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A strategic cut: Kara Walker's art and imagined race in American visual culture
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A strategic cut: Kara Walker's art and imagined race in American visual culture
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Dissertation
A strategic cut: Kara Walker's art and imagined race in American visual culture
2006
Overview
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.
