Nancy Bentley
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- November 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780231156172
- eISBN:
- 9780231520775
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231156172.003.0013
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter invokes the work of Jacques Rancière on the way that sensory experience serves as the space of political existence and uses his arguments to diagnose the current critical situation in ...
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This chapter invokes the work of Jacques Rancière on the way that sensory experience serves as the space of political existence and uses his arguments to diagnose the current critical situation in American literary and cultural studies—a situation of exhaustion with prevailing modes of ideology critique. But arguments such as Rancière's need to be “illuminated and tested through examples from African American art,” a body or tradition of expression that has always been politically invested but has often been equally invested in formal experimentation and extravagance. The chapter works from the inventive formal features of some recent paintings by Kehinde Wiley—the way they violate and reconfigure certain spatial and ornamental conventions of Western representational painting—to show how they contest certain universalizing norms that have been historically associated with (and instrumental in perpetuating) racial hierarchies. The analysis of Wiley's visual art provides the tools to bring to bear upon some earlier African American literary works, namely, an early and never completed experimental narrative by W. E. B. Du Bois, as well as Of One Blood by Pauline Hopkins and several other fictions by Sutton Griggs and James Corrothers, all of which feature a kind of “aesthetic warping” for which Wiley's paintings provide a retrospective model.Less
This chapter invokes the work of Jacques Rancière on the way that sensory experience serves as the space of political existence and uses his arguments to diagnose the current critical situation in American literary and cultural studies—a situation of exhaustion with prevailing modes of ideology critique. But arguments such as Rancière's need to be “illuminated and tested through examples from African American art,” a body or tradition of expression that has always been politically invested but has often been equally invested in formal experimentation and extravagance. The chapter works from the inventive formal features of some recent paintings by Kehinde Wiley—the way they violate and reconfigure certain spatial and ornamental conventions of Western representational painting—to show how they contest certain universalizing norms that have been historically associated with (and instrumental in perpetuating) racial hierarchies. The analysis of Wiley's visual art provides the tools to bring to bear upon some earlier African American literary works, namely, an early and never completed experimental narrative by W. E. B. Du Bois, as well as Of One Blood by Pauline Hopkins and several other fictions by Sutton Griggs and James Corrothers, all of which feature a kind of “aesthetic warping” for which Wiley's paintings provide a retrospective model.
Simone C. Drake
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780226363837
- eISBN:
- 9780226364025
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226364025.003.0002
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gender Studies
Privileging imagination and creativity, this chapter is composed of vignettes that consider the complex and sometimes paradoxical relationship between crisis, vulnerability, and empowerment. It ...
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Privileging imagination and creativity, this chapter is composed of vignettes that consider the complex and sometimes paradoxical relationship between crisis, vulnerability, and empowerment. It begins with Toni Morrison’s Beloved as a theoretical framework for seeing what imagining grace looks like and demonstrating how black feminist theory provides important tools for seeing power in vulnerability and emotiveness. President Obama’s appearance on the cover of Ms. and his accompanying feminist declaration, social commentary on Tom Joyner’s radio show, Donald McKayle’s dance performance “Rainbow ‘Round My Shoulder,” Richard Pryor’s comedy, Presidential initiated social policy, and the visual art of Kehinde Wiley all work together to illustrate how the author both employs and negotiates the challenges of synthesizing black feminist and black masculinity studies. Read together, these vignettes lay out the stakes for critical black gender studies, as well as the complicated nature of constructing complex masculine identities in an era dominated by dialogues of crisis. While vulnerability and emotiveness is privileged in this chapter, the chapter also considers how what Mark Anthony Neal references as illegible masculinities—those expressing vulnerability in this case—are not always a progressive performance that fosters self-actualization and resistance to crisis metaphors.Less
Privileging imagination and creativity, this chapter is composed of vignettes that consider the complex and sometimes paradoxical relationship between crisis, vulnerability, and empowerment. It begins with Toni Morrison’s Beloved as a theoretical framework for seeing what imagining grace looks like and demonstrating how black feminist theory provides important tools for seeing power in vulnerability and emotiveness. President Obama’s appearance on the cover of Ms. and his accompanying feminist declaration, social commentary on Tom Joyner’s radio show, Donald McKayle’s dance performance “Rainbow ‘Round My Shoulder,” Richard Pryor’s comedy, Presidential initiated social policy, and the visual art of Kehinde Wiley all work together to illustrate how the author both employs and negotiates the challenges of synthesizing black feminist and black masculinity studies. Read together, these vignettes lay out the stakes for critical black gender studies, as well as the complicated nature of constructing complex masculine identities in an era dominated by dialogues of crisis. While vulnerability and emotiveness is privileged in this chapter, the chapter also considers how what Mark Anthony Neal references as illegible masculinities—those expressing vulnerability in this case—are not always a progressive performance that fosters self-actualization and resistance to crisis metaphors.
Christine Sylvester
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780190840556
- eISBN:
- 9780190840587
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190840556.003.0002
- Subject:
- Political Science, International Relations and Politics, Political Economy
This chapter reviews American wars in Vietnam and Iraq from critical social and political history sources and from people who experienced these wars. How America remembers and renders accounts of ...
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This chapter reviews American wars in Vietnam and Iraq from critical social and political history sources and from people who experienced these wars. How America remembers and renders accounts of itself, relative to how others remember America in these wars, is key to learning whose war knowledge gets attention and whose wars languish unacknowledged. The chapter reconstructs the wars from memories of ordinary people close to or distant from combat, rather than positioning war only as a matter of state interests, military strategies, and geopolitics that collateralize people. In doing so it considers three contemporary paintings that can convey ideas related to Americans and their post-911warsLess
This chapter reviews American wars in Vietnam and Iraq from critical social and political history sources and from people who experienced these wars. How America remembers and renders accounts of itself, relative to how others remember America in these wars, is key to learning whose war knowledge gets attention and whose wars languish unacknowledged. The chapter reconstructs the wars from memories of ordinary people close to or distant from combat, rather than positioning war only as a matter of state interests, military strategies, and geopolitics that collateralize people. In doing so it considers three contemporary paintings that can convey ideas related to Americans and their post-911wars
