Nka

JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN ART

FOUNDED 1994
5

6
RAMEZ ELIAS
IN MEMORIAM 19582016

FROM THE EDITORS

Cheryl Finley and Deborah Willis
FOUNDING PUBLISHER
Okwui Enwezor 8 THE SLAVE AT THE LOUVRE
EDITORS
AN INVISIBLE HUMANITY
Okwui Enwezor Françoise Vergès
Salah M. Hassan
Chika Okeke-Agulu 14 WHO’S ZOOMIN’ WHO?
THE EYES OF DONYALE LUNA
ASSOCIATE EDITORS Richard J. Powell
Sarah Adams • Carl Hazelwood • Nancy Hynes

CONTENTS
Derek Conrad Murray • Sunanda Sanyal

CONSULTING EDITORS
Rory Bester • Isolde Brielmaier • Coco Fusco
NUMBER 38–39, 2016
Kendell Geers • Michael Godby • Elizabeth Harney
Thomas Mulcaire • O. Donald Odita • Gilane Tawadros
Frank Ugiomoh
22 DEFACING THE GAZE
MANAGING EDITOR AND REIMAGINING THE
Clare Ulrich
BLACK BODY
GRAPHIC DESIGN CONTEMPORARY CARIBBEAN WOMEN
Marshall Hopkins ARTISTS
Michelle Stephens
ADVISORY BOARD
Norbert Aas • Florence Alexis • Rashid Diab
Manthia Diawara • Elsabet Giorgis • Freida High 32 BLACK, QUEER, DANDY
dele jegede • Kellie Jones • Sandra Klopper THE BEAUTY WITHOUT WHOM
David Koloane • Bongi Dhlomo Mautloa WE CANNOT LIVE
Gerardo Mosquera • Helen Evans Ramsaran Monica L. Miller
Ibrahim El Salahi • Janet Stanley • Obiora Udechukwu
Gavin Younge • Octavio Zaya 40 POSING THE BLACK PAINTER
KERRY JAMES MARSHALL’S PORTRAITS OF
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.
ARTISTS’ SELFPORTRAITS
Hendricks Peter Erickson

Nka wishes to acknowledge support for the publication of the journal

52 AU NÈGRE JOYEUX
through generous grants from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the
EVERYDAY ANTIBLACKNESS
Visual Arts, the Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development, GUISED AS PUBLIC ART
The Hague, Netherlands, and David Hammons. Trica Keaton

Andy Warhol Foundation 60 SAGA BWOYS AND

RUDE BWOYS
MIGRATION, GROOMING, AND DANDYISM
Michael McMillan
Nka is published by Duke University Press
on behalf of Nka Publications.
70 PORTRAITS IN BLACK 152 JAMES BARNOR
STYLING, SPACE, AND SELF IN THE EVER YOUNG, NEVER SLEEP
WORK OF BARKLEY L. HENDRICKS AND Renée Mussai
ELIZABETH COLOMBA
Anna Arabindan-Kesson 162 MAKING SPACE,
CHANGING SPACE
80 POSTPOST BLACK PEOPLE AND NEW MUSEUMS
BLACK? Ngaire Blankenberg
Nana Adusei-Poku
168 OTA BENGA IN THE ARCHIVES
90 CONFESSIONS OF UNMAKING MYTHS, MAPPING RESISTANCE
A BLACK FEMINIST ACADEMIC IN THE MARGINS OF HISTORY
Pamela Newkirk
PORNOGRAPHER
Mireille Miller-Young
174 BUST BRAWL
THE BATTLE OVER A BLACK BRONZE
96 A PICTURE’S WORTH PRINCE
TOWARD THEORIZING A BLACK/QUEER
Yemane I. Demissie
GAZE IN THE INTERNET “PORNUTOPIA”
Jafari Sinclaire Allen
182 BENDING HISTORY
Maaza Mengiste
102 ICONS BROUGHT
FORWARD 186 DIFFERENT, BUT NOT ABNORMAL
RENÉE COX’S QUEEN “OUT” IN AFRICA
NANNY OF THE Lyle Ashton Harris
MAROONS
Kimberli Gant 196 RECLAIMING HISTORY
A VISUAL ESSAY
110 THE UNNAMED BODY Elizabeth Colomba
ENCOUNTERING, COMMODIFYING,
AND CODIFYING THE IMAGE OF 202 FROM BODY TO DISEMBODIMENT
THE BLACK FEMALE Jean-Ulrick Désert
Alissandra Cummins and Allison Thompson
210 BLACK PRESENCE IN
122 NO MORE “POISONOUS,
FRANCE
DISRESPECTFUL, AND SKEWED Lewis Watts
IMAGES OF BLACK PEOPLE”
BARBARA WALKER’S LOUDER THAN WORDS
Celeste-Marie Bernier REVIEWS

134 HANK WILLIS THOMAS 218 READING BASQUIAT

A NECESSARY CAUTION
EXPLORING AMBIVALENCE IN
Kerr Houston
AMERICAN ART

142 NO BODY’S PERFECT 220 A NEW REPUBLIC

Kanitra Fletcher
KEHINDE WILEY
RAMEZ ELIAS
In Memoriam (1958–2016)

I
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 dic-
tionaries in Egypt, founded in 1913 the Elias Modern
Publishing House, which has contributed tremen-
dously 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
Nka • 5
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
H
ow the  black  body has been imaged in the
West has always been a rich site for global
examination and contestation. The represen-
tation and depiction of black peoples often has been
governed by prevailing attitudes about race and sex-
uality. 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, con-
stantly 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, perfor-
mance, 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
Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
6 • Nka DOI 10.1215/10757163-3641612 © 2016 by Nka Publications
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 pur-
chasable, global marketplace, and what are its lega-
cies? In what visual and nonvisual spaces do these
images and instances either take permanent resi-
dence, reemerge, recycle, or simply become illegi-
ble? How can performing blackness be liberating for
both the performer and the audience? Can the black
body be deracialized to emphasize cultural group-
ings, encouraging appropriation and varied perfor-
mances 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 read-
ings, Black Portraiture[s] included a wide range of
discussions relating to the experiences of a people
who have been caricatured through much of visual
history, particularly in nineteenth-century anthro-
pological 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 recon-
structing 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 con-
temporary 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, schol-
ars, 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 profes-
sor 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 Nka • 7
THE SLAVE
AT THE LOUVRE
AN INVISIBLE HUMANITY

I
n 2012, for the Paris Triennial, I organized a
Françoise Vergès 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 Saint-
Domingue 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 slav-
ery 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
8 • Nka 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

Vergès Nka • 9
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
10 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
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 representa-
tions of blacks with representations of the enslaved.
From the late 1400s to the early 1600s, Africans
living in or visiting Europe included artists, aris-
tocrats, saints, and diplomats. It was not until the
second half of the nineteenth century that abolition-
ist propaganda, especially British, popularized the
representation of the suffering body of the enslaved
and the cruelty of slave trade and slavery. On the
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 mascu-
linity, 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 trad-
ing 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 Nka • 11
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 confed-
eration 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, litera-
ture, commerce and a sort of equilibrium.”5
The 1713 Treaty of Utrecht speaks of the neces-
sity of establishing peace “for the perpetual tranquil-
lity 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 dis-
pose 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
12 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
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, inaugu-
rated by the Treaty of Utrecht, 60 percent of the total
African captives were deported. The connection
between the demand for goods, as well as construc-
tion 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 anti-
black 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 col-
onies. 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
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 for-
bade 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, dis-
placing 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 inde-
pendent 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 civi-
lization/barbarism, modern/primitive to forge a singular culture.
Andrade turned the European accusation of savagery and canni-
balism 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).

Vergès Nka • 13
WHO’S
ZOOMIN’
WHO?
THE EYES OF DONYALE LUNA

I
n 1996 Taschen Verlag, widely known for their
Richard J. Powell beautifully designed and reasonably priced art
books, joined forces with Museum Ludwig in
Cologne, Germany, to produce a spectacular 760-
page 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 photo-
graphs graced the book’s front, back, and spine: pho-
tojournalist Fritz Henle’s 1943 portrait of Nieves, one
of Mexican muralist Diego Rivera’s models; surreal-
ist 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 cap-
tivating 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

14 • Nka 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 dis-
tinction—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
16 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
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 alle-
giances 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 pho-
tographic collage depicting the British fashion
model Jean Shrimpton wearing a paper cutout hot
pink astronaut’s helmet and, on selected publica-
tion runs, an affixed plastic sticker of a lenticular,
blinking blue eye placed over Shrimpton’s right
eye. Among other memorable subjects for this spe-
cial 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-year-
old 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
Cover of March 1966 British Vogue, featuring Donyale Luna. Photo: David Bailey/Vogue. © The Condé Nast Publications Ltd.

