Black Portraiture[s]: The Black Body in the West

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Nka

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JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN ART

FOUNDED 1994

FOUNDING PUBLISHER Okwui Enwezor EDITORS Okwui Enwezor Salah M. Hassan Chika Okeke-Agulu

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CONSULTING EDITORS Rory Bester • Isolde Brielmaier • Coco Fusco Kendell Geers • Michael Godby • Elizabeth Harney Thomas Mulcaire • O. Donald Odita • Gilane Tawadros Frank Ugiomoh

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WHO’S ZOOMIN’ WHO?

THE EYES OF DONYALE LUNA Richard J. Powell

DEFACING THE GAZE AND REIMAGINING THE BLACK BODY

CONTEMPORARY CARIBBEAN WOMEN ARTISTS Michelle Stephens

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Cover: Barkley L. Hendricks, Photo Bloke, 2016. Oil and acrylic on linen, 72 x 48 in. Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. © Barkley L. Hendricks

Andy Warhol Foundation

THE SLAVE AT THE LOUVRE

AN INVISIBLE HUMANITY Françoise Vergès

NUMBER 38–39, 2016

GRAPHIC DESIGN Marshall Hopkins

Nka wishes to acknowledge support for the publication of the journal through generous grants from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development, The Hague, Netherlands, and David Hammons.

FROM THE EDITORS

CONTENTS

MANAGING EDITOR Clare Ulrich

ADVISORY BOARD Norbert Aas • Florence Alexis • Rashid Diab Manthia Diawara • Elsabet Giorgis • Freida High dele jegede • Kellie Jones • Sandra Klopper David Koloane • Bongi Dhlomo Mautloa Gerardo Mosquera • Helen Evans Ramsaran Ibrahim El Salahi • Janet Stanley • Obiora Udechukwu Gavin Younge • Octavio Zaya

IN MEMORIAM 19582016

Cheryl Finley and Deborah Willis

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ASSOCIATE EDITORS Sarah Adams • Carl Hazelwood • Nancy Hynes Derek Conrad Murray • Sunanda Sanyal

RAMEZ ELIAS

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BLACK, QUEER, DANDY

THE BEAUTY WITHOUT WHOM WE CANNOT LIVE Monica L. Miller

POSING THE BLACK PAINTER

KERRY JAMES MARSHALL’S PORTRAITS OF ARTISTS’ SELFPORTRAITS Peter Erickson

AU NÈGRE JOYEUX

EVERYDAY ANTIBLACKNESS GUISED AS PUBLIC ART Trica Keaton

SAGA BWOYS AND RUDE BWOYS

MIGRATION, GROOMING, AND DANDYISM Michael McMillan Nka is published by Duke University Press on behalf of Nka Publications.

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PORTRAITS IN BLACK

STYLING, SPACE, AND SELF IN THE WORK OF BARKLEY L. HENDRICKS AND ELIZABETH COLOMBA Anna Arabindan-Kesson

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POSTPOST BLACK?

CONFESSIONS OF A BLACK FEMINIST ACADEMIC PORNOGRAPHER

Mireille Miller-Young

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ICONS BROUGHT FORWARD

RENÉE COX’S QUEEN NANNY OF THE MAROONS Kimberli Gant

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A PICTURE’S WORTH

TOWARD THEORIZING A BLACK/QUEER GAZE IN THE INTERNET “PORNUTOPIA” Jafari Sinclaire Allen

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THE UNNAMED BODY

ENCOUNTERING, COMMODIFYING, AND CODIFYING THE IMAGE OF THE BLACK FEMALE Alissandra Cummins and Allison Thompson

NO MORE “POISONOUS, DISRESPECTFUL, AND SKEWED IMAGES OF BLACK PEOPLE”

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HANK WILLIS THOMAS

A NECESSARY CAUTION Kerr Houston

NO BODY’S PERFECT

Kanitra Fletcher

OTA BENGA IN THE ARCHIVES

UNMAKING MYTHS, MAPPING RESISTANCE IN THE MARGINS OF HISTORY Pamela Newkirk

BUST BRAWL

THE BATTLE OVER A BLACK BRONZE PRINCE Yemane I. Demissie

BENDING HISTORY

Maaza Mengiste

DIFFERENT, BUT NOT ABNORMAL

“OUT” IN AFRICA Lyle Ashton Harris

RECLAIMING HISTORY

A VISUAL ESSAY Elizabeth Colomba

FROM BODY TO DISEMBODIMENT

Jean-Ulrick Désert

BLACK PRESENCE IN FRANCE

Lewis Watts

BARBARA WALKER’S LOUDER THAN WORDS Celeste-Marie Bernier

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MAKING SPACE, CHANGING SPACE

BLACK PEOPLE AND NEW MUSEUMS Ngaire Blankenberg

Nana Adusei-Poku

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JAMES BARNOR

EVER YOUNG, NEVER SLEEP Renée Mussai

REVIEWS 218

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READING BASQUIAT

EXPLORING AMBIVALENCE IN AMERICAN ART

A NEW REPUBLIC

KEHINDE WILEY

RAMEZ ELIAS

In Memoriam (1958–2016)

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t is with deep sorrow that we, the editors of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, mourn the death of Ramez Elias, who passed away on Thursday, April 21, 2016, in Paris, France. Ramez was the designer of Nka for the last sixteen years. A remarkably talented artist, Ramez has left an indelible mark on the design of Nka, shaping its character, not only as a leading journal, but also as an elegant one in the field of contemporary and African and African diaspora art. Ramez was not just a brilliant designer; he was a dear friend. He was generous, kind-hearted, and a very caring human being. Words fail to convey our loss and sadness. But here at Nka, we shall continue to build on the design vision he established and that has taken us this far. Ramez studied at the American University in Cairo before moving to Ithaca, where he lived beginning in 1994. He was a multitalented and creative individual. In addition to being a designer, he was also a gifted theater actor who performed with groups such as Al Warsha, an experimental theater company based in Cairo, Egypt. Ramez hailed from a prominent Egyptian family that played a pioneering role in the rise of the independent publishing industry in Egypt since the early part of the twentieth century. His grandfather, Elias Anton Elias, a well-known modernist intellectual and the author of one of the first Arabic-English dictionaries in Egypt, founded in 1913 the Elias Modern Publishing House, which has contributed tremendously to publishing in the fields of literature, arts, and children’s books. Our sincere condolences to our dear friend Natalie Melas, Ramez’s wife; his brother, Nadim Elias, and his wife, Laura Elias; his nephews, Sammy and Karim; his niece, Nada El Omari; his brother-in-law, Majdi El Omari; and the extended family and friends in Egypt and Ithaca, New York. Rest in peace, Ramez. Your memory and the beauty you brought to our lives will forever stay with us and guide us to better horizons. Okwui Enwezor Chika Okeke-Agulu Salah M. Hassan

Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016 DOI # 10.1215/10757163-3777031 © 2016 by Nka Publications

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From the Editors BLACK PORTRAITURE[S] In Bamako we say, “I ka nye tan,” which, in English, means “You look well,” but, in fact, it means, “You look beautiful like that.” Seydou Keita

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ow the  black  body has been imaged in the West has always been a rich site for global examination and contestation. The representation and depiction of black peoples often has been governed by prevailing attitudes about race and sexuality. From the ubiquitous Renaissance paintings that picture black people as the sublime backdrop or purposely attracting the lustful gaze of the other, to the 2012 French Elle magazine’s article on First Lady Michelle Obama’s sense of style finally filtering down to the fashion-strapped black masses, to the 2012 Italian Vogue special issue on African fashion, there is evidence that discussion of the black body remains relevant. How the black body is displayed and viewed changes with each generation, constantly allowing young diasporic innovators from the Americas, Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean to add their own ideas about reinvention and self-representation. To be sure, the universality of black culture and its global presence has played a leading role in mainstream sports, music, performance, fashion,  and visual arts, with implications worthy of much critique. Paris, an internationally key and highly influential Western space in all things concerning the visual arts and modernity, was the perfect stage for  Black  Portraiture[s]: The  Black  Body in the West, the fifth in the series of visual art conferences organized by Harvard University and New York University since 2004 and jointly presented in 2013 with L’École des hautes études en sciences sociales (the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences), musée du quai Branly, and Cornell University. We were honored to participate as conference organizers with professionals representing a wide range of disciplines. They included Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Harvard University, W. E. B. Du Bois Institute); Manthia Diawara, Lydie 6 • Nka

Diakhaté, and Jaira Placide (New York University, Institute of African American Affairs); Awam Ampka (New York University, Tisch School of the Arts, Department of Social and Cultural Analysis); Thelma Golden (The Studio Museum in Harlem); Jean-Paul Colleyn (L’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Centre d’études Africaines); and Anne-Christine Taylor-Descola, Anna Laban, and Christine Barthe (Musée du quai Branly). The essays offered in this special issue of Nka were gathered from that historic meeting in Paris from January 17 to 20, 2013, and offer the most cutting-edge perspectives on the production and skill of black self-representation, desire, and the exchange of the gaze from the nineteenth century to the present day in fashion, film, art, and the archive. Artists, historians, designers, writers, and image makers from around the world gathered in Paris to discuss the state of the black portrait circulating in the present and in the past. They asked: How are these images—both positive and negative—exposed to define, replicate, and transform the black body? Why and how does the black body become a purchasable, global marketplace, and what are its legacies? In what visual and nonvisual spaces do these images and instances either take permanent residence, reemerge, recycle, or simply become illegible? How can performing blackness be liberating for both the performer and the audience? Can the black body be deracialized to emphasize cultural groupings, encouraging appropriation and varied performances across racial lines? Finally, and importantly, what are the responses and implications? These are some of the questions that were posed over the four-day conference held at noteworthy venues across the snowy city of Paris, including L’École des Beaux-Arts, the Université de Paris 7, and the musée du quai Branly, where a riveting film series was held on the last day. Discussions also focused on aesthetics, vernacular style, fashion, and ethnography in describing a sense of place and identity. Day after day, participants and presenters conducted diverse visual readings of the notion of the black  portrait while challenging conventional perspectives on identity, beauty, cosmopolitanism, and community in Africa and its diaspora. Through a series of panels, films, and readings, Black Portraiture[s] included a wide range of

Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016 DOI 10.1215/10757163-3641612 © 2016 by Nka Publications

discussions relating to the experiences of a people who have been caricatured through much of visual history, particularly in nineteenth-century anthropological and colonial photography. Presenters also explored how African men and women used photography, and later environmental portraiture, film, fashion, art, and performance, to experiment with varied ideas of themselves and to ultimately honor how they see themselves and wish to be seen by others. For example, they demonstrated how some photographers, often in collaboration with their subjects, created idealized poses, while others displayed active confidence through style and dress. Scholars, artists, and writers alike unabashedly proved how these individuals sought to celebrate their beauty and style, whether in Senegal, France, Jamaica, New York, or all around the world. As in the past, photographs and film today are considered visual testimony of a collective memory. Even now, race and power guide our visual reading of these images, which both entice and incite. What we imagine and know about these subjects through the visual image is mediated through the insight of curators, historians, writers, poets, photographers, filmmakers, and visual artists and is framed within the experience of the idealized portrait, whether in art, fashion, film, or documentary photography. “Having a portrait taken by [the well-known Malian photographer] Seydou Keita . . . signified that the sitter was modern,” according to Manthia Diawara. “To go before Keita’s lens is to pass the test of modernity, to be transformed as an urbane subject even if one has no power in the market or at the train station.”1 Thus, African photographers today are reconstructing their experiences of life by capturing moments through visual testimony. Writers and curators today are framing exhibitions in novel ways in urban spaces as well as in popular museum settings. By including a discussion of fashion, we continue to bring international attention to contemporary designers and photographers and bring to light the social and aesthetic impact their work has made in defining this art form. Some authors use theoretical and analytical tools of art history and film studies, while others mine the wealth of popular imagery to demonstrate the complexity found in mapping and reading both historical and

contemporary black portraiture. All in all, we believe that the essays presented in Black Portraiture[s] offer an important collective story told through multiple voices. What makes this collection of essays so exciting and critical is its broad focus on the black portrait and the important aesthetic and ideological issues it continues to engage. Drawing on the ideas and works of leading and emerging writers of our time while including the discussions of photographers, scholars, artists, curators, and filmmakers of the African diaspora, the Black Portraiture[s] conference clearly revolved around collaboration, building upon the strengths of each of the organizing institutions as well as the curators, writers, artists, filmmakers, and photographers whose visualization of the African diaspora has guided these crucial discussions about art and representation. By featuring some of the most extraordinary writers, historians, artists, and theorists working today, we hope this special issue of Nka, based on the conference, enables readers to see that the image remains ever powerful in an age where black lives matter. Cheryl Finley is an associate professor and director of visual studies in the Department of the History of Art at Cornell University. Deborah Willis is professor and chair of the Department of Photography and Imaging at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Notes

1 Manthia Diawara, “Talk of the Town,” Artforum 36 (February 1998): 67. Finley/Willis

Finley and Willis

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THE SLAVE

AT THE LOUVRE AN INVISIBLE HUMANITY

Françoise Vergès

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n 2012, for the Paris Triennial, I organized a program called “The Slave at the Louvre: An Invisible Humanity,” hosting guided visits to look for the ghosts of slaves in the Louvre. Built in 1793, the museum collects work dating through 1848 (everything post-1848 being housed in the Musée d’Orsay). These two dates carry particular resonance for the history of slavery in the French colonies. On August 29, 1793, following the 1791 slaves’ insurrection, the French colony of SaintDomingue abolished slavery, and on April 27, 1848, slavery was finally abolished in all of the French colonies. In May 1802 Napoleon Bonaparte rejected the decree of February 4, 1794, abolishing slavery in French colonies, and reinstated slavery. France is the only European country to have abolished slavery twice. It was thus interesting to visit the Louvre, whose collection is framed between these two dates, to see how modern slavery has been represented, or not.

Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016 DOI 10.1215/10757163-3641623 © 2016 by Nka Publications

Jan Steen (1626–79), La Mauvaise compagnie (Wicked Company). Oil on wood, 0.414 x 0.655 m. Courtesy Musée du Louvre. © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre). Photo: Adrien Didierjean

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Jean-Baptiste Simeon Chardin (1699–1779), The Smoker’s Case, c. 1737. Oil on canvas, 32 x 42 cm. Courtesy Musée du Louvre. Photo: Herve Lewandowski

For the guided visits, I chose to tour the galleries as they were, rather than ask curators to look in the unexhibited pieces to find representations of enslaved persons or of slavery, and to walk through the galleries in the search of an invisible humanity and the traces, fragments, and shadows of its ghostly presence. Our tour prompted discussion of the intersection in the seventeenth century of tobacco, masculinity, and loose mores (smoking and drinking, games of cards, prostitution, according to bourgeois norms), of which the Steen painting offers a glimpse. Additionally, we could trace the itinerary of tobacco from slavery, dispossession, and

plantation economy to Europe. Paintings such as Chardin’s The Smoker’s Case depict the world of the eighteenth-century bourgeois home, where tobacco had entered the quotidian of European men. It was also important not to confuse representations of blacks with representations of the enslaved. From the late 1400s to the early 1600s, Africans living in or visiting Europe included artists, aristocrats, saints, and diplomats. It was not until the second half of the nineteenth century that abolitionist propaganda, especially British, popularized the representation of the suffering body of the enslaved and the cruelty of slave trade and slavery. On the

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tour I wanted to show how slavery had contaminated European ways of living, consuming, and receiving. When did the first paintings featuring men smoking appear? Or salons with tables covered with china teapots, sugar bowls, or coffeepots? What about paintings of aristocratic women wearing cotton? Of enslaved négrillons, whose black skin was used as a contrast to their mistresses’ whiteness? Pulling different threads from representation to history, paintings can show the global network established by the mercantile economy of slavery in Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean, as well as free trade in Asia and the growing gap between consumers and producers in a society learning new ways to live in luxury. The conditions surrounding the production of goods—sugar, tobacco, cotton, coffee—had to be hidden. During the tour art historians of the Louvre indicated paintings that illustrated such history, including still lives with cowries or tropical fruits and landscapes. The first part of the visit focused on the history of each product; slave trade and colonial slavery were evoked through the stories of tobacco, sugar, cotton, coffee, and cowries. We also discussed relationships between gender and consumption— sweet sugar with femininity; tobacco with masculinity, prostitution, and revolution. Then a poet, an artist, and/or a writer in attendance evoked what the painting triggered for them. For instance, in front of Le Radeau de la méduse artist Isaac Julien talked of the Africans drowned on the shores of the island of Lampedusa in the Mediterranean as they were fleeing wars, poverty, and dictatorships, the sea a marine cemetery as the Atlantic had been during the slave trade. Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé drew from the legend that cannibalism had occurred among the survivors while on the raft drifting toward African shores in order to develop the theory of literary cannibalism.1 Rather than focusing on the lives of the enslaved (as very few paintings before the second half of the nineteenth century represent them), the guided visits showed the ways in which cultural and social life had been saturated by the goods and products of colonial slavery. Colonial slavery deeply and forever affected European taste and consumption, transforming social gatherings, personal presentation, celebrations of births and weddings,

and representations of gender. It necessitated an erasure of the conditions of production, including the itineraries and living conditions of those who produced the goods. Coffee, sugar, cotton, precious woods, and indigo were intimately connected with slave trade and slavery, but the creation of the consumer and his or her rights—easy access to goods at a reasonable price—required distance from the producer, a naturalization of the economic system of slavery. “The Slave at the Louvre” was designed to show visitors that the centuries of slave trade and slavery were not about “something over there,” but were also about their own society, about how their daily lives had been deeply transformed by sugar, tobacco, coffee, and cotton and about the birth of antiblack racism. Colonial slavery constructed a division between consumer and producer, and even though the colonial empire has not visibly been part and parcel of French social and cultural life, it has had a deep impact on French society. “Slavery is a ghost, both the past and a living presence; and the problem of historical representation is how to represent that ghost, something that is and yet is not,” says Haitian postcolonial thinker Michel-Rolph Trouillot.2 “The Slave at the Louvre” was about this ghost. The program’s attention to history illuminated how slave trade and slavery belonged to a global, economic, social, and cultural system. For example, Dutch paintings figured goods and products of slavery so prominently, because in the seventeenth century ships sailed from Amsterdam to Africa, Indonesia, Brazil, and the Americas and back to the Dutch port, creating the basis of a worldwide trading network. Amsterdam became the port of entry in Europe for spices, tobacco, and sugar. Thus the “Golden Age” of the Dutch city rested on slavery and free trade. History also explains how and why slave trade, on a global scale, became the organization of a mobile, precarious, racialized, and sexualized workforce. The Treaty of Utrecht (1713) was the first transnational treaty to speak of an “idea of Europe,” and it connected slavery and free trade. The works of two European thinkers—Abbé de Saint-Pierre (French) and Charles d’Avenant (English)—were important in its wording. In 1697 d’Avenant argued: “In a trading nation, the bent of all the laws should Vergès

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tend to the encouragement of commerce, and all measures should be there taken, with a due regard to its interest and advancement.”3 The two pillars of free trade were the plantation in the Western colonies and free trade in the Eastern trading posts. “The plantation trade gives employment to many thousand artificers here at home, and takes off a great quantity of our inferior manufactures. The returns of all which are made in tobacco, cotton, ginger, sugars, indico, etc. by which we were not only supplied for our own consumption, but we had formerly wherewithal to send to France, Flanders, Hamburgh, the East Country and Holland, besides what we shipped for Spain and the Streights, etc.”4 Bonded labor and free trade were connected. In his Project for Perpetual Peace in Europe, first published in 1712, Abbé de Saint-Pierre argued that a confederation resulting from a contract and a balance of power among European rival powers would allow the “Powers of Europe to form a sort of system among themselves, which unites them by a single religion, the same international law, morals, literature, commerce and a sort of equilibrium.”5 The 1713 Treaty of Utrecht speaks of the necessity of establishing peace “for the perpetual tranquillity of the whole Christian world” and of “securing the tranquillity of Europe by a balance of power.” It was a truly political program with geopolitical consequences, giving Europe the power to rule over international affairs in order to preserve a peace it had unilaterally decided to be universal. It asked European powers to forget the wrongs and damages that they had inflicted upon one another. Forgetting crimes at home served two goals: to preserve European unity against common external enemies and to turn a blind eye to crimes committed outside of Europe by a European power. Though Europe remained divided, in this context “unity” meant that European powers agreed that each could freely dispose of the spoils of its conquest. The fictitious unity of Europe was important for maintaining hegemony abroad. The new global order involved deporting Africans, pacifying what d’Avenant called “natives” and working out internal European competition for the larger objective of preserving European global interests. Finally, the Treaty of Utrecht gave England the asiento (the monopoly on slave trade with the

Spanish colonies), opening the way for the country to become the eighteenth-century global maritime power and the first slave trader. The treaty also boosted the European slave trade. Whereas between 1630 and 1640 twenty to thirty thousand Africans per year were taken as slaves to European colonies, between 1740 and 1840 the number increased to between seventy and ninety thousand per year. During the European eighteenth century, inaugurated by the Treaty of Utrecht, 60 percent of the total African captives were deported. The connection between the demand for goods, as well as construction of palaces and fortresses and the necessity to enslave, is not, however, specific to colonial slavery. Nevertheless, colonial slavery introduced the idea that wealth rests both on the capacity to move a workforce around and on making that workforce disposable. Colonial slavery contributed to the fabrication of “whiteness” in Europe. It is important to note that the construction of whites vs. blacks and of antiblack racism did not belong only to the history of the colony or to the postslavery empire. These views were anchored in colonial slavery. In the eighteenth century Europe had its own racialized minorities, but the slave trade gave new meaning to racial hierarchy. In the case of France, the decrees taken to regulate the presence of persons of African origin in France bring light to the history of whiteness. On July 13, 1315, the king of France declared that “the soil of France frees the slave that touches it” (le sol de France affranchit l’esclave qui le touche). France became a land of free men (not yet “whites”). In 1685, the Code Noir set a series of provisions to govern the lives of the enslaved, in the French colonies. Poor French settlers brought as indentured workers became “whites” with the consolidation of slavery. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, between five thousand and seven thousand people of African origin were living in France, mostly in Paris, occupying positions as slaves, domestics, workers, craftsmen, tailors, seamstresses, musicians, and so on. In 1694 the first limitations on the entry of slaves were issued. In October 1716 new provisions limited more severely the entry of slaves, and for the first time marriage between blacks and whites was forbidden. (In the colonies, it was forbidden by

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the Code Noir.) A slow shift began to make being black and being enslaved synonymous. In August 1777, the Police des Noirs was created, which forbade the entry of any black, free or enslaved, in France. Color became the fundamental marker.6 Freed blacks, or métis, had to carry a permit; if they were arrested without it, they were imprisoned in barracks set up in every French port until they were expelled to a colony, regardless of their wish of destination. On April 5, 1778, marriage between blacks and whites was rigorously forbidden. The French Revolution abolished these provisions, but they were reestablished by Napoleon in March 1802, along with slavery. “The Slave at the Louvre” made use of history to reflect on the impact of slavery in France, displacing the gaze from the colony to the metropole. European art had contributed to the construction of an invisible humanity. The guided visits sought to restore its presence and affirm the living legacies of the enslaved. Françoise Vergès is Chair Global South(s) at Le Collège d’etudes mondiales, Fondation Maison des sciences de l’homme, Paris, and works as an independent curator on tours and exhibitions about the colonial past and postcolonial present. Notes

1 In her intervention, Condé drew from Brazilian modernist poet Oswald de Andrade’s “Manifesto Antropofago,” published in 1928, in which the poet challenged the Western dualities civilization/barbarism, modern/primitive to forge a singular culture. Andrade turned the European accusation of savagery and cannibalism against itself. Condé built on this and spoke of the practice of reverse appropriation, of “cannibalism” as devouring European culture to adapt it and incorporate it into the native self. 2 Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon, 1995), 147. 3 Charles d’Avenant, The Political and Commercial Works of That Celebrated Writer Charles d’Avenant, Relating on Trade and Revenue of England, the Plantation Trade, the East-India Trade and African Trade (London: R. Horsfield, 1771), 89. 4 Charles d’Avenant, “An Essay on the East-India Trade (1697),” avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/eastindi.asp. 5 Abbé de Saint-Pierre, Projet pour rendre la paix perpétuelle en Europe (1761). Jean-Jacques Rousseau repeated Saint-Pierre almost verbatim in his The Plan for Perpetual Peace, on the Government of Poland, and Other Writings on History and Politics, trans. Christopher Kelly and Judith Bush (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2005), 29. 6 Jean-François Niort, Le Code Noir (Paris: Dalloz, 2012).

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WHO’S ZOOMIN’ WHO?

THE EYES OF DONYALE LUNA Richard J. Powell

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n 1996 Taschen Verlag, widely known for their beautifully designed and reasonably priced art books, joined forces with Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany, to produce a spectacular 760page illustrated catalogue of the highlights from the museum’s photographic collections. Among the hundreds of historically significant photographs that appeared in 20th Century Photography: Museum Ludwig, Cologne, three especially enthralling photographs graced the book’s front, back, and spine: photojournalist Fritz Henle’s 1943 portrait of Nieves, one of Mexican muralist Diego Rivera’s models; surrealist Man Ray’s 1930 photographic detail Lips on Lips; and fashion photographer Charlotte March’s 1966 photograph of the African American fashion model Donyale Luna, shot for twen magazine. Taschen’s art director, Mark Thomson, placed Charlotte March’s Donyale Luna with Earrings for twen on the book’s spine, giving the photograph a conspicuous place on prospective bookshelves and, because of Luna’s captivating visage, conscripting the photograph to draw bookstore browsers into Luna’s penetrating gaze. This essay considers Charlotte March’s photograph, paying special attention to her subject, the fashion model and actress Donyale Luna (1945–79), and to Luna’s extraordinary presence within the modern fashion industry and the photographic enterprise, circa 1966.1

Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016 DOI 10.1215/10757163-3641634 © 2016 by Nka Publications

Charlotte March, Donyale Luna with Earrings for twen, 1966. Gelatin silver print, 40 x 39.9 cm. Courtesy Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany

Photograph and collage for April 1965 Harper’s Bazaar cover, featuring Jean Shrimpton. Photo: Richard Avedon. © The Richard Avedon Foundation

By the time of the creation of Donyale Luna with Earrings for twen, Luna had already appeared on the covers of Queen, Harper’s Bazaar, and British Vogue—the first black woman to attain this distinction—and was photographed in haute couture clothing by such legendary fashion photographers as Richard Avedon, David Bailey, Guy Bordin, Frank Horvat, William Klein, Charlotte March, and Norman Parkinson.2 Describing Donyale Luna in 1966 as “the completely new image of the Negro woman,” a commentator in Time magazine further remarked that “fashion finds itself in an instrumental position for changing history, however slightly, for [in the industry’s promotion of Donyale Luna] it is about to bring out into the open the veneration, the

adoration, the idolization of the Negro.”3 Charlotte March’s Donyale Luna takes this pronouncement a step further, interpolating into this declaration a corporeal rejoinder: Luna’s forceful, subliminally militant counter-gaze directed toward a world that, despite its professed adoration of her, nevertheless struggles with the principles of black beauty and black agency. The story of Charlotte March’s photograph of Donyale Luna began one year earlier, but not with photographer March. At the beginning of 1965 the preeminent fashion photographer Richard Avedon was guest editing the April 1965 issue of Harper’s Bazaar (before switching his professional allegiances exclusively to Vogue). This special edition of the fashion magazine—popularly referred to as the “What’s Happening?” issue—was considered the American fashion scene’s official heralding of the Swinging Sixties. Avedon’s guest issue explores the interrelatedness of the arts and of various forms of communication within popular media in 1965, mixing fashion with contemporary painting and sculpture, rock music, poetry and fiction, and culture, both high and low. The much-publicized cover of the April 1965 Harper’s Bazaar is a photographic collage depicting the British fashion model Jean Shrimpton wearing a paper cutout hot pink astronaut’s helmet and, on selected publication runs, an affixed plastic sticker of a lenticular, blinking blue eye placed over Shrimpton’s right eye. Among other memorable subjects for this special issue (such as rock musicians Bob Dylan and Ringo Starr, Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Henry Geldzahler, artist Robert Rauschenberg, and socialite Signora Gianni Agnelli), Avedon included photographs of two especially striking African Americans: the remarkable high school basketball talent Lew Alcindor (who would later go on to greater heights in professional sports under the name Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) and the eighteen-yearold novice fashion model Donyale Luna.4 Although Donyale Luna’s appearance in the legendary “What’s Happening” issue of Harper’s Bazaar signaled her meteoric ascent in the world of American fashion, it also marked, paradoxically, the imposed limitations on her career as a fashion model. For all Luna’s celebrity status after being photographed by Richard Avedon that season

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Cover of March 1966 British Vogue, featuring Donyale Luna. Photo: David Bailey/Vogue. © The Condé Nast Publications Ltd.

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(and, remarkably, after also having appeared on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar just a few months earlier), she quickly collided with the American fashion industry’s glass ceiling for women of color, with her modeling assignments during the latter half of 1965 rapidly plummeting in prestige to the secondary (read “Negro”) advertising market. Richard Avedon admitted years later that “for reasons of racial prejudice and the economics of the fashion business. . . . I was never permitted to photograph [Donyale Luna] for publication again.”5 Coming from one of the most important and influential figures in the fashion industry, Avedon’s admission underscored just how insidious and powerful institutional racism was in the United States: pervasive enough to thwart the materialization of black people in certain media outlets and, when they were seen, influential enough to predetermine a particular image or emotional tenor. One of the entries in a “People Are Talking About” column in a 1965 issue of Vogue perhaps summed up this proscription against black visibility: “People are talking about anything to ease thinking about the two subjects on everyone’s mind: Viet Nam and ‘the Negro Revolution.’”6 It was around this same time that the idea of living and working abroad was planted in Donyale Luna’s mind.7 The lively axis of fashion activities between London, Paris, and Milan, as well as a reputation for being less corrupted by racial prejudice, recommended Europe as the ideal environment in which to work in fashion. Although a professional model, Luna had always aspired to become an actor and writer, and Europe now loomed as the place where these aspirations could be realized and where she might dismantle or retrofit the two identities—Negro and fashion model—which she felt particularly constrained by in America. She left the United States in December 1965, and almost immediately upon arriving in England connected with Richard Avedon’s London counterpart, the famous and notorious fashion photographer David Bailey. If being photographed by Richard Avedon was considered the pinnacle of a fashion model’s career in America, then being shot in 1966 by British photographer David Bailey would have been considered a veritable “blast.” London’s reputation as Europe’s youth capital was legion, and David Bailey was

considered the scene’s official chronicler. Fashion’s centrality to this “youthquake,” evident in the readyto-wear phenomenon of designer Mary Quant, the popularity of the miniskirt, and the deification of the fashion model, invariably included David Bailey’s photographic subjects and their particular histories. From Bailey’s fashion industry portraits of clothing designer Ossie Clark, coiffeur Vidal Sassoon, and model/ex-girlfriend Jean Shrimpton, to those of such London scene makers as painter David Hockney, actor Michael Caine, socialite Jacquetta (Lady Eliot), and assorted rock musicians (i.e., the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, and the Who), the likenesses of London’s most fashionable and up-to-the-minute celebrities were forever enshrined in this photo galaxy of the 1960s.8 “He’s fantastic,” waxed Donyale Luna about her fashion shoot with David Bailey soon after arriving in London. “I could almost rape him when he photographs me,” she flippantly continued, “and I tell him so while we work. We discuss it.”9 Bailey’s photograph of Luna on the March 1966 cover of British Vogue exuded far more modesty than this outrageous admission of hers. Wearing a Chloe dress, Mimi di N earrings, and fiercely eyeballing Bailey through manicured fingers that formed the letter V (for Vogue), this flirtatious eye game was both Luna’s trademark and a clever retort to Bailey’s ex-girlfriend Jean Shrimpton and Richard Avedon’s famous “blinking” photograph of her on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar a year earlier. With Luna’s face partially hidden by her hand, subsequent commentators have suggested that racial concealment was British Vogue’s intent. But this theory collapses upon a closer inspection of the original magazine’s cover and content, especially after surveying Bailey’s numerous group photographs of models Moira Swan, Peggy Moffitt, and the noticeably browner Donyale Luna, all camping it up in the latest Paris fashions.10 Apart from visually “cutting” Richard Avedon, David Bailey was exploring, via Donyale Luna, the visual power of the depicted and isolated eye. Bailey, a longtime admirer of artist Pablo Picasso, drew inspiration from the artist’s portrayals of women and his placement of their eyes at each picture’s nerve center. For Picasso the eye was an acknowledgment of the renegade surrealist

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Georges Bataille’s obsession with that body part or a self-referencing of his own magisterial gaze. For Bailey, the all-seeing eye seemed to function almost independently of its human owner, delivering a demoniac, if shuttered, facade at this voyeuristic, media-driven moment. That the eye, as Bataille had theorized it thirty years earlier, was a conceptual weapon and cognate for a projecting, phalluslike organ came across via Luna’s predatory expression (and verbal aggression) toward the photographer.11 Donyale Luna’s ocular assault, reenacted that same year for millions of American television viewers on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, quickly became her calling card (like Sojourner Truth’s carte de visite a century earlier) and transformed her into an international celebrity.12 “American fashion fotogs missed the boat (and we all know why) when they ignored the talents of Detroit’s Donyale Luna,” dispatched Charles Sanders, a European-based correspondent for Jet magazine, the popular African American weekly. “Maybe it was best that they did, since Donyale’s now living in London and is probably the most photographed girl of 1966.”13 Luna’s knack for conveying a meaningful, commanding presence in her photographs could be described as subject agency. Referred to at that time as “The Look,” Luna’s unremitting, emphatic demeanor was beauty in action and demonstrated an almost indiscernible call-and-response between the photographer and the subject. One is reminded here of Roland Barthes’s statement in Camera Obscura about the “aberrant” way that certain photographic subjects animate their image: “It is this scandalous movement which produces the rarest quality of an air. . . . It is because the look, eliding the vision, seems held back by something interior.”14 Donyale Luna’s most celebrated photograph in which she exhibited “The Look” was Charlotte March’s Donyale Luna with Earrings for twen. Created in Germany in 1966, March’s photograph did not obtain a significant measure of widespread visual currency until Taschen published it thirty years later in 20th Century Photography: Museum Ludwig, Cologne.15 Acquired by the renowned Cologne-based collector Leo Fritz Gruber, Donyale Luna with Earrings for twen joined the other fashion-oriented fine-art photography in Gruber’s extensive collection.

Andreas Feininger, The Photo-journalist, 1955. Gelatin silver print. © Time Life Pictures

The specific circumstances surrounding the 1966 photography session between Charlotte March and Donyale Luna are not known. In all likelihood the shoot followed her sessions with David Bailey earlier that year and, hence, March’s photograph functioned as a kind of visual retort to Bailey’s Donyale Luna / Vogue cover which, in turn, was a visual riposte to Avedon’s Jean Shrimpton / Harper’s Bazaar cover. March, one of the few successful female fashion photographers of that era, was known for her exacting eye and employment of a compositional richness and economy that veered toward the surreal. March was a regular contributor to twen, a pioneering magazine whose topical articles, sophisticated page designs, and cutting-edge art and typography were targeted to Germany’s twenty-something (or “twen”) generation.16 Working closely with twen’s art director, the noted book and magazine designer Willy Fleckhaus, March did at least one other major Powell

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photo shoot with Luna for twen, suggesting that the Hamburg-based photographer and the African American model worked amicably together and, somewhat like Luna and Bailey in British Vogue, were artistic collaborators of sorts.17 What confronts viewers in Donyale Luna with Earrings for twen are Luna’s striking facial features, her perfectly manicured and lens-mimicking hand, and the shiny hoop-and-ball-drop earrings. The combination of the straightforward design, dramatic lighting, a black-and-white film that when processed yielded sooty blacks and subtle shades of gray, and a salient subject all conspired to turn an otherwise conventional head shot into something magical. Despite assertions of being in full control over their creations, many artists, and photographers in particular, are at the mercy of chance or outside intervention. In 1977 Susan Sontag made what would have been considered a profane pronouncement on this subject in her book On Photography, saying that “photography has powers that no other image-system has ever enjoyed because, unlike the earlier ones, it is not dependent on an image maker.”18 Although Sontag quickly follows up this statement with a list of technological factors that determine visual outcomes, her provocation was already aimed and discharged. But to pursue this question of artistic prerogative, one could propose that the other authorial component is the photographic subject. And how does a human subject stand on par with a commandeering photographer / image maker? Through direct eye contact, conspicuous poses and hand gestures, and other peremptory actions. Certain photographic genres like portraiture, fashion photography, performing arts documentation, and pornography consciously or unconsciously employ these tactics to enliven the image and beguile viewers. Charlotte March’s portrait of Donyale Luna was certainly cognizant of how subject agency worked, especially through subject-to-camera eye contact and, by association, the initiation of “The Look.” One is tempted to link March’s portrait of Luna to the well-known portrait of photojournalist Dennis Stock by Life magazine photographer Andreas Feininger, since the two pictures have so many formal and

thematic ingredients in common. Yet one can also draw distinctions between Feininger’s ode to the photographer and March’s fascination with the subject/model and her artistic sightings through an imaginary instrument. That Luna both sees March and her camera, and through a controlling, cyclopslike eye imagines a world beyond the photographer’s studio, is the message that, even under the pretenses of high fashion, permeates the image.19 Donyale Luna’s imaginary monocle and her wide-eyed bemusement at what appears within her viewfinder were emblematic of her subject agency and infused her image with a barely contained satire. At a moment in history when mass media seemed powerful, almighty, and unfettered by either law or morality, Luna’s sassy scrutiny of the world beyond March’s darkened chamber, camped up by her pursed lips and a clawing pinkie finger, carried a signifying air akin to the irony-laden winks and tongue-in-cheek asides of Chitlin’ Circuit comedians and insolent teenagers.20 March’s photograph lovingly captured Luna’s “Negro” features, which when enhanced by cosmetics and embellished with reflective, attention-grabbing, geometric jewelry, transformed her into a fierce Afro-pop goddess, more cyborglike than the victimized, sociological entity that blacks had become in the media’s imagination, circa 1960s. Anticipating by almost twenty years the catchphrase “Who’s Zoomin’ Who?” (the title of Aretha Franklin’s platinum record of the summer of 1985), Luna’s gaze embodied that refrain’s voiced one-upmanship, but not necessarily to a cheating lothario.21 Luna’s parting shot is for an essentially racist fashion industry and, with the assistance of an insurgent female photographer from Germany, symbolically turned the camera’s lens toward the image makers and taste makers, with a critical, all-consuming eye. Richard J. Powell is the John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art and Art History at Duke University. Notes

1 For biographical information on Donyale Luna, see Richard J. Powell, “Luna Obscura,” in Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 80–123. This article is partially derived from the author’s “Luna Obscura” chapter and from Richard J. Powell, “From Diaspora to Exile: Black Women Artists in 1960s and 1970s Europe,” in The Migrant’s Time: Rethinking Art History and Diaspora, ed. Saloni Mathur

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(Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Institute, 2011), 78–90. 2 See Janice Cheddie, “The Politics of the First: The Emergence of the Black Model in the Civil Rights Era,” Fashion Theory 6, no. 1 (2002): 61–81. 3 “Fashion: The Luna Year,” Time 87, April 1, 1966, 55. 4 The “What’s Happening” issue of Harper’s Bazaar 98, April 1965, guest edited by Richard Avedon. Also see Jane Livingston, “The Art of Richard Avedon,” in Richard Avedon, Evidence: 1944– 1994 (New York: Random House, 1994), 11–101. 5 Richard Avedon, as quoted in Dennis Christopher, “Donyale Luna: Fly or Die,” Andy Warhol’s Interview, October 1974, 5–7. 6 “People Are Talking About,” Vogue 145, June 1, 1965, 94. 7 Peggy Ann Freeman (Donyale Luna), Passport Application, November 26, 1965. Issued in New York, NY. Courtesy of the United States Department of State, Washington, DC. 8 Martin Harrison, David Bailey: Birth of the Cool, 1957–1969 (New York: Viking Studio, 1999). 9 Donyale Luna, as quoted in Jane Wilson, “Restless Phase of La Luna,” New York World Journal Tribune, April 16, 1967, 10. 10 See Ben Arogundade, Black Beauty: A History and a Celebration (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2000), 76–79. Also see the “Collections” issue of British Vogue 123, March 1966. 11 Georges Bataille, Story of the Eye (1928; repr. New York: Penguin, 1983). For related discussions on the importance of the eye in modern art, see Jeanne Siegel, “The Image of the Eye in Surrealistic Art and Its Psychoanalytic Sources, Part One: The Mythic Eye,” Arts Magazine 56, February 1982, 102–6, and Jeanne Siegel, “The Image of the Eye in Surrealistic Art and Its Psychoanalytic Sources: Part II: Rene Magritte,” Arts Magazine 56, March 1982, 116–19. 12 For the roster of celebrities, along with Donyale Luna, who appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson on December 12, 1966, see www.imdb.com/title/tt0918304/. 13 Charles L. Sanders, “Paris Scratchpad,” Jet 30, June 16, 1966, 28. 14 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (1980; repr. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 111. 15 20th Century Photography: Museum Ludwig (Cologne, Germany: Taschen, 1996), 419. 16 Zeitgeist Becomes Form, German Fashion Photography 1945– 1995 (Stuttgart, Germany: Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations, 1995). 17 “Pelz auf Eis,” twen 8, November 1966, 68–73, 132, 134. Also see Michael Koetzle and Angelika Beckmann, Twen: Revision einer Legende (Munich, Germany: Münchner Stadtmuseum, 1995). 18 Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 139. 19 Andreas Feininger, Andreas Feininger: Photographer (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1986). 20 The Chitlin’ Circuit was the collective name of segregationera theaters, nightclubs, and performance venues throughout the United States, where African American entertainers and their mostly black audiences engaged in racially informed (and often culturally coded) “call-and-response” banter with one another. For the artistic milieu of the Chitlin’ Circuit, see Peter Guralnick, Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom (New York: Back Bay Books, 1999). 21 Aretha Franklin, Who’s Zoomin’ Who? Arista B000002VD3, 1990, compact disc.

Powell

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DEFACING THE GAZE AND REIMAGINING THE BLACK BODY CONTEMPORARY CARIBBEAN WOMEN ARTISTS

Michelle Stephens

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I

n a now canonical 1990 essay, the Caribbean philosopher Sylvia Wynter describes two central features of colonial modernity that bear on the topics of portraiture and the representation of the black body in Western visual arts.1 In one regard, the discourse of colonial modernity rests on a Manichean struggle between the masculine subjectivities of the colonizer and the colonized, Prospero and Caliban, the European master and the native slave on Shakespeare’s magical island in his play The Tempest. This struggle is staged in a way that forecloses or excludes woman, as a discursive category, from the framework of racialized subjectivity established by colonial modernity. Where is Caliban’s woman, Wynter asks, and why is she excluded? What Wynter describes using the language of colonial discourse, Lacanian philosopher Joan Copjec describes using psychoanalytic theory. If, as modern subjects, our unconscious is structured like a language, with a set of rules, codes, and conventions prescribing our desires and shaping us, then this unconscious language is generated from a social symbolic order that operates according to a phallic logic or function. This phallic function is defined not so much by the absence of woman as by an inability to decipher her placement within

Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016 DOI 10.1215/10757163-3641645 © 2016 by Nka Publications

Patricia Kaersenhout, Invisible Men, 2009. Bound book, 128 pages, full color with a variety of paper and printing techniques, 165 x 240 mm. Published by Eindeloos uitgevers with graphic design by Vivienne van Leeuwen

a discursive order governed by patriarchal rules. Although woman is absent (as with Caliban), she is also an open signifier standing outside the symbolic order and confounding reason.2 In her equally canonical essay, described by many as the first piece of cultural criticism on the black female body in art, Lorraine O’Grady points to an erasure of the black female in visual mediums that corresponds to the discursive erasures both Wynter and Copjec identify. As O’Grady observes: “The female body in the West is not a unitary sign. Rather, like a coin, it has an obverse and a reverse: on the one side, it is white; on the other, non-white or, prototypically black.” Like Caliban’s woman, the black female subject’s “place is outside of what can be conceived of as woman.” Instead, she functions to “cast the difference of white men and white women into sharper relief.”3 Caribbean women visual artists, in wrestling with this dis-appearing of woman from the realms of both discourse and image, have chosen to

foreground a particular vision of the black body as flesh. If for Nicole Fleetwood the phrase excess flesh describes “ways in which black female corporeality is rendered as an excessive overdetermination and as overdetermined excess,” for Caribbean female visual artists excess flesh also figures as a black body that resists being phallicized, that literally disrupts a visual and symbolic order that dresses the black body and face as an impermeable surface with a hard, impenetrable, racially fixed skin.4 A close reading of Édouard Manet’s nineteenthcentury oil painting Olympia, a representative portrayal of the European female nude, brings the insights from Wynter, O’Grady, and Fleetwood to the forefront. Seated next to the bed on which Olympia lounges, the other woman in the painting, the black woman, hovers, almost invisible, in the background. In stark contrast, Olympia’s defiant gaze has gained distinction in the history of the nude, demonstrating the white female model’s bold self-awareness.5 By staring back at the male gazer

Oneika Russell, Olympia 7, from The Olympia Series, 2006. Digital print. Courtesy the artist

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Holly Bynoe, Pedigree, 2009. Digital collage, 40 x 40 in. Courtesy the artist

she becomes more than a body; she acquires a face, placing herself in the picture in a way that points to her subjectivity. However, O’Grady argues, “only the white body remains as the object of a voyeuristic, fetishizing male gaze,” and Olympia’s gaze is as much a commentary on her relationship to the black woman barely in view. The painting’s message is not “I am black but beautiful,” but rather, as Kim Hall describes, “I am beautiful because she is black.” It is the white woman’s, and not the black woman’s, face that speaks.6 Over the course of European modernity, the face has come to represent what it means to be a person, a human. This is one of the central symbolic functions of portraiture, as Jennifer Law describes: “Modern ideas of selfhood and individual subjectivity have their roots in the philosophies of the Enlightenment period. . . . [T]he figurative emphasis on external physical and physiognomic characteristics as representative of a person’s ‘socialised self ’ in portraiture . . . the ‘front of an individual’ . . . has persisted well beyond the eighteenth century.”7 As a master signifier, the face is seen to express one’s subjectivity. In this dressing of the self (portraiture), the subject creates an idealized self-image for the viewer’s gaze.8 Caribbean artist Oneika Russell draws our attention to Manet’s effaced black woman in her piece Olympia 7, appropriating Manet’s canonical work.

In Olympia 7, the black woman outlined in relief against the frame is not a transcendent face because her racialized appearance obfuscates and erases her gendered meaning. In Manet’s original work, her cloaking in the shadows represents how different epidermal aspects of black femininity become visible and impose themselves on the viewer. Epidermalization foregrounds the importance of surfaces to racialization processes specifically, transforming the female body in Olympia into a signifier for race rather than sex.9 In Olympia 7, Russell points an arrow toward the black female figure, now outlined in gray. Foregrounded in contrast to the white female figure who blends into the patterned background, the thicker line around the black model’s body intimates that the decorative pattern hits a limit at the border of her skin. This gray barrier, a visual metaphor for the epidermal bodyline, suggests that there may be something about her black skin that blocks the sexualizing tendencies of the gaze directed at the nude. This raises the second important feature of colonial modernity that Wynter’s essay addresses. Caliban and Prospero’s conflict, with its Manichean, phallocentric logic both in colonial and postcolonial discourses, rests on an understanding of identity as fundamentally derived from and based on difference. This is a difference located not so much in the body as on its surface. Beginning in the early modern era of colonial discovery, Wynter argues, anatomical sexual difference was replaced by epidermal racial difference as the primary signifier for differences among humans. The consequence of this fundamental shift in Western discourse was, Wynter notes, that “the not-white woman as well as the not-white man are symbolically excluded from sexual difference.” Medieval Western conceptions of the body were focused on anatomy, on what was inside the body rather than what lay on its surface. For the early anatomists, the body was also a grotesque surface of “execrescences and orifices,” where what was inside could become outside: “Protruding body parts (the nose or stomach, for example) are understood as projecting into the world, and the inside of the body comes out and mingles with the world.”10 Even gender difference was understood in European Stephens

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terms as an inversion rather than a difference. The female genitals were simply “inside the body and not outside it,” or as another medieval scholar put it, “Turn outward the woman’s, and turn inward . . . and fold double the man’s, and you will find the same in both in every respect.”11 The body of the Middle Ages was a “grotesque body” completely at odds with a more modern, post-Baroque conception of “an entirely finished, completed, strictly limited body.”12 Colonial modernity is founded on this fundamental shift in European thinking from understanding the body in terms of anatomy to understanding it in terms of physiognomy. In the 1990s critical efforts to decolonize the black body from Western regimes of representation were still shaped by an older dichotomy between the body of nature and the body of culture. “At the end of every path we take,” O’Grady laments, “we find a body that is always already colonized.”13 In our current moment, critical discourse has shifted toward comparisons of a body of experience to a body of construction, both situated in a subjective rather than objectified corporeal space. This raises the question of whether the once fetishized object of a fleshy blackness could also arouse the desire to touch (upon) aspects of the bodily self that the phallic order struggles to represent and can never fulfill. This is the body of affect, constituted by “visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than

conscious knowing, vital forces insisting beyond emotion—that can serve to drive us toward movement, toward thought” and toward multiple, mobile forms of relation.14 This is the phenomenological black body Frantz Fanon contrasted with epidermalization, constituted by his sense of the “slow composition of my self as a body in the middle of a spatial and temporal world.”15 This is a black body that is more, experiences more, than the gaze can see or describe in words, an embodied subjectivity that knows itself instead through “residual sensations and perceptions primarily of a tactile, vestibular, kinesthetic, and visual character.”16 The black body of affect is also the “body without an image,” in that it works against the phallic gaze that excludes woman and epidermalizes difference.17 It is this black body of affect, a fleshly body, that appears in the works of contemporary women artists from the Caribbean. Un/dressing the Black Subject of Female Flesh If the portrait is the paradigmatic visual genre for representing the Western male subject—his mirror image, his frontal image, his apprehension of himself as whole—the female nude offers a very different kind of “sight” of the human body. Throughout European cultural history the flesh has often been associated with the female, while the ability to transcend an image of the human subject as mere

Ebony G. Patterson, Untitled (Venus Inverts), 2005. Collagraph, 96 x 192 in. Courtesy the artist and Monique Meloche Gallery. © Ebony G. Patterson

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skin has been associated with masculinity. Claudia Benthien argues, for example, that depictions of the idealized male nude borrow the hard muscularity and rigid lines present in older, anatomically detailed écorchés and leave behind the flayed skin depicted as a loose cloth or covering.18 Everything not idealized about the leaky, permeable skin remains an aspect of female flesh: “Femaleness lies only in the dark and muddy breeding ground in the depths of the body. . . . The male body was, symbolically, gradually closed into an ‘impermeable body,’ while the female body was construed as ‘a leaking, uncontrollable, seeping liquid.’”19 Benthien describes this further as a process of “phallicizing the male body.” It has implications for how we understand the phallic signifier as a structure for the modern subject. The (phallic) subject struggles with an internal split between the social self he perceives in the mirror and with whom he identifies and a presymbolic, bodily self split off and left behind with the subject’s entrance into the symbolic order. Unconsciously, the subject experiences this original “rending of the subject from himself ” as an interior gap. This is a place of not knowing within the self, not unlike the undecipherable place of woman within a phallic symbolic order.20 Modern gendered subjectivity is constituted by and out of the subject’s desire to fill this gap, to fill in the subject that is not whole. The body’s orifices are seen not as openings that fold unto and into each other, but rather as holes that need to be filled. The missing parts of this grotesque bodily self are made (w)hole by the substitution of phallic objects that temporarily replace and thereby fulfill the subject’s desire. The image of the face, the frontal self seen and imagined as a unified whole, is one such imaginary object. The objectified, nude female body is another, a prop the (male) subject of discourse utilizes to close up the holes in the self. Portrait photography often promises to deliver a realistic “likeness” of the subject as conveyed in the face. In defiance of this photographic gaze, which works to make faces appear seamless and closed, Holly Bynoe digitally manipulates photos with density and texture in her collage series Compounds to create palimpsests of the face. In Pedigree a black, charred, inky background oozes

around a doubled face of indeterminate race and gender. The surface, a mix of inky, smudged-over, and underdeveloped blots, and the permeable faces merge to remove identifying characteristics. On her website Bynoe adds a caption: “a part of the pool.”21 The pun on the word pool—a pool of water, a family pool—questions the notion that identity is fixed by pure, linear, racial genealogies. In Pedigree one might even say Bynoe overexposes the face to capture not subjectivity as surface but invaginated subject as orifice, composed by what lies in the swirling, fluid, murky, and inky depths of the embodied self. The damaged surface of the image, like a weathered face, captures a haunting portrayal of the impressionistic semblance rather than the expressive likeness of human subjectivity, which still retains a sense of mystery for both the subject and the gazer. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon also suggests that the most frightening specter of the lost body of the subject in a phallic order might be the black phallus. Fanon theorizes a form of white psychopathology in which the (white) subject, separating from and leaving behind his fleshy, bodily self, suddenly sees in the image of the black subject an apparition of that residual, leftover body shadowing his or her mirror image.22 This black imago, the “black man” that appears in the mirror of the white ego as phobic fantasy and racial stereotype, is nothing but the afterimage of an otherness that exists in the terrifying gap between the (white) subject’s own felt body and his body-image. This black imago then appears on the cultural screen as the black penis-object. However, the black phallus is not simply the hypersexualized, eroticized black penis we are used to analyzing in critical cultural discourse. Rather, it is also, potentially, an image of the sensational body, even if now characterized negatively as biologically determined. “The Negro is fixated at the genital,” “the Negro symbolizes the biological,” “the Negro represents the sexual instinct (in its raw state)”— Fanon tells us this repeatedly, not in order to point only to the black phallic subject as a fetish arousing desire, but also to point to his status as a frightening, anxiety-producing figure for those missing parts that the white man uses the phallus and other phallic props to defend himself against.23 Stephens

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Ebony G. Patterson, Vulva II, 2006. Mixed-media collagraph, 108 x 60 in. Courtesy the artist and Monique Meloche Gallery. © Ebony G. Patterson

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Fanon’s “phobogenic object,” the Negro “penis symbol” that is also “a stimulus to anxiety,” is a metonymic figure for the lost sensational and erogenous body, the phallic signifier’s ugly, meaty underside.24 In Robert Mapplethorpe’s famous photograph Man in Polyester Suit, for example, the image of a black male dressed in a three-piece polyester suit is cropped from just above the waist to just above the knee, emphasizing and framing his exposed, uncircumcised phallus.25 Not quite portrait and not quite nude, what disturbs the gaze in Mapplethorpe’s photograph is precisely the visibility of the fleshy skin of the phallic signifier—or the phallic signifier as a fleshy black foreskin covering over what is frightening about the erogenous body. In her 2009 illustrated book Invisible Men, Patricia Kaersenhout chooses to reimagine what is culturally invisible about black masculinity as a wounded, exposed, skinned body. Colorfully painting over “the pages of an old biology book, with its illustrations of intestines, skin structure, hair, the digestive system, and so on,” Kaersenhout rips into the phallic signifier, creating images of flayed black male bodies in all their visceral, meaty, muscular, fleshy layers.26 In the cover image for Invisible Men, a black male face peeks out from between the entrails of a fleshy black body imagined as a porous container. Kaersenhout returns us to the grotesque, privileging a representation of the black male’s viscera over his portrait. Compared with Man in Polyester Suit, with its privileging of the black phallus as more important than the face, here the face of the phallic, black male is turned inside out, his innards exposed on the outside. In a similar vein, Ebony Patterson captures the uncanny, meaty aspects of a black female body that defies symbolization in her 2004–5 series, Venus Investigations, where “portraits” of the nude, headless, and anonymous female torso of an ample-bodied Venuslike figure reference the fatty, fleshy, viscous, sensuous body of the Venus Hottentot, whom audiences fetishized and Georges Cuvier dissected and anatomized in the early nineteenth century. Subsequent works by Patterson subject the vagina to a similar scrutiny, producing images of a vulva that, like the one-sexed body of the medieval era, are simultaneously phallic and vaginal volumes, indecipherable and undifferentiated when viewed

from the inside out. Representing black female flesh as a metonym for the black body more broadly, Patterson reveals the black bodily subject less as an absence or an imago than as a material presence whose leaky pulpy insides shift us from an image of the subject as a surface, a face, to one of relational flesh and sensational skin. Russell, Bynoe, Kaersenhout, and Patterson all point to the ways in which the black body in art has been displaced by its surrogate, a facialization of the black body as pure surface, the phallicization and epidermalization of the black subject as nothing more than his or her skin. To destabilize this body, these artists seek to get back to what Hortense Spillers describes as a black body of the flesh. This is flesh that reveals the markings of the symbolic order on and beneath its skin—“its seared, divided, ripped-apartness”—and whose “undecipherable markings . . . come to be hidden to the cultural seeing by skin color.”27 These contemporary Caribbean women artists turn inward, literally and figuratively, in order to shift our attention away from the overdetermined black body of social and visual construction and toward a more haptic, tactile, viscous experience of ourselves as flesh. Michelle Stephens is a professor of English and Latino and Caribbean studies at Rutgers University. Notes

1 Sylvia Wynter, “Beyond Miranda’s Meanings: Un/silencing the ‘Demonic Ground’ of Caliban’s ‘Woman,’” in Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature, ed. Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1990), 355–71. 2 Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 224. 3 Lorraine O’Grady, “Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity,” Afterimage 20, no. 1 (1992), www.lorraineogrady.com /olympia%E2%80%99s-maid-1992-1994. 4 Nicole R. Fleetwood, Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 5 John Berger, Ways of Seeing (New York: Viking, 1973), 46–47. 6 Kim Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 251. 7 Jennifer Law, “Knowledge Is Made for Printing: Joscelyn Gardner’s Creole Portraits Series,” in Bleeding and Breeding: Joscelyn Gardner (exhibition catalogue), ed. Joscelyn Gardner (Whitby, ON, Canada: Station Gallery, 2012), 12. 8 In “Year Zero: Faciality,” in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 167–91, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari call this facialization, arguing that the logic of the modern signifying order is one in which the face, the surface, is the master signifier for subjectivity, sitting at the intersection between subjectification and signification. Stephens

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9 In Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1967), 111, Frantz Fanon names epidermalization—an inability to see beneath the skin, beyond appearance—as the visual regime that lies at the heart of racial classification. 10 Claudia Benthien, Skin: On the Cultural Border between Self and World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 38–39. 11 Vanita Seth, Europe’s Indians: Producing Racial Difference, 15001900 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 183. 12 Benthien, Skin, 38. 13 O’Grady, “Olympia’s Maid,” includes a “Postscript,” originally published in New Feminist Criticism: Art, Identity, Action, ed. Joanna Frueh, Cassandra L. Langer, and Arlene Raven (New York: Icon, 1994), where she describes her efforts to reclaim a more phenomenological theory of the body that could escape the constructivist/essentialist dichotomy that so shaped discourses on the black body in the 1990s. 14 Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, eds., The Affect Theory Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 1. 15 Fanon, Black Skin, 111. 16 Ibid. 17 Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Post-Contemporary Interventions) (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 57. 18 Benthien, Skin, 17. 19 Ibid., 89. 20 Jacques Lacan, Écrits (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999), 286. 21 hollybynoe.com/artwork/1125201_pedigree.html. 22 Fanon, Black Skin, 161. 23 Ibid., 165, 167, 177. 24 Ibid., 151–70. 25 For more discussion of Mapplethorpe’s images of the black male body see Kobena Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1994). 26 Patricia Kaersenhout, “Foreword,” in Invisible Men (The Hague: Eindeloos, 2009). 27 Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 67.

