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"Peabody, Rebecca"
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The unruly PhD : doubts, detours, departures, and other success stories
\"The Unruly PhD is a collection of first-person stories recounted by former graduate students who have successfully reached the other side of a PhD - and are willing to speak frankly about the challenges and decisions they faced along the way. Their stories reveal that many of the difficulties associated with graduate school are institutional rather than personal; that getting sidetracked, detoured and even derailed are the norm, not the exception; and that success is not necessarily tied to the tenure track - or even to completion. Ultimately, The Unruly PhD leaves no doubt that there are as many right ways to get through graduate school as there are students willing to forge their own paths\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Race and Literary Sculpture in Malvina Hoffman's \Heads and Tales\
In 1933 the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago opened the Races of Mankind—an anthropological exhibition of nearly one hundred portrait sculptures, all by American artist Malvina Hoffman, which was meant to display the physical traits of racial difference as they were understood by scientists of the era. A few years later, Hoffman published a book documenting her experiences while carrying out the commission. Titled Heads and Tales, the work is at once a personal memoir of Hoffman's travels, a technical guide to the process of creating bronze sculpture, and a distillation of Hoffman's reflections on the science that undergirded the project's racial typing. While Heads and Tales has often been cited in order to explicate the sculptural exhibition, it has not yet been considered as its own object—a discrete project that is fundamentally linked to, yet still separate from, the Field's exhibition. This essay argues that Heads and Tales should be considered as its own object of study, that the work done by the book differs in important ways from the work done by the exhibition, and that the illustrated text of Heads and Tales went further than the exhibition in making racialized ways of perceiving others accessible to readers.
Journal Article
Consuming stories : Kara Walker and the imagining of American race
\"Rebecca Peabody uses the work of contemporary American artist Kara Walker to investigate a range of popular storytelling traditions with roots in the nineteenth century and ramifications in the present. Focusing on a few key pieces that range from a wall-size installation to a reworked photocopy in an artist's book, and from a theater curtain to a monumental sculpture, Peabody explores a significant yet neglected aspect of Walker's production: her commitment to exploring narrative depictions of race, gender, power, and desire. Consuming Stories considers Walker's sustained visual engagement with literary genres such as the romance novel, neo-slave narrative, and children's fairy tales, and internationally-known stories including Roots, Beloved, and Uncle Tom's Cabin. Walker's interruption of these familiar works, along with her generative use of the familiar in unexpected and destabilizing ways, reveals the extent to which genre-based narrative conventions depend on specific representations of race--especially as it is aligned with power, and desire. Breaking these implicit rules makes them visible - and, in turn, highlights viewers' reliance on them for narrative legibility. As this study reveals, Walker's engagement with narrative continues beyond her early silhouette work as she moves into media such as film, video, and sculpture--and when she works beyond the United States, using her tools and strategies to unsettle cultural histories abroad. Ultimately, Consuming Stories shifts the critical conversation around Walker away from the visual legacy of historical racism, and towards the present-day role of the entertainment industry--and its consumers--in processes of racialization\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Strategies of Visual Intervention: Langston Hughes and Uncle Tom's Cabin
In 1952 publisher Dodd, Mead and Company invited African American writer and intellectual Langston Hughes to create an introduction, select illustrations, and prepare discursive captions for a new edition of Harriet Beecher Stowe's
. The mid-twentieth century was a complex moment in the cultural reception of the novel, characterized both by public demand for new incarnations of the story and by protests against the book and the performances it inspired. Hughes, who had a long-standing relationship with the story, accepted the invitation and produced an unusual project that reflects the story's ambivalent cultural status, celebrating the novel even while unraveling its narrative threads. While Hughes's introduction to the 1952 edition is often cited by scholars, there has been little sustained consideration of the multiple layers of critical interpretation evident throughout the rest of the book. In fact, while Hughes takes Stowe's novel as a point of departure, the work done by his choice of images, their captions, and their placement in the text is the real story. This essay elucidates some of the deeply complex strategies Hughes employed in order to elicit multiple, sometimes contradictory, stories from Stowe's text and analyzes the effects they create for readers. The essay argues that Hughes used critical and creative tools in ways unique to this project to strategically disrupt readers' suspension of disbelief and thereby provoke a more critical, more culturally and historically inflected understanding of the story.