Powell Nka • 17
(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 repu-
tation for being less corrupted by racial prejudice,
recommended Europe as the ideal environment
in which to work in fashion. Although a profes-
sional 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 imme-
diately 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 pho-
tographer David Bailey would have been considered
a veritable “blast.” London’s reputation as Europe’s
youth capital was legion, and David Bailey was
18 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
considered the scene’s official chronicler. Fashion’s
centrality to this “youthquake,” evident in the ready-
to-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 arriv-
ing 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 com-
mentators 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
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 ear-
lier) 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 prob-
ably 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 Andreas Feininger, The Photo-journalist, 1955. Gelatin silver print.
Look,” Luna’s unremitting, emphatic demeanor © Time Life Pictures

was beauty in action and demonstrated an almost

indiscernible call-and-response between the pho-
tographer 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 pho-
tography in Gruber’s extensive collection.
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 exact-
ing eye and employment of a compositional rich-
ness and economy that veered toward the surreal.
March was a regular contributor to twen, a pioneer-
ing 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 Nka • 19
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, dra-
matic 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 pronounce-
ment 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 photo-
graphic 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
20 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
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, cyclops-
like 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 comedi-
ans 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 imagi-
nation, 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 necessar-
ily 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 Profes-
sor 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
(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 segregation-
era 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 Nka • 21
DEFACING THE GAZE
AND REIMAGINING THE
BLACK BODY
CONTEMPORARY CARIBBEAN
WOMEN ARTISTS

I
n a now canonical 1990 essay, the Caribbean
Michelle Stephens 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 subjec-
tivities 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 fore-
closes or excludes woman, as a discursive category,
from the framework of racialized subjectivity estab-
lished 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 con-
ventions 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

22 • Nka 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
Oneika Russell, Olympia 7, from The Olympia Series, 2006. Digital print. Courtesy the artist
24 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
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 nineteenth-
century 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

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 voyeuris-
tic, 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 repre-
sentative of a person’s ‘socialised self ’ in portraiture
. . . the ‘front of an individual’ . . . has persisted well
beyond the eighteenth century.”7 As a master signi-
fier, 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 atten-
tion 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 differ-
ent 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 differ-
ence. 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 epi-
dermal 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 Nka • 25
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 concep-
tion 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 phal-
lic order struggles to represent and can never fulfill.
This is the body of affect, constituted by “visceral
forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than
Ebony G. Patterson, Untitled (Venus Inverts), 2005. Collagraph, 96 x 192 in. Courtesy the artist and Monique Meloche Gallery. © Ebony G. Patterson
26 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
conscious knowing, vital forces insisting beyond
emotion—that can serve to drive us toward move-
ment, toward thought” and toward multiple, mobile
forms of relation.14 This is the phenomenological
black body Frantz Fanon contrasted with epider-
malization, 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 subjectiv-
ity 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 him-
self as whole—the female nude offers a very differ-
ent 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
skin has been associated with masculinity. Claudia
Benthien argues, for example, that depictions of
the idealized male nude borrow the hard muscu-
larity 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 ‘imperme-
able 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 inter-
nal 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 origi-
nal “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 ful-
fill 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 psycho-
pathology 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 shadow-
ing 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 frighten-
ing, anxiety-producing figure for those missing
parts that the white man uses the phallus and other
phallic props to defend himself against.23
Stephens Nka • 27
Ebony G. Patterson, Vulva II, 2006. Mixed-media collagraph, 108 x 60 in.
Courtesy the artist and Monique Meloche Gallery. © Ebony G. Patterson

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

 Fanon’s “phobogenic object,” the Negro “penis
symbol” that is also “a stimulus to anxiety,” is a met-
onymic 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, uncir-
cumcised 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 signi-
fier 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 paint-
ing 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, mus-
cular, 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 phal-
lus 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, head-
less, and anonymous female torso of an ample-bod-
ied Venuslike figure reference the fatty, fleshy, vis-
cous, 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 phalliciza-
tion 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 “unde-
cipherable 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 (exhi-
bition 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 Nka • 29
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, 1500-
1900 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 183.
12 Benthien, Skin, 38.
13 O’Grady, “Olympia’s Maid,” includes a “Postscript,” originally pub-
lished 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 loca-
tion 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 police-
man must beat into submission, but also the beauty
without whom he cannot seem to live.
Robert Reid-Pharr, Once You Go Black
Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
32 • Nka DOI 10.1215/10757163-3641656 © 2016 by Nka Publications
I
f blackness itself is a “sexual crime,” if “the col-
ored is thought to be more prone to sexual per-
version,” 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 pos-
ture that demands not only notice but acclaim, and
maybe even an aggressive embrace. Though pres-
ent 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
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 Nka • 33

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 ques-
tion 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 rela-
tionship between Shonibare and Wilde by present-
ing a short history of the black dandy that suggests
that pairing these two artists is, like the blackness
34 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
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 him-
self 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 vis-
ible 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 edu-
cated 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 high-
lighted 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 seem-
ingly appealing.
 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 isola-
tion 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 same-
sex 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 simultane-
ously, 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, politi-
cal, 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 orna-
ment 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 min-
strel performances and in the iconography of
nineteenth-century popular culture.7 The urbane,
sarcastic, buffoonish, and sexually aggressive char-
acters 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 min-
strel 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 Nka • 35
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 eco-
nomic mobility?
Although the early minstrel show presented the
dandy in slightly different guises, it consistently
associated the figure with sexual threat and class cri-
tique. 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 black-
face 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
36 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
limit the total force of his boundary crossings. The
black dandy’s overweening and inappropriate sexu-
ality 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
with Wilde, therefore, becomes a locus for imaging
the intersections of race, class, nationality, sexual-
ity, and gender—a perfect figure for artist Yinka
Shonibare to use to re-dress this history of postco-
lonial 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 photo-
graphic work was, perhaps, inevitable. Whereas
most of his sculptures are displayed without a back-
ground, 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 black-
ness, 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 loca-
tions (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 ser-
vice, 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 board-
room. 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 seem-
ingly triumphant, within the scenes Shonibare as
Victorian dandy looks both in command and awk-
wardly 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 Nka • 37

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  and the melancholy that accompanies this lonely
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 trium-
phant and even more cautionary about the subver-
siveness 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 aestheti-
cism or the ethical problem of psychological influ-
ence, 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
38 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
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 con-
templates 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,
position.
If “the critic is he who can translate into another
manner or a new material his impression of beauti-
ful things,” as Wilde states in his aphoristic preface
to The Picture of Dorian Gray, then Shonibare’s
transformations of the history of British imperial-
ism 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 [representa-
tion 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 head-
less, 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
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 Nka • 39
POSING THE
BLACK PAINTER
KERRY JAMES MARSHALL’S
PORTRAITS OF ARTISTS’ SELF-PORTRAITS

I
n the period 2007–10 Kerry James Marshall com-
Peter Erickson pleted a cluster of portraits of painters in a studio
setting.1 Their extraordinary dramatic range and
power are designed “to reclaim that image of black-
ness 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

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

40 • Nka 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

Erickson Nka • 41
 As the idiomatic language of the title suggests,
Shadow of His Former Self turns on the racially neg-
ative 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 self-
portraiture, 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 self-
portraiture. 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
42 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
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 invis-
ible 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 clari-
fication 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 aes-
thetic impact of his rendering of blackness:
The problem was how to bring that figure close to
being a stereotypical representation without col-
lapsing completely into stereotype. I was playing at
the boundary between a completely flattened-out
stereotype, a cartoon, and a fully resonant, compli-
cated, 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 hypervisualiza-
tion 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 particu-
lar, the portraits of artists painting portraits com-
municate a paradoxical combination of visibility
and invisibility. The artists unquestionably possess Phillis Wheatley’s “To S. M. a young African Painter,
a strong visual force, but at the same time Marshall’s on seeing his Works.”12
chosen absence implies an emblem, or metaphor, of We are inclined to hope, or to imagine, that
residual invisibility. His stance of distanced invest- Moorhead’s encounter with Wheatley through his
ment becomes part of the intrigue. portrait of her, which we know from the frontis-
piece of her volume, inspired the two artists, though
Black Artists’ Self-Portraiture both are slaves, and the descriptive border over
It is telling that Marshall’s series begins with his Wheatley’s image identifies her as “Negro Servant.”
only portrait that has a specific title, as well as the We have to believe that he received encourage-
only painting that refers to a historical figure. The ment from the cross-media mixture envisioned in
title is Scipio Moorhead, Portrait of Himself, 1776. Wheatley’s poem to him: “Still may the painter’s
The painter Scipio Moorhead is believed to have and the poet’s fire / To aid thy pencil, and thy verse
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 self-
portrait—a fact for which there is no tangible evi-
dence 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 ques-
tion. 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 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
at the end of the title reminds us, reaches back to Marshall
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 conspire!” Yet idealism about this frail foundation
work of this enslaved black portraitist. The title’s will take us only so far. The logic of jumping from
conspicuous avoidance of the obvious term “self- the point of origin supplied by this fragile legacy
portrait” in favor of the more convoluted “portrait to the anonymous contemporary black portraitists
of himself ” underscores the question of the black depicted in the rest of Marshall’s series is both beau-
man’s entitlement. Moorhead’s left hand lifts the tifully and disturbingly appropriate. The profusion
brush high, while the open fingers of his right hand of works suggests that the numbers have multiplied,
grip the easel. The most arresting feature is that we thus relieving Moorhead’s isolation. The continued
cannot see what is on the canvas. We are forced to anonymity suggests that their status remains tenu-
rely on the eyewitness account of the black poet ous and their occupation still embattled. Marshall’s