30 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016

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BLACK QUEER DANDY THE BEAUTY WITHOUT WHOM WE CANNOT LIVE

Monica L. Miller The inevitable logic with which we are confronted is not so much that the black, the Negro, the colored is always thought to be more prone to sexual perversion but instead that blackness itself, that telltale color, is always a sort of sexual crime regardless of how it is articulated. The presence of the black in any location represents precisely the failure of the American and European eugenicist projects, a failure that has occurred because the black is not only threatening, but appealing, not only the monster that the policeman must beat into submission, but also the beauty without whom he cannot seem to live. Robert Reid-Pharr, Once You Go Black 32 • Nka

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f blackness itself is a “sexual crime,” if “the colored is thought to be more prone to sexual perversion,” then how do we read Nigerian/British artist Yinka Shonibare’s 2002 sculpture or “dress” (his word) Big Boy? The crimes, sexual and racial, bespoken by this image are multiple; as Big Boy strides so elegantly into our visual space, he brings confusion and a beautifully designed ruffled train with him. This image is an announcement, a posture that demands not only notice but acclaim, and maybe even an aggressive embrace. Though present here in an unknown historical or geographical location (he is at once African and Victorian, in a museum space and perhaps striving to get off his dais), he seems vigorous, in spite of any “eugenicist projects” or even his lack of a head. This black “is not only threatening, but appealing . . . the beauty without whom” any “policeman” or critic patrolling

Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016 DOI 10.1215/10757163-3641656 © 2016 by Nka Publications

Yinka Shonibare MBE, Big Boy, 2002. Wax-printed cotton fabric, fiberglass, 215 x 170 x 140 cm. Plinth, 220 x 12 cm. Courtesy the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London. © Yinka Shonibare MBE

Miller

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The Aesthetic Craze. Lithograph, 42.8 x 33.5 cm. Courtesy the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles. © Currier & Ives, New York, 1882

the borders of race, sexuality, and gender “cannot seem to live.” Shonibare’s sculpture prompts a rhetorical, and ultimately silly, question: what is more queer— blackness or homosexuality? Inevitably, choosing which of the two is “the queerest of all” is pointless and even dishonest. As Robert Reid-Pharr reminds us, blackness has always been perverse. The opposite seems true as well—the queer has always been in some ways raced or racialized. Yet I pose the question because I have nonetheless been thinking about it while assembling the black queer dandy archive in my book Slaves to Fashion, an archive in which the aesthete Oscar Wilde plays an intriguing part.1 In this essay I explore the question through the relationship between Shonibare and Wilde by presenting a short history of the black dandy that suggests that pairing these two artists is, like the blackness

and queerness that joins them, both monstrous and beautiful, and necessarily so. In my archive the first black dandy who was famous, fabulous, and, therefore, criminal was an eighteenth-century Londoner, Julius Soubise. Soubise belonged to a select group of English black slaves and servants called “luxury slaves” or “darling blacks.” Among the first black dandies that I have identified in an Anglo-American context, these boys and men were, perhaps, the first group of dandified slaves that were able to make fashion their slave. In discussing these men, and the history of black dandyism more generally, I have coined the phrase crime of fashion to capture the dynamic in which these men were embroiled and of which they took advantage. Crimes of fashion cut both ways. They are racial and sexual, dehumanizing, and, potentially, a means by which the agency and subjectivity of queer black subjects can be imagined and produced. To be more specific, Soubise himself was at once the victim of a vogue as well as a traitorous trendsetter himself. Born in Jamaica and brought to England in 1764, he was the most visible and famous of the servants who, as early as the 1650s, had been used as the ultimate expression of imperialist wealth by royalty, aristocracy, and, later, upstart merchants. These young black servants were dressed in the latest fashions and sometimes educated in the genteel arts. And they were made into companions and confidants to their masters and mistresses. As such, they expressly were not used as labor and therefore particularly emblematized slavery’s conspicuous consumption of black bodies.2 A former slave, manumitted and “adopted” by the Duchess of Queensbury, Soubise was theatrical and spectacular, and he complicated perceptions of black masculinity, sexuality, and Englishness. Often clad in a “powdered wig, white silk breeches, very tight coat and vest, with enormous white neck cloth, white silk stockings, diamond-buckled red-heeled shoes,” Soubise’s dress and accessories signaled his overweening interest in self and highlighted both his assimilation to Englishness and his foreignness.3 As an effeminate xenophile, a fop is a traitor on a number of levels—to his class, gender, and country. When racialized as black, a fop like Soubise is even more outrageous, even while seemingly appealing.

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Despite his appearance and behavior (or because of it), Soubise became a noted man-about-town, a status that included entertaining visitors in rooms filled with hothouse flowers, pursuing an array of women via song and poetry, taking boxes at the opera, joining expensive men’s clubs like the Macaroni Club (the sexuality of the members of this club was actually under surveillance), and riding around town in his own post chaise and four, driven by a white groom. Considered an Othello from an early age, Soubise was as much on display for his sexuality as for his blackness or Africanness. Dressed in the latest fashions as a boy while at the duchess’s side, he was at once feminized and spectacularized, made into an object whose own desires could be ignored. With the duchess’s purse in his hand as an adult, he seemingly became a different kind of curiosity, able to act, at least sometimes, on his own will. For Soubise and all black slaves and servants, whether they labored in the fields or in country houses, the subjugation of their race depended absolutely on the disciplining of their sexuality. Given his isolation as a black in elite white society, to exercise his sexuality could only be perceived as a miscegenistic threat. Although a product of the confused desires of the British elite and, indeed, a man whose very body and its adornment in lace and silks embodied that disorder, Soubise could not or would not be allowed to spread the bewilderment further as he matured. Accused of violating his patron’s maid, he was forced into exile and sailed for Calcutta in July 1777.4 While perhaps not queer in the sense of samesex loving, Soubise and his fellows were certainly, to borrow E. Patrick Johnson’s definition, “quare.” According to Johnson, a quare is “one for whom sexual and gender identities always already intersect with racial subjectivity.”5 Soubise’s tale teaches that dandyism begins in black and white simultaneously, that the two depend on each other, that their dependency makes them “queer/quare.” Wilde and Shonibare make much of this lesson when they meet. We also learn from Soubise that Empire and imperialism produce these rakish phenomena and set into motion a contest—aesthetic, cultural, political, sartorial—in which many crimes of fashion are committed.

Given what we know about Soubise, it might not be surprising to learn that when Oscar Wilde was on tour of America in 1882, Wilde was frequently caricatured in the press as a black dandy. As Curtis Marez argues, contemporary caricatures of Wilde as a black dandy expose the supposed foreignness of his effeminacy and aesthetic philosophy to Americans who, a hundred years earlier, in 1776, had “manned up” and rid themselves of British colonial rule.6 To these pragmatic postcolonial Americans, Wilde, with his love of artifice, his celebration of indolence and disdain for work, and his championing of ornament and accessory as ends in themselves (notice the Soubisean echoes), embodied the antithesis of an American national ideology of naturalness, practicality, ruggedness, and hard work. While the caricatures mocked Wilde’s decadent Britishness and hinted at his sexual anomalousness, they also emphatically reminded him of his Irishness. At that time in the United States, as in Britain, Irish was its own racial category: Irish people were simian, savage, base, black. Yet, despite the effort to estrange Wilde, this odd visitor to American shores, he was also queerly embraced as a kind of foreigner within because the caricatures utilized the symbols of blackface minstrelsy, a homegrown critique of America’s very own internal strangers, African Americans. Black dandies abound in blackface minstrel performances and in the iconography of nineteenth-century popular culture.7 The urbane, sarcastic, buffoonish, and sexually aggressive characters of Zip Coon, Long Tail Blue, and Dandy Jim from Carolina all strutted across the minstrel stage, announcing their menacing yet fascinating presence. Singing, “I’ve often heard it said of late / Dat South Carolina was de state / Whar handsome niggars bound to shine / Like ‘Dandy Jim from Caroline,’” Dandy Jim was certainly one of those characters from the nineteenth century’s most popular entertainment, whose narcissism, sexual prowess, and class aspiration titillated with equal parts threat and appeal. In the antebellum minstrel show in particular Dandy Jim and his fellow “black” dandies provided a way for working-class, immigrant, white performers of blackface, who were ironically often Irish, to ask, “What if?” What if blacks were free? What if they had money, access Miller

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Yinka Shonibare MBE, Diary of a Victorian Dandy: 03.00 hours, 1998. C-type print, 183 x 228.6 cm. Courtesy the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London. © Yinka Shonibare MBE 

to education, unchecked social, cultural, and economic mobility? Although the early minstrel show presented the dandy in slightly different guises, it consistently associated the figure with sexual threat and class critique. Despite the fact that blackface dandy’s sexual threat is almost always figured as heterosexual, because of the way in which his racialization is so bound up in his sexuality and vice versa, the figure has a quare effect. (This is not to mention that blackface performance was often also drag performance, as white men portrayed black women pursued by blackface dandies). To say that the blackface dandy himself is queer, as in same-sex loving, however, would be anachronistic and would in some ways

limit the total force of his boundary crossings. The black dandy’s overweening and inappropriate sexuality blackens him, just as his blackness (and fine dressing) makes his sexuality anomalous. Thus, representations of Oscar Wilde as a black dandy signify in a number of arenas: he is black because he is socially outré and overweening, he belongs to “aping culture,” he has class aspirations, and he is Irish (and thus savage). All of these traits he shares with African Americans. His perception as black also signals that his gender identity and sexuality are, at best, out of order. For his American audiences, he was not quite English and yet too British; this queerness led to his being perceived as black. The black dandy, along with his association

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with Wilde, therefore, becomes a locus for imaging the intersections of race, class, nationality, sexuality, and gender—a perfect figure for artist Yinka Shonibare to use to re-dress this history of postcolonial crimes of fashion. When describing how he is perceived in the art world, London-born, Nigerian-raised artist Yinka Shonibare says: “When people see an artist of African origin, they think: oh, he’s here to protest.” He admits: “Yes, okay, I’m here to protest,” and adds, provocatively, “but I am going to do it like a gentleman. It is going to look very nice.”8 While he has not yet worn any of his own cloth sculptures or dresses, to play the dandy himself in his photographic work was, perhaps, inevitable. Whereas most of his sculptures are displayed without a background, as “naked” tableaux they are ambiguously raced and gendered, have no discernible sexual orientation, and hail from no known nation. They challenge us to fill in a context around the dandified figure. In contrast, Shonibare’s photographic work presents the dandy’s context in the same kind of meticulous, wry detail that characterizes the fabric folds in his sculptures. Here, the dandy played by Shonibare is definitively African; his setting is at once the Enlightenment, Victorian England, and altogether contemporary. What fascinates about Shonibare’s photographic work in particular is that he looks at both the history of black representation and that of representing queerness through blackness, explicitly through the dandy’s history. In fact, in Diary of a Victorian Dandy (1998) and Dorian Gray (2001), he takes on the black dandy figure more particularly as the vehicle of his productive confusion in order to re-dress Wilde in blackface and also to recognize the dangerous beauty of a Wildean aesthetic game. Shot like a series of film stills, Diary of a Victorian Dandy signifies transhistorically as it reimagines the black dandy’s origins in the Enlightenment and classic European dandy locations (Victorian England) while also bringing the figure to the threshold of the twenty-first century. In this piece, Shonibare calls on the likes of Soubise, Dandy Jim, and the aesthete Oscar Wilde to narrate the black dandy’s more recent crimes. Instead of wearing a livery and being in someone else’s service, this dandy is served, again and again. There is

no scene here in which the dandy does not appear totally in control. Indeed, the photograph 03.00 hours from the series shows him not only being served, but serviced, as he lounges in pink waistcoat on the bed, surrounded by servants in various stages of sexual exploration of him and each other. In this image, the black dandy is centered as the/an object of desire. Throughout the sequence, all eyes devour him when he is either in the bedroom or the boardroom. His clothing is the richest and most colorful, and all others are positioned, it seems, to get a good view. Finally, at 19.00 hours, occupying the middle of an elaborate drawing room, he is feted by an adoring, extremely fashionable public; he is being toasted for his accomplishment—for inserting his interrogative body within this dandified frame, for triumphing in his cool aestheticism. In Diary of a Victorian Dandy, as in Shonibare’s entire oeuvre, he “would proffer a fiction of difference, like the devil’s hand in a card game.”9 The staged quality of these images, as well as the settings in which they appear, impact how we read the black dandy and narcissism within them; when exhibited in a gallery, the images are shown in elaborate, heavy, gilt frames. Though seemingly triumphant, within the scenes Shonibare as Victorian dandy looks both in command and awkwardly positioned, even alienated. His body is stiff, his face blank in marked contrast to the much more expressive bodies of his servants, attendants, and audience and their eager-to-please faces. Though the figure’s disposition in these photos is partly due to Shonibare’s own physical limitations (he was nearly crippled by a viral infection while in his first year of art school), his dis-ease within the frame is both actual and symbolic. This dandy might be imprisoned within this image, all grown-up (a “Big Boy”) but with no discernible way out of the frame that “raised” him. Additionally, when reproduced in exhibition catalogues, the scene most raw in its desire, the orgy scene 03.00 hours, is sometimes positioned as the first photograph in the series, sometimes the last. Thus, this Diary of a Victorian Dandy has a distinctive circularity about it. The dandy’s narcissism in these elaborate self-portraits both redeems and traps, liberates and imprisons. In Dorian Gray (2001) Shonibare asks a related but slightly different set of questions about the Miller

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Yinka Shonibare MBE, Dorian Gray, 2001. One of eleven digital lambda prints, 122 x 152.5 cm., unframed. Courtesy the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London © Yinka Shonibare MBE 

politics of the look and what decadence affords the abject through the dandy figure. Deliberately shot in the form of twelve film stills that correspond in mood, but not always in content, to Wilde’s classic story (and also to a 1945 American film of Wilde’s story), Dorian Gray, like The Diary of a Victorian Dandy, both celebrates and reviles the dandy figure. In fact, Shonibare’s Dorian Gray seems less triumphant and even more cautionary about the subversiveness and liberatory quality of an artist’s dandy masquerade. Just as The Diary follows a black rake through his day, Dorian Gray follows a black dandy through his encounter with Wilde’s “New Hedonism.” The moments of Dorian’s tale that Shonibare chooses to represent, and the ways in which he represents them, are curious, leading us to surmise that at stake in this Dorian Gray are not only the Wildean themes concerning the moral compass of aestheticism or the ethical problem of psychological influence, but also the threat and beauty of “black” as an identity, intertwined with the power and problem of self-regard. Since we miss major moments from both the novel and the film in Shonibare’s series, the drama of Wilde’s particular narrative clearly is not what

the artist is after. Instead, he privileges a dandy’s contemplation over his status as a provocateur or pleasure-seeker. In shot after shot Dorian either contemplates his own image or engages in what looks like guarded conversation with others; particularly telling, the image of Dorian in the park illustrates his physical isolation from others and, perhaps, even himself. Nowhere is the sexiness of The Diary of a Victorian Dandy nor the Wildean story in evidence in this series; instead, it is empty of any scenes of charged assignations or homoerotic banter. As such, Shonibare empties one of the English language’s most prototypically “queer” texts of its homosexual or homosocial content (or he encodes it).10 Black and dandy, the outsider status of this figure—not his sartorial fabulousness or seductive power—is on display. If anything is emphasized in this series, it is the queerness of being black or dandy or both, and the melancholy that accompanies this lonely position. If “the critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things,” as Wilde states in his aphoristic preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, then Shonibare’s transformations of the history of British imperialism through African fabric and through Oscar Wilde reveal his critical faculty as acute and extremely attentive to the politics of the dandy’s queer crimes.11 And if, as Wilde also says in the same preface, “the nineteenth century’s dislike of realism [representation of the real] is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in the glass,” then Shonibare as Caliban uses both the dandy’s “interrogative body” and his own to probe the scene of his subjection in a way that allows him to articulately curse at those who taught him this sartorial semiotic. So if the dandies in Shonibare’s photographs are arrested within their frames and in their critique of the styling of blackness, while his fabric sculptures, though headless, retain a vitality in their implied motion, then where does that leave us? Given that, like Wilde, Shonibare wants to “look at his practice in the area of the poetic,” outside of moralizing and anything that resembles what he calls “straight speech,” the dandy artist (Soubise, Wilde, Shonibare) remains a trickster, because dandies, whether as the vehicle or the subject of critique, are never what they seem.12 A dandy is “unknowable, because he is always in

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disguise.”13 A frisson of disguise and desire, the “beauty without whom we cannot seem to live,” is then this delicious, dangerous, and perhaps deadly black dandy queerness. Monica L. Miller is an associate professor of English at Barnard College, Columbia University, in New York City. Notes

1 Initially presented at the Black Portraiture[s]: The Black Body in the West conference in Paris, January 2013, this essay reworks some of the arguments in my book Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). 2 For more on the “luxury slave” phenomenon, see especially Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London: Pluto Press, 1970); Folarin Shyllon, Black People in Britain 1555–1833 (London: Oxford University Press, 1977); Edward Scobie, Black Britannia: A History of Black in Britain (Chicago: Johnson, 1972); Gretchen Gerzina, Black London: Life Before Emancipation (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003). 3 The most comprehensive version of Soubise’s biography is found in Scobie, Black Britannia and also Vincent Caretta, “Soubise,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). This quotation is from Scobie, Black Britannia, 92. 4 Scobie omits this detail of Soubise’s life; Fryer and Shyllon mention it briefly. 5 E. Patrick Johnson, “‘Quare Studies,’” in Black Queer Studies, ed. E. Patrick Johnson and Mae G. Henderson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 125. 6 Curtis Marez, “The Other Addict: Reflections on Colonialism and Oscar Wilde’s Opium Smokescreen,” ELH 64, no. 1 (1997): 257–87. 7 For more on black dandies on stage and in popular culture during the nineteenth century, see Eric Lott’s classic, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), and Shane White and Graham White, Stylin’: African American Expressive Culture from Its Beginnings to the Zoot Suit (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998). 8 Jaap Guldemond and Gabrielle Mackert, “To Entertain and Provoke: Western Influences in the Work of Yinka Shonibare,” in Yinka Shonibare: Double Dutch (Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen Rotterdam / NAi Publishers, 2004), 41. 9 Olu Oguibe, “Double-Dutch and the Culture Game,” in Yinka Shonibare: Be-Muse (exhibition catalogue) (Rome, 2001). 10 I am thankful to Caroline Levin, professor of English, University of Wisconsin, Madison, for this insight. 11 Oscar Wilde, “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (New York: Harper and Row, 1989). 12 Okwui Enwezor, “Of Hedonism, Masquerade, Carnivalesque, and Power: The Art of Yinka Shonibare,” in Looking Both Ways: Art of the Contemporary African Diaspora (exhibition catalogue), ed. Laurie Ann Farrell (New York: Museum for African Art, 2003), 166. 13 In the interview with Enwezor cited above Shonibare says, in the form of Wildean aphorism, “My work is read in contradictory ways, sometimes by the same critics, and I enjoy that. I think the value of resolving something is overstated. I don’t necessarily think that resolution is what a poet should be seeking.” Enwezor, “Of Hedonism, Masquerade, Carnivalesque, and Power,” 177. Miller

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POSING THE BLACK PAINTER KERRY JAMES MARSHALL’S PORTRAITS OF ARTISTS’ SELF-PORTRAITS

Peter Erickson

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n the period 2007–10 Kerry James Marshall completed a cluster of portraits of painters in a studio setting.1 Their extraordinary dramatic range and power are designed “to reclaim that image of blackness so that it wasn’t negatively valued, but achieved an undeniable majesty.”2 We see a black artist figure wielding the brush, often in front of a canvas on which the depiction of his or her self-portrait is in process but unfinished. Marshall shows us the act of self-portraiture, but he does not reveal his self. He remains outside the frame, the invisible prime mover outside our field of vision.

From Invisible Man to Black Visibility Marshall’s starting point is his 1980 A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self, which he describes as “my first figurative painting,” “the first time I used a black silhouette against a nearly black background,” and “the first time I was completely conscious of what I was doing, all the way through.”3 He alludes to, and plays with, the conventional mode of self-portraiture. A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self does not use the term self-portrait in its formal title, but in conversation Marshall explicitly applies the genre to himself. His investigation of modulations of black paint as a means of representing black identity begins with himself: “I started with a self-portrait because it’s an easy subject to use to explore bigger issues. You use yourself as a stand-in for other things.”4 40 • Nka

Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016 DOI 10.1215/10757163-3641667 © 2016 by Nka Publications

Kerry James Marshall, Untitled (Painter), 2010. Acrylic on PVC panel, 47 1/2 x 43 x 4 in. Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. © Kerry James Marshall

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As the idiomatic language of the title suggests, Shadow of His Former Self turns on the racially negative connotation of the operative word “shadow” embodied in the reductive stereotype of the “toothy grin.”5 The result is a jokey, mocking image that Marshall draws from a horror film aptly entitled Mr. Sardonicus: “In one scene, a skeleton face with a toothy grin is revealed in a coffin.”6 It is no surprise that Marshall refrains from using the honorific term “self-portrait” in the actual title. The word “former” insists that this “self ” is a thing of the past that he is leaving behind in order to move on. Marshall makes other references to selfportraiture, but these generic allusions tend to be low-profile and teasing. Self-Portrait of the Artist as a Super Model (1994) endows the male artist with a blond wig that seems to make fun of his freedom to use art to engage in unrestricted role playing but feels inconsequential without deeper elaboration. Marshall reveals that he is present as a child with his brother and sister in Watts 1963 (1995), but however important that is from a documentary standpoint, its internal structural significance is largely incidental. In Souvenir III (1998), Marshall’s presence is registered in a tiny oval mirror but kept in the background so that the effect is reticent.7 These reflexive gestures remain small gestures. Marshall holds back from making a full-fledged entry into the generic arena of intensive selfportraiture. This very refusal is what eventually gives his portraits of black artists their mysterious quality. Marshall raises the expectations that we bring to self-portraits but, having prompted us, does not quite fulfill them. We are hence caught between genres, unsure of our bearings and unclear how to react to the painted figure or where we stand with respect to Marshall himself. Out of the uncertainties generated by the wide gap between the figure of the painter whom Marshall paints and Marshall the painter come the multiple perspectives from which we later view the artist figure in the studio paintings. Two paintings entitled Two Invisible Men Naked (1985) and Two Invisible Men (1985), however, have a special significance because their split-screen format separates white and black into discrete halves that display different forms of invisibility.8 The black version presents a darkness that erases; even the black penis stereotypically on view confirms the

negation. By contrast, the white version suggests the affirmation of white privilege as an unclassified, and therefore unnoticeable, racial category, as though whiteness is above race and therefore racially invisible and immune to accountability. The drama of Marshall’s visual format applies a pressure that exposes this white position and thereby performs a cathartic analysis of whiteness that opens up new possibilities for black representation. Overall, the value of the Invisible Men paintings is their function as an exorcism and a critical clarification of racial invisibilities. The exploration of both black and white invisibility clears away enough racist debris for Marshall to shift the emphasis to the monumental centrality of highly visible black figures who no longer disappear into a background that absorbs them. This new direction creates a very different experience from the invisible man motif. Marshall’s figures do not end up confined in a cellar but burst forth and stand out; nor does Marshall restrict himself to “the lower frequencies.”9 Marshall describes the tension built into the aesthetic impact of his rendering of blackness: The problem was how to bring that figure close to being a stereotypical representation without collapsing completely into stereotype. I was playing at the boundary between a completely flattened-out stereotype, a cartoon, and a fully resonant, complicated, authentic representation—a black archetype, which is a very different thing. The archetype allows for degrees of complexity that the stereotype always minimizes or undermines.10

This is a very fine line indeed, but the line is drawn. The new mode’s stress on hypervisualization makes a step toward the complexity that will be more fully explored in the portraits of artist figures. The black visibility achieved in large-scale figure paintings has a direct continuity with the specific format of painters in studio settings because the main strand of black figuration is carried over into the generic realm of self-portraiture. Also, in common with other black characters, the artists have an undeniable presence accompanied by an element of hesitation or tentative quality. In particular, the portraits of artists painting portraits communicate a paradoxical combination of visibility

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and invisibility. The artists unquestionably possess a strong visual force, but at the same time Marshall’s chosen absence implies an emblem, or metaphor, of residual invisibility. His stance of distanced investment becomes part of the intrigue. Black Artists’ Self-Portraiture It is telling that Marshall’s series begins with his only portrait that has a specific title, as well as the only painting that refers to a historical figure. The title is Scipio Moorhead, Portrait of Himself, 1776. The painter Scipio Moorhead is believed to have created the frontispiece for the first published black poet, Phillis Wheatley, shown with pen in hand. Marshall’s portrait offers a parallel tribute: a matching image with brush in hand, painting a selfportrait—a fact for which there is no tangible evidence but which Marshall’s title daringly imagines: Portrait of Himself. The conjunction of Moorhead and Wheatley invokes the moment of independence when black freedom is not a self-evident truth, but imperiled. Marshall’s courageous starting point is close to an abyss: it is grounded in this historical baseline, but given the absence of information about Moorhead, the facts are extremely obscure and speculative.11 The image of Moorhead thus presents a problem of the unknown rather than a celebration of certainty; Marshall begins not with assurance but with a question. The shift from “historical” figure to Marshall’s subsequent fictional artists is a continuation, not a departure. The first in the series of artist figures, Scipio Moorhead, Portrait of Himself, 1776 names an historical black artist whose career, as the date at the end of the title reminds us, reaches back to the moment of the United States Declaration of Independence, whose “self-evident” truth that “all men are created equal” is very much at issue in the work of this enslaved black portraitist. The title’s conspicuous avoidance of the obvious term “selfportrait” in favor of the more convoluted “portrait of himself ” underscores the question of the black man’s entitlement. Moorhead’s left hand lifts the brush high, while the open fingers of his right hand grip the easel. The most arresting feature is that we cannot see what is on the canvas. We are forced to rely on the eyewitness account of the black poet

Phillis Wheatley’s “To S. M. a young African Painter, on seeing his Works.”12 We are inclined to hope, or to imagine, that Moorhead’s encounter with Wheatley through his portrait of her, which we know from the frontispiece of her volume, inspired the two artists, though both are slaves, and the descriptive border over Wheatley’s image identifies her as “Negro Servant.” We have to believe that he received encouragement from the cross-media mixture envisioned in Wheatley’s poem to him: “Still may the painter’s and the poet’s fire / To aid thy pencil, and thy verse

Scipio Moorhead, Portrait of Himself, 1776, 2007. Acrylic on PVC panel, 28 x 22 in. Courtesy the artist and Richard Gray Gallery, Chicago. © Kerry James Marshall

conspire!” Yet idealism about this frail foundation will take us only so far. The logic of jumping from the point of origin supplied by this fragile legacy to the anonymous contemporary black portraitists depicted in the rest of Marshall’s series is both beautifully and disturbingly appropriate. The profusion of works suggests that the numbers have multiplied, thus relieving Moorhead’s isolation. The continued anonymity suggests that their status remains tenuous and their occupation still embattled. Marshall’s Erickson

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initial portrait of an artist has raised the stakes as high as possible. Out of One Many A general statement by Kerry James Marshall about art making ten years earlier provides a point of entry into the 2008 Untitled painting of the black man with the brush. Marshall’s artistic goal is to achieve “complete control of how much tension you are putting on the spring. You should be able to tweak it, even a millimeter, to get it fine-tuned.”13 In Marshall’s portrait of the black painter, the aesthetic spring is so tightly coiled that we can feel the tension. Aided by the painting’s huge, life-size scale and close-up impact, the man’s assertion of artistic power verges on confrontational, the strength held in check but also held in reserve. The torque of the painter’s shoulders suggests movement. The downward slant of the right shoulder propels the large, tipped-up palette into the foreground, acting like a shield that protects the artist.14 The left arm thrusts the brush forward. This challenge is backed up by the severity of the face with eyes directed outward toward the viewer and with mouth firmly set. Enveloped by the helmet-like Afro, the squared-off forehead looks masklike. This entire ensemble of visual elements is in the service of one conspicuous sight: the tip of the brush in the spot of black paint prominently placed on the palette. Given the emphasis on black paint in Marshall’s own practice, there can be no doubt about his support of, and alliance with, the means by which the painted figure so strongly and beautifully asserts his power. The circle of black paint in the center pushes the muted white circle off to the side. The tiny details of the artist’s three exposed fingernails and the sclera of his eyes show how diminished whiteness becomes against the blackness of his hands and face. Large and colorful as the palette occupying the foreground is, the dark background above dominates, with its expanse occupying more than half of the area and reaching out to three of the four corners of the picture frame. Yet the portrait is held in a state of suspension that prevents us from seeing what happens next. There is no painting, only the painter and his implements. With the transition to the 2009 portraits of black women painters, the studio scenario

becomes more complicated, because it includes a canvas within the canvas and hence expands to encompass three images of the artist: the double figure of the painter and her image inside the painting, plus Marshall as the unseen third painter outside the frame. The women pose with poised brush in front of their self-portraits in progress, while Marshall himself is not directly

Untitled, 2008. Acrylic on PVC panel, 72 3/4 x 61 1/4 x 4 in. Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. © Kerry James Marshall

engaged in self-portraiture. Any symmetrical alignment of the three is therefore disrupted at the outset. The interior relationship between the woman painter and the self-image, which judging from the disproportionate blank space on the canvas she has only just begun to paint, is staged in the context of an overall struggle between areas of white and black. In Untitled (2009), we are faced with fracture. The head of the impeccably dressed artist rests atop the elaborate curling shape of the wide collar encircling her neck. The seated position places her face near the center, while the second face above is displaced to the upper right corner, which her long green brush will have to angle up to reach. The only bits of shining light on the artist’s side are the silver

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hoop earring and the three golden clips on her right ear. Since the image on the canvas lacks matching ornamentation, this detail fosters the disparity between the two faces—the mirror image is already broken. The painting’s two vertical bars of color create a split-screen effect. On one side, the blackness of the artist is enhanced and reinforced by the black setting. Her black face and hair blend in with the dark space behind and above that surrounds and embraces her. The blending is facilitated by making the whites of her eyes lavender. On the left periphery the small area of light yellow on the back of her chair calls attention to the much darker gold base of her pristine work shirt in the foreground. In addition, the wide stripes of purply blue and maroonish brown on the shirt extend the dark area downward. The left sleeve, half hidden behind the palette, is sheer brown. On the other side, the as yet unpainted face, ostensibly the artist’s potential double, stands out as a white area on the adjacent canvas. Will the artist’s blackness be transferred to the canvas so that we can see two black faces? Pending completion of the picture, the question is suspended. What is evident is that the two shirts and backgrounds are different. The bright colors on the canvas—the orange, red, and yellows of the shirt and light pastoral greens in back of the head—do not correspond to the prevailing dark colors on the artist’s side, and this calls into question the idea of a self-portrait in progress. What version of self is being represented? On the palette that mediates between the images of the two women, the spreadout orange paint predominates. The loaded tip of the brush lingers in the pool of incredibly bright pink paint on the palette at the bottom right—nothing on the artist’s side comes close to this next color about to be applied. In the opposite corner is the counterpoint—a small triangle of pure black. In Untitled (Painter) (2009) a broad swath of white and off-white color that consists of the canvas, the palette, and the plain material underneath the woman’s vest or smock flows down from the upper left in a left-to-right diagonal. The dominance of this blanket of whiteness is signaled by the surprising absence of black paint on the palette necessary to duplicate her skin—an absence highlighted by the way the tip of her brush points to a mass of

Untitled, 2009. Acrylic on PVC, 61 1/8 x 72 7/8 x 3 7/8 in. Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. © Kerry James Marshall

white paint. The only black color comes from her two hands over the palette—one holding the brush, the other grasping the palette with thumb from above through the black hole and fingers from below through the indentation that infringes on the palette’s otherwise smooth curves. Paradoxically, we see painted black bits on the canvas above the woman’s and her image’s heads with no visible evidence or explanation of where the black paint came from. It is as though the black swatches on her wrap spontaneously migrated from the printed cloth to the upper reaches of the canvas. A reverse L-shape from upper right to bottom left establishes an oppositional darkness dominated by blackness. On the right side is a black band parallel to and reinforcing the blackness displayed by the woman’s erect posture—her amply piled layers of hair, her face and open neck, and her bare arm. The vertical blackness on the right sweeps down below the table, on which we see the plastic container with four additional brushes at the ready, to the table’s green understructure, where we find two horizontal bands of black and purple that sweep all the way across to the other side, past the light brown easel stand and the dark brown chair. The visual connection between the two sides is facilitated by the woman’s spacious lap with the dark purple-flecked skirt and blue coverall with darkened folds and shadows. Erickson

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Taken together, the two L-shaped bars occupy almost one-third of the painting’s vertical space and approximately one-quarter of the horizontal zone at the bottom. These darker sectors press against the white area, with the further encroachment of the sliver of black wedged along the left edge of the canvas. We are left with the feeling that, if the black woman’s image could only be reproduced on the canvas behind her, blackness would prevail on Marshall’s big-picture canvas. Yet Marshall has introduced an additional difficulty in the paint-by-numbers organization of the black woman’s canvas that raises the question of whether she is simply following and filling in somebody else’s script. Marshall upsets this implication by scrambling, and thus mocking, the numbering system. The highest number is 115, but nowhere near all the numbers in the sequence starting from 1 are represented; the lack of sequential order begins to suggest that there is something random about the color code. Moreover, the color red is arbitrarily assigned to more than one number; we see red bits in the incompletely filled-in spaces for numbers 89 and 96, representing the woman’s hair, and for numbers 1 and 4 further to the left. The ultimate subversion is the lack of a match between her actual black hair and the explosive red and orange accents in the hair as represented in her painting. These anomalies demonstrate that the work unfolding is not completely prescribed in advance by the prefabricated specifications of a prior hand. Such directions can be violated and defied in the name of creative freedom. Of course we are still left with the question of whose agency activated this opening for free expression, but perhaps we may imagine that Kerry James Marshall’s generous artistic sympathy extends to the woman painter so that he and she can be seen as united in this commitment. Marshall’s relationship to the painters he has created remains double-edged, almost as though he is addressing two audiences. Painting-by-numbers simultaneously expresses sarcastic anger at insufficient opportunity for, and racist obstacles to, black painters as well as humility in the unwavering dedication to rigorous training as the absolute precondition to artistic attainment. Marshall’s portraits suggest the sheer difficulty of

painting that aspires to be great art and consequently insist on the necessity of learning techniques grounded in deep knowledge and reflection. Marshall comments: “I started collecting paint by number because I’m interested in knowledge systems and techniques of representation. Paint by number is a gateway system that goes some way toward developing confidence in one’s ability to produce a passable image. It can be like following patterns at Arthur Murray style dance schools, or following chord charts learning to a play a musical instrument.”15 The qualified descriptors “some way toward” (not all the way) and “passable” (not outstanding) indicate the possibility that Marshall portrays artists who have yet to develop fully mature confidence. This would help to account for the combination of stiffness and uneasiness conveyed by the artists’ postures. In his role as the upholder of standards, Marshall seems at times to challenge and even to compete with his fictional artists. For instance, he outdoes them by bestowing an impeccable outfit on them that they as relative novices may or may not yet be able to replicate, in turn, on their canvases. The moment of the pose indicates a mood of pause—even hesitation and stasis—that expresses the unfinished, suspended state of what we see on the canvas within the canvas. Overall there is a strong sense of incompleteness, which is open-ended in several possible directions. Marshall writes: “In the artist paintings the painter paints the painting we see, but disregards the color scheme for a more arbitrary use of color. They are free to follow or abandon the system at will.”16 But questions remain. How, in the end, will the artists use this freedom? Are their artistic gestures substantial or minor breakouts contained within a grid? In terms of what we can see, the freedom is exercised in relation and reaction to the grid and, therefore, limited. The opportunity for free expression in the open field of a blank canvas is not presented. We cannot know the outcomes of these halfcompleted self-portraits. The moment of pause is effectively permanent. We are caught in a freezeframe situation that prevents us from fast forwarding to the end result. It is the unresolved quality stemming from this stop-motion circumstance that gives Marshall’s portraits of artists their

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Untitled (Painter), 2009. Acrylic on PVC, 44 5/8 x 43 1/8 x 3 7/8 in. Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. © Kerry James Marshall

extraordinary power. Ultimately, the paintings do not give immediate, complete fulfillment. Instead, they require us as viewers to wait with patience and with confidence. The transition to Untitled (Painter), the 2010 portrait of an artist, shown on page 41, is abrupt for two immediate reasons. First, the man is posed shorn of the implements and weapons of his work: the now familiar palette is missing, and there are no brushes to wield. The only evidence of his occupation is the pinkish paint stains on the pant legs of his upper thighs. Second, although his face bears a concentrated expression, his physical posture is slouched and relaxed. Despite the desire for concealment hinted by his camouflaged shirt, its various shades of green have been transposed to the canvas where they populate the whole left side

and thus are illuminated for all to see. Down to the noticeable fold over his crotch, the man is wide open and exposed. His vulnerability is given visual form in the sharp mismatch and clash between his own skin pigment and the overwhelming cast of the various pinkishorange color tones that envelop his image in the adjacent self-portrait. The numbered units of the flesh in his right hand and his face are unfinished, but even if consistent with the man’s blackness when completed, these aspects will be flooded, drowned, and washed out. In the interim, the man’s head in his painting already looks skull-like. His own head in Marshall’s painting looks terrifyingly unperturbed and calm rather than depleted or anguished. Yet if we follow the color trajectory from the painter’s shirt in a different direction, it leads to Erickson

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the smaller painting above the man’s head to the opposite corner on the left. Here we can just barely discern a dark background with an obscure green pattern of colors lifted from the man’s shirt. This painting represents an alternate route, another possibility, to which at the moment the man seems tragically oblivious. I return to Kerry James Marshall’s reserve intrinsic to his position as the third artist standing back and apart from the artist pair bracketed within his painting—that is, the double image of the artist whose brush is creating the artist on the canvas within the canvas. The formulation in the title of Marshall’s 2010 lecture, “The Artist in the Studio,” thus operates at two levels that cannot be fused: what’s happening in the scene inside Marshall’s painting and what happens in Marshall’s own studio. This dual structure enables Marshall to balance, or juggle, emotional engagement and tempered investment in responding to his artist figures. By posing the black artist, but not himself, in the painting, he gains a critical filter that creates portraiture capable of observing and assessing itself. In his lecture Marshall reads a passage by Daniel Arasse on Vermeer’s interiors that he clearly finds congenial and significant: “The ‘real world’ of Vermeer’s pictures is the world the pictures themselves inhabit, a world of painting; and painting was, for him, an exact and specific activity. In refusing to be ruled by social or commercial aspirations, Vermeer was able to use his paintings as a workplace, his laboratory for constant pictorial research.”17 This passage resonates with Marshall’s chosen format of the specialized “interior” of the studio. His scenario allows us to understand Marshall’s artists’ selfportraits as “his laboratory for constant pictorial research.” In Marshall’s own words at the outset of his lecture, the idea of a laboratory means that the artist’s studio should be conceived as a site “where intellectual activity takes place.”18 The drama enacted in Marshall’s paintings of artist figures is conducive to the thinking that he wants to do. Because this artistic self-consciousness is not synonymous with literal self-portraiture, Marshall’s vantage point has a built-in ruminative backlooping that comes from working in the space between him and the on-canvas artist figure, and hence the self works independently through the

figure rather than as the figure. Marshall speaks with compelling eloquence about his urgent desire to populate his art and, by extension, museums with black figures. He is equally convincing about his desire to make black figures whose selves are visibly complex rather than uncritically sentimental. For Marshall, posing black painters means registering the complexities they pose. Opening Up the Studio Four years after seemingly completing the series focusing on black artists working in a studio setting, Kerry James Marshall unexpectedly created a huge, seven-by-twelve-foot painting, Untitled (Studio) (2014).19 Compared to the relatively self-enclosed, confined, and even slightly claustrophobic space of the earlier studio paintings, the sheer size of the new work immediately signals openness through its generous spaciousness. It is as though the previous constraints in the studio series have suddenly been removed. In a dramatic shift, the studio bursts open in such brightness that the space lights up by sources far more extensive than the single Lowel Tota flood light on the far right edge, focused on the sitter posing for her portrait. This opening up is amplified by the fantastic expanses of brilliant color that flow around and across, filling Marshall’s canvas. The two spans of bright red in the backdrop behind the sitter and in its replication on the canvas of the portrait in progress flare and are linked by the flashy red cup on the painter’s worktable in the foreground. Also abundant and striking are yellows, blues, blacks, whites, and orangey touches, not to mention the exuberant green of the artist’s shoes. The viewer’s dazzled eyes keep jumping but are also drawn to the tiny stack of colored swatches pinned to the leg of the table upfront where we can’t miss them. The swatches, reinforced by the array of unicolored cups, make clear that Marshall’s color spectrum here is a planned, not a random, agenda. The open space inside the studio continues outside because we see the blue sky of daylight through the window in the back. Further, the exterior setting is reminiscent of the view from Kerry James Marshall’s own studio. The tall building with glass windows and the green foliage of the tree are recognizable approximations of the view

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from 7am Sunday Morning (2003), which is, in turn, connected to Marshall’s Black Artist (Studio View) (2002). In the latter, we know that the artist is Marshall himself and that the studio in which he is working is his. This new painting suggests a further opening up in which his own site appears as a tangential reference point. Another sign of expansiveness is the increase in the cast of characters occupying the studio and in the resulting complexity of their relationships. In the broad foreground are two black women. The artist is seen adjusting the sitter’s head in profile position to obtain the desired pose. We also see a second version of the sitter in the image beginning to emerge on the canvas to the left, though still roughly sketched with no facial features and no eyes. The sitter and her image are conspicuously, and perhaps disconcertingly, not identical. There is, for example, no match on the canvas yet of the

prominent green dots we see on her blouse. But we are simultaneously aware of a much larger group activity in the studio as a whole. Surrounding the foreground action are two male background figures. In the line behind the two women’s heads is a man whose yellow sleeve is pulled down over his raised left arm and whose body is hidden by the large red backdrop.20 Yet he is highlighted by the horizontal windowpane behind and accented by the geometric grid of windows on the building outside. Set deeper back to the left stands a disrobed black man whose total nakedness is emphasized by his frontal position as he faces out toward the viewer. His body is framed by two available vertical canvases leaning against the wall behind him. Who are the two additional supporting characters, and why have they been placed here inside the studio? One scenario might be to imagine that all three guests are clients visiting a busy

Untitled (Studio), 2014. Acrylic on PVC panel, 83 1/2 x 118 7/8 in., 84 1/8 x 119 1/2 x 3 1/8 in., framed. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner Gallery, London. © Kerry James Marshall

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portraiture practice in order to create and preserve a beautiful image, akin to a beauty parlor, as suggested by the placement of the artist’s right-hand fingers spread apart and virtually massaging the sitter’s hair. Two items—the handbag under the sitter’s chair, along with the offering of cake and tea on the corner of the table nearest to the sitter—hint at a high-end business. Close to the picture’s dead center, a skull displays a bulging eyeball that reminds us of the importance of visual memory and thus serves as a memento mori symbol that advertises the value of one’s portrait as a legacy passed down to the next generation. In this context, we could think of the man behind the red screen as a patron who has finished his appointment and is now putting on his jacket and preparing to leave. Meanwhile, the naked man could be seen as eagerly awaiting his turn. Yet the one character who does not convincingly fit this scenario is the naked man. Kerry James Marshall entices us to provide a narrative construction that would allow us explain the situation as ordinary characters in a recognizable scene. However, the assumption of an ordinary scene does not account for the painting’s energy concentrated in the naked man. The all-too-neat term “nude,” superficially celebrated by the art historian Kenneth Clark, seems inadequate to describe the striking presence and distinctive resonance in the stance and potential role of this male figure.21 While the other characters may be perceived as ordinary, the black man, to the contrary, remains strange, and it is the strangeness that gives him his power. The seeming remoteness of the man in the background is nullified because of his visual connection with the easel in the strong left side of the painting. This relation to the easel projects him forward, making him a prominent figure. Through this figure, Marshall raises questions that intentionally remain unanswerable. At the beginning of his conversation with Angela Choon, Marshall presents his vision of a workplace: “The artist’s studio was a laboratory in which you did experiments and tried to discover the principles governing the way things work.”22 Our role as viewers in the experimental context of Untitled (Studio) becomes not to solve a puzzle but rather to enter into, and live with, an ongoing mystery. For all the busy, crowded activity subsumed

in the overall circular motion of the painting’s population, the naked black man stands out and stands apart. His proximity to the artistic center is felt in the linking effect of the canvas’s slight overlap that blocks our view of the man’s akimbo right arm. The readiness of his posture signals that he is drawn in, as though the canvas might be his to claim. Whether he approaches as subject, painter, observer, or critic, we don’t yet know for sure. Marshall’s intervention gestures beyond the attractive glamour of the scene toward deeper levels of what we can ultimately know and for which the black body—instead of the unopened, greencovered book on the table underneath the skull—is the emblem. Kerry James Marshall shows the figure of a black man participating in the ultimate work in progress: the increasing expansion and development of an art capable of sustaining black life. Peter Erickson is a visiting resident scholar at Northwestern University’s Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities. Notes

1 The list includes seven paintings as follows: Scipio Moorhead, Portrait of Himself, 1776 (2007) in a private collection in Chicago; three untitled portraits from 2008 in Marshall’s Black Romantic exhibition (items 9–11) at Jack Shainman Gallery, the largest of which is now in the collection of the Harvard Art Museums; two portraits of black women painters from 2009—the first, Untitled (Painter), in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and the second, Untitled, shown in Embodied: Black Identities in American Art from the Yale University Art Gallery (New Haven, CT: Yale University Art Gallery, 2010), 24–26; and, most recently, Untitled (Painter) (2010) in Kerry James Marshall, curated by Kathleen S. Bartels and Jeff Wall (Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 2010), 9. Two related precursor works, exhibited in Production Site: The Artist’s Studio Inside-Out (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2010), are Marshall’s photograph Black Artist (Studio View), dated 2002, and his painting 7am Sunday Morning the following year. As described by curator Dominic Molon: “Shot using ‘black light,’ which gives everything in a space a neon-bluish hue while starkly offsetting anything white,” [Black Artist (Studio View)] “depicts Marshall in the studio space studying his painting 7am Sunday Morning (2003)—itself a studio-centered image, albeit one capturing the immediate environs of the studio’s neighborhood” (22). It is as though these antecedent examinations of the interior and exterior of his own studio prepare the way for Marshall’s subsequent portraits of artist figures in their imagined studio settings. 2 Kerry James Marshall (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2000), 117. 3 “An Argument for Something Else: Dieter Roelstraete in Conversation with Kerry James Marshall, Chicago 2012,” in Kerry James Marshall: Painting and Other Stuff, ed. Nav Haq (Antwerp: Ludion, 2013), 11–33; quotation from page 22.

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4 Kerry James Marshall (2000), 117. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., 116. 7 The three images are available in Kerry James Marshall (2000), 72, 84, and 98. Terrie Sultan refers to the artist’s reflection in the mirror as “inserting himself as a shadowy character”: Sultan, “This Is the Way We Live,” 19. 8 For the images, see Kerry James Marshall (2000), 39–40. 9 Marshall acknowledges his reading of Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man in both Kerry James Marshall (2000), 116–17, and the Roelstraete interview, 22. 10 Kerry James Marshall (2000), 117. 11 The paucity and tentativeness of documentation about Scipio Moorhead is indicated by the recourse to the phrase “may have” in Vincent Carretta’s Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011): “Wheatley’s frontispiece may have been designed in Boston, perhaps by Scipio Moorhead, a black artist to whom Wheatley apparently addressed one of the poems in her book. Moorhead may have been the artist who advertised in the Boston News-Letter on 7 January 1773” (100); “John Moorhead’s wife, Sarah (1712–74) was a well-known Boston art teacher, who may have instructed Scipio Moorhead,” 104. The caption accompanying the illustration of the frontispiece inside the book also uses the same “may have” construction—“it may have been engraved after a portrait by Scipio Moorhead”— which leaves unclear whether both a painting and an engraving are attributed to Moorhead. The most detailed study to date is Eric Slauter’s “Looking for Scipio Moorhead: An ‘African Painter’ in Revolutionary North America,” in Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World, ed. Agnes Lugo Ortiz and Angela Rosenthal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 89–116. The title parallel with Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston evokes both the need for, and the archival difficulty of, the search, while Slauter’s description of his project as “an experimental portrait” (89) acknowledges the near fictional status of his subject. 12 Wheatley’s poem appears in her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (London: A. Bell, 1773), republished in Complete Writings, ed. Vincent Carretta (New York: Penguin, 2001), 59–60. 13 Calvin Reid, “Kerry James Marshall,” Bomb 62 (Winter 1998): 40–47. Marshall continues: “These paintings are loaded with contradictions. That’s what makes it exciting. Taking it to the edge, where it’s so full of contradictions that in some way there’s no reason why these works should hold together formally, but somehow they do.” The accumulated vocabulary of “control,” “tension,” and “contradictions” leads to the idea that perfect tension is stimulated by the conflict between contradictions that threaten disruption and the control that keeps them just barely in check. 14 The use of the oversized palette as a shield is strongly supported by the two portraits of black women artists in the 2008 Black Romantic show. In each instance, the woman in full standing position holds up a gigantic palette. This position also allows the woman’s thumb, protruding through the palette’s thumbhole, to appear as a penis, which I read as testimony to Marshall’s gender critique as well as his humor. 15 In his lecture at Williams College on September 22, 2011, Marshall mentioned that he had a collection of paint-by-numbers material. The quotation is from his subsequent email dated October 3, 2011, in response to my inquiry. 16 Email as in note 15. 17 Daniel Arasse, Vermeer: Faith in Painting (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 16. Marshall’s lecture, “The Artist

in the Studio,” presented on the occasion of the 2010 Production Site exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, was recorded by Chicago Access Network Television (CAN TV) and is accessible at www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sv-YptD9Bc. 18 Relevant here are the two chapters on Vermeer at the end of Harry Berger Jr.’s Second World and Green World: Studies in Renaissance Fiction-Making (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), in which Berger’s analysis turns on experimental uses of interior space. In Fictions of the Pose: Rembrandt against the Italian Renaissance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), Berger summarizes his approach to “the temptation of aesthetic idyllicism”: “A Vermeer picture pretends so conspicuously to subordinate human complexities to ‘pure painting,’ to the vanity of art, that it focuses the observer’s attention on them—by formal as well as iconographic means” (486). Marshall’s work similarly creates a tension between “pure painting” and “human complexities” as a way of calling attention to the latter. 19 Untitled (Studio) appeared in the exhibition Kerry James Marshall: Look See, October 11–November 22, 2014, David Zwirner Gallery, London. The book Kerry James Marshall: Look See (New York: David Zwirner Books, 2015) was published with a text by Robert Storr and an interview by Angela Choon. In a particularly valuable extended discussion with Choon (94–99), Marshall addresses this major painting in detail. 20 The hidden man’s gender is more clearly visible in the sketch—Untitled (Study for Studio)—in which he is shown without the screen, in “Works on Paper,” Kerry James Marshall: Look See, 82. 21 Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (London: John Murray, 1956). 22 Choon interview, Kerry James Marshall (2015), 94.

