Kara Walker

Starting with a reflection on the role of public sculpture as a catalyst of political debate, this chapter explores the possibility of decolonizing knowledge both within Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA) and through the work of Kara Walker, with a focus on her monumental installation Fons Americanus (UK, 2019). While MCDA has advanced a strong critique of logocentrism, it remains imbricated in a critical perspective that, apart from a few interventions, is still predominantly dominated by the visual. Therefore, this chapter explores ways of decolonizing this bias through a focus on the senses and on materiality capable of displacing the logocentrism and ocularcentrism of the Western tradition. Similarly, Walker's installation not only highlights the contemporary legacies of Western colonialism in the form of racism and intellectual and material colonization but enables the emergence of alternative and marginalized narratives through a decolonial process-encapsulated in the concept of 'critical fabulation'-that makes the artist an 'unreliable narrator' (in her own words). This process is the result of a decolonial pedagogy that draws on the Black feminist tradition to shed light on the political imbrication of history, race,
and gender in contemporary forms of ongoing colonialism as a way of
opening up the way to a multiversal and global-centric perspective.

A partir da análise do romance A cor púrpura, proponho-me a
analisar neste trabalho a relação entre a escrita de autoria feminina e o
papel desempenhado por Alice Walker enquanto intelectual engajada na luta por transformações. Ao longo desta reflexão utilizo como referencial teórico as reflexões de Edward W. Said (2005) sobre o “papel do intelectual” e de bell hooks (1995) sobre intelectuais negras, bem
como questões relativas às “políticas do cotidiano” (HOOKS, 1995) e às
“imagens de controle” (COLLINS, 2019). Esta análise não se restringe
às especificidades da literatura negra produzida por mulheres, pois busco
estabelecer um debate sobre o papel desempenhado por Alice Walker
enquanto intelectual negra que utiliza a esfera pública como forma de
elaborar um espaço de intervenção na realidade social e a consequente
transformação nas relações étnico-raciais, na medida em que o romance
investigado aborda demandas oriundas dos negros e fornece visibilidade
cultural, ao mesmo tempo em que denuncia a condição marginalizada
dessa população e demonstra toda a potencialidade da literatura produzida por mulheres negras.

A Review of Greg Pierrot's essay in the Decolonize This! series by OR Books, Decolonize Hipsters. A passionate and erudite take on the subject of cultural appropriation, with topics ranging from 18th and 19th century fashion and their political roots, to the politics of punk and indie music.

Kara Walker's work and its borrowings from an iconography linked to the fantasized and travestied history of American chattel slavery has been theorized and critiqued in countless texts throughout her career. Critical interpretations of her work have been shaped by the numerous debates on the very discussions it generated. How, then, do we approach a work that has been covered by such “thick theoretical layers”?
In a new installment in the October Files series, Kara Walker emphasizes Walker's work itself rather than the controversies surrounding it.These essays and interviews survey Walker's artistic practice from her early works in the 1990s through her most recent ones, from her famous silhouette projects to her lesser-known drawings and lantern shows, stressing the full range and depth of her remarkable body of work. It enables one to look at the work precisely and to see it—rather than those that tell us what one should, or should not, see in it. Contributors include Lorraine Morales Cox;Vanina Géré, specialist in contemporary American art and editor of this volume; ThelmaGolden, director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem; Tavia Nyong’o; YasmilRaymond; Jerry Saltz, Senior Art Critic at NewYork Magazine and 2018 Pulitzer Prize award winner for Criticism; Zadie Smith, novelist whose works include White Teeth and SwingTime, which was short-listed for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction; Anne M.Wagner; Hamza Walker, director of LAXART, anonprofit art space in Los Angeles, and adjunct professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago

In May 2014, visual artist Kara Walker presented her large-scale public installation “A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby: an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes,” commissioned by agency Creative Time on the occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Factory refining plant in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Built in 1882, this had been the largest sugar refinery in the world. In 2004, operations halted; the decaying building was to be replaced by a luxury apartment complex, following the gentrifying trend that had already swept across the neighborhood. Framed by this symbolic event, Walker’s piece built on the complex history of the site as the final stage in sugar production and, at the same time, a ruin; a metaphor of U.S. economy and society, and the long and violent history of slavery that preceded it.

More specifically, the work was an artistic rejoinder to the infamous 1923 proposal to erect a statue “in memory of the faithful colored mammies of the South” on the National Mall. Following the sentimental idiom of plantation literature, this was an attempt by southern congressmen to romanticize slavery through the cult to “Mammy;” the loyal female servant created under chattel slavery. The image was to be part of a foundational myth and the building of a common identity based on forgetting, understood here as a conscious decision, finding in memory not the past, but a claim to it.

Walker’s ephemeral installation acts as a contradiction; it evades confinement and yet remains confined within the factory space; a space that saw its creation and that saw its destruction shortly after. To be experienced, the public had to inhabit this space too—they had to be concealed in it—and, in this time, make use not only of sight, but of smell, of touch and of taste. In this exchange, the artist was able to activate a memory that is both personal and collective. Like an anti-monument, Walker’s work is out of sight, hidden by the same architecture that saw the formation of its figures.