Erickson Nka • 43
initial portrait of an artist has raised the stakes as becomes more complicated, because it includes
high as possible. a canvas within the canvas and hence expands
to encompass three images of the artist: the
Out of One Many double figure of the painter and her image inside
A general statement by Kerry James Marshall about the painting, plus Marshall as the unseen third
art making ten years earlier provides a point of painter outside the frame. The women pose with
entry into the 2008 Untitled painting of the black poised brush in front of their self-portraits in
man with the brush. Marshall’s artistic goal is to progress, while Marshall himself is not directly
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 aes-
thetic 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 down-
ward 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 Untitled, 2008. Acrylic on PVC panel, 72 3/4 x 61 1/4 x 4 in. Courtesy the
in Marshall’s own practice, there can be no doubt artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. © Kerry James Marshall
about his support of, and alliance with, the means
by which the painted figure so strongly and beauti- engaged in self-portraiture. Any symmetrical
fully asserts his power. The circle of black paint in alignment of the three is therefore disrupted at
the center pushes the muted white circle off to the the outset. The interior relationship between the
side. The tiny details of the artist’s three exposed fin- woman painter and the self-image, which judg-
gernails and the sclera of his eyes show how dimin- ing from the disproportionate blank space on the
ished whiteness becomes against the blackness of canvas she has only just begun to paint, is staged
his hands and face. Large and colorful as the palette in the context of an overall struggle between areas
occupying the foreground is, the dark background of white and black.
above dominates, with its expanse occupying more In Untitled (2009), we are faced with fracture.
than half of the area and reaching out to three of the The head of the impeccably dressed artist rests
four corners of the picture frame. Yet the portrait is atop the elaborate curling shape of the wide collar
held in a state of suspension that prevents us from encircling her neck. The seated position places her
seeing what happens next. There is no painting, only face near the center, while the second face above is
the painter and his implements. displaced to the upper right corner, which her long
With the transition to the 2009 portraits green brush will have to angle up to reach. The only
of black women painters, the studio scenario bits of shining light on the artist’s side are the silver

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

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 periph-
ery 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 addi-
tion, 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 back-
grounds 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 spread-
out 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—noth-
ing 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 surpris-
ing 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 evi-
dence 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 paral-
lel 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 connec-
tion between the two sides is facilitated by the wom-
an’s spacious lap with the dark purple-flecked skirt
and blue coverall with darkened folds and shadows.
Erickson Nka • 45
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 dif-
ficulty 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 some-
body 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 num-
bers 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 per-
haps 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
46 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
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 half-
completed self-portraits. The moment of pause is
effectively permanent. We are caught in a freeze-
frame 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
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 pinkish-
orange 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 Nka • 47
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 intrin-
sic 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 invest-
ment 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 them-
selves 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’ self-
portraits 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
48 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
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
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
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
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
Erickson Nka • 49
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 convinc-
ingly fit this scenario is the naked man. Kerry
James Marshall entices us to provide a narrative
construction that would allow us explain the situa-
tion 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 nulli-
fied 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
50 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
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, green-
covered 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 North-
western 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.
4 Kerry James Marshall (2000), 117. in the Studio,” presented on the occasion of the 2010 Production
5 Ibid. Site exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago,
6 Ibid., 116. was recorded by Chicago Access Network Television (CAN TV)
7 The three images are available in Kerry James Marshall (2000), and is accessible at www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sv-YptD9Bc.
72, 84, and 98. Terrie Sultan refers to the artist’s reflection in the 18 Relevant here are the two chapters on Vermeer at the end
mirror as “inserting himself as a shadowy character”: Sultan, “This of Harry Berger Jr.’s Second World and Green World: Studies in
Is the Way We Live,” 19. Renaissance Fiction-Making (Berkeley: University of California
8 For the images, see Kerry James Marshall (2000), 39–40. Press, 1988), in which Berger’s analysis turns on experimental
9 Marshall acknowledges his reading of Ralph Ellison’s novel uses of interior space. In Fictions of the Pose: Rembrandt against
Invisible Man in both Kerry James Marshall (2000), 116–17, and the the Italian Renaissance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
Roelstraete interview, 22. 2000), Berger summarizes his approach to “the temptation of aes-
10 Kerry James Marshall (2000), 117. thetic idyllicism”: “A Vermeer picture pretends so conspicuously to
11 The paucity and tentativeness of documentation about Scipio subordinate human complexities to ‘pure painting,’ to the vanity of
Moorhead is indicated by the recourse to the phrase “may have” art, that it focuses the observer’s attention on them—by formal as
in Vincent Carretta’s Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in well as iconographic means” (486). Marshall’s work similarly cre-
Bondage (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011): “Wheatley’s ates a tension between “pure painting” and “human complexities”
frontispiece may have been designed in Boston, perhaps by Scipio as a way of calling attention to the latter.
Moorhead, a black artist to whom Wheatley apparently addressed 19 Untitled (Studio) appeared in the exhibition Kerry James
one of the poems in her book. Moorhead may have been the artist Marshall: Look See, October 11–November 22, 2014, David
who advertised in the Boston News-Letter on 7 January 1773” Zwirner Gallery, London. The book Kerry James Marshall: Look See
(100); “John Moorhead’s wife, Sarah (1712–74) was a well-known (New York: David Zwirner Books, 2015) was published with a text
Boston art teacher, who may have instructed Scipio Moorhead,” by Robert Storr and an interview by Angela Choon. In a particu-
104. The caption accompanying the illustration of the frontispiece larly valuable extended discussion with Choon (94–99), Marshall
inside the book also uses the same “may have” construction—“it addresses this major painting in detail.
may have been engraved after a portrait by Scipio Moorhead”— 20 The hidden man’s gender is more clearly visible in the
which leaves unclear whether both a painting and an engraving sketch—Untitled (Study for Studio)—in which he is shown without
are attributed to Moorhead. The most detailed study to date is Eric the screen, in “Works on Paper,” Kerry James Marshall: Look See,
Slauter’s “Looking for Scipio Moorhead: An ‘African Painter’ in 82.
Revolutionary North America,” in Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic 21 Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (London:
World, ed. Agnes Lugo Ortiz and Angela Rosenthal (Cambridge: John Murray, 1956).
Cambridge University Press, 2013), 89–116. The title parallel with 22 Choon interview, Kerry James Marshall (2015), 94.
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,” “ten-
sion,” 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 sup-
ported 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