Erickson

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AU NÈGRE JOYEUX EVERYDAY ANTIBLACKNESS GUISED AS PUBLIC ART

Trica Keaton

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roximately on display at Place de la Contrescarpe in the 5th arrondissement of Paris—an area of high tourism commingled with local life—is a rather large and offensive sign that reads “Au Nègre Joyeux.” This entity has become so integrated into the flow of daily life that passersby seem to pay it scant attention, despite its arresting title-board, translated as the “Happy N-word.” Yet, for an array of people this over 250-year-old relic is not simply a vestige of France’s cultural patrimony; rather, it is a vivid illustration of antiblackness in the everyday, one experienced as a form of microviolence by those whom it assails in a French Republic supposedly blind to color and race.1 According to precious few sources about the life of the sign, which are at times contradictory, it is all that remains of “one of the first establishments that allowed Parisians to taste the exotic flavor of chocolate,” a delicacy produced, however, through slave labor, even today.2 Founded in 1748, Au Nègre Joyeux is officially documented as the first chocolate confectionary in Paris, according to Paris City Hall (la Mairie de Paris). In 1988, a co-owners association of the building on which the sign hangs gifted it to the city, thereby relinquishing all responsibility for it and its upkeep, including public reaction.3 The

Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016 DOI 10.1215/10757163-3641678 © 2016 by Nka Publications

Au Nègre Joyeux, Rue Mouffetard, Paris, 2010. Courtesy Samba Doucouré. Photo: Michelle Young

Keaton

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Close-up of image on building. Courtesy Samba Doucouré. Photo: Michelle Young

city restored the sign around that period and later encased it in protective glass, a prescient move in light of responses to it, albeit recently, a point to which I’ll return. In this context it is also worth noting that by the nineteenth century, affirms anthropologist Susan Terrio, “the word chocolat signified a black man” in French argot, and “French chocolate manufacturers sold their products using images of blacks often depicted as naïve and childlike inferiors.”4 Further,

in his insightful book, Critique de la Raison Nègre, a meditation on the Western invention of race through racism, theorist Achille Mbembe argues that the very notion of “le nègre,” someone racialized as black, results from European imperial fantasies, discourses, and discursive practices that have both fashioned and written out of history persons whom the West crafted as subhuman.5 Even as Négritude thinkers sought to reverse the stigma attached to the term, in this context “nègre” is a denigrating

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legacy of French race-making whose use today is a punishable offense. The renowned perfumer JeanPaul Guerlain learned this lesson the hard way in a highly publicized case. During an interview on French television in 2012, Guerlain casually stated that he “worked like a nègre to develop a new scent,” adding, “I don’t know if les nègres ever worked that hard.” The French courts convicted him of “racist injury” and fined him six thousand euros, albeit two years after antiracism associations filed a lawsuit against Guerlain. Historical depictions of the sign are few and far between, and businesses beneath it have changed over the years. For instance, artist Robert Sivard’s rendering of the sign in his 1955 Time magazine article shows it perched above a coffeehouse similarly named: “Cafe au Negre Joyeux on the left bank was once a famous artists’ hangout and favorite haunt of Hemingway.”6 Hemingway lived around the corner from Place de la Contrescarpe on rue du Cardinal-Lemoine, where a commemorative plaque is affixed on the building to acknowledge his presence there from 1922 to 1923. A different plaque nearby also mentions the existence of “some signs,” but absolutely no references to Au Nègre Joyeux exist in a city where commemorative plaques abound. In fact, Paris City Hall states in official correspondence with me that “it should be noted that this sign is neither classified nor recorded as a historical monument,” and whether the sign has remained on rue Mouffetard since its inception (or the 1950s) is another unknown. More to the point, the absence of some type of public information or documentation near the sign detailing the history and significance of arguably “public art” of this nature, dating from the late eighteenth century, makes the piece all the more offensive and effectively anti-black. Comprising a five-meter-wide title board and fresco, “this famous sign, depicting a black waiter, broadly smiling in shorts and white stockings with a carafe in hand, preparing to serve a seated lady, is inspired by a certain Zamor, a servant that Madame du Barry particularly cherished.”7 In the same documentation provided by Paris City Hall, officials state that the painting “shows Zamor (circa 1762–1820), a slave from Bengal who was a pageboy of Countess du Barry.” In other words, Zamor may have been from South Asia where a variety of skin

tones can be found, but in this piece and the wellknown de Creuse painting of Madame du Barry, who is in the company of one such person, Zamor is represented as black. On that note, and as a range of scholars document, the terms nègre and esclave (slave) were synonyms in the eighteenth century, including in French dictionaries. It would eventually be displaced by the label noir (black), though all terms carried pejorative connotations.8 Although racialized categories were not fixed at that time, scientific racism was crystalizing, and Europeans had long questioned whether people so identified were even human. Zamor may have been enslaved and/or bonded to the notorious Countess du Barry, the last chief mistress of Louis the XV of France, but he would have his revenge. His denouncement of the countess to the authorities during the French Revolution eventually led her straight to the guillotine. Clearly the “cherished” feelings were not mutual. The décor, clothing, and table setting in the painting, including the style of the chocolate (as opposed to coffee) pots conjure images of perhaps eighteenth-century French aristocracy and gesture to refinement. People racialized as black occupied a variety of roles during this period in France, and, as historian Kaija Tiainen-Anttila reports: Approximately 1000 to 5000 blacks are estimated to have lived in France in the 18th century, most of them in the area of the Ile de France. The Paris upper crust used to strut with their black servants in FaubourgSaint-Germaine at the beginning of the century. In Rue Mouffetard from 1748 one could drop into a restaurant called Au Negre Joyeux. The Africans in France clearly had the role of servants.9

An art historian friend of African descent who lives in Paris holds an altogether different perspective about this piece. She supports the Zamor scenario and also vehemently disagrees with the antiblack read of the sign. She reasons that the paucity of images in public spaces in France of black people, historical and otherwise, renders the sign an essential historical document, one that attests to the varied existences and centrality of black people in French history and culture. This aspect of French history is not widely taught or known writ Keaton

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large in France. However, what makes the entire sign so racially reprehensible in a race-blind French Republic, about which I have written elsewhere, is not entirely the painting, irrespective of its interpretation.10 Rather, it is the fresco with its large title board that both dwarfs the painting and heralds what it ultimately constructs: once more, an antiblack representation. Consider the wide-tooth grin of the black male figure that recalls the footnote on “the grin” in Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks: We like to depict the black man grinning at us with all his teeth. And his grin—such as we see it—such as we create it—always signifies a gift . . . an endless gift stretching along posters, movie screens and product labels . . . playing the fool . . . service always with a smile.11

Or, as anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer states in the same footnote: “Nevertheless the whites demand that the blacks be smiling, attentive and friendly in all their relationships with them” in order to demonstrate ultimately that they are not a threat. Product trademarks such as the 1930s Banania logo vividly illustrate the proverbial “grinning black man” in the French context, indeed one emblematic of antiblack racialization in French advertising. As historian Dana Hale writes, “The Banania soldier’s grin remains one of the most recognized and popular trademarks in France,” one that reduces African colonial conscripts to a “stereotype of the bon noir or bon nègre—a harmless, infantile black figure who was devoid of power despite his military role.”12 While less ubiquitous today, Banania figures are still visible in public space and are defended by proponents of it and similar imagery, who see it rather as nostalgic, innocuous memorabilia and certainly not antiblack. By everyday antiblackness, I draw upon sociologist Philomena Essed’s research and theories of everyday racism in the Netherlands and United States to conceptualize the cumulative microaggressions integrated in the routine or flow of everyday French life that results from systemic racism.13 These repetitive acts or moments of injury and insult, experienced directly and vicariously, devalue, stigmatize, and harm people racialized as somehow inferior in a society, as a wealth of studies

show. This particular form of violence—not always recognized as such—is insidious because it occurs as one is attempting to go about one’s daily activities such as walking down the street or going to the supermarket. It is precisely over such a site of everyday life that the sign timelessly hangs, while the market itself and its ownership has changed hands several times in the last twenty years. What additionally renders Au Nègre Joyeux pernicious is the extent to which it has become naturalized while sustaining racial boundaries and racialized representations that largely go unchallenged in the everyday. There is a visible crack in the lower right corner, where something thrown at it hit its mark, but at the writing of this article, I have no information to explain whether this blemish is due to negative sentiment directed at the piece or someone perhaps blowing off steam. In 2011, a measure of ambiguity about the public’s sentiment vanished once the grassroots antiracism association, La Brigade Anti-Negrophobie, organized a three-week silent protest in front of the above-mentioned supermarket, in all likelihood the only formal and documented protest against the sign in its history.14 Members of the brigade have themselves been subjected to another form of everyday racism in France, racial profiling by law enforcement, which on three separate occasions resulted in their ironic and perverse expulsion and exclusion from the commemoration ceremony for the abolition of slavery on May 10, 2011, 2013, and 2014. Clips of these events posted on YouTube and Dailymotion quickly went viral, and literally for the world to witness they show undeniable acts of racial profiling, excessive force, and police brutality. In 2011, French undercover officers appeared in droves, seemingly from nowhere, to block the entry of these mostly, but not exclusively, black bodies attired in black T-shirts that boldly proclaimed their group’s name.15 Though they had invitations, a police phalanx physically barred the brigade’s members and then turned on them, muscling them to the ground and eventually dragging them away, as they defended themselves toe-to-toe. Oddly, their T-shirts seemed to trigger this response at an invitation-only event that did not specify a dress code. The adage of history repeating itself as both tragedy and farce proved true at the commemoration ceremony

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in 2013. Once again, French law enforcement denied prominent spokespeople of the brigade access to the ceremony, despite their having had invitations. Once again, they defended themselves and resisted what they saw as a violation of their rights. And, once again, their violent arrest was caught on video, but this time, rather than being released, they were held and also faced criminal charges. Unbelievable, yet not in this context, these events repeated themselves at the 2014 ceremony, which served again to commemorate the abolition of the slave trade and slavery in France.16 Protest by the brigade and other pressure groups resulted not entirely in what they wanted, which was to have the sign taken down and placed in a museum. But their activism did compel Paris City Hall to make a compromise in 2013, which commissioned a commemorative plaque for the sign, but with the Zamor narrative. Because this version of history has yet to be substantiated, this response appears to be more a pretext for not only staving off further protest, but also for keeping the sign essentially where it is. In early July 2015, I returned to Place de la Contrescarpe, as I have done from time to time when visiting Paris, hoping against hope that it was taken down. To my surprise, someone had pelted the fresco with paint but left largely untouched the most egregious aspect of this composition: its large title board. Once the city removes the painting for cleaning, all that will be left is the insult and its injury, that is, the wording—“Happy N-word”—on display every day. Implicit bias and category association theories illuminate another dimension of Au Nègre Joyeux and the aforementioned treatment of the brigade. As psychologist Mahzarin Banaji and her colleagues continue to demonstrate in their extensive research on stereotypes and implicit bias, “the human mind’s tendency to generalize from instances to sets is an essential feature of learning and categorization, but this feature may produce unanticipated problems when the characteristics of individual people are generalized to their social [negatively racialized] groups,” which begins at a very early age and is transmitted over generations.17 These associations can translate into unconscious attitudes and stereotypes that are ascribed to groups who are apprehended as an undifferentiated mass. Researchers

Au Nègre Joyeux, 2015. Photo: Trica Keaton and Annette and Steeve Joseph-Gabriel

have found that dark skin color, for instance, is implicitly associated with beliefs about deeper psychological attributes and behavior such as violence, anger, aggression, and hostility. Already, black color symbolism has played a fundamental role in the European invention of race that established a radical dualism between that which is sacred and demonic. In returning to this large eighteenth-century sign on public display labeled the Happy N-word I argue that it only fosters anti-blackness with all the stigma and stereotypes both implicitly and explicitly associated with it. This and other offensive antiblack imagery illustrate on multiple levels that we are heirs to centuries of anti-black representations and sentiment that have proximately figured in French visual culture and practices. This fact was well demonstrated in the former soccer star, now philanthropist and activist, Lilian Thuram’s collaborative and polemical Musée du quai Branly exhibit in 2012 on the invention of the “savage” in colonial expositions, referred to as human zoos.18 Keaton

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While this sign is not the only one of its kind in Paris or France, let alone the numerous street names documented by various associations that honor slaveholders or colonial figures, I personally do not believe that hanging a commemorative plaque near Au Nègre Joyeux at this juncture makes it more palatable or consciousness raising. Such is particularly the case for people and their children who are assailed by such racialized imagery on a regular basis and who experience it, again, as antiblack. The damage has been done, but not irreparably for future generations. There is a perfect space for this sign, the Carnavalet Museum, which is devoted to the history of Paris and where a room already houses similarly represented artifacts, including a sign that dates from the nineteenth century entitled “A la tête noire,” an advertisement for a furniture merchant. Trica Keaton is an associate professor in African and African American studies at Dartmouth College. Notes

1 As I have written elsewhere, discourses of color and race-blindness are intrinsic to the potent ideology of French republicanism, which camouflages the lived experience of social race in French society. For the broader European context, see, for instance, Fatima El-Tayeb, European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), and Dienke Hondius, Blackness in Western Europe: Racial Patterns of Paternalism and Exclusion (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2014). 2 “Don de l’enseigne ‘Au nègre joyeux,’ no. 14 rue Mouffetard á la ville de Paris,” Paris Village, no. 1 (January 2003): 130, a popular, nonscholary source. 3 This information derives from an email exchange dated July 1, 2014, with an official from Paris City Hall (la Mairie de Paris) specifically about the sign. Paris Village dates the sign from 1738: see “Don de l’enseigne ‘Au nègre joyeux,’” 130. 4 Susan J. Terrio, Crafting the Culture and History of French Chocolate (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 248, 249. 5 See also Stuart Hall, “The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power,” in Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies, ed. Stuart Hall et al. (1996; repr. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 184–228. 6 Robert Sivard, “Painters Luck,” Time, April 18, 1955, 75. 7 “Don de l’enseigne ‘Au nègre joyeux,’” 130. 8 See for instance William Cohen, The French Encounter with Africans: White Response to Blacks, 1530–1880 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003); Dominic Thomas, Black France: Colonialism, Immigration, and Transnationalism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007); Pascal Blanchard, Eric Deroo, and Gilles Manceron, Le Paris Noir (Paris: Editions Hazan, 2001); and Françoise Vergès, L’homme prédateur (Paris: Albin Michel, 2011). 9 Kaija Tianen-Anttila, The Problem of Humanity: The Blacks in the European Enlightenment (Helsinki, Finland: Suomen

Historiallinen Seura, 1984), 69. Also see Cohen, The French Encounter with Africans, 111, and Tyler Stovall, Transnational France: The Modern History of a Universal Nation (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2015). 10 Trica Danielle Keaton, “The Politics of Race-Blindness: (Anti) Blackness and Category-Blindness in Contemporary France,” Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race 7, no. 1 (2010): 103–31 and Keaton, “Racial Profiling and the ‘French Exception,’” French Cultural Studies 24, no. 2 (2013): 231–242. 11 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1952; repr. New York: Grove, 2008), 32. 12 Dana S. Hale, Races on Display: French Representations of Colonized Peoples, 1886–1940 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), Kindle location 1291, 1284. Also see Leora Auslander and Thomas C. Holt, “Sambo in Paris: Race and Racism in the Iconography of the Everyday,” in The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France, ed. S. Peabody and T. Stovall (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), and Dana Hale’s article in the same volume, “French Images of Race on Product Trademarks during the Third Republic,” 131–46. 13 The pioneering studies include Philomena Essed, Everyday Racism: Reports from Women of Two Cultures (Claremont, CA: Hunter House, 1990), and Essed, Understanding Everyday Racism: An Interdisciplinary Theory (London: Sage, 1990). 14 Brigade Anti-Negrophobie, fr-fr.facebook.com/BrigadeAnti NegrophobiePageOfficielle (accessed May 19, 2014). 15 “The Anti-Negrophobia Brigade Banned from the French Commemoration for the Abolition of Slavery,” YouTube video, 9:33, accessed May 19, 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IcS-iwuT5c. 16 “10 Mai 2014 . . . L’envers du décor de la commémoration de la dite abolition de l’esclavage,” YouTube video, 14.47, accessed May 20, 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v=KV1dqRJLh8k&feature= youtube_gdata_player. Also see the illuminating film by Nathalie Etoke on these events entitled Afro-Diasporic French Identities, YouTube video, 2:21, accessed July 7, 2015, www.youtube.com /watch?v=bQcGNjGywSI. 17 Scott A. Akalis, Mahzarin Banaji, and Stephen M Kosslyn, “Crime Alert!: How Thinking about a Single Suspect Automatically Shifts Stereotypes toward an Entire Group,” DuBois Review: Social Science Essays and Research on Race 5 (2008): 227; Andrew Scott Baron and Mahzarin R. Banaji, “The Development of Implicit Attitudes Evidence of Race Evaluations from Ages 6 and 10 and Adulthood,” Journal of Psychological Science 17, no 1 (2006): 53–58; and Project Implicit, implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/ (accessed July 7, 2015). 18 See “L’invention du sauvage,” www.quaibranly.fr/fr /programmation/expositions/expositions-passees/exhibitions. html (accessed May 20, 2014). See also Moïse Udino, Corps noirs, têtes républicaines: Le paradox antillais (Paris: Présence Africaine, 2011),  and Lynne E. Palermo, “Identity under Construction: Representing the Colonies at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1889,” in Peabody and Stovall, The Color of Liberty. Also see Pascal Blanchard et al., La France noire: Trois siècles de présences des afriques, des caraïbes, de l’océan indien et d’Océanie (Paris: Découverte, 2011), along with the film series similarly titled.

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SAGA BWOYS AND RUDE BWOYS MIGRATION, GROOMING, AND DANDYISM

Michael McMillan A dandy is a kind of embodied, animated sign system that deconstructs given and normative categories of identity (elite, white, masculine, heterosexual, patriotic) and reperforms them in a manner more in keeping with his often avant garde visions of society and self. Monica L. Miller, Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity

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andyism was initially imposed on black men in eighteenth-century England as the transatlantic slave trade and an emerging culture generated a vogue in dandified black servants. The black dandy’s appropriation of Western Victorian and Edwardian aesthetics was infused with African sensibilities to create a new character in the visual landscape, identifiable by ironic gestures, witty sartorial statements, and improvisations on existing styles. In a British context there are notable examples of black dandies who have made themselves present where they would otherwise have been absent or erased from the colonial era through the post-colonial period, which was marked by significant post–Second World War Caribbean migration. Space does not allow an unpacking of black dandy geneologies from the eighteenth century except to say that, as Monica Miller points out in her seminal book Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity, histories

Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016 DOI 10.1215/10757163-3641689 © 2016 by Nka Publications

Three Jamaican immigrants arrive at Tilburg Docks, Essex, June 22, 1948, on board the ex-troopship SS Empire Windrush, smartly dressed in zoot suits and trilby hats. Left to right: John Hazel, a twenty-one-year-old boxer; Harold Wilmot, thirty-two; and John Richards, a twentytwo-year-old carpenter. Photo: Douglas Miller

McMillan

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and analyses of dandyism in a European context have not explored to any significant extent factual or fictional black dandies.1 Needless to say, a “racialized dandy” disrupts and subverts the gendered status quo, as he is hypermasculine and feminine. As if to compensate for his emasculation by slavery, he is the “aggressively heterosexual” outsider announcing his “alien status” by clothing his dark body in a fine suit.2 In focusing on how Caribbean migrant men and their sons contributed to understanding black dandyism in an African diasporic context, this article will focus on the material culture and performativity of the saga bwoy (bwoy as in Caribbean creole vernacular) and rude bwoy as markers of sartorial interventions that Eastern Caribbean and Jamaican migrant men were making in the 1950s and the 1960s, respectively, in an attempt to convert absence into presence through self-display.3 Stuart Hall describes the symbolic journey of the diasporic subject as circuitous rather than teleological. He characterizes diasporic subjectivity as a process of becoming that involves traveling by another route to arrive at the same place as the original point of departure. This rerouting creates the possibility to retell the past in a new way, which the moment of arrival in the old world (the “mother country” of the British Empire) provided for migrants of my parents’ generation. In this framework, as Hall sees it, identity is a performative process, continually negotiating through a “complex historical process of appropriation, compromise, subversion, masking, invention and revival.”4 Style-Fashion-Dress As Carol Tulloch argues, black style has always “played a starring role” in the development of black culture, embodied in dress, music, language, and mannerisms, yet it remains a “complex commodity” to adequately define.5 Being elusively enigmatic, black style is more about who or what expresses style at a particular moment rather than about being cool or being an arbiter of style. What is suggested here is that style is a process of becoming, which echoes Hall’s conception of diasporic identity as a dialectic between subject positions. This negotiation of multiple subject positions as a means to express emotion through the performance of the dressed body is a form of

entanglement of style-fashion-desire or, to use Tulloch’s triumvirate, “style-fashion-dress.” In this context, style constitutes a system of concepts that signifies the multitude of meanings and frameworks that are always the “whole-and-part” of dress studies. Tulloch sees style as agency in the construction of self through the assemblage of garments, accessories, and beauty regimes that may or may not be in fashion at the time of use.6 The style of dress worn by black people, where blackness here is culturally, historically, and politically constructed, has had a profound effect on the fashion of street cultures in Britain since at least the 1940s, at the moment of post–World War II Caribbean migration.7 I have always been struck by how men and women of my father’s generation were so well dressed in those iconic black-and-white documentary photographs depicting their arrival in their new homeland after a three-week transatlantic journey by sea. With dignity and respectability packed deep in their suitcases, they were formally dressed as a sign of self-respect—with dresses pressed and hats angled in a “universally jaunty cocky” style, in preparation for whatever was to happen next.8 Their neatly pressed suits were complemented with white breast-pocket handkerchiefs, polished brogue shoes, white starched shirts with throat-strangling ties, and topped by trilby hats that they set at a cocked angle. Cool Within the struggle for meaning over the representation of the black male body, the black dandy operates in the process of becoming in a betwixt-and-between world that is governed by the context of his practice. That context is usually public, and for the dandy, much less the black dandy, the street is his home, where performance is inscribed in his (sometimes her) signifying practices as a “cultural sphere” of representation.9 This “is situated entirely on boundaries; boundaries go through it everywhere. . . . Every cultural act lives on boundaries; in this is its seriousness and significance.”10 The dialectic of that context is symbolically expressed in Hall’s metaphor of frontlines and backyards. Operating in the public realm, the frontline represents a politicized edge between black culture and white culture; the

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backyard is less confrontational, more informal, more complicated—a place where private negotiations might occur.11 Yet the frontlinebackyard dichotomy does not quite capture the negotiation between the public and the private realms for the black dandy in his performance. Daniel Miller’s duality of the transcendent and the transient is useful for unpacking these complex subjective negotiations on an ontological plane.12 Semiotically, in the diasporic vernacular, the transcendent has equivalence in the practice of good grooming as a register of respectability, as in the ethos of paying attention to one’s appearance because first impressions matter, which as a sartorial principle resonates across the African diaspora. While good grooming as performance does not reveal all there is to know about black subjectivity, it does reveal the mythic nature of black popular culture as a theater of popular desires. The transient, on the other hand, is registered in reputation, which in the vernacular of African diasporic culture values the public performances of speech, music, dance, sexual display, and prowess. If respectability through the transcendent is more enduring, then reputation is very much more local, ephemeral, and consequently transient as a “highly personalized and self-controlled expression of a particular aesthetic.” The dialectic of the transcendent and the transient is that agency through style-fashion-dress can be an agreement to conform and a struggle as “a symbol of transience and disconformities.”13 The interplay between transcendent and transient sheds light on the “signifying practice,” to use Hall’s concept, of the black dandy in terms of appearing to be cool.14 As a mutable concept, cool is a state of being, manifested not only in garments worn on the body but also in the walk, posture, and gestures that constitute a performance.15 In Aesthetics of Cool: Afro-Atlantic Art and Music, Robert Farris Thompson associates cool with the Yoruba Orisha deity of Oshun, who signifies beauty apart from other West African associations.16 Using African trickster figures such as Anansi, the ancient power of Eshu, and the subversive philosophical priorities mandated by the cosmic power of Ashe, slaves incorporated a performance strategy as a mask. The mask is the signifier, while

the masquerade is the signified, which, as a ritual practice from Africa, served to camouflage slaves in plantation society. The masquerade in this masking is the phenomenon of being cool. To exhibit grace under pressure, as reflected in personal character, or Ashe, became a means to invert and subvert the brutal oppression of plantation society through imitation, reinvention, and artifice. Thompson’s concept of cool applies to the self-control of the black dandy’s sartorial aesthetics, which exhibits the duality of transcendental balance and transient rebellion in the style-fashion-dress of the black male body. The Zoot Suit Throughout the colonial era, and especially during the postcolonial period in the twentieth century, there has been cultural political traffic between North America and the Caribbean within the context of the African diaspora. Because of growing American cultural imperialism, this traffic was often represented as coming from the United States in the forms of music such as jazz, soul, and the blues. But the Caribbean, and particularly Jamaica, has also had a powerful, if hidden, influence on American cultural politics, namely, Harlem Renaissance writer Claude McKay, Marcus Garvey, and DJ Kool Herc, whose sound system played in Brooklyn and is credited as giving birth to hip-hop. A key aspect of this cultural political traffic was the aesthetic exchange through style-fashion-dress and an article of clothing that would affect men’s fashion in the future and become relevant in terms of saga bwoys and rude bwoys: the zoot suit. It was first worn by young African American and Mexican American men in urban areas across the United States as part of a dance cult and to make a political statement and be associated with the representation of social deviant behavior during the 1940s. The zoot suiter spared no expense on garments that were meticulously worn from head to foot. As Holly Alford notes, “The suit came in various colors, such as lime green or canary yellow, and many suits bore a plaid stripe, on hounds-tooth print.”17 Everything was exaggerated with accessories such as a v-knot tie, the zoot chain, tight collar, wide flat hat, and Dutchtype shoes. The zoot suit was part of a total look that not only included the suit, but also hairstyle, gait, McMillan

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and vernacular language. Slicking back the hair so that it was shiny and smooth was achieved by cutting the hair close or by relaxing or straightening it with a process called congolene, using a mixture of lye, eggs, and potatoes.18 In fact, in his autobiography Malcolm X recalls how wearing his “conk” hairstyle, associated with zoot suiters and musicians like Little Richard and social deviants like pimps and drug dealers, was a painful experience.19 How the zoot suit was worn was heavily influenced by the walk or strut, a confident swagger through which the body performed a “transcendental balance and transient rebellion.” Intrinsic to the style-fashion-dress of the zoot suit was jive talk, which was used in the African American swing community to detract and sometimes put down the white man. Alford acknowledges that some define jive talk as a language intrinsic to the signifying practice of the zoot suit, yet she does not explore it beyond the semiotic meaning of argot.20 Relegating jive talk to colloquial slang negates the fact that it is expressed as much through the body as part of an oral tradition such as creole languages in the Caribbean. Jive talk and creole languages appropriate a European lexicon with African grammar or rhythm and have been stigmatized through the colonialist lens on creole culture that shaped the racism that characterized slavery.21 These expressions provide black people, and provided the enslaved, a secret language and a soft means of resistance in order to subvert the power of the white and colonial elite; as a consequence, they have been demonized as inferior languages. Caribbean poets like Louise Bennett and Edward Kamau Brathwaite have reclaimed Creole as a national language by valorizing its practice within an oral tradition that resists its demonization as an inferior dialect or bastardized pidgin form of the colonial tongue.22 Across a whole range of cultural forms there is a “syncretic” dynamic which critically appropriates elements from the master-codes of the dominant culture and “creolises” them, disarticulating given signs and re-articulating their symbolic meaning. The subversive force of this hybridising tendency is most apparent at the level of language itself where creoles, patois and black English decentre, destabilise and carnivalise the linguistic domination of “English”— a nation language of the master discourse—through

strategic inflections, re-accentuations and other performative moves in semantic syntactic and lexical codes.23

The zoot suit for young African American and Mexican American men provided a means of negotiating subject positions in the making and remaking of their identities. From a subcultural perspective, wearing a zoot suit was a rebellion through style against white hegemony, parental repression, and black middle-class conservatism in American society. The suit became a code for criminal male youths, and a rationing order issued in 1942 restricted the suit, along with other goods. Regardless, zoot suiters continued their conspicuous consumption of what has been called bling. African American and Hispanics would promenade around town; in 1943, during the Second World War, this attracted negative and violent attacks from Navy servicemen, who went on “zootbeating” sprees. The zoot suit became associated with race riots across the United States at a time when racism was rife and many African Americans and Mexican American felt disenfranchised. The zoot suit was a refusal . . . of subservience. . . . It was during his period as a young zoot-suiter that Chicano union activist Cesar Chavez first came into contact with community politics, and it was through the experiences of participating in zoot-suit riots in Harlem, that the young pimp “Detroit Red” began a political education that transformed him into the Black radical leader Malcolm X.24

The influence of the zoot suit’s style-fashiondress migrated beyond the United States to youth cultures that were emerging elsewhere. It would also be acknowledged as the first American suit, informing the aesthetics of style through generously cut and elaborate pin-striped, herringbone, and plaid suits with long, roomy coats and generously cut pleated and cuffed pants.25 Saga Bwoys The style-fashion-dress of the zoot suit was also evident in the brightly colored, generously cut suits that black men wore in the Caribbean during the 1950s. As with the zoot suit, the flamboyant use of

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color and the cut of the suits made in the Caribbean were distinctive: trousers were high-waisted and had low seats and baggy legs that tapered to the ankle and were paired with double-breasted jackets with wide lapels. These sharp suits provided a lively contrast to the “endless shades of grey that engulfed ‘never had it so good’ Britain.”26

his collection; the big operation of wetting his hair with water, greasing it, combing it, then touching it up with a brush into shape; putting on the trousers with a seam that could cut you; and finally the jacket fitting square on the shoulders. “One thing with Galahad since he hit London, no foolishness about clothes.”30

They set a new pace in picture ties, and “Tropical” lightweight, vanilla-tinted, Scottish tweed or “Rainbow” mohair suits, so devilishly cut by fellow cottage bespoke tailors they appeared to move in rhythm with the wearer’s easy stride. Hats expertly perched on the head completed the look. It was an ensemble so sharp that these purveyors of style appeared to slice their way through the smog of Britain’s major cities. It was a potent, capricious mode of dress worn en masse by black, working class immigrants, accompanied by a deep-rooted love affair with hot calypsos, sensuous Latin-American sounds and temperamental jazz. A rhythmic patter laced with fresh, intoxicating words and phrases, was an essential accessory.27

Supposed predation by black men on white women was another staple image recycled from the ancient lexicon of colonial racism. Those men were linked to the image of the pimp, and whether they were black or white, the women with whom they associated were marked by the taint of prostitution. If the women were unwilling, the men became rapists. If the women were willing, they became the vanguard of racial degeneration.31

In Eastern Caribbean vernacular, saga bwoys, or sweet bwoys, were men who combined sartorial orginality with ways of walking and talking in conspicuous display.28 To echo the point made by Daniel Miller in his anthropological research in Trinidad, gallerying, or promenading, is not so much fashion as style, not simply what is worn but how it is worn, based on the recombining of elements in an individual style that has a transient quality. It is about maintaining a personal reputation for the occasion, the event for the moment. It is therefore ephemeral just like the costumes made for carnival, signifying on something or someone as the performance of style.29 Like zoot suiters, the suits saga bwoys wore had full pants that were comfortable and roomy and conducive to dancing to swing, jazz, Latin American music, and calypso. In his novel The Lonely Londoners, Sam Selvon describes the attention to detail that the character Sir Galahad pays in dressing for a date: the cleaning of his shoes with Cherry Blossom until he could see his face in the leather; putting on a new pair of socks with a nylon splice in the heel and the toe; the white Van Heusen shirt; the tie he chooses from

Then there is Harris: Harris is a fellar who like to play ladeda, and he like English customs and thing, he does be polite and say thank you and he does get up in the bus and the tube to let woman sit down, which is a thing even them Englishmen don’t do. And when he dress, you think is some Englishman going work in the city, bowler and umbrella, and briefcase tuck under the arm, with The Times fold up in the pocket so the name would show, and he walking upright like life is he alone who alive in the world. Only thing, Harris face black.32

Harris could be read here as registering a “speaky spokey” sensibility, being more English than the English, a mimic man imitating the mores of the colonial elite. And yet it is Harris who organizes dances that provide a disparate network of West Indians a place to socialize with each other during the late 1950s. We could imagine Harris among a group of West Indian shakers and movers greeting Norman Manley, the Jamaican prime minister, when he visited England in 1958 after the race riots in Notting Hill. What both Harris and Sir Galahad share as immigrants are aspirational desires in a long process of becoming, becoming settled, and becoming something else in Britain. Moreover, there were many men and women like Harris who, imbued with an English colonial culture, practiced high McMillan

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standards of sartorial expression and good grooming of their body, as well as social behavior and the presentation of self based on manners and respect. There is a myth that because Caribbean migrants were socially leveled as working class, if not the underclass, they all came from such backgrounds in the Caribbean. Many were in fact highly educated professionals and artisans; regardless, an unspoken moral code existed among them that was based on minding appearances and creating the impression of respectability and reputation that meant they largely knew how to dress. Moreover, as noted in Zimena Percival’s film about migrant workers on the London buses, Caribbean drivers and conductors brought a sense of good grooming and sartorial neatness that would eventually be adopted by their English colleagues.33 Rude Bwoys Rude bwoy subculture originated in the ghettos of Kingston, Jamaica, coinciding with the popular rise of rocksteady music, dancehall celebrations, and sound-system dances. “They were mostly unemployed and had taken to carrying German ratchet knives and hand guns. They could be anything from fourteen to twenty-five years old and came from all over West Kingston. And above all, the rude boys were angry.”34 Young, urban, and frequently unemployed, rude bwoys drew inspiration for their cool and smart style—sharp suits, thin ties, and pork-pie or trilby hats—from American gangster movies, where the aesthetics of the suits worn were influenced by the zoot suit. The American soul-element was reflected most clearly in the self-assured demeanour, the sharp flashy clothes, the “jive-ass” walk which the street boys affected. The rude boy lived for the luminous moment, playing dominoes as though his life depended on the outcome—a big-city hustler with nothing to do, and all the time rocksteady, ska and reggae gave him the means with which to move effortlessly. . . . Cool, that distant and indefinable quality, became almost abstract, almost metaphysical, intimating a stylish kind of stoicism—survival and something more.35

We can sense the transcendental cool and transient rebelliousness in Hebdige’s description. The bad bwoy, pistol-slinging Ivan, played by Jimmy Cliff in the 1972 film The Harder They Come, would come to signify the rude bwoy image throughout the African diaspora. The rude bwoy style was also immortalized in ska music from the 1960s onward, with The Wailers’ “The Rude Boy” (1964), produced by Clement Dodd, or Prince Buster’s “Too Hot” (1967). An archetypal rude bwoy outfit would have a rhizoidal quality about its assemblage, rather than being sourced from one stylistic root. It included a red felt hat, tonic suit, a cotton shirt from Jamaica, a cotton string vest, nylon socks (USA), the loafers, nylon underpants, elastic braces, and a silk handkerchief. Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style begins to discuss how Jamaican rude bwoy sartorial style, creolized expressions, and blue beat music was adopted by the hard mods (modernists) and skinhead subcultures in the 1960s.36 The spaces where these subcultures encountered each other included the Ram Jam club in Brixton, where black and white youth mixed and ska music became associated with violence. Hard mods and skinheads were in awe of what they perceived to be the rude bwoy’s style-fashion-dress, as illustrated from a 1964 interview with David Holborne, a nineteen-year-old mod, cited by Tulloch: “At the moment we’re heroworshipping the spades—they can dance and sing. . . . We have to get all our clothes made because as soon as anything is in the shops it becomes too common. I once went to a West Indian club where everyone made their own clothes.”37 This passion for emulation is further highlighted by Hebdige: The long open coats worn by some West Indians were translated by the skinheads into the “crombie” which became a popular article of dress amongst the more reggae-oriented groups (i.e., amongst those who defined themselves more as midnight ramblers than as afternoon Arsenal supporters). Even the erect carriage and the loose limbed walk which characterises the West Indian street-boy were (rather imperfectly) simulated by the aspiring “white negroes.”38

By the 1970s, skinheads and Aggro boys would became inextricably linked with working-class

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conservatism and various far-right political groups such as the National Front. Therefore, when the 2-Tone ska music revival arrived in the early 1980s with bands like The Selector dressed in rude bwoy suits, it served as a reminder that diasporic objects have been fashionable since the 1950s and the birth of rock ’n’ roll because, as Van Dyk Lewis argues, “they are self-images of people who are in an unenviable position.”39 The 1970s was the moment of Pan-Africanist radical black politics and the coolest street culture, as exemplified through reggae, sound-system culture, and Rastafarian icongraphy and vernacular idioms and expressions of Jamaican origin. Since Caribbean migrant communities have always been stereotyped as Jamaican, whether or not that was one’s family background, cool-seeking black teenagers went along with the myth. Many black youth (read, black male overrepresentation) reappropriated the bad bwoy ontology of the rude bwoy in a self-fashioning performative style. A typical outfit was very label-conscious and consisted of a black Kangol hat, Farah trousers, Gabicci cardigans (yardie cardies), and shoes by Bally and Pierre Cardin. Jewelry was central to the style, and thick gold rope chains with Nefertiti heads, cannabis leaves, onyx medallions, and sovereigns were favorite pieces. The term yardie derives from the slang name given to occupants of government yards in Trenchtown, a neighborhood in West Kingston. The poverty and crime experienced by many residents led to them becoming known as yardies, a stigma that yardie-style sought to challenge. In fact, during the British media frenzy over Jamaican gunmen commiting crimes on British soil during the late 1980s and 1990s, yardie became another term used in the relentless demonization of any Caribbean immigrant, much less anyone of Caribbean heritage. For zoot suiter saga bwoys, rude bwoys, or black dandies the barbershop catered to black males’ desire to beautify their hair. Although these men were socially disempowered, the transformative practices of pampering and controlling their hair that took place in this space provided them with a sense of embodied power. Like the black hairdressing saloon, the black barber is a secret-gendered institution where black men chat, joke, share,

unmask, and reminisce as they wait to enter a ritualized intimate relationship with the person who cuts their hair: the barber. After the obligatory grooming—bath, hair combed, face creamed, and sweet-smelling scents applied, not unlike Sir Galahad—the saga bwoys, young black male teenagers eager to go out raving, would be stepping out to a club, a dance with a sound system playing blues music, a party, or a shebeen (illegal party) in the rude bwoy casual dress style, as de rigueur with the garments and accessories listed above; a neat, short Afro hairstyle; and possibly a Crombie coat in the winter. The attire meant nothing without the swagger of a bad bwoy gait, that is, walking as if you had a loose limp that Hebdige associates with rude bwoys. Returning to the rude bwoy suit, one owner says that in the late 1970s he would wear it with as much gold as he could afford and that he used gold cigarette paper on his teeth as a cap. This fetish for luxury and opulence bestowed by things shiny and gold echoes the conspicuous consumption of the sapeurs—the Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Élégantes (Society for the Advancement of Elegant People) centered in Brazzaville in the Republic of Congo—ordinary men who exalt fashion, style, and elegance. It [sapeur subculture] has strong religious and moral undertones and codes, while at the same time verging on the blasphemous by flouting its unstinting devotion to worldly symbols of money, “bling” and consumerism. It is at once a throwback to colonial patterns of behaviour and conditioning while at the same time signalling a particular post-colonial appropriation of the master’s style and manners and “re-mixing them for today’s society of the spectacle.”40

The performativity and performance of the sapeurs as dandies, at the intersection of the saga bwoys and rude bwoys, embody the sense of aspiring to defiance through grooming and conspicuous consumption in dressing the male body. In diaspora, formation music and sound are central, as Krista Thompson points out.41 However, Paul Gilroy argues that “master signifiers of black creativity, sound, have been supplanted by eyes and visuality” as ways of seeing and approaches to being McMillan

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seen.42 Relevant here is the term bling, in the context of the 1998 hit “Bling-Bling” by rapper B.G. (Baby Gangsta) of the New Orleans–based group Cash Money Millionaires. The Oxford English Dictionary defines bling not only as a “piece of ostentatious jewelry,” but also as any “flashy” accoutrement that “glorifies conspicuous consumption.” Bling is not simply about conspicuous consumption; it is also about visual effect, the way light, for instance, strikes the diamond/ice in that necklace or ring to reveal its opulence, and through the optics of shine, blinds the viewer with its visibility/invisibility while simultaneously appearing larger than life. In drawing this essay to a close it is evident that in their performance of the style-fashion-dress the zoot suiter, saga bwoy, rude bwoy, and sapeurs continually remake themselves not only in terms of blackness as deviance, but also blackness as creativity. This perspective, as proposed by curator Paul Goodwin and cited by Tulloch, opens up what has been termed post-black. On this subject, Tulloch quotes Thelma Golden of the Studio Museum in Harlem: [P]ost-black is a concept that “is not about erasing the past, but to restart and reset, an attitude, a stance, a positioning, a way to enable expansive questioning to see culture in a broader sense. A space in which to look backward in order to look forward.” The unraveling of what post-black means is in its early stages.43

Tulloch goes on to quote Shirley Anne Tate: We are in a post-Black is beautiful discursive space where “post” points to the waning of old paradigms without their supersession by anything new. As we are still living and developing this space we cannot say what its outcome will be. What we can say though is that the “Black” in Black beauty has become part of the axes of difference which provide overlapping lines of identification, exclusion and contestation over beauty paradigms.44

In a globalized postcolonial and neoliberal market society where “beauty paradigms” are often expressed through Western cultural hegemony, it is evident that saga bwoys and rude bwoys, like other black dandies within the African diaspora,

expressed a sense of sartorial freedom, liberation, and rebellion. Through diasporic migration and settlement, the diffusion, aesthetic exchange, and appropriation of their style-fashion-dress reveal dynamic and fresh possibilities for rethinking black masculinities and the performance of the clothed male body in the public domain that still resonate today. Michael McMillan is a British-born playwright, artist / curator of Vincentian migrant heritage, and associate lecturer in cultural and historical studies at the London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London. Notes

1 Monica Miller, Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 10. 2 Ibid., 11. 3 Ibid., 10. 4 Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Williams (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), 401. 5 Carol Tulloch, “Rebel without a Pause: Black Street Style and Black Designers,” in Chic Thrills: A Fashion Reader, ed. Juliet Ash and Elizabeth Wilson (London: Pandora, 1992), 85. 6 Carol Tulloch, ed., Black Style (London: V&A Publishing, 2004), 14. 7 Stuart Hall and Mark Sealy, Different (London: Phaidon, 2001), 12. 8 Stuart Hall, “Reconstruction Work: Stuart Hall on Images of Post War Black Settlement,” Ten-8, no. 16 (1984): 4. 9 Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (New York: Verso, 1997), 35. 10 Deborah J. Haynes, Bakhtin and the Visual Arts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 85. 11 Stuart Hall, “Aspiration and Attitude . . . Reflections on Black Britain in the Nineties,” New Formations: Frontlines/Backyards, no. 33 (1998): 38. 12 Daniel Miller, “Fashion and Ontology in Trinidad,” in Design and Aesthetics: A Reader, ed. Jerry Palmer and Mo Dodson (London: Routledge, 1996), 136. 13 Ibid. 14 Stuart Hall, Jessica Evans, and Sean Nixon, eds. Representation, 2nd ed. (Milton Keynes: Oxford University Press / Sage, 2013), 237. 15 Tulloch, Black Style, 12. 16 Farris Robert Thompson, Aesthetics of Cool: Afro-Atlantic Art and Music (New York: Periscope, 2011), 29. 17 H. Alford, “The Zoot Suit: Its History and Influence,” Fashion Theory 8, no. 2 (2004): 225–236. 18 Ibid., 226. 19 Malcolm X with Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Grove, 1965), 155. 20 Alford, “The Zoot Suit,” 227. 21 R. Mooneeram, “From Creole to Standard: Shakespeare, Language, and Literature in a Postcolonial Context,” in Cross/

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Cultures: Readings in the Post/Colonial Literatures in English (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), 107. 22 See Edward Kamau Brathwaite, History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry (London: New Beacon Books, 1984). 23 Ibid., 24. 24 Stuart Cosgrove, “The Zoot-Suit and Style Warfare,” History Workshop, no. 18 (1984): 77–91. 25 Alford, “The Zoot Suit,” 233. 26 Tulloch, “Rebel without a Pause,” 85. 27 Ibid., 86. 28 Mighty Sparrow, Mr. Walker, 1968 (from the album Sparrow Calypso Carnival, Recording Artists, 1968). 29 Miller, “Fashion and Ontology in Trinidad,” 137. 30 Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners (London: Penguin Books, 1956), 50. 31 Paul Gilroy, Black Britain: A Photographic Essay (London: Saqi/Getty Images, 2011), 95. 32 Selvon, The Lonely Londoners, 103. 33 Zimena Percival, Arena: Tube Night and Arena: Underground, London: BBC4, 2007. 34 Dick Hebdige, Cut ’n’ Mix: Culture, Identity and Caribbean Music (London: Methuen, 1987), 72. 35 Dick Hebdige, “Reggae, Rastas and Rudies: Style and the Subversion of Form,” Working Papers in Cultural Studies, no. 7/8 (1975): 145. 36 Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Methuen, 1979), 145. 37 David Holborne, interview by Charles Hamblett and Jane Deverson for Generation X, Library 33, 1964, cited in Tulloch, “Rebel without a Pause,” 87. 38 Hebdige, Subculture, 149. 39 Van Dyk Lewis, “Dilemmas in African Diaspora Fashion,” Fashion Theory 7, no. 2 (2003): 186. 40 Paul Goodwin, “Introduction,” in Daniele Tamagni, Gentlemen of Bacongo (London: Trolley, 2009), 11. 41 Krista A. Thompson, “Youth Culture, Diasporic Aesthetics, and the Art of Being Seen in the Bahamas,” African Arts, Spring 2011, 26–39. 42 Paul Gilroy, “‘ . . . To Be Real’: The Dissendent Forms of Black Expressive Culture,” in Let’s Get It On: The Politics of Black Performance, ed. Catherine Ugwu (Seattle: Bay Press / London: ICA, 1995), 29. 43 Carol Tulloch, “Style-Fashion-Dress: From Black to PostBlack,” Fashion Theory, vol. 14, no. 3 (2010): 273–304. 44 Ibid., 283.

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PORTRAITS IN BLACK STYLING, SPACE, AND SELF IN THE WORK OF BARKLEY L. HENDRICKS AND ELIZABETH COLOMBA

Anna Arabindan-Kesson

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central focus of the 2013 conference Black Portraiture[s]: The Black Body in the West was understanding the relationship between representation and subject formation in the visual construction of blackness in the West. As the organizers explained, this requires a dialogue of sorts: an exploration of representation and its implications. If we think of these conversations as taking a kind of call-and-response format, we could ask: What are we responding to?1 Black intellectuals, including Phillis Wheatley, Sojourner Truth, and Frederick Douglass, have always been aware of the power of (self)-representation.2 These women and men radicalized the visual technologies and aesthetic principles of their moment to project their personhood beyond the strictures of racist constructions that denied their subjectivity. Their self-representation was, on the one hand, a response to negative, caricatured, and violent forms of visual erasure. But as Richard J. Powell has pointed out, these acts reconstituted the black body while also reforming the aesthetics of portraiture, a genre that has often worked to marginalize, negate, or simply ignore expressions

Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016 DOI 10.1215/10757163-3641700 © 2016 by Nka Publications

Barkley L. Hendricks, APBs (Afro Parisian Brothers), 1978. Oil and acrylic on linen canvas, 72 x 50 in. Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. © Barkley L. Hendricks

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Barkley L. Hendricks, Noir, 1978. Oil and acrylic on canvas, 72 x 48 in. Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. © Barkley L. Hendricks

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of black subjectivity altogether. By “invoking art’s capacity to elicit the spirit of freedom” these women and men created a form of image making that was transformative.3 Rather than merely translating blackness into readable forms for white audiences, they used portraiture as self-actualization. They created a mode of representation whose starting point was black subjecthood on its own terms, in which we see both the performance of self and the knowing use of the black subject as a “deliberate vehicle in art and cultural discourse.”4 This visual history is my starting point. It marks what scholars have pointed out are the “counternarratives . . . critical genealogies and archives” produced by black artists and intellectuals.5 I see these responses as having a dual function. On the one hand they are a response to mainstream, negative discourses. But more powerful is their emphasis on self-actualization. In approaching the ways the black body has been imagined across mediums and across times, I want to examine this act of selfactualization in contemporary portraiture. More specifically, I will look at how two contemporary artists reformulate portraiture as a response to the black body and its histories rather than use portraits of black subjects to challenge art history’s status quo. Replete with different, evocative histories and produced decades apart, the paintings I will briefly discuss here by Barkley L. Hendricks and Elizabeth Colomba resonate in their shared attention to surface. Upon first glancing at either of these two artists’ works, one is immediately engaged by their glistening immediacy expressed in strong matte colors and sensitive detail. While Hendricks plays with a certain kind of pop-art abstraction, juxtaposing a monochrome background with a bold gesture to the court portraiture of artists like Anthony Van Dyck, Colomba combines the symbolism, mannered coloring, and precise detail of French still life and Flemish genre painting in her mysterious and mythical portraits of black women.6 Both present us with portraits of black subjects. And both draw on the foundational, space-making gestures made by earlier explorations of the black body in Western art such as David Dabydeen’s Hogarth’s Blacks.7 In so doing these artists propel us toward new discussions that open up the picture plane as they explore relationships between surface

and depth and interior and exterior that underpin the genre of portraiture. While Hendricks draws on the aesthetics of vernacular street culture, Colomba reassembles the canonical language used to aestheticize the female form. Ultimately, what I hope to show is that for both artists portraiture emerges as a response to the expressions of oppositional and transfiguring aesthetic and social practices performed across the black diaspora. I begin with Barkley L. Hendricks’s striking painting APBs (Afro-Parisian Brothers). In the latter years of the 1960s the artist spent a week in Paris.8 He recalls wandering through the different Parisian neighborhoods, taking photographs, watching people, and of course seeing art. On one particular day he walked through Pigalle, an area immortalized in the songs of Edith Piaf and the posters of Toulouse-Lautrec and notorious as the thriving center of Paris’s red-light district. The area is also close to the Goutte d’Or, where a large number of the city’s African and Arab populations have lived for years.9 Hendricks remembers it as a place of continual movement and change, where urban grit and sensuality combine: a place of constant parading, casual exchanges, and careful posing. Noticing the well-dressed black men and women, he was particularly taken by two gentlemen wearing the well-tailored, close-fitting suits he recalls were fashionable at the time. He asked if they would mind having their photographs taken, and they agreed. The photograph inspired the double portrait and its pendant piece, Noir. In these portraits, like his others, Hendricks explores the possibilities of sartorial style and the projection of identity. In the process he reclaims the black body—here the black male body—as a serious subject for art historical study, using the idealized language of the Grand Manner portrait that reached its apotheosis in the eighteenth century. Influenced by the dramatic court portraits of seventeenth-century painters such as Anthony Van Dyck and Peter Paul Rubens, the genre’s greatest expositors included the eighteenth-century British artists Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough, as well as the nineteenth-century American painter John Singer Sargent.10 Conceived as a corollary to the elevating ideals of history painting, the Grand Manner portrait displayed sitters, using an Arabindan-Kesson

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aggrandizing aesthetic and narrative style.11 The Grand Manner portrait is itself a kind of costume drama, where theatricality and performance coalesce in the atmospheric gestures of impasto, brush stroke, and composition. Women and men are idealized as historical actors. They are of their time while also existing beyond it. While portraiture is in essence a form of memorialization, the Grand Manner portrait monumentalizes and transforms sitters from the domestic surrounds of the everyday into classicized subjects. In their size and sharp detail both APBs and Noir allude to this painterly style. They are large in scale and sensual in detail. Carefully modulated tones and sharply observed bodily posturing dramatically convey these men as psychologically heightened subjects—personas, not mere likenesses. Such idealized projection has long been associated with whiteness.12 Hendricks’s decision to draw on the aesthetics of the Grand Manner portrait to paint subjects deemed outside the realms of canonical art history destabilizes the cultural hierarchies signified by painting. As I briefly outlined earlier, black subjects have always been creators of their own portraits.13 But I would argue that here Hendricks’s selfconscious reconceptualization of the mythologizing tendencies of the Grand Manner portrait radically alters the ways in which the black body, and particularly the black male body, could be viewed in the politicized, cultural milieu of America in the 1960s and 1970s, the era when he began painting, and still today. This act is not simply a reinsertion of the black body into the art historical canon; rather, it emerges from the destabilization of the figure/ ground relationship through a set of spatial aesthetics that I want to explicate further here.14 Hendricks was not involved in the separatist aesthetics of the Black Arts movement, nor did he find a home within the photorealism or abstractionist tendencies of mainstream American art. Yet his braggadocio style, attention to detail, and intense color fields engage all these movements.15 His photographic accuracy and sensitivity to color also reveal the influence of his teachers at the Yale School of Art, Walker Evans and Josef Albers, between 1970 and 1972.16 Maintaining a classically influenced painterly style, the artist dispels with the accessorized background of more traditional

portraiture. Although highly realistic, the interlocking planes of color, smooth surface, and close cropping collapse the relationship between figure and ground. This flatness evokes the cool ambivalence of pop art, just as Hendricks’s choice of subject resonates with the movement’s collapse of boundaries between high and low culture.17 Painted in oil, the figures in these paintings glisten. Behind them the acrylic matte finish of the background creates the semblance of chiaroscuro through sheen: the men are highlighted and propelled forward. Despite the paintings’ obvious flatness, a clear depth of vision is being created. It is tempting to see this as a kind of iconicity: the projection of an interiority, an immanence, that goes beyond the external and physical reality we see.18 This notion of the iconic is further complicated for contemporary viewers by these portraits’ historical context. Painted in an era where the catchphrase “Black is beautiful” held international importance, APBs and Noir—from their natural hairstyles to the finely cut suits— embody the powerful meaning of this phrase and its transnational resonances. By the time Hendricks came to paint these men, he had already traveled to Nigeria more than once, participating in the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture and visiting various cultural sites. For Hendricks it was a time of racial and political awareness, the beginnings of a black diasporic consciousness that continues to shape his understanding of black identity, and particularly black masculinity, today.19 It was also for Hendricks a time of artistic exploration that allowed him to express his fascination with sartorial splendor across national boundaries. In an interview with Thelma Golden he explains that “there was a style at the time, with the long, slit-back suits that you saw a lot of tall, graceful African brothers wearing.”20 A black American in Paris, Hendricks also remembers being interested by different diasporic expressions of black identity. Hendricks’s collapse of the aesthetic relationship between surface/depth is, then, a response to the sartorial gestures he witnessed around him. It is fundamentally a spatial move. Hendricks transforms the canvas into something like a catwalk across which these two brothers project themselves through their attention to detail, from the belt buckles to their hairstyles, mirroring

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the artist’s own painstaking style of realism. The monochrome background of APBs and Noir is not intended as a screen or support for the projection of figures; rather, it is more like a stage across which subjects dramatically enact their personhood. The two men in APBs, for example, with their air of cool nonchalance, call up the scenes, sounds, and energy of the streets on which Hendricks first photographed them walking. They swagger just a little as they stand carefully balanced and well-composed. Their bell-bottom trousers and slim-fitting jackets capture for us the sleekness of that 1970s look: trim, confident, and almost lyrical in its coordination. Their effortless cosmopolitanism, worn in their confident brashness and stylized swagger—their finished “look”—rhymes with Hendricks’s own painterly style that re-creates the culture of artifice underpinning the projection of subjecthood. As I have already suggested, Hendricks’s use of the language of the Grand Manner portrait challenges the associations of whiteness, canonical art history, and theories of aesthetic judgment. It is not simply that he reimagines the idealized art subject as the black male, but rather that this reimagining requires a new kind of aesthetic language. The Grand Manner portrait was both classical and timeless in its contemporaneity, but it worked to secure, locate, and hold bodies in place. In attending to artifice as a presentation of self, Hendricks recalls the language of the street and the language of street photographers, from Eugène Atget to Gordon Parks to James Barnor, who saw the street as stage, as platform, as runway.21 In turning to street culture and the urban youth culture he saw around him in Paris, Nigeria, New Haven, and Philadelphia, Hendricks finds other sources, cadences, and spaces from which to approach, appropriate, and refine the genre. Portraiture relies on the surface to evoke depth below, but Hendricks’s portraits almost always conflate the two. Artifice is not superficial, but in the historical language of the black dandy it is a form of composition. Attracted to their fashionable suits, in APBs Hendricks uses them to connect these brothers across the matte surface. They are poised across the canvas, emphasized all the more by the riffing of clothing, color, and accessories rather than fixed into their background. In this physical space, their self-possession, their

own careful tailoring, and their own attention to surface detail propel and project them into our space. They are suddenly within, but also somehow outside, the frame. Harnessing the tailored slickness of their fashionable suits, Hendricks’s own painterly slickness creates an image of black masculinity, which like their outfits seems instantly recognizable yet remains aloof, is expressive yet uncategorized. This is not a call for solidarity but a nod to the individualism and individual creativity of his subjects. It is an anti-iconicity, if you will. Brothers they may be, but by drawing on fashion as the primary mode of expression in this and other portraits, Hendricks presents a form of masculinity that, particularly for its moment, is remarkable: 1970s carried outwardly perhaps yet retained, composed, and hidden. Blackness is less a characteristic than a form of expression, carried sometimes easily and sometimes ambiguously.22 Here it is given a corporeal subjectivity that art historian and artist Rick Powell has defined as an “in-process identity formation.”23 The background is more like a backdrop, and rather than being fixed or held in place, as portraiture is want to do, these men are hard to pin down. Subjectivity is in flux, which returns us to the culture of the street with its variation, its runway-like quality, and its attention to surface; whether in Paris, New Haven, Philadelphia, or Nigeria, the street is a space of motion, a space of formation. The street can be anywhere. If Grand Manner portraiture emphasizes timelessness transforming the everyday into mythology, APBs and Noir transform the here into anywhere. Although location is suggested by the titles, the collapse of the figure/ground relationship transforms these men on a spatial level. Their blackness does not ground them; rather, it seems to give them space to exist beyond the confines of temporality. This possibility of recognition, of being seen and seeing others, underpins the process of identification just as it describes the interactions that take place on streets across the world. His AfroParisian brothers, dandies by another name, exude what Monica L. Miller has elsewhere described as “black cosmopolitanism,” a sense of sartorial projection that “functions as a kind of eye on the world in which limitations imposed by race, gender, sexuality, economics or the demands of an artistic Arabindan-Kesson

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Elizabeth Colomba, Mama Legba, 2011. Oil on canvas, 48 x 35 in. Courtesy the artist. © Elizabeth Colomba

movement were, for moments, not impermeable . . . a kind of freedom dream.”24 And it is this spatial movement that Hendricks appears to draw on most fully here, an aesthetic that seems to mirror, perhaps, his own hopes for a diasporic expression of black subjectivity that could exist beyond the boundaries of nation: a hope he continues to express in his art and musings. To conclude this examination, I want to briefly sketch out a more contemporary expression of this spatial reformulation and begin to think through

what a critical genealogy of black portraiture might look like now. In APBs and Noir Hendricks uses the language of the Grand Manner portrait to harness the spatial maneuvers of street culture and transform portraiture into a moving spectacle, where the transnational meanings of black masculinity could be spatially expressed. New York–based French artist Elizabeth Colomba’s paintings also revolve around a spatial disruption to the traditions of Western art in order to express alternative histories of blackness and representation. Her paintings are a study in the tensions between movement and stillness. In many of her oils, she uses surfaces to render her astute observation into luxurious form: tapestries fall thickly; dresses form stiff coverings around lithe bodies that glide or sit or stand. Furnishings glisten, while ornate chairs and tables of dark woods anchor her interiors, whose stillness is activated by the interaction of objects, artistic references, and figures. In Mama Legba (2011) Colomba draws on the religious themes of Haitian voudun, refiguring Papa Legba, the interlocutor, intermediary, and voice of God, as a woman. The painting is full of symbolism—the rooster symbolizing vigilance, the cat as a symbol of freedom, and the cornucopia of fruit and bread a symbol of abundance and fertility.25 Mama Legba has the charisma and power of a John Singer Sargent portrait. With her red-gloved hand on her hip she shimmers in the haute couture of a feathery bodice overlaid with beads and pearls. Silver jewelry flowers over an ivory-rustled silk gown. She stands on thick carpet, a rich floral design that is rhymed with the curvature and carvings on the green chair and the basket of fruit it holds. Portraying an allegorical, mythical figure— one that Colomba associates with the Caribbean island of Haiti—this painting theatrically brings together myth and portraiture to construct a powerful narrative of black femininity.26 It draws on the society portraits of artists like Sargent, in which the female form and fashion coalesce into a powerful portrayal of personality and status.27 Colomba’s black subject perfectly adapts to this narrative of portraiture with her haute couture, powerful posing, and steely gaze; however, she evokes an alternate history of black identity, expression, and community. As with Hendricks,

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Elizabeth Colomba, Seated, 1997. Oil on canvas panel, 18 x15 in. Courtesy the artist. © Elizabeth Colomba

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this defamiliarization involves the re-creation of a movement in space. We move into a space that lies beyond the upper-class drawing rooms and salons of Europe yet seems to simultaneously exist alongside them. This is a space where alternate visual genealogies might be created from the networks of black diasporic heritage. This becomes clearer in the painting Seated (1997). Here Colomba makes specific reference to James Abbot McNeil Whistler’s Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1: Portrait of the Artist’s Mother (1871), replacing the white mother with this reflective black woman. In Seated the woman is painted in gray, white, and inky blue. She is silent and smooth; her features and form are powerfully sculpted and thickly textured; her impassive body anchors the painting. Framed into the background behind her is a portrait of a topless black woman, which she looks past. The lines of their sight form a dynamic movement within the painting that punctuates its stillness. Colomba has inserted Marie-Guillemine Benoist’s Portrait d’une Négresse (1800), a painting inspired by the French decree to abolish slavery in 1794. In the paintings by Benoist and Whistler, the female form figures as allegory and surrogate. In one she asserts a new understanding of the materiality of figuration as pure color. In the other she stands as a symbol of sociopolitical critique. In both, the women represent the artist’s desire for a new aesthetic language.28 Colomba’s reformulation of these historical works suggests a similar aesthetic maneuver. In other words, her work is not simply concerned with acts of omission. Behind the elderly woman in Seated is a second painting of a tropical picturesque scene. It rises above her like an exteriorization of a private reflection. While the landscape painting might reflect a point of origin, grounding the painting, it also troubles this connection. It evokes histories of trauma, spaces of encounter, creolization, and hybridity that reflect the complicated networks of movement shaping black diasporic identity.29 Like Hendricks, Colomba draws on the iconicity of portraiture as a genre, only to reassemble its formulation around the black body. Hendricks uses his monochrome backdrop to evoke the vernacular aesthetics of a transnational black selffashioning. Colomba’s paintings reconceptualize

the (domestic) space of portraiture as a site of encounter, or what Mary Louise Pratt has called a “contact zone.”30 Colomba turns the power dynamics of this encounter on its head, however. Her portraits do not point to an origin so much as embody the constant sense of translation that takes place in any kind of encounter—what Stuart Hall has called the “logic of cultural translation” within Caribbean, diasporic cultures.31 Here she stages the interaction of two visual histories: that of the black body and its canonical referents. By using the language of portraiture to embody this interaction, she collapses the hierarchical classicizing ideals of the canon and instead uses them to create an alternate mythology, an alternative genealogy of visuality drawn from the networks of black diasporic movement and history. Colomba’s portraits become the space in which these mythologies take shape; her interiors stage these transnational routes, histories, and dreams as they coalesce into paint. Rather than inserting black bodies into the canon, both Hendricks and Colomba imagine what a history of art might look like in which black bodies are not only subjects, but their presence also requires new modes of aesthetic expression. Like artists who came before them, they draw on the vernacular and the diasporic experiences of their communities to reconceptualize the idealizing language of canonical art history.32 Anna Arabindan-Kesson is an assistant professor in the Art and Archaeology and African American Studies departments at Princeton University. Notes

1 Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and AfroAmerican Art and Philosophy (New York: Random House, 1983), xiii. 2 Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw and Emily K. Shubert, Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century (Andover, MA: Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy; Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006); Celeste-Marie Bernier, Characters of Blood: Black Heroism in the Transatlantic Imagination (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012); Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol, (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997); John Stauffer et al., Picturing Frederick Douglass: An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth Century’s Most Photographed American (New York: Liveright, 2015).

