Collusions of Fact and Fiction

Performing Slavery in the Works of Suzan-Lori Parks and Kara Walker

Ilka Saal

• Publisher: University Of Iowa Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781609387785
• eBook ISBN: 9781609387792
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: American Drama

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.
 

1

FICTIONS OF HISTORY AND HISTORIOPOETIC PERFORMANCES OF THE PAST

“I got her this ring today. Diamond. Well, diamondesque, but it looks just as good as the real thing” (10), a character named Booth declares in Suzan-Lori Parks’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play Topdog/Underdog (2001). The smooth transition from the real to the fake and back again, the blurring of critical differences between the two ontological entities is indicative not only of this particular character’s performative handling of a rather oppressive reality but more generally of Parks’s (as well as Walker’s) performances of history, particularly histories of the traumatic past of transatlantic slavery and its various material, affective, and representational legacies. Topdog/Underdog features two African American brothers, provocatively named Lincoln and Booth, who attempt to gain economic success and social status through various forms of performance and conmanship. Most prominent is the three-card monte hustle, which the two brothers consider their ticket to success. In addition, there is Lincoln’s job at a penny arcade as a whiteface impersonator of his presidential namesake, specializing in the spectacle of the president’s assassination. And there is Booth’s expertise in shoplifting. Booth’s hustling skills also stand him in good stead when he attempts to brighten up the brothers’ rather bleak housing situation by repurposing two plain milk crates as various pieces of missing furniture and when he seeks to revive a worn-out romance with the aforementioned “diamondesque” ring. Booth believes that when presented from the right angle, the fake / the make-believe is “just as good as the real thing” (10). What is more, because the proper performance of the fake will have a concrete effect in the world, it will become real. As Booth explains with regard to the salutary effects of wearing a stolen suit in times of economic depression and moral dejection, “just wear it around. Itll make you feel good and when you feel good yll meet someone nice” (30). It is in this spirit that the two brothers also regularly flip through their “raggedy family photo album” (13) in an attempt to reimagine a strenuous past marked by the trauma of parental abandonment as memories of happy childhood days. To the brothers, it is entirely irrelevant whether these memories are actual or imagined. What matters is that these fake/imagined memories enable them to inhabit usable posttraumatic identities in the present.

In light of the protagonists’ evocative historical names, Lincoln and Booth, the play invites an allegorical reading as a reflection on the contemporary economic and psychological legacies of slavery in the United States. The insistence on the possibility of breaking with an oppressive past in the playful manipulation of the boundary between fact and fiction, history and (hi)stories also proves to be an effective strategy for a number of other characters in Parks’s oeuvre. Many of her protagonists are poised performers, such as Venus in Venus (1996) and Billy Bead in Getting Mother’s Body (2003); inspired impersonators and skillful storytellers, such as the Foundling Father and Brazil in The America Play (1994); or resolute historiographers, such as Aretha Saxon in Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom (1989)—all of them determined to refigure through verbal, visual, and bodily performances the official historical record to their own ends, to generate useable versions of the past.¹

Kara Walker’s artworks, especially her controversial silhouettes of the antebellum plantation South, present us, in the words of the artist, with a “purposeful misreading of historical texts.”² Her momentous debut installation, Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred b’tween the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart (1994), challenges conventional readings of history in all sorts of ways (fig. 1). Liberally drawing on mass-cultural genres, such as the historical romance—Margaret Mitchell’s best-selling novel Gone with the Wind (1936) and David O. Selznick’s Academy award–winning film version of the same title (1939)—as well as on sentimental novels, Harlequin romances, and pornographic fiction, Walker contests the very notion of what constitutes the “historical” when approaching the past and its legacies. Referring to her imaginative silhouette installations, such as Gone or The End of Uncle Tom and The Grand Allegorical Tableau of Eva in Heaven (1995), as “pictorial histories” or “historical paintings,”³ the artist provocatively puts fictional works such as Mitchell’s and Stowe’s on par with scholarly historiographies of slavery. In doing so, Walker not only mocks readers’ faith in the historical truthfulness of fictional accounts like Stowe’s or Mitchell’s, but also underlines that, precisely because of their immense popularity and mass-cultural appeal, these works have significantly shaped late twentieth-century knowledge of slavery.⁴ On this score then, Walker’s made-up pictorial histories render a portrait of the various ways in which romanticized and mythologized representations of the American past continue to influence the popular historical imagination. It is in this sense that the artist considers Gone with the Wind as well as her own Gone “historical texts.”

FIGURE 1. Kara Walker. 1994. Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as it Occurred b’tween the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart. Cut paper on wall. Installation dimensions variable; approx. 13 × 50 ft. (4 × 15.2 m). © Kara Walker, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York. Installation view: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA, 2008. Photo: Joshua White.