Erickson Nka • 51
AU NÈGRE
JOYEUX
EVERYDAY ANTIBLACKNESS
GUISED AS PUBLIC ART

Trica Keaton
P
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
52 • Nka DOI 10.1215/10757163-3641678 © 2016 by Nka Publications
Au Nègre Joyeux, Rue Mouffetard, Paris, 2010. Courtesy Samba Doucouré. Photo: Michelle Young
Keaton Nka • 53
 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,
54 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
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
legacy of French race-making whose use today is a
punishable offense. The renowned perfumer Jean-
Paul 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 simi-
larly 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 pres-
ence 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 correspon-
dence 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 well-
known 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 Faubourg-
Saint-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 per-
spective about this piece. She supports the Zamor
scenario and also vehemently disagrees with the
antiblack read of the sign. She reasons that the pau-
city 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 Nka • 55
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 inter-
pretation.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 anti-
black 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 popu-
lar 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 propo-
nents of it and similar imagery, who see it rather as
nostalgic, innocuous memorabilia and certainly not
antiblack.
By everyday antiblackness, I draw upon soci-
ologist Philomena Essed’s research and theories
of everyday racism in the Netherlands and United
States to conceptualize the cumulative micro-
aggressions 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
56 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
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 activi-
ties 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 infor-
mation 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 pub-
lic’s sentiment vanished once the grassroots anti-
racism 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 brutal-
ity. 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 invita-
tion-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
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 them-
selves 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 com-
missioned 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 essen-
tially 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 Au Nègre Joyeux, 2015. Photo: Trica Keaton and Annette and
that it was taken down. To my surprise, someone Steeve Joseph-Gabriel

had pelted the fresco with paint but left largely

untouched the most egregious aspect of this com-
position: 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 ste-
reotypes that are ascribed to groups who are appre-
hended as an undifferentiated mass. Researchers
have found that dark skin color, for instance, is
implicitly associated with beliefs about deeper psy-
chological 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 representa-
tions 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 collab-
orative 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 Nka • 57
 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
58 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
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.
Photography and the Black Body
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SAGA BWOYS AND
RUDE BWOYS
MIGRATION, GROOMING,
AND DANDYISM
Michael McMillan
A dandy is a kind of embodied, animated sign sys-
tem that deconstructs given and normative catego-
ries of identity (elite, white, masculine, heterosex-
ual, 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
Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
60 • Nka DOI 10.1215/10757163-3641689 © 2016 by Nka Publications
D
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
 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 twenty-
two-year-old carpenter. Photo: Douglas Miller

McMillan Nka • 61
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 “racial-
ized 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 announc-
ing 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 per-
formativity 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 teleologi-
cal. He characterizes diasporic subjectivity as a pro-
cess 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
62 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
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 stud-
ies. Tulloch sees style as agency in the construction
of self through the assemblage of garments, acces-
sories, 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 documen-
tary photographs depicting their arrival in their
new homeland after a three-week transatlantic jour-
ney 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
backyard is less confrontational, more informal,
more complicated—a place where private
negotiations might occur.11 Yet the frontline-
backyard 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 com-
plex 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 sarto-
rial 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 prow-
ess. 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 tran-
scendent and the transient is that agency through
style-fashion-dress can be an agreement to con-
form 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 con-
text 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 representa-
tion 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 Dutch-
type shoes. The zoot suit was part of a total look that
not only included the suit, but also hairstyle, gait,
McMillan Nka • 63
and vernacular language. Slicking back the hair so
that it was shiny and smooth was achieved by cut-
ting 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 autobiog-
raphy 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 influ-
enced by the walk or strut, a confident swagger
through which the body performed a “transcen-
dental 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 com-
munity 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 stig-
matized 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 valo-
rizing 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 cul-
ture 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
64 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
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 conspicu-
ous 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-fashion-
dress migrated beyond the United States to youth
cultures that were emerging elsewhere. It would also
be acknowledged as the first American suit, inform-
ing 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
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
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
In Eastern Caribbean vernacular, saga bwoys,
or sweet bwoys, were men who combined sartorial
orginality with ways of walking and talking in con-
spicuous 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 indi-
vidual 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 clean-
ing 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
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
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 associ-
ated 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
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 greet-
ing 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 pro-
cess 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 Nka • 65
standards of sartorial expression and good groom-
ing 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 conduc-
tors 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 unem-
ployed 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 unem-
ployed, 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 influ-
enced 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 metaphysi-
cal, intimating a stylish kind of stoicism—survival
and something more.35
66 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
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 skin-
head 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-fash-
ion-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 car-
riage 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
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 unen-
viable position.”39
The 1970s was the moment of Pan-Africanist
radical black politics and the coolest street culture,
as exemplified through reggae, sound-system cul-
ture, 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 teenag-
ers went along with the myth.
Many black youth (read, black male overrepre-
sentation) 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 sover-
eigns were favorite pieces. The term yardie derives
from the slang name given to occupants of govern-
ment 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 chal-
lenge. 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 hairdress-
ing saloon, the black barber is a secret-gendered
institution where black men chat, joke, share,
unmask, and reminisce as they wait to enter a ritual-
ized 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 acces-
sories 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 fash-
ion, style, and elegance.
It [sapeur subculture] has strong religious and moral
undertones and codes, while at the same time verg-
ing 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 Nka • 67
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 creativ-
ity. 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 unrav-
eling 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,
68 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
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/
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 Post-
Black,” Fashion Theory, vol. 14, no. 3 (2010): 273–304.
44 Ibid., 283.

McMillan Nka • 69
PORTRAITS IN BLACK
STYLING, SPACE, AND SELF
IN THE WORK OF
BARKLEY L. HENDRICKS AND
ELIZABETH COLOMBA

Anna Arabindan-Kesson
A
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)-repre-
sentation.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 aesthet-
ics of portraiture, a genre that has often worked to
marginalize, negate, or simply ignore expressions
Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
70 • Nka 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

Arabindan-Kesson Nka • 71
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

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

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 cre-
ated 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 know-
ing 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 “counter-
narratives . . . 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, nega-
tive 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 self-
actualization 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 immortal-
ized 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 parad-
ing, 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 fash-
ionable 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 sar-
torial 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 Nka • 73
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 memo-
rialization, the Grand Manner portrait monumen-
talizes 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 signi-
fied by painting. As I briefly outlined earlier, black
subjects have always been creators of their own por-
traits.13 But I would argue that here Hendricks’s self-
conscious reconceptualization of the mythologizing
tendencies of the Grand Manner portrait radically
alters the ways in which the black body, and par-
ticularly 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 aesthet-
ics 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
74 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
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 par-
ticularly black masculinity, today.19 It was also for
Hendricks a time of artistic exploration that allowed
him to express his fascination with sartorial splen-
dor 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 wear-
ing.”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 wit-
nessed around him. It is fundamentally a spatial
move. Hendricks transforms the canvas into some-
thing like a catwalk across which these two brothers
project themselves through their attention to detail,
from the belt buckles to their hairstyles, mirroring
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 photo-
graphed 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 portrai-
ture is want to do, these men are hard to pin down.
Subjectivity is in flux, which returns us to the cul-
ture 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 relation-
ship 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 Afro-
Parisian 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 Nka • 75

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
76 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
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 trans-
form 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 still-
ness. In many of her oils, she uses surfaces to render
her astute observation into luxurious form: tapes-
tries 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 fertil-
ity.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 cou-
ture 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 carv-
ings 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,
Elizabeth Colomba, Seated, 1997. Oil on canvas panel, 18 x15 in. Courtesy the artist. © Elizabeth Colomba

Arabindan-Kesson Nka • 77
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 along-
side 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 reflec-
tive 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 mate-
riality 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 self-
fashioning. Colomba’s paintings reconceptualize
78 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
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 ideal-
izing language of canonical art history.32
Anna Arabindan-Kesson is an assistant professor in
the Art and Archaeology and African American Stud-
ies departments at Princeton University.
Notes
1 Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-
American 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).
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 sub-
jects 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 reformu-
lated 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 per-
sonal 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 exhi-
bition 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.
Arabindan-Kesson Nka • 79
POST-POST-
BLACK?
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
Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
80 • Nka DOI 10.1215/10757163-3641711 © 2016 by Nka Publications
T
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 aes-
thetic articulation of black artists and subsequently
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

Adusei-Poku Nka • 81
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 generational-
ism 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 new-
ness (“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 post-
black 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 con-
sider 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 gov-
ernmental 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) methodolo-
gies and the way in which we look at contemporary
art.
Let me briefly recap from where the term post-
black 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
82 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
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 per-
ceived, either as a disrespectful dismissal of the politi-
cal 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 compli-
cated 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 presi-
dency 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 antiapart-
heid 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 consis-
tently 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
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 heri-
tage, 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 cultur-
ally 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 repre-
sentation 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 politi-
cal 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 politi-
cal philosopher in this context, integrates the term
Afropolitanism into a narrative that stresses its dis-
tinction from Afropessimism. Mbembe describes
Afropolitanism as “an aesthetic and a particular poetic
of the world. It is a way of being in the world, refus-
ing 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 diver-
sity 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 cat-
egories 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 Nka • 83
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 post-
black 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 par-
ticular 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 con-
text, 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 syn-
chronicities—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 contempo-
rary black art is that the intersections of categories
such as race, gender, class, and in particular sexuality
84 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
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 repre-
sentation,” 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 black-
ness, 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 fol-
lows 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 solidarity-
driven, black-is-beautiful aesthetic to heteronorma-
tive 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 pack-
ages 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
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

Adusei-Poku Nka • 85
Leslie Hewitt, Riffs on Real Time (9 of 10), 2013. Traditional chromogenic print, 40 x 30 in. Courtesy the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co.

