Slavery and the Post-Black Imagination

Bertram D. Ashe, Ilka Saal, Bertram D. Ashe, Ilka Saal

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780295746630
• eBook ISBN: 9780295746654
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

Honorable Mention for the 2022 Modern Language Association Prize for an Edited Collection Interrogates how artists have created new ways to imagine the past of American slavery From Kara Walker's hellscape antebellum silhouettes to Paul Beatty's bizarre twist on slavery in The Sellout and from Colson Whitehead's literal Underground Railroad to Jordan Peele's body-snatching Get Out, this volume offers commentary on contemporary artistic works that present, like musical deep cuts, some challenging "alternate takes" on American slavery. These artists deliberately confront and negotiate the psychic and representational legacies of slavery to imagine possibilities and change. The essays in this volume explore the conceptions of freedom and blackness that undergird these narratives, critically examining how artists growing up in the post–Civil Rights era have nuanced slavery in a way that is distinctly different from the first wave of neo-slave narratives that emerged from the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. Slavery and the Post-Black Imagination positions post-blackness as a productive category of analysis that brings into sharp focus recent developments in black cultural productions across various media. These ten essays investigate how millennial black cultural productions trouble long-held notions of blackness by challenging limiting scripts. They interrogate political as well as formal interventions into established discourses to demonstrate how explorations of black identities frequently go hand in hand with the purposeful refiguring of slavery's prevailing tropes, narratives, and images. A V Ethel Willis White Book

CHAPTER ONE

THE BLACKEST BLACKNESS

Slavery and the Satire of Kara Walker

DEREK CONRAD MURRAY

HAS BLACKNESS SIMPLY BECOME CULTURE—A MERE PAGEANT TO BE performed in the halls of the ivory tower? As African American art historians, with our impressive degrees, speaking with impassioned grace about the historical and present-day traumas of black life and its various relics and spectacles, do we merely polish what I’ve come to characterize as the memorabilia of marginalia? In the midst of an African American art history event at an institution that has been historically indifferent to that very field, I began to ponder these questions. The irony, of course, is that without that very institution’s support, the event would likely not have occurred in the first place. Possibly for that reason, not one paper broached the topic of the discipline’s long-standing erasure of African American art and culture: the theoretical dismissiveness, the paucity of black students in art history, and the appalling lack of African American art historians on the faculty of art history programs—including the one that was hosting the event. With each lecture, I became more agitated, as it grew clear I could no longer play the role of the ennobled suffering black academic: the one who poetically muses about the beauty and dignity of blackness in the face of benign neglect. Our job is to celebrate, to commemorate, to recover what has been lost and ignored: to perform a cultural appreciation of the margins.

These feelings were not new. In fact, they have bubbled to the surface in my writing for years, but this was different. It was a primal scene of sorts. I had hit the wall. I was less concerned about the scholarship itself. All of these emergent academics were bright, their papers interesting, and their subjects illuminating. My concern was the performance of proper blackness: a combination of posturing and racial sermonizing mixed with a politics of authenticity laced with the markers of art-historical appropriateness. Needless to say, I’ve become increasingly concerned that the African American art historian’s role is to perform a pleasing yet nonthreatening display of blackness. But there is also a logic that subtends this performative positionality: a logic that suggests that our self-love is the greatest love of all. It is, in fact, a beacon of self-love, a guiding force for all those laboring on the periphery. It is the blackest blackness. Our very institutional presence hinges upon our performance of racial health and dignified suffering, our well-adjusted sense of ethnic pride—and, perhaps most importantly, our unwillingness to challenge institutional, disciplinary, and methodological exclusions.

When it was time for me to speak, rather than respond directly to the papers I had been asked to address, I read the following joke by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek:

THERE IS A NICELY VULGAR JOKE about Christ: the night before he was arrested and crucified, his followers started to worry—Christ was still a virgin; wouldn’t it be nice to have him experience a little bit of pleasure before he dies? So they asked Mary Magdalene to go to the tent where Christ was resting and seduce him; Mary said she would do it gladly and went in, but five minutes later, she ran out screaming, terrified and furious. The followers asked her what went wrong, and she explained: “I slowly undressed, spread my legs and showed Christ my pussy; he looked at it, said ‘What a terrible wound! It should be healed!’ and gently put his palm on it.”

So beware of people too intent on healing other people’s wounds—what if one enjoys one’s wound? In exactly the same way, directly healing the wound of colonialism (effectively returning to the pre-colonial reality) would have been a nightmare: if today’s Indians were to find themselves in pre-colonial reality, they would have undoubtedly uttered the same terrified scream as Mary Magdalene.¹

The reading of the joke was not premeditated. It was a spontaneous act and it was met with silence and shock, if not also revulsion. But I was liberated. In that instance, I had unwittingly stepped outside the borders of racial appropriateness and proper blackness. The act itself was satirical; it was meant to provoke everyone in the room, including myself—not simply to indict histories of white racism, but to also redirect the critique inward and back upon itself. I felt a need to turn away, albeit somewhat clumsily, from the institutional theatrics of black pride. It did not go over well.