Having established the profound entanglement of fact and fiction in our understanding of history, Walker then sets out to “misread” both. Her works are replete with recognizable references to well-known figures, motifs, narrative themes, and received iconographies of plantation slavery: full moons, live oaks, and Spanish moss, ardent cavaliers and hoopskirted damsels, faithful retainers and mischievous children. Notably, these well-known clichés of history are presented somewhat out of focus, so that the familiar (das Heimliche) haunts us as the uncanny (das Unheimliche) of our own imagination. In Gone the amorous encounter between the Southern ingénue and her knight-errant appears on closer inspection to be a ménage à trois with a second pair of legs appearing from under the belle’s skirt, most likely belonging to a slave.⁵ While the hands and chests of the couple touch, their lips, expectantly parted for a kiss, do not. White heteronormative desire is deferred, on the one hand, to the belle’s hoopskirted shenanigans and, on the other hand, via the gallant’s sword aggressively pointing to a Black girl’s behind to the violent assertion of the master’s sexual power over enslaved women. The girl, however, seems quite oblivious to such advances, preoccupied instead with wringing a swan’s neck. The swan itself is a keen reminder of mythologies of white patriarchal omnipotence as, for instance, rendered in the story of Leda’s rape by Zeus in the body of the swan.⁶ The little girl seems to make quick work of such powerful representational legacies. She offers up the dead bird to a Black woman riding the waters of an adjacent lake in boatlike fashion (possibly a reference to the Middle Passage) with what appears to be a bust of a founding father (possibly George Washington) in tow. Further on in this visual narrative, a replica of the bust is spit out by an older Black woman wielding a broom while she is sexually abused by another white cavalier figure (or perhaps the same?) in tailcoat as nearby a Black girl drops babies from between her legs. Meanwhile, center stage, we behold the silhouette of a third little Black girl fellating a little white boy, who yearningly reaches up to a young Black boy floating up into the air thanks to his ballooning phallus—another provocative allusion to entrenched mythologies of Blackness.

Each vignette in this wild carnivalesque silhouette installation thus indexes entrenched stereotypical figures, tropes, images, and mythological narratives of Blackness and whiteness embedded in mass-cultural historiographies of slavery. But ultimately the sequence of vignettes also refuses full legibility, throwing viewers back on their own devices, making them wonder what exactly it is they imagine seeing and for what reasons. In the end, Walker’s “pictorial histories” of slavery seem to tell us more about our contemporary habits of reading history than about the past itself. Walker herself concedes that she persistently flounders in her “sincere attempt” to render the facts of history when encountering the various fictions articulating, shaping, and distorting them. She comments, “I am too aware of my overzealous imagination interfering in the basic facts of history, so in a way my work is about the sincere attempt to write Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and winding up with Mandingo instead” (quoted in Armstrong 1997, 107). In “coupling the real and the imagined” in her art (quoted in Lott 2000, 70), Walker aims to get at just this “collusion of fact and fiction” (quoted in Armstrong 1997, 107) that any access to history entails—including her own. The “offspring” of this collusion, so she contends, is vivaciously alive, is real in the sense of impacting perceptions and behaviors in the present, and is thus making history. Similar to Parks, she understands her role as artist-historian as intervening in entrenched collusions of fact and fiction to generate new kinds of offspring—new narratives and images of history that open up the field of possibilities for Black subject positions in past and present.

This introductory chapter aims to bring Walker’s and Parks’s performative collusions of fact and fiction into critical focus from a theoretical and contextual angle. In a first step, I contend that their imaginative engagement with the history of slavery differs significantly from that of other artists, especially those immediately preceding them—the authors of verbal and visual neo–slave narratives of the 1970s and 1980s. I trace this difference with regard to the kind and degree of imagination involved as well as with regard to a changing political interest in the past, focusing in particular on shifting notions of veracity, representation, and commitment. In a second step, I introduce the concept of “historiopoiesis” as a category of analysis for understanding the particularities of Parks’s and Walker’s creative processes. In contrast to historio-graphy, the term historio-poiesis is meant to draw critical attention to the various formal or, as I prefer to call them in this study for reasons delineated below, poetic devices at work in narrations of the past (e.g., narrative structuring, troping, framing, genre conventions, and intertextuality) and thus to the essentially constructed and mediated nature of knowledges of the past. Furthermore, it is to emphasize the performative gestus inherent in the work of Parks, Walker, and other artists of the time. As self-aware text and image makers, they claim the right to intervene in established processes of signification through formal revisions and to generate new significations of the past. In short, with the term “historiopoiesis” I wish to give expression to the making (poiesis) of history through poetic means. In a last step, I establish Parks’s and Walker’s historiopoetic work on the past as representative of a wider, generational ethos that begins to gain contours around the turn of the millennium and that has been variously dubbed “post-soul” or “post-black.” This chapter then provides the basic theoretical frame and historicization for the discussions of concrete poetic interventions in the subsequent chapters.

