Monday February 25th, 2008
In her book Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination Toni Morrison refers to the dark signifying influence of the “Africanist presence,” a cultural and phantasmic force that has defined the trajectory of the white universal subject since the slave era. Morrison links the articulation of the Africanist presence in the literature of the so-called New World with Enlightenment ideology and the formation of the American republic. Within this equation blackness and whiteness are not binary but dialectical forces; dependent upon each other for their very cultural identities. Much of visual artist Kara Walker’s work mines this territory. Using silhouetted figures of African American slaves and slave masters, Walker foregrounds the role that the pornographic imagination played in shaping an American subjectivity associated with freedom, individual liberty and the moral righteousness of conquest. By placing black slave women at the center of her visual narratives Walker redefines the axis of confrontation and secrecy that informed coercive relationships between female slaves and white slave masters. The unabashed salaciousness of Walker’s images is a pointed rebuke to and commentary on the historical shame and covertness that enshrouds the slave/slave master ritual of rape. In one such untitled image from 2001, Walker poses an older black female slave in a gothic ménage-a-trois with an (apparent) white man and a younger black woman. Wearing a head scarf and a billowing dress, the older woman appears to juggle the other two figures while giving the white man fellatio. Held aloft by the older woman, the white man’s hand disappears into the younger black woman’s crotch, lending the image an aura of ambiguity about who is exploiting whom. Walker’s allusion to the ambiguity of pleasure and agency in these “encounters” is perhaps the most striking aspect of her work. Using the caricatured black female body as her canvas, Walker not only comments on the over-determined nature of black female hypersexuality but connects it to the construction of American empire. As Morrison notes, white men were only free to be civilized, sovereign and possessed of the inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness within the context of the debased, abject, sexualized, enslaved African racial other. In Morrison’s view, the Africanist presence “enriched the creative possibilities” of the “new” white man in the so-called New World, allowing white men to exercise imperial power and authority under the guise of Enlightenment values of secular humanism.
Walker’s evocation of these themes in silhouette satirizes the pristine simplicity of the American and European silhouette traditions, as typified by the work of William Henry Brown and August Edouart. Walker draws from this tradition and upends it—featuring naked or partly clothed subjects who often appear in desolate plantation landscapes. The traditional bucolic plantation landscape, with its rows and rows of verdant fields worked by bent over slaves, is supplanted by a tenebrously amorphous hell. For example, in the 2004 image “Middle Passages,” Walker depicts a naked black woman with willowy distorted features set against a black and white backdrop, her arms outstretched as though she were conjuring some unseen force. The power of the image derives both from the enigma of what remains outside of the frame as well as the woman’s defiant posture and somewhat sardonic gaze, the gaze of a woman possessed. Departing from traditional representations of debased black female bodies, Walker confers the viewer with greater license to interpret the identity, provenance and intentions of this “nameless” figure as a subject in her own right, rather than a sexualized “beast” of burden. In this sense, Walker’s work suggests alternative narratives to that of pure white supremacist dominion over black bodies, narratives of resistance that challenge official history by forcing us to consider the deeper context of black women’s struggle for agency, voice and the right to their own bodies under the regime of slavery.
Sikivu Hutchinson is the editor of blackfemlens.org and the author of Imagining Transit: Race, Gender and Transportation Politics in Los Angeles.