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3 Richard J. Powell, Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 26. 4 Ibid., 13. 5 Nicole R. Fleetwood, Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 113. 6 For more on this see Kobena Mercer, Discrepant Abstraction (London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 2006); Kobena Mercer, Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). See also Trevor Schoonmaker, “Birth of the Cool,” in Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool, ed. Trevor Schoonmaker (Durham, NC: Nasher Museum of Art and Duke University Press, 2008), 14–38. 7 David Dabydeen, Hogarth’s Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth Century English Art (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987). I highlight this text because it ushered in an important new direction in art history, and social art history in particular. Dabydeen’s text was significant for its close reading of portraiture and genre painting that included black figures. He highlighted the way these figures were positioned as marginal, as accessories, and as property in order to argue against their invisibility in (British) art history and to question why these kinds of paintings and subjects had long been ignored in art history. As significant as this text has been, its attempts to “make space” for black figures in the canon of art history and its reading of race and aesthetics through the lens of center/margin is now being expanded and reformulated by historians and art historians. See for example Agnes Lugo-Ortiz and Angela Rosenthal, Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Catherine Molineux, Faces of Perfect Ebony: Encountering Atlantic Slavery in Imperial Britain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Shaw and Shubert, Portraits of a People; Powell, Cutting a Figure. 8 All discussions with Barkley L. Hendricks took place via personal communication among author, Susan Hendricks, and artist. Barkley L. Hendricks and Susan Hendricks, interview by author, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT, April 12, 2010. 9 Centralité immigré—Le quartier de la Goutte d’Or— Dynamique d’un espace pluriethnique (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1990). See also Alec G. Hargreaves, Immigration, “Race” and Ethnicity in Contemporary France (London: Routledge, 1995). 10 Marcia R. Pointon, Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993); Elizabeth Prettejohn, Interpreting Sargent (New York: Stewart, Tabori and Chang, 1999); Victoria Charles, Anthony van Dyck (New York: Parkstone International, 2011); Christopher White, Anthony Van Dyck: Thomas Howard, the Earl of Arundel (Malibu, CA: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1995); Amal Asfour and Paul Williamson, Gainsborough’s Vision (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999); Joanna Woodall, Portraiture: Facing the Subject (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1997). 11 Andrew Graham-Dixon, A History of British Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 38; Pointon, Hanging the Head. 12 Fleetwood, Troubling Vision, 113. 13 Powell, Cutting a Figure; Shaw and Shubert, Portraits of a People; Lisa E. Farrington, Creating Their Own Image: The History of African-American Women Artists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 14 I think of this move in particular in relation to a recent exhibition and scholarly publication that critically reappraises the work of Archibald Motley. Moving beyond “reinserting” Motley into the narrative of early twentieth-century modernism, the essays of the catalogue and the trajectory of the exhibition highlight his works’

centrality to the aesthetics and politics of modernism and the radical ways he foregrounded the modernity of his black subjects. See Richard J. Powell, ed., Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist (Durham, NC: Nasher Museum of Art, 2014). 15 Richard J. Powell, “Barkley L. Hendricks, Anew,” in Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool, 39–57, and Richard J. Powell, Cutting a Figure, 125–71. 16 Barkley L. Hendricks and Susan Hendricks, interview by author, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT, April 12, 2010. 17 Mercer, Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures. 18 Catherine M. Soussloff, The Subject in Art: Portraiture and the Birth of the Modern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 8. 19 Barkley L. Hendricks and Susan Hendricks, interview by author, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT, April 12, 2010. 20 Thelma Golden, “Conversation with Barkley Hendricks,” in Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool, 63. 21 Deborah Willis, Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers 1840 to the Present (1948; repr. New York: W. W. Norton, 2002); Ever Young: James Barnor (London: Autograph ABP, 2010); Vanessa K. Valdés, The Future Is Now: A New Look at African Diaspora Studies (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012). 22 Monica L. Miller, Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 219. 23 Powell, Cutting a Figure, 24. 24 Miller, Slaves to Fashion, 219. 25 Elizabeth Colomba, artist statement. 26 Ibid.; Elizabeth Colomba, email interview by author, December 27, 2012. 27 Prettejohn, Interpreting Sargent; Susan Sidlauskas, “Painting Skin: John Singer Sargent’s ‘Madame X,’” American Art 15, no. 3 (October 1, 2001): 9–33. 28 James Smalls, “Slavery Is a Woman: ‘Race,’ Gender, and Visuality in Marie Benoist’s Portrait d’une Négresse (1800),” www.19thc-artworldwide.org/spring04/70-spring04/spring04 article/286-slavery-is-a-woman-race-gender-and-visuality -in-marie-benoists-portrait-dune-negresse-1800 (accessed July 31, 2015). 29 Stuart Hall, “Créolité and the Process of Creolization,” in Créolité and Creolization: Documenta 11_Platform 3, ed. Okwui Enwezor (New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2003), 27–42. 30 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2008), 4. 31 Hall, “Créolité and the Process of Creolization,” 31. 32 See especially Richard J. Powell, “Becoming Motley, Becoming Modern,” in Powell, Archibald Motley, 109–47.

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POST-POSTBLACK?

Nana Adusei-Poku In the collective experience of African / Diasporic histories and futures we live our theories, work and praxis not as some distant dream, but as something that can and will happen, that is happening right now. Peggy Piesche, Deposits of Future

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he politics of time has been not only a central tool to strategically oppress people, but also a tool for liberation.1 Given the complexity of our contemporary, in which a black person can be under life threat due to the aftermath of colonialism or the aftermath of slavery, a black person can also be very powerful. The curatorial statement Post . . . introduced the term post-black art for the first time.2 In this article, I will focus on post-black art and reflect upon some of the possible ways to think about contemporary art and our methods by looking retrospectively at the term. My argument speaks to the synchronicity of multiple ideas of blackness within the diasporas, namely that new concepts framing groups of black people are invented, such as Afropolitan, that obstruct the intrinsic potential of post-black art as well as the actual individual art pieces that challenge and emphasize the changing meaning of identity. Post-black has been applied to a generation of artists born since the mid-1960s. It derives from a curatorial concept developed at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, that signaled a new aesthetic articulation of black artists and subsequently

Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016 DOI 10.1215/10757163-3641711 © 2016 by Nka Publications

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Firecrest, 2013. Oil on canvas, 59 x 55 1/8 in. Courtesy the artist; Jack Shainman Gallery, New York; and Corvi-Mora, London. © Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

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promised an alternative political practice, as its claim went beyond the visual arts.3 I became interested in the idea of post-black in 2009, as I encountered, apart from Stuart Hall’s writing from the late 1990s, a theoretical vacuum in terms of being black in the contemporary Anglophone European context. I was particularly interested in concepts that would provide a possible framework to write about this generation of black individuals and artists.4 The curator Thelma Golden and the artist Glen Ligon coined the term post-black in 2001 with Freestyle, the first in a series of four Studio Museum shows featuring up-and-coming black artists. Golden and Ligon described post-black art polemically in the curatorial note as a generation of artists who were rejecting identity categories such as black and nevertheless using black culture as a resource while redefining blackness on their own terms.5 Post-black drew on a sense of generationalism prevalent in contemporary art in conjunction with ageism, based on the neoliberal belief that everything new and different is created by a younger generation of artists whose work is seen as inherently innovative and progressive, instead of investing in the generational differences in aesthetic practices as consistencies.6 Second, it also emphasized this newness (“post-black was the new black”) within a logic of linear temporality.7 Therefore, by using the term post-black one is trapped in the assumption that postblack heralds the end of black represented by the civil rights era and connected to the idea of a post-racial society, which was never proposed by Golden. In 2016, it appears to me to be impossible to consider the end of blackness, or a post-racial era, while the US justice system shows how racialized injustice is prevailing. Black human beings present the main population of incarcerated people in the United States, and black lives are consistently under governmental physical threat. I am nevertheless arguing that post-black still offers great potential for thinking through and working with blackness in the arts. The discourse, which was opened up by the term, allows one to radically reassess (art historical) methodologies and the way in which we look at contemporary art. Let me briefly recap from where the term postblack art derives. Freestyle was the first show of a tetralogy called the “F” series, introducing a new generation of artists that included Layla Ali, Senam

Okudzeto, Mark Bradford, and Kojo Griffin. The second exhibition was named Frequency (2005), featuring artists such as Xaviera Simmons and Kalup Linzy. Four years after the term post-black entered the discussions Malik Gaines remarked in the catalogue to Frequency that the term was ambiguously perceived, either as a disrespectful dismissal of the political achievements of the civil rights movement or as a marketing strategy for a newly appointed curator.8 The third exhibition called Flow presents the work of twenty artists of African descent, some who live and work on the continent and some who do not, but all of whom spend time in Africa and are focused on African issues and methods and celebrate the complicated and complex contemporary diaspora.9 Through this opening to a wider diaspora new terms entered the post-black discourse, as I will shortly discuss. In 2013 the “F” series of emerging artists concluded with a show called Fore that did not mention post-black art and instead highlighted the artists’ birthdates (between 1971 and 1987) as well as their various means of expression.10 During the third exhibition, Flow, the discourse on post-black shifted tremendously after the 2008 presidential election of Barack Obama. This presidency has continued to challenge our thinking about race, govermentality, and dispositions of power; notions of oppression and solidarity on the basis of race are questioned and stress the interdependence and intersectionalities with other categories such as class, gender, and sexuality.11 At the same time, as these aspects take center stage, another era of highly influential black intellectuals, artists, and antiapartheid activists comes slowly to an end, heralded by the passing of, for example, Maya Angelou (1928–2014), Stuart Hall (1932–2014), Amiri Baraka (1934–2014), Albert Murray (1916–2013), Chinua Achebe (1930–2013), and Nelson Mandela (1918–2013). Their voices will be missed in the necessary dialogue among generations of black artists, intellectuals, and political activists, which reveals that these exhibitions, as well as the term post-black, can also be considered a contemporary archive of sociopolitical discourses that are reflected upon through the arts and consistently reassess how blackness is framed, performed, and discussed. Flow finally embraced this idea of black artists as not exclusively African American and that the African

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or black diaspora is much more diverse than it was portrayed in the previous shows. This exhibition gave artists who where born either somewhere in Africa or to African parents a platform, and another term entered the discussion: Afropolitan.12 Less driven by generationalism, this concept grasped the enormous mobility and hybridity of people of African descent working as artists in various places of the world. Let me clarify the term Afropolitan.13 It originally derives from Taye Selasi (formerly Tayie Tuakli-Wosurnu), the internationally celebrated author of Ghana Must Go.14 Selasi is a woman of mixed African heritage, Ghanaian and Nigerian, who was born in the United Kingdom and grew up in the United States (Massachusetts). She coined and defined Afropolitan in a short essay for LIP magazine in 2005: “[L]ike so many African young people working and living in cities around the globe, they belong to no single geography, but feel at home in many. They (read: we) are Afropolitans—the newest generation of African emigrants, coming soon or collected already at a law firm/chem lab/jazz lounge near you.”15 Afropolitan, in this short quote, describes a hybrid group of culturally and intellectually educated individuals who are dislocated from their place of origin. Afropolitanism as a literary genre developed by authors like Teju Cole, Tayie Selasi, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie marks an important shift in the representation of Africanness in global discourse. It could be argued that it is a reaction toward the ongoing, narrow narratives about diaspora subjects (displaced through the Middle Passage) and the Afropessimistic perspectives of the 1980s and 1990s.16 Afropessimism is connected to a specific form of representation of the African continent, dominated by a Western perspective, that foregrounds economic and political crisis and its resulting catastrophes, hunger, and epidemics. Simon Gikandi stresses this notion when he says, “Fitting neatly into traditional Western notions of Africa as the ‘other’ of modern reason and progress, Afropessimism has proved hard to dislodge because it seems to be the only logical response to political failure and economic stagnation in Africa.”17 Achille Mbembe, the most frequently quoted political philosopher in this context, integrates the term Afropolitanism into a narrative that stresses its distinction from Afropessimism. Mbembe describes Afropolitanism as “an aesthetic and a particular poetic

of the world. It is a way of being in the world, refusing on principle any form of victim identity—which does not mean that it is unaware of the injustice and violence inflicted on the continent and its people by the law of the world. It is also a political and cultural stance in relation to nation, to race and to the issue of difference in general.”18 Mbembe also emphasizes in his further elaborations the international diversity on the continent and thus includes the African continent into a conceptualization of the global as an active agent rather than a constantly overdetermined, monocultural, passive entity. Okwui Enwezor conceptualizes Afropolitanism as a space in between when he says, “Between the categories of identity (ethnicity, religion, nation) lies the space of cosmopolitan African identity. This identity is global in its stance and transnational in its traversal of cultural borders.”19 Just as the classical Greek idea of kosmopolitês, which translates as citizen of the world, it stands as a form of antithesis to the polis of the state to which citizenship is intrinsically bound, which harks back to Aristotelian philosophy.20 Enwezor thus challenges existing ideas such as cultural, national, or religious identity and emphasizes hybridity. What is interesting about these descriptions is that, first, they implement a generationalist discourse and, second, they are based on a notion of cosmopolitanism that is predominantly an idea of movement infiltrated with neoliberal agency.21 This idea of movement is still marked by the particularity of Africanness as a fixed, locatable, yet fluid paradigm, a paradox that is also highlighted by Enwezor. The difficulty of the term in the arts for African artists is exactly this particularity: their reduced version of African identity is constantly reified and bound to notions of origin. In terms of the logic of the art market, the spectacle of Africanness is not always a disadvantage for the curators of specific shows, who often instrumentalize and produce this constructed otherness.22 But is this framing necessary in order to give value to the various ways in which our black identities have been shaped? The art world is historically complicit in the “imperialist project” that reproduces otherness in order to maintain the exclusionary “tyranny of the universal.”23 Semantics of Our Times As part of a generation that was born neither on the African continent nor in the United States but Adusei-Poku

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in Europe thirty years after the 1960s, with mixed parents and family members in various parts of the world and a family history that includes colonial exploitation, slavery, enslavement, national socialism, and many more embodied contradictions, in order to create one narrative of blackness another category would have to be invented. Coming from this angle I argue that it is the temporal, spatial, and cultural synchronicity, which I call heterotemporal, that most significantly marks the conditions of being a black subject in the contemporary and is intrinsic to postblack art. Heterotemporality means that any sense of linearity of time, space, and history has to be thought of as existing in synchronicity.24 “Hetero” does not refer to a binary system of gender or sexuality, but rather stresses the notion of difference.25 There will never be a single way to be a black subject, scholar, artist, or curator. It is the unification and ambiguity that determines my generation and the ones before. For this reason it appears most eloquent and helpful to use Stuart Hall’s definition of post- in order to clarify post-black. Hall discusses the term post- in a context of the role of the museum in his text “Museums of Modern Art and the End of History,” which I choose to apply to post-black. He writes: I do not use the term (post) to mean “after” in a sequential or chronological sense, as though one phase or epoch or set of practices has ended and an absolutely new one is beginning. Post, for me, always refers to the aftermath or the after-flow of a particular configuration. The impetus which constituted one particular historical or aesthetic moment disintegrates in the form in which we know it. Many of those impulses are resumed or reconvened in a new terrain or context, eroding some of the boundaries which made our occupation of an earlier moment seem relatively clear, well bounded and easy to inhabit, and opening in their place new gaps, new interstices.26

Looking at post-black or Afropolitan through this angle reveals that we are dealing with a set of synchronicities—not only temporal, spatial, geographic, economic, and cultural synchronicities, but also the ideological synchronicities of being black. One set that has changed in the discussion about contemporary black art is that the intersections of categories such as race, gender, class, and in particular sexuality

have become a prevalent theme in the artists’ works presented in the Studio Museum’s exhibitions. Also noteworthy is the way in which this generation deals aesthetically with these synchronicities through media and expressions that range from abstractions and pop to minimalist references.27 This doesn’t mean that these subjects didn’t exist before, but instead of working toward the acceptance and visibility of these subjects, artists such as Leslie Hewitt, Hank Willis Thomas, Mickalene Thomas, Mark Bradford, or Kori Newkirk simply took them as a given. I consequently argue that their work is the result and complication of what Hall describes as the “new politics of representation,” which highlighted at the end of the 1990s the instability of the category of black interplay with gender and sexuality.28 The photo-conceptual artist Hank Willis Thomas, who was featured in the first show, Freestyle, engages the notion of self-conception, constructions of blackness, and market forces as well as visual regimes through focusing on the economy of blackness. For example, in his series Unbranded: Reflections in Black by Corporate America from 1968–2008, Thomas follows the developments of visual print advertisements targeting black audiences. Through digitally erasing the script from the images, only the photographs and their coded visual messages remain. The images as script show the change of style and discourse in African American communities from the solidaritydriven, black-is-beautiful aesthetic to heteronormative hypersexuality. They also show the shift from blaxploitation-inspired advertisements to images addressing and creating emancipated working women in the 1980s who would equally manage the household and satisfy their husbands. These images of emancipation are superseded by the biopolitical glossy aesthetics of the 1990s, featuring rap icons such as Lil’ Kim, who becomes, in a postfeminist turn, a prophetic icon wearing a light bikini strip outfit. These are only a few of the themes that Thomas’s installation addresses before it ends with a portrait of Uncle Ben in a golden frame, subtitled Chairman. Uncle Ben is the house slave whose face and name has accompanied generations around the globe on packages of parboiled rice.29 The portrait does not directly derive from an advertisement and is inspired by a New York Times article, which discusses MasterFood’s approach in its new campaign to depict Uncle Ben as

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Hank Willis Thomas, The Liberation of T.O.: “I’m Not Goin’ Back to Work for Massa in Dat Darned Field!”, 2003/2005. Lambda photograph, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. © Hank Willis Thomas

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Leslie Hewitt, Riffs on Real Time (9 of 10), 2013. Traditional chromogenic print, 40 x 30 in. Courtesy the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co.

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an empowered black role model.30 The appearance of the Uncle Ben brand’s new image in 2008 coincided with Barack Obama’s run for presidency and thus underlines the points I developed earlier in terms of power and race. To choose this image as an endnote for the installation not only stresses the history of slavery and the assumption of success through economic and social advancement, but also that old representations cannot remain the same. Another artist I would like to highlight is Leslie Hewitt, whose photographs were shown in the second show, Frequency. Through formalist and minimal aesthetic expression she raises questions about the personal and political body. By including archival materials Hewitt deconstructs and reconstructs the notion of history and time through media, ranging from photography, film, and video to sculpture and stresses the fractured nature of the current moment.31 Not only does she constantly reflect on the medium and history of photography, but she is equally interested in relics, ephemera, and leftovers—the hidden stories in the attic of our relational histories whose narrators have failed to survive their rediscovery. She thus questions the dramaturgy of histories, genres, and the eagerness of the spectator in order to make sense of it by using the historical debris. In the exhibition Flow the painter Lynette Yiadom Boakye challenges spectators through a color scale reminiscent of Flemish painting and a figurative sensitivity to Barkley Hendricks’s famous portraitures. Her visual protagonists look at us in an uncanny directness and arouse a personal encounter. Okwui Enwezor calls her technique “para-portraiture,” because although none of the characters’ portraits ever existed, they nevertheless create an immediacy.32 Whether the medium is photography, sculpture, painting, performance, mixed media, or conceptual work, these exhibitions and their artists affirm that the range of styles and practices are as diverse as ever. The photographer Dawoud Bey has a convincing argument about this newly discovered display of styles and practices when he writes about the 1990s academic and artistic approaches: The field of semiotics became a critical point of departure in art discourse. For artists of color the prevailing discourse came to center almost solely around issues of race and representation. And while

these new texts did indeed do much to foreground new and previously excluded voices, I also believe they were terribly disruptive and had a deleterious effect, since they completely eliminated or ignored whole categories of art production that were still taking place among black art practitioners. It seemed that in order to create an unbroken linear progression towards the moment of multicultural postmodernity, any artists whose works did not fit this unbroken revisionist trajectory were conveniently eliminated. . . . The move towards pluralism, contrary to what it implies, ironically only allowed for a certain kind of black art practitioner.33

Thus, post-black allows spectators to engage with artists such as Mark Bradford, Abigail deVille, Adam Pendelton, Kyra Lynn Harris, or Kamau Patton, who challenge the abstract expressionist tradition, while re-engaging with previous generations of black artists such as Norman Lewis, Al Loving, Howardena Pindell, Jack Whitten, or Barbara Chase-Riboud, who remained marginalized by the prevalent discourse. The absence of this generation within the dominant discourse on abstraction shows how segregated the art world still is, and I wonder in which light Gerhardt Richter’s abstract paintings would have been perceived if Jack Whitten would not have been excluded from the art historical canon. Black artists are often framed as particular in terms of the discourses they are presenting.34 However, it is still necessary to continue to raise awareness of the profound symbolic violence to which black scholars and artists are exposed on an institutional and everyday basis.35 Most of Europe’s societies remain in a stage of historical amnesia, particularly in an institutional framework. French persistent negrophilia, Dutch determination to celebrate the highly racist tradition of Zwarte Piet, or German inability to realize that the n-word was and remains racist are only a few examples.36 Nevertheless, contemporary black artists are on exhibition all over Europe, gaining greater attention and acknowledgment. At the same time, the list of contemporary racisms, misconceptions, and sustained racism continues to exist; this is the cultural landscape, and it seems to become more contested than before. Not only is the scholarship about black artists constantly in danger of overlooking the Adusei-Poku

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tensions between cultural differences and historical similarities within the black diasporas, it also tends to become a conversation among experts that leaves those who are in many ways more confronted with everyday racism out of the conversation. So, there is often no ground to begin to speak about post-black or Afropolitanism in Europe, for example, if blackness is still an underrepresented political category. This is what I mean by the term heterotemporal: there are different kinds of blackness at play simultaneously. Black thought has always been embedded in intellectual exchange across national borders; diaspora means practice and must include knowledge produced on the African continent and in diasporic contexts that hasn’t been recognized thus far. We exist of multiplicities, as Eduard Glissant has framed it, or as Henry Louis Gates Jr. articulated it—of a multiplicity of multiplicities, in fact, and these statements don’t help if there is no dialogue and subsequent political practice that creates and manifests new political imaginaries. Nana Adusei-Poku is a research professor in cultural diversity at Rotterdam University and lecturer in media arts at the University of the Arts, Zurich. As the 2015 Curatorial Fellow at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, she co-curated the exhibition NO HUMANS INVOLVED. Notes

1 Michael Hanchard, “Afro-Modernity: Temporality, Politics, and the African Diaspora,” Public Culture 11 (1999): 245–268. 2 Thelma Golden, “Post . . . ,” in Freestyle: The Studio Museum in Harlem, ed. Christine Y. Kim and Franklin Sirmans (New York: Studio Museum in Harlem, 2001), 14–15. 3 I have to note that the term was used earlier by the art historian Robert Farris Thompson, in which context he critically discusses multiculturalism and the raising awareness of nonwhite artists. See Robert Farris Thompson, “Afro Modernism,” Artforum International (1991): 91–94. 4 This remark is not meant as dismissive of the extensive scholarship that has been produced over the past twenty years, but grasping the meaning of blackness from a queer feminist perspective in connection to representation is a complex endeavor. One of the most helpful interventions was Darby English’s How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). 5 Golden, “Post . . .,” 14. 6 It may be more accurate to speak of different articulations of “old questions” when it comes to black art and intellectual thought, because not wanting to be called a black artist has been a discussion among black artists ever since. See Romare Bearden, A History of African-American Artists: From 1792 to the Present (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993); Romare H. Bearden,

“Letters to Allen Shields Article: Is There a Black Aesthetics?,” Leonardo 7, no. 2 (1974): 188–89; Norman Lewis, “Oral History Interview with Norman Lewis, 1968 July 14,” interview by Henri Ghent (Oral Histories, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution), www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews /oral-history-interview-norman-lewis-11465. 7 Golden, “Post . . . ,” 14. 8 Malik Gaines, “Frequency,” in Frequency, ed. Thelma Golden and Christine Y. Kim (New York: Studio Museum in Harlem, 2005), 25. For another in-depth discussion of post-black art see Nana Adusei-Poku, “The Multiplicity of Multiplicities—Post-Black Art and Its Intricacies,” darkmatter (November 29, 2012), www .darkmatter101.org/site/2012/11/29/the-multiplicity-of -multiplicities-%E2%80%93-post-black-art-and-its-intricacies/. Thelma Golden, “Director‘s Foreword,” in Flow, ed. Christine 9 Y. Kim (New York: Studio Museum in Harlem, 2008), 17. 10 Although the series is concluded, the Studio Museum in Harlem is still devoted to exhibiting emerging artists, but the framing has intrinsically changed. “Curatorial Statement,” in Fore, ed. Lauren Haynes, Naima J. Keith, and Thomas J. Lax (New York: Studio Museum in Harlem, 2012), 22–23. 11 Also see Angela Davis, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016), 77, 81ff. 12 I have to add that these kinds of categories could have been applied to some of the artists featured in the previous shows as well. 13 For a discussion see Stephanie Bosch Santana, “Exorcizing Afropolitanism: Binyavanga Wainaina Explains Why ‘I Am a PanAfricanist, Not an Afropolitan’” (paper presented at the African Studies Association UK Biennial Conference, University of Leeds, September 2012), africainwords.com/2013/02/08/exorcizing -afropolitanism-binyavanga-wainaina-explains-why-i-am-a-pan -africanist-not-an-afropolitan-at-asauk-2012/. 14 Nell Freudenberger, “Home and Exile: ‘Ghana Must Go,’ by Taiye Selasi,” review of Ghana Must Go by Taiye Selasi, New York Times Sunday Book Review, March 8, 2013, www.nytimes .com/2013/03/10/books/review/ghana-must-go-by-taiye-selasi .html. See also Taiye Selasi, “Taiye Selasi on Discovering Her Pride in Her African Roots,” The Guardian, March 22, 2013, www.guardian .co.uk/books/2013/mar/22/taiye-selasi-afropolitan-memoir. 15 Taiye Selasi, “Bye-Bye Barbar,” LIP, March 2005, thelip .robertsharp.co.uk/?p=76. 16 Simon Gikandi, “Foreword: On Afropolitanism,” in Negotiating Afropolitanism: Essays on Borders and Spaces in Contemporary African Literature and Folklore, ed. Jennifer Wawrzinek and J. K. S. Makokha (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011), 9–11. 17 Ibid., 9. 18 Achille Mbembe, “Afropolitanism,” in Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent, ed. Simon Njami and Lucy Durán (Johannesburg: Johannesburg Art Gallery, 2007), 26. 19 Okwui Enwezor, “Networks of Practice: Globalization, Geopolitics, Geopoetics,” in Contemporary African Art since 1980 (Bologna: Damiani, 2009), 25. 20 Aristoteles, Politik, ed. and trans. Olof Gigon (Düsseldorf: Artemis and Winkler, 2006). 21 As Salah Hassan has noted in his discussion of Afropolitanism, he also creates an important link to postcolonial theorists like Stuart Hall, when he connects the phenomenon of Afropolitanism and Hall’s idea of new ethnicities, a term that Hall introduced in the end of the 1980s in connection to the changes of the politics of representation in concern of the black body. Salah M. Hassan, “Flow: Diaspora and Afro-Cosmopolitanism,” in Flow: The Studio Museum in Harlem, ed. Christine Y. Kim und Samir S. Patel (New York: Studio

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Museum in Harlem, 2008), 26–31. 22 Enwezor, “Networks of Practice,” 25. 23 My argument here is that the contemporary art world is part of the aftermath of the imperialist project, which could be described in the words of theorist Alexander Weheliye as follows: “The uneven global power structures defined by the intersections of neoliberal capitalism, racism, settler colonialism, immigration, and imperialism, which interact in the creation and maintenance of systems of domination, and dispossession, criminalization, expropriation, exploitation and violence that are predicated upon hierarchies of racialized, gendered, sexualized, economized, and nationalized social existence.” Alexander Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 1. 24 For an in-depth discussion of heterotemporality see Nana Adusei-Poku, “A Time without Before and After,” in Not Now! Now! Chronopolitics, Art and Research, ed. Renate Lorenz (Berlin: Sternberg, 2014), 25–45. 25 Also see Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005); Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Renate Lorenz, “Transtemporal Drag,” in Queer Art: A Freak Theory (Bielefeld, Germany: Transcript Verlag, 2012), 93–118. This notion of difference is also connected to an acceptance of difference or a nonunderstanding of difference and nontotality deriving from Édouard Glissant’s notion of opacity. Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 190. 26 Stuart Hall, “Museums of Modern Art and the End of History,” in Annotations 6: Modernity and Difference, ed. Stuart Hall and Sarat Maharaj (London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 2001), 9–11. 27 For an in-depth discussion about post-black see Adusei-Poku, “The Multiplicity of Multiplicities.” 28 Stuart Hall, “New Ethnicities,” in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (New York: Routledge, 1995), 445. 29 For a more in-depth historical background of figures like Uncle Ben and Aunt Jemima and the products they are marketing see Marilyn Kern-Foxworth, Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, and Rastus: Blacks in Advertising, Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1994), 43–115. 30 Stuart Elliott, “Uncle Ben, Board Chairman,” New York Times, March 30, 2007, www.nytimes.com/2007/03/30/business /media/30adco.html. 31 For more on Leslie Hewitt see Adusei-Poku, “A Time without Before and After.” 32 Okwui Enwezor, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Any Number of Preoccupations, ed. Naomi Beckwith (New York: Studio Museum in Harlem, 2010). 33 Dawoud Bey, “The Ironies of Diversity, or the Disappearing Black Artist,” Artnet (2014), www.artnet.com/magazine/features /bey/bey4-8-04.asp. 34 This myth of particularity was fortunately contested by the main exhibition at the Venice Biennial in 2015 with artists such as Lorna Simpson, Kerry James Marshall, Isaac Julien, Adrian Piper, Melvin Edwards, Wangechi Mutu, Coco Fusco, Sonya Boyce, Samson Kambalu, Terry Adkins, as well as Theaster Gates. 35 Also see Nana Adusei-Poku, “Catch Me, If You Can!” in Decolonising Museums, ed. L’Internationale Online, September 2015, 54–63, www.internationaleonline.org/resources/decolonising _museums

36 This paradox does not only apply to Europe. The US context is equally struggling with ignorance, if one has followed the discussion around the New York Times critique by Ken Johnson, who ridiculed an exhibition, Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980, at MoMA PS1 in October 2013 and reclaimed the modernist tradition to be a white invention, which created a public discussion and open letter/petition. See Ken Johnson, “‘Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles,’ at MoMA PS1,” New York Times, October 25, 2012, www .nytimes.com/2012/10/26/arts/design/now-dig-this-art-black-los -angeles-at-moma-ps1.html; Julia Halperin, “Petition Protesting Ken Johnson’s NYT Reviews Triples in Size, Adding More Big Names,” BlouinArtInfo Blogs, November 28, 2012, blogs.artinfo.com /artintheair/2012/11/28/petition-protesting-ken-johnsons-nyt -reviews-triples-in-size-adding-more-big-names/.

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CONFESSIONS OF A BLACK FEMINIST ACADEMIC PORNOGRAPHER Mireille Miller-Young

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hen Sander Gilman first published his pathbreaking work on the iconography of the Hottentot Venus and early nineteenth-century racial scientific inquiry into black female sexuality, he was accused of going too far. Gilman’s amply illustrated study, published in the famed Autumn 1985 special issue of Critical Inquiry, and Gilman’s own 1985 monograph Difference and Pathology displayed images of Saartije Baartman’s genitals, as they were studied and eventually dissected and exhibited by French scientists.1 Although he was accused of “bringing black women into disrepute” by showing these images, his work revolutionized the study of black female sexuality, inspiring scores of black feminists to theorize (and argue about) Baartman’s iconicity—the Hottentot Venus—as urtext for emergent thinking on racialized sexuality and discourses of black female sexual deviance. Gilman reflected on the difficulty of being labeled an academic pornographer in his foreword to artist Kara Walker’s 2007 book My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love.2 Black feminist responses to Walker’s controversial art ignited similar accusations about her role as exhibitor-purveyor of “negative images” that pandered to the racism of white audiences.3 Gilman’s essay, “Confessions of an Academic Pornographer,” highlights how entrenched and complicated issues of representation are for scholars and artists who work on black women’s images. The visual representation of black sexuality images is a powerful one for black feminists. We

Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016 DOI 10.1215/10757163-3641722 © 2016 by Nka Publications

Author’s book cover featuring Jeannie Pepper during a photo shoot in Paris, 1986. © John Dragon

have seen black artists like Renee Cox, Carrie Mae Weems, Lyle Ashton Harris, Zaneli Muholi, Cheryl Dunye, crystal am nelson, and Carla Williams use sexuality, and sometimes their own bodies, in their art in ways that powerfully illuminate how the process of making black sexuality visible necessarily invokes a collective racial trauma. It is in this collective racial trauma that we find ourselves groping for a language to talk about our own pleasure and for a set of practices for living within and against all the contemporary forms of exploitation, alienation, and objectification that make up life under advanced capitalism and sexualized racism. In my fourteen years researching black women in pornography I have grappled with these issues profoundly. I have been called a pervert and a pornographer for not only writing about the history of black women’s images, performances, and sex

work in pornography, but also showing this history in various presentation formats. As I prepared to publish a manuscript that would reproduce and circulate these images to an even greater degree, I found myself considering Sander Gilman’s embrace of the pejorative title “pornographer.” Gilman’s move to “confess” his investment and belief in the work of uncovering a field of vision that, even though perhaps traumatic, is in essence a complex iconography of race that we simply must look at and engage with in order to understand its enduring power in our lives and on behalf of those in the image. How do we begin to theorize the meanings of black pornography and to understand our own ways of looking and desiring without ignoring the fact that we are never outside the sexual (political) economy? When I started this project I was told to either focus on images and representation or on labor, because they were two separate issues. However, I have not come to see them that way. I wanted to understand how the women in the images experienced the ways in which these images are produced. I came to understand that black sexual labor is, in fact, critical to our experiences of visual culture and sexuality. Women like Jeannie Pepper helped me understand the inextricable connection between sexual representation and sexual labor. In 1982 when Jeannie Pepper began her career as an actress in X-rated films there were few black women in the adult-film industry. Performing in more than two hundred films over three decades, Jeannie broke barriers to achieve porn-star status and opened doors for other women of color to follow.4 She played iconic roles as the naughty maid, the erotically possessed “voodoo girl,” and the incestuous sister in films like Guess Who Came at Dinner?, Let Me Tell Ya ’bout Black Chicks, and Black Taboo. She traveled internationally as a celebrity, even working and living in Europe for seven years. In a career that spanned the rise of video, DVD, and the Internet, Jeannie watched the pornography business transform from a quasi-licit cottage industry into a sophisticated, transnational, and corporate-dominated industry. In 1997 Jeannie was the first African American porn actress to be inducted into the honored Adult Video News Hall of Fame. By all accounts, Jeannie had an exceptionally long Miller-Young

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and successful career for an adult actress; she was well liked by her colleagues and served as a mentor to young women new to the porn business. Yet the experience of being a black woman in the porn industry brought formidable challenges. As in other occupations in the United States, black women in the adult film industry are devalued workers who confront systemic marginalization and discrimination as they toil in an already stigmatized field of labor. Jeannie became a nude model and adult-film actress in her twenties. The reason, she says, is because she enjoyed watching pornography and having sex and was keen to become a pathmaker in an industry with few black female stars: “I just wanted to show the world. Look, I’m black and I’m beautiful. How come there are not more black women doing this?”5 Jeannie felt especially beautiful when in 1986 she did a photo shoot with her photographer husband, a German expatriate known as John Dragon, on the streets of Paris. Dressed only in a white fur coat and heels, she walked around, posing in front of the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe, in cafes, and next to luxury cars. Coyly allowing her coat to drape open (or off altogether) at opportune moments, she drew the attention of tourists and residents alike. She imagined herself as Josephine Baker, admired in a strange new city for her beauty, class, and grace. Finding esteem and fearlessness in showing the world her blackness and beauty, Jeannie felt she embodied an emancipated black female sexuality. Still, Jeannie remained conscious of the dual pressures of needing to fight for recognition and opportunity in the adult business, especially in the United States, and having to defend her choice to pursue sex work as a black woman.6 “You are not supposed to talk about liking sex because you are already assumed to be a whore,” said Jeannie.7 Black women sexual performers and workers have had to confront a prevailing stigma: if all black women are considered to be sexually deviant, then those who use sex to make a living are the greatest threat to any form of respectable black womanhood. In my manuscript A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography, I employ brown sugar as a metaphor to get at how, publicly scorned and privately enjoyed, the alluring, transformative, and

perverse sexuality of black women is thoroughly cemented in the popular imaginary.8 Seen as naturally sexual, black women continue to be fetishized as the very embodiment of excessive or non-normative sexuality. What’s most problematic about this sticky fetishism—in addition to the fact that it spreads hurtful and potentially dangerous stereotypes with very real material effects—is that the desire for black women’s sexuality, while so prevalent, remains unacknowledged, and that contributes to their structural devaluation in the sex industries. As a metaphor, brown sugar references a key component of the profitable industries of entertainment and sex in the United States. The expression also exposes how black women’s sexuality, or more precisely their sexual labor, has been historically embedded in culture and the global economy. Brown sugar played a central role in the emergence of Western nation-states and the capitalist economies. Across the American South and the Caribbean black slaves cultivated and manufactured sugar that sweetened the food, changed tastes, and energized factory workers in the Industrial Revolution.9 In addition to physical labor, their sexual labor was used to “give birth to white wealth” and was thus the key mechanism for reproducing the entire plantation complex.10 “Sugar was a murderous commodity,” explains Vincent Brown, “a catastrophe for workers that grew it.”11 The grinding violence and danger that attended sugar’s cultivation in colonial plantations literally consumed black women’s labor and bodies.12 Brown sugar, as a trope, illuminates circuits and nodes of domination over black women’s bodies and their labor. This metaphor exposes black women’s oft-ignored contributions to the economy, politics, and social life; like sugar that has dissolved and is traceless but has nonetheless sweetened a cup of tea, black women’s labor and the mechanisms that manage and produce it are invisible but there nonetheless. The metaphor of brown sugar illustrates how sexualized representations—which always manage to be about labor and exploitation as much as they are about desire and a racialized erotic imaginary—shape the world in which black women come to know themselves. But stereotypes usually have dual valences; they may also be taken up by the oppressed and

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refashioned to mean quite different things. In African American vernacular speech and song, brown sugar often expresses adoration, loveliness, and intimacy even as it articulates lust, sensuality, and sex (and sometimes illicit, pleasure-giving materials like heroin or pot).13 Like the saying “The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice,” brown sugar is sometimes used by black people to speak to the complex pleasures they derive from their own eroticism. In my work, brown sugar references a trope of disciplining power and possibility that black women must always broker. Sometimes they refashion it to fit their needs. As Jeannie Pepper shows, some black women choose to perform brown sugar—the perverse, pleasurable imago projected onto black women’s bodies—in an effort to express themselves as desired and desiring subjects. Given the brutal history of sexual expropriation and objectification of black bodies, these attempts by black women to reappropriate a sexualized image can be seen as a bid to reshape the terms assigned to black womanhood. Chief to the racial fetishism of black women in pornography is a “double focus”: a voyeurism that looks but also does not look, that obsessively enjoys, lingers over, and takes pleasure in the black female body even while it declares that body strange, other, and abject.14 Black women are of course aware of this regime of racial fetishism in representation (and the social and legal apparatus that sustains it), which licenses the voyeuristic consumption of their bodies as forbidden sex objects. As Jeannie Pepper noted, black women are always “already assumed to be” whores. She, then, uses this insistent myth in her own work. That is, Jeannie Pepper employs her own illicit desirability in a kind of sexual repertoire; by precisely staging her sexuality so as to acknowledge the taboo desire for it, she shows that racial fetishism can actually be taken up by its objects and used differently. “You know taking off your clothes on the beach . . . It made me feel free. It made me feel like I could do things.”15 Standing nude on the beach in the south of France as throngs of tourists look on, Jeannie takes pleasure in presenting herself as irresistibly captivating and attractive in the face of the denial of those very capacities. In this way, Jeannie Pepper exposes the disgust for black female sexuality as

a facade for what is really forbidden desire. It is a myth that can be reworked and redeployed for one’s own purposes. Jeannie Pepper shows us how black women sex workers sometimes mobilize what I term illicit eroticism to advance themselves in the sexual economy.16 Actively confronting the taboo nature and fraught history of black female sexuality, black sex workers choose to pursue a prohibited terrain of labor and performance. Illicit eroticism provides a framework to understand the ways in which black women put hypersexuality to use. They do so in an industry that is highly stratified, with numerous structures of desire and “tiers of desirability.”17 Black women’s illicit erotic work manipulates and re-presents racialized sexuality—including hypersexuality—in order to assert the value of their erotic capital.18 Black porn actresses can be read as having more sophisticated engagements with representation than previously allowed. In discussing her role as the voodoo girl in the 1985 Dark Bros. porno, Let Me Tell Ya ’bout Black Chicks, Jeannie explained that she chose a role that, though stereotypical, she saw as an alternative to the then-standard role of the maid: I wanted that part. I was glad to have [it]. I loved the way they dressed me up with the costume. They made me look very exotic with all the makeup and feathers, and I was running around [acting possessed]. But I didn’t want to play the maids. Those other girls were playing maids. . . . But I liked my part.19

By playing the supernatural black woman instead of the servile black maid, Jeannie negotiated what she saw as a demeaning representation and form of labor.20 The voodoo girl was not necessarily a positive representation against the maid’s negative one, but it allowed space for Jeannie to take pride in what she identified as a more complex performance located in exoticism that transcended some of the domestic themes of black dependency so prevalent in the 1980s. Dressed as the primitive, magical savage in a tinsel skirt that looks more fitting for a luau than a voodoo ceremony, colorful neon bangles, and 1980s eyeshadow-heavy makeup, Jeannie’s voodoo girl invokes a spell that conjures two white men to Miller-Young

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satisfy her sexual appetite. Even though her choice to perform a playful, mysterious, and self-possessed female character did not dismantle racist regimes of representation for black women in pornography, her tactics for self-representation are important to recognize. This counterstrategy of representation at times involves, as Stuart Hall tells us, attempting to play the stereotype in order to reverse or go beyond it. At other times it is about offering alternative, more complex images of black sexuality.21 For Jeannie another more complex image was to be found in exotic and cosmopolitan notions of blackness. Deploying public nudity in her photo tour of Europe—she literally stopped traffic in busy streets—she plays with the illicitness of her sexuality and makes it all the more visible. Yes, people looked. They were fascinated. “Who is this black lady taking off her clothes?” [they thought.] All the tourists were taking pictures of me too. . . . I was in the park posing for pictures and I let them take pictures of me too. They said, “Who are you?” I said, “I’m Jeannie Pepper from America.”22

Like José Esteban Muñoz’s concept of “disidentification,” illicit eroticism helps make sense of how cultural workers enact a repertoire of skills and theories—including appropriating certain stereotypes— to “negotiate a phobic majoritarian public sphere that continuously elides or punishes the existence of subjects who do not conform to the phantasm of normative citizenship.”23 Unlike disidentification, illicit eroticism is a repertoire of appropriations distinct to the realm of sexual and sexualized labor, and it is available to those whose sexuality has been marked specifically as illicit, including people of color, queer folk, and queer people of color. Illicit eroticism conceptualizes how these actors use sexuality in ways that necessarily confront and manipulate discourses about their sexual deviance, while at the same time they remain tied to a system that produces them as sexual laborers. For Jeannie Pepper, leveraging one stereotype meant avoiding another. Yet her nonconforming, layered work as black woman, as hypersexual, as voodoo priestess, or as a neo–Josephine Baker in Parisian street theater remains connected to her very survival within a punishing field of representation

and labor. Jeannie’s aspirations to be seen as a more complicated subject than the pornographic script allowed involved playing up, against, and within caricature. She imagined herself as an actor depicting a woman with power, one who magically and mischievously produces men to service her sexual desires, while generating a kind of glamour and joviality. Imagining a black female pornographic sexuality as joyful, subversive, and attractive, Jeannie’s performance asserts erotic subjectivity. Yet her performance is never separate from the conditions that propelled and shaped her work in the porn industry during the 1980s, including the impact of Ronald Reagan’s devastating economic policies and rhetoric on African Americans and the porn business’s interest in capturing white consumers for black-cast products during the video era. Black porn actresses like Jeannie Pepper simultaneously challenge and conform to the very racial fantasies that overwhelmingly define their representations and labor conditions. Their negotiations offer a view into black women’s needs, desires, and understandings and into the deeply felt conflict between what stories about black women exist and what stories they long to imagine for themselves. For Jeannie Pepper, like so many black cultural workers in the past, achieving cosmopolitanism, reaching beyond the confines of national racial borders, and inhabiting the unapologetic iconicity of black women performers such as Josephine Baker were aspects of her illicit erotic repertoire. “How were you received in Europe as a black performer?” I asked. Jeannie Pepper responded:

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Like I was a superstar. Like I was Whitney Houston, Josephine Baker, or Billie Holiday, or one of these women. Like a queen. Like they treat the white movie stars over here. They embraced me. They rolled out the red carpet, gave me whatever I wanted, champagne . . . whatever I wanted. At the end of the tour I felt like Dorothy [in The Wizard of Oz] tapping my heels to get home. But . . . when I saw the Eiffel Tower my eyes lit up and tears came to my eyes, I couldn’t believe I was there. Me and Josephine. And I felt like Dorothy when she saw the Emerald City. . . . I finally made it to Paris and Paris was my Emerald City. . . . Yes, I loved it. I said, “I know these pictures will be around hundreds and hundreds of

years, I just know it. And my face will be plastered somewhere, like Marilyn Monroe.” It gave me a lot of power. I feel the way I do now because I accomplished that. [It] was like my dream come true. I [said], “I made it, I made it!” I just cried.24

Mireille Miller-Young is associate professor of feminist studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Notes

1 Sander Gilman, “Confessions of an Academic Pornographer,” in Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love, ed. Philippe Vergne (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2007), 27–36. 2 Vergne, Kara Walker. 3 See Saar’s statements in Juliette Bowles, “Extreme Times Call for Extreme Heroes,” International Review of African American Art  14, no. 3 (1997): 2–16. Also Gilman, “Confessions of an Academic Pornographer.” 4 I use first names when discussing porn actresses throughout this book because not all actors take on last names for their personas, and those who do often do not use them. Using their entire professional pseudonym or just their first name allows me to maintain equality in how they are discussed. 5 Jeannie Pepper, personal interview with author, December 8, 2002. 6 Ronald Weitzer, “Sex Work: Paradigms and Policies,” in Sex for Sale: Prostitution, Pornography, and the Sex Industry (New York: Routledge, 2000), 1. Sex work is defined by Weitzer as “the exchange of sexual services, performances, or products for material compensation. It involves activities of direct physical contract between buyers and sellers (prostitution, lap dancing) as well as indirect sexual stimulation (pornography, stripping, telephone sex, live sex shows, erotic webcam performances).” 7 Jeannie Pepper, personal interview with author, December 8, 2002. 8 Mireille Miller-Young, A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). 9 Sidney Wilfred Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin Books, 1986). 10 Adrienne Davis, “Don’t Let Nobody Bother Yo’ Principle: The Sexual Economy of American Slavery,” in Sister Circle: Black Women and Work, ed. Sharon Harley and the Black Women and Work Collective (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 117. 11 Vincent Brown, “Eating the Dead: Consumption and Regeneration in the History of Sugar,” Food and Foodways 16, no. 2 (2008): 117. 12 Mintz, Sweetness and Power, 43. 13 It is precisely for its lyrical ambiguity as both bawdy and loving, or dangerous and attractive, that the words have been taken up by artists, entertainers, and poets. See, for example, the song “Brown Sugar” from the album Sticky Fingers (1971) by the Rolling Stones. 14 Stuart Hall, “The Spectacle of the ‘Other,’” in Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, ed. Stuart Hall (London: Sage, 1997), 268.

15 Jeannie Pepper, personal interview with author, December 8, 2002. 16 Adrienne Davis uses the term sexual economy in “Don’t Let Nobody Bother Yo’ Principle” to point to the important interaction between enslaved black women’s sexual meanings and sexual expropriation and the functions of political economy during the antebellum period. I find it a useful concept to describe the historical and continuing relationship between sexual knowledge, sexual power, and the political economy in advanced capitalism. 17 Adam Isaiah Green, “The Social Organization of Desire: The Sexual Fields Approach,” Sociological Theory 26, no. 1 (1998): 25–50, 32. 18 Ibid., 29. 19 Jeannie Pepper, personal interview with author, December 8, 2002. 20 José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). 21 Hall, “The Spectacle of the ‘Other.’” 22 Jeannie Pepper, personal interview with author, December 8, 2002. 23 Muñoz, Disidentifications, 4. 24 Jeannie Pepper, personal interview with author, December 8, 2002.

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A PICTURE’S WORTH TOWARD THEORIZING A BLACK/QUEER GAZE IN THE INTERNET “PORNUTOPIA”

Jafari Sinclaire Allen

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I

n the early 1990s Essex Hemphill, Kobena Mercer, and Isaac Julien incisively problematized high art photographic images such as famed white gay American Robert Mapplethorpe’s (in)famous Man in Polyester Suit, from his impactful work The Black Book.1 This black-and-white image of a black man wearing a three-piece suit caused controversy, not only as one skirmish in the culture wars in which the work of the photographer was cited by neoconservatives as sexually inappropriate pornography and putatively not art, but also for close readers who noted that the figure is headless and heartless. That is, the image is cropped just at chest level, revealing only the midsection and, at the center of the frame, a large semi-erect uncircumcised penis jutting out suggestively from an open fly. Was this a comment on the ill-fit of black men in the corporate world, inappropriately insinuating themselves into the polyester world of American commerce? Or perhaps it is a statement of the photographer’s (and the viewer’s) desire for a big black dick as the only thing that could be of value or desirable from the black man, given the fact that there is no head (and therefore no eyes to the soul or no soul, indeed) in the frame and no shoulders (to cry on, or even to put to a hoe). In this essay I am not concerned to reopen this controversy but rather to query a similarly framed selfie that I found on the Internet. I like to call it Brother with No Suit. I have not been

Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016 DOI 10.1215/10757163-3641733 © 2016 by Nka Publications

able to trace the precise provenance of this evidently self-made image, although it is safe to say that it has been shared, (re)blogged, (re)posted, and liked hundreds of times around the world. I can say with certainty that it has traveled at least four continents and has been the bait for catfishing—that is, using an image or images as the basis for a false or assumed identity—on at least three occasions, including in the popular practice of racialized cuckolding in which black men serve as exogamous sex partners for white women in heterosexual couples. Unlike Mapplethorpe’s studied sculptural studio image, the anonymous brother here appears, as in many selfies or “dick pics,” to be snapping a quick shot. Moist and therefore ready, semi-erect but already formidable and seeming unable to be contained by his jeans, the figure stands in poetic comparison to Man in Polyester Suit, revealing how the object is contained in Mapplethorpe’s work. The object of the gaze in the Brother with No Suit is multiple and polymorphous—at once playful and dangerous, and not only unzipped but also seemingly ready and available. A trickster, the brother does not necessarily answer back to the person in the photo, or even the original poster. As in Man in Polyester Suit, no head is shown, but following the convention in dick-pic selfies, this is likely for privacy and semianonymity. In effect, the missing head here is the poser’s agential refusal of certain forms of gazing rather than the unseen artist’s dictate. As a respondent of my larger project on uses and meanings of black/queer online interaction described to me his own practice of carefully curating images of himself for the Internet: “They will see what I want them to see, when I want them to see it. . . . They will want me from the moment they see it.”2 Questions arise: What does it feel like to be an object looking at an object? Does authorship of the image or the action of gazing make one a subject? Is the object no longer a fetish? What does it reveal? Who is the gazer in the context of the Internet? Finally, how should we draw the ethics of transnational porn-erotics? Currently, Internet-based technologies facilitate the circulation of a huge amount of professional and amateur gay porn images, much of which is free and available to anyone with a computer or smartphone and adequate bandwidth. It is striking, however, that with the variety of genres, themes,

interests, and formats, images of black men and other men racialized as black seem to fit only a limited number of frame(work)s, which are predictably narrativized in advance. In “Just Looking for Trouble: Robert Mapplethorpe and Race Fantasy,” Kobena Mercer’s slight shift from his earlier strong position on Mapplethorpe’s Man in Polyester Suit is certainly right that the question the work brings up is more complex than whether or not Mapplethorpe was a racist.3 Earlier, in “True Confessions,” Mercer and Julien held that a certain sexual liberalism of gay (white) men assumes a freedom of choice to consume various types of porn and that as black gay men they are “interest[ed] in the contradictory experience that the porno-photo-text implicates us in.”4 Indeed, what do these images say to and about black men’s desires, both to be seen or framed in particular ways, and for one another? While black/ queer visual, film, and performance artists, as well as poets and writers—that is, nonacademic literary types and people who write porn, erotic, and romance novels and stories—have powerfully answered this query now nearly thirty years since Mercer and Julien inquired, most academic scholars have steered clear of theorizing porn and erotica, representing what Essex Hemphill theorized as the “magical adhesion of deep open kisses and warm seed that binds us and terrifies us.”5 Still fewer studies critically engage the ways in which the Internet is currently transforming the modes and speed (but not always the content) by which images and expressions of black sexuality are mediated. This essay is a small opening toward such a project, part of my forthcoming book exploring the constitution and practice of black/queer diaspora. Here, I turn to visual images on the Internet—finding rich and contradictory material and an ethnographic archive of the everyday (self-)posing of black male sexuality among black men who have sex with men. My object of investigation in this essay is an emerging and unrecognized form of portraiture and narrative theorizing, drawn from my archival and ethnographic encounters with the pornblog of a black gay Brazilian and a small cross section of his subscribers, transnational networks of Facebook pages, and other photoblogs, where black men visually curate, narrate, position, and Allen

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frame themselves and other black men for transnational erotic legibility. This engagement of “low” representations of black male (sex)uality impels a return to unanswered questions of black gay desire reflected in black/queer studies, including earlier theorization of “black men loving black men” and M. Jacqui Alexander’s call for “an erotic that is fully bodied and sexed, one that can take ample note of our many vulnerabilities.”6 We will briefly consider how erotic desire is bracketed, framed, reproduced, and represented (i.e., multiply reposted or reblogged) in the everyday archive of (self-)posed, framed, filmed, narrated, and displayed portrait and snapshot representations of black bodies, in what I call the black gay pornutopia. What insights might we gain by reading “low” globally widespread and circadian self-representation and self-referencing of black bodies on the Internet? What are the qualitative and affective differences between how black men are framed and how they frame themselves? What do close and ethnographically contextual readings about these objects convey about (black) (gay) desire, subjectivity, and belonging? In the historical moment at the dawning of cyberspace, poet and essayist Essex Hemphill averred at the 1995 Black Nations / Queer Nations conference: The texture of my hair and the color of my skin are just two of the prerequisites for visibility and suspicion. I am profoundly perplexed by this continuing adversity and the unnecessary loss of life that occurs as a result of being seen. . . . I remain the same in the eyes of those who would fear and despise me . . . I stand at the threshold of cyberspace and wonder, is it possible that I am unwelcome here too. Will I be allowed to construct a virtual reality that empowers me? Can invisible men see their own reflection? . . . As always, I am rewarded accordingly when I fulfill racist fictions of my aberrant masculinity. My primary public characteristics continue to be defined by dreads of me; myths about me; and plain old homegrown contempt. All of this confusion is accompanying me into cyberspace. Every indignity and humiliation, every anger and suspicion. It is not easy loving yourself as a Black person—a Black man living in America. It is not any easier for our sisters

either. . . . Don’t be confused: Racism doesn’t go better with a big dick, or a hot pussy, or a royal lineage.7 (My emphasis)

While we must keep in mind that Hemphill was ostensibly speaking in a US context, the sites of racialized shame, cruelties of slavery, and ghettos obtain throughout the Americas and reverberate, resonate, or refract in every corner of the globe and the World Wide Web. Hemphill’s queries about what cyberspace would mean for black people was prophetic in some ways. Moreover, it reflects his criticism of the photographic representation of black male bodies in the work of Mapplethorpe. He echoes the ambivalence of black British critics Isaac Julien and Kobena Mercer, citing their admission that “we want to look, but do not always find what we want to see” (in Mapplethorpe’s work).8 This conundrum owes to the predictable repertoire of images and orientations in what they call the “landscape” of male/male pornographic fantasies that, following Bhabha, they hold betrays the colonial fantasy of the white producers and the demand of white consumers.9 Leaving the answer for us to take up, Julien and Mercer ask (and, of course, Hemphill famously quotes): “What do they say to our needs and wants as black gay men?”10 Pushing this further today, what does consumption of images of other black men—perhaps those Hemphill, Joseph Beam, and others imagined as mirror-image brothers—say about our own fantasies, including those that might be described as colonial, across the often brutally uneven terrain of national, class, and age difference? What do close contextual readings of these images convey about black gay desire, subjectivity, and belonging across difference? What are the qualitative and affective differences between how black men in the global South are framed (circulated and consumed) in the global North and how they frame (circulate and consume) themselves? Today we are in a better position to ask precisely what “confusions, contempts, dreads,” and possibilities accompany black/queer people around cyberspace. Essex Hemphill asserts: “Don’t be confused: Racism doesn’t go better with a big dick, or a hot pussy, or a royal lineage.”11 Still, a number of my respondents seem to have found measures of

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affective and material utility in, for example, “a big (black) dick, or a hot (black) pussy,” or, more particularly, the representation or virtual performance of possessing or consuming these. What does the practice of gazing upon them, impugning others (or a character one creates through catfishing) with these fetishes, or displaying one’s body for comparison to the always ready-made imaginations of the black body produce or conjure? What meanings do people make of a “royal” lineage that calls up particular sites or scenes of iconic or imagined blackness? Chela Sandoval, responding to Donna Haraway’s “harsh, unrelenting, and ruthless cyberspace of infinite dispersion and interfacing,” offers a decolonizing cyberspace as a “realm between and through meaning systems . . . in which alternative realities provide individuals and communities increased and novel means of communication, creativity, productivity, mobility.”12 Again, there are no guarantees here and no promise of unqualified or even better control. In this “location of resistance existing . . . in the interstices between decolonial processes, transnational capitalism, and the forms of consciousness that postmodern cultural conditions make available for appropriation,” Sandoval goes on to stipulate that her formulation offers only “a different sense of control.”13 Indeed. In my research throughout the Americas and online over the last few years, I have found respondents who pose/frame or make themselves available as potential friends, lovers, and objects of admiration or desire on Facebook and as curators of and respondents to various individual Tumblr and blog sites. This includes filming, friending, networking, Internet-mediated cybersex and dating, and both local and transnational sexual relationships and play among black subscribers and Facebook friends. Their actions and visions exist within these interstices Sandoval describes and have various and sometimes competing intentions in the representation of their online presence. These pose critical questions that are not apropos of a white gaze. Still, I continue to hear Hemphill asking, “Is this a virtual reality that empowers me?” and “Can invisible men see their own reflection?”14 This is especially germane apropos of uneven transnational erotic trade between black men and might

be another channel of what black men may want to look at, but not really want to see, at least not when in the throes of cyberspace-mediated sexual play and fantasy—that is, the deeper contexts below the surface of the sexual urge. Chela Sandoval submits that part and parcel of differential consciousness is the “dialectical modulation between forms of consciousness . . . functioning within, yet beyond, the demands of dominant ideology,” generating what she calls the “other story,” or the counterpoise.15 This should not be a surprise. At the end of his previously cited quote, Hemphill goes on to say: “Counting t-cells on the shores of cyberspace, my blessing is this: I do not stand alone, bewildered and scared.”16 He does not aver that there is nothing to cause fear or bewilderment. The facts and vulnerabilities are clear. Sociality, however—not standing alone, even perhaps virtually—is the grace. Juana Maria Rodriguez likewise asks us to consider the politics of queer bonds, queer sex, and community in moments of “violent political ambiance.”17 Her larger project toward queer socialities mines “attempts at recognition” like Hemphill’s and the scores of those who look for love, sex, work, conversation, and company across national and language borders and the fiber-optic cables of cyberspace. Jafari Sinclaire Allen is an associate professor of anthropology at University of Miami. Notes

1 Isaac Julien and Kobena Mercer, “True Confessions,” in Kobena Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1994). See Robert Mapplethorpe, The Black Book (1986; repr. Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 2002). 2 Jafari Sinclaire Allen, “There’s a Disco Ball between Us” (unpublished manuscript, June 10, 2016). 3 Kobena Mercer, “Just Looking for Trouble: Robert Mapplethorpe and Fantasies of Race,” in Anne McClintock, Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspective (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). 4 Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle, 131. 5 Joseph Beam and Essex Hemphill, Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men (1991; repr. Washington, DC: RedBone Press, 2007). 6 Joseph Beam, In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology (1986; repr. Washington, DC: RedBone Press, 2008), 156. M. Jacqui Alexander, “Danger and Desire: Crossings Are Never Undertaken All at Once or Once and for All,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2007):154–66. 7 Essex Hemphill speaking in Shari Frilot, Black Nations / Queer Nations? Lesbian and Gay Sexualities in the African Diaspora (New York: Third World Newsreel, 1996). I recently discovered that Christina Sharpe had put forth similar queries in

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her essay, yet I found this too late to incorporate in my analysis. Please see Christina Elizabeth Sharpe, “Racialized Fantasies on the Internet,” Signs 24, no. 4 (1999): 1089–96. For a book-length treatment of this see Shaka McGlotten, Virtual Intimacies: Media, Affect, and Queer Sociality (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013). 8 Julien and Mercer, “True Confessions.” 9 Ibid. See Homi K. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” October 28 (1984): 125–33. 10 Julien and Mercer, “True Confessions,” 134. 11 Essex Hemphill speaking in Frilot’s Black Nations/Queer Nations? documentary. 12 Chela Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 175. 13 Ibid., 134. My emphasis. 14 Essex Hemphill speaking in Frilot’s Black Nations / Queer Nations? documentary. 15 Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed, 62. My emphasis. 16 Beam, In the Life. 17 Juana María Rodríguez, Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings (New York: NYU Press, 2014).