IMAGINATIVE ARCHAEOLOGIES ON A POSTMEMORY CONTINUUM

The collusion of fact and fiction, the purposeful interplay of established knowledges and the imagination in accessing and assessing the archive, is not new; in fact, it is quite typical for any postmemory approach (if not any mnemonic/historiographic approach) to the past. As Marianne Hirsch explains, forms of traumatic memory that are passed on inter-and transgenerationally well beyond any living recollection of the original experience are “mediated not by recall but by imaginative investment, projection, and creation” (2012, 5; emphasis added). Although originally developed in the context of Holocaust studies with regard to how the children of trauma survivors deal with their parents’ past, Hirsch’s concept of postmemory can be usefully extended to artistic productions in other historical contexts in which traumatic experience is passed on between and across generations, particularly when there is no longer a tangible proximity to the traumatic event—as is the case with the memories of slavery that have emerged continuously in verbal and visual form from the late 1960s onward.

Indeed, in the second half of the twentieth century, we witness what Paul Gilroy calls a “decisive turn to history” in African American literature (1993, 222). In the visual arts, scholars such as Huey Copeland and Krista Thompson (2011) have likewise pointed to the emergence of a great number of artworks dealing with transatlantic slavery in the same period.⁷ Yet the continuing stream of cultural productions on slavery is far from homogeneous, comprising a wide spectrum of postmemory engagements with the past. Some striking differences in poetics and politics become apparent when the canon of works produced in the 1970s and 1980s—for instance, Ernest Gaines’s novel The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971), Faith Ringgold’s Slave Rape Series fabrics (1972–73), and Alex Haley’s TV series Roots (1977)—is compared to later works, such as Walker’s provocative silhouette installations and sculptures and Suzan-Lori Parks’s metatheatrical plays; Cheryl Dunye’s 1996 mockumentary The Watermelon Woman; Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s 2014 metadrama An Octoroon; Paul Beatty’s 2015 satirical novel The Sellout; and visual artist Titus Kaphar’s playful Signifyin(g) on received images in, for example, The Myth of Benevolence (2014).

My inquiry into the shifts of emphases in artists’ approaches to the history of slavery begins from the vantage point of literary studies because the field has traditionally asked pertinent questions about the nature and function of narrative structuring.⁸ If history is what we know about the past, then this knowledge is always rendered in some form of narrative that unfolds events both in a temporal and causal sequence—whether in words, images, bodily performances, or a combination of these. Hence, due to their structural affinity with scholarly modes of writing history (historiography), narrative-based artistic reflections on slavery are particularly interesting with regard to changing emphases in conveying knowledges of the past. Literary studies can offer a set of useful tools for reading not only literary but also visual narratives of history.⁹ It also points us to the inherent collusion of fact and fiction in any approach to history, including the discipline of history itself. As historians Reinhart Koselleck (1985) and Hayden White (1990) have compellingly shown, narrative structuring along recognizable story lines (“emplotment,” as White calls it) is essential to turning an occurrence (Begebenheit) into a historical event (Ereignis) and a list of factual statements into a historical discourse.¹⁰ History is in this regard intrinsically connected to the creative and persuasive arts (poetics and rhetoric in the Aristotelian sense). Paul Ricoeur speaks of the “mutual belonging” of history and literature (1981, 274), a notion that Koselleck underscores in his concept of the Fiktion des Faktischen (“fiction of facticity”): “Every event historically established and presented lives on the fiction of facticity; reality itself is past and gone” (2004, 111).¹¹ Koselleck hastens to add that this does not mean that scholarly historiography becomes arbitrary; it remains bound to the principal of verifiability by sources. But the source itself does not stipulate what can be said about it. Hence, he concludes, while historians remain beholden to the traces of the past, they also share in the function of the storyteller when they begin to interpret these traces on the basis of narrative structuring.¹²

By the same token then, verbal, visual, or bodily storytellers who rework the traces of the past also partake through their trade in the production of forms of historiography. These artistic historiographic productions tend to be more attuned to the noncanonical traces of the past than scholarly narratives—that is, they respond to the sounds, gestures, and movements of the past, record its commonplace (rather than exceptional) figures, quotidian spaces, and unremarkable objects, as well as the evanescent hints of felt experience. Diana Taylor differentiates on this score between the tangible and “supposedly enduring materials (i.e., texts, documents, building, bones)” of the archive and the more ephemeral forms of “embodied practice/knowledge” offered up by the repertoire (2003, 19). Due to the intangible nature of the latter, scholarship has tended to draw a line between the study of memory and that of history. Pierre Nora (1989), for instance, would insist that the unorthodox traces of the past contained in what Taylor calls “t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1. Fictions of History and Historiopoetic Performances of the Past
• 2. Digging, Rep & Rev–ing, and Faking: Suzan-Lori Parks’s Historiopoetic Praxis
• 3. A Sidelong Glance at History: Unreliable Narration and the Silhouette as Blickmaschine in Kara Walker
• 4. Stereotypes and Theatricality: (Re)Staging Black Venus
• Coda: Whither Historiopoiesis?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Series List