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

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 end-
note 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 inter-
ested 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 sen-
sitivity 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 convinc-
ing 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 art-
ists 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 per-
ceived 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 Nka • 87
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 me-
dia 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,
88 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
“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/.
9 Thelma Golden, “Director‘s Foreword,” in Flow, ed. Christine
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 Pan-
Africanist, 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
Museum in Harlem, 2008), 26–31. 36 This paradox does not only apply to Europe. The US context is
22 Enwezor, “Networks of Practice,” 25. equally struggling with ignorance, if one has followed the discussion
23 My argument here is that the contemporary art world is around the New York Times critique by Ken Johnson, who ridiculed
part of the aftermath of the imperialist project, which could be an exhibition, Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980, at
described in the words of theorist Alexander Weheliye as follows: MoMA PS1 in October 2013 and reclaimed the modernist tradition
“The uneven global power structures defined by the intersections to be a white invention, which created a public discussion and open
of neoliberal capitalism, racism, settler colonialism, immigration, letter/petition. See Ken Johnson, “‘Now Dig This! Art and Black Los
and imperialism, which interact in the creation and maintenance Angeles,’ at MoMA PS1,” New York Times, October 25, 2012, www
of systems of domination, and dispossession, criminalization, .nytimes.com/2012/10/26/arts/design/now-dig-this-art-black-los
expropriation, exploitation and violence that are predicated upon -angeles-at-moma-ps1.html; Julia Halperin, “Petition Protesting
hierarchies of racialized, gendered, sexualized, economized, and Ken Johnson’s NYT Reviews Triples in Size, Adding More Big
nationalized social existence.” Alexander Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Names,” BlouinArtInfo Blogs, November 28, 2012, blogs.artinfo.com
Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories /artintheair/2012/11/28/petition-protesting-ken-johnsons-nyt
of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 1. -reviews-triples-in-size-adding-more-big-names/.
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

Adusei-Poku Nka • 89
CONFESSIONS OF
A BLACK FEMINIST
ACADEMIC
PORNOGRAPHER
W
Mireille Miller-Young hen Sander Gilman first published his
pathbreaking work on the iconography
of the Hottentot Venus and early nine-
teenth-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 dis-
sected 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 racial-
ized 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 simi-
lar 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 representa-
tion 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
90 • Nka 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 pro-
cess of making black sexuality visible necessarily
invokes a collective racial trauma. It is in this collec-
tive 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 (politi-
cal) 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 indus-
try into a sophisticated, transnational, and corpo-
rate-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 Nka • 91
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 discrimina-
tion 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 beauti-
ful 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
92 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
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 entertain-
ment 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 econo-
mies. 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 com-
modity,” 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 cir-
cuits 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 mecha-
nisms 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
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 fetish-
ism 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 Nka • 93
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 sexual-
ity 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 “disiden-
tification,” illicit eroticism helps make sense of how
cultural workers enact a repertoire of skills and theo-
ries—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 sexu-
ality in ways that necessarily confront and manipu-
late 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
94 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
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 depict-
ing 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 negotia-
tions 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:
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 15 Jeannie Pepper, personal interview with author, December 8,
somewhere, like Marilyn Monroe.” It gave me a lot of 2002.
16 Adrienne Davis uses the term sexual economy in “Don’t Let
power. I feel the way I do now because I accomplished Nobody Bother Yo’ Principle” to point to the important interaction
that. [It] was like my dream come true. I [said], “I between enslaved black women’s sexual meanings and sexual
made it, I made it!” I just cried.24 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.
Mireille Miller-Young is associate professor of fem- 17 Adam Isaiah Green, “The Social Organization of Desire:
The Sexual Fields Approach,” Sociological Theory 26, no. 1 (1998):
inist studies at the University of California, Santa 25–50, 32.
Barbara. 18 Ibid., 29.
19 Jeannie Pepper, personal interview with author, December 8,
2002.
Notes 20 José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and
1 Sander Gilman, “Confessions of an Academic Pornographer,”
the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
in Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My
Press, 1999).
Love, ed. Philippe Vergne (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2007),
21 Hall, “The Spectacle of the ‘Other.’”
27–36.
22 Jeannie Pepper, personal interview with author, December 8,
2 Vergne, Kara Walker.
2002.
3 See Saar’s statements in Juliette Bowles, “Extreme Times Call
23 Muñoz, Disidentifications, 4.
for Extreme Heroes,” International Review of African American
24 Jeannie Pepper, personal interview with author, December 8,
Art  14, no. 3 (1997): 2–16. Also Gilman, “Confessions of an
2002.
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.

Miller-Young Nka • 95
A PICTURE’S WORTH
TOWARD THEORIZING A
BLACK/QUEER GAZE IN THE
INTERNET “PORNUTOPIA”

I
n the early 1990s Essex Hemphill, Kobena Mercer,
Jafari Sinclaire Allen 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 neocon-
servatives as sexually inappropriate pornography
and putatively not art, but also for close readers
who noted that the figure is headless and heart-
less. 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
96 • Nka 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 mul-
tiple and polymorphous—at once playful and dan-
gerous, 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 semi-
anonymity. 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 respon-
dent 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 predict-
ably 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 power-
fully 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 theo-
rized 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 medi-
ated. 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—find-
ing rich and contradictory material and an ethno-
graphic 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 Nka • 97
frame themselves and other black men for trans-
national erotic legibility.
This engagement of “low” representations of
black male (sex)uality impels a return to unan-
swered 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 re-
presented (i.e., multiply reposted or reblogged) in
the everyday archive of (self-)posed, framed, filmed,
narrated, and displayed portrait and snapshot rep-
resentations 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 suspi-
cion. 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 empow-
ers 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
98 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
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 “land-
scape” 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 differ-
ence? What do close contextual readings of these
images convey about black gay desire, subjectivity,
and belonging across difference? What are the qual-
itative 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 pre-
cisely 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
affective and material utility in, for example, “a big
(black) dick, or a hot (black) pussy,” or, more par-
ticularly, 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 mean-
ings 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 cyber-
space of infinite dispersion and interfacing,” offers
a decolonizing cyberspace as a “realm between
and through meaning systems . . . in which alterna-
tive realities provide individuals and communities
increased and novel means of communication, cre-
ativity, 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, transna-
tional 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 indi-
vidual 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 transna-
tional 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 modu-
lation between forms of consciousness . . . function-
ing 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 commu-
nity 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, conver-
sation, and company across national and language
borders and the fiber-optic cables of cyberspace.
Jafari Sinclaire Allen is an associate professor of an-
thropology 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
Allen Nka • 99
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).

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

Photography, Race, History

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

Kimberli Gant

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

102 • Nka 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 Nka • 103
escaped from the plantations and fled to the moun-
tains 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, fugi-
tive, 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, sev-
eral 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 biogra-
phies 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 moni-
kers 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
104 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
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 encour-
aged 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 separat-
ism issue mean when considering Cox’s rendition
of Nanny? The artist herself was born in Jamaica
and considers the nation strongly in her self-iden-
tification, 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 informa-
tion 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 cen-
tury, 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 exhi-
bition, the photograph is one of three that pres-
ent Nanny as a military leader. In this particular
image Cox, as Nanny, wears the uniform of an
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 distinc-
tive feature of the British military, both in Europe
and abroad; thus the soldiers were nicknamed red-
coats. The three-quarter formal pose of the figure
and landscape background references eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century British military portrait
painting, although Cox creates a subtle subversion.
The military portrait was initially only of aristo-
cratic 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 Nka • 105
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 wear-
ing the coat of a British officer, a trained and sea-
soned 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
106 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
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-dom-
inated 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 trans-
gression 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 con-
sisted of digging holes for canes, hoeing and weed-
ing—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
Lolivya, 2004. Color digital inkjet print on watercolor paper. Courtesy the artist Gant Nka • 107
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 guer-
rilla 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
108 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
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
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 wash-
ing 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 his-
torical information says she is—namely, as a sexu-
ally desirable woman. By imposing this new identity
on Nanny, Cox not only revises the privileged tales
told of this historic figure, but also muddles inter-
nal 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 character-
ized as ‘riotous and disorderly,’ such movements
of the batty invite a public discourse that chal-
lenges 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 musi-
cal 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 cat-
egorize 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.
Gant Nka • 109
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 anthro-
pological representations. . . . In the pictorial domain,
we are still anthropological, cultural, national, ethnic
or electoral commodities and signifiers. We remain la-
belled 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
Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
110 • Nka DOI 10.1215/10757163-3641755 © 2016 by Nka Publications
T
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 ges-
ture 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 codify-
ing race, gender, and class within larger established
systems of attributing value in an increasingly glo-
balized 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
Agostino Brunias, The Barbadoes Mulatto Girl, 1779. Mezzotint, 26 x 17.6
cm. Courtesy the Barbados Museum and Historical Society

