Dilemma in the Art of Kara Walker

Nichols uses humour as the main deconstructive strategy to be an efficient tool for subverting the myths that have oppressed black women. The woman’s body acquires relevance, as the poems focus on a black immigrant woman within a context of white supremacy. Nichols creates persona who she uses to represent the black female body and she constitutes a challenge to black women’s objectification in the Western (British) society, in which she is exiled. The writer occasionally speaks in the first person, has no name, so the third-person poetic voice refers to her as ‘the fat black woman’. The fat black woman refuses to be a victim and, therefore, rejects all the traps laid by racist and sexist society by means of stereotypes that aim at constricting her into limiting roles. It is her that

It seemed to amaze her how they could tell her how they did theirs, but wouldn’t teach her how it’s actually done. All her paintings came from her traveling experience. I remember her saying how the clouds looked solid as she looked up and just imagined. She lived until she was 90, she died of old age. I admired the fact where she talked about how early she would wake up and what time she would be back after being out working as an artist because it showed how dedicated she was to her craft. There was a time when her drawings were put up in a museum without her knowing and she found out from someone else and got down to the bottom of

Roderick Ferguson’s article, “Nightmares of the Heteronormative,” details the ways that the categories of home and domesticity are constructed in a manner made to be accessible by people of color, using the queer of color critique. Similarly, Kimberle Crenshaw’s “Mapping the Margins” coins intersectionality to explore the ways that sexism and racism intersect to produce the doubly marginalized experience of being a woman of color.

This week’s reading of Roderick A. Ferguson’s Aberrations in Black: Towards a Queer of Color Critique offers a queer of color analysis that poses itself against Marxism, revolutionary nationalism, liberal pluralism and historical materialism, and opts instead for an “understanding of nation and capital as the outcome of manifold intersections that contradict the idea of liberal nation-state and capital as sites of resolution, perfection, progress and confirmation (3). By challenging some of the main complacent thinking that characterized canonical sociology, Ferguson pushes for an engagement with racial knowledge about African American culture as it was produced by American sociology if one is to fully understand the gender and sexual variations within the African American culture. One of the principle assumptions of canonical sociology is represented by its use of cultural, racial and sexual differences in the process of pathologizing African American culture. By juxtaposing canonical sociological texts from the Chicago School of Sociology with that of African American literature, Ferguson provides a genealogy of this foundational issue of imagining African American culture as sites of polymorphous gender and sexual perversions and how these perversions are in turn associated with societal and moral failings.

bell hooks, renowned black feminist and cultural critic criticizes the lack of racial awareness in her essay, Representing Whiteness in the Black Imagination (1992). ‘bell hooks’ is written in lower case to convey that the substance of her work reigns more important than the writer. From a marginalized perspective, hooks argues that sites of dominance, not otherness is problematic and critiques the lack of attention that white scholars pay to the representation of whiteness in the black imagination. Critical feminist scholars Peggy McIntosh and Ruth Frankenberg identify their own whiteness as a dominant discourse, but share a critical departure from hooks with the notion of whiteness as terror. hooks aim is not to reverse racism, but discuss her position to authentically inform readers about how she experiences racism. Furthermore, systems of oppression are manufactured by human thought and thus the site of the Other is always produced as a site of difference. Gender, race, sex, class, disability, and geography are situated differently in social structure, but dominant groups assume they share the same reality though they cannot experience it. In consequence, the Other cannot hold a singularized identity of their own and the binary structure succeeds in containing racialized bodies in place. What happens to those bodies when they cross boundaries of the binary? hooks recounts being routinely disciplined back into place when crossing the border; however, dominant white

Renee Cox, as an African American woman and artist, uses her body and identity to start a discussion on the Black experience in America. Besides representing a population of minority artists, the female and the non-white, her art has affected society with her brazen approach to her craft. Cox’s significance comes from her open display of race and sex. In many of her pieces, nudity and the celebration of the African American experience is the focus. In addition to this, her medium of choice, mixed media and photography, is opening an outlet of art that isn’t traditionally used. In essence, Renee Cox is an artist that can pave the way for future artists by diversifying through medium, race, and sex.

