Kristine Stiles
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780226774510
- eISBN:
- 9780226304403
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226304403.003.0021
- Subject:
- Art, Art Theory and Criticism
This chapter examines the hybrid, cyborgian identity that Wangechi Mutu constantly reinvents in her art througth an analysis of Family Tree. Mutu's collage and installation work delivers visual ...
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This chapter examines the hybrid, cyborgian identity that Wangechi Mutu constantly reinvents in her art througth an analysis of Family Tree. Mutu's collage and installation work delivers visual creolization as the corollary of “contact zones.” She continually reforms the metaphorical “we” in images, objects, and actions, working in every medium to invent this hybrid. The chapter explores Mutu's visual analysis of world culture and its planetary rootedness in racial, sexual, economic, and national divides; war; and the violence of privilege. It places Mutu's work within the domain of a philosophical conversation on intersubjectivity and discusses her exacting reconstruction of shared states of collective subjectivity and cultural agency. It also considers the convergence of trauma and feminism in her work and the forensic aspect of her reconstruction of composite imagery.Less
This chapter examines the hybrid, cyborgian identity that Wangechi Mutu constantly reinvents in her art througth an analysis of Family Tree. Mutu's collage and installation work delivers visual creolization as the corollary of “contact zones.” She continually reforms the metaphorical “we” in images, objects, and actions, working in every medium to invent this hybrid. The chapter explores Mutu's visual analysis of world culture and its planetary rootedness in racial, sexual, economic, and national divides; war; and the violence of privilege. It places Mutu's work within the domain of a philosophical conversation on intersubjectivity and discusses her exacting reconstruction of shared states of collective subjectivity and cultural agency. It also considers the convergence of trauma and feminism in her work and the forensic aspect of her reconstruction of composite imagery.
Zakiyyah Iman Jackson
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781479890040
- eISBN:
- 9781479834556
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479890040.003.0005
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
This chapter departs from an exclusive focus on structure, whether it be that of the double-helix or scaled up to the symbolic order, I argue that black female sex(uality) and reproduction are better ...
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This chapter departs from an exclusive focus on structure, whether it be that of the double-helix or scaled up to the symbolic order, I argue that black female sex(uality) and reproduction are better understood via a framework of emergence and within the context of iterative, intra-active multiscalar systems—biological, psychological, environmental, and cultural. Crucially, Wangechi Mutu’s Histology of the Different Classes of Uterine Tumors and Audre Lorde’s TheCancer Journals reveal the stakes of this intra-activity as it pertains to the semio-material history of “the black female body,” reproductive function, and sex(uality) as linchpin and opposable limit of “the human” in scientific taxonomies and medical science, particularly that of Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae and Ernst Haeckel’s highly aesthetic approach to evolutionary theory. Mutu’s art is notable for its constructive reorientation of the theorization of race via a reflexive methodological practice of collage, one that reframes the spectatorial encounter from that of a determinate Kantian linear teleological drama of subjects and objects to that of intra-active processes and indeterminate feedback loops. Thus, this is not a study of a reified object but of an intra-actional field that includes material objects but is not limited to them.Less
This chapter departs from an exclusive focus on structure, whether it be that of the double-helix or scaled up to the symbolic order, I argue that black female sex(uality) and reproduction are better understood via a framework of emergence and within the context of iterative, intra-active multiscalar systems—biological, psychological, environmental, and cultural. Crucially, Wangechi Mutu’s Histology of the Different Classes of Uterine Tumors and Audre Lorde’s TheCancer Journals reveal the stakes of this intra-activity as it pertains to the semio-material history of “the black female body,” reproductive function, and sex(uality) as linchpin and opposable limit of “the human” in scientific taxonomies and medical science, particularly that of Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae and Ernst Haeckel’s highly aesthetic approach to evolutionary theory. Mutu’s art is notable for its constructive reorientation of the theorization of race via a reflexive methodological practice of collage, one that reframes the spectatorial encounter from that of a determinate Kantian linear teleological drama of subjects and objects to that of intra-active processes and indeterminate feedback loops. Thus, this is not a study of a reified object but of an intra-actional field that includes material objects but is not limited to them.