The desire to use Black bodies—to represent them, to fix them in time, to own them—speaks of the violence that is inscribed in the act of remembering. How, then, does the artist escape this? Fabricated to be destroyed and a the same time immortalized by its extensive documentation and circulation on social media, A Subtlety exists in the liminal space between production and destruction, life and death, remembering and forgetting.

The debate about public monuments reached an intense pitch in spring 2020, with tributes to imperialism and the slave trade being removed – sometimes forcibly – in both Europe and America. Kara Walker’s recent work, Fons Americanus, a Turbine Hall commission at Tate Modern, engages with this conversation, and examines the ways in which public art preserves and celebrates falsified versions of history. A 13-metre fountain modelled on the Queen Victoria memorial outside Buckingham Palace, the installation offers up a satirical counter to Thomas Brock’s imposing monument, created to celebrate the imperial legacies of Queen Victoria’s reign. Its scrappy provisionality lends the piece the quality of a work in progress, which mocks the formal composition and imperious address of the original while bearing witness to Walker’s subject position as an African American woman, an identity or perspective that has no place in Brock’s vision. Comedy is fundamental to Walker’s approach: both in terms of the deliberate incongruity of the contrasts and in the uncrowning of piety or reverence, which as Mikhail Bakhtin recognised, are procedures that put comedy firmly at odds with the epic.

Este artigo foi idealizado a partir das discussões nas aulas na disciplina de "Cultura, Sociedade e Educação", no programa de Pós-Graduação de Programa em Demandas Populares e Dinâmicas Regionais-PPGDire, da Universidade Federal do Norte do Tocantins-UFNT, campus de Araguaína. Este trabalho tem caráter exploratório e parte da utilização de bibliografia coerente com nossa discussão e de parte dos textos lidos na referida disciplina. Buscamos, com este artigo, desenvolver alguns conceitos em relação à cultura e diversidade, levando em consideração a escola pública municipal de Araguaína/TO. Vemos que tudo que é díspar acaba sendo motivo de preconceito e intolerância, logo, precisamos de ensinamentos na escola que levem a uma aceitação das diferenças, auxiliando a tornar a sociedade mais justa e igualitária.

Ever since they have become a numerous species, humans have enormously affected the environment often led by a conception of nature as something to exploit for their benefit. Colonialism has largely contributed to reshaping the ‘con-vironment’ through the transplantation of animals, people and crops and has been responsible for the development of a pseudoscientific discourse seeking to associate colonized people with animals and the natural world as an attempt to justify forms of violence, domination and exploitation. Drawing on Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis, this chapter aims to explore the emergence of a social-ecological memory in Kara Walker’s monumental installation A Subtlety (2014, USA) which uses recyclable materials (sugar, with a clear reference to colonial history; wood; cork; and jesmonite) and, in contrast with usual monuments, is not permanent/invasive but offers a counter-discourse to colonial/environmental history pointing at a different understanding of the human relationship with the con-Vironment.

Despite the power of Black satire, there are few comprehensive studies of it. The early twenty-first century saw the publication of several books, including Dickson-Carr's and Dana Williams's edited collection of essays, African American Humor, Irony, and Satire (Cambridge Scholars, 2007). More recently Danielle Fuentes Morgan has published Laughing to Keep from Dying: African American Satire in the Twenty-First Century (University of Illinois Press, 2020), which deals with film, TV, and performance; and Derek Maus and James J. Donahue edited a volume of essays titled Post-Soul Satire: Black Identity after Civil Rights (Oxford University Press, 2014). Maus notes that the discourse on African American satire is heavily focused on literature. Richard J. Powell's Going There: Black Visual Satire is a timely contribution dedicated entirely to Black visual satire as a genre and adds to this growing attention to Black satire as resistance. Wide-ranging and painstakingly researched, Going There situates Black visual satire in historical, political, and discursive contexts that tease out the nuances of the form.

A rtist Mary Evans has been working in cut paper since the mid-1990s. Despite earning both undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in painting at UK universities, she transformed her creative practice during her postgraduate studies in Amsterdam. Describing herself as "a sort-of painter-printer," she says, "I was never a painter that was interested in paint." 1 Her shift from one medium to another was a revelation, and one that had been hindered somewhat by an academic artistic hierarchy that elevates painting above all other arts. Though blurring the distinction between art and craft is intuitive to her, she likewise observes that such conceptualizations have spurred recent critical debate within the art establishment. She cites increasing interest in British artists "working in a crafty way," like Yinka Shonibare's fine tailoring; Chris Ofili's use of collage, spangles, and shellac; and Hew Locke's cardboard cutout compositions. 2 She also appreciates the ways that cutting and pasting paper resonate with traditional women's handiwork, such as sewing, quilting, and cooking, and notes that her maternal grandfather was a tailor in Nigeria. Evans contrasts Western academic artversus-craft divisions with what she feels are more African attitudes toward creating: "Just a making, not making a definition between art and craft, as they would not do in Nigeria, for example.… It is a creative process, but without making a big deal out of it, which I think for me, is African. The flair." 3 In her chosen medium, Evans investigates signs and signifiers of the way humans tend to classify certain races and nationalities, particularly in visual terms. Over the course of her career, her work has Nka