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Photography, Race, History

At the Edge of Sight

Photography and the Unseen SHAWN MICHELLE SMITH 120 photographs, incl. 9 in color, paper, $28.95

Pictures and Progress

Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity MAURICE O. WALLACE and SHAWN MICHELLE SMITH, editors 71 photographs, paper, $27.95

Photography on the Color Line

W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture SHAWN MICHELLE SMITH a John Hope Franklin Center Book 86 photographs (incl. special plate section), paper, $23.95

Forthcoming by Shawn Michelle Smith: Photography and the Optical Unconscious

SHAWN MICHELLE SMITH and SHARON SLIWINSKI, editors 112 illustrations, incl. 20 in color, paper, $27.95

May, 2017

Feeling Photography ELSPETH H. BROWN and THY PHU, editors

62 photographs, incl. 20 in color, paper, $27.95

The Echo of Things

The Lives of Photographs in the Solomon Islands CHRISTOPHER WRIGHT Objects/Histories 85 illustrations, 1 map, paper, $27.95

Photography’s Other Histories

CHRISTOPHER PINNEY and NICOLAS PETERSON, editors

Objects/Histories 128 halftones, 1 table, paper, $24.95

ICONS BROUGHT FORWARD RENÉE COX’S QUEEN NANNY OF THE MAROONS

Kimberli Gant

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Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016 DOI 10.1215/10757163-3641744 © 2016 by Kimberli Gant

Renée Cox, Wash, from Queen Nanny of the Maroons series, 2004. Color digital inkjet print on watercolor paper. Courtesy the artist

I

n Renée Cox’s 2004 photographic series Queen Nanny of the Maroons, the artist embodies the iconic Jamaican figure of Queen Nanny as “a tangible and accessible image and representation of the sensual, confident, independent, empowered, sexually sophisticated and intelligent Black woman representing the Caribbean.”1 Cox’s Nanny is a multitude of complex identities, which the artist touches upon in various tableaus over a series of fourteen black-and-white and color photographs. However, what is more striking about Cox’s images is that within these beautiful images are glimpses into much deeper conversations about the ambiguous notions of masculinity and femininity, varying societal representations of black Caribbean female bodies, the artist’s strong knowledge of art

history and past art practices, tourism, and black women’s labor. Though each of these ideas deserves its own essay, I will settle for briefly discussing how I read these issues within a few of Cox’s work and what the potentials for further exploration can be. I begin by presenting a summation of the actual seventeenth-century figure of Queen Nanny and her continuing legacy into the twenty-first century. Queen Nanny herself is an enigmatic figure. Her history is rather mysterious, since the majority of primary information known about her comes from Jamaican Maroon oral tradition or from biased accounts by seventeenth-century British officials on their transactions between the Maroons. The Jamaican Maroons were communities of enslaved Africans and local-born enslaved populations who Gant

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escaped from the plantations and fled to the mountains and forests throughout Jamaica.2 Also, the term Maroon was coined by the British in the 1730s but was believed to have originally derived from the Spanish word cimarrón, which means “wild, fugitive, gone wild.”3 The descendants of the Maroons still live in various isolated parts of Jamaica, and it is because of their ongoing community and cultural/ spiritual beliefs in Queen Nanny that her legacy still exists today. However, within the past few decades, several scholars have added to the limited literary scholarship on Nanny. Edward Brathwaite’s Wars of Respect: Nanny, Sam Sharpe, and the Struggle for People’s Liberation (1976) and Kara Gottlieb’s more recent book The Mother of Us All: A History of Queen Nanny, Leader of the Jamaican Windward Maroons (2000) are the primary historical biographies on Nanny’s life and her legacy as a Jamaican icon. Based on historical evidence, it is believed that Nanny was born in the 1680s in present-day Ghana, in the Akan or Ashanti culture, and possibly of royal blood, which connects to one of her monikers as Queen Nanny.4 It is generally accepted by scholars that she was transported to Jamaica during her middle years, though not as a slave but free and with her own slaves; was married to a man named Adou; had no children; and during the height of the Maroon revolution against the British from 1725 to 1740 was the military, spiritual, and culture leader of the Windward Jamaicans. Shortly after a peace treaty was signed with the British and a land grant was given to Nanny and the Windward Maroon community in 1740, it is believed that Nanny’s military role diminished and became primarily a cultural and spiritual one until her death around 1750.5 Her burial, at the site of the original Nanny Town, is considered the most sacred of spaces for the Maroons, and visitors are unwelcome. However, tourism does occur within present-day Moore Town, or New Nanny Town, which is located several miles away from the original settlement. Despite her death over 260 years ago, Nanny’s significance to present-day Maroons remains. Her spirit is believed to keep outsiders away, and her presence in Jamaican history and popular culture serves as a way to “define, delineate and separate Maroon culture from the rest of Jamaican culture.”6

This separation is reflected in original myths of Granny/Grandy Nanny, another of her monikers, and her spiritual sister Grandy Sekesu. In the story both sisters were brought to the New World on a slave ship, but Nanny was able to escape, while Sekesu was taken to the plantation. Nanny encouraged Sekesu to escape, but her child cried during the attempt and she was enslaved. It is believed that Sekesu’s metaphorical descendants are the non-Maroon Jamaicans who were still enslaved during emancipation, while Nanny’s ability to escape and rebel against the British is indicative of the Maroons’ ability to survive and live separately into the twenty-first century.7 The issue of cultural separatism between Maroon society and Jamaican society generally, via Nanny, has yet to be explored, and is an interesting complication considering Nanny was inducted as a Jamaican national hero in 1976. Her induction thus blurs the lines, at least on the national Jamaican side, of what Jamaican culture is and who is a part of it. Furthermore, what does this cultural separatism issue mean when considering Cox’s rendition of Nanny? The artist herself was born in Jamaica and considers the nation strongly in her self-identification, although she is not of Maroon descent. By Cox appropriating Nanny, the artist makes the figure an emblem of the multiple cultures that make up Jamaican society. Turning now to Cox’s Queen Nanny of the Maroon series, it consists of two parts. The first, which I investigate here, are black-and-white and color portraits of Cox as Nanny in various tableaus, while the second part are black-and-white portraits of different members of the present-day Maroon community of Moore Town. The factual information and numerous oral tales told about Nanny are the inspirations for Cox’s scenes. While a few of the images bring Nanny into the twenty-first century, the majority are temporally ambiguous, as if Nanny’s exploits can occur at any time. The most famous image in the series is Cox’s portrait Redcoat (2004). Shown most recently at the Studio Museum in Harlem as part of the 2012 Caribbean: Art at the Crossroads of the World exhibition, the photograph is one of three that present Nanny as a military leader. In this particular image Cox, as Nanny, wears the uniform of an

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Nanny Warrior, 2004. Black-and-white digital inkjet print on watercolor paper. Courtesy the artist

eighteenth-century British officer while holding a machete. The red color of the uniform was a distinctive feature of the British military, both in Europe and abroad; thus the soldiers were nicknamed redcoats. The three-quarter formal pose of the figure and landscape background references eighteenthand nineteenth-century British military portrait painting, although Cox creates a subtle subversion. The military portrait was initially only of aristocratic second sons who had to choose the armed

forces because they would not inherit family title and property. The paintings were a celebrated visual symbol of the wealth and status of the painted figure and a demonstration of him as a military hero.8 The background landscape became a staple in this genre through the work of painters such as Sir Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough. By placing her black body into the uniform Cox co-opts the original meaning to place herself and Nanny on the same level as the British aristocracy. Gant

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Her black skin color is the antonym to the white skin color of the soldier who would normally wear the uniform, and the machete, as a tool used in the cultivation of sugar, becomes a symbol of the enslaved Jamaicans on sugar plantations. By wearing the coat of a British officer, a trained and seasoned member of the military and member of the aristocracy, Nanny also defiantly insults them, since her ownership of the coat signifies that the original owner of the uniform has most likely been killed, thus demonstrating the power and military strength of the Maroons. The fact that Cox’s image is in color also makes the artist’s gesture so poignant. Viewers can easily differentiate between Cox’s skin tone and the color of the uniform and know that one would not equate one with the other. If the image was produced in black-and-white the message between Nanny and her enemies might not have been as clear, because the color of uniform, and therefore its emblem for Britain, would not have been as easily recognized.

Redcoat, 2004. Color digital inkjet print on watercolor paper. Courtesy the artist

What is also significant is Cox’s ambiguous presentation of gender, the military, and race. It is common knowledge that plantation owners used their female slaves for sexual purposes, and most likely British soldiers participated in this practice. With Cox wearing a symbol of Britain, a white-dominated nation, over her black skin, the photographer is also referencing the gender-specific domination of white males over black female bodies. However, in this instance Cox is presenting a black female body dominating over the (absent) white male body, who as previously mentioned, is deceased, and wearing his uniform shows proof of his demise. However, a complication arises between this triangular relationship when one realizes that Cox’s figure has no overtly distinguishing markers of gender. In Cox’s image, nothing directly points to the fact that the figure is a woman. Though one could argue the figure has “feminine” facial features, her body is covered and her breasts are not visible. What demonstrates Cox’s Nanny as a woman, other than knowing the context of the image? Furthermore, Nanny’s primary legacy is that of a military strategist and leader of the Windward Maroons. It was this role that led to her induction as a national hero. However, the connection between gender and military prowess becomes ambiguous within Cox’s depiction. Two ways to consider the androgyny of Cox’s/ Nanny’s body in the image are as a form of transgression against traditional Western gender roles and/or as a reminder to viewers that black women in Western societies have historically transgressed those gender roles because their bodies were used for external labor, the same as males. Scholar Barbara Bush-Slimani writes, “From the earliest days of the slave trade Europeans regarded women as eminently suited to fieldwork because of their perceived ‘drudge’ status in polygynous marriages. A large part of the labour on sugar estates consisted of digging holes for canes, hoeing and weeding—tasks generally accepted in slaving circles as ‘women’s work’ in Africa.”9 She continues by noting that the “labour regime ensure[d] that women shared the same backbreaking work, miseries, and punishments as men.”10 Thus, by refusing to overtly display female physical attributes, Cox denies a physical distinction between Jamaican men and

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Lolivya, 2004. Color digital inkjet print on watercolor paper. Courtesy the artist

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women in their resistance against the British. A final conjecture is that since Cox’s depiction of Nanny is a contemporary one, Cox is making a link between black women presently serving in the armed forces and those who died in battle in generations past. Cox presents two other depictions of Queen Nanny as an armed rebel in Nanny Warrior and Ambush. In these two examples Nanny is not posed but activated, as if the viewer is watching Nanny about to strike her foes. In the former, Nanny can also be read as female through the clothing she wears; her outlined breasts are visible, marking her gender. In the latter, Nanny demonstrates her guerrilla warfare techniques, which were the methods for which the Maroons became famous. The Maroons would cover themselves in branches and leaves to resemble trees and would stand for hours while the British soldiers passed by them unknowingly. Oral history recounts that the Maroons’ disguises worked to such an extent “that a British soldier would come to a clearing and hang his coat on what he presumed to be a tree, until that tree suddenly came to life and chopped his head off.”11

Ambush, 2004. Black-and-white digital inkjet print on watercolor paper. Courtesy of the artist

However, in Ambush the viewer is again denied the ability to see Cox’s body because of her camouflage, suggesting the photographer is more interested in the fighting act than in who is doing the fighting. Cox’s depiction of Nanny as an active participant in battles is in opposition to the literary information written about Nanny. According to Gottlieb, there is no evidence that Nanny actually fought in any battle, because when she arrived in Jamaica she was already middle aged. It is predominantly believed that Nanny “acted as an advisor, as a strategist . . . as well as a charismatic figurehead.”12 Cox’s Lolivya is another complicated image from the series. Cox, as Nanny, stands barefoot in the center of a colored archway, gazing directly toward the viewer and holding a machete. Visible behind the artist is the outside patio and the blue ocean. Above the archway embedded in the wall is a plaque with the name of the estate, Lolivya, where the photograph took place and from which the image takes its name. The estate is actually a resort villa in Port Antonio, a town on the eastern side of Jamaica. The website for Port Antonio promotes tours into the Maroon community of Moore Town, which is apparently located only a few miles from the city center in the Blue Mountains. In addition, the site states that travelers can learn about “the real Jamaica” by visiting this nearby Maroon community and buying “cultural herbal remedies” from “the Lady bush doctor,” Ivey, who is purportedly also the seventh great-granddaughter of Nanny.13 It is clear that current Maroon communities are being commodifed for economic gain, although it is uncertain for whose benefit. However, Cox’s image seems to touch on the cultural tourism of the Maroons through the merging of Nanny within a luxury resort. Standing in the front entryway to the villa, Cox’s Nanny aggressively blocks passage into it and cuts into what could be the perfect advertising image for a Jamaican seaside resort. Assuming the viewer is an international traveler denied access to the villa, and most likely coming from Europe or the United States, Cox’s Nanny therefore denies the West access to her community, to herself, and perhaps even Jamaica. Her very presence is a reminder of the past struggles and rebellions for which the island’s inhabitants sought political, societal, and economic freedom and adds another dimension to what would

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normally be a nice postcard image. A final important image in Cox’s series is Wash. In this photograph Cox takes poetic license by presenting Nanny as a sensual women. As previously mentioned, it is believed that Nanny was older when she led the Maroon rebellions. This notion is repeated from coinciding historical accounts such as Memoirs and Anecdotes of Philip Thicknesse Late Lieutenant Governor (1739). The author refers to an elderly Obeah woman, believed to be Nanny, who is mentioned as an “old Hagg.”14 In Cox’s version, Nanny is a mature yet sensual woman. Cox presents viewers with a moment that could almost be called serendipitous as the figure’s face angles upward toward the camera and, though partially in shadow, projects a sense of passiveness or vulnerability. Her toned upper body and décolletage are exposed, and the thin white cloth wrapped around her body is soaked through. The clothing both covers yet reveals her breasts, and beneath the yellow/green water Cox’s legs are visible, spread far apart. The image has captured a solitary, private moment that any woman can relate to: that of washing herself. For Cox, even a military, cultural, and spiritual leader such as Nanny has to attend to her body and at the most basic level is a human being with physical needs, desires, and bodily functions. Yet Cox has also made the simple act of washing something beautiful and sensual to behold. The fact that this image is Queen Nanny, a mythic military hero, demonstrates Cox’s ability to envision Nanny as more than what oral traditions and limited historical information says she is—namely, as a sexually desirable woman. By imposing this new identity on Nanny, Cox not only revises the privileged tales told of this historic figure, but also muddles internal and external views on black Caribbean female bodies and their sexuality. Janell Hobson writes: “Black female batties [buttocks] are let loose and uninhibited in glorious celebrations of flesh and sexual energy. Even though such displays have historically been characterized as ‘riotous and disorderly,’ such movements of the batty invite a public discourse that challenges colonial constructs of ‘decency’ and ‘white supremacy.’”15 While Cox is not presenting her or Nanny’s batty to the viewer, that part of the anatomy of black women has been historically identified by

European philosophers and “scientists” as a physical example of their overt hypersexuality. By combining the sensuality of the image and making reference to Nanny as a sexual being, Cox speaks to what artist and Bahamaian critic A’Keitha Carey describes as “Caribbean culture[s] embrace[ing] [of] the batty,” or the embracing of one’s sensuality and sexuality.16 Though Carey is speaking about Caribbean musical forms such as calypso and dancehall, which tell women to “stick out your butt and gyrate, [and] evoke a certain respect and homage to the derriere,” Cox’s Wash, along with the rest of the images of Nanny in her other positions as a mother, laborer, churchgoer, and teacher, asks viewers not to categorize Nanny within a limited lens but witness her numerous and often contradictory facets.17 Kimberli Gant is a PhD candidate at University of Texas at Austin and Mellon Curatorial Fellow at the Newark Museum in Newark, New Jersey. Notes

1 A’Keitha Carey, “CaribFunk Technique: Afro-Caribbean Feminism, Caribbean Dance and Popular Culture,” Journal of Pan African Studies 4, no. 6 (2011): 129. 2 Karla Gottlieb, The Mother of Us All: A History of Queen Nanny (New York: Africa World Press, 2000), xi. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid., xv–xvi. 5 Ibid., xvi. 6 Ibid., 80. 7 Ibid., 62. 8 J. Brown Carter, The Martial Face: The Military Portrait in Britain, 1760–1900 (Providence, RI: Brown University, 1991), 15. 9 Barbara Bush-Slimani, “Hard Labour: Women, Childbirth and Resistance in British Caribbean Slave Societies,” History Workshop, no. 36 (1993): 85. 10 Gottlieb, Mother of Us All, 85. 11 Ibid., 43. 12 Ibid. 13 Nanny of the Maroons: Traditional Herbal Bath House and Cottage, www.portantoniojamaica.com/ivey.html. 14 Gottlieb, Mother of Us All, xvi. 15 Janell Hobson, “The ‘Batty’ Politic: Toward an Aesthetic of Black Female Body,” Hypatia 18, no. 4 (2003): 89. 16 Carey, “CaribFunk Technique,” 134. 17 Ibid.

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THE UNNAMED BODY

ENCOUNTERING, COMMODIFYING, AND CODIFYING THE IMAGE OF THE BLACK FEMALE

Alissandra Cummins and Allison Thompson In a place like the Caribbean, we cannot take the agency of portraiture for granted in the aftermath of a much longer history of topographical and anthropological representations. . . . In the pictorial domain, we are still anthropological, cultural, national, ethnic or electoral commodities and signifiers. We remain labelled but nameless images. The moment of encounter and of exchange is what is at stake. Christopher Cozier, Notes on Wrestling with the Image Cummins / Thompson

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he Barbadoes Mulatto Girl, a 1770s print by Agostino Brunias, identifies the central figure according to geographic location—the British colony of Barbados—and by her ethnicity, but not by name.1 She is more clearly situated pictorially. Brunias used costume, in particular, as well as gesture to stage and codify the newly creolizing West Indian society. The other two women in the image, darker in complexion and more plainly attired, are not even mentioned, but their diminished social status in relation to the Barbados Mulatto Girl is evident. The portrayal of the black female body in art in Barbados provides a rich opportunity to discuss the complex processes involved in naming and codifying race, gender, and class within larger established systems of attributing value in an increasingly globalized modernism. Historian Sir Hilary Beckles lays out a unique history that establishes the Caribbean island as a starting point and model for what an African slave society would be from as early as the mid-seventeenth century. This model, which was then exported to the rest of the West Indies and throughout the Western hemisphere, has had an indelible impact on contemporary African diaspora

Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016 DOI 10.1215/10757163-3641755 © 2016 by Nka Publications

Agostino Brunias, The Barbadoes Mulatto Girl, 1779. Mezzotint, 26 x 17.6 cm. Courtesy the Barbados Museum and Historical Society

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Thomas Rowlandson, Rachel Pringle of Barbadoes, 1796. Hand-colored etching after original drawing by E. D., 57.5 x 47 cm. Courtesy Barbados Museum and Historical Society

societies and, we argue, the way in which the black female body in particular has been represented.2 This essay presents a number of representations of the black figure and examines the continuation of, as well as the challenges to, certain tropes that have been used to frame both blackness and tropicality. Barbados was the first colony in the New World where Africans formed the majority population. When the British first arrived in 1627, they claimed they found an empty island, the only empty island in the Caribbean. There was no remaining indigenous population. Colonies such as Antigua, Jamaica, Guyana, St. Lucia, Grenada, and St.Vincent (and later Dominica and Trinidad) all had indigenous Amerindian inhabitants vigorously resisting European settlement. But in Barbados “all you had to do was build a few forts” and you could, as Beckles says, “start from scratch” to build a new society.3 In the space of forty years, sixty thousand African slaves were imported, and by 1660 Barbados had the largest black population in the New World. It soon became the hegemonic model, the first society built

entirely on slave labor, for what Beckles identifies as “the Barbados Experiment.”4 The question then became how to define a slave society. Multiple concepts that referenced economic as well as moral and religious arguments operated to define the conditions and terms under which Africans would be forced into labor. After more than a century of debate, the raw economics and profitability of sugar came fully into itself, and Barbados set out the Slave Code of 1661, the Act for the Good Governance of African Slaves, which became the quintessential archetype for the legal structure of a slave society in the New World.5 The concept was now set out for the first time in law that all Africans coming to Barbados were to serve for life, along with their progeny and offspring. In addition, Africans were to be classified as property, so that the owner was entitled to all the benefits of ownership, including sexual benefits. This model was later exported to Jamaica, Antigua, St. Kitts, even South Carolina and beyond. Barbados charted the new reality in which Africans were being classified, codified, and commodified in the New World. The second point highlighted by Beckles is that during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Barbados was the only colony where women outnumbered men. All the islands of the Caribbean were complaining about a shortage of females, while in Barbados a female majority existed for 80 percent of the period of slavery. Beckles’s third point is that by the late seventeenth century, Barbados had become the richest colony, not only in the New World but in the entire British Empire. While its position in the colonial world was established in the mid-seventeenth century, it was with the accelerated emergence and dissemination of images a century later by itinerant European artists, and the rise of the early print culture, that representations of Barbados and the rest of the New World gained widespread currency in Europe. These images illustrate the newly evolving creolized society, a hybridization of European, African, and Amerindian cultures, and the complex hierarchical structure that was established in order to accommodate, articulate, and manage this phenomenon. The mulatto woman emerges as the quintessential focus of admiration, emblematic of all that is exotic and desirable. Not only is she

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beautiful, she is intelligent and able to negotiate and even transgress the complex codes that structure the society. Working in the West Indies as Sir William Young’s official painter, Italian artist Agostino Brunias, from 1765 onward, produced images such as The Barbadoes Mulatto Girl, which recorded the inhabitants and customs of the British-held islands with a view to attracting new landowners. However, Brunias’s images might best be understood, as Mia Bagneris has suggested, as “simultaneously participating in and subtly, but significantly, troubling ideas of race and racial classification during the eighteenth century, helping to construct them while simultaneously exposing their constructedness and underscoring their contradictions.”6 The figures are clearly Brunias’s primary interest, emphasized by their size within the landscape, which differs from other images of the period. Whereas traditionally black or mulatto people were rendered as minute spots on the colonial landscape, they dominate in The Barbadoes Mulatto Girl. The central figure, after whom the print is titled, is distinguished from the other two unnamed bodies who are both seen from the back or side. She is further distinguished by her lighter skin color, elaborate dress, towering headdress, and extraordinary gold jewelry. Why has Brunias depicted these women in this way? Barbados by the late eighteenth century had become a key site where this phenomenon of a fully matured creolized community could be observed as fact. The artist had neither seen nor experienced anything similar before arriving in the Caribbean, and so he recorded the visceral impact of the presence and demeanor of the mulatto woman. This image, therefore, represents a portrait of a society in its becoming. During his 1796 visit to Barbados British army officer William Dyott observed that the “white people all appear sickly, and look extremely pallid, but almost tout le monde is of the sable race.”7 Visiting aboard two slave ships in Carlisle Bay that had arrived from the coast of Guinea, Dyott reported that “some of the girls I really thought very good-looking (as far as the sable race could be so), and the finest made creatures I ever beheld. Not all the powers of the first dancing-master could give such attitude as some of them had.” He went on to

observe, “I was much delighted with the dress of the negro girls in Bridge Town, which is exactly that of the fine ladies when I left England; short-waisted and turbans, the latter made of white or coloured handkerchiefs, but displayed and put on with better taste than anything I ever saw. Really and truly I never beheld that part of female dress (and which I much admire) so well disposed as in some of the black women in Bridge Town.”8 This is a remarkably graphic conflation of the spectrum of race in the New World. The Barbados Slave Code prescribed the amounts and types of cloth and clothing that were to be supplied each year by the planter to his slaves, but the mulatto was often neither dependent on nor

Jean-Michel Moreau the Younger, Un Anglais de la Barbade vend sa Maitresse, 1780. Engraving, 9.0 x 14.5 cm. Courtesy Barbados Museum and Historical Society

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desirous of accessing such substandard materials to make up her costume. In his discussion of female agency of the period, Hilary Beckles examines economic entrepreneurship, which had been the specific domain of women—the hucksters, the higglers, and the hawkers who bought, sold, and traded fruits, vegetables, and other goods along the roadside. Such practices were in fact illegal; Beckles references two hundred years of legislation trying to prevent such commerce, and yet while these women were routinely locked up, the authorities could not suppress these activities. Legislation from the mid- to late-eighteenth century set out that all items found on the person of any African woman on the street were deemed to be stolen goods and the possessor imprisoned. According to the law, a slave was property, and property cannot own property. The implication was that these women were engaged in the buying and selling of stolen goods. These transactions were illegal and their continuation was transgressive. Thus Brunias’s representation of The Barbadoes Mulatto Girl can be read as a subversive alternative to the mere picturesque, and in documenting such practices as the norm, served to represent alternate, subaltern discourses which, unless read alongside these other processes of attempted control, misunderstand and misinterpret their potential for destabilizing the dominant and hegemonic social configurations of the period. Brunias’s Barbadoes Mulatto Girl depicts such commercial transactions as part of the broader, complex negotiations that structured the society. The sexual relations between Europeans, Africans, and Amerindians that resulted in the creolized or mixed-race population was the subject of popular storytelling as early as the seventeenth century. Richard Ligon’s 1657 A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes provided one of the earliest tales of tragic encounter between the old and new worlds, between differing ethnicities and cultures in the West Indies, with the story of Yarico, a “free” Amerindian woman sold into slavery by her treacherous Englishman lover. In Ligon’s account, the beautiful Yarico saves the life of Thomas Inkle, sequestering him in a cave from her murderous countrymen, the black Caribs (both Amerindian and African in origin), on an unnamed island. During Inkle’s confinement of seven years, the two

fall in love, and he promises to transport her to England, where they will live a happy merchant-class life together. Instead, after his rescue, when Inkle is taken to Barbados, “the most English of islands,” he sells Yarico into slavery to secure the funds needed for his re-entry into “civilized” society. She attempts to dissuade him with news of her pregnancy, but he “only made Use of that Information, to rise in his Demands upon the Purchaser.”9 The resulting sale enabled Inkle to establish a thriving antique and furniture business, while leaving the care of his plantation to an overseer. A century later, another interpretation of the legend was included in Abbé Raynal’s and Denis Diderot’s highly influential L’Histoire philosophique des deux Indes, which graphically illustrated the tragic end of the relationship.10 Jeane-Michel Moreau the Younger produced the accompanying illustration, Un Anglais de la Barbade vend sa Maitresse (1798), which offered a completely different perspective and philosophical standpoint.11 Yarico arrives on Barbados’s shore, where she is enchained, literally becoming Inkle’s property, as he is poised to receive the monies from the sale of his mistress. It is the pivotal moment when Yarico’s pregnancy is commodified and reveals most strikingly the different values of the Amerindian and the Englishman, the woman and the man, the merchandise and the merchant, and is definitively antislavery in tone. Importantly, Inkle’s betrayal as a social, sexual, and economic act has potentially serious consequences that extend beyond his specific relationship with the heroine. In Moreau’s image, Yarico loses not only her clothes and adornments (and of course her voice, as she no longer speaks for herself), her ethnicity (she is imaged much darker, because she is assumed to be a slave), her liberty, and her child, but finally and most important, she loses her name (becoming merely the mistress) even while she retains her location, Barbados. Ambiguity about Yarico’s ethnicity has entered the artistic discourse. Is she Amerindian, mulatto, or black? She shifts back and forth across each rendering and publication of the story. As a black Carib, Yarico was of course a blend of African and indigenous Carib and thus could with ease assume both identities, though never at the same time. Yarico was probably the product of

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Eva Campbell, Encounters, 2012. Acrylic on canvas, 48 x 72 in. Courtesy the artist

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the fiercely independent community of black Caribs found mainly on St. Vincent, to which escaped African slaves, largely from Barbados, made their way. Had Yarico indeed been a full Carib, such a transaction would have been illegal at the time when the enslavement of indigenous Indians had been outlawed under Barbados’s slave laws. But as a black Carib, Yarico would have been regarded as an escaped African, thus losing her freedom. A contemporaneous lithograph produced in 1796 by the British artist Thomas Rowlandson both names and locates the formidable central figure as Rachel Pringle or Mama Rachel of Barbadoes, seated outside her “hotel.” There is no other document like it as far as we can determine in the whole genre of the artist, or in this genre of portraiture of the period. Prince William Henry’s (later King William IV) rampage through her brothel may have made Rachel Pringle Polgreen’s story legendary, but it has in many ways rendered her history, accomplishments, and problematic relationships opaque and in need of reexamination.12 Rachel, a free(d) woman of color and former-slave-turned-slave-owner, was a propertied resident who ran a well-known brothel. Like Brunias, Rowlandson devotes great care to articulating the commanding stance and elaborate costume of the central figure, including the rich dress, turban, and jewels. The materials, styles, and modes of display with diverse origins in Europe and her colonies serve as signifiers of the melange of empire that the mulatto came to represent. Behind the commanding figure of the proprietress are three other figures: a youthful Rachel from the past stands before a gluttonous white man identified variously as either her customer or her lecherous father, while the handsome British officer standing to the right is believed to be her lover, Captain Pringle, who rescues her from these unsavory circumstances, facilitating her freedom as well as her business ventures. A sign posted above Rachel’s head reads: “Pawpaw Sweetmeats & Pickles of all Sorts by Rachel PP,” advertising not just the culinary items on sale, but also alluding to the sexual services offered inside. The image has been read as reinforcing the positionality of enslaved black women as sexually available and consumable, but equally what is revealed are the negotiated positions of power taken up by women within

the newly creolizing society of the West Indies. Nevertheless, it is important to remember that this visual production representing Rachel Pringle’s ethnicity, gender, and sexuality is a complete narrative of her life story as the artist imagined her. The labels or titles printed below the scenes serve to frame the reading of the depictions. The Brunias, Moreau, and Rowlandson images discussed above refer only to the central figure when clearly the subject is the more complex system of triangulated relations structured and negotiated through classifications of gender, ethnicity, and class. The publication of all these depictions as prints ensured their wide dissemination across the colonized world, and their continued circulation across several centuries finds resonance with Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s argument that history represents both the past (facts and archival materials) and the story told about the past (narrative), demonstrating that this interaction between the processes of historical production and representation has relevance in contemporary art historical readings as well.13 The prints’ exotic appeal also ensured their appropriation within popular consumption across ages: Brunias’s imagery of a newly creolizing society adorned objects ranging from Toussaint L’Ouverture’s coat buttons during the time of the Haitian Revolution to modern tourist products as diverse as placemats and phone cards. Contemporary artists seeking to challenge the pervasive stereotyped depictions of the Caribbean have also turned to these eighteenth-century images as both source material and points of departure. In Lord Byron’s Drawing Rooms from 2001, Godfried Donkor, a Ghanaian British artist, collages disparate sources of print imagery to create Hogarthian scenes of African presence in Victorian England. In Donkor’s Mama Calabah’s Chop Shop, Brunias’s Barbadoes Mulatto Girl appears alongside Rowlandson’s Rachel Pringle, dominating the foreground as proprietors in contrast to the frenzied chaos of European men behind. In a second work by Donkor entitled Mulatto Madonna, Rachel Pringle is now towered over by a bikini-clad Trinidadian glamour girl. This is part of Donkor’s Madonna series, produced during a residency in Trinidad, where images taken from dancehall fetes, local beauty pageants, and pornography are superimposed on pages from the Financial Times, unifying

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Ras Ishi Butcher, Exotic Encounters, 2014. Mixed media on canvas, 60.5 x 57.5 in. Courtesy the artist

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Sheena Rose, Sweet Gossip: She Feels She’s All That, 2012. Digital photograph documenting performance. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Adrian Richards

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both colonial and contemporary bodies within a field of trade commodities. Other works in this series incorporate images of eighteenth-century sailing ships or cross-sectional diagrams of slave ships, making the point that this early transatlantic system of globalized capitalism, in which human bodies are available commodities, continues in the present through the sporting industry, the entertainment industry, and the sex trade. The inherent opportunism of exploitation within encounters of difference also inspired Barbadian painter Ras Ishi Butcher and his series entitled Exotic Encounters. Like Donkor, Ishi focuses on the proliferating images of hypersexualized female bodies, this time sourced from online pornography. In his series, a single contour drawing is repeated in a manner reminiscent of works by Ghada Amer, but whereas Amer’s bodies are stitched onto the canvas, the contours in Ishi’s works are drawn out using string that is glued onto the surface. After layers of paint have dried, the cord is ripped out, so that the figure is now delineated by an absence, by the contour of bare canvas. In other works in the series, the thick pigment is replaced with washes of turmeric and coffee, commodities exported from the West Indies, which stain and run down the surface of the canvas and make the figures more difficult to decipher. Like Donkor’s Glamour Girls, Ishi’s title was inspired by recent news reports of the “exotic dancers” who enter Barbados illegally and subsequent citations by the US State Department listing Barbados as “a source of sex trafficking and forced labor.” Encounters plays on the perception of the Caribbean as a site of perpetual discovery, encounter, and exploitation, a trajectory from the transatlantic slave trade to sex tourism as well as the perpetuated tropicalization and exotification of a region that continues to be equated with sun, sand, and sex. Encounters is also the title of the self-portrait by Ghanaian Canadian artist Eva Campbell, which incorporates inverted images of Brunias’s Barbadoes Mulatto Girl and Rowlandson’s Rachel Pringle as well as eighteenth-century trade cards and botanical illustrations of tropical fruits, intermingling “tropical” bodies and commerce and interrogating the place of these early exoticized images of

Afro-Caribbean women in the artist’s own selfrepresentation. Campbell’s Encounters references her brief residency in Barbados, the birthplace of her father and her own home as a very young child. Her encounters with personal sites of memory are sifted through the accumulated imagery and representations by other (European male) experiences. In another work painted at the same time, Intertext, Campbell is ambiguous in situating the black female body in the past or in the present but clearly references Brunias’s women. The sitter, seen completely from behind, is naked except for her elaborately wrapped headdress, her back bearing the impressions of her tightly laced corset. Visibility is clearly central to the work of Sheena Rose. Sweet Gossip is a series of works focusing on conversations and observations the artist has overheard in the streets in Bridgetown, not unlike the recordings made by William Dyott more than three centuries earlier. She captures, on plywood panels in raw and direct images and equally raw dialect captions, the crude comments, the aggressive comeons, and the harsh judgments typically made about bodies, their adornment, and public performance: “Look how she digging she panty”; “All of his backside by the door”; or “Man I want a piece of that.” Rose then takes these placards back into Bridgetown and confronts her subjects/audiences with them, photographing their reactions. The inclusion of the text below the image harks back to the early prints by Brunias and Rowlandson, where the descriptions or labels identify and frame the bodies depicted. Rose’s gossip is the malicious judgments of bodies always under surveillance. While Rose is reflecting back to us these unnamed bodies, she includes herself in the final photographs; but she, like her subjects, is usually headless, simultaneously the anonymous voyeur and selfobjectified subject. Rose subsequently presented One Person, Many Stories, a performance that evolved out her own experiences working as a nude model in a life-drawing class. While presenting herself as the naked model, an object of observation with the expectation that she will remain motionless and silent, she is instead performative, vocalizing stories that revolve around her experiences as a young black female artist from Barbados participating in various Cummins and Thompson

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residences and exhibitions globally, responding to the expectations and assumptions made about her. She begins the performance by naming herself: “My name is Sheena Rose. I’m from Barbados. . . . [pause] . . . Color? What do you mean by color?” Very quickly Sheena is completely naked, as she continues to confront the viewer’s expectations: “You tink I ginna talk about Africa; you tink I ginna talk about race; you tink I ginna talk about identity; you tink I ginna talk about sexuality.” The last item of clothing she removes is the familiar headscarf to reveal a garland of silk roses woven into her dreadlocked hair, an expression of her own exotic beauty and also a reference to and reinforcement of her name. She confronts these stereotypes assigned to her with her frank nakedness, an act whose transgression is particularly notable given the very conservative nature of Barbadian society and the fact that it is illegal to appear nude in public. If Rose’s intent is to assert her independence from preconceptions and labels, her transgressive, defiant actions place her in the good company of a long tradition. Trinidadian artist and curator Christopher Cozier has written eloquently about the agency of portraiture in the aftermath of a long history of colonized representation within “a visual territory not exclusively of our own making,” where the black body transitioned from property to citizen but where, within the pictorial domain, subjects remained labeled and nameless.14 These images require expanded readings of historical experience and provide pivotal points of reference for contemporary investigations in a world where the representation of black women’s bodies continues as sites of contestation and transgression.

literally translated as “young mule,” from mulo, “mule,” possibly in allusion to the hybrid origin of mules. 2 Hilary Beckles, Barbados Legacy: Sugar and Slavery (keynote address delivered at the Eighth Annual International African Diaspora Heritage Trail Conference, Barbados, September 17–19, 2012). 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. 5 The full name is “An Act for the better ordering and governing of Negroes,” and most of its provisions have been reprinted in Stanley Engerman, Seymour Drescher, and Robert Paquette, eds., Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 105–13. 6 Mia Bagneris in Angelica Poggi and Marco Voena, eds., Agostino Brunias: Capturing the Carribean [sic] (c. 1770–1800) (London: Robilant and Voena, 2010). 7 Reginald W. Jeffery, ed., Dyott’s Diary 1781–1845: A selection from the journal of William Dyott, sometime general in the British army and aide-de-camp to His Majesty King George III (London: Archibald Constable and Company, 1907), 91, archive .org/details/dyottsdiary17811oodyot. Ibid., 94). 8 9 Richard Ligon, A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes, 2nd ed. (1657; facsimile of 1673 ed., London: Frank Cass: 1970). 10 Abbé Guillaume-Thomas Raynal, attrib., L’Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes (d’Histoire des deux Indes) (Amsterdam, c. 1770). 11 Moreau’s image was clearly based on S. Hutchinson’s larger watercolor entitled Slave Traffic (1793). The original image contextualizes this notorious transaction on the Barbados beach with the panoply of the colonial transaction in commodities, including their production, commodification, and transportation. Courtesy National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London, collections.rmg .co.uk/collections/objects/139644.html. 12 For a full distillation of these issues see M. J. Fuentes, “Power and Historical Figuring: Rachael Pringle Polgreen’s Troubled Archive,” Gender and History 22 (October 2010): 564–84. 13 An in-depth interrogation of these issues is offered in MichelRolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon, 1995). 14 Christopher Cozier, “Notes on Wrestling with the Image,” in Christopher Cozier and Tatiana Flores, Wrestling with the Image: Caribbean Interventions (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2011), 9–10.

Alissandra Cummins is director of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society and part-time lecturer in heritage and museum studies at University of the West Indies, Cave Hill. Allison Thompson lectures in art history at the Centre for Visual and Performing Arts at Barbados Community College. Notes

1 This term dates from 1593 and comes from the Spanish or Portuguese word mulato, meaning “of mixed breed,” referring to individuals of both African and European descent. The word is

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NO MORE “POISONOUS, DISRESPECTFUL, AND SKEWED IMAGES OF BLACK PEOPLE” BARBARA WALKER’S LOUDER THAN WORDS

Celeste-Marie Bernier

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I have developed a practice which is concerned with social, political, and cultural issues, with particular relation to history and contemporary practice,” black British artist Barbara Walker declares, summarizing that her “work touches on class, racial identity, power and belonging.”1 As an artist engaged in a prolific outpouring of paintings and drawings over her decades-long career to date, Birmingham-based Walker works across multiple narrative series. She creates hard-hitting dramatic tableaux in which she does powerful justice to the psychological, physical, emotional, cultural, social, and imaginative realities of lives as lived by black women, men, and children, not only within twentieth- and twenty-first-century Britain, but across the African diaspora more generally. Answering her own question “Where is the black presence?” she works within the series format to create self-reflexively experimental and politically radical bodies of work in which she dramatizes the repeatedly invisibilized and misrepresented lives of black subjects. As an artist committed to visual storytelling, she lays bare the importance of working with narratives by explaining, “I tend to work two or three years in a series . . . and then I edit them,” admitting to the role played by her own authorial presence. Over a twenty-year period, Walker’s vast bodies of work include Private Face (1998–2002), Louder Than Words (2006–9), Show and Tell (2008–present), and Here and Now (2012–present).2 Working with the formal and thematic possibilities presented by painting and

Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016 DOI 10.1215/10757163-3641766 © 2016 by Nka Publications

Barbara Walker, Untitled, 2006. Digital mixed-media print, 81 x 106 cm. Courtesy the artist. © Barbara Walker. Photo: Gary Kirkham

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My Song, 2006. Mixed media on digital paper, 41 x 55 cm. Courtesy the artist. © Barbara Walker. Photo: Gary Kirkham

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drawing, as well as mixed-media works in which she traces shifting relationships between text and image, Walker has developed a powerful aesthetic practice. She actively intervenes into debates related to black absences within the domain of white Western art histories. She directly confronts widespread tendencies toward black objectification and stereotyping within a national body politic and white mainstream popular culture and media. Walker refuses to shy away from black physical and psychological annihilation and violation as per legal systems of white racist discrimination and historical erasure. Writing candidly regarding the fundamental role played by her exposure to positive images of black subjects, as created by white artists and authors, Walker refuses to flinch from their perpetuation of assumptions and biases. As she concedes, “I must also admit to strong feelings of pride, empathy and a little curiosity whenever I read stories that touched on Africa and its peoples. Seeing people who were Black like me, presented in ways that, whilst not unproblematic, were in so many ways better than the poisonous, disrespectful and skewed images of Black people so readily available in today’s society.”3 Creating hard-hitting, multilayered, and multireferential bodies of work in which she not only questions problematic representations of “Africa and its peoples” but also rejects the centuries-long stranglehold of “poisonous, disrespectful and skewed images of Black people,” Walker fuses personal autobiography, family testimony, and scholarly research to bear witness to her status as a contemporary history painter. Coming to grips with the imaginative, political, and aesthetic force of only one of her series, I examine Louder Than Words to trace Walker’s visual and textual resistances to the intersecting relationships between black masculinity and white mainstream stereotyping, criminalization, racial profiling, physical persecution, and psychological wounding. At the same time that she refuses to sanitize or clean up white atrocities enacted against black subjects—and, more specifically in this series, toward black men— Walker works with charcoal, pencil, and paint to create emotively charged portraits and landscape scenes. Here she visualizes black-centered, rather

than white-centered, histories, narratives, and memories in a contemporary era. A vast series executed on an epic scale, Walker’s Louder Than Words consists of over thirty works in which she dramatizes the stark realities confronting the daily life of her son, Solomon, and the dominant role played by the racist actions of a twenty-firstcentury British police force. “Louder Than Words came about during a period [when] I wasn’t working for about three years,” she explains. Walker notes the intellectual and philosophical as well as political origins of the series by confirming, “It was a time to reflect and out of that reflection Louder Than Words came.” As she summarizes, “Solomon came home one day frustrated and upset and said, ‘I’ve been stopped again,’ and I looked at him . . . and said, ‘What do you mean stopped?’ He explained what had happened. He was just walking about his business and he had been stopped again. And so I said, ‘What do you mean, again?’”4 Turning to artmaking to expose the social, political, and legal restrictions circumscribing the rights of black men living in Britain today, Walker’s series takes inspiration from her son’s exposure to discriminatory police practices concerning targeted incidents of surveillance popularly designated as “stop and search,” or “sus.” Tracing a long history of police practices aimed at racial profiling and the singling out of black men, which came to a head in the 1980s in acts of radical resistance undertaken by black grassroots protest groups, Eddie Chambers writes, “In the period leading up to the disturbances of September 1985, hundreds of Black youth were subject to summary stop and search, whilst going about their legitimate business.” As he notes, and as Walker’s body of work reveals, very little progress has been made in a contemporary era: “Two decades later, the intrusive and corrosive effects of stop and search are still being felt, in Birmingham and elsewhere in the country,” Chambers explains, adding that “in 2006, Black youth, many of whom were born in the 1980s and 1990s find themselves, in effect, harassed by a similarly new generation of police officers.” He is incensed that “behind each stop and search statistic there lies an individual human being who has, for whatever reason, been targeted as someone of interest to whichever police officers or patrol car that happen to be passing.” For Chambers, Bernier

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as for Walker, the white racist motivations of these abuses and violations visited upon black manhood are clear-cut: “Stop and search is in effect racial profiling by another name. These stopped individuals, these luckless pedestrians, tend to be of a certain ethnic background (African Caribbean), tend to be of a certain gender (male), and tend to be of a certain age group (young).”5 As Walker explains, a motivation for the series was her determination to condemn ongoing cycles of oppression. She “makes links to the sus law of the 80s” only to critique the fact that “I’ve gone through that in that generation” and now it has “come back again.”6 Adding insult to injury regarding the traumatizing violations enacted by police authority against the individual rights of black men, Walker declares that Solomon “produced . . . four crumpled slips and I was immediately kind of perplexed by them and upset.” These yellowed A5-sized carbon copies, which functioned as the proof of her son’s stop and search and were given to him while the police officers kept the originals, provide the material catalyst to Walker’s Louder Than Words. Starting to collect them in 2002 while “he was still being stopped and searched,” she declares that a few years later, in 2006, “I decided I wanted to respond to them.”7 For Walker, Louder Than Words assumes heightened dramatic force by doing justice to her outrage: “How can and why should such pathetic pieces of police detritus impact so much on the life of one of my family members?”8 As an artist typically undertaking six months to a year of research for each of her series, Walker learned that the West Midlands Police kept the original dockets on official record, a stark reality that stimulated her art production even further. As she concedes, “It was quite disturbing to know that each time he was stopped but he was just searched, that documentation is on file. It’s almost kind of sinister for me to know that this activity existed. It’s almost like, ‘just in case.’ It’s almost building a profile on someone” given that the record “stays in the system for five years.”9 As Chambers notes, Walker’s decision to work with Solomon’s actual dockets physically, materially, and imaginatively inscribes “the curiously modern and thoroughly bizarre act of being issued with a record of the stop and search.” He concludes, “It’s difficult to know

what those stopped and searched are supposed to do with these souvenirs.”10 Walker refuses to shy away from these objects as macabre souvenirs commemorating homegrown injustices rather than national tourist attractions. As she explains of her epic-sized, digitally scanned reworkings of these police dockets: “None of these are tampered, they’re in their authentic state.” Onto these dockets that assume newfound status as memorials and as works of art, she collages not only portraits of Solomon, but also urban views representing the locations of these incidents.11 As talismans to traumatizing experiences, on the surface, Walker’s works testify to white racist persecution and black suffering. Probe deeper, and they emerge as monumental declarations to formal and thematic developments within her practice. She endorses the power of artistry in transforming black men from their status as criminalized specimens into psychologically and physically complex individuals. “Like the great African American artist Charles White, Barbara’s pictures are ‘images of dignity,’” Chambers states. He declares that “because her work is highly figurative, we all have an uncommon access to its multiple and pronounced social narratives.”12 Regardless of their vast and important differences with regard to national context, historical framework, and time period, Chambers’s comparison between Walker and White reveals many shared formal and thematic dimensions to their practice. Both artists produce “images of dignity” by creating monumental portraits of black subjects, which they execute in black-and-white and/or sepia. Equally, in the same way that White used seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenthcentury runaway slave advertisements in his individualized portraits of black women, men, and children as a powerful visual testament to his participation in black activism in a 1960s United States civil rights era, Walker collages similarly hyperreal portraits of black subjects onto twentyfirst-century police dockets and newspaper accounts in a powerful denunciation of the fact that, while black bodies and souls may no longer be bought and sold on the auction block, they nevertheless remain imprisoned in the social, political, cultural, and class-based inequalities generated by slavery’s

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contemporary legacies. Across Louder Than Words, Walker’s portraits of Solomon, and her landscape scenes documenting the locations of his police encounters, come to life not only on the digitally scanned enlargements of police dockets, but also on collaged newspaper fragments containing powerful accounts related to white atrocity and black martyrdom as well as on the symbolically white backdrop of drawing paper. Issuing a call to arms as White did decades previously, Walker adopts experimental artistic practices to defy white racist forces of annihilation and subjugation. She ensures that her black protagonists circulate as subjects rather than objects, and as individuals rather than types. Walker works with physiognomic expression, bodily gesture, and self-expression through clothing to provide radical declarations of individual agency and artistry. Writing of one of Walker’s earlier series, Private Face, in which Walker visualizes black women, men, and children at work and at play as she dramatizes their everyday lives in full color and sepia paintings similarly executed on a monumental scale, Chambers underscores the extent to which the artist “has to work hard to win the trust and confidence of her subjects before she can begin to sketch or otherwise document these people and their everyday or regular activities.” He adds that “for everyone involved, not the least Walker herself, the right to paint familiar subject matter has to be earned.” Chambers is in no doubt that “having earned that right it has to be nurtured, protected and never abused.”13 As a series inspired by the personal memories and private experiences not only of community members but of Walker’s own son, these issues surrounding the “right to paint” remain of even more fundamental moral, ethical, and political importance in Louder Than Words. Admitting to Solomon’s initial reluctance regarding her decision to take his “upsetting” experiences as her subject matter on the grounds that “he was very wary of being recognised and being up for public scrutiny,” she explains the moral and emotional importance of adapting her practice to ensure a respectful engagement with his personal experiences. In a bold departure from her favored method of working in her studio, she explains, “I started the

charcoal drawings of him . . . at home so he could see and he could be part of it.” She emphasizes, “It was important that he could see what I was doing and understand it.” Walker goes on to describe how “as an intervention and introduction, I always start a project within drawing. I began by creating several  laboured  charcoal studies  of Solomon at home, as a catalyst to develop a critical dialogue wi th him. To begin I often work and think quite literally, with an  expectation that  the metaphor  and the critical analysis will flow in later.” She further notes that “these first series drawings were the genesis of and were pivotal to Louder Than Words. It was very important that Solomon (he usually never sees me working) was present  to  bear witness, to see the process, to absorb and be part of what seemed at the time a mother and son collaboration.”14 Walker’s decision not only had powerful aesthetic results in significant bodies of work, but also profound emotional consequences. “Whilst I was working he could see and then he came in and we talked,” she declares. “I managed to unlock certain things through that whole process of what he was feeling because he held a lot in. And through that work—and I’m not saying that the work was therapy—it gave a place to discuss these critical and very personal experiences.” Far from creating Louder Than Words in isolation, Walker’s admission that “it’s a collaboration between us” provides a powerful lens through which to examine her tendency toward interweaving autobiography, familial testimony, oral history, and scholarly research integrally into her visual lexicon. Self-reflexively interrogating the relationship not only between image and image, but also text and image, she repeatedly reinforces “the tension between the text and the drawing” to open up a space for audience engagement.15 An antiexplicatory and antididactic artist, Walker works with understatement, fragmentation, and a multiplicity of narratives across her portraits and landscapes in order to introduce ambiguity and actively inscribe the viewer’s interpretative process into her series. Deliberately fusing her radical political consciousness with an experimental aesthetic practice, Walker’s Louder Than Words heightens social and political awareness among her Bernier

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audiences with regard to racist discrimination in general, and the excessive practices of the British police force more specifically. As she emphasizes, it is “because a lot of people aren’t aware of it” that “it’s so important to me because I’m still dealing with history and documentation in recording the particular policing of today.”16 Across Louder Than Words Walker’s drawings, etched onto official police dockets, constitute by far the larger proportion of works in the series and can be divided between works consisting solely of portraits of Solomon—such as My Song (2006), Untitled (2006), and Series . . . I can paint a picture with a pin (2006)—and compositions from which she entirely absents the figure in favor of creating idealized renderings of the locations at which he was stopped and searched, including Polite Violence I (2006), Polite Violence II (2006), and Polite Violence III (2006). Walker defies the diminutive size of the official police dockets by inserting her charcoal and pencil drawings onto digitally enlarged scans of these original documents. As she explains, “They’re meant to be monumental, they’re meant to engulf you, they’re meant to be powerful. It’s a symbolic thing.” As self-confessed “monoliths,” these works assume spiritual and allegorical function as part memorial, part monument, and part testimonial as she actively intervenes into the official records to create artworks out of archives. As per White’s decades-earlier monochrome works executed on a similarly aggrandized scale, Walker insists that “the reason why they’re large is . . . so the audience can engage with them.” She also emphasizes the necessity of creating larger-than-life black figures as “a political statement.” As Walker declares: “It’s almost to say, ‘Here we are,’ ‘Here I am.’”17 She deliberately rejects “poisonous, disrespectful and skewed images of black people,” to urge that she works “within the art world and art practice” in order to “interrogate the perception of images and perception of ideas.” Ultimately, she works to “change or interrogate a perception or stereotype” regarding black humanity within white mainstream society.18 As Gen Doy emphasizes, Walker’s “aim [is] to produce artistic documents in a difficult and traditionally prestigious visual language, in order to offset the media images which still persist of black people as violent, threatening, or potential criminals.”19

