walker, and Ellen Driscoll, and uses the representational strategies of these artists to decode the visual work performed in 19th-century literary narratives by Elizabeth Keckley, Solomon Northup, William Craft, and Henry Box Brown. Focusing on slave narratives’ textual visuality and aspects of narrative performance, rather than the intermedial, semiotic traffic between images and text, the book argues that ex-slave narrators and the contemporary artists under consideration use the logic of the slave narrative form against itself to undermine the evidentiary epistemology of the genre and offer a model of visuality as intersubjective recognition rather than objective division.
John Levi Barnard
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780190663599
- eISBN:
- 9780190663629
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190663599.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 18th Century and Early American Literature
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 ...
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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.”Less
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.”
R. Blakeslee Gilpin
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- July 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780807835012
- eISBN:
- 9781469602608
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/9780807869277_gilpin
- Subject:
- History, African-American History
From his obsession with the founding principles of the United States to his cold-blooded killings in the battle over slavery's expansion, John Brown forced his countrymen to reckon with America's ...
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From his obsession with the founding principles of the United States to his cold-blooded killings in the battle over slavery's expansion, John Brown forced his countrymen to reckon with America's violent history, its checkered progress toward racial equality, and its resistance to substantive change. Tracing Brown's legacy through writers and artists such as Thomas Hovenden, W. E. B. Du Bois, Robert Penn Warren, Jacob Lawrence, Kara Walker, and others, this book transforms Brown from an object of endless manipulation into a dynamic medium for contemporary beliefs about the process and purpose of the American republic. It argues that the endless distortions of John Brown, misrepresentations of a man and a cause simultaneously noble and terrible, have only obscured our understanding of the past and loosened our grasp of the historical episodes that define America's struggles for racial equality. By showing Brown's central role in the relationship between the American past and the American present, the book clarifies Brown's complex legacy and highlights his importance in the nation's ongoing struggle with the role of violence, the meaning of equality, and the intertwining paths these share with the process of change.Less
From his obsession with the founding principles of the United States to his cold-blooded killings in the battle over slavery's expansion, John Brown forced his countrymen to reckon with America's violent history, its checkered progress toward racial equality, and its resistance to substantive change. Tracing Brown's legacy through writers and artists such as Thomas Hovenden, W. E. B. Du Bois, Robert Penn Warren, Jacob Lawrence, Kara Walker, and others, this book transforms Brown from an object of endless manipulation into a dynamic medium for contemporary beliefs about the process and purpose of the American republic. It argues that the endless distortions of John Brown, misrepresentations of a man and a cause simultaneously noble and terrible, have only obscured our understanding of the past and loosened our grasp of the historical episodes that define America's struggles for racial equality. By showing Brown's central role in the relationship between the American past and the American present, the book clarifies Brown's complex legacy and highlights his importance in the nation's ongoing struggle with the role of violence, the meaning of equality, and the intertwining paths these share with the process of change.
John Levi Barnard
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780190663599
- eISBN:
- 9780190663629
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190663599.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 18th Century and Early American Literature
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
George Cotkin
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- December 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780190218478
- eISBN:
- 9780190218508
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190218478.003.0026
- Subject:
- History, American History: 20th Century, Cultural History
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