The focus of my research centers on the contemporary work of Georgia-based artist, Kara Elizabeth Walker. In conducting extensive research on the life of the artist as well as three select artworks which recall the antebellum slave era within the south, I argue the explicit presence of the power of the enslaved prepubescent girl and young woman. The three select works that I intend to analyze are Burn, a cut-paper silhouette on canvas created in 1998, The Invisible Beauty, a mixed media piece made in 2001, and Cut, a paper cut-out silhouette made in 1998. In a time where one’s power and freedom were both stripped away upon entering the prison-like confines of a plantation home, the life of a slave (a female slave in this case) was committed to grueling housework, the rearing of her slave master’s children in the place of her own, sexual exploitation and merciless beatings, humiliation, submission to her white counterparts, and in many cases, the occasion of rape. Walker’s intense, o...

Die Literaturgeschichtsschreibung kennt Friedrich Schlegels einziges Drama zumeist nur als dichterischen Bankrott. 1 Alarcos steht im Verdacht, »eine peinlich mißlungene Nachahmung Calderons« 2 zu sein, und nicht einmal Hans Eichner, der Herausgeber der Dichtungen im Rahmen der Kritischen Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, 3 mochte ein wohlwollenderes Urteil fällen: Der in »bombastischen Schwulst« 4 verfallene Schlegel habe mit der Wahl seines Stoffes einen argen Fehl-griff getan und sei als Dichter ganz einfach zu unbegabt gewesen. 5 In seiner englischsprachigen Schlegel-Monographie hat Eichner das Urteil über den Alarcos lakonisch zusammengefasst: »the poorest work Schlegel ever produced«. 6 Ein ästhetisches Tollhaus Friedrich Schlegels Zeitgenossen haben kontrovers reagiert, wenngleich schon damals die Ablehnung überwog. 7 Ganz belanglos sind die positiven Stimmen den-1 Eine vergleichsweise frühe Ausnahme bilden Wolfgang Paulsens und Jean-Jacques Anstetts Versuche, den Alarcos gegen die frühromantischen Ideen Friedrich Schlegels abzugrenzen bzw. einen christlich-ethischen Gehalt des Stücks heraus-zuarbeiten:

The focus of my research centers on the contemporary work of Georgia-based artist, Kara Elizabeth Walker. In conducting extensive research on the life of the artist as well as three select artworks which recall the antebellum slave era within the south, I argue the explicit presence of the power of the enslaved prepubescent girl and young woman. The three select works that I intend to analyze are Burn, a cut-paper silhouette on canvas created in 1998, The Invisible Beauty, a mixed media piece made in 2001, and Cut, a paper cut-out silhouette made in 1998. In a time where one’s power and freedom were both stripped away upon entering the prison-like confines of a plantation home, the life of a slave (a female slave in this case) was committed to grueling housework, the rearing of her slave master’s children in the place of her own, sexual exploitation and merciless beatings, humiliation, submission to her white counterparts, and in many cases, the occasion of rape. Walker’s intense, o...

The extraordinary political and cultural controversies generated by The Birth of a Nation (1915) over the past 100 years have centred, for the most part, on its extreme stereotypes of Black characters and imagined Black behaviours, set forth in scenes and images perceived to be so toxic that they have largely been bracketed from critical scrutiny. The racist stereotypes repeatedly evoked in the film, which were once a mainstream topic of graphic art and entertainment-regularly featured in publications such as Harper's Weekly, Currier and Ives and in blackface performances-are today seen as manifestations of a social pathology so threatening that the film, and the traditions from which it emerged, have been placed in a kind of critical quarantine, seen as a malignant cultural force with the power to reinfect. 1 Thus the re-emergence of racial stereotype as an aesthetic resource and political provocation in the work of several Black visual artists is a surprising development, a rethinking that challenges our notions of aesthetic value. 2 In the work of the artists I consider here-Kara Walker, Kehinde Wiley and Paul Miller (aka DJ Spooky, that Subliminal Kid)-racial stereotype is repurposed as a political and aesthetic strategy, a critical tool and a device for reawakening what Walker calls the 'unspeakable past'. 3 Each of these three artists employs stereotype in ways that are deeply historical and critically informed, bringing to the surface the undercurrents of a past that still troubles our historical lives today. Probing eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and early twentieth-century art forms for the larger histories concealed within them, Walker, Wiley and Miller conduct a kind of rack-focus reframing of several different artistic and popular visual traditions, including the silhouette, monumental sculpture, heroic painting and classical film. Walker's recasting of the medium of the silhouette engages with a dense cultural history, exposing the racial undercurrents of an art form that has signified in radically different ways in different historical periods. 4 Originally associated mainly with white, European bourgeoisie culture, it later became the emblematic graphic design form for artists of the Harlem Renaissance, a powerful expression of an emergent Black modernism, used on posters, 2