Antisensationalist and antivoyeuristic, Walker’s mixed-media works My Song, Untitled and Series . . . I can paint a picture with a pin variously consist of a close-up of a full frontal or rear view of Solomon’s face or the back of his head. She foregrounds the role played by portraiture within her revisionist and experimental aesthetic. Walker’s admission that “I’m still in the conversation of portraiture,” no less than her commitment to debates surrounding “how you define a portrait,” are dramatically played out in her delicately rendered line drawings of Solomon. Shoring up thematic and formal relationships across works in this series, Walker’s decision to provide a full frontal view of Solomon’s physiognomy in Untitled functions in conjunction with her representation solely of the back of his head in My Song and Series . . . I can paint a picture with a pin to lay claim to the impossibility of doing justice to black subjects within a single work. Betraying her critique of the ways in which black manhood is fragmented and distorted across official documentation, Walker creates a series of likenesses dramatizing different parts of Solomon’s face and body to attest to portraiture as fraught terrain for black subjects. In stark contrast to the government docket in which the police officer attempts to categorize or itemize black male identity in socially determinist ways, Walker collages delicately rendered and only partially complete full frontal and rear views of Solomon onto the textual surfaces and lined grids. Here, Walker ensures that his physiognomy is simultaneously both revealed and concealed: she reimages black masculinity, not as a criminalized spectacle but as an absent-presence and present-absence in these works. More particularly, in My Song and Untitled, Walker introduces further ambiguity by inserting her pencil portraits not directly onto the original docket but on swathes of white paint through which the text of the police document bleeds but is ultimately rendered illegible in the artist’s physical act of erasure. As an antididactic artist self-confessedly working with “a lot of code,” the white paint for Walker has the potential to symbolize the whiteness of art production, as referenced in blank paper and canvases and even in correction fluid, as its uneven layerings confirm her active role in editorializing official information concerning black subjects. In

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Polite Violence II, 2006. Oil on paper, 81 x 106 cm. Courtesy the artist. © Barbara Walker. Photo: Gary Kirkham

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more hard-hitting terms, as she explains, her preferred technique testifies to her conviction that “I’m using the white to wipe away that pain because it was really painful for me to know what my son was going through because it’s almost like it’s happening to me.” She admits that his exposure to these traumatizing experiences are far from over: “Since that day in 2002 . . . even now when Solomon goes out there’s a fear, and I always say be careful, just be careful. It’s still ongoing.”20 Opting not to whiten the whole area of the docket in Untitled as she did in My Song, Walker leaves more of the police document visible at the same time that she inserts a frame delicately rendered in pencil. Simultaneously providing a barrier separating Solomon’s portrait from the physical and psychological violations enacted against black manhood by the dehumanizing process of stop and search, her inclusion of a frame explicitly references Western art history to defy widespread racist associations of the genre of portraiture for whites only. As an artist working to expose the ideological forces at work within the seemingly detached neutrality of the police docket, Walker inserts Solomon’s face and body onto this official document’s surface in My Song, Untitled, and Series . . . I can paint a picture with a pin to critique the profoundly entrenched tendencies within national institutions toward a wholesale whitewashing of black psychological and physical realities. Walker’s hand-drawn portraits appear in ambiguous relation to the official text within the police docket. She names and shames the dehumanizing practice inscribed in British law of stop and search that results in a “Search Record of Person/Vehicle/Stop Form.” In the case of My Song and Series . . . I can paint a picture with a pin, Walker’s decision to include a detailed rendering solely of the back of Solomon’s head guarantees that he retains his individualism in the face of white mainstream attempts to objectify and quantify black bodies. Similarly, while she provides a full frontal view of his physiognomy in Untitled, she defies audience tendencies toward voyeuristic consumption by ensuring his eyes are closed. At the same time she meticulously delineates his hooded jacket in a powerful interrogation of white racist stereotypes surrounding black masculinity and items of clothing. She renders this preoccupation in more clear-cut ways in her detailed representation

of his jacket and baseball cap in Series . . . I can paint a picture with a pin. Despite the fact that, as Karen Roswell states, the title of My Song is an allegorical and spiritual “meditation on the Old Testament’s Song of Solomon,” Walker sets out across these works to obliterate his name as it appears in the original docket. In so doing, she not only symbolically reenacts the ways in which white racist practices annihilate black identities, but also attests to his representative importance. While this experience has happened to her son, stop and search remains a lived reality for the vast majority of black men exposed to ongoing practices of racial profiling and police surveillance.21 “While I was doing my research,” Walker explains, “to begin with it didn’t start off just with Solomon and myself. It was a bigger approach. I started to collect dockets from other young men that had been subjected to it.” Accumulating a “bag of dockets from various men” that were ultimately unusable due to dataprotection issues, Walker’s decision to focus solely upon her son’s physiognomy has powerful implications regarding her ongoing engagement with “how you define a portrait.” His likeness testifies not only to the individual, but also to the collective experiences confronting black men. As a result, his portrait shores up her protest against widespread systems of official discrimination and persecution.22 Opting for no clear-cut vision of spiritual redemption, Walker’s monochrome renderings of Solomon in My Song, Untitled, and Series . . . I can paint a picture with a pin testify not only to black survival in the face of white strategies of subjugation, but also to black sacrifice in potential martyrdom. In powerful ways, the suspended placelessness of the portraits symbolically works in conjunction with the monumental scale of the work to resonate with tombstones and memorials more generally. At the same time, however, Walker’s drawings attest to black male self-expression. She carefully details Solomon’s personal style via clothing in order to testify to black resistance over and above white discrimination. Across her portraits, he retains his individualism regardless of white racist forces of annihilation and erasure. Revealingly, Solomon’s personal strategies of resistance are inscribed into the very texture of these works. As

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Chambers observes, these portraits are etched onto police dockets that, far from surviving as pristine documents, exist solely as “crumpled yellow bits of paper” that “reflect and represent Solomon’s own frustration, displeasure and above all fear.”23 Walker ultimately relies on the language of portraiture to carve out a space for black representation and black agency while interrogating white racist strategies of discrimination. As Gen Doy declares, “Walker sees herself not as a portrait painter, but rather as a commemorator of the histories and experiences of people she knows and the Birmingham community in which they live.”24 On the surface, Walker’s series of idealized townscapes, including Polite Violence I, Polite Violence II, and Polite Violence III, which come to life not in the monochrome starkness of charcoaled lines but the softened sepia hues of oil on paper, could not be further from her highly politicized and aestheticized portraits of Solomon. If examined further, however, her seemingly idyllic content soon loses its sentimental and nostalgic sheen, especially when analyzed in relation to her emotive use of titling. She provides explicit references to “polite violence” in order to reveal her politicized subject matter. She visualizes the “locations where he was stopped” in a direct condemnation of police rituals of public intimidation. Taking the local geographical terrain rather than Solomon’s physiognomy or torso as her starting point, Walker emphasizes that “the reason why I put these landscapes in [is] because I’m moving away from the figure.” She is careful to note, however, that “they’re still portraits of Solomon,” but she is engaged in “abstracting the idea.”25 Walker deliberately extends her political critique of the violations enacted upon Solomon’s body in order to interrogate the abstract and philosophical questions related to the body politic of the nation. She exposes the rhetoric surrounding Britain as a “green and pleasant land” as nothing less than a propagandistic fantasy and delusional mythology based upon systems of exclusion that cut across race, class, and gender divides. Seemingly relying on identical formal techniques in the same way that she ensures that the police officer’s handwriting is all but obliterated in My Song, Untitled, and Series . . . I can paint a picture with a pin, Walker repeats her preferred practice not of overwriting, but of overimaging

across Polite Violence I and III in order to eradicate Solomon’s exposure to ritualistic dehumanization. At the same time, however, she favors an entirely different practice in Polite Violence II. Here, Walker provides the viewer with unmediated access to the police officer’s handwritten data as entered onto the form and following Solomon’s subjection to one stop and search incident in particular. With the exception of one act of censorship—she inserts a white sticker to conceal the specificities of the family’s home address—Walker provides full access to the information provided by “PC 7152 EGAN DIGBETH,” as written on “24/01/03.” According to Digbeth’s record, Solomon, who is listed as “short black,” “slim,” “5' 0",” was stopped on “Corporation St” at “2341” hundred hours, at which point the police undertook a “search for weapons” on the grounds that he was “seen acting suspiciously pointing at bar staff through window of closed PH [Public House].” While she refuses to provide a direct reimaging of the exchange between Solomon and the police officer, Walker’s decision to represent a street scene in which she foregrounds architectural landmarks over and above any figurative representations of humanity in Polite Violence II offers a powerful condemnation of the ways in which the daily persecution of black men is not only written but imaged out of British history. Unmistakably to the fore here are the damages done by a “polite”—read concealed—form of physical and psychological violence as enacted by national authorities against black subjects. Admitting that she found this police docket, which “talks about suspicious pointing,” not only a “laughing point” but “really disturbing,” Walker’s decision to include the police officer’s text maintains a stark formal and thematic “tension” between “the personal handwriting of the police officer” and the artist’s “personal marking.” Here she artfully juxtaposes dominant systems of record keeping with subversive strategies of aesthetic practice. At the same time that the official docket operates to effect black eviction and exclusion, Walker performs a powerful act of inclusion in this work. She relies on a vignette style rather than a social and political documentary framework to represent “through rose-tinted spectacles” the scenes at which Solomon was stopped and searched in Polite Violence I, II, and Bernier

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III. In so doing, she testifies to the entitlement of black subjects to the rights of British citizenship and belonging. She endorses her powerful recognition of the fact that despite “all the complexities of the situations that happen,” this “working-class neighbourhood” is “home.”26 At the same time, as Chambers emphasizes, Walker refuses to shy away from an underlying sense of threat: “Through the device of depicting decidedly pleasant street scenes, she reveals her home neighbourhood not to be an environment of comfort, safety and domesticity, but rather an environment in which there lurks a terror that might, quite literally, descend at any given moment.”27 As Walker herself summarizes here and elsewhere across Louder Than Words, she repeatedly raises the question “Are you safe?”28 Any in-depth examination of Walker’s Louder Than Words reveals that her engagement with police dockets is far from the whole story. Her delicately rendered portraits of Solomon also come to life against the politically charged backdrops of collaged newspaper texts. An especially hard-hitting example is Walker’s diptych Brighter Future, which she created in 2006 and which consists of two portraits executed in charcoal and conte crayon. A close-up of a full frontal portrait of Solomon assumes center stage in the first work as Walker’s meticulous rendering of his physiognomy appears alongside an article published in The Independent. Accompanied by the headline “In the wrong place at the wrong time,” this newspaper article reports the tragic murder of Brazilian-born Jean Charles de Menezes by the London Metropolitan Police in 2005. As Walker explains, she replaced a photograph of de Menezes with “a charcoal drawing of Solomon” in order to condemn the senseless injustice of arbitrary police killings. She also communicates her personal fears regarding the safety of her son during his repeated subjection to stop and search interrogations by poignantly asking, what if “that was my son[?]”29 Walker generates yet further dramatic tension in the second image in the diptych, which consists of a charcoal and conte rendering of Solomon. This time he is represented in profiled view as she provides a direct evocation of criminalized mug shot iconography. He is also collaged over a headline within the same newspaper, which reads, “Met chief defends ‘shoot-to-kill’ policy for his

officers.” Refusing to shy away from the life-anddeath consequences of police atrocities, Solomon’s portrait appears immediately beneath the prostrate and traumatized figures of de Menezes’s family in a powerful exposure of parental grief on an unimaginable, and even unimageable, scale. Walker relies on a mixed-media visual language not only to reference the suffering to which she and her son are exposed within their own personal lives, but also to do hard-hitting justice to the struggle that confronts millions of black women, men, and children throughout the diaspora. In yet another work in which she relies upon collaged newspaper text, Walker created Time a few years later in 2009. Appearing against the whitedout backdrop of the Financial Times, her full frontal portrait of Solomon emerges in hard-hitting contrast, not only to her reproduction of a handwritten police docket, but also to her inclusion of a diminutive photograph of Jean Charles de Menezes, accompanied by an article headlined “Pressure grows over anti-terror police.” In a radical departure from her other works in this series, however, Walker’s composition is dominated by her poignant decision to include the rear view of a delicately rendered and unidentified black female figure. Her head is bowed as if to render her exposure to emotional suffering clear-cut. Introducing the possibility that this figure may well be a surrogate for the artist herself, she summarizes that there is a “woman coming through” who “symbolises metaphorically how I felt about this work.” She admits that “it was really a weight just dealing with this work and dealing with Solomon.” Here and elsewhere Walker testifies to her sense of art making as a catalyst to consciousness-raising on the grounds that “it’s still ongoing” but “people don’t realise.”30 “I always go back to history,” Barbara Walker summarizes. She explains that her interest in history is “in the sense of documenting” and “leaving traces.” Across her bodies of work she confides her determination to do justice to the repeatedly elided political, physical, social, cultural, and imaginative realities of black lives as lived, not only in a historical, but also in a contemporary era. Recognizing and resisting the ideological stranglehold maintained by dominant forces of political power, social control, and historical

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revisionism, Walker exposes mainstream biases, prejudices, and blind spots. She unequivocally declares, “I look at history to learn and to work with and work against so there’s a lot of loaded information.” Acknowledging the fundamental role played by audience engagement with her bodies of work, Walker, in her multiple narrative series, including Louder Than Words, foregrounds her commitment not only to critiquing white racist caricatures of black humanity, but also to rendering them obsolete. Shedding powerful light upon her artistic practice, Walker categorically states, “I want to challenge the stereotyping and misunderstanding that abounds, and offer a sophisticated and positive alternative in a mainstream setting, as a number of other Black artists have tried to do.”31 Working not in isolation but in full awareness of a vastly underresearched tradition of black British and African diasporic painting, filmmaking, sculpture, photography, prints, and mixed-media installation and performance art, Walker’s narrative series can be examined not only in their own right, but also in powerful relation to the creative outpourings of artists as diverse as Lubaina Himid, Donald Rodney, Maud Sulter, Marlene Smith, Ingrid Pollard, Keith Piper, Claudette Johnson, Gavin Jantjes, Mona Hatoum, Roshini Kempadoo, and Mary Evans, to name but a few. Committed to creating images that are “louder than words” as her black subjects come to life despite their ongoing subjection to dominant forces of physical, social, cultural, existential, and even art historical incarceration, Walker adopts an array of experimental practices in a heartfelt determination to give “voice to the voiceless and power to the powerless.”32

5 Eddie Chambers, “It’s a Bit Much,” in Barbara Walker: Louder Than Words (exhibition brochure) (London: London Metropolitan University, 2006), n.p. 6 Walker, interview by the author, September 2013. 7 Ibid. 8 Chambers, “It’s a Bit Much,” n.p. 9 Walker, interview by the author, September 2013. 10 Chambers, “It’s a Bit Much,” n.p. 11 Walker, interview by the author, September 2013. 12 Chambers, n.p. For an examination of Charles White’s use of runaway slave advertisements as a catalyst to his aesthetic practice, see Celeste-Marie Bernier, African American Visual Arts: From Slavery to the Present (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 135–38. 13 Eddie Chambers, “Barbara Walker,” in Private Face (exhibition catalogue) (Birmingham, UK: Midlands Arts Centre, 2002), 5. 14 Barbara Walker, email conversation with the author, June 2014. 15 Walker, interview by the author, September 2013. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 Gen Doy, “The Subject of Painting: Works by Barbara Walker and Eugene Palmer,” Visual Communication 1, no. 1 (February 2002): 47. 20 Walker, interview by the author, September 2013. 21 Karen Roswell, “Barbara Walker: Essay,” in Barbara Walker: As Seen (London: Tiwani Contemporary, 2013), 9. 22 Walker, interview by the author, September 2013. 23 Chambers, “It’s a Bit Much,” n.p. 24 Doy, “The Subject of Painting,” 46. 25 Walker, interview by the author, September 2013. 26 Ibid. 27 Chambers, “It’s a Bit Much,” n.p. 28 Barbara Walker, email message to the author, c. April 2014. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 31 Quoted in Chambers, “Barbara Walker,” 11. 32 Quoted in Maria Varnava, “Foreword,” in Barbara Walker: As Seen (London: Tiwani Contemporary, 2013), 1.

Celeste-Marie Bernier is a professor of Black studies at University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Notes

This article is written in profound gratitude to the exceptional generosity and inspirational kindness of Barbara Walker. I would also like to extend my sincere and heartfelt thanks to Deborah Willis and Cheryl Finley. 1 Barbara Walker, artist statement, june96.wordpress.com/. 2 Barbara Walker, interview with the author, Birmingham, UK, September 2013. 3 Artist statement, Here and Now, june96.wordpress.com/. 4 Walker, interview by the author, September 2013.

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HANK WILLIS THOMAS A NECESSARY CAUTION

Kerr Houston In itself a clenched fist is nothing and means nothing. But we never perceive a clenched fist. We perceive a man who in a certain situation clenches his fist. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

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an we take a few minutes to think about Hank Willis Thomas’s use of hand gestures in his 2014 Goodman Gallery show? The show, titled History Doesn’t Laugh, was recently on view (in slightly different permutations) in both Johannesburg and Cape Town. And, as Michael Smith noted in a review in artthrob, it was conceived quite emphatically for the South African venues: it featured two dozen new works that were rooted in apartheid-era visual culture.1 Print enlargements of midcentury mail order advertisements from True Love shrilly proclaimed the value of stretch mark cream and weighted bracelets. A monumental reproduction of a Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) button in fiberglass commemorated the cause in a finish fetish idiom. And several cast sculptures, made of a variety of metals, gave details from iconic apartheid-era photographs a three-dimensional reality. Even as the work thus offered an extension of themes in Thomas’s earlier oeuvre—the social construction and commodification of the black male and an acute, critical use of archival materials and popular visual culture—it now had a distinctly South African cast.

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Hank Willis Thomas. Raise Up, 2014. Bronze, 285 x 25 x 10 cm. Installation view of History Doesn’t Laugh exhibition, Goodman Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa, 2014. Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Then, too, there were those gestures. Each of the four photo-based pieces, for instance, centered on hands. Die Dompas Moet Brand! (The Passbook Must Burn!) focused on the decisive, resolute hands of protestors in Eli Weinberg’s photograph of passburning from the early 1950s. Raise Up emphasized the uplifted arms and hands of miners undergoing a medical inspection in a routine that was first captured and published by Ernest Cole. A Luta Continua and Amandla, meanwhile, granted solid form to the hands of demonstrators in a police van following a 1992 protest that was photographed by Catherine Ross. The accent upon gesture was hardly limited to the photo-based sculptures. On a nearby wall, Develop Striking Power, a C-print enlargement of a classified ad, offered a single, simple graphic: a clenched fist. The clenched fist was also on display in Victory Is Certain, a staff made of assegai wood that recalled, in form and materials, Zulu examples but eschewed their conventional finial

motifs, opting instead for a closed hand. The magnified COSATU button, too, pictured the raised fists of workers. Finally, another button (shown in Johannesburg but not Cape Town) pictured four hands clenching the wrists of their partner—forming, in the process, a powerful square. History may not laugh, we gather, but it is conversant in the idiom of gesture. Indeed, it always has been—or, at least, the visual record of apartheid implies as much. Look through a copy of a magazine or book of photos from the era and you’ll soon gain a sense of the expressive ubiquity of hands. There are the remarkable photographs from December 1956 of assembled onlookers giving a vigorous thumbs-up to the antiapartheid militants as they are driven to trial. There are Miriam Makeba’s hands, elegantly and provocatively pressed against her thighs, on the cover of the June 1957 issue of Drum. There’s Noel Watson’s memorable image from 1980 of a seventeen-year-old Thabo Sefatsa raising both hands in a V-shaped gesture of Houston

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Die Dompas Moet Brand! (The Passbook Must Burn!), 2014. Bronze and copper shim, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

peace as a police dog snarled at him only a meter away.2 There’s Graeme Williams’s shot of Nelson and Winnie Mandela, thrusting their fists into the air upon his release from prison in 1990. And then, too, there are all of the unphotographed moments: Robert Sobukwe, for instance, letting dirt trickle through his hands as a means of communicating his sense of solidarity to other prisoners passing his cell on Robben Island. Hands mattered in the apartheid era. They were tools; they were signals; they were terms in a larger syntax. Unsurprisingly, then, hands also play a prominent role in recent histories and studies of apartheid, several of which Thomas encountered as he developed his South African work (Thomas previously showed in South Africa in 2010). The Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, for example, grants much of a wall to a huge print of Cole’s photograph of miners, their hands in the air. In related

published materials, moreover, the museum has occasionally isolated symbolically potent gestures. In its elaborate educational booklet, for instance, the museum paired the image of the miners with another photograph by Cole (also from House of Bondage) of two handcuffed black hands joined at the wrist. The resulting juxtaposition is understated but eloquent: the positions of the hands in each photograph speak to what Allan Sekula once called the everyday flows of power and the microphysics of barbarism.3 Or consider the terrific and ambitious catalogue for Rise and Fall of Apartheid, the sprawling 2012 show of photographs curated by Okwui Enwezor and Rory Bester. In his introductory essay, Enwezor remarks upon the importance of gesture and points to an important evolution: following the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960, anti-apartheid protestors abandoned the thumbs-up sign for the clenched fist.4 Just when the African National Congress turned from a nonviolent strategy of resistance, in other words, hands expressed a comparable move from passive support to active defiance. The accompanying images bear this point out and clearly communicate, again, the potent and mutable place of gesture in apartheid-era visual discourse. Watson’s 1986 photograph of a workers’ strike in Durban includes no fewer than fifteen raised hands: most of them are tightly clenched fists, but two thrust their index fingers proudly upward, and another lifts a copy of a union paper into the air In turn, as Thomas drew on archival and historical materials, he too accented gestural details, but often did so by means of active editing, or simplification. In his photo-based sculptures, for instance, he eliminated numerous secondary details. Many of these were incidental, but some were arguably not: think of the touching pairing of shod and bare feet in Weinberg’s original photo of pass-burners, or the papers—the signs of the bureaucratization of labor—that rest at the feet of each miner in Cole’s iconic image. Similarly, in the enlarged COSATU button, he eliminated the organization’s slogan and created an image, in the process, in which the raised hands of the figures did not have to compete with text. Such decisions allowed Thomas to grant hand gestures a distinct visibility. But they also, inevitably, implied an attendant process of abstraction and

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decontextualization. Shorn of their original context, the gestures become floating signifiers. Those floating signifiers are assigned novel meanings in Thomas’s work. Take, for example, Raise Up. To be sure, the gestures of the men were already overdetermined before Thomas used them; since they were published by Cole as a part of a book in 1967, they have been repeatedly reused and given distinct new contexts. Indeed, Darren Newbury has remarked on the complicated status of the reproduction of Cole’s photograph at the Apartheid Museum, where page spreads from the book are paired with enlargements of single images. “The status of the original artefact,” Newbury has noted, “and the fact that one is confronted here with its replica rather than the real thing combine to unsettle its position in the narrative of apartheid.”5 We might question Newbury’s use of the phrase real thing—was any copy of the book more real than Cole’s negative, which he smuggled out of South Africa? But his central point is a fair one: in the context of the museum, the miners’ gestures are given a new inflection or narrative context. Similarly, in Thomas’s show, they are isolated and assigned a title—Raise Up—that invokes insurrection and resurrection, rather than the base humiliation of the procedure documented by Cole. Gestures of passive, powerless conformity are thus converted into gestures of defiance. A comparable process of revision is visible in the five works that center upon clenched fists. In Cape Town, the works were shown without any accompanying wall texts (a list of works was available at the desk). As a result, the images of raised fists seemed almost to belong to a common, transhistorical lineage: shorn of their fuller context and unlabeled, the fists congealed, by implication, into a coherent and constant motif. The fist, in other words, seemed a common unifying element in what is otherwise a contested history, linking midcentury classified ads to trade union buttons of the 1980s and early 1990s demonstrators. And what if one did pause to investigate the titles of the works? The sense of a transhistorical universalism was only reinforced. A Luta Continua, for example, depicts the hands of protestors arrested at the South African Supreme Court on July 22, 1992, but through its use of a pan-African slogan (coined in Mozambique, it has since been used in Nigeria and Uganda in relation

to various causes) as a title, situates those hands as part of a wider and more abstract continental pattern of resistance. Although Thomas’s sources were distinctly historical then, his use of gesture drifted toward the ahistorical. The fist was treated primarily as a leitmotif embodying a consistent lineage of resistance. But as Enwezor notes in the catalogue to Rise and Fall of Apartheid, gestures are in fact complex and evolving signs, dependent upon local variables for their effect. “It is necessary,” he writes, “to underscore the potent iconographical discourse of the image of the fist, as it travels from gesture to

Develop Striking Power, 2014. Inkjet print on museum etching paper with carborundum flocking, 29.92 x 19.69 in. Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

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representation, from symbol to sign, from signifier to signified.”6 Indeed, and in fact the clenched fist has never been a completely stable symbol in South African discourse. After all, by the time that it was embraced by South African blacks in the 1960s, it already bore a range of associations. It had been used by German laborers in the strike waves of the 1880s, when it often connoted a readiness to fight. In 1917, the Industrial Workers of the World transformed it into a symbol of solidarity. By the 1930s, in turn, it had acquired antifascist connotations in much of Europe.7 In 1956, Life ran an image of Pietro Nenni, an Italian communist leader, raising a clenched fist at a rally, and in 1957 it published a photograph of a Haitian using the same gesture to salute Daniel Fignolé.8 Clearly, the gesture embodied a degree of semantic flexibility: it could convey a wide range of meanings and affiliations. But that very semantic flexibility meant, in turn, that local variables mattered intensely.9 The clenched fist never had a simple, static meaning. Usage of the sign by South Africans during the apartheid era points to a related degree of semantic flexibility. The activist Zithulele Cindi, for instance, has recalled his arrival as a prisoner on Robben Island and his confusion at the older, longtime prisoners’ lack of enthusiasm for the clenched fist, a tendency he attributed to a culture of deference fostered in the prison. “So we then had to embark on a defiance,” he later said, “now of the warders. We would say, hey, black style [clenched fist up] and they’d say ‘keep quiet.’ And we’d say there’s nothing wrong in greeting . . . this is our form of greeting. . . . The point of it was to restore their dignity.”10 Cindi’s anecdote is a reminder that local context matters and that the associations of the sign were mutable. Indeed, by the 1970s the clenched fist had become broadly associated with the black consciousness movement and also with the American civil rights movement (where it was given dramatic prominence at a 1966 rally by Stokely Carmichael).11 Chief Kaiser Matanzima, for instance, embraced the gesture as a sign of black power and once raised a clenched fist in the legislative assembly of the Transkei, only to cause, according to one report, considerable bewilderment.12 Enwezor has observed that “it is not only a symbol of power, it signifies self-affirmation, subjecthood and subjectivity.”13 In

turn, this wide range of associations meant that the gesture, by itself, was ultimately drained of some of its initially acute force, which explains why the Publications Appeal Board had come to feel, by 1987, that “the clenched fist is not undesirable as such because it has lost its inciting effect.”14 As with all signs, context matters. Image and Metaphor, Hand and Fist Given these complexities, it is tempting to call Thomas’s isolation and abstraction of the clenched fist naive, or historically simplistic. But of course artworks do not necessarily purport to be reliable historical documents; they belong, we might say, to a distinct discursive field. Yet an artistic context does not simply obviate historical realities, and it is easy to think of examples in which an artistic usage of documentary materials toward a universalizing end can spark heated controversies. The debate regarding white South African artists’ use of archival materials in the mid-1990s offers one relevant example.15 But also relevant here is The Family of Man, MoMA’s vast 1955 show of photographs that was curated by Edward Steichen and accented, in his words, “the universal elements and emotions in the everydayness of life.”16 Dozens of photographs of birth, work, and death taken in a variety of contexts suggested certain basic common human denominators. But the show was promptly skewered by a number of critics, including Roland Barthes, who vigorously objected to its emphasis on shared experience. The photographs, Barthes argued, depicted a superficial diversity but finally insinuated an underlying humanism that flattened difference and ignored socioeconomic variables. “From this pluralism,” he complained, “a type of unity is magically produced.”17 As with Thomas’s use of the fist, local differences and historical specificity yielded to an implied consistency. Interestingly, a recent strand of scholarship has convincingly shown that South African responses to The Family of Man, which arrived in Johannesburg in 1958, varied considerably.18 Many liberal viewers in South Africa saw the show’s acknowledgment of a common humanity as exemplary: a corrective to the system of apartheid that denied the humanity of a majority of the country’s residents. And some young South African photographers found

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National Women’s Day poster, 2009. Designer unknown. Courtesy the Apartheid Museum, Johannesburg, South Africa

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themselves challenged or inspired by the images on display. Ultimately, though, many South Africans also came to view the show as problematic, laced with what David Goldblatt called an “ideological twist that was . . . not altogether admirable.”19 Or, as Tamar Garb has since observed, “there is a necessary caution about a generalising humanist vocabulary of suffering and experience; the need to assert the particularity, the historicity of the local, and the camera’s capacity to capture that.”20 It is critically important, in other words, to heed disparate inflections and local circumstance. What does this mean in practice? A poster produced by the Apartheid Museum as part of a 2009 campaign developed to commemorate National Women’s Day offers an example. The poster depicted a clenched black woman’s fist next to a white male hand holding an identity card; above the hands, a block of text reads, “The Day That Rock Beat Paper.” That text referred to a song chanted by the tens of thousands of women who had marched in protest of the 1950 pass laws on August 9, 1956: “Wathint’ abafazi Wathint’ imbokodo” (“Now you have touched the women: you have struck a rock”).21 In bold visual terms, the poster evokes the slogan by means of a creative metaphor: the clenched fist, of course, signifies the rock in the game of rock, paper, scissors. The paper passbooks of the apartheid government are trumped in an inversion of the traditional rules of the game. Yet on a different symbolic plane, the image is curiously ahistorical. Again, as Enwezor has pointed out, the clenched fist was not used by South African protestors in the 1950s. The poster thus collapses historical time. It denies, to use Garb’s terms, the historicity of the local and accents instead a generalizing vocabulary of experience. It privileges, rather, metaphor. And is that a problem? In his 1929 essay “Surrealism,” Walter Benjamin thought in some detail about the relationship between metaphor and image and their places in a committed political art. “Nowhere,” he argued, “do these two collide so drastically and so irreconcilably as in politics.” He then recommended the expulsion of moral metaphor from politics, urging the Surrealists “to discover in political action a sphere reserved one hundred percent for images.”22 But Benjamin was far from optimistic that this would actually happen. Rather,

he seems to have felt that the Surrealists hesitated in transcending mere contemplation and in applying its practice. And he does not seem to have been alone in this regard. In a pair of photographs published by E. L. T. Mesens in the Surrealist journal Marie in 1927, we see two fists, each outfitted with a pair of brass knuckles. In the first image (labeled “as they see it”), the knuckles are pointed inward, ineffectively and self-defeatingly; in the second (“as we see it”), by contrast, the knuckles are worn correctly. As Sherwin Simmons observed, “The images appear to allegorize a public view of Surrealism as inwardly directed self-destruction and the movement’s own view of itself as aggressive social critique.”23 To put it in Benjamin’s terms, the Surrealist image, printed in a limited-circulation avant-garde journal, was merely contemplative, and comfortably removed from the sphere of political action. And so we return to the white cubes of the Goodman Gallery, where we comfortably contemplate Thomas’s show in the rarified context of a handsome art gallery. We contemplate the process by which images of gestures of protestors are abstracted and transformed into metaphors of victory and struggle. We ponder the conversion of Cole’s searing photograph of apartheid labor—a photograph banned by the South African state— into a collectible bronze. We stare at the workers in the glossy reproduction of the COSATU logo and realize that this button, devoid of any evidence of facture, will never be worn in any contested public arena. In the process, perhaps, we recall Tom Crow’s claim regarding 1960s protest art in Europe: The street-level activism of the late 1960s had raised the stake beyond what any gallery-bound art could offer. . . . It was one thing to fashion arresting visual emblems of emancipated perception and response; it was an entirely different—and unattainable—thing to break free from the space of contemplation and the posture of sympathetic witness into the arena of action using the cumbersome means of monumental sculpture.24

The analogy is, admittedly, not exact. But as we study the translation of icons of the struggle against apartheid into an art gallery and find ourselves urged to contemplate the actions of protestors in

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an ahistorical mode, an aesthetic context, and a monumental format, it is difficult to avoid a certain thought. If historically rooted gestures possess what Benjamin Buchloh once termed a certain sanctity, then it has yielded, here, to something else entirely.25 Something abstract; something, Barthes might say, magically produced. Something, arguably, in need of a certain form of caution. Kerr Houston is a professor of art history and criticism at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Notes

1 Michael Smith, “Struggle Kitsch? A Review of Hank Willis Thomas’s History Doesn’t Laugh,” artthrob: Contemporary Art in South Africa, artthrob.co.za/Reviews/Michael_Smith_reviews _Struggle_Kitsch_A_Review_of_Hank_Willis_Thomass_History _Doesnt_Laugh_by_Hank_Willis_Thomas_at_Goodman_Gallery .aspx. For the identification of the boy’s identity, see Sipho Masondo, 2 “City Press Readers Find One of Our ‘History Boys,’” City Press, February 14, 2014, m24arg02.naspers.com/argief/berigte /citypress/2014/02/19/7/CP-019-StoryB_30_0_210931485.html. 3 Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (Winter 1986): 3–64, 64. 4 Okwui Enwezor and Rory Bester, eds., Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life (New York: Prestel, 2013), 36–38. 5 Darren Newbury, Defiant Images: Photography and Apartheid South Africa (Unisa, South Africa: Unisa Press, 2009), 288. 6 Enwezor and Bester, Rise and Fall of Apartheid, 38. 7 Gottfried Korff and Larry Peterson, “From Brotherly Handshake to Militant Clenched Fist: On Political Metaphors for the Worker’s Hand,” International Labor and Working-Class History 42 (Fall 1992): 70–81. Korff and Peterson concentrate primarily on the gesture’s German resonances. For a brief analysis of the fist’s antifascist significance in Spain, see Eugene Cantelupe, “Picasso’s Guernica,” Art Journal 31, no. 1 (1971): 18–21, 21 n. 24. 8 Emmet John Hughes, “Nenni’s Strong Italian Hand,” Life 40, no. 24 (1956): 45–46, 45; Lee Hall, “The Mob and Its Man Take Over in Haiti,” Life 42, no. 23 (1957): 41–44, 41. 9 Indeed, the gesture’s flexibility seems to have prompted, in certain cases, a move toward a more specific vocabulary of usage: in some contexts, the specific orientation of the raised fist also mattered. See Sherwin Simmons, “‘Hand to the Friend, Fist to the Foe,’” Journal of Design History 13, no. 4 (2000): 319–39, 334. 10 Fran Lisa Buntman, Robben Island and Prisoner Resistance to Apartheid (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 116. 11 For a discussion of the rally, which occurred on June 17, and the significance of Carmichael’s gesture, see Andrew Lewis, The Shadows of Youth: The Remarkable Journey of the Civil Rights Generation (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009), 207. 12 Timothy Gibbs, Mandela’s Kinsmen: Nationalist Elites and Apartheid’s First Bantustan (Woodbridge, UK: James Currey, 2014), 81. Matanzima also declared at one point that the raising of a clenched fist would be the symbol of the Transkei National Independence Party. See D. A. Kotzé, African Politics in South Africa, 1964–1974: Parties and Issues (London: C. Hurst, 1975), 92.

13 Enwezor and Bester, Rise and Fall of Apartheid, 38. 14 J. C. W. Van Rooyen, Censorship in South Africa (Cape Town: Juta, 1987), 109. For an important review of the book, see J. M. Coetzee, “Censorship in South Africa,” English in Africa 17, no. 1 (1990): 1–20. Of some relevance here, too, is the discussion regarding variations in South African signed language. As Debra Aarons and Philemon Akach have noted, for instance, “It is a very plausible hypothesis that as a result of apartheid education and social policies, different signed languages developed in South Africa.” See Aarons and Akach, “South African Sign Language— One Language or Many? A Sociolinguistic Question,” Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics 31 (1998): 1–28, 11. Ultimately, though, the authors argue that “there are a number of facts that cast doubt on the veracity of this hypothesis” and contend instead that “although there are certainly different varieties of the signed language used in South Africa most Deaf people in the country control many of these varieties.” There is no doubt, however, that various national systems of signed language are mutually unintelligible. See Aarons and Akach, “South African Sign Language,” 2, 14–15. 15 For a summary of the debate, and for a qualified insistence that artists are bound by a certain ethics when it comes to the use of archival materials, see Okwui Enwezor, “Remembrance of Things Past: Memory and the Archive,” in Democracy’s Images: Photography and Visual Art after Apartheid, ed. Jan-Erik Lundström and Katarina Pierre (Umeå, Sweden: Bildmuseet, 1998), 23–27, esp. 27, on “the responsibility of art as being not just an interpretation or facsimile of history, but a moral force in the production of a new reality and hope for a damaged society.” 16 Quoted in Marianne Hirsh, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 49. 17 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (London: Vintage, 2000), 100. 18 See, for example, Newbury, Defiant Images, 154–59; Tamar Garb, Figures and Fictions: Contemporary South African Photography (Göttingen, Germany: Steidl and V&A Publishing, 2011), 39, 269, 273; and Tamar Garb, “Rethinking Sekula from the Global South: Humanist Photography Revisited,” Grey Room 55 (Spring 2014): 34–57. 19 Garb, Figures and Fictions, 269. 20 Ibid., 273. She then adds: “But at the same time, the particular is always haunted by our own sense of our humanity.” 21 The phrase was later popularized as “You strike a woman, you strike a rock.” 22 Walter Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz and trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken, 1978), 191. 23 Simmons, “Hand to the Friend,” 334. 24 Thomas Crow, The Rise of the Sixties: American and European Art in the Era of Dissent (London: Laurence King, 2004), 150. 25 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “From Faktura to Factography,” October 30 (Fall 1984): 82–119, 93: “The paradox and historical irony of Lissitsky’s work,” argued Buchloh, “was, of course, that it had introduced a revolution of the perceptual apparatus into an otherwise totally unchanged social institution, one that constantly reaffirms both the contemplative behavior and the sanctity of historically rooted works.”

Houston

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NO BODY’S PERFECT Kanitra Fletcher

Renée Green, Seen, 1990. Wooden platform, rubber, stamped ink, screen, motorized winking glasses, magnifying glass, spotlight, sound, 81.5 x 81.5 x 53.5 in. Courtesy the artist and Free Agent Media

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H

ow do you see blackness? What does it look like? Can it be shown? In seeming response to such uncertainties, artists Renée Green, Satch Hoyt, and Sheila Pree Bright forwent representation of the black body altogether. In installation and photographic works—Seen (1990), Say It Loud (2004), and Suburbia (2005–7), respectively— they instead presented spaces for any body, black or otherwise, within contexts that signify black lives, histories, and experiences. The works affirm that the nature of blackness is not a given, while they demonstrate ways in which it has come to be regarded as such. Via texts, sounds, and objects the artists challenge us to see not bodies but the cultural constructions of and around them. Moreover, Green, Hoyt, and Bright demonstrate that blackness cannot be seen or shown by any body, or, rather, no body is perfect. Their elimination of bodies serves as a refusal to perpetuate the simultaneous overexposure and simplification to which black bodies have been historically subjected. Green, Hoyt, and Bright’s unpeopled scenarios also allow us to recognize how particular signs prompt the sight of blackness sans the body or how items might be used as its representation. The exchange of black bodies with objects or other figures invites viewers to physically and psychically identify with black subjects or assess their own identification and expectation of them. The works ask what might happen and what it means when a nonblack person inhabits a putatively black space or experience. Although blackness is often seen ahead and outside of works of art, is it opaque or does it have multiple significations? What are the means and meanings of objects that represent black identities? The absences or exchanges in the works, therefore, reject the equation of and affirm the difference between concepts and bodies of blackness. American artist Renée Green’s installation Seen specifically turns the tables of past mistreatment of black women’s bodies onto the viewer. One person at a time climbs onto a crude wooden platform resembling a slave auction block, which serves as a stage. Across the surface of the floor Green stamped extracts from past accounts of Saartjie Baartman and Josephine Baker. Otherwise known as the “Hottentot Venus” and the “Black Venus,” respectively, Baartman and Baker were two of the

most fetishized black women in European history. As Lisa Gail Collins also observes, “Contemporary artists frequently point to the saga of ‘the Hottentot Venus’ as a defining moment in the representation of black women in visual culture”—conditions that Baker’s persona extended beyond the stage to film and song. Accordingly, a sound loop of Baker singing “Voulez-vous de la canne à sucre?” (“Would you like some sugar cane?”) complements the writings that are mostly demeaning and lascivious in nature. Critically, to examine the text, one must climb onto the stage and consequently become trapped in the display. Green positioned a floodlight to shine onto the stage and a white screen at the opposite end of the platform to project a silhouette of the person’s figure for other gallery visitors to observe. Further compounding the senses of voyeurism and vulnerability, while walking up and down the stage one encounters motorized winking blue eyes peering up at her from a hole in a floorboard. The fear and discomfort generated by these imbalanced relations of the gaze speak to the wider social context of power and its relation to sight and seeing. Moreover, rather than objectifying black female bodies, Green turns the tables on spectators and subjects them to treatment partially echoing that endured by Baker and Baartman. In fact, Baartman was “deceitfully promised a rapid and wealthy return to southern Africa after a short stint of public displays in Europe.”1 Thus, the tricking of viewers to enter the display of Seen evokes her experience. Jennifer González also affirms that “while the experience of racial objectification could never be replicated by the installation, the artist provided the phenomenological conditions for the mechanism of this objectification.”2 Green, therefore, inverts and deconstructs the construction of the black female body in visual culture. The apparatuses that typically create representations are represented instead, inviting us to consider, like Michele Wallace does, “what some have called the spectatorial imagination of the West, the gaze, the need to study and examine the ‘other,’ fueled by the popularity of such inventions and developments as photography, the electric light bulb, popular journalism and film.”3 Baker and Baartman’s figures were not viewed Fletcher

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Detail from Seen

simply on stage and screen; particular devices mediated their appearances and the public’s views of them. In the absence of black female bodies, Green presents the ways in which sight, sound, language, and technology reify historical (mis)perceptions of them. Seen illustrates González’s assertion that “race discourse, in all its historical complexity, is not reducible to visuality; visual representation is merely one of the most powerful techniques by which it operates.”4 One encounters multiple perspectives on and of black women within the work, yet no actual black female body is on display. The absences of Baker and Baartman highlight the functions of the text, stage, screen, and lights that generate impressions and supersede actual presences. Thus, to reinterpret the title of the work, Baker’s and Baartman’s bodies were “seen,” not just optically, but also mentally. They were understood in particular ways based on factors beyond their corporeality. Consequently, they bear meanings (such as those stamped upon the stage) not of their own making. Furthermore, the initial encounter with the work prompts the surprise and disorientation of the viewer who does not expect to go on display but must do so to appreciate Green’s arrangement fully. The viewer’s experience of the artwork moves from typical observation to a performative dimension. This shift alludes to the ways in which Baker and Baartman had to enter specific, contrived scenarios to play roles for onlookers. Therefore, images and recordings of the women figure more as portrayals of others’ desires than their actual personalities. To underscore these circumstances, opposite the

floodlights the viewer produces a dark distorted figure on the screen. In effect, the study of Baker and Baartman entails the projection of one’s own fears and desires onto a black body. Moreover, as the viewer faces the eyes looking up at her and the light glaring down on her, she most likely self-consciously comports herself within this environment. In this sense, her actions reflect the way such circumstances put forward crafted portrayals and coerced performances rather than genuine personalities. Nonetheless, the continual incorporation of individuals into the artwork to assume the roles of Baker or Baartman heeds Chandra Mohanty’s call to “look upward . . . [from] the particular standpoint of poor indigenous and Third World/South women, [which] provides the most inclusive viewing of systemic power. . . . This particular marginalized location makes the politics of knowledge and the power investments that go along with it visible.”5 Indeed, the writings on the floorboards are not proof of black female alterity. but rather evidence of a historical power imbalance. Accordingly, within Seen one steps on and stands over them to structurally overpower distortions of Baker and Baartman. Although the viewer is still aware of the myths and fallacies that lie beneath her feet, upon Green’s stage she is able to move around and beyond them. Individuals also ascend a platform in AfroBritish artist Satch Hoyt’s installation Say It Loud, a monumental stack of approximately five hundred books. Relating to black diaspora art, history, and culture, the texts appear in a pyramidal shape that surrounds a stepladder and supports a microphone. Playing in the background is a sound loop of James Brown’s famous chorus “Say it loud! I’m black and I’m proud!” However, the recording mutes the word black to allow for others’ speeches. Prompted by the pause in the music, speakers can say what makes them “proud” or express themselves in any way they choose and thereby translate “black” into infinite meanings. As Fred Moten stated, “The phrase, the broken sentence, holds (everything). . . . The quickened disruption of the irreducible phonic substance . . . is where universality lies. Here lies universality: in this break, this cut, this rupture. Song cutting speech. Scream cutting song.”6 It is in the “break” of Brown’s lyrics that blackness becomes

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Satch Hoyt, Say It Loud, 2004. Books, metal staircase, microphone, speakers, sound. Dimensions variable. Installation view in Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, 2012. Photo: Jerry Jones

limitless and transformable. The interruption of the song with speakers’ statements generates boundless unpredictability that also speaks to a fundamental paradox of racial identification. On the one hand, countless critics and scholars have developed theories of blackness. The magnitude of their output is conveyed by the towering presence of the stacked books that form the artwork. On the other hand, the numerous texts indicate the indefiniteness of the subject. That there have been so many approaches to blackness affirms the improbability of any stable or essential meaning. Say It Loud’s format, therefore, encourages the reinterpretation, if not the rejection, of established concepts. Rather than being offered for perusal, the books are closed and repurposed as a podium to invite the new ideas and words of others. In this way the closures and omissions are not denials of blackness; rather, Say It Loud denies acquiescence to blackness, particularly the monolithic notions popularized in 1968, the year Brown released his recording and the height of the Black Power movement. The various speakers’ individual statements not only indicate the temporality and variability of blackness, but also allude to the silences and omissions within black nationalist discourses. Hoyt’s eloquent description of his own background further underscores the contention that

Detail from Say It Loud

Fletcher

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Sheila Pree Bright, Untitled 11 (Suburbia), 2005–7. Chromogenic color print, 58 x 48 in. Courtesy the artist

Say It Loud aims less at defining than personalizing blackness. He states: I was born in London to an Afro-Jamaican father and a white English mother in the late 1950s. . . . As a hybrid, one learns to navigate the marginal seas of difference, to remain intact while floating between the two poles. . . . In effect, we were deconstructing race and class, inventing our own imaginary islands. We, the disenfranchised, fragmented, and marginalized youth—the black, brown, and beige vanguard learning the ancient codes, speaking a new patois: racialized shape-shifters, reinventing a new black identity.7

Hoyt’s statement speaks to the ways people contradict and individualize social classifications. Thus, he effectively collaborates with the speakers in a way that reconstitutes this process as it mirrors his past. The altar becomes an “imaginary island,” and the figure of the speaker “shape-shifts” as one replaces the next. Throughout these changes, the work becomes an ongoing demonstration of the performative dimension of blackness. As Maurice Berger attests, “The ‘performative’ encompasses the broader range of human enactments and interactions—the performances of our everyday lives, the things we do to survive, to communicate.”8 Accordingly, Hoyt’s personal statement,

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as well as that of each speaker in Say It Loud, suggests that translations of blackness are not only normal, but also necessary. They are performative strategies for finding one’s way through life. Furthermore, they demonstrate that reinterpretations of blackness ultimately make it less restrictive and increase its potentiality after 1968 and for the future. In Suburbia American photographer Sheila Pree Bright shows how objects also play roles in the performative dimension of blackness. The series comprises forty 58-by-48-inch photographs of wellappointed homes in suburban Atlanta, Georgia, a city with a large affluent black population. Mostly due to post–World War II “white flight,” however, the popular notion of suburbia is a residential area composed of middle- and upper-class white families. Bright’s series, therefore, points to the intersection of race and class as it pertains to geographical space in the United States. Moreover, the impact of her series is not derived from any activity in the scenes. She thwarts viewers’ expectations with rare glimpses of unidentifiable occupants and the notable yet tacit racialization of household objects. The framework of Suburbia emphasizes the fear and paranoia that lie at the basis of white flight. The scenes have a voyeuristic feel that comes from their formal composition. For instance, it appears as though Bright “cased” the home featured in Untitled 11. She shows the exterior of the house on a rainy day from afar and partially behind a bush. In other scenes, the occupants are blurred, concealed, or fragmented in surreptitious shots that were taken behind a door or a counter and in the reflection of a mirror. Bright’s camera figures as a tool of surveillance, capturing a realm of American society that has been largely invisible in mainstream media. As if taken by a private investigator, many of the images figure as snapshots—photographs taken quickly and informally—to be used as evidence of this seemingly foreign territory. The large scale of the photographs also heightens the sense of voyeurism and gives the viewer the impression that she is a detective entering these domestic spaces. Lacking the returned gaze of protagonists, the design of the scenes in Suburbia enhances their realism. The viewer can imagine she has gained access to a restricted area to investigate the nature of middle-class black domesticity on an intimate

Sheila Pree Bright, Untitled 13 (Suburbia), 2005–7. Chromogenic color print, 58 x 48 in. Courtesy the artist

level. However, she must do so without observing the appearance or behavior of the residents. For instance, in Untitled 13, the entrance of a home features a casual yet conscious display of belongings. Chanel accessories are framed by a large, elegant portrait of a black girl in the background and a sizable vase encircled by an Africaninspired motif in the foreground. These elements of tasteful decoration function as racial signifiers to subtly indicate black ownership. Throughout the series, the viewer receives other occasional clues to the racial identity of the occupants, thereby affirming Jennifer González’s contention: Material culture of everyday life, such as . . . forms of commodity production and consumption, participate in the construction of race discourse. . . . Objects come to stand in for subjects not merely in the form of commodity fetish, but as a part of a larger system of material and image culture that circulates as a prosthesis of race discourse through practices of collection, exchange, and exhibition . . . Objects in other words can become epidermalized.9

Bright’s series thus critically analyzes how one reads race through toys (such as black dolls in Untitled 3 and Untitled 6), publications (like a set of magazines featuring Barack Obama on the covers in Untitled 40), or novelties (including the black Americana figurines displayed on a kitchen counter in Untitled 34). The imagery raises questions about Fletcher

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Sheila Pree Bright, Untitled 34 (Suburbia), 2005–7. Chromogenic color print, 58 x 48 in. Courtesy the artist

Sheila Pree Bright, Untitled 12 (Suburbia), 2005–7. Chromogenic color print, 58 x 48 in. Courtesy the artist

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how and why the viewer might infer the racial identity of the occupants without sight of their bodies, and furthermore, how and why that assumption affects reception of the images. As Susan Richmond explains, the series “demonstrates that attempts to wrest narratives of identity—racial, familial or otherwise—from photographs require extradiegetic leaps. Resorting to knowledge and experience beyond the image, some of these leaps jarringly expose the viewer’s unconscious recourse to racial assumptions.”10 What effect do the occasional blurred or fragmented appearances of bodies have on the viewer? Is the sight of an occupant’s skin the effective culmination of an image? Does it serve as a confirmation of or an inquiry into blackness? Suburbia suggests that the black body does not answer questions; it raises them. Similar to Lorna Simpson’s “anti-portraits” of the 1990s, which depicted black subjects turned away from the viewer, Bright refuses identifications or visual consumption of the residents. In so doing, we might (re)consider our desires for subjects to perform or elicit some expression of blackness. Thus, the objects perform rather than the bodies. Despite the inference of social and psychological tensions, as Bridget Cooks explains, “there is little evidence of the drama of daily life. . . . Figures are not performing . . . [and the photographs] do not solicit empathy from viewers. . . . Instead, the banality of suburban life is pictured.”11 In other words, the unremarkableness of Suburbia makes the series remarkable. Consequently, some black viewers have complained that there are too few indications of African American heritage or identity in the work.12 Suburbia also might perplex white viewers who assume or feel secure in notions of their difference from black families.13 Nonetheless, the inhabitants of these homes, when they are visible, appear comfortable in their surroundings. In Untitled 12, a partially concealed black woman lies on her bed to read an issue of Business Week. Although the diagonals of her figure visually counter the horizontal lines of the furniture, she literally and figuratively appears at ease as the deep red and gold fabrics envelop her.14 This enfolding of her body visually affirms her belonging to this lifestyle and environment. Regardless of

others’ discomfort with the portrayal of her home or her presence in Suburbia, she is at peace. Bright’s minimization of black corporeality in Suburbia further suggests that bodies would not reveal any inherent truths about blackness. She visualizes how the subjects represent themselves, not their race. In scenes of everyday objects, Bright demonstrates the difficulty in depicting something distinctively or essentially black. In this sense, the photographs ultimately represent the failure of their implied investigation. The imagined voyeur who searches through these homes to find evidence of an essential blackness comes up short. As blackness remains unresolved in Suburbia, this failure and the aforementioned criticism of the series beg questions: Had Bright aimed to represent a distinct black identity through these homes, what would that project entail? What would it look like? Would the depiction of more black bodies and certain items or symbols suffice? Moreover, had Bright “blackened” Suburbia, what would the series communicate? Would it define blackness for viewers, deceive them, or simply lead them nowhere? Ultimately, in all these works Green, Hoyt, and Bright demonstrate the shifting, dialectical nature of blackness—its social, political construction and its personal, psychological dimension—the understandings of which depend upon context and are never final. Nonetheless, despite this similarity, they do take divergent approaches to matters of black subjectivity that relate to the cultural contexts in which the works were created. For instance, in Seen, while one identifies with past and present black female figures whose historical experiences are recuperated in the process, these subjects also appear passive. The work hardly suggests black female agency or resistance. Lorraine O’Grady also argues that in terms of “the establishment of subjectivity . . . because [Seen] is addressed more to the other than to the self and seems to deconstruct the subject just before it expresses it, it may not unearth enough new information.”15 In this sense, the activity within the piece does not alter, but rather reproduces ongoing historical conditions. Rather than a shortcoming, this aspect reflects how the beginning of Green’s artistic career in the late 1980s and early 1990s was influenced heavily by cultural and postcolonial theory in the writings Fletcher

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of Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Stuart Hall, Gayatri Spivak, and other critics.16 In the making of Seen, Green asked, “Who can speak? Where can they speak . . . How is a ‘whom’ ever identified . . . What is given respect where? What is believed in where?”17 In other words, how does power relate to knowledge? Further, how do we understand our subjective positions in relation to these circumstances?18 In the early 2000s, rather than visualize difference and marginality or “talk back” to others, artists often refused or questioned identities. Hoyt’s work does not assume a white participant, as opposed to Green’s installation, which arguably expects one. The tables do not appear to turn that much on a black person within Seen, whereas all raced bodies equally are consequential in Say It Loud, which calls for diverse translations of blackness and personal concepts of pride. Suburbia also poses questions to any viewer of any race about whether or not and how she identifies blackness beyond the body. Speakers in Hoyt’s work loudly express their opinions and personalities as well. Say It Loud requires them to take command of the situation and actively define themselves. By upsetting the status quo in the redefinition of blackness, the participants enact change. While their speeches are addressed to others, their actions are in service of personal expression and cultural transformation, and not just that of black participants, but all who enter and consider the space of blackness that the paused recording creates. Suburbia also allows its subjects to express themselves. Rather than being visually consumed, they are in fact the consumers, as evidenced by the displays of their wealth throughout the series. Returning to Untitled 13, the subtle hues of beige and tan in the foyer are interrupted by a bright pink Chanel bag hanging from the banister of a staircase above a pair of matching high heels. In Untitled 5, luxurious, carefully arranged possessions—jewelry, perfumes, and crystal containers—sit on a vanity table. In these images and others, Bright’s representation of her secreted subjects via objects, apparel, and furnishings comprises not only racial, but also socioeconomic signifiers. The interiors constitute self-conscious performances of class, which broaden identifications of blackness. Further, Suburbia does so in a manner that speaks more to

the affluence and advancement of black people than to their repression. Also in the early 2000s, Thelma Golden popularized the term post-black. She aimed to classify what she observed as an emergence of artists “who were adamant about not being labeled as ‘black’ artists, though their work was steeped, in fact deeply interested, in redefining complex notions of blackness.”19 Older approaches to blackness usually assumed a stable black subject, culture, or personality; however, in the twenty-first century, there is a widespread sense that racial conditions have changed in ways that make blackness no longer a foundation, but rather “a question, an object of scrutiny, a provisional resource at best, and, for some, a burden.”20 As Paul Taylor affirms, “For post-black thinkers, nationalist ideas about cultural self-determination and about a unique African personality have been supplanted by individualist and often apolitical aspirations, and by appeals to intra-racial diversity and interracial commonalities.”21 Say It Loud fits in well with this movement. While Hoyt formally and conceptually structures the entire piece around identifications of blackness, he eliminates the explicit statement of “black” and invites us to question and create associations. Suburbia also avoids overt declarations of race. While the series presents an underrecognized division of the black population, it also suggests many commonalities between its residences and other suburban homes of nonblack families. Consequently, these artworks represent different contexts of and approaches to the discursive formation of black pasts and peoples. However, they are not at odds. In a sense, Seen is the first step in a process that Say It Loud and Suburbia advance. Seen alerts individuals to historical circumstances, which the vocal and visual performances of Say It Loud and Suburbia defy. Together the works show processes of deconstruction and reconstruction, which are necessary to forestall and complicate the significations of black bodies. Green, Hoyt, and Bright deploy the absence and alteration of bodies in order to encourage the contemplation of our fears, desires, fantasies, and expectations of blackness. The artists thus put the onus on the viewers to substantiate ideas perceived ahead and outside of the black body. In so doing, Seen, Say It Loud, and

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Suburbia demonstrate that in the representation of mythic, monolithic blackness, no body’s perfect. Kanitra Fletcher is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History of Art and Visual Studies at Cornell University. She is currently based in Houston, Texas, and serves as curator of video art for Landmarks, the public art program of the University of Texas at Austin. Notes

A significant portion of this essay was presented at the 2015 College Art Association Conference in New York City. Thanks to Professors Margo Crawford and Jessica Santone and the Nka editorial team for their feedback and assistance with earlier versions. 1 Lisa Gail Collins, The Art of History: African American Women Artists Engage the Past (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 25. 2 Jennifer A. González, Subject to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 216. Her emphasis. 3 Michele Wallace, Dark Designs and Visual Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 428. 4 González, Subject to Display, 5. 5 Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “‘Under Western Eyes’ Revisited: Feminist Solidarity through Anticapitalist Struggles,” Signs 28, no. 2 (2003): 511. 6 Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 39, 43. 7 Satch Hoyt, “Hybrid Navigator,” Small Axe 32 (2010): 151–52. 8 Maurice Berger and Hans Haacke, Minimal Politics: Performativity and Minimalism in Recent American Art (Baltimore: Fine Arts Gallery, University of Maryland, 1997), 15. 9 González, Subject to Display, 5–6. 10 Susan Richmond, “Sheila Pree Bright’s Suburbia: Where Nothing Is Ever Wanting,” Art Papers 31, no. 4 (2007): 20. 11 Bridget Cooks, “Pictures of Home: The Work of Sheila Pree Bright,” Afterimage 36, no. 2 (2008): 17. 12 Richmond, “Sheila Pree Bright’s Suburbia,” 21. Bridget Cooks also quotes Bright: “[A book publisher] explained to me that he grew up during the Civil Rights Movement with Martin Luther King, Jr. and that I did not have enough signifiers or clues about African American culture in the work to show that these were African American homes.” Cooks, “Pictures of Home.” 17. An interview with Bright also mentions how, during the Santa Fe Prize Photography Awards, “respected curators, consultants and photo editor . . . ‘loved the pictures, but they said they didn’t have enough signifiers in them to show that they were black homes. What those comments showed me is how seriously a stereotype is ingrained in a person’s mind. . . . They expected certain things to be there and they weren’t.’” Rosalind Bentley, “Sheila Pree Bright’s Look at ‘Suburbia’ in an Unlikely Place,” Atlanta JournalConstitution, February 4, 2014, www.ajc.com/news/entertainment /sheila-pree-brights-look-at-suburbia-in-an-unlikel/ndBtF/ (accessed August 1, 2015). 13 The aforementioned interview with Bright recounts, “Back when Suburbia was shown in Santa Fe, one consultant . . . was white and told the artist that he didn’t understand its point. The homes pictured didn’t look any different from his home, he told her.” [Bright

responded,] “That’s the point! To show our commonality. . . . If we could get past the stereotypes, we could see that.” Bentley, “Sheila Pree Bright’s Look.” 14 Richmond, “Sheila Pree Bright’s Suburbia,” 19. 15 Lorraine O’Grady, “Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity,” in Art, Activism, and Oppositionality: Essays from Afterimage, ed. Grant H. Kester (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 272. 16 Elvan Zabunyan, “We Are Here = Nous sommes là,” in Renée Green and Nicole Schweizer, Renée Green: Ongoing Becomings: Retrospective 1989–2009 (Lausanne, Switzerland: Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, 2009), 7–10. 17 Renée Green quoted in Alex Alberro, “The Fragment and the Flow,” in Renée Green: Sombras y señales / Shadows and Signals (Barcelona, Spain: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 2000), 26. 18 Ibid., 27. 19 Thelma Golden, “Introduction,” in Thelma Golden et al., Freestyle (New York: Studio Museum in Harlem, 2001), 14. 20 Paul Taylor, “Black Aesthetics,” Philosophy Compass 5, vol. 1 (2010): 10. 21 Ibid.