Cummins and Thompson Nka • 111


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 popula-
tion. 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 indig-
enous 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
112 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
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 profit-
ability 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, includ-
ing 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 com-
modified 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 out-
numbered 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 dis-
semination 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 evolv-
ing creolized society, a hybridization of European,
African, and Amerindian cultures, and the com-
plex 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
beautiful, she is intelligent and able to negotiate observe, “I was much delighted with the dress of the
and even transgress the complex codes that struc- negro girls in Bridge Town, which is exactly that of
ture the society. the fine ladies when I left England; short-waisted
Working in the West Indies as Sir William and turbans, the latter made of white or coloured
Young’s official painter, Italian artist Agostino handkerchiefs, but displayed and put on with better
Brunias, from 1765 onward, produced images such taste than anything I ever saw. Really and truly I
as The Barbadoes Mulatto Girl, which recorded the never beheld that part of female dress (and which
inhabitants and customs of the British-held islands I much admire) so well disposed as in some of the
with a view to attracting new landowners. However, black women in Bridge Town.”8 This is a remark-
Brunias’s images might best be understood, as Mia ably graphic conflation of the spectrum of race in
Bagneris has suggested, as “simultaneously par- the New World.
ticipating in and subtly, but significantly, troubling The Barbados Slave Code prescribed the
ideas of race and racial classification during the amounts and types of cloth and clothing that were
eighteenth century, helping to construct them while to be supplied each year by the planter to his slaves,
simultaneously exposing their constructedness and but the mulatto was often neither dependent on nor
underscoring their contradictions.”6
The figures are clearly Brunias’s primary inter-
est, emphasized by their size within the landscape,
Jean-Michel Moreau the Younger, Un Anglais de la Barbade vend sa
which differs from other images of the period. Maitresse, 1780. Engraving, 9.0 x 14.5 cm. Courtesy Barbados Museum and
Whereas traditionally black or mulatto people were Historical Society
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 dis-
tinguished 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 soci-
ety 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

Cummins and Thompson Nka • 113

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
114 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
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 illustra-
tion, Un Anglais de la Barbade vend sa Maitresse
(1798), which offered a completely different per-
spective 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 differ-
ent 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 (becom-
ing 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
Eva Campbell, Encounters, 2012. Acrylic on canvas, 48 x 72 in. Courtesy the artist

Cummins and Thompson Nka • 115

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, accomplish-
ments, 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 propri-
etress 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 consum-
able, but equally what is revealed are the negoti-
ated positions of power taken up by women within
116 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
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 nar-
rative 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 classifi-
cations of gender, ethnicity, and class. The publica-
tion 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 argu-
ment that history represents both the past (facts
and archival materials) and the story told about the
past (narrative), demonstrating that this interac-
tion 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 pop-
ular 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 per-
vasive 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, col-
lages 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 fore-
ground 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 superim-
posed on pages from the Financial Times, unifying
Ras Ishi Butcher, Exotic Encounters, 2014. Mixed media on canvas, 60.5 x 57.5 in. Courtesy the artist

Cummins and Thompson Nka • 117

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

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

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 enter-
tainment 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 tur-
meric 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 subse-
quent citations by the US State Department list-
ing 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 botani-
cal illustrations of tropical fruits, intermingling
“tropical” bodies and commerce and interrogat-
ing the place of these early exoticized images of
Afro-Caribbean women in the artist’s own self-
representation. 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 repre-
sentations 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 refer-
ences Brunias’s women. The sitter, seen completely
from behind, is naked except for her elaborately
wrapped headdress, her back bearing the impres-
sions 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 over-
heard 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 come-
ons, and the harsh judgments typically made about
bodies, their adornment, and public performance:
“Look how she digging she panty”; “All of his back-
side 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 photo-
graphs; but she, like her subjects, is usually headless,
simultaneously the anonymous voyeur and self-
objectified 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 Nka • 119
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.
Alissandra Cummins is director of the Barbados
Museum and Historical Society and part-time lec-
turer 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
120 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
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 (key-
note 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 govern-
ing 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 selec-
tion 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.
8 Ibid., 94).
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 phi-
losophique 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 con-
textualizes 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 Michel-
Rolph 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.
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NO MORE “POISONOUS,
DISRESPECTFUL, AND SKEWED
IMAGES OF BLACK PEOPLE”
BARBARA WALKER’S LOUDER THAN WORDS

“
Celeste-Marie Bernier I have developed a practice which is concerned
with social, political, and cultural issues, with
particular relation to history and contempo-
rary 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 twenti-
eth- 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
122 • Nka 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

Bernier Nka • 123

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

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

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-first-
century 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 prog-
ress 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 Nka • 125
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 pro-
filing 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
126 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
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 nineteenth-
century 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 twenty-
first-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
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 aes-
thetic 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 ther-
apy—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 Nka • 127
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
128 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
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 pro-
vide a full frontal view of Solomon’s physiognomy
in Untitled functions in conjunction with her repre-
sentation 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 por-
traiture 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 com-
plete 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 ulti-
mately 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
Polite Violence II, 2006. Oil on paper, 81 x 106 cm. Courtesy the artist. © Barbara Walker. Photo: Gary Kirkham

Bernier Nka • 129

more hard-hitting terms, as she explains, her pre-
ferred 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 trauma-
tizing 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 bar-
rier 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 asso-
ciations 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
130 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
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 data-
protection issues, Walker’s decision to focus solely
upon her son’s physiognomy has powerful impli-
cations 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 redemp-
tion, 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
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 town-
scapes, 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 aestheti-
cized 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 Nka • 131
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 exam-
ple 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 render-
ing 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 poi-
gnantly 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
132 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
officers.” Refusing to shy away from the life-and-
death 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 whited-
out backdrop of the Financial Times, her full frontal
portrait of Solomon emerges in hard-hitting con-
trast, not only to her reproduction of a handwritten
police docket, but also to her inclusion of a diminu-
tive photograph of Jean Charles de Menezes, accom-
panied by an article headlined “Pressure grows over
anti-terror police.” In a radical departure from her
other works in this series, however, Walker’s com-
position 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 suffer-
ing 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 conscious-
ness-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
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
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.
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.
Bernier Nka • 133
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
Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
134 • Nka DOI 10.1215/10757163-3641777 © 2016 by Nka Publications
C
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 monumen-
tal reproduction of a Congress of South African
Trade Unions (COSATU) button in fiberglass com-
memorated 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 commodifica-
tion of the black male and an acute, critical use of
archival materials and popular visual culture—it
now had a distinctly South African cast.
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 pass-
burning 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 dis-
play 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 Nka • 135

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 promi-
nent role in recent histories and studies of apart-
heid, 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 pho-
tograph of miners, their hands in the air. In related
136 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
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 aban-
doned 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 pas-
sive 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 pho-
tograph 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 histori-
cal materials, he too accented gestural details, but
often did so by means of active editing, or simplifi-
cation. 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, inevita-
bly, implied an attendant process of abstraction and
decontextualization. Shorn of their original context, to various causes) as a title, situates those hands as
the gestures become floating signifiers. part of a wider and more abstract continental pat-
Those floating signifiers are assigned novel tern of resistance. Although Thomas’s sources were
meanings in Thomas’s work. Take, for example, distinctly historical then, his use of gesture drifted
Raise Up. To be sure, the gestures of the men were toward the ahistorical. The fist was treated primar-
already overdetermined before Thomas used them; ily as a leitmotif embodying a consistent lineage of
since they were published by Cole as a part of a book resistance.
in 1967, they have been repeatedly reused and given But as Enwezor notes in the catalogue to Rise
distinct new contexts. Indeed, Darren Newbury has and Fall of Apartheid, gestures are in fact complex
remarked on the complicated status of the reproduc- and evolving signs, dependent upon local vari-
tion of Cole’s photograph at the Apartheid Museum, ables for their effect. “It is necessary,” he writes, “to
where page spreads from the book are paired with underscore the potent iconographical discourse of
enlargements of single images. “The status of the the image of the fist, as it travels from gesture to
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 cen-
tral 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 accompa-
nying 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 lin-
eage: 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
Develop Striking Power, 2014. Inkjet print on museum etching paper
pan-African slogan (coined in Mozambique, it has with carborundum flocking, 29.92 x 19.69 in. Courtesy the artist and Jack
since been used in Nigeria and Uganda in relation Shainman Gallery, New York