Post-Soul Satire is a well-chosen assortment of essays that discusses African American issues in various media within the cultural context of the United States and in terms of the phenomenon of post-soul. From literature and art to films and television shows, everything discussed in this collection demonstrates a subversive nature, and traditional ideas about blackness are again and again confronted by a new black aesthetic. The antiquated aversion to irony and humor is sharply questioned by a new generation, with satire the crux of this cogent publication. The volume situates the origins of post-soul in the post-civil rights era when black identity became significantly more diverse and offbeat self-introspection became a popular trait of artistic productions. For some readers, the term post-soul may be confusing, but it is lucidly explained by Derek C. Maus in his introduction to the volume. For Maus, post-soul is a contemporary black aesthetic most prominently associated with the black entertainment industry. Satire is of utmost importance in these non-print and literary productions because it annuls existing ideas of black authenticity and sometimes even adds a grotesque twist to customary definitions of it. Several diagnostic accounts that focus on Aaron McGruder's The Boondocks are pivotal in understanding post-soul in this volume and so deserve first mention. These essays include Derek C. Maus's introduction, Terrence T. Tucker's "Blackness We Can Believe In: Authentic Blackness and the Evolution of Aaron McGruder's The Boondocks," and Cameron Leader-Picone's "Pilgrims in an Unholy Land: Satire and the Challenge of African American Leadership in The Boondocks and The White Boy Shuffle." Both McGruder's original comic strip of The Boondocks (1996-2006) and the popular animated television series based on it (The Boondocks, Cartoon Network, 2004-2014) draw on the concept of comic rage. As Maus describes these essays in his introduction, Tucker finds comic rage of The Boondocks

Rebecca Peabody's Consuming Stories: Kara Walker and the Imagining of American Race is the first monograph solely about Kara Walker's work since Gwendolyn Dubois Shaw's Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker (2004). To be sure, a dizzying amount of literature exists about Kara Walker and her creative output in book chapters, journal articles, and exhibition catalogs. With this in mind, Peabody's sustained and thematic reading of Walker's work is welcome, vital, and necessary because she introduces new ways of understanding Walker's work by focusing on her literary influences.

Collusions of Fact and Fiction traces a generational shift in late twentieth-century African American cultural engagements with the history and legacies of transatlantic slavery. With a focus on works by playwright Suzan-Lori Parks and visual artist Kara Walker, the book explores how, in comparison to the first wave of neo-slave narratives of the 1970s and 1980s, artists of the 1990s and early 2000s tend to approach the past from the vantage point of a liberal entanglement of fact and fiction as well as a highly playful, often humorous, and sometimes irreverent signifying on entrenched motifs, iconographies, and historiographies.
Saal argues that the attempt to reconstruct or recuperate the experience of African Americans under slavery is no longer at stake in the works of artists growing up in the post–Civil Rights era. Instead, they lay bare the discursive dimension of our contemporary understanding of the past, and address the continued impact of its various verbal and visual signs upon contemporary identities. In this manner, Parks and Walker stake out new possibilities for engaging the past and inhabiting the present and future.

Este artigo nasce das reflexoes a partir do uso do filme “A cor purpura” no ensino superior. Tal experiencia ocorreu na disciplina de “ Topicos I: Ensino e Valorizacao da Diversidade”, do Programa de Pos-Graduacao em Ensino de Lingua e Literatura (PPGL) da Universidade Federal do Tocantins - UFT. Este escrito partiu das observacoes de todos os estudantes da referida disciplina e objetivou refletir  sobre questoes etnico-raciais e de genero numa perspectiva humanista. A metodologia aqui utilizada foi a analise do referido filme em relacao a bibliografia estudada. Os resultados demonstram a riqueza dos filmes enquanto mecanismos geradores de pensamentos criticos para a educacao superior.

The focus of my research centers on the contemporary work of Georgia-based artist, Kara Elizabeth Walker. In conducting extensive research on the life of the artist as well as three select artworks which recall the antebellum slave era within the south, I argue the explicit presence of the power of the enslaved prepubescent girl and young woman. The three select works that I intend to analyze are Burn, a cut-paper silhouette on canvas created in 1998, The Invisible Beauty, a mixed media piece made in 2001, and Cut, a paper cut-out silhouette made in 1998. In a time where one’s power and freedom were both stripped away upon entering the prison-like confines of a plantation home, the life of a slave (a female slave in this case) was committed to grueling housework, the rearing of her slave master’s children in the place of her own, sexual exploitation and merciless beatings, humiliation, submission to her white counterparts, and in many cases, the occasion of rape. Walker’s intense, o...

What does water mean to contemporary society today? This paper is interested in water and race; Blackness specifically, wherein the Middle Passage (Mid-Atlantic Slave Trade) marks the beginning of a fraught and complex relationship between African-Americans and water…typified many might argue by Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath in 2005. This article looks backward at water's ability to destroy and to create through lenses focused on race and art: something akin to water as a symbol of America's complicated relationship with race. Using cultural texts such as art and film this piece works to unsettle the intimate connections of power, gender, and sexuality and offer alternative cartographies of empowerment and survival with regard to racialization and water.