The joke resonates with me because it utilizes biting satire to call into question the often-farcical relation between the social victim and those who are intent (at least symbolically) on healing the wounds of historical inequity. And in my closing comments, I left the audience with a question: “Is it our role as black art historians to merely (and performatively) enjoy our wounds as social spectacle?” In other words, is it our institutional position to find new entertaining and expressive means to perform blackness as intellectual entertainment? The public enactment of black rage, black sorrow, black pride, and black fear have become as routinized and predictable as the institutional exclusions and forms of discrimination that continue to marginalize people of African descent. These absurd pageants, which I tend to view as a form of ventriloquism, have not transformed academic and intellectual cultures into more equitable spaces. So what purpose do they serve?

I recount this narrative as a metaphor for the unique representational troubling of post-blackness envisioned in the artistic production of Kara Walker. The introduction of Walker’s infamous narrative tableaux into the American art scene created a violent rupture in the genteel and selfconsciously dignified space of African American art. Her images were not stifled by respectability politics, even while they were unflinching in their indictment of histories of antiblack racism. Walker’s approach was more holistic, more Foucauldian in its discursive exploration of power and its abuses. In its engagement with black people, her work did not shy away from the mess, so to speak: the forms of self-abuse, the intracultural nihilism, and our complicity with antiblackness. Satire is her weapon of choice, and for that reason, her images were met with condemnation and calls for censorship from within the black community itself. Walker’s work serves as an exemplar for the mobilization of satire as a form of self-criticality.

This type of work needs to be done in order for black artists and scholars alike to reject the stifling dictates of compulsory essentialism: a limitation that hinders progress and forbids self-criticality. However, this potentially breaches the sacrosanct intracultural demand for racial fidelity, one of the fundamental dimensions of African American community. The boundaries of black authenticity, which are most readily expressed in a set of visual and behavioral markers that define one’s rootedness in blackness (black cultural distinctiveness), are rigidly policed—and ultimately define one’s racial legitimacy.

Post-blackness, as a theory of representation, has enabled us to unpack these complexities as they manifest visually, yet as scholars and historians of color, there needs to be a post-black satire as intellectual praxis that transcends the mere performance of racial authenticity. Many in the African American artistic and intellectual communities have reacted to post-black with condemnation and hostility. These attitudes have largely been the result of two core misinterpretations. The first is its mischaracterization as a postracial stance (an antiblack blackness). The second is a failure to understand that post-black is a theory of representation: it is a means to both understand and characterize a set of aesthetic, conceptual, political, and artistic tendencies that are present in the creative practices of post–civil rights generation artists. It is not, in contrast to its rampant mischaracterization, a genre of art—nor should its critical engagement be regarded as a form of advocacy. The role of the critic (as a public witness) is to characterize cultural forms: to explicate them and to render judgment—but not to promote them. Postblack functions as a means to unpack a shifting set of attitudes and expressive modalities about blackness that are steeped in satire.

The aim of this analysis is to explore the intricacies of Walker’s unique brand of satirical troubling, an approach that is intent on pushing through the boundaries of respectability politics and racial obligation that continue to inform (if not also limit) the genre of contemporary African American art, not to mention its interpretive possibilities and historiography. Post-black satire continues to be a fraught and largely misunderstood polemical tool, and Walker has utilized it to forge a representational path that has indelibly transformed how artists and intellectuals conceptualize the possibilities of black artistic production in the twenty-first century. This paper will unpack how Walker mobilizes a post-black sensibility to reimagine and reanimate cultural and representational engagements with the legacy of slavery.

A MESSY REFUSAL OF RESPECTABILITY POLITICS

African American artist Kara Walker has built a considerable body of work that tackles the most controversial and thorny issues in American history—specifically, the legacy of chattel slavery, its complex power relations, and attendant physical and psychic violence. As a post–civil rights artist, Walker’s formal and critical approach has evolved alongside the rise of post-blackness, a divisive terminology that has most popularly been utilized to characterize the conceptual, aesthetic, and political particularities of African American contemporary art production in the post–civil rights era. Walker is a deft formalist whose work has pushed the boundaries and representational conventions of contemporary art; however, her oeuvre continues to confound audiences and cultural commentators alike—not least because she has managed to blend formal lyricism and material sophistication with postblackness and its subversive and biting racial satire.