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JAMES BARNOR

EVER YOUNG, NEVER SLEEP

Renée Mussai

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“I

n the world through which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself,” the revolutionary psychiatrist, philosopher, and writer Frantz Fanon famously wrote in 1952.1 Fanon was a contemporary of James Barnor. His Caribbean ode to self-invention is one that finds a compelling resonance and beguiling echoes in Barnor’s remarkable African journey and unconventional destiny. Although not immediately apparent, underneath the surface lies something intrinsically revolutionary, something inherently transient in the evolution of Barnor’s multifaceted practice: something quietly rebellious, surprising, and wonderfully different. This something is reflected in Barnor’s images of yoga practitioners, ballroom dancers, and blackand-white minstrel performers in drag, and it also manifests palpably in those intimate moments with key architects of the independence movement in colonial and newly postcolonial Accra, Ghana. Within the space of a decade, a uniformed civil servant synonymous of a new generation of professional Ghanaian women will exist beside a black Barbarella

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James Barnor, Untitled #1, Drum cover girl Selby Thompson, Campbell-Drayton Studio, London, 1967. Courtesy Autograph ABP

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Selina Opong, Policewoman #10, Ever Young Studio, Accra, c. 1954. Courtesy Autograph ABP

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Eva, London, 1960s. Courtesy Autograph ABP

Ginger Nyarku, featherweight boxer with Coronation Belt, Accra, 1953. Courtesy Autograph ABP

in intergalactic silver go-go boots, pink mini, and fantasy wig. Locked in a salute, one gazes respectfully outside the frame—toward progress, perhaps—while the other playfully engages the camera through her oppositional gaze. In other words, the emancipated respectability, industriousness, and upward mobility of a female police academy graduate will encounter the sexual politics of Drum magazine in a Jamaican bus-conductor-turned-amateur-fashion-model in that extraordinarily Fanonian flow that will become the hallmark of Barnor’s practice.

Whether in Ghana or England, Barnor documented cultures in transformation, new identities coming into being—the fragmented experience of modernity and diaspora; the shaping of cosmopolitan societies and selves; and the changing representation of blackness, desire, and beauty across time and space. His archive thus not only constitutes a rare document of the black experience in postwar Britain during the Swinging Sixties, but also provides an important frame of reference, overlapping and suturing questions of the postcolonial in relation to diasporic perspectives in twentieth-century photography.

Societies in Transition Born in 1929 in Accra, then the Gold Coast colony, James Barnor began his career in photography typically, as an apprentice in a colonial portrait studio of a relative, his cousin J. P. Dodoo. But in a unique career spanning more than six decades, bridging continents and photographic genres, Barnor would migrate into creating a singular portfolio of street and studio portraiture depicting societies in transition: images of a burgeoning sub-Saharan African nation moving toward independence and a European capital city becoming a multicultural metropolis. In the process, Barnor would become, uniquely perhaps, the only African studio photographer to leave the continent before 1960 to study and practice in Europe.2

An Archival Encounter I first met James Barnor in 2009. We were introduced by cultural historian, writer, and filmmaker Nana Oforiatta Ayim, who had previously organized an exhibition of his work for the Black Cultural Archives in London. Ayim’s introduction triggered the beginning of an intensive phase of my working together with Barnor, for which I am eternally grateful to her. What I encountered on first entering Barnor’s small apartment, situated in an elderly people’s residence overlooking Brentford Lock, West London, can only be described as a quintessential hiddenarchive story. Largely tucked away from public view Mussai

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for decades was a treasure trove of great historical significance, consisting of thousands of negatives, glass plates, transparencies, and prints stored in shoe boxes, plastic bags, and Tupperware. Many were in a precarious state. While the prints, for instance, had been handled intermittently over the years by Barnor himself and/or visitors, the bulk of his negatives had remained largely untouched. A majority still sat inside their original brown semitranslucent paper envelopes, inscribed with vaguely discernible sets of notes, sometimes including names or places but rarely dates. Frequent relocating in those “Fanonian journeys” between countries meant that a considerable percentage of glass plates, film negatives, and prints had also been lost, and those surviving had suffered from the absence of cold storage, unstable temperatures, and the everpresent threat of humidity. The Curatorial Eye Thus began “Operation Barnor,” at first merely an attempt to present a small portfolio of his work as part of Autograph ABP’s Archive and Research

Beatrice with Trademark Figurine, Ever Young Studio, Accra, c. 1953. Courtesy Autograph ABP

Drum Cover Girl Erlin Ibreck at Trafalgar Square, London, 1966. Courtesy Autograph ABP

Centre initiative, established to redress a series of gaps in the visual representation of Britain’s different postmigrant communities. Barnor’s images are a gift to photography’s culturally diverse histories, unique in their temporalities and multiplicity of registers. As such, they fit perfectly within the archive’s continuing mission and seamlessly segued with our desire to preserve the legacy of significant bodies of work by a constituency of artists traditionally overlooked. As curatorial agents engaged in rituals of archival excavation, we have to be brutal at times: methods of selection necessarily also morph into rules of omission. It is therefore more than a curatorial courtesy to recognize that this collection is a selection from a vast archive, one that invites a multitude of entry points, approaches, and exploratory journeys. We also acknowledge that the photographs selected for this portfolio, and previously for the exhibition James Barnor: Ever Young, enunciate particular aspects of Barnor’s oeuvre and leave other areas yet to be explored. Take the transition from colony to postcolony, for instance. Occasionally Barnor would gently remind me that he not only photographed Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, but also Nana Ofori Atta ll of AkyemAbuakwa and Dr. J. B. Danquah (neither of whom is represented in this portfolio), photographs that serve

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Drum Cover Girl Erlin Ibreck, London, 1966. Courtesy Autograph ABP

as testament to his intimate affiliations inside the fortifications of Ghana politics. He would remind us that not only did he photograph glamorous fashion models over the years, but also a myriad of cultural ceremonies and other social events significant to his nation’s story. I would respond by saying that our project is an attempt to map a migratory genealogy of “here and there” in his work from the late 1940s to the early 1970s through the prism of a curatorial eye focused on global photography and the politics of cultural identity, race, and representation. That mission, in other words, is about tracing other trajectories in the evolution of photography and introducing work such as Barnor’s to a wider canon, responding to certain shifts as new images emerge through progressive archival research. African Photography Photography arrived in Africa soon after the invention of the medium in the 1840s. Yet it took over 150 years for African photography (as opposed to anthropological inquiry) to appear in contemporary art discourse. The international art world has since been fascinated with the work of artists contemporaneous with James Barnor: Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé in Bamako, Mali; J. D. ’Okhai Ojeikere in Lagos, Nigeria; and Jean Depara in Kinshasa, now the Democratic Republic of Congo,

to name but a few. Ghana of course has its own long indigenous tradition of studio photography: J. K. Bruce Vanderpuije, Francis K. Honny, Philip Kwame Apagya, and one of the very few female practitioners in the field, the formidable Felicia Abban, whose studio was located in Jamestown, the same Accra neighborhood as Barnor’s Ever Young studio, during the 1950s. Barnor officially entered this discourse only five years ago with an exhibition and symposium I organized for Harvard University’s W. E. B. Du Bois Institute at the invitation of its director, Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. When I first told Barnor the news on the eve of his eightieth birthday, his humble response was: “Harvard University, are you sure? For someone who didn’t attend secondary school, with no GCSEs [General Certificate of Secondary Education] to boast, that is quite something.” James Barnor’s journey is, of course, his own. But its migrations also reveal to us certain instructive markers—traces, if you will—of photography’s other itineraries beyond its officially inscribed grand narrative.

Drum Cover Girl Marie Hallowi, Rochester, Kent, 1966. Courtesy Autograph ABP

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The Alchemy of the Image After completing his apprenticeship and running an open-air mobile studio for several years, Barnor opened Ever Young in 1953, transforming an ordinary room barely ten meters square into one of Accra’s leading photographic studios. Here he was artistic director and magician, photographer and technician, offering a day and night service that attracted a diverse clientele from all walks of life, not in small part due to his ability to move effortlessly through divergent sociocultural spaces, a skill that would prove immensely useful as he continued his path over the next decades. A dark, open sky dominated by a cumulus of dreamlike clouds was painted on his studio wall, bearing the stamp of his artistry and his originality. Always with Barnor there is a sense of a figure both contained in as well as transcending the prescribed place, forever hovering at the borders of genre and approach. His early portraits, for instance, reflect and reject the rigid formality characteristic of studio portraiture of the era, with an ever-present dual sense of disquiet and fidelity. In a favorite portrait of mine, a young woman is pictured with arms resting on a table, Barnor’s trademark figurine next to her like a faithful miniature companion. The portrait is perfectly composed and beautifully lit. Nestled deep within its alchemy is a kind of melancholia, a closeness and intimacy different from his portraits of those years. The young woman’s name is Beatrice, “bringer of joy” and namesake of Dante Alighieri’s guide through paradise in his Divine Comedy: tradition and modernity woven seamlessly into a new whole. A Sense of Place The 1950s in Africa was a decade marked by the emergence of a black political consciousness and anticolonial movements in the spirit of Kwame Nkrumah’s “philosophical consciencism,” which provided the intellectual map to enable social revolution toward freedom from colonial rule, which Ghana gained in 1957.3 People were connected through this sense of living in a new time, and photography served as a perfect medium to satisfy the desire to become a modern subject, to partake in the game of modernity, and to see and be seen in a state of becoming as well as being, to

paraphrase the late Stuart Hall.4 One of the elective affinities that brought people together in this period was music. The 1950s was the heyday of highlife, a fusion of traditional African rhythms, Latin calypso, and jazz influences that soon spread across Ghana’s borders to West Africa and beyond. Synonymous with a rising cosmopolitanism in Accra on the eve of independence, its lyrics intimated the coming of change, vividly reflecting a particular Ghanaian zeitgeist pre- and postindependence. Indeed, the Pan-African and diasporic dimension of highlife is intimately linked to the very heart of Barnor’s practice. When the rhapsody of “London Is the Place for Me” called, it was South Africa’s Drum magazine that embraced the young photographer and offered a sense of place in the metropolis. This influential journal for lifestyle, culture, and politics was born out of the antiapartheid struggle, with a quarter of a million copies distributed each month across the African continent. Diasporic Desires As Miles Davis releases Kind of Blue, Barnor embarks on his Hallean “journey to another identity” in order to witness firsthand the hedonistic charm and cultural revolution in the capital of cool, swinging London of the 1960s.5 His forte is now both the studio and the street. At the time of his arrival in 1959, little trace remains of the previous decade’s formality: the stiffness associated with mid-twentieth-century African studio portraiture was all but gone. In Barnor’s new dramaturgy, the metropolis itself serves as backdrop, as we find ourselves seduced by Drum models in psychedelic frocks and fancy cars. Surrounded by a sea of menacing pigeons worthy of a Hitchcock set, Erlin Ibreck is strategically posed at Trafalgar Square, while Mike Eghan seemingly floats on the steps of Eros at Piccadilly Circus, arms outstretched. With a dedicated campaign of wide-ranging advocacy led by Autograph ABP, these images have now become iconic and synonymous for “another London,” firmly written into that continuously morphing compendium of different photographic histories in the making.6 They remind us that the visual register of the Swinging Sixties was not only

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Mike Eghan at Piccadilly Circus, London, 1967. Courtesy Autograph ABP

occupied by Twiggy, David Bailey, and Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up, but also by the multinational Drum models and other luminaries solicited by Barnor’s lens. As such, these photographs provide us with that crucial visual evidence imperative in our simultaneously intertwined project of rewriting a general cultural history while reconfiguring specific histories of the medium of photography.

The Burden of Representation Barnor’s remarkable portraits represent significant moments in African diasporic subject formation and the cosmopolitan self-fashioning that emerged in tandem with transcultural journeys through modernity and postcolonial worlds—new identities coming into being, epitomized by his subjects with a burning sense of pride and optimism. Even more Mussai

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astounding is that these were the days of “No dogs. No blacks. No Irish” in a country irrevocably tainted by Enoch Powell’s 1968 “Rivers of Blood” antiimmigration speech, delivered only three years after the introduction of the 1965 Race Relations Act, the first legislation passed in the United Kingdom to outlaw racial discrimination on the grounds of color, race, ethnic, or national origin.7 It could be argued that Barnor had the luxury to photograph without the burden of representation or the need to remediate existing or previous pictorial modes; thus, he was able to avoid the familiar depictions of racist graffiti and raised fists locked in moments of revolt that were seen later in the work of a younger generation of black photographers such as Neil Kenlock and Armet Francis. Barnor’s photographs trouble the dominant narrative associated with 1960s Britain as a hotbed for racial tension; they depict no signs of displacement, marginality, or sense of diasporic desperation. But they are marked by the sense of a curious presence in a new place. “Tried Color Yet?” The next chapter in Barnor’s story is intimately tied to the journey of the medium itself as it evolves and expands across the globe.8 In 1969, after a decade in London and now fully versed in the art and technique of color photography, Barnor returned to Ghana. One of the first pictures he took upon his return shows his two young daughters in glorious color, connected to each other by a giant Agfa beach ball: testament to yet another ritual of cross-cultural exchange that would see him manage the first dedicated laboratory offering color processing in Accra in the 1970s. “‘Race’ disables us,” philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah wrote provocatively in his seminal book, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture.9 Considering his life and work, it is evident that Barnor chose what it meant to be African in 1960s England and how to construct his African identity as empowering rather than disabling outside the confines of race and its attendant prescriptions of propriety, provenance, and place. He has followed this path with great determination, insistently refusing to be disabled by either race or class, refusing that shadow of race and its concomitant glare of obligations and reverberations.

What strikes me more than anything else as I write this is the looming presence of another, more primeval, more challenging, and more unavoidable shadow. A tautology perhaps, but remarkable all the same, to be struck by the reality of how many of the people mentioned in this essay or depicted in his photographs are now long gone. They include not only Barnor’s Drum associates such as Jim Bailey and Anthony Smith, who spoke passionately at the opening of his exhibition at Rivington Place in 2010, but also fellow artists, including Seydou Keïta and J. D. ’Okhai Ojeikere, as well as other contemporaneous photographers such as Bandele “Tex” Ajetunmobi, Syd Burke, and Raphael Albert. Gone too, of course, are the majority of the sitters in these photographs. I am reminded that working with Barnor is inevitably locked into this logic of relentless and unvarnished temporality: I see myself now, a witness to Barnor sharing a panel with the late Ojeikere at the epic Black Portraiture[s] conference held in Paris in January 2013: a rare moment between two great artists with a shared practice whose paths rarely cross. This was a momentous encounter that touched Barnor profoundly and one that I, too, will not experience again. Renée Mussai is curator and head of archive at Autograph ABP, London. Notes

This essay was first published in the monograph James Barnor: Ever Young (London and Paris: Autograph ABP and Clémentine de la Féronnière, 2015). I sincerely thank everyone who contributed to bringing this book to fruition—and James’s work to wider recognition—while he is still very much with us, continuously enlightening us with his wisdom, generosity of spirit, undying curiosity, and sheer joie de vivre rarely found in an octogenarian of his generation. I am indebted to John Akomfrah for many invaluable insights and comments on the first draft of this essay; in gratitude. 1 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (1952; repr. London: Pluto,1986), 179. 2 South African documentary photographers Peter Magubane and George Hallett lived and worked in the United Kingdom in the 1960s and 1970s, respectively, and the late Bandele “Tex” Ajetunmobi, a self-taught amateur photographer from Lagos, Nigeria, arrived in 1947. 3 See Kwame Nkrumah, Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for De-Colonization and Development with Particular Reference to the African Revolution (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1964). 4 Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf,

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1993). “Cultural identity, in this second sense, is a matter of ‘becoming’ as well as ‘being.’” In Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990). 5 Stuart Hall, “Reconstruction Work,” in Critical Decade: Black British Photography in the 80s, vol. 2, no. 3 (Birmingham: Ten 8, 1992), 107. 6 Another London: International Photographers Capture City Life 1930–1980 was the title of a blockbuster exhibition held at Tate Britain, July 27–September 16, 2012; its catalogue featured James Barnor’s portrait of Mike Eghan as the cover image. 7 Commonly known as the “Rivers of Blood” speech, Enoch Powell’s April 20, 1968, address to the General Meeting of the West Midlands Area Conservative Political Centre in Birmingham derives its (unofficial) title from the following statement: “As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood.’” In his infamous speech, delivered shortly before the second hearing of the Labour government’s Race Relations Bill 1968, Powell predicted that by the year 2000, up to 7 million people living in Britain would be of ethnic descent. 8 The slogan “Tried Color Yet?” was printed on Kodakmanufactured paper pockets to advertise color film during the 1960s; many of Barnor’s surviving negatives were stored in these original pockets. 9 Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 176.

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MAKING SPACE, CHANGING SPACE BLACK PEOPLE AND NEW MUSEUMS

Ngaire Blankenberg

M

useums are important symbols of what a society values. The proliferation of new museums in the world is a wonderful reflection of our changing values and perspectives. Today we have so many museums telling so many previously unheard stories—an African American or Hispanic American history museum, museums of immigration, centers for peace and tolerance, a children’s story center, museums for performance art, and even museums of heartbreak.1 It is sometimes easy to lose sight of the essential value of museums, particularly when there is much to criticize. They are public places—places where you can explore treasures of the world, of your communities, of past and present at your leisure, a change of pace in a world increasingly dominated by screens and brands. Museums are not only places that represent the black body; they are also places black people and others can actually choose to inhabit. Museums Should Be Places We All Want to Be in The fact is, many of us don’t. Even though most people in the West agree that museums should exist, many more don’t choose them as places to go to during their leisure time.2 Typically, museumgoers

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The author’s children inhabiting space their own way at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona

are very educated, earn a higher income than average, and are white, even as the population in the West is undergoing a major demographic shift. In the United States less than one in ten museum visitors are from minority groups, even though more than three out of ten people in the general population are minorities.3 By 2050 the percentage of what are now considered to be minorities in the United States is projected to make up roughly half the national population. Will the demographics of museum visitors keep pace? The signs are not encouraging. College education is the single biggest predictor of museum attendance, but museums on the whole are doing a dismal job of attracting nonwhite college students and graduates, thereby missing an important opportunity to create a museumgoing culture among a key segment of the population.4 The National Endowment of the Arts Participation Survey in 2012 found a 12 percent decline in arts attendance among college-educated Americans, and the median age of museum visitors has shot up from thirty-six years to forty-three years in the last twenty-five years.5 If you live in the United States or Canada and

many other Western countries, the younger you are, the more likely you are to be of color. The more likely you are also to never visit museums unless you are forced to at school. There is a real possibility that many museums may eventually age themselves into redundancy. The future of museums in the West lies in the multiracial millennials of today. But, as writer Beth Spotswood acknowledged in her blog, Tourist Trapped, “like most people, I wish I enjoyed museums more than I actually do.”6 Millennials don’t seem to be too impressed by museums. Let me summarize what you likely already know: the millennials of today—you, your students, your children, your friends—have grown up in an era of ubiquitous technology. Millennials like to be in the know and can be through social media and 24/7 access to information via the Internet, often on smartphones. They are the fastest-growing age segment for travel.7 They are connected, and social relationships are very important; their choices of where to go are heavily influenced by their peers.8 Millennials expect choice and the ability to customize an experience. They value being able to interact and participate, and they lose interest when Blankenberg

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expected to be the passive recipients of information. They like experiences that are meaningful to them. They like art events, or art on the streets, but they are not so keen on museums.9 New Social Relations Demand a New Space The French philosopher Henri Lefebvre coined the idea of social space, based on the idea that every society produces its own space and that the hegemonic classes use space as a tool to reproduce its dominance. For Lefebvre, any change in social relations demands a new space.10 We need to conceive of the space of museums differently in order to attract a new color-full generation. Creating a more participatory experience can radically change how compelled people feel to come to a museum. Making a connection with another human being is one of the most powerful and memorable experience-creators one can ask for. I have two children. They have been hauled to a lot of museums and a lot of progressive museums. I can tell you that despite my best efforts, my enthusiastic commentary (“Wow! Check out the way he’s transforming bottle caps into this amazing piece of cloth!” Or, “Can you believe this is the actual prison where Mandela was kept?” Or, “Isn’t it incredible that we can see one of the first records of human writing!!”) more often than not falls flat. Their eye rolling is my personal motivation. What is it that will help them find their space in these great places of the human soul? There Are Many Barriers I recently visited the Cité nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration (National Museum of Immigration) in Paris. I did not know beforehand, but the museum is in a grand old building, the Palais de la Porte Dorée, constructed for the Paris Colonial Expo of 1931. After the Colonial Expo, it became the Museum of France Overseas, then the Museum of African and Oceanic Art, and then the National Museum of the Arts of African and Oceania. In 2000, its collections moved to the Musée du quai Branly, and the building became the home of the Cité nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration and the Dorée Tropical Aquarium. The idea apparently was to show how France has progressed by making space for a museum tackling the very contemporary

issue of immigration in a building formerly devoted to celebrating its colonial age, a political statement implying that while the connection remains, colonization and colonial relations are a thing of the distant past. As we approached the building, I was amazed by its architecture. Closer still, at the steps leading up to the front door, an exterior text panel described how it was a former Museum of the Colonies. Initially as I read I thought it was an interesting idea to link colonialism to immigration and migration, but then I saw the photo accompanying the text. It seemed to be of two men working on the external bas relief of the building (itself a 1,200-square-meter ode to the flora, fauna, and “natives” of the colonies). One of the men is fully clothed, his face obscured. The other is a naked black man with scars on his back, seemingly working on the sculpture. There is no explanatory text for who either of the men is or why the one is naked and has scars and what he is doing on the building. Just a jarring image confronted me that I interpreted as a naked slave working to create an idealized story in stone that would remain, triumphant in the public imaginary, long after he, his name, and his wounded black body would. I forced myself to enter the building and visit the immigration museum, which incidentally was quite interesting. But mostly for the rest of the afternoon I felt battered and wanted to go home. How could I feel comfortable in a place that normalized the humiliation of black servitude? Do they not know that this is not over yet? Changing the use of the old colonial spaces is not enough without a fundamental shift of power relations in the institution. Our museums are often tainted, many beyond repair. I think you need only to see this image once and you are turned off to museums for life. Plain old racism is still the biggest barrier to entry. Museums have to take a seriously critical look at what they collect and exhibit and who their staff is. There is still, shamefully, so much to be done. There are also barriers such as the hostile front of house staff or allwhite museum personnel, high admissions, inaccessibility of location, and so on. We need to look at how museums engage people. The typical museum is set up to minimize conversation. They assume individuals are attending alone and eager to quietly reap knowledge from the

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exhibitions, constructed by a certain expert. Most museum visitors, however, tend to visit at least in a group of two. During the museum visit, we tend to stop talking to the person we’re with and disappear in the solo world the museum creates for us. Museums encourage people to literally only look one way in a presentation model (authority telling you something that you consume). And even if we re-present through exhibitions curated by people of color who problematize race or who simply address identities, histories, and communities of color, it is the same didactic model. I would argue that this is not necessarily the new space that will give rise to new social relations. Postcolonial scholar Homi Bhabha contends that it is “the inbetween. . . . that carries the burden of the meaning of culture. It is in this space that we will find those words with which we can speak of Ourselves and Others. And by exploring this ‘Third Space,’ we may elude the politics of polarity and emerge as the others of ourselves.”11 Bhabha speaks of the notion of creating a third space of empowerment where cultures collide and new realities are made. I would argue that the very model of representation reinforces the politics of polarity. It creates little space between authority and recipient. For me, the third space is conversation and engagement. It is about agency. Museums that are serious about changing power relations have big empowering third spaces. Those that aren’t, don’t. What could this third space look like? We know because those who are most successful at attracting young people of color are doing this. Changing social relations is not just about changing what we exhibit. It’s not just about presenting exhibitions about race or about a particular cultural identity, although this goes a long way to make the invitation. While showing exhibits that deal with race or diverse cultural communities sends a positive message of invitation and acknowledgment, it cannot be the sole strategy to enable black people to own their public museums. In fact, such shows may unintentionally backfire. I recently saw the Making Africa—A Continent of Contemporary Design exhibit produced by the Vitra Design Museum and the Guggenheim Bilbao. The exhibit, which had Nigerian star curator Okwui Enwezor as its consulting curator, showcased the work of

over 120 artists and designers and aimed to present Africa as “a hub of experimentation generating new approaches and solutions of worldwide relevance” and “as a driving force for a new discussion of the potential of design in the twenty-first century.”12 The design and art objects were undoubtedly glorious and were well chosen and framed, but the way in which they were presented was traditional, didactic, leaving little space for visitor engagement beyond just looking and reading. I couldn’t shake the feeling (which is probably unfair of me) that the incredible vibrancy and creativity that I knew had given rise to these works within very specific contexts had been reduced to “Africa, on show,” or, even worse, “Look! Africans create cool things too.” I saw the exhibit in Barcelona, where I live, with a crowd of mainly

Conguitos on display in Barcelona

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white people. There are not a lot of black people in Barcelona, and black people in public visual culture are reduced mainly to Médecins Sans Frontières billboards of suffering black babies being rescued by white care workers and the painfully ubiquitous Conguito sweet displays. The exhibit represented well, but as an “object” in its own right, it didn’t even try to change the fundamental social relations here. We need to create the conditions of conversation. We don’t need to own the conversation, but we need to let it happen. I remember very clearly the one time my daughter was really excited about going to a museum. We were living in Canada, and she went on a school trip to the War Museum and the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Ottawa. She had been to both before with me. I was amazed to see that on her BBM status she posted: “so cool. Met a real war vet from WW2 at the museum.” For this to make it to her BBM status was an indication as to how a personal contact can make (and also break) an experience. You don’t need much space for conversation. In order to allow four people to talk in a group in a circular configuration there needs to be approximately 4.5 square meters of free space in the gallery. That’s it—some space, a trigger, a question, clear instructions for what to do.13 But this is typically what happens: I’m in a workshop, a place that, as a consultant, is like my second home. It is a workshop dedicated to developing the storyline for a new museum. We’ve assembled together a mixed bag of people: the museum director, some curators, the public and education program staff, and some external experts, normally academics and researchers as well as a few community organizers and maybe some artists. I stand in front of a flipchart, marker in hand. “What is the central idea you think this museum should convey?” We go around the room. The directors talk of mission, funding, and politics. The curators provide complex analyses of theme, subject, and narrative. The education program staff speak of pedagogical outcomes and curriculum. The IT people talk of mobile and augmented reality. The academics say things like “intersection,” “disruption,” “trouble the

story,” and “deconstruction.” The artists talk about doing something out of the ordinary. We write it up; it’s shaping up to be a great place. We put together an interpretive plan. Enter the designers. There is a long process of development. The designers try to bring the content to life. They work with the curators and sometimes the educators. The curators tend to be higher in the pecking order. The designers are practically focused on getting the artifacts, the text, the photos, the videos, and the art they need to put the exhibition together. There is never enough space; there is always one more story that needs to be told, one more exhibit that needs to be put in. Before you know it, all of the space that we had put aside for school groups and conversation is gone. It loses out to “important things you have to know.” Every time. This is our most common barrier: museum staff who believe telling is more important than inspiring or are making space and museums that see their only form as presenting knowledge. The Denver Art Museum did a study of how to attract young people in their museum and spoke of easy moments of creativity where visitors are invited to unleash their own creativity and not just bask in the creativity of others.14 Creativity with low barriers to entry is another way to engage. And there’s technology. I think the hardest thing for a museum to do is to let go of the talking stick online. Online is a big scary place where you have very little control. We work with many museum professionals who have a thousand excuses about why not to let audiences post, respond, and share online. But here’s the thing—virtual space is a new space where social relations have been irrevocably altered. It is the in-between, the third space. It is no surprise that the latest study of participation in the arts from the National Endowment for the Arts shows that mobile devices “appear to narrow racial/ethnic gaps in arts engagement.”15 What can museums learn from this third space? But more important, what is our intent? How committed are we to really changing social relations? As embodied by the example from the Paris Museum of Immigration, it is easier to change what we present than it is to change who we are. Making space changes space. Isn’t it time we did?

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Ngaire Blankenberg is European director and principal consultant at Lord Cultural Resources and co-author with Gail Lord of Cities, Museums and Soft Power (Arlington, VA: AAM Press, 2015). Notes

1 For example, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Smithsonian, opening in September 2016 in Washington, DC, on the National Mall, and the National Museum of the American Latino. A number of immigration or migration museums have opened over the last twenty-five years in the United States (Ellis Island Immigration Museum, Tenement Museum), Canada (National Museum of Immigration at Pier 21), Australia (Immigration Museum, Migration Museum), France (Cité nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration), United Kingdom (Museum of Bristol), Belgium (Red Line Museum), and others. There are the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre, Rwanda; the Apartheid Museum, South Africa; the Museum of Tolerance, Los Angeles, United States; Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, Japan. For children, for example, there are the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre, Buckinghamshire, United Kingdom; Discover Children’s Story Centre, London. Performance arts: Turbine Hall, Tate Modern; PS1, MOMA. And the Museum of Broken Relationships, Zagreb, Croatia; the Museum of Innocence, Istanbul, Turkey. 2 There are many studies in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom that demonstrate broad public support for museums. For example, Jack Jedwab, “History Knowledge and Trust in Sources” (presentation, Association for Canadian Studies, December 2011), based on a study of survey respondents in Canada, United States, United Kingdom, and France. 3 Betty Farrell and Maria Medvedeva, Demographic Transformation and the Future of Museums (Washington, DC: American Association of Museums Press, 2010), based on research by Reach Advisors, who analyzed census data and survey data. 4 Gregory Rodriguez, an author and journalist, discusses demographic change in the Americas, cultural transformation, and the future of museums in a lecture, “Towards a New Mainstream” (Washington, DC: Embassy of Canada, December 9, 2009), which was subsequently released as a webcast by Learning Times and the Centre for the Future of Museums, including an overview of of the demographic trends led by James Chung of Reach Advisors. 5 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Arts, November 2009). See also Jennifer L. Novak-Leonard and Alan S. Brown, Beyond Attendance: A Multi-Modal Understanding of Arts Participation (Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Arts, February 2011). 6 Tourist Trapped Blog, “Tourist Trapped: After Hours at the Museum of the African Diaspora,” blog entry by Beth Spotswood, November 7, 2011, blog.sfgate.com/culture/2011/11/07/touristtrapped-after-hours-at-the-museum-of-the-african-diaspora/ 7 New Horizons III Executive Summary: A Global Study of the Youth and Student Traveller (Alexandria, New South Wales, Australia: WYSE Travel Confederation, September 2013), w ysetc.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/newhorizonsiii-v7 -execsummary-v4s.pdf. Millennials: A Portrait of Generation Next. Confident. 8 Connected. Open to Change (Pew Research Center, February 2010). 9 Novak-Leonard and Brown, Beyond Attendance. 10 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1991).

11 Homi Bhabha, “Cultural Diversity and Cultural Differences,” in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (London: Routledge, 1995), 209. 12 Making Africa—A Continent of Contemporary Design, Vitra Design Museum, www.design-museum.de/en/exhibitions /detailseiten/making-africa.html. 13 For more on the importance of scaffolding for a participative experience, read Nina Simon, The Participatory Museum (Santa Cruz, CA: Museum 2.0, 2010). See also Ngaire Blankenberg, “Participatory Exhibitions,” in Manual of Museum Exhibitions, ed. Barry Lord and Maria Piacente (Toronto: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014). 14 Creativity, Community, and a Dash of the Unexpected: Adventures in Engaging Young Adult Audiences (Denver: Denver Art Museum, 2011). 15 National Endowment for the Arts Presents Highlights from the 2012 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Arts, September 26, 2013), www.arts .gov/news/2013/national-endowment-arts-presents-highlights -2012-survey-public-participation-arts.

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OTA BENGA

IN THE ARCHIVES UNMAKING MYTHS, MAPPING RESISTANCE IN THE MARGINS OF HISTORY Pamela Newkirk

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n September 8, 1906, Ota Benga, a boyishappearing young man said to be twenty-three years old and a so-called African pygmy from the Congo Free State, was first exhibited in the Bronx Zoo Monkey House. The exhibit drew record crowds to the zoo while stoking controversy and attracting global attention. More than a century later, accounts of the episode have been distorted by omissions, half-truths, and outright deceptions. Not only has Benga’s captor, the self-described American explorer Samuel Verner, been widely depicted as his friend and savior, but his true saviors has languished in obscurity. In addition, while Benga’s bust remains in storage at the American Museum of Natural History, where he was temporarily housed, neither that institution nor the Bronx Zoo has accurately recorded Benga’s story in institutional accounts, nor have they erected a plaque or other fitting tribute to his memory. Worse yet, shame over the episode has resulted in what one can only reasonably view as subterfuge by those charged with recording the history of the New York Zoological Society, commonly called the Bronx Zoo. In Gathering of Animals: An Unconventional History of the New York Zoological Society, first published in 1974, the society’s then curator emeritus of publications leaves the matter of Benga’s exhibition vague, open to interpretation, or unknowable. Blithely ignoring overwhelming evidence in the zoo’s own archives, William Bridges wrote:

Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016 DOI 10.1215/10757163-3641821 © 2016 by Nka Publications

Ota Benga (c. 1883–1916). Glass negative, 5 x 7 in. Courtesy Library of Congress. Photo: Bain News Service (1915–16)

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Was Ota Benga “exhibited”—like some strange, rare animal? That he was locked behind bars in a bare cage to be stared at during certain hours seems unlikely; that he did for the first few days enter a cage in the Primate House to play with the chimpanzee that had accompanied him from Africa is certain; also it is certain that a “label of information” about him was hung on the front of the cage while he was in it. At this distance in time, that is about all that can be said for sure, except that it was all done with the best of intentions, for Ota Benga was interesting to the New York public.1

The incredible account goes on to say that after the uproar over his exhibition, Benga was “immediately withdrawn from official exhibition (or employment) and the label was stowed away.”2 No evidence has been recovered that even mildly suggests that Benga was ever employed by the zoo. On the other hand, there are hundreds of documents in the New York Zoological Society archives and elsewhere that conclusively show he was intentionally (and unapologetically) “locked behind bars in a bare cage to be stared at during certain hours.” Bridge’s account is but one example of the numerous egregiously false and misleading characterizations of Benga’s plight in the United States that have served to sanitize the episode and minimize his struggle, if not his humanity. In many accounts Benga is depicted as a friend or protégé of Verner and as a willing participant in his own degradation. Few highlight the extent to which he resisted his captivity or the ways in which this episode underscored the common racial attitudes of the day. While Benga did not leave behind personal papers, his iron will is indelibly etched into the archival documents. Like other marginalized people, his daily activities and state of mind can be glimpsed in the margins of history, mostly in the letters of his captors and dozens of newspaper accounts. Woven together, they provide a tragically stark portrait of Benga as he faced the daily indignity of exploitation. The New York Times broke the story on September 9, 1906, and over the next three weeks published no fewer than fourteen articles and

editorials on Benga’s saga. The first story appeared beneath the headline “Bushman Shares a Cage with Bronx Park Apes.”3 The following day, on Monday, September 10, 1906, the Times reported that even bigger crowds attended the zoo that Sunday. It noted that Dohong, an orangutan, was placed in Benga’s cage, which was now littered with bones to suggest cannibalism. A sign outside the cage read: The African Pygmy, “Ota Benga.” Age, 23 years. Height, 4 feet 11 inches Weight 103 pounds. Brought from the Kasai River, Congo Free State, South Central Africa, By Dr. Samuel P. Verner. Exhibited each afternoon during September.4

Readers would learn that the iron cage Benga inhabited had been built at the southern end of the primate house to keep the monkeys, who were sensitive to cold, warmer and to make the antics of the orangutan plainer to the view of spectators. “Like his fellow-lodgers, the orang outangs and monkeys, Benga has a room inside the building. It opens, like the rest, into the public cage.”5 From the beginning, Benga’s displeasure was palpable to observers. “Frequently he appeared at the door and in looks not hard to understand let the keepers know he’d rather be among the trees and shrubs,” a Times article said.6 Another article reported how a bewildered Benga occasionally sat silently on a stool staring, at times glaring, through the bars as spectators squealed with delight. Agitated, he occasionally mimicked the menacing mob. “From time to time it looked as though the little Bushman was running out of patience,” the article said.7 Meanwhile, Bronx zoo director William Hornaday defended the exhibit, saying it was in keeping with human exhibitions in Europe and bringing to mind Saartjie Baartman, the barely clad South African woman exhibited as “Hottentot Venus” until her death in 1815.8 Hornaday said he planned to keep Benga on exhibit until late fall, and possibly the spring. As such, he prepared an article

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Reverend Robert Stuart MacArthur, the pastor of Manhattan’s Calvary Baptist Church, was the first to publicly express outrage over Ota Benga’s exhibition.

Reverend James Gordon, the superintendent of the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum in Brooklyn, New York. Gordon led the protests against Ota Benga’s exhibition and captivity in the monkey house. After securing Benga’s release, he provided him a home at the orphanage in Brooklyn and later at its farm on Long Island.

Wilford H. Smith, the prominent lawyer and confidant to Booker T. Washington, appealed for Ota Benga’s release from the Bronx Zoo Monkey House cage.

William Sheppard, the Presbyterian missionary and explorer hailed as the “Black Livingstone” for his discovery of the Congo’s Kuba kingdom. He helped expose Leopold’s atrocities in the Congo.

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for the October 1906 issue of the Zoological Society Bulletin. In it he described Benga as “a genuine African pigmy, belonging to the sub-race commonly miscalled ‘the Dwarfs.’”9 By Verner’s own account, one that would change over the years, he purchased Benga with a pound of salt and a bolt of cloth in order to exhibit him in the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904. As millions of Congolese people were being killed, tortured, and enslaved to feed the international appetite for rubber, copper, and minerals, Verner was hired as a special agent to procure “pygmies” for the fair. A deal finalized on October 22, 1903, authorized the allocation of $8,500 for Verner to procure “one pygmy patriarch or chief. One adult woman, preferably his wife. One adult man, preferably his son. One adult woman, the wife of the last or daughter of the first. One female youth unmarried. Two infants of women in the expedition. . . . All of the above to be pygmies.”10 A year later the fair would feature a massive human menagerie that included two thousand Native Americans, among them the famous Apache leader Geronimo, and a Philippine Reservation set on forty-seven acres with hundreds of Filipinos and nine African “pygmies,” one of whom was Ota Benga. On day 3 of Benga’s exhibition at the zoo, the Times ran an editorial expressing bewilderment over the growing protests: We do not quite understand all the emotion which others are expressing in the matter. Ota Benga, according to our information, is a normal specimen of his race or tribe, with a brain as much developed as are those of its other members. Whether they are held to be illustrations of arrested development, and really closer to the anthropoid apes than the other African savages, or whether they are viewed as the degenerate descendants of ordinary negroes, they are of equal interest to the student of ethnology, and can be studied with profit.11

Meanwhile, letters exchanged between zoo director William Hornaday and Verner provide compelling evidence of Benga’s fierce resistance. “Boy here became quite unmanageable,” Hornaday wrote in an undated letter to Verner. “Will not obey

keepers and resists control. Think it unwise for us to punish him for several reasons. Call me or phone. W. T. Hornaday.”12 In another letter dated September 17, Hornaday wrote, “Finding himself immune from punishment, the boy does quite as he pleases, and it is utterly impossible to control him. Whenever the keepers go after him in his meanderings and attempt to bring him back to the Monkey House, he threatens to bite them, and would undoubtedly do if they should persist. I see no way out of the dilemma but for him to be taken away.”13 By then Hornaday faced growing criticism, with William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal that morning condemning the exhibition as “in bad taste” and “disgusting” and claiming that it “held up to scorn” the African race.14 In a letter from Verner to Hornaday dated September 19, Verner proposed a solution. “If he should become too nervous, a dose of some sedative might be good, as I frequently found in the ecstatic frenzies which sometimes occur among the natives in Africa; tho I never had to use any for him.”15 It is not known if Verner’s advice was heeded. Still, despite clear evidence of Benga’s forced captivity, exploitation, and resistance, many accounts have continued to characterize him as a friend or protégé of Verner, and even downplay or deny his exhibition. Ten years after the zoo debacle the New York Times, in an article reporting Benga’s suicide in Lynchburg, Virginia, described him as Verner’s protégé and dismissed as “unfounded” reports that Benga had ever been exhibited in the Bronx Zoo.16 More recently, the introduction to the 1992 book Ota Benga: The Pygmy in the Zoo claimed: “It is the story of the friendship between S. P. Verner and Ota Benga.”17 The authors are Harvey Blume and Phillips Verner Bradford, the latter Verner’s grandson, who appear to accept at face value Verner’s questionable and self-interested characterization of his relationship with Benga. The suggestion that Benga was Verner’s friend and was somehow complicit in his plight continues to be perpetuated in some accounts of the episode. An article in the New York Post quotes Bradford, Verner’s grandson, as saying: “Perversely, Benga enjoyed the enormous attention he was generating among New Yorkers and the press. . . . Benga loved entertaining the crowds, singing, dancing and playing his horn, and he wanted

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to put on skits. . . . Sadly, he didn’t fully understand that the people were not laughing with him but were laughing at him.”18 Once again, the archives tell another story. Fortunately, it is possible to correct decades-old historical fallacies by drawing on a rich reservoir of untapped or underutilized documents that illuminate Benga’s unbridled resistance, as well as his soaring humanity. Pamela Newkirk is a professor of journalism at New York University. Notes

This article was adapted from my book Spectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga (New York: Amistad, 2015). 1 William Bridges, Gathering of Animals: An Unconventional History of the New York Zoological Society (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), 225. 2 Ibid. 3 “Bushman Shares a Cage with Bronx Park Apes,” New York Times, September 9, 1906. 4 “Man and Monkey Show Disapproved by Clergy,” New York Times, September 10, 1906. 5 “Bushman Shares a Cage.” 6 Ibid. 7 “Man and Monkey Show Disapproved by Clergy.” 8 See Hornaday’s defense in “Bushman Shares a Cage.” 9 William Hornaday, New York Zoological Society Archives, Director’s Office correspondence, April 20–October 20 1906. 10 Samuel Phillips Verner Papers, Box 1, Correspondence (Columbia: South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina Library). 11 “Send Him Back to the Woods,” New York Times, September 11, 1906. 12 William Hornaday, New York Zoological Society Archives, Director’s Office correspondence, April 20–October 20, 1906. 13 Ibid. 14 “The Black Pigmy in the Monkey Cage: An Exhibition in Bad Taste,” New York Journal, September 17, 1906. 15 Samuel Verner to William Hornaday, Wildlife Conservation Society Archives, Director’s Office correspondence. 16 “Ota Benga, Pygmy, Tired of America,” New York Times, July 16, 1916. 17 Phillips Verner Bradford and Harvey Blume, Ota: The Pygmy in the Zoo (New York: St. Martin’s, 1992), xxi. 18 Jerry Oppenheimer, “Treated Like an Animal: The Tragedy of Ota Benga, the Man Exhibited in the Bronx Zoo,” New York Post, November 18, 2012.

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BUST BRAWL THE BATTLE OVER A BLACK BRONZE PRINCE Yemane I. Demissie

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racing the short but singular and well-documented life of Prince Alemayehu of Ethiopia, my research for a book and a film probes the relationships of an African crown prince with preeminent British political, military, and cultural leaders on the eve of the European Scramble for Africa.1 Born in 1861, Prince Alemayehu was the son of the mid-nineteenth-century emperor Tewodros II. In the latter part of his reign, endeavoring to thwart the efforts of encroaching peripheral Ottoman client states, Emperor Tewodros attempted to forge diplomatic and military alliances with Britain, France, Prussia, and Austria.2 When they ignored his overtures, the emperor took umbrage at the perceived lèse-majesté and arrested several British government representatives and missionaries from a few other European countries.3 His action provoked much fury and indignation among Europeans, prompting the press to lampoon and demonize him in poems, articles, and caricatures.4 When the emperor refused to release the captives, the British government sent a punitive expeditionary force in August 1867.5 With Lieutenant-General Sir Robert Napier commanding thirteen thousand Indian and British soldiers, the force used forty-four trained elephants and forty thousand other animals to scale the precipitous

Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016 DOI 10.1215/10757163-3641832 © 2016 by Nka Publications

Front and back of a carte de visite of Prince Alemayehu, taken at Regina House, Ryde, Isle of Wight, Summer 1868, by Jabez Hughes, photographer to Queen Victoria, 2.85 x 4.027 in. Courtesy the author

Ethiopian highlands and storm the emperor’s fortress at Mekdela. Unwilling to face humiliation and share the fate of his former captives, the emperor eluded the British force by committing suicide. The fate of his son, Prince Alemayehu, the subject of this article and my future book and film, was very different. In an effort to avoid the risk of the emperor’s Ethiopian foes exacting their revenge on his seven-year-old crown prince, his consort, the Empress Tiruwork Wube, on her deathbed, asked Napier to take her son out of the country.6 How Alemayehu left his homeland at age seven and what he then experienced in his all-too-brief life in Britain, India, and the Straits Settlements I shall examine elsewhere. For this article, I will focus on one of the concluding episodes of Alemayehu’s story: a tug-of-war over the creation of the prince’s

bust soon after his November 1879 death at age eighteen.7 The principal cast of characters in this epistolary wrangle includes Prince Alemayehu; Queen Victoria; Sir Stafford Northcote, the chancellor of the exchequer; John Throp, a sculptor and marble mason based in Leeds; Lt. General Sir Henry Frederick Ponsonby, the queen’s private secretary; Francis John Williamson, the queen’s favorite sculptor; and Professor Cyril Ransome, Prince Alemayehu’s private tutor. Immediately upon Alemayehu’s death in Leeds, Sir Stafford Northcote, as guardian ex officio, telegraphed Ransome, the professor in whose home Prince Alemayehu had died, to have photographs and a cast or death mask taken “which might serve, if thought desirable, for a bust.” Northcote Demissie

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The French representation of the confrontation between Emperor Tewodros and Britain, La Lune, August 10, 1867. Engraving by André Gill, 12.961 x 18.55 in. Courtesy the author

The French representation of Prince Alemayehu’s introduction to Queen Victoria, L’univers illustré, August 1, 1868. Engraving by Paul Phillippoteaux, 15.823 x 11.0 in. Courtesy the author

presumably made this request for the benefit of the queen, who since Alemayehu’s arrival in Britain in 1868 had become a staunch and steadfast advocate of the young prince’s welfare. Ransome implemented the chancellor of the exchequer’s instructions without delay and hired Throp to create a cast. Aspiring to capitalize on the august patronage, Throp executed the cast promptly and of his own accord and within a month of Alemayehu’s death created a bust of the prince. Not long after, Ransome examined Throp’s work and contacted the queen’s private secretary, Sir Henry Frederick Ponsonby. In his December 19, 1879, letter, Ransome informed Ponsonby that the bust “is not good, being disfigured by a bad arrangement of the hair and by the modern dress in which it is habited. The mask, however, is good and a good bust might be made from it.”8 For the six months that followed, Ransome’s ostensibly perfunctory assessment of Throp’s work

triggered a fierce bureaucratic warfare between the private secretary of the era’s most powerful world leader and an ordinary provincial sculptor over the image of a dead African prince. Three days shy from 1880, Ponsonby commissioned Francis John Williamson, the sculptor favored by the queen, to make a bust of the prince.9 He charged Williamson with the collection of the Alemayehu cast from Ransome, assuming that it was at the professor’s disposal.10 Williamson agreed, requesting recent photographs of Alemayehu and charging one hundred guineas for the bust.11 Throp, however, resisted. The sculptor informed Ransome that he had already made the bust in plaster and that he proposed to make one in marble to exhibit at the upcoming 1880 Royal Academy exhibition. If Throp yielded the cast to Williamson, he contended, “it would destroy the value of his work.”12 Annoyed perhaps by Throp’s at once astute and

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determined stance, Ponsonby confided to Ransome about the necessity of the two sculptors settling matters between themselves.13 But Williamson would have none of that. He rejected Ponsonby’s suggestion to arrange matters with Throp, “as he [Williamson] does not know who he [Throp] is or where he resides.” Williamson also insisted that he could “do very well without it [the cast]” if he could have a few photographs to work from.14 Venturing to outmaneuver Ponsonby, Throp subsequently sent a letter directly to the queen. First, he shrewdly reminded the monarch that he was in possession of the only cast taken of Prince Alemayehu. Then he nonchalantly informed Victoria that he had almost completed Alemayehu’s bust in marble and concluded by expressing how it would afford him the greatest possible pleasure if he could submit the bust for her “Gracious Majesty’s Inspection.”15 Clearly Throp was not privy to the palace organizational chart, for his feisty letter of January 12, 1880, landed not on the sovereign’s bureau but smack on Ponsonby’s desk. Irritated perhaps by Throp’s temerity, Ponsonby pronounces on Throp to his associate, Doyne Courtney Bell, as “not very grand in style.”16 The next day he fired an icy letter back at the sculptor in full regalia: “Lt. General Sir H. Ponsonby,” he proclaimed, “presents his compliments to Mr. Throp & begs leave to inform him that The Queen has already given an order to Mr. Williamson to execute a Bust of Prince Alamayou & that he had requested Mr. Williamson to communicate with Mr. Throp with reference to the Casts.”17 Ponsonby was now ready to forgo Alemayehu’s cast and have photographs as the sole inspiration for the creation of the prince’s bust. The choices were J. W. Ramsden’s post-mortem photographs of Alemayehu and E. H. Speight’s portraits taken a few months before the prince’s death.18 Williamson, the queen’s designated sculptor, found the post-mortem photographs “exceedingly good.”19 The queen concurred. In a letter to Sir Robert Napier, the general who had brought the young prince to Britain, she wrote: “She cannot refrain from sending him [Lord Napier] this beautiful Photograph taken of him after his death. It is so calm and so unlike death.”20 Ponsonby, however, was not impressed with the memento mori. He bid Williamson to use Speight’s portraits of the animate prince instead.21

The British representation of the confrontation between Emperor Tewodros and Britain, Punch, or the London Charivari, August 10, 1867. Engraving by Sir John Tenniel, 9.187 x 6.77 in. Courtesy the author

On April 17, 1880, three and a half months into the commission, Williamson sent Ponsonby an apprehensive progress report. Prince Leopold, the queen’s son, who would also later die at a relatively young age, had examined Williamson’s bust of Alemayehu in clay. Although Leopold deemed the bust “very good as far as his memory served him,” Williamson suggested to Ponsonby that he “thought it would be admirable for the Queen to see it before I cast it into plaster.”22 Nine days later, Queen Victoria examined Williamson’s bust at Windsor Castle.23 Soon after Williamson’s audience with the queen, Ponsonby scribbled a note for himself. The note read, “The Queen wants the mask at any price.”24 Ponsonby contacted Professor Ransome posthaste. Loath to identify Throp by name and averse to bestow imperial largesse on the intractable sculptor, the queen’s private secretary wrote: “Is there any means of obtaining the cast taken of Alamayou’s face by the Artist at Leeds? I would purchase it or ask for it on any reasonable terms the Artist might Demissie

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The Right Honorable General Sir Henry Frederick Ponsonby, the Privy Purse and private secretary to Queen Victoria, Vanity Fair, March 17, 1883. Caricature by Théobald Chartran, 9.035 x 14.361 in. Courtesy the author

think it right to demand.”25 Six days later Ransome relayed the sculptor’s terse and prompt response to Ponsonby: “Mr. Throp’s answer is in the negative.” Ransome added, “I have taken legal advice in the matter, and I fear that, though in equity he has no standing, in law it will be impossible to touch him, any movement in that direction, too, would make him a martyr which is probably what he wants. I am informed that his bust has been sent to the Academy.”26 Soon after, Ponsonby wrote an internal memo to Bell, his assistant, this time specifying Throp by name and admitting the sculptor’s triumph without reservation. He concluded the seemingly matter-offact note with a diktat masquerading as a suggestion. “Throp,” Ponsonby affirmed, “has got Alamayou’s cast—which we want. He is master of the situation.

Could The Queen buy his bust of Alamayou with the mask—Perhaps the only way will be to ask him direct.”27 Bell, not Ponsonby, would have to pen the entreaty. Meanwhile, with no word from Ponsonby for two weeks, Williamson dispatched a letter to the private secretary. “Have you heard anything respecting the mask of the late Prince Alamayou or can you tell me if I had better finish the bust without it?” he asked. Vexed, conceivably, by his treatment, Williamson also added forty additional guineas to his original one hundred for the price of the bust.28 Nettled, perhaps, by having to do Ponsonby’s bidding, Bell took two weeks to act. On May 21, 1880, he wrote Throp a note on Buckingham Palace letterhead. Bell, unlike Ponsonby, addressed Throp in second person and made clear his subordinate role in the communication of the request and its implicit concession. “Sir Henry Ponsonby,” he wrote, “desires me to enquire whether you would be willing to sell a copy of the bust of Prince Alamayou, and also the cast which you originally took of the face, either together or singly.”29 Throp must have been filled with relish, even schadenfreude, while composing his immediate response to Bell. Writing on his own letterhead, Throp declared: “I am willing either to dispose of the bust of the late Prince Alamayou, which is now being exhibited at the Royal Academy which has been favourably commented on by the press or I would execute a special one, should Her Majesty so desire. For obvious and numerous reasons, however, I am compelled to retain the cast, being unable to say what further use I may yet have for it.”30 Disinclined to acknowledge the looming checkmate, Ponsonby mustered the dwindling arsenal in the citadel. He contacted Sir Stafford Northcote, the chancellor of the exchequer, seeking procedural violations in Throp’s strategy. Northcote informed Ponsonby that soon after the death of Prince Alemayehu he had sent a telegraph to Ransome to have Throp take Alemayehu’s cast. However, Northcote emphasized that Throp had not billed the treasury for the cast or the bust.31 After making inquiries with the solicitor to the treasury, Northcote wrote that “the cast is Mr. Throp’s, and if he chooses to say he will not sell it unless with the bust he cannot be compelled by any legal

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Prince Alemayehu’s engraving by an unidentified artist appears on The Graphic several days after his death on November 29, 1879, 2.85 x 4.027 in. The image’s likeness is taken from E. H. Speight’s photograph, which was also later used by Francis John Williamson to sculpt the bust. Courtesy the author

Demissie

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proceedings to part with it.”32 Five weeks after the queen’s rejection of Williamson’s work, Ponsonby instructed the royal sculptor to complete the bust.33 A June 30, 1880, entry in Queen Victoria’s journal reads: “Saw Mr. Williamson’s bust in clay, of poor young Alamayou, which is really good but he has had great difficulties.”34 Postscript Williamson’s bust of Prince Alemayehu survived and is on display in the Grand Corridor at Osborne House, Queen Victoria’s royal residence on the Isle of Wight. Throp’s bust was last seen publicly at the 1880 Royal Academy exhibition.35 Its present whereabouts, if indeed it has survived, are unknown. It is also not known whether Throp’s cast of Prince Alemayehu has survived.36 Yemane I. Demissie is a filmmaker and an associate professor in the Department of Film and Television at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Notes

1 In almost all of the European correspondence, the prince’s name is spelled incorrectly as Alamayu. I have used the standard and more precise transcription of his name. 2 Aleqa Zeneb, The Chronicle of King Theodore of Abyssinia, ed. Enno Littmann (Princeton, NJ: University Library; New York: Scribner, 1902); Sven Rubenson, King of Kings, Tewodros of Ethiopia (Addis Ababa, Ethiopia: Addis Ababa University Press, 1965); Percy Arnold, Prelude to Magdala: Emperor Theodore of Ethiopia and British Diplomacy (London: Bellew, 1991). 3 Hormuzd Rassam, Narrative of the British Mission to Theodore, King of Abyssinia (London: J. Murray, 1869); Henry A. Stern, The Captive Missionary: Being an Account of the Country and People of Abyssinia (London: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin, 1868). 4 Syoum Wolde, “Depictions of Tewodros in Historical Publications,” in Kasa and Kasa: Papers on the Lives, Times and Images of Tewodros II and Yohannes IV, 1855–1889 (Addis Ababa: Institute of Ethiopian Studies, Addis Ababa University, 1990); John Tenniel, various cartoons, Punch, 1867–68; Roger Acton, The Abyssinian Expedition and the Life and Reign of King Theodore. With 100 Illustrations Engraved . . . from the “Illustrated London News” (London: Illustrated London News, 1870). 5 T. J. Holland and H. M. Hozier, Record of the Expedition to Abyssinia (London: W. Clowes and Sons, 1870); Darrell Bates, The Abyssinian Difficulty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). 6 Rassam, Narrative of the British Mission, 58, 343. 7 I wish to thank Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II for graciously allowing access to documents in the Royal Archives at Windsor and for permitting me to quote from Queen Victoria’s journals and from Private Secretary Lt. General Sir Henry Frederick Ponsonby’s correspondence with Professor Cyril Ransome, Sir Stafford Northcote, John Throp, and Francis John Williamson. 8 Ransome to Ponsonby, December 19, 1879, RA PPTO/PP/QV /MAIN/1880/6874/1.