Je m’intéresse, dans cette thèse, à la manière dont la nudité féminine participe d'une expérience hégémonique de l'image. Mon postulat est que la nudité féminine occupe dans les productions culturelles contemporaines une place privilégiée, une fonction bien spécifique : elle se présente comme le support d’un désir épistémologique masculin, phallique, blanc, et assure la promotion et le maintien de relations de pouvoir sexistes et racistes. Figure d’aliénation, ruse de la sexualité, elle offre paradoxalement la promesse de la vérité, fait miroiter le fantasme, le secret de la libération par le sexe. La nudité féminine est une image cadrée de telle sorte qu'elle met en jeu le ≪ savoir du sexe ≫, plus précisément le désir de connaître la vérité du sexe de la femme. Admettant ainsi l’usage détourné de la nudité féminine, attendu qu'elle sert d'instrument à une pensée et des pratiques dominantes, cette thèse problématise sa fonction épistémologique et son rôle dans la construction identitaire et ontologique des femmes. En ce sens, cette thèse pose les questions suivantes : Comment opère la domination de l’image? À quel ordre de savoir la nudité féminine profite-t-elle? Quelle pensée cette image permet ou interdit-elle? De quels récits nous détourne-t-elle? Et en quoi concerne-t-elle les femmes? Envisageant la nudité féminine comme une ≪ mise en scène ≫, cette thèse avance en interrogeant, dans un premier temps, la récurrence de cette scène à travers une sélection d’œuvres littéraires et visuelles, et les paramètres qui font de la femme dénudée une image fascinante et une expérience esthétique hégémonique. En accord avec une méthodologie féministe, élaborée depuis les pensées de Catherine Malabou, Rosi Braidotti, Avital Ronell, Judith Butler, Francoise Collin, Anne Dufourmantelle, Zadie Smith et Martine Delvaux, je procède à une lecture critique des travaux de philosophie et de théorie esthétique qui se réclament d’une neutralité quant à la question sexuelle au nom d’un idéal universaliste ou humaniste. Je cherche, dans un second temps, à mettre de l'avant des mises en scène qui répondent d’une exigence à féminiser l’image, à faire entrer en compte la sexualité et le désir des femmes dans l’expérience esthétique. Ainsi, je repère à travers les analyses des œuvres de Marguerite Duras, David Lynch, Kathy Acker, Deana Lawson et Jamaica Kincaid diverses mises en scène et configurations de cadres donnant forme à un espace ou la matérialité de la sexualité féminine peut se penser. Car enfin, l'impératif de sexualiser la pensée et le désir, et d'envisager la pensée comme désir (du) féminin, détermine le trajet de cette thèse.

Celles et ceux qui eurent la chance, durant l'été 2007, de parcourir l'exposition de l'oeuvre de Kara Walker intitulée My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love, qui se tenait alors au musée d'art moderne de Paris, en conservent probablement un souvenir aussi vif que mêlé. Des vastes panoramas de silhouettes se dégageait en effet une grâce insolite, d'une netteté presque brutale, que la nature des scènes ainsi figurées transformait aussitôt en stupeur, puis en malaise, face à une violence qu'aucune forme n'avait en quelque sorte prévenue. Quant à la foule de petits dessins au lavis qui y étaient conjointement exposés, elle faisait montre d'une naïveté sans rien d'enfantin, ou bien d'une enfance abîmée dont l'artiste avait crument multiplié les épisodes en les fractionnant. Partout se voyaient des scènes d'abus en tous genres, que l'inscription dans le cadre de la mémoire de l'esclavage rendait certes lisibles, mais que leur représentation sous cet aspect maintenait à la limite du supportable et, en toute fin de compte, du déchiffrable. À l'époque, le musée parisien n'avait pas jugé opportun de faire traduire le catalogue édité en anglais de cette exposition qui, venant de Minneapolis, fut ensuite présentée à New York et à Los Angeles. Sans être déterminant, ce choix n'a certainement pas encouragé la recherche d'auteurs francophones sur l'oeuvre de Kara Walker auquel aucune monographie n'a été consacré avant celle que les Presses du réel ont publiée en 2019. Cette situation accorde par conséquent au livre de Vanina Géré, issu de son travail de thèse, une position désormais centrale, bien que sa valeur de référence sur le sujet se fonde sur d'autres raisons. Les trois longs chapitres de l'ouvrage (près de cent pages chacun outre une introduction et un épilogue d'un volume équivalent à eux deux) examinent les différents sens dont l'artiste a investi sa pratique de la figuration. De manière transversale, Vanina Géré parle de « défiguration », d'une « transformation fantastique de la figure » qui, écrit-elle, « est déjà ellemême une abstraction puisque l'artiste représente toujours des représentationsdes figures filtrées par le racisme. » (p. 33) Les stéréotypes plus ou moins grotesques ou effrayants que réemploie Kara Walker sont ainsi restitués par elle d'une façon encore plus caricaturale qu'ils ne le sont à l'origine, et cela sans concession, sans même les reverser dans le registre du monstrueux, ce qui justifie que l'on ait pu voir en elle, dès ses débuts au milieu des années 1990, une artiste éminemment « confrontational » (p. 13). Or, si confrontation il y a effectivement, celle-ci provient paradoxalement de l'« ambiguïté fondamentale » de ces oeuvres reposant, écrit Géré, « sur l'équilibre entre [leur] accessibilité plastique et leur ambiguïté herméneutique. » (p. 18) En d'autres termes, ce qui complique l'insertion des figures de Walker dans un cadre interprétatif adéquat tient précisément à leur caractère d'évidence, au fait que la « dé-figuration » qu'elle met en oeuvre ne procède ni d'une déformation du médium, qu'il s'agisse de papiers découpés ou de dessins à l'encre, ni d'une désintégration de l'imagerie où elle puise, mais d'une reconfiguration de celle-ci dans un contexte où une technique traditionnelle paraît se retourner contre une iconographie qui ne l'est pas moins. Le spectateur qui reconnaît aisément ce que l'artiste met sous ses yeux avec exactitude n'est pourtant pas sûr d'en connaître la provenance exacte.