Houston Nka • 137

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 trans-
formed 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 embod-
ied 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 con-
sciousness 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
138 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
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 archi-
val 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 denomi-
nators. But the show was promptly skewered by a
number of critics, including Roland Barthes, who
vigorously objected to its emphasis on shared expe-
rience. The photographs, Barthes argued, depicted
a superficial diversity but finally insinuated an
underlying humanism that flattened difference and
ignored socioeconomic variables. “From this plu-
ralism,” 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 human-
ity of a majority of the country’s residents. And
some young South African photographers found
National Women’s Day poster, 2009. Designer unknown. Courtesy the Apartheid Museum, Johannesburg, South Africa

Houston Nka • 139

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 neces-
sary caution about a generalising humanist vocabu-
lary 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 inflec-
tions and local circumstance.
What does this mean in practice? A poster pro-
duced 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 gov-
ernment are trumped in an inversion of the tradi-
tional 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 dras-
tically 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,
140 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
he seems to have felt that the Surrealists hesitated
in transcending mere contemplation and in apply-
ing its practice. And he does not seem to have been
alone in this regard. In a pair of photographs pub-
lished 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, inef-
fectively 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
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 criti-
cism 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.
2 For the identification of the boy’s identity, see Sipho Masondo,
“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 Nka • 141
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

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

142 • Nka DOI 10.1215/10757163-3641788 © 2016 by Nka Publications
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 repre-
sentation of the black body altogether. In installa-
tion 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 cul-
tural 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 represen-
tation. The exchange of black bodies with objects or
other figures invites viewers to physically and psy-
chically 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 dif-
ference 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 sing-
ing “Voulez-vous de la canne à sucre?” (“Would
you like some sugar cane?”) complements the writ-
ings 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 peer-
ing 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 specta-
tors and subjects them to treatment partially echo-
ing 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 typi-
cally create representations are represented instead,
inviting us to consider, like Michele Wallace does,
“what some have called the spectatorial imagina-
tion 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 Nka • 143

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 per-
spectives 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 func-
tions of the text, stage, screen, and lights that gen-
erate 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
144 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
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 structur-
ally 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 Afro-
British 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

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
Detail from Say It Loud
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 mag-
nitude of their output is conveyed by the tower-
ing 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 mean-
ing. 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 mono-
lithic 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 back-
ground further underscores the contention that
Fletcher Nka • 145
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 marginal-
ized youth—the black, brown, and beige vanguard
learning the ancient codes, speaking a new patois:
racialized shape-shifters, reinventing a new black
identity.7
146 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
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 enact-
ments and interactions—the performances of our
everyday lives, the things we do to survive, to com-
municate.”8 Accordingly, Hoyt’s personal statement,
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 black-
ness 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 well-
appointed 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 surveil-
lance, 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 voy-
eurism 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 back-
ground and a sizable vase encircled by an African-
inspired 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 affirm-
ing Jennifer González’s contention:
Material culture of everyday life, such as . . . forms
of commodity production and consumption, partici-
pate 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 col-
lection, 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 Nka • 147
 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

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

how and why the viewer might infer the racial iden-
tity 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 frag-
mented appearances of bodies have on the viewer?
Is the sight of an occupant’s skin the effective culmi-
nation 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-por-
traits” of the 1990s, which depicted black subjects
turned away from the viewer, Bright refuses iden-
tifications 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 psy-
chological tensions, as Bridget Cooks explains,
“there is little evidence of the drama of daily life.
. . . Figures are not performing . . . [and the pho-
tographs] 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 furni-
ture, 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 belong-
ing 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 cer-
tain items or symbols suffice? Moreover, had Bright
“blackened” Suburbia, what would the series com-
municate? 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 under-
standings 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 sub-
jectivity . . . 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 activ-
ity within the piece does not alter, but rather repro-
duces 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 Nka • 149
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 knowl-
edge? Further, how do we understand our subjective
positions in relation to these circumstances?18
In the early 2000s, rather than visualize differ-
ence 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—jew-
elry, 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
150 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
the affluence and advancement of black people than
to their repression.
Also in the early 2000s, Thelma Golden popular-
ized 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 inter-
ested, in redefining complex notions of blackness.”19
Older approaches to blackness usually assumed a
stable black subject, culture, or personality; how-
ever, in the twenty-first century, there is a wide-
spread sense that racial conditions have changed in
ways that make blackness no longer a foundation,
but rather “a question, an object of scrutiny, a pro-
visional 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 black-
ness, 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 divi-
sion 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
Suburbia demonstrate that in the representation of responded,] “That’s the point! To show our commonality. . . . If we
could get past the stereotypes, we could see that.” Bentley, “Sheila
mythic, monolithic blackness, no body’s perfect. Pree Bright’s Look.”
14 Richmond, “Sheila Pree Bright’s Suburbia,” 19.
Kanitra Fletcher is a doctoral candidate in the De- 15 Lorraine O’Grady, “Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female
Subjectivity,” in Art, Activism, and Oppositionality: Essays from
partment of History of Art and Visual Studies at Cor-
Afterimage, ed. Grant H. Kester (Durham, NC: Duke University
nell University. She is currently based in Houston, Press, 1994), 272.
Texas, and serves as curator of video art for Land- 16 Elvan Zabunyan, “We Are Here = Nous sommes là,” in Renée
marks, the public art program of the University of Green and Nicole Schweizer, Renée Green: Ongoing Becomings:
Retrospective 1989–2009 (Lausanne, Switzerland: Musée cantonal
Texas at Austin. des Beaux-Arts, 2009), 7–10.
17 Renée Green quoted in Alex Alberro, “The Fragment and
Notes the Flow,” in Renée Green: Sombras y señales / Shadows and Signals
A significant portion of this essay was presented at the 2015 College (Barcelona, Spain: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 2000), 26.
Art Association Conference in New York City. Thanks to Professors 18 Ibid., 27.
Margo Crawford and Jessica Santone and the Nka editorial team 19 Thelma Golden, “Introduction,” in Thelma Golden et al.,
for their feedback and assistance with earlier versions. Freestyle (New York: Studio Museum in Harlem, 2001), 14.
1 Lisa Gail Collins, The Art of History: African American 20 Paul Taylor, “Black Aesthetics,” Philosophy Compass 5, vol. 1
Women Artists Engage the Past (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers (2010): 10.
University Press, 2002), 25. 21 Ibid.
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 Journal-
Constitution, 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

Fletcher Nka • 151

JAMES
BARNOR
EVER YOUNG, NEVER SLEEP

“I
n the world through which I travel,
Renée Mussai 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 uncon-
ventional destiny. Although not immediately appar-
ent, underneath the surface lies something intrinsi-
cally revolutionary, something inherently transient
in the evolution of Barnor’s multifaceted practice:
something quietly rebellious, surprising, and won-
derfully different.
This something is reflected in Barnor’s images
of yoga practitioners, ballroom dancers, and black-
and-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 ser-
vant synonymous of a new generation of professional
Ghanaian women will exist beside a black Barbarella
Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
152 • Nka DOI 10.1215/10757163-3641799 © 2016 by Nka Publications
James Barnor, Untitled #1, Drum cover girl Selby Thompson, Campbell-Drayton Studio, London, 1967. Courtesy Autograph ABP

Mussai Nka • 153

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

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

Eva, London, 1960s. 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.
Societies in Transition
Born in 1929 in Accra, then the Gold Coast colony,
James Barnor began his career in photography typi-
cally, 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, bridg-
ing 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 photog-
rapher to leave the continent before 1960 to study
and practice in Europe.2
Ginger Nyarku, featherweight boxer with Coronation Belt, Accra, 1953.
Courtesy Autograph ABP
Whether in Ghana or England, Barnor docu-
mented cultures in transformation, new identities
coming into being—the fragmented experience of
modernity and diaspora; the shaping of cosmopoli-
tan societies and selves; and the changing represen-
tation 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 pro-
vides an important frame of reference, overlapping
and suturing questions of the postcolonial in rela-
tion to diasporic perspectives in twentieth-century
photography.
An Archival Encounter
I first met James Barnor in 2009. We were intro-
duced 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 work-
ing 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 resi-
dence overlooking Brentford Lock, West London,
can only be described as a quintessential hidden-
archive story. Largely tucked away from public view
Mussai Nka • 155
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 semi-
translucent paper envelopes, inscribed with vaguely
discernible sets of notes, sometimes including
names or places but rarely dates. Frequent relocat-
ing 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 ever-
present 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
156 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
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 omis-
sion. 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 Akyem-
Abuakwa and Dr. J. B. Danquah (neither of whom is
represented in this portfolio), photographs that serve

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.
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 second-
ary school, with no GCSEs [General Certificate of
Secondary Education] to boast, that is quite some-
thing.” James Barnor’s journey is, of course, his own.
But its migrations also reveal to us certain instruc-
tive markers—traces, if you will—of photography’s
other itineraries beyond its officially inscribed
grand narrative.