Journal Article
The Art of Storytelling in Kara Walker's Film and Video
This essay considers several film and video works by American artist Kara Walker, focusing specifically on three issues: the artist's transition from silhouettes and works on paper to video, the challenges of displaying her video work in a gallery context, and the narrative impact of her video. Throughout, the essay argues that the differences between Walker's video and paper-based works have less to do with media, and more to do with issues around production and display that allow video to push harder on certain pressure points that have always been important within Walker's practice: the constructed nature of historical fantasy, for example, as well as viewers' cultural reliance on storytelling to remember and reimagine the past.
Journal Article
A strategic cut: Kara Walker's art and imagined race in American visual culture
Contemporary American artist Kara Walker uses a variety of media---most famously, black paper silhouettes---to create raced and gendered characters who demonstrate power and desire in unexpected and provocative ways. Other scholars have located Walker's work in the context of African American art history, 19th century silhouettes or early 20th century minstrelsy, and have theorized her art as addressing a racist and incomplete history. This leaves unexplored, however, one of the most interesting, challenging and ultimately useful aspects of Walker's project---her sustained engagement with late 20th century historical fiction. I take this engagement as my point of departure, and conduct an interdisciplinary visual analysis of Walker's art as it makes reference to certain storytelling practices in the United States that construct, and represent, race. As Walker's images provide visual navigation through \"Roots,\" Beloved, Uncle Tom's Cabin, historical romance novels, Greek mythology and children's fairy tales, several questions arise: when and why is it appropriate to use fantasy to fill in historical blanks? What happens when historical fiction becomes \"truer\" than historical fact? How is \"whiteness\" constructed to be invisible in historical fiction? My investigation reveals both anxiety and continuity in the ways that race is constructed, consumed, reproduced, and celebrated in the visual culture of contemporary historical fiction. Further, I illuminate the strategic power of Walker's silhouettes to interrupt cultural suspension of disbelief as it currently operates in America's racialized imagination. Ultimately, I believe that Walker's visual intervention provides a valuable opportunity for reflection---not only on the dynamics of the story-telling industry, but on the role and responsibility of the individual viewer. At stake are our imaginative limits; as Walker demonstrates, the images of race and history that we choose to consume influence not only our memories of the past, but also the ways that we will see, imagine and produce race in the future.
Dissertation
Accommodating injustice: Women and conflict settlement processes
This dissertation explores the impact of conflict settlement processes on women's access to rights and resources in two accommodative (South Africa, Northern Ireland) and two separatist (Croatia, Eritrea) conflict settlement processes. It hypothesizes that accommodative conflict settlement process will limit women's access to rights and resources and that separatist settlement process will expand women's access to rights and resources, and that the manner in which a conflict is settled will determine the nature of the outcome of the conflict for women. The findings of this research suggest that it is the changing structure of the identity groups participating in the conflict that will determine whether women's access to rights and resources will expand or contract after the settlement of the conflict. This dissertation was supported by a Peace Scholar award from the United States Institute of Peace. The views expressed in this dissertation are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Institute of Peace.
Dissertation
Kara Walker, in Context
The Long Hot Black Road to Freedom, a Double Dixie Two-Step (2005-08) is a strong representative of the artwork for which Kara Walker first became known. It remains one of her signature mediums: the black-and-white cutout. Like her other silhouette installations, this piece interrogates the audience, creating a psychologically interactive drama. Viewers are given the opportunity to become aware of and spend time experiencing their own uneasiness with stories that invoke race, violence, love, and lust without any of the familiar narrative preconditions they might expect. Yet, this piece also offers a unique opportunity to its viewers.Walker's imagery is often associated with the legacy of slavery in the United States and, indeed, Walker has used this legacy as a rich vein of material inspiration, drawing from archival sources, historical and contemporary reimaginings of history, and her own imagination. But just as the work has a slippery association with the signifiers of race, time, and place, so too does it evade a concrete and permanent location in the US. Owned by a private collection in Hong Kong, which also collects works from Europe, America, and across Asia, and loans its pieces out globally, this work has the potential to disrupt comfort zones, as well as initiate selfreflection and larger conversations worldwide. What histories of violence and enslavement might be called up by the works alongside this piece within the collection? What local meaning might be activated when The Long Hot Black Road to Freedom is loaned out and displayed elsewhere in the world? What might be said about the exportation Of US Specific imagery about slavery to other countries that are grappling with their own unique histories of oppression? This is, indeed, a piece that resonates uncomfortably, yet productively, far beyond the US.
Magazine Article