Os objetivos da pesquisa foram analisar fi lmes comerciais/fi ccionais sobre Violência Contra a Mulher (VCM), buscando caracterizar encenações desse fenômeno. A seleção dos fi lmes foi sistemática e realizada em sites especializados no assunto (AdoroCinema, Cinepop etc.), cruzando termos como "violência" e "mulher" (N = 19). A análise pressupôs três passos: observação das películas; lançamento de dados observados em planilhas; relação de frequências simples de encenações sobre VCM com aspectos teóricos apontados pela literatura especializada (enfoque quanti-qualitativo). Os agressores eram estranhos (n = 11, 39%), maridos (n = 9, 33%), namorados (n = 4, 14%) e outros (n = 4, 14%). Houve encenações de violência psicológica (n = 19, 27%), física (n = 18, 25%), sexual (n = 16, 22%), moral (n = 12, 16%) e patrimonial (n = 7, 10%). As representações fílmicas focaram indícios gerais de traumatização psíquica nas personagens (n = 17, 37%). Os fi lmes estudados são ilustrativos da realidade das mulheres em contextos de violência; enquanto tais, podem ser convertidos em ferramenta didática ampliadora de debates e refl exões sobre questões de gênero e sobre promoção de saúde em contexto de VCM.

African American folklore embodies themes of the Tropical Gothic. It has an air of mystery as it has a deeper meaning underneath the different layers of plot. Folklore of the American South represents the darkness of the slavery period and its implications for African Americans. This article discusses two folklore collections: Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings: The Folk lore of the Old Plantation by Joel Chandler Harris, and From My People: 400 Years of Folklore by Daryl Cumber Dance. Both collections illuminate the ways in which West African oral tradition became a source of empowerment, courage and wisdom for the enslaved African Americans. Folk stories served as a means of silent resistance and preserved the cultural heritage of African Americans.

What does water mean to contemporary society today? This paper is interested in water and race; Blackness specifically, wherein the Middle Passage (Mid-Atlantic Slave Trade) marks the beginning of a fraught and complex relationship between African-Americans and water…typified many might argue by Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath in 2005. This article looks backward at water's ability to destroy and to create through lenses focused on race and art: something akin to water as a symbol of America's complicated relationship with race. Using cultural texts such as art and film this piece works to unsettle the intimate connections of power, gender, and sexuality and offer alternative cartographies of empowerment and survival with regard to racialization and water.

“Hurricane Alley” ponders what happens when we define the literature of the coastal American South (Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas), as shaped by the paths, threats, and aftermaths of hurricanes. It explores what shifts in our understanding of the field if we consider Southern literature not solely in terms of plantation and creolization, but also around a geography of vulnerability. It argues that coastal Southern literature (and its resonances with the Caribbean) provides an apt example to reflect on the anthropocene, climate change, and environmental racism. With a 19th to 21st-century corpus featuring fiction, poetry, theater, visual arts, and cinema by George Washington Cable, Lafcadio Hearn, Zora Neale Hurston, Marc Twain, Tennessee Williams, Edwidge Danticat, Spike Lee, Patricia Smith, Kara Walker, Benh Zeitlin, Natasha Trethewey, Tiphanie Yanique, and Jesmyn Ward, the chapter expands the limits –generic, geographical, ethnic, generational, gendered, sexualized-- of Southern literature.

Suzan-Lori Parks (1963- ) and Kara Walker (1969- ) are two African- American artists born within the same decade and produced most of their works in the 1990s. Suzan-Lori Parks, a playwright, and a novelist employs important events from the African-American past and situates them on the contemporary theater stage. Similarly, Kara Walker, with different artistic media such as cut-paper silhouettes, installations, and video recordings returns to the African-American past. Although Parks and Walker employ different artistic media, their works show a considerable resemblance to each other in terms of their historical content and experimental form. Their experimentation with form relies mostly on postmodern techniques of
narrative such as the blending of fact and fiction and the use of fragmented space and time. Through these techniques, both Parks and Walker aim at remembering and rewriting African-American history besides criticizing the official history written by the people in power, in other words, the white race in the US. In their works, the artists remember the forgotten tragedies lived by the African-American people and, therefore, show that African American art has a strong sense of historical and political consciousness. At final analysis, these artistic works transform into non-official documents of the history of the African-American people. Through their art, both artists manage to create petit histories against the grand narrative of the official history, as has famously been differentiated by the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard in his report The Postmodern Condition (1979).