Francis John Williamson, 1833–1920, British portrait sculptor. 9 10 Ponsonby to Williamson, December 29, 1879, RA PPTO/PP /QV/MAIN/1880/6874/2. 11 Williamson to Ponsonby, December 31, 1879, RA PPTO/PP /QV/MAIN/1880/6874/3. One hundred guineas in 1880 is roughly equivalent to US $7,300 in today’s currency. “Currency Convertor,” National Archives, www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency/default0 .asp#mid (June 2014). 12 Ransome to Ponsonby, January 7, 1880, RA PPTO/PP/QV /MAIN/1880/6874/4. 13 Ponsonby to Ransome, January 12, 1880, RA PPTO/PP/QV /MAIN/1880/6874/5. 14 Williamson to Ponsonby, January 13, 1880, RA PPTO/PP/QV /MAIN/1880/6874/8. 15 Throp to Victoria, January 12, 1880, RA PPTO/PP/QV /MAIN/1880/6874/6. 16 Ponsonby to Bell, not dated, RA PPTO/PP/QV /MAIN/1880/6874/11. 17 Ponsonby to Throp, January 13, 1880, RA PPTO/PP/QV /MAIN/1880/6874/7. 18 Ponsonby to Williamson, January 15, 1880, RA PPTO/PP/QV /MAIN/1880/6874/10. 19 Williamson to Ponsonby, January 19, 1880, RA PPTO/PP/QV /MAIN/1880/6874/12. 20 Victoria to Napier, January 7, 1880, National Archives (formerly Public Records Office), MSS. Eur. F114/16/75. 21 Ponsonby to Williamson, January 15, 1880, RA PPTO/PP/QV /MAIN/1880/6874/10. 22 Williamson to Ponsonby, April 17, 1880, RA PPTO/PP/QV /MAIN/1880/6874/13. 23 Victoria’s note is recorded on Williamson’s letter of April 13, 1880, RA PPTO/PP/QV/MAIN/1880/6874/13. 24 Memorandum by Ponsonby, April 28, 1880, RA PPTO/PP/QV /MAIN/1880/6874/14. 25 Ponsonby to Ransome, April 28, 1880, RA PPTO/PP/QV /MAIN/1880/6874/15. 26 Ransome to Ponsonby, May 4, 1880, RA PPTO/PP/QV /MAIN/1880/6874/16. 27 Ponsonby to Bell, May 6, 1880, RA PPTO/PP/QV /MAIN/1880/6874/18. 28 Williamson to Ponsonby, May 19, 1880, RA PPTO/PP/QV /MAIN/1880/6874/20. Forty guineas is roughly an additional $3,000 in today’s currency, bringing the total to $10,300. “Currency Convertor,” National Archives. 29 Bell to Throp, May 21, 1880, RA PPTO/PP/QV /MAIN/1880/6874/23. 30 Throp to Bell, May 22, 1880, RA PPTO/PP/QV /MAIN/1880/6874/24. 31 Northcote to Ponsonby, May 28, 1880, RA PPTO/PP/QV /MAIN/1880/6874/26. 32 Northcote to Ponsonby, June 8, 1880, RA PPTO/PP/QV /MAIN/1880/6874/28. 33 Ponsonby to Williamson, June 7, 1880, RA PPTO/PP/QV /MAIN/1880/6874/27. 34 RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ/1880: June 30. 35 Algernon Graves, The Royal Academy of Arts, A Complete Dictionary of Contributors and Their Work from Its Foundation in 1769 to 1904, vol. 7 (London: Henry Graves and Co. and George Bell and Sons, 1906), 388. 36 Carolyn Wildgoose, John Throp and Sons, Stone Carvers of Leeds (privately published monograph, 2015), 95.

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Photo taken in Ethiopia in 1937. The author found it in a flea market in Rome, Italy, in 2010. From the author’s collection

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Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016 DOI 10.1215/10757163-3641843 © 2016 by Nka Publications

BENDING HISTORY Maaza Mengiste

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n 2010 I went to Rome on a fellowship to research my second novel, set during the 1935 Fascist invasion of Ethiopia and the war and brief occupation that followed. While there, I found that it was impossible to escape the past. Everywhere plaques and statues commemorate other eras: famous deaths and wars, territorial expansions and conquests. I also felt a strange sensation that bodies, specifically East African bodies, were their own kinds of monuments and vessels of a still unnegotiated past in Italy. And, specifically, I began to see my own figure as a carrier of a kind of history I didn’t want and I didn’t fully understand. I wrote the following account after an encounter on the street one afternoon in Rome.

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I have been in Rome, Italy, for the last six months to research and write about Fascist Italy’s 1935 invasion and war with Ethiopia. My days are a constant struggle to shift my mind and heart into the place where my body exists: this day of this month in 2011. This is where you are, not there. I walk the slender path between majestic Roman palazzos and the poisoned, decimated villages that the Italians left behind in Ethiopia. I am mindful that the soldati of whom I write once pointed their rifles at people who looked just like me, that I might be passing by their children and grandchildren, that the people

who stare at my Ethiopian face might connect me to those photographs distributed freely by a propaganda machine intent on depicting my people as a savage, sexual spectacle in desperate need of the generous hand of Benito Mussolini and the Italian people. The cobblestone streets change so easily to rocky trails. I catch my breath when I see a face that looks like a mix of Italian and East African roots. I want to pause in front of that person and stare, trace the feature that has crossed a shimmering sea, followed the arch of a blue sky, and made the journey from village to city. I want to gently unfold the layers of time that shield that private moment when two countries met in the form of bodies and produced a new type of history that present-day Italy still struggles to understand. I want to know what it is I am looking at. I do not know sometimes how to remind myself of where I am. On those days when I am confident that time has gone by, when I say that seven decades is long enough to push the disgust for Italy’s war tactics behind me, when I tell myself that even my grandfather—who lost a brother during this period, who remembered well the years of Italian occupation—did not seem to hate the colonizing nation, on those days, it seems, is when a hand reaches out in the middle of a busy sidewalk, a shop clerk smiles in recognition: You are Ethiopian. Yes. I know that face; my father was a soldier. My grandfather was Mengiste

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there. He was stationed in Gondar. He lived in Asmara. Do you know this village near Adua? He loved your country. He asked to be sent back. He didn’t want to return. A wink. A grin. A look back at my face, my body. He brought back photos, they add. Your women, they suggest with a smile and nod, leaving me to finish their thought. My stomach tightens.

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For weeks after arriving in Italy, I struggled with finding my footing in Rome. So much of the city depends on how you look at it, on how you position yourself in relation to the history of which it boasts. We either imagine ourselves as part of the lineage of conquest or remnants of the conquered. It is a decadent place, voluptuous, full of lines that continually drag one from present day to another moment in time. As the center for much of Mussolini’s activities during his reign, it was, I thought, the perfect place to be. My goal was to write from both sides of the battle lines in the Italo-Ethiopian war, to create Italian characters and render them as fully as my Ethiopians. But I couldn’t get past my discomfort of being in a country where most Italians either did not know about their colonial history, or they believed that unlike other colonizing nations Italy’s brand of subjugation was a kind one, benevolent even. At worst, it was an adventure gone wrong. Italians were la brava gente—the only decent people on the list of colonial forces who invaded Africa. Much of my research in archives contained this view of history, when I knew something different. And yet the challenge I had set for myself as a novelist was to create Italian characters I could sympathize with but who felt true to the violence I know occurred. I moved out of the archives and libraries onto the streets, to antique shops and flea markets, hoping to find stories told by Italian soldiers and officers themselves, some fragment of history, however incomplete, that was not a monument for public viewing but a personal record of a private moment. This is what I found: an old photograph of two people in military attire. Who do you see first: the conquered or the conqueror? The folded arms or the carefully positioned

legs? Look: it is as if they are standing on a hill, these two. Shadows like stains collecting in neat pools of dark earth behind them, hats shielding them from the hot African sun. Here is a boy mimicking manhood. Here is a man in a familiar military stance of arms across chest. And there, that foot, do you see it taking up space, claiming more land than is necessary? The photographer crouched to get this shot. It favors the two people in the center but forces our eye to traverse foreground and empty space before the imposing bodies appear. It is the boy and this officer who dominate the frame, but we are aware of land and its implied meaning of conquered territory and vastness. There was nothing here, the photo seems to say, until we came, and we are staying. This is a photograph about dimensions and space, about what rises up and rests between an empty landscape and modern construction. This is a photo about a boy, about many boys and men. This photo is about this little boy, straightbacked and slender, a narrow strip of brown in a sepia-colored world. This is about his folded arms and the frown. About the hat that sits perfectly centered on his head, protecting him from sun he is accustomed to. But everything you see in the boy reflects back on the Italian. The boy would be a truncated image on his own, only half-existing. This photo is really about the two of them. It is impossible to look at one without glancing at who is standing next to him. Together they are a trick mirror that distorts and snaps back from one to the other then back again. Once the eye has rested, once you take a step back, you notice other things: the way the elbows are almost touching, but not quite. The way their shadows almost push into each other, but not quite. The way a cigarette dangles from the mouth of this Italian, posed and poised. The way there is a woman in the background passing by, breaking the perfect symmetry, creating a kind of triptych, her unfinished step frozen in time, dangling above shifting territory, pointing me back to this little boy and his bare feet. The careful way his heels are tucked snug against each other, precise and neat; the way the Italian man wears his boots laced tight and has his hat tilted ever so slightly. This photo was taken in 1937.

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In early 1937, Mussolini had established racial segregation laws in Italy’s colonies, banning mingling between Italians and native populations at the risk of imprisonment for Italian citizens. All children of mixed heritage lost their Italian citizenship and were no longer considered legitimate. That same year saw a succession of orders and rules that progressively strengthened Italy’s racist policies, creating a system of apartheid thirteen years before racism was institutionalized in South Africa. Nineteen thirty-seven was the year of massacres and continued bloodshed. Though the war was declared a victory for Italy in 1936, poison gas was still dropping in Ethiopia. Thousands were dying in Italian prisons in East Africa, including the notorious Danane concentration camp in Somalia. Ethiopian patriots had taken to fighting in the hills, descending on the Italian military and laborers in ambushes, destroying roads and supply routes and lines of communications in a steady and expanding guerrilla war. Men and women and children were part of the effort to oust the invaders. It could be difficult for an Italian to know whom to trust. It must have been difficult at times to know what it was you were looking at. To live in harm’s way in the midst of a declared victory, to be a conqueror but to be unsafe, unsure, never fully comfortable. I found this photograph and several others of this same man and this boy, always together, either dressed alike or the boy in Western clothes. One photo shows the boy in uniform on a camel with a rifle slung on his shoulders, gazing down into the camera with pride. But what does this tell me about Italians in East Africa, or in particular, this Italian man and this young boy? I enter this image in the only way I can: as a novelist, as a fiction writer bending history to create a story that I hope will fill some gaps. There are questions I ask myself about the moments, days, months before and after the photograph. I wonder about the journey this man made back to Italy, this photograph and others in tow. What part of history did he want to remember? Is it the same part that draws me again and again to these photos? An Italian officer exists in my novel, and I have begun to move in his skin for chapters at a time. I am finding the voice that will speak for him as if

it were always meant to do so, as if he were born that way. With each new moment, I move toward complexity, toward uncomfortable truths that this photograph hints at but cannot voice. No story is ever simple. Every photograph extends beyond the frame. Each eye shapes what it sees, and history bends to fit our needs. Maaza Mengiste is a Fulbright Scholar and the award-winning author of  Beneath the Lion’s Gaze, selected by the Guardian as one of the ten best contemporary African books.

Mengiste

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DIFFERENT, BUT NOT ABNORMAL “OUT” IN AFRICA

Lyle Ashton Harris

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n this article I share a few observations and personal reflections that inform my recent work, which is an outgrowth of having spent extended periods in Ghana teaching one semester annually over the last seven years at New York University Global in Accra. The article’s subtitle, “‘Out’ in Africa,” intimates that I wish to explore ways in which being gay may be problematized based on what I encountered in Ghana. The circumstances for gay men and lesbians there are particularly complex and do not necessarily conform to a simple, binary logic characteristic of contemporary gay culture in the West, where one is either out or closeted, gay or DL.1 The title, “Different, but not Abnormal,” is taken from a flyer for a party that I found discarded in the street. What caught my eye was the rainbow flag motif, which has universally come to signify the gay community. I found it—or perhaps it found me—in 2005, soon after I arrived in Accra. The flyer extended an invitation to a private fundraising party for a notable gay rights organization, the Centre for Popular Education and Human Rights, Ghana. Visible on the card is a reference to the

Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016 DOI 10.1215/10757163-3641854 © 2016 by Nka Publications

Lyle Ashton Harris, Untitled (New York Times Pre-Election Self Portrait Commission), 2000. Digital ink jet print on watercolor, 41.5 x 33 in. Courtesy the artist. © Lyle Ashton Harris

Harris

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Thuram detail from Blow Up IV (Sevilla)

party venue, the Sea View Hotel, which uncannily served as a residence for the African American author Richard Wright when he visited the city in the 1950s, an experience that resulted in his publishing Black Power about the nationalist revolution in what was then the British Gold Coast colony.2 The Sea View Hotel is located in an area of the city called Jamestown, about which I will say more later. The party theme, “different, but not abnormal,” struck me as an apt characterization of the sense of empowered subjectivity African gay people are fostering among themselves in spite of the challenges and contradictions they face every day. Before traveling to Ghana much of my work since the early 1990s consisted of portraiture and selfportraiture. In 2000 the New York Times Magazine commissioned the untitled work reproduced here,

a chocolate-colored self-portrait published in an edition highlighting topical issues that anticipated the year’s upcoming US election. In the photograph, text scrawled on the torso reads “My Nigga,” and on my right arm is my birth date, “2/6/65.” I pose with handcuffs, inspired by the brutal stationhouse assault by police on Abner Louima in 1997 while he was held in custody; the image conveys a strong sense of angry passion. It is also suggestive of a Christlike figure and connotes a heightened sense of anxiety around desire, death, and mortality. Layerings such as these continue to interest me and have become more formally pronounced in my recent work. A fellowship at the American Academy in Rome that began in 2001 afforded me the opportunity to undertake photographic studies in public settings

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beyond the formal constraints of my previous studio work. A front-page story in the International Herald Tribune on racism in European soccer, with Italy at the epicenter, inspired me to approach an editor at the New York Times with a proposal to compose a related photographic essay and conduct accompanying interviews with several players such as Cafu, the most internationally capped male Brazilian player, and Masinga, who took South Africa to the World Cup in 1998. The resulting photographs, shot on the soccer field during the course of a game, capture not only the frenzy of Italian soccer matches, but also the aggression and delirious force of the masses that often requires paramilitary police deployments to intervene. My concurrent research on racism in sports included reading Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power, which explores these dynamics by drawing out their political implications, specifically the connections between the emergence of rulers and their relation to paranoia.3 Around this same time I was contracted to shoot a portrait of the notorious Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi to accompany a story published in the New York Times Magazine.4 I later used this formal study of the media mogul as one component in a series of new collage-based, site-specific assemblages collectively titled Blow Up, which I started producing soon after I relocated to teach in West Africa.

While working on the Italian soccer project, one of the many well-known soccer stars I had the opportunity to photograph and interview was Lilian Thuram, who was playing for Parma at the time. In contrast to other soccer players, Thuram was fearlessly outspoken about racism in European sports. What struck me most was the sophistication of his critique, which was quite uncharacteristic a decade ago, when that topic was only beginning to be discussed publicly. To give an example, at the 2013 conference Black Portraiture[s]: The Black Body in the West, Thuram noted how racism in its many forms presents a significant danger to us all, specifically because of the negative effects it has on self-esteem that get expressed in violence toward oneself and others. I might add that homophobia, sexism, classism, and other forms of exclusion follow a similar pattern. In Blow Up IV (Sevilla) (2006), which was installed at the Second International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Seville in 2006, I include a photograph of Thuram that I took in Italy. In this context, the image is situated among other elements: the portrait I shot of Berlusconi is just to the right of Thuram’s photo, and a classic image of Black Panther Huey Newton is just above. As a whole, Blow Up IV (Sevilla) consists of a multiplicity of massed images, collaged and layered to produce new relations of associative meaning that go beyond

Blow Up IV (Sevilla), 2006. Mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist. © Lyle Ashton Harris

Harris

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Untitled (Elmina #1), 2006. Archival pigment on Crane Museo rag paper, 18 x 27 in. Courtesy the artist. © Lyle Ashton Harris

any individual element. This series represents a new formal manifestation of many of the themes that have engaged me over the years, characterized by my directly confronting and thereby diffusing charged images that might otherwise threaten to subsume my subjectivity. A central element of Blow Up IV (Sevilla) is an Adidas ad, individually titled Readymade (2006), which was published in an Italian daily sports newspaper and features an unidentified brown-skinned man who bears a striking resemblance to me. When I first encountered the ad in print, it strongly suggested itself as a focal point for the entire piece. The figure representing my double appears to be servicing (if you will) the French Algerian celebrity footballer Zinedine Zidane; the pose bears an uncanny resemblance to Manet’s painting Olympia. As reproduced and appropriated in Blow Up IV (Sevilla), the original newsprint was splattered with my semen, a bodily intervention meant to mark it and make it my own, troubling the privileged masculine relation and racial hierarchy implied in the ad as well

as alluding to the ambivalent colonial desire that it suggests. The commanding presence and visual vibrancy of this mixed-media piece draws viewers in. A closer encounter often leaves them disturbed, compelling them to ask themselves questions they might rather avoid. Entering into the piece’s layerings, looking closer and closer across surface details (analogous to the classic Antonioni film Blow Up), what typically remains unspoken and invisible is revealed, opening up and out of the space of the piece itself. Though initially inspired by my earlier experiences in Italy, I produced Blow Up in 2005 during my first year of residence in Ghana. The work incorporates numerous elements that index the materiality of that particular setting, including a rice sack printed with a photograph of the black stars of the Ghanaian national football team set against the country’s flag, red-printed Ghanaian funerary fabric, and numerous other found objects, including portraits and various photographic materials.

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White Ebony, 2008. Acrylic on Ghanaian funerary fabric, 72 x 44 in. Courtesy the artist. © Lyle Ashton Harris

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In my seven years living in Ghana I amassed many images and created a working archive of photographs. One image, which I shot on my daily walk in the vicinity of my residence in the Osu neighborhood of Accra, captures a streetside billboard that presents the president at that time in front of the Ghanaian flag and reads, “100 Days of a Better Ghana.” Among the former colonies in West Africa, Ghana is generally considered one of the most stable in the region, both politically and economically. The billboard here celebrates the accomplishments of the late former president John Atta Mills, who was succeeded by the current president, John Dramani Mahama.5 In spite of the country’s long-standing embrace of modernity, particularly among its cosmopolitan elites, it is worth noting that consensual sexual relations between same-sex male partners in Ghana remains a criminal offense. This sentiment was reinforced in the rhetoric of some community leaders during the recent election campaign, when Ghana’s deputy information minister publicly described homosexuality as “alien to our culture,” and when the general secretary of the country’s Christian Council chided the West not “to impose what is acceptable in their culture on us.”6 Of course, many Ghanaians seem quite willing to embrace other aspects of Western consumer culture, as exemplified by Untitled (Elmina #1) (2006), a photograph of a local fisherman I shot in the coastal town of Elmina. Elmina was once the first stop of the Atlantic slave trade and the site of the oldest European-built structure in sub-Saharan Africa; it is currently a lively tourist destination. First exhibited in 2010 at CRG Gallery in New York, this image was among several to document scenes from my extensive travels across Ghana to places like Kumasi, seat of the Asante kingdom, and Jamestown, a vibrant fishing community and home of Richard Wright during his brief visit to Ghana, mentioned earlier. In Untitled (Jamestown #6) (2008), I capture a fragment of the bustling fishing community on the beach shore. Just outside the picture frame stands a seventeenth-century fort that once housed slaves awaiting transport and was used as a prison until 2007, when it fell into disuse. Upon visiting this site before 2007 I frequently noticed long lines of local women and children waiting outside, which piqued my interest. I discovered that they were there to visit incarcerated family members who were serving

their prison sentences in the former slave fort. After the prison closure, the site was being considered for architectural renewal, so I arranged a field trip with New York University students to visit and tour the premises. What we discovered hidden behind the fort’s immense stone walls was a warren of spaces. Scattered throughout we encountered the remaining fragile evidence of the site’s recent inhabitants in the form of newspaper cutouts pasted on the rough-hewn wall surfaces. Although the prisoners had been released or transferred, these abandoned artifacts—bearing witness to their desires and fantasies during incarceration—memorialized this lost time in the form of fragmentary wall collages. Consisting of images torn from popular magazines, including attractive women, expensive consumer products in advertisements, religious imagery, and contemporary political figures, these diverse expressions of yearning fascinated me immediately by virtue of their raw honesty and evoked in me a sense of empathy, uncanny recognition, and implicit connections with my own collaged, site-specific assemblages. In the catalogue for the Progress of Love exhibition at the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas, in 2012–13, curator Kristina Van Lee addresses my recent work, which preserves some of these ephemeral expressions, describing them as “a creative act of self-preservation through longing, the use of imagination and projection.”7 My engagement with this material became further developed in subsequent installation work that overlays image clusters and ephemera collected during my time in Ghana against mural-sized enlargements of my photo documentation of the Jamestown prison walls. Installed in a corner at CRG Gallery in New York, with the adjacent walls converging in a vanishing point suggested by the piece itself, this work captures my transcultural gaze, conveyed as a dialogic collision around sexual identity. The juxtaposition of photographic images, current media representations and news clippings, mirrors, found objects, and barbershop signage reflects the varying degrees of negotiation that I felt compelled to undertake as a queer man living in contemporary Ghanaian society. One individual element that comprises this installation includes a red logo for the Daily Graphic,

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Untitled (Accra #10), 2012. Courtesy the artist. © Lyle Ashton Harris

a leading Ghanaian newspaper, which reports in a front-page headline: “Four Homosexuals Jailed for Two Years.” Another front-page clipping from 2005 is reflected in a yellow-framed mirror and reads “Gays and Lesbians on Fire,” reflecting the hysterical media backlash that ensued in response to rumored plans for holding an international LGB conference in the country. Being confronted with such a reactionary news story soon after arriving in Ghana elicited in me a palpable sense of fear and initially left me feeling desperate to find ways to work through it by engaging coping strategies of self-empowerment against such a seemingly hostile homophobic cultural climate. As a distillation of the complexities and degrees of negotiation that

I encountered, this piece instantiates a uniquely queer gaze—an essentially fearless act of reframing through combining objects, commingling effects, seducing viewers confronted with their own reflections, and compelling them not to merely look away. The works I have described here strongly resonate with my initial explorations of collage in the mid-1990s, specifically with a body of work titled The Watering Hole (1996). This work consists of photographs framing a personal study—a collage on the walls of an interior—compiled of news clippings, sexy magazine ads, and my own Post-it notes and photographs. Undertaken as an exploration of the Dahmeresque, this work exposes the labyrinthine logic of consumption by which Harris

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the racially and sexually excluded are further marginalized in mainstream discourses, as well as the desperate search for validation that finds its only consummation in untimely death.8 These works are explicitly uncompromising while functioning as a form of exorcism against types of internalized social trauma that too often remain unseen and unspoken. In a related vein, my various artistic deployments of the image of global pop icon Michael Jackson, before his untimely passing in 2009, which include White Ebony (2008), created in collaboration with Ghanaian sign painter Nicholas Wayo, reproduce a cover of Ebony magazine and serve to tease and trouble the multiple associations and various readings that Jackson’s particular embodiment of racial and sexual ambivalence invites. Rendered in paint on traditional Ghanaian funerary fabric, woven with repeated skulls alternating with a phrase in the Twi language that translates as “Death destroys the family,” we are confronted in this piece with an androgynous and light-skinned Michael clad in virginal white, while the Ebony magazine cover text purports to reveal “the Africa you don’t know.” I leave it up to you to imagine what this may imply. In an attempt to reveal another side of contemporary Africa with which we may not be so familiar, I have compiled a number of personal photographs from my working archive. These casual, often intimate photographs document aspects of daily life in urban Accra through which I discovered a much greater acceptance of sexual diversity, although this still remains far from the general norm. I shot a number of the images at a private party near my Accra neighborhood that was hosted by the owner of a popular Ghanaian shop on the occasion of her gay son’s twenty-fifth birthday. With over a hundred people in attendance, dancing revelers of all persuasions unabashedly spilled out of the storefront onto the busy public thoroughfare. The guests reflected a diverse range of friends and extended members of this Ga family, including the hostess’s four children, one of whom was visiting with his German husband, with whom he is living in Europe in an openly gay marriage. Looking back, this experience served to expand my perspective on what it can mean when contemporary gay and lesbian people in Africa courageously embrace their desires and fashion

effective means of resistance and solidarity to affirmatively construct their subjectivities anew. The birthday party celebration presented a refreshing contrast to the typically clandestine gay clubs found in Africa, where only behind closed doors can one shed a well-honed public persona. Established to ensure one’s survival amid the dominant heterosexist society, such clubs provide a relatively safe space for many. I shot another set of images at a local club in Accra, where on Wednesday nights gay men and lesbian women congregate to enjoy themselves. Upon entering these welcoming spaces where gay people can openly express themselves performatively through dress and adornment, one can witness a decided shift in expressions of gay self-determination. In one photograph, a man flirts with another while dressed in paradoxically traditional Kente cloth—a stylishly irreverent fashion statement. This casual portrait typifies what might be found in many gay clubs in an urban environment. Internationally, gay men of African descent have embraced hip-hop culture and rap music, appropriating the style, sensibility, and coding that signifies masculinity and embodying it in their own way. Bolstered by broader forces in global popular culture and Internet access to expanded community networks, public expressions of gay identity and resistance have increased as people speak out against social repression. The potential of fomenting a backlash from a regressive social sector, fueled by an exploitative media, cannot be underestimated. Consequently, in certain contexts, being “out” often entails a strategic choice and becomes a fluid matter of degree. Lyle Ashton Harris is an associate professor of art and art education at New York University. Notes

1 “DL,” short for “down-low,” a slang term popularized by the African American gay community to refer to black men who publicly identify as heterosexual but engage in gay sex acts with other men. 2 Richard Wright, Black Power: Three Books from Exile (New York: HarperPerennial Modern Classics, 2008). 3 Elias Canetti, Masse und Macht (Crowds and Power), trans. Carol Stewart (New York: Viking, 1963). 4 Alessandra Stanley, “Berlusconi, the Return,” New York Times Magazine, April 15, 2001.

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5 Mills served as president of Ghana from 2009–12. Mahama is the author of My First Coup d’État and Other True Stories from the Lost Decades of Africa (New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2012). 6 Reverend Dr. Fred Deegebe, General Secretary of the Christian Council of Ghana, cited in 2011. For further record see “Christian Council Joins Calls to Condemn Homosexuality in Ghana,” Ghana News Agency, July 19, 2011, www.ghananewsagency.org /social/christian-council-joins-calls-to-condemn-homosexuality -in-ghana-31187. The second quote was stated in Parliament in June 2011 by Mike Oquaye, member of the New Patriotic Party, former member of Parliament for Dome-Kwabenya, former High Commissioner to India. For further documentation see Mike Oquaye, “Ghana, UK and Homosexuality,” Ghanaian Times, November 8, 2011. 7 Elias Kifton Bongmba, Francesca Consagra, and Banning Eyre, The Progress of Love, ed. Kristina Van Dyke and Bisi Silva (Houston: The Menil Collection; St. Louis: The Pulitzer Arts Foundation, 2012). 8 A reference to the convicted serial killer and sex offender Jeffery Dahmer, who committed acts of rape, murder, dismemberment, necrophilia, and cannibalism on seventeen boys and men between 1978 and 1991.

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RECLAIMING HISTORY A VISUAL ESSAY Elizabeth Colomba

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eing of Martinique descent but born and raised in France has shaped and influenced my perception of my self-identity. This dual background has pushed me to explore the totality of social experience and fuse my two worlds in my work. While acknowledging the past, I wish to reshape the narratives and bend an association of ideas so that a black individual in a period setting is no longer synonymous with slave subservience and, by extension, does not instill fear or mistrust. She becomes the center of her own tale and hastens it forward. Creating pieces that simulate Old Masters’ techniques while incorporating Western themes implies a precontemporary creation, an egalitarian existence in a story from which the black body is painfully absent. When a work of art depicts a figure (mythical, biblical, allegorical) the narrative is identified with the help of pictorial codes. Eros would be recognized by his arrows, Psyche 196 • Nka

is associated with the butterfly, and so forth. Thus, skin color no longer dictates the story of the protagonist but transcends it. The viewer no longer ponders status but rather representation, iconography. Reclaiming history and anchoring the spirit of the African diaspora by redefining its place is a difficult and ambitious task that requires patience and visual reappropriation. It could be attained by resetting one’s mind and establishing a different visual landscape devoid of servile narrative. By generating an environment for my subjects to inhabit a space that honors their presence and place in and through culture and time allows me to redefine not only how black people have been conditioned to exist, but also how black people have been conditioned to reflect upon themselves. Elizabeth Colomba is a representational artist living in New York City.

Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016 DOI 10.1215/10757163-3641865 © 2016 by Nka Publications

Elizabeth Colomba, The Ants, 2011. Oil on canvas, 24 x 18 in. Based on a mythological theme of Psyche and Eros. Courtesy the artist. © Elizabeth Colomba

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Summer, 2012. Oil on canvas, 72 x 36 in. Allegorical theme: four seasons. Courtesy the artist. © Elizabeth Colomba

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Mary in the Hall, 2008. Oil on canvas, 36 x 24 in. Biblical theme: New Testament. Courtesy the artist. © Elizabeth Colomba

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The Reading, 2015. Oil on canvas, 60 x 48 in. Mythological theme: Psyche and Eros. Courtesy the artist. © Elizabeth Colomba

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Chevalier de St. Georges, 2009. Oil on canvas, 30 x 46 in. Historical theme: black Mozart. Courtesy the artist. © Elizabeth Colomba

Phillis, 2010. Oil on canvas, 24 x 30 in. Historical theme: Phillis Wheatley. Courtesy the artist. © Elizabeth Colomba

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FROM BODY TO DISEMBODIMENT

Jean-Ulrick Désert

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rom the body as sign to the disembodiment of signs, the work of Jean-Ulrick Désert, a Haitian-born artist currently based in Berlin, Germany, has often used the image of the body. Most notably, in his earlier performative works such as Negerhosen2000, the public was allowed to submit portraits of the artist wearing skin-colored lederhosen. This would later inspire the use of nearly lost images of nineteenth-century black Germans rendered as cyanotypes in Prussian blue. The artist has progressively distanced himself from the use of his own body in his works whenever possible; therefore in his (The) White Man project, he hired a white English-speaking man in the Netherlands to impersonate him in the art gallery. There (the white) Jean-Ulrick Désert conducted free art classes to the public with an unnamed (black) 202 • Nka

helper. Reproductions of Manet’s Olympia of 1863 and postcards of the Dutch black-faced Zwarte Piet contributed to the decor and content of the classes. The artist progressed in later years to using the bodies of his audience to perform new works such as The Passion, where the spectator was invited to choose and model various elements of soccerhooligan fan costumes, denuded of color, national references, team, club, or corporate affiliations for a permanent photographic record. The artist acknowledges the trope that certain racialized bodies are perceived as magical, yet figures like a self-exiled jazz-era beauty have come to embody a diversity of meanings for Americans and Europeans. Désert has initiated a series he calls The Goddess Projects, in which the image of Josephine Baker, the American/French activist and performer,

Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016 DOI 10.1215/10757163-3641876 © 2016 by Nka Publications

Jean-Ulrick Désert, Morgensglück, Good Morning Prussia series, 2009. Cyanotype photography from digitally collaged negatives, 31 x 48 cm. © Jean-Ulrick Désert. Photo: Jean-Ulrick Désert

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The Passion, 2006. Digital photography, frames, and shelves, variable dimensions. Installation view, 2015. Courtesy Shelly and Donald Rubin Foundation, New York, and artist. © Jean-Ulrick Désert. Photo: Charles Roussel

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Negerhosen2000 / Gothik, 2001. Twelve stacked light boxes, digital prints on film, 73 x 73 x 292 cm. Installation view, Saavy Contemporary, Berlin, Germany, Désert Nka • 205 2013. Courtesy S. Burns Collection, Berlin, and artist. © Jean-Ulrick Désert. Photo: Jean-Ulrick Désert

The Goddess Constellations / Sky above Port-au-Prince Haiti 12 January 2010, 21:53 UTC, Grand Palais, Paris, France, 2012. Embossed metallic foil and velveteen on Styrofoam panels, 300 x 300 cm. © Jean-Ulrick Désert. Photo: Jean-Ulrick Désert

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Shrine of the Divine Negress no. 1, Goddess Projects series, 2009. Mixed media, wood, and colored gels on clear PVC, approximately 400 x 300 cm. Installation view, Kunstraum Dada Post gallery, Berlin, Germany, 2010. © Jean-Ulrick Désert. Photo: Michael Markwick

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Les battements des ailes des papillons peuvent déclencher des tornades au tour du monde (The flapping of the wings of butterflies can generate great storms), 2014, Dak’Art 11, Dakar Biennale, Senegal, 2014. Wood and textiles. © Jean-Ulrick Désert. Photo: Jean-Ulrick Désert

Secretum (I am very much in love w/u), 2014, Dak’Art 11, Dakar Biennale, Senegal, 2014. Glass, paper, inks. © Jean-Ulrick Désert. Photo: Jean-Ulrick Désert

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Amour Colère Folie—A Temporary Monument to Resistance, 2013. Public installation view, BIAC Martinique, Biennial of Contemporary Art, Martinique, West Indies, 2013–14. Mixed media, 500 x 900 cm. Courtesy BIAC. © Jean-Ulrick Désert. Photo: Nadia Huggins

serves as the project’s visual leitmotif. It was first deployed at the Havana Biennial as a large, folding, stained-glass black Madonna in Shrine of the Divine Negress No. 1. A later work, both abstract and literal, from the series The Goddess Constellations renders Josephine Baker’s image onto seven hundred fifty silver-foil cameos, replicating the stars in the sky above Port-au-Prince, Haiti, at the time of the devastating earthquake of January 12, 2010. Désert’s art practice continues to articulate the body, be it present or absent, including his two works presented at Martinique’s first biennial (BIAC) in 2013 and at the eleventh Dakar Biennale in 2014: Les battements des ailes des papillons peuvent déclencher des tornades au tour du monde and Secretum (I am very much in love

w/u). The African projects are a series of fullscale, redacted protest placards with velvet grips from his BlackOut series and a set of jarred secrets indicating on their clinical labels the abuse and ravaging of LGBT Africans. The later Caribbean project, Amour Colère Folie—A Temporary Monument to Resistance, is a seemingly makeshift monument in a public square of Martinique’s Fort de France. It is constructed of concentric crowdcontrol barriers and thirty quick-response codes containing voices of artists, activists, journalists, politicians, and poets. Jean-Ulrick Désert is a conceptual artist who was born in Haiti and established his Berlin, Germany, studio practice in 2002. Désert

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BLACK PRESENCE IN FRANCE Lewis Watts

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n January 2013, I came to Paris for the first time in forty years to present work at the first Black Portraiture(s) conference. I had planned to photograph there but had no agenda. My interest was piqued on the train from Charles de Gaulle airport, when five young black men in hoodies and backward baseball caps got on. I was immediately drawn to the critical mass of people of color in Paris, as well as the constant visual reference to African American music and culture that was present on the street. I began photographing and building up a network of contacts in France that began at the conference. I’ve had the opportunity to return multiple times, and I have since exhibited and published in France. In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo incidents, the refugee crisis, and the changing demographics in France and other parts of Europe, this investigation has taken on a wide range of complexities. French hip-hop is the second-largest-selling in its genre in the world, and it is not surprising that it has resonated with young immigrant populations. There is a vital jazz scene in France but also a growing specter of racism. I am interested in recording the ways in which black bodies exist in the world, and this project continues to be a stimulating and challenging one for me. I was very interested to show this work to an international audience at the conference in Florence, and I hope that the feedback and questions the work generates will continue. Lewis Watts is a San Francisco Bay Area-based photographer and professor emeritus of art at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Lewis Watts, Metro, Paris, 2013. Archival pigment print, 44 x 30 in., framed. Courtesy the artist

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Barbès Rochechouart, 2013. Archival pigment print, 44 x 30 in., framed. Courtesy the artist

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Belleville, Paris, 2014. Archival pigment print, 44 x 30 in., framed. Courtesy the artist

Ménilmont, Paris, 2014. Archival pigment print, 30 x 44 in., framed. Courtesy the artist

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Okra, Chateau Rouge Market, Paris, 2013. Archival pigment print, 30 x 44 in., framed. Courtesy the artist

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Police National Headquarters, Paris, 2015. Archival pigment print, 30 x 44 in., framed. Courtesy the artist

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Showing His Kicks, Sebastopol / Saint Denis, Paris, 2014. Archival pigment print, 30 x 44 in., framed. Courtesy the artist

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REVIEWS

READING BASQUIAT: EXPLORING AMBIVALENCE IN AMERICAN ART JORDANA MOORE SAGGESE BERKELEY: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS, 2014 Jordana Moore Saggese’s Reading Basquiat: Exploring Ambivalence in American Art is a monographic study of Jean-Michel Basquiat, an artist who experienced a near meteoric rise and fall. Saggese acknowledges that moments of the artist’s life were, in fact, dramatic; however, that is not her main concern. Rather, she sets her sights on giving his work the scholarly and historical attention it rightly deserves. The book is divided into four chapters, with one serving as an introduction and the others performing as its body. From this reader’s point of view, the manuscript begs for a conclusion, one that doesn’t so much neatly wrap up Saggese’s multiple intellectual strands as offer theoretical or methodological proposals to the fields of American art, African American art, and/or contemporary art, based on the prodigious research she has undertaken on Basquiat’s work. The introduction sets the stage for contemporary readers to grasp the art world of the 1980s. As she lays it out, the art world quickly became an increasingly commercial institution: artists jockeying for galleries and collectors; galleries forming stables of artists; gallerists selling works at everincreasing prices; collectors cherrypicking artists and artworks; and banks and corporations participating as collectors, investors, and insurers. At the same time, a stylistic sea change occurred in which the heady, cool, and anticommercial practice of conceptualists was replaced by the emotional, impassioned, and market-driven practice of neo-expressionists. Saggese positions Basquiat between these and other trends. She acknowledges that his work appears 218 • Nka

Courtesy University of California Press

most like other expressionists of the period, even while she is critical of the primitivism with which other critics have labeled the artist. Likewise, she agrees that Basquiat did not have the institutional training that some of his colleagues received, yet she pushes back on the notion that the artist was naive and unschooled. Similarly, though the author allows that the artist is most often compared to modern European artists and that he, in fact, places himself within this lineage, she admits that a diasporic consciousness informs his work. Thinking of Basquiat in relation to “multiconsciousness,” diasporic consciousness, or ambivalence is one of Saggese’s best contributions, for it accounts for his experiences as a person of African descent who was born and raised in the United States but whose parents hail from the Caribbean, an individual with a middle-class background who turned

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his back on such stability and chose instead to live more precariously, and a young and successful man who could afford to buy and wear the Armani power suit even while he could not hail a cab because of his brown skin and dreadlocked hair.1 Such multiple identifications defined Basquiat’s life; it is nonetheless difficult for the historian to reanimate them in order to provide a rich and textured account of his milieu. In chapter 1, “‘The Black Picasso’: Jean Michael Basquiat and Questions of Race,” Saggese walks what feels like a rather careful line in order to delineate where precisely blackness can be assigned to Basquiat and his work. She admits that he was the most successful black artist of the time, even while he did not acknowledge the existence of other African American visual artists. She asserts that he performed an artistic persona that reinforced stereotypes of blackness while simultaneously

lampooning them. Perhaps most effective is Saggese’s fleshing out of stylistic comparisons of Basquiat’s work to that of Picasso, Twombly, Dubuffet, and Pollock at the same time that she explores the African diasporic subject matter of his work. Evidence of the black or African diasporic content of Basquiat’s work is located in his exploration of boxing and the participation of African American male athletes such as Sugar Ray Robinson and Jersey Joe Walcott. According to the author, blackness, or a diasporic subjectivity, can be discerned in the artist’s interest in bebop-era improvisational jazz. Looking to Stuart Hall, Saggese suggests that it is most useful to imagine Basquiat constructing an identity for himself, based on his multiple identifications pulled from his various heritages, and synthesizing different heterogeneous cultural strands—African, Haitian, European, urban, and rural among them.2 “Creativity Found and Made,” the book’s second chapter, directs attention away from hip-hop and toward the important role improvisational jazz played in Basquiat’s art and practice. Indeed, Saggese finds her stride when she delves into bebop jazz. As practiced by musicians such as Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and Max Roach, bebop featured moments of improvisation punctuated by the riffing of elements appropriated from foundational sources. The author points to the fact that bebop pioneers communicated to insiders and aficionados and displayed their dexterity, virtuosity, and musical knowledge. Saggese then demonstrates that Basquiat employed similar methods in his painting practice. She compares the artist’s work to that of members of the Pictures Generation, artists Sherrie Levine and Robert Longo among them, who were similarly engaged with how images signify rather than with their original significances.3 This chapter, by this reader’s reckoning, is Saggese’s most ambitious: it meditates on the relationships between appropriation, copying, and imitation while at the same time deliberating on the myths of originality and authenticity that form the foundations of modernism. In Basquiat’s case, he appropriated from himself as well as from other athletic,

musical, literary, or visual artists as a way to reflect on genius, virtuosity, and activism and the role that racialization plays in each arena. The final chapter, “The Language of Expressionism,” takes up two related topics: the place of expressionism and the preeminence of text in Basquiat’s work. Here Saggese employs Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s notion of the rhizome, which she defines as “a displacement of linear narrative, origins, and hierarchical structures.”4 The author eschews easy binaries such as black/white, primitive/civilized, expressionism/conceptualism, and instinct/rationality that are often used to categorize and dismiss certain artists and styles. She focuses instead on Basquiat’s subversion of consumer culture through his engagement with the intimacy and speed associated with the Beat literary style as well as with the disconnect between language, meaning, and subjectivity. In some ways, Saggese’s methods are classics in the art historical canon: connoisseurship, iconographic readings, and artistic biography. Yet in other ways she expands the methodological canon, bringing literary criticism, improvisation theory, and music history to the table. The author does not hide that she employs those methods—and use them well, she does— but she also does not reflect critically on the politics of employing such approaches. For example, what are the pitfalls and advantages of considering an artist’s biography; what can the author say about the privilege of having been up-close-and-personal with so many Basquiat paintings; and what lessons does this study on Basquiat teach art history, Latino studies, or African American studies? Even though moments of the manuscript do not stray far enough from the language and argumentation of dissertation-stage writing, Reading Basquiat contributes greatly to scholarship on an artist whose work continues to be simultaneously highly valued (monetarily) and undervalued for its artistic merit.

Texas at Austin, where she directs the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies. Notes My thanks to art historian, curator, and writer Rebecca Giordano for assistance with research during the editing process. 1 Jordana Moore Saggese, Reading Basquiat: Exploring Ambivalence in American Art (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2014), 49. Here Saggese mobilizes art historian Henry Drewal’s term. See Henry John Drewal, “Signifyin’ Saints: Sign, Substance, and Subversion in Afro-Brazilian Art,” in Santeria Aesthetics in Contemporary Latin American Art, ed. Arturo Lindsay (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996). 2 Saggese, Reading Basquait, 38, 40. Saggese uses Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Walsh and Wishart, 1990), to make this complex argument. 3 Pictures is a 1977 exhibition featuring work by Troy Brauntuch, Sherrie Levine, Jack Goldstein, Robert Longo, and Phillip Smith and curated by Douglas Crimp at New York’s Artist’s Space. Pictures Generation is a 2009 exhibition curated by Douglas Ecklund at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The phrase “Pictures Generation” has come to refer to artists who were interested in both quoting earlier art forms and critiquing consumer culture. 4 Saggese, Reading Basquait, 117. Saggese references Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).

Cherise Smith is an associate professor of art history and African and African diaspora studies at the University of Smith

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REVIEWS

A NEW REPUBLIC KEHINDE WILEY

BROOKLYN MUSEUM OF ART FEBRUARY 20–MAY 24, 2015 Since the turn of the new millennium, Kehinde Wiley, American celebrity artist of the moment, has delivered a broadly appealing oeuvre to the center of the art world on a silver platter.1 Like other fans, a majority of art cognoscenti have been seduced by Wiley’s celebratory, formal portraits of self-styled young black men set against bright, patterned backdrops. Some, however, have been skeptical of not only the accessibility of his imagery, but also his retrophotorealist technique and resultant “superflat” style.2 In the midst of continuing widespread commentary vis-à-vis the Brooklyn Museum’s recent retrospective covering roughly the past fourteen years, Roberta Smith hit on something when she ventured a comparison with Norman Rockwell in Wiley’s charismatic balance of populist and high-art credibility, and, I would add, an emotional connection with viewers.3 The timing of Wiley’s breakthrough into the mainstream art scene was fortuitous, as African American hip-hop music and style reached an apex after two decades across diverse cultural and social spheres. Nonetheless, the black male art subject still stood out distinctly in the proverbial white box gallery venue in which Wiley, from the start, was staking his professional claim. In this sense, his art career harks back to Jean-Michel Basquiat’s highprofile outsider-insider art persona, as well as the multifaceted charge of Thelma Golden’s game-changing exhibition Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art.4 More immediate, as far as contextual resonance goes, has been the rash of official violence against black male youth in recent years, which could not help but bear on the Brooklyn show.5 Wiley, who grew up in South Central Los Angeles in the Rodney King era, cut this reality into the exclusion220 • Nka

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ary orbit of his chosen vocation by inserting b-boys into compositions lifted from Western art masterpieces, not unlike Robert Colescott did three decades earlier in cartoonish, satirical paintings like George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page from an American History Textbook (1974–75), highlighted in Black Male. Beyond their diametrically opposed painting sensibilities, Wiley’s embrace of art pedagogy, similar in an obvious way to his predecessor, is interesting. Such art historical pastiche, by Wiley and more broadly, has been critiqued as variously clever and engaging, and old hat, if not gimmicky. Yet in my view the very transparency of the mode complements Wiley’s strong social messages as well as the veneer effect of his painting surface. So, in Wiley’s Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps (2005), a climactic example of this type in the show, the cutout conqueror in JacquesLouis David’s propagandistic portrait

(itself produced by David’s studio in five versions) has been replaced with a similarly rendered, urban warrior tricked out in camouflage. The clashing of “Williams,” as the subject is identified on the canvas above the names of those rulers preceding Napoleon, noted on the David, and the Eurocentric-patterned, wallpaper-like backdrop brings a postmodern visual bling to the remix of representational status and power. Not visible in most reproductions, in person Wiley’s Napoleon reveals minute sperm-shaped squiggles woven into the faux-fabric pattern. Also repeated on an ornately carved, Wiley-designed frame, this element outs masculinity themes latent in the tradition signified by the David. What Wiley has been doing, again pretty much from the start, is overlaying his African American, male, gay subjectivity and agency onto this artistic lineage with which he identifies closely. Wiley’s near exclusive turn to hiphop subjects, facilitated by the sartorial

Kehinde Wiley, Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps, 2005. Oil on canvas, 130.5 x 121 x 12 in., framed. Courtesy Kehinde Wiley and Sean Kelly, New York; Roberts and Tilton, Los Angeles; Galerie Daniel Templon, Paris/Brussels; and Stephan Friedman, London. © Kehinde Wiley

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Conspicuous Fraud Series #1 (Eminence), 2001. Oil on canvas, 72.5 x 72.5 in. Courtesy The Studio Museum in Harlem. © Kehinde Wiley. Photo: Marc Bernier

bricolage he encountered on 125th Street while doing a residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2001–2, led to another layer of content and controversy in his oeuvre, namely, in his words “street casting.” Thus, male strangers were invited to participate in portrait projects involving photo sessions in poses collaboratively selected from art history books. None from his first series of this type, Passing/Posing (c. 2002–3), is in this show, but several are on view in the museum’s permanent collection, a bonus of this venue. The earliest large-scale painting in the show, Conspicuous Fraud Series #1, Eminence (2001), which depicts a solitary black male surrounded by a smoky, curlicue form that may also be “growing” out of his hair, serves to elucidate the roots (several puns intended) of his subsequent groove. Some critics have called out the street casting as manipulative and even predatory—charges that could be directed at many famous artists

throughout history and are arguably intrinsic to the portrait genre; the criticism seems unduly personal, if not homophobic, here.6 The dynamic that this brings to the oeuvre is better addressed through structural discourses like the artist-model dyad and the artist-flaneur. Through those frameworks, my reading of the tack only enhances the content of affirmation and desire in Wiley’s art. Wiley pushed the homo-spectatorial gaze forward explicitly in the Down series, which features sprawling, horizontal images of black men in art historical poses of heroic death. A show-stopper is Femme piquée par un serpent (2008), in which the sharp edge of the low-slung jeans across the figure’s Jockeys is centralized on the canvas and the fluid gender switch-up from the source is amplified in the effusively floral, wraparound patterning. By the time Wiley embarked on his most ambitious series to date, World Stage, begun c. 2007 and ongoing,

he had a crew of assistants, who, among other things, helped expand his signature-busy backdrops; his primary painting activity subsequently has focused on the figures, à la Western “masters” across centuries, including David. Although there may be some irony in the fact that painterly detail was an important aspect of Wiley’s early acclaim a half century after Warhol’s Factory, this development in his practice has to be considered part of his art—an extension of artistconceived, illusionistic imagery and modes of production. Shaping up as a survey of international hip-hop style, World Stage has grounded the “new republic” concept of the artist-titled Brooklyn show. First stop, Beijing, which resulted in portraits of local club kids blended with Mao-era youth posters and chinoiserie patterns. From there, on to Africa (Dakar, Senegal, and Lagos, Nigeria) and a series that narrates, in condensed form, a postcolonial, two-way African diaspora. In a major example, Dogon Couple (2011), two figures in African American–inspired get-ups are posed as a West African sculpture type that alludes to duality and gender codes against a backdrop of pan-African wax-print textile designs popularized in contemporary art by Nigerian British artist Yinka Shonibare. Twins and couples are recurrent in much diasporic art as a reference to their symbolic importance in many African societies, and they also appear elsewhere in Wiley’s oeuvre. Again, the concept of a rainbow-coalition tour, which has passed through Israel, India, Brazil, Jamaica, and Haiti so far (as represented in the show), may seem both simplistic and extravagant; however, the earnestness of the pursuit and yield of exuberant imagery remains compelling. One gallery was given over to Wiley’s recent foray into female subjects, with a number of paintings from his 2012 series Economy of Grace. In these, the previously self-fashioned sitters have given way to professional models bedecked by Givenchy designer Roberto Tisci, reflecting and revealing (among other things) a shift in creative milieu for Wiley. The diva couture and exaggerated fertility symbolism of densely foliaged backdrops conjures futuristic Botticellian goddesses. Linked to this series in the center Cutler

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REVIEWS Dogon Couple, 2008. Oil on canvas, 105 x 93 x 2.5 in., framed. Courtesy Kehinde Wiley and Sean Kelly, New York; Roberts and Tilton, Los Angeles; Galerie Daniel Templon, Paris/Brussels; and Stephan Friedman, London. © Kehinde Wiley

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Femme piquée par un serpent, 2008. Oil on canvas, 102 x 300 in., framed. Courtesy Kehinde Wiley and Sean Kelly, New York; Roberts and Tilton, Los Angeles; Galerie Daniel Templon, Paris/Brussels; and Stephan Friedman, London. © Kehinde Wiley

of the gallery was Bound (2014), a colossal bronze of three female busts intertwined by towering braided and adorned coifs; wrangled classicism, surrealism, and Afrocentrism; and myriad specific references from nineteenth-century orientalist allegory to artistic peers Alison Saar and Maria Campos-Pons. Bound is partly the outcome of earlier sculptural experiments of b-boy Roman-type male busts, also on view in the show—somewhat more predictable but well compatible with Wiley’s by now autonomous art thinking. Another new direction on display was the substitution of landscape backgrounds for some of the largescale portraits that did not match the comprehensive narrative-optical connection of the pattern-stamped work. In a group of intimate portraits after Renaissance precisionist Hans Memling, however, the miniaturist landscapes behind the tattooed and T-shirted (male) subjects made clear art sense meticulously appropriated. Which brings us to a landscape drawn from a Rubens portrait of Philip II in a portrait of Michael Jackson, Equestrian Portrait of King Philip II (2009), begun before and completed after Jackson’s death. In this context, the represented space is peculiarly vacuous, apropos of the wispy-maned figure and steed in their matching, kitschy costumes, recalling the tragi-camp late paintings of Giorgio DiChirico. A number of more resolved paintings of celebrities by Wiley have been exhibited and publicized through these years that would

have better added this dimension to a retrospective (notwithstanding logistics that may have precluded such loans). Finally, two recent series develop the spiritual dimensions, with regard to black men especially, implied equally with the sensual in much of Wiley’s art: gold-leaf-backed “saint” portraits adorned with delicate floral filigree, typically overstated but undeniable in shimmering surface appeal; and recent stained-glass paintings (or paintings produced in stained glass) of young men taking up pictorial positions of saints and clergymen. Blue-jean-toned stained glass is definitely cool, as are backlit brand logos and multiracial putti. Still, most engaging in the oeuvre so far in light of the Brooklyn show are the surface semiotics of the simulated cloth-backed painted portraits in their evocative constellation of culture, class, gender, commodity, and slick joie de peintre—brightly packaged for the masses. Jody B. Cutler is an art historian affiliated with St. John’s University in New York City.

2 The reference to art star Takashi Murakami, who coined the term for his own pop-animé, is relevant. 3 Roberta Smith, “Review: ‘Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic’ at the Brooklyn Museum,” New York Times, February 19, 2015, www .nytimes.com/2015/02/20/arts/design /review-kehinde-wiley-a-new-republic-at-the -brooklyn-museum.html?_r=0. Especially after a large, traveling Rockwell show organized by the Rockwell Museum and the High Museum of Art stopped in 2002 at that bastion of the avant-garde, the Guggenheim, criticism began to veer toward the emotional and metaphorical aspects of his work; e.g., Arthur C. Danto, “Age of Innocence,” The Nation (January 7, 2002): 47–50. 4 Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, November 10, 1994–March 5, 1995. 5 Among high-profile cases of the death of unarmed black men by police ongoing through the course of the Wiley show are Michael Brown (2014, Ferguson, Missouri), Eric Garner (2014, Staten Island, New York), and Freddie Gray (2015, Baltimore, Maryland). 6 For a summary see Michelle-Renee Perkins, “All Is Fair in Love and Art Criticism?,” International Review of African American Art Plus, iraaa.museum.hamptonu.edu/page /All-is-Fair-in-Love-and-Art-Criticism%3F (accessed May 1, 2015).

Notes

A New Republic is also on view at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, June 11–September 5, 2016. 1 In fact, the “shiny” aspect of Wiley’s painting is analyzed in depth in Krista Thompson, “The Sound of Light: Reflections on Art History in the Visual Culture of Hip Hop,” Art Bulletin 91, no. 4 (December 2009): 481–505.

Cutler

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Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art is published two times a year, in May and November, by Duke University Press, 905 W. Main St., Suite 18B, Durham, NC 27701, on behalf of Nka Publications. Submissions/correspondence Please send submissions and inquiries to The Editors Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art Toboggan Lodge, Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853 Phone: 607-255-0696 Fax: 607-254-4271 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.dukeupress.edu/nka Unsolicited material must be accompanied by proper return postage. World Wide Web Visit Duke University Press Journals at www.dukeupress.edu/journals. Subscriptions Direct all orders to Duke University Press, Journals Customer Relations, 905 W. Main St., Suite 18B, Durham, NC 27701. The 2017 volume of Nka corresponds to issues 40–41. Annual subscription rates: print-pluselectronic institutions, $200; print-only institutions, $190; e-only institutions, $160; individuals, $50; students, $35. For information on subscriptions to the eDuke Journals Scholarly Collections through HighWire Press, contact [email protected]. Print subscriptions: add $8 postage and applicable HST (including 5% GST) for Canada; add $10 postage outside the U.S. and Canada. Back volumes (institutions): $190. Single issues: institutions, $95; individuals, $27. For more information, contact Duke University Press Journals at 888-651-0122 (toll-free in the US and Canada) or 919-688-5134; [email protected].

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