I embark on this writing with a healthy dose of cynicism because, since Walker’s emergence in the art world in the ’90s, there has been a regressive turn in the historiography of African American art toward a combination of respectability politics and racial sermonizing that has produced less of what could be characterized as a discourse and more a platform for recuperation and celebration. Blackness has become a type of fetish, a symbol of either social suffering or cultural spectacle—or perhaps a combination of both. And in our digitally inflected society, I increasingly view blackness as a type of playable and inhabitable media. It is, in many respects, the coolest suffering and the most resplendent of abjections. But along those lines, the apparent rise of, or at least increased visibility of, antiblack violence in American life and its visual culture (i.e., the current cultural fascination and moral outrage around the ubiquity of police shootings) has been responsible for several related phenomena, one of the most significant being a renewed interest in antiracist activism and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement—which has greatly impacted cultural consciousness around the continued persistence of antiblackness in America’s cities, not to mention corrupt and racially skewed systems of criminal justice and incarceration. These social ills are well known and often debated; yet on the level of representation, there is a greater need to interrogate what amounts to a pornographics of violence implicit within the visual spectacles of these media images.

Walker’s incendiary formalism makes explicit reference to the violence inflicted upon black bodies—as well as to the relation among “vision, visualizing and visibility,” identifications that are deeply entangled in the logics of power and social authority.² Given the representational entanglements between images of antiblack violence in American visual culture and an increased consumer demand for black bodies in contemporary art, it is necessary to consider how satire upends a compulsory politics of racial fidelity and begins to embark upon a contentious intracultural debate about the social function of blackness (as culture) in the twenty-first century.

The curation of blackness has always been a fault line and an enduring source of institutional consternation. Case in point: the melee over artist Dana Schutz’s painting Open Casket (a recreation of the notorious photograph of the slain Emmett Till), which caused a stir when included in the 2017 Whitney Biennial in New York. Schutz, a white American artist, was attacked for laying claim to an image of antiblack violence: an iconic photograph that many in the black arts community felt was the domain of African American culture. What ensued was a highly contentious and very public debate about the presence of such images in our media-saturated culture. While not taking a partisan position in this debate, I will say that I found it particularly generative that there was a public discussion about the proliferation of images of black suffering. What do these images mean? And what is their social function? In many respects, both the images and the very predictable response to their presence have become culture—and therefore, I am beginning to question the larger social role that blackness (as an imago and a positionality) plays in the cultural landscape. Nicole Fleetwood suggests that it is understood within visual culture scholarship that “optical technologies have been used to discipline racialized bodies,” and as she reminds us, “vision and visual technologies, in this context, are seen as hostile and violent forces that render blackness as aberration.”³ Fleetwood effectively captures the inescapability of racial marking that is implicit to vision and visuality—and which functions as a powerful means to maintain power relations rooted in containment, repression, and social control. I’m also thinking here of Christian Metz’s concept scopic regime, which has been instrumental in theorizations dedicated to unpacking the relation between looking and power, as well as the use of visual technologies within the realm of the imaginary—and as a means to produce desire.⁴ Considering the relation between looking and power, vis-à-vis the representation of black bodies, there has not been a significant intracultural dialogue about the perpetuation and proliferation of what could be characterized as antiblack images by artists of African descent. Nor has there been a conversation about how black cultural producers’ self-position within the logics of antiblackness in the U...

Table of contents

• Slavery and the Post Black Imagination
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Ilka Saal and Bertram D. Ashe
• 1. The Blackest Blackness: Slavery and the Satire of Kara Walker Derek Conrad Murray
• 2. Three-Fifths of a Black Life Matters Too: Four Neo-Slave Novels from the Year Postracial Definitively Stopped Being a Thing Derek C. Maus
• 3. Whispering Racism in a Postracial World: Slavery and Post-Blackness in Paul Beatty’s The Sellout Cameron Leader-Picone
• 4. Getting Graphic with Kindred: The Neo-Slave Narrative of the Black Lives Matter Movement Mollie Godfrey
• 5. “Stay Woke”: Post-Black Filmmaking and the Afterlife of Slavery in Jordan Peele’s Get Out Kimberly Nichele Brown
• 6. The Song: Living with “Dixie” and the “Coon Space” of Post-Blackness Chenjerai Kumanyika, Jack Hitt, and Chris Neary, with an Introduction by Bertram D. Ashe
• 7. Performing Slavery at the Turn of the Millennium: Stereotypes, Affect, and Theatricality in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Neighbors and Young Jean Lee’s The Shipment Ilka Saal
• 8. Thylias Moss’s Slave Moth: Liberatory Verse Narrative and Performance Art Malin Pereira
• 9. Plantation Memories: Cheryl Dunye’s Representation of a Representation of American Slavery in The Watermelon Woman Bertram D. Ashe
• 10. “An Audience Is a Mob on Its Butt”: An Interview with Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Bertram D. Ashe and Ilka Saal
• List of Contributors
• Index