By employing themes such as psychosexual fantasies, race, gender, and violence, artist Kara Walker reconstructs and explores the history and effects of American slavery on American culture. Although being called names like notorious, revolting, anti-progressive, and shameless, she continues to be a pioneer of bringing the unspeakable aspects of American slavery that are not commonly discussed and are left out of the history books to the foreground of public discussion.

Her self expression through painting is used as an outlet for her expression as the new individual she has grown to be.

His frustration is visible in the expression on his face. He appears tired of her bothering him about it, hence the hand. The child is showing a lot of white which can represent faith, I think the artist did this to say that the baby is giving the family faith because they are trying to provide for their child and in order to do that they need to be able to put food on the table which won’t just only help the baby but them as a whole. The woman may also symbolize strength that’s why the artist made her dress and lipstick red; she’s fiery. She may help the husband maintain his sanity no matter how many problems they are going through as a family.

In addition to offering a narrative in which Black women have navigated the historical stereotypes of Jezebel, Mammy, and Sapphire, she introduces the research methodology of focus groups to offer the insight of ‘real life’ Black women and how they identify, contextualize, rationalize and combat these stereotypes in comparison to their role as citizens. ---- The Chapter 2, is dedicated to the description, and historical and contemporary manifestations how the crooked room is prescribed to the Black women through three distorted angles: the licentious and hypersexual Jezebel, the asexual, white family devotee, Mammy, and the angry black woman, Sapphire. MHP assists her exploration of these stereotypes with discussions shared by the focus groups and props her analysis and discussion using public figures, public policy, slavery, and popular culture.

How Americans romanticize their history is constantly challenged by African American artist Kara Walker. Her controversial work has broken huge boundaries of race, gender, power and violence. But Walker’s art never had the intention of pleasing viewers or answering easy questions. Winning the John.D and Catherine T. Mac Arthur Foundations genius grant at only twenty seven years old, Walkers art has taunted Americans to recognize the legacy that slavery has left behind.

Mammie, Jezebel, and the ever ready prostitute and Sapphire. In “Four Women” Nina Simone links the history of black women in America as defined

She erases the blackness of the woman to justify her actions, a common endeavor in white America’s exploitation of the black body. This endeavor is evident of the

The descriptions of nature, trees and flowers permeate the textual body. Walker, a specialist in using images of garbled bodies relates the disgusting story of how a three year old has to die because of his color. Meridian carries the accountability of reporting it to the authorities and takes the child to the mayor’s office and “the people who followed Meridian it was as if she carried a large bouquet of long-stemmed roses” (Meridian 191). Walker executes an ideological tightrope act typical of her perceptive style of interrogating political dogma with a naturalist pastoral can dour. By concurrently mourning the loss of children and yet protecting women’s rights regarding reproductive discussion, she castigates black nationalists, who circumcised black woman’s life within domesticity, respectability, cultural racial pride and purity.

These visuals may reconstruct and confirm racist pigeon-holes that dub black buttocks with terms such as “junk,” “bubble,” or “cake,” linking its physicality and location to ideas of black ghettos, and dictating “its value and the spatial location for women who possess this body type” (Durham 41). However, within these stereotypes, along with Beyoncé’s self-representations, exists “classed femininity,” where “shared racial history is less useful when attempting to delineate within-group distinctions, such as class” (Durham 40-41). “Black ghetto” stereotypical depictions, such as hypersexuality, are often performed to maintain southern black authenticity in hypermasculine demeanors in order to gain respect from their black and white counterparts. This is done when Beyoncé’s lower half is utilized in her musical performances “to mark authentic blackness rooted in the American South” (Durham 43). These “hood” roots assist in creating respect and visibility for these otherwise demeaned, diminished, and silenced bodies, although, this practice can merely be a facade as “both the street and the strip club are hypermasculine spaces where Black girls and women are economically and sexually vulnerable” (Durham