This article takes up the trope of “Eating the Other” as it relates specifically to sugar children in the visual arts and offers a glimpse as to how this trope manifests also in literature.  Beginning with Brazilian artist, Vik Muniz’s Portraits of the Sugar Children, (1996), I consider his naturalistic portraits of children “drawn” with sugar on black paper.  As the offspring of sugarcane laborers on the island of St. Kitts, the children’s sugar portraits encapsulate a more profound significance regarding the conflation of sugar and the black body.  Subsequently, this relates to Kara Walker’s sugar installation at the Domino Sugar Factory, A Subtlety or The Marvelous Sugar Baby, (2014), by addressing shared aesthetics, materiality, and the black body as a consumable entity.  Walker’s installation featured thirteen sculptures of young black boys made of resin and coated in molasses flanking a 75-foot sugar sphinx.  This analysis focuses keenly on the advent of Walker’s sugar children and their relationship to the treachery of sugarcane production and colonial desire.  This shared attunement to the materiality and mediality of sugar by Muniz and Walker culminates into a richer tableaux of sugar body politics that addresses the hypersexualization and consumption of black bodies through a deconstruction of colonial appetites.  Together these two artists’s work in sugar offers a comparative analysis that goes beyond the material and temporal and ultimately addresses the contentious and violent histories of sugar and the vulnerability of children’s bodies.

Ce que performer en cage veut dire : une discussion avec Selogadi Mampane autour de l'action Chromotherapie (2013) L'imagerie populaire que constitue les représentations de femmes emprisonnées dans des cages est un trope culturel répandu, rarement questionné par la réception sur l'oppression systémique qu'elle cristallise. Incontestablement tributaire de sa construction historique, l'imaginaire attaché à « l'encagement » féminin s'est vu mobilisé à des fins critiques à l'orée des années 1970 dans des actions artistiques indépendantes tant formellement et esthétiquement que conceptuellement. Cependant, au sein du système de représentation sexiste que ces performances dénoncent, la perception spécifique qui hypersexualise, réifie et présume l'hétérosexualité des femmes noires est peu interrogée. Cette carence constitue pour l'artiste et activiste noire sud-africaine Selagodi Mampane le socle même d'une performance critique qui croise les biais d'une réception concurremment androcentrée, raciste et hétéronormée: Chromotherapie. Pour le colloque Arts, Cultures et Activismes LGBTI et Queer, Selogadi Mampane évoque avec Marie-Dominique Gil les enjeux de sa performance en cage à l'égard de l'enchevêtrement des constructions racistes, sexistes et anti-LGBTI caractéristiques du système de représentation dominant. Pour cette action présentée pour la première fois en 2013, elle apparaît partiellement vêtue de cuir au sein d'une cage dans laquelle elle a placé une échelle. Si elle peut s'en extraire, les chaînes qui la lient à la structure l'empêchent irrémédiablement de s'en défaire. Au cours de cet entretien Selagodi Mampane évoquera sa volonté d'investir l'esthétique spécifique que la cage convoque dans le champ de l'érotisme queer, lui-même profondément intégré à

Este texto pretende avançar o olhar para a produção audiovisual das mulheres
negras no contexto cultural do Brasil e de Portugal, a fim de possibilitar o
aprofundamento de questões ligadas ao racismo e também à discussão de gênero a partir
das premissas da teoria feminista interseccional.

Risham Majeed with Blake Bradford / May 22, 2020 / Conversations Prefatory note, in the time of COVID-19: When I started this project, it was unimaginable that museums would be shuttered inde nitely and that we would all be in self-isolation, clinging to virtual reality for sporadic shards of normalcy. As I revisited my dialogue with Blake Bradford during the editorial process, it seemed to me that our exchanges in real life, in real space, could serve as a proxy visit to these unique and vital museums and monuments. Blake and I were unable to meet in Montgomery, Alabama, which itself requires some e ort to reach from New York City and Philadelphia, and so we began our conversation, which we did not record, on the phone. Blake and I had already (separately) visited the National Museum for African American History and Culture, Smithsonian Institution (NMAAHC), in Washington, DC, before our respective visits to Montgomery, and so we had the NMAAHC model in mind as the looming point of comparison in the intimate and emotive spaces of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) museum and memorial. Blake and I agreed that the EJI was a powerful testament and indictment of American history, and we wanted to highlight it as a kind of critical counterpoint to the NMAAHC project in Washington, knowing full well that Montgomery would receive a small fraction of the tra c. I begin with a short topographical description of Montgomery and the EJI, which is followed by an edited transcription of the conversations that Blake and I had in Washington, walking through the galleries of NMAAHC. I invite you to come along, think with us, perhaps argue with us, and keep the conversation going.-Risham Majeed

This essay will consider the ways in which audiences can interpret artworks which address racial representation by playing with contemporary taboos of race representation from classical and historical literature and cultural production. The 1993 Wooster Group production of Emperor Jones will be explored first, with their repetitive use of blackface as a device. Then Kara Walker’s 1994 art installation ‘Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as it Occurred B’tween the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart’ and her repetitive use of pornographic and scatological depictions of black slavery. In examining their multi-layered meanings within changing social and political contexts, I will look to the emergence of postmodern and ‘post-identity’ theories of race, which inform these satirical practices. This essay asks, how do these works open up historical and contemporary ideas of race representation up for critical debate? What tensions do they create, in their tendency to divide, challenge and offend their audiences, through their ambivalence (Gillespie 2014)  in their presentation of anti-black iconography?

In 2014, Kara Walker opened the controversial exhibition 'A Subtlety' in the soon-to-be demolished Domino Sugar Factory. The centrepiece was an enormous sugar-coated sphinx whose face resembled the stereotypical Mammy. Unlike in the classic Oedipus tale, this sphinx did not speak or pose riddles in a literal sense. Rather, she embodied a riddle herself by bearing features of the deliberately desexualised Mammy that contradicted her explicit sexuality. Mirroring the bourgeois confection from the Middle-Ages, the sphinx indeed resembled a giant dessert, waiting passively to be enjoyed by the visitors. However, the scope of this exhibition extended far beyond the walls of the factory. Within days after the opening, the sphinx’s enormous breasts, prominent buttocks and brazenly displayed labia became the object of thousands of pictures on social media. Visitors uploaded selfies in which they sexualised and fetishized the sphinx, posing as though licking, pinching or touching her breasts and genitals. Unknowingly, the audience was captured on film by Walker. The after-movie, titled An Audience, worked as a mirror to reveal the audience’s reactions to the stereotypical and sexualised imagery. In analysing how this exhibition functioned to challenge notions of the stereotype, I have taken the question posed by Mitchell as point of departure: “what if the materials of memory are overwhelming, so traumatic that the remembering of them threatens identity rather than reconstituting it?” These ‘materials of memory’ could be interpreted as stereotypical imagery, confirming the notion that the reductive qualities of the stereotype are sustained by iterating them. Re-examining Bhabha’s, Hall’s, and Rosello’s notions of the stereotype, I argue that this exhibition invokes a reconfiguration of these ‘materials of memory’, putting into effect processes of reconsideration and overcoming. In conclusion, A Subtlety marks the difference between the impossible stereotype and the fluidity of individual identity.

Water Graves considers representations of lives lost to water in contemporary poetry, fiction, theory, mixed-media art, video production, and underwater sculptures. From sunken slave ships to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, Valérie Loichot investigates the lack of official funeral rites in the Atlantic, the Caribbean Sea, and the Gulf of Mexico, waters that constitute both early and contemporary sites of loss for the enslaved, the migrant, the refugee, and the destitute. Unritual, or the privation of ritual, Loichot argues, is a state more absolute than desecration. Desecration implies a previous sacred observance--a temple, a grave, a ceremony. Unritual, by contrast, denies the sacred from the beginning.

In coastal Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, Miami, Haiti, Martinique, Cancun, and Trinidad and Tobago, the artists and writers featured in Water Graves—an eclectic cast that includes Beyoncé, Radcliffe Bailey, Edwidge Danticat, Édouard Glissant, M. NourbeSe Philip, Jason deCaires Taylor, Édouard Duval-Carrié, Natasha Trethewey, and Kara Walker, among others—are an archipelago connected by a history of the slave trade and environmental vulnerability. In addition to figuring death by drowning in the unritual—whether in the context of the aftermath of slavery or of ecological and human-made catastrophes—their aesthetic creations serve as memorials, dirges, tombstones, and even material supports for the regrowth of life underwater.

Ce livre retrace le parcours de Kara Walker (née en 1969), l'artiste afro-américaine la plus internationalement reconnue depuis Jean-Michel Basquiat, et revient sur l'histoire de la réception d'une œuvre qui affronte les limites de la représentation, en posant la question de la figuration du corps noir.
Puisant à la fois dans une méthode d'analyse formaliste et dans l'histoire politique de l'histoire de l'art, ce livre regarde les plus grandes œuvres de la plasticienne comme les plus confidentielles. Il revient sur l'histoire de la réception de l'œuvre de Kara Walker aux États-Unis, notamment en éclairant les controverses qui ont marqué ses grandes expositions depuis les années 1990. De ses incontournables silhouettes découpées dans du papier noir montrant des visions ricanantes et horrifiques d'un Vieux Sud esclavagiste, dont le kitsch emprunte à l'étourdissant imaginaire raciste au fondement de toute la culture visuelle américaine, jusqu'à sa géante éphémère en sucre dans un Williamsburg gentrifié (2014), Kara Walker affronte dans son travail les limites de la représentation. Comment intégrer la conscience de l'impossibilité de représenter les traumas collectifs dans le dispositif artistique, dans un contexte social et politique pollué par le racisme ? Comment figurer les corps noirs : c'est la question que nous pose Kara Walker et que ce livre tente d'explorer.