African Photography
Photography arrived in Africa soon after the inven-
tion of the medium in the 1840s. Yet it took over
150 years for African photography (as opposed
to anthropological inquiry) to appear in contem-
porary 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 Drum Cover Girl Marie Hallowi, Rochester, Kent, 1966.
Kinshasa, now the Democratic Republic of Congo, Courtesy Autograph ABP

Mussai Nka • 157

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 ordi-
nary 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: tradi-
tion 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
158 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
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-twenti-
eth-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
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 Nka • 159
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” anti-
immigration 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 picto-
rial 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 pho-
tographs 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 dedi-
cated 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.
160 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
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] confer-
ence 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 Auto-
graph 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 recogni-
tion—while he is still very much with us, continuously enlighten-
ing us with his wisdom, generosity of spirit, undying curiosity, and
sheer joie de vivre rarely found in an octogenarian of his genera-
tion. 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,
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 Kodak-
manufactured 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.

Mussai Nka • 161

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 some-
times easy to lose sight of the essential value of
museums, particularly when there is much to criti-
cize. 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
Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
162 • Nka DOI 10.1215/10757163-3641810 © 2016 by Nka Publications
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 aver-
age, 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 muse-
ums 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 cus-
tomize an experience. They value being able to
interact and participate, and they lose interest when
Blankenberg Nka • 163
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 hege-
monic classes use space as a tool to reproduce its
dominance. For Lefebvre, any change in social rela-
tions 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 enthu-
siastic 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
164 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
issue of immigration in a building formerly devoted
to celebrating its colonial age, a political state-
ment 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, tri-
umphant 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 fundamen-
tal 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 all-
white museum personnel, high admissions, inacces-
sibility of location, and so on.
We need to look at how museums engage people.
The typical museum is set up to minimize conversa-
tion. They assume individuals are attending alone
and eager to quietly reap knowledge from the
exhibitions, constructed by a certain expert. Most over 120 artists and designers and aimed to present
museum visitors, however, tend to visit at least in a Africa as “a hub of experimentation generating new
group of two. During the museum visit, we tend to approaches and solutions of worldwide relevance”
stop talking to the person we’re with and disappear and “as a driving force for a new discussion of the
in the solo world the museum creates for us. potential of design in the twenty-first century.”12 The
Museums encourage people to literally only look design and art objects were undoubtedly glorious
one way in a presentation model (authority telling and were well chosen and framed, but the way in
you something that you consume). And even if we which they were presented was traditional, didactic,
re-present through exhibitions curated by people of leaving little space for visitor engagement beyond
color who problematize race or who simply address just looking and reading. I couldn’t shake the feeling
identities, histories, and communities of color, it is (which is probably unfair of me) that the incredible
the same didactic model. I would argue that this is vibrancy and creativity that I knew had given rise to
not necessarily the new space that will give rise to these works within very specific contexts had been
new social relations. reduced to “Africa, on show,” or, even worse, “Look!
Postcolonial scholar Homi Bhabha contends that Africans create cool things too.” I saw the exhibit
it is “the inbetween. . . . that carries the burden of in Barcelona, where I live, with a crowd of mainly
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 Conguitos on display in Barcelona

Blankenberg Nka • 165

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 conversa-
tion. We don’t need to own the conversation, but we
need to let it happen.
I remember very clearly the one time my daugh-
ter 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 approxi-
mately 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
166 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
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 peck-
ing order. The designers are practically focused on get-
ting 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 inspir-
ing 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 barri-
ers 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 partici-
pation 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 commit-
ted 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?
Ngaire Blankenberg is European director and princi- 11 Homi Bhabha, “Cultural Diversity and Cultural Differences,”
pal consultant at Lord Cultural Resources and co-au- in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth
Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (London: Routledge, 1995), 209.
thor with Gail Lord of Cities, Museums and Soft 12 Making Africa—A Continent of Contemporary Design,
Power (Arlington, VA: AAM Press, 2015). Vitra Design Museum, www.design-museum.de/en/exhibitions
/detailseiten/making-africa.html.
13 For more on the importance of scaffolding for a participative
Notes experience, read Nina Simon, The Participatory Museum (Santa
1 For example, the National Museum of African American Cruz, CA: Museum 2.0, 2010). See also Ngaire Blankenberg,
History and Culture, Smithsonian, opening in September 2016 “Participatory Exhibitions,” in Manual of Museum Exhibitions, ed.
in Washington, DC, on the National Mall, and the National Barry Lord and Maria Piacente (Toronto: Rowman and Littlefield,
Museum of the American Latino. A number of immigration or 2014).
migration museums have opened over the last twenty-five years 14 Creativity, Community, and a Dash of the Unexpected:
in the United States (Ellis Island Immigration Museum, Tenement Adventures in Engaging Young Adult Audiences (Denver: Denver
Museum), Canada (National Museum of Immigration at Pier 21), Art Museum, 2011).
Australia (Immigration Museum, Migration Museum), France 15 National Endowment for the Arts Presents Highlights from the
(Cité nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration), United Kingdom 2012 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (Washington, DC:
(Museum of Bristol), Belgium (Red Line Museum), and others. National Endowment for the Arts, September 26, 2013), www.arts
There are the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre, Rwanda; the .gov/news/2013/national-endowment-arts-presents-highlights
Apartheid Museum, South Africa; the Museum of Tolerance, Los -2012-survey-public-participation-arts.
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/tourist-
trapped-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.
8 Millennials: A Portrait of Generation Next. Confident.
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).

Blankenberg Nka • 167

OTA BENGA
IN THE ARCHIVES
UNMAKING MYTHS, MAPPING RESISTANCE
IN THE MARGINS OF HISTORY

O
Pamela Newkirk n September 8, 1906, Ota Benga, a boyish-
appearing 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 pub-
lished in 1974, the society’s then curator emeritus
of publications leaves the matter of Benga’s exhibi-
tion 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

168 • Nka 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)

Newkirk Nka • 169

 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 “immedi-
ately withdrawn from official exhibition (or employ-
ment) 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 char-
acterizations of Benga’s plight in the United States
that have served to sanitize the episode and mini-
mize 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 tragi-
cally 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
170 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
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
Reverend Robert Stuart MacArthur, the pastor of Manhattan’s Calvary Baptist Wilford H. Smith, the prominent lawyer and confidant to Booker T. Wash-
Church, was the first to publicly express outrage over Ota Benga’s exhibition. ington, appealed for Ota Benga’s release from the Bronx Zoo Monkey House
cage.

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, William Sheppard, the Presbyterian missionary and explorer hailed as the
he provided him a home at the orphanage in Brooklyn and later at its farm on “Black Livingstone” for his discovery of the Congo’s Kuba kingdom. He
Long Island. helped expose Leopold’s atrocities in the Congo.

Newkirk Nka • 171

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, pref-
erably 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
172 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
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 grow-
ing criticism, with William Randolph Hearst’s New
York Journal that morning condemning the exhibi-
tion 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 question-
able 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, sing-
ing, dancing and playing his horn, and he wanted
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 illu-
minate 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.

Newkirk Nka • 173

BUST BRAWL
THE BATTLE OVER A BLACK
BRONZE PRINCE

Yemane I. Demissie
T
racing the short but singular and well-docu-
mented 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 indigna-
tion 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
174 • Nka 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 for-
tress 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 sub-
ject 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 episto-
lary 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 Nka • 175
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
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 arrange-
ment 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
176 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
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
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 com-
missioned 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 photo-
graphs 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
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 sub-
sequently sent a letter directly to the queen. First, he
shrewdly reminded the monarch that he was in pos-
session 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 orga-
nizational 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 The British representation of the confrontation between Emperor Tewodros
grand in style.”16 The next day he fired an icy letter and Britain, Punch, or the London Charivari, August 10, 1867. Engraving by
Sir John Tenniel, 9.187 x 6.77 in. Courtesy the author
back at the sculptor in full regalia: “Lt. General Sir
H. Ponsonby,” he proclaimed, “presents his compli- On April 17, 1880, three and a half months into
ments to Mr. Throp & begs leave to inform him the commission, Williamson sent Ponsonby an
that The Queen has already given an order to Mr. apprehensive progress report. Prince Leopold, the
Williamson to execute a Bust of Prince Alamayou & queen’s son, who would also later die at a relatively
that he had requested Mr. Williamson to communi- young age, had examined Williamson’s bust of
cate with Mr. Throp with reference to the Casts.”17 Alemayehu in clay. Although Leopold deemed the
Ponsonby was now ready to forgo Alemayehu’s bust “very good as far as his memory served him,”
cast and have photographs as the sole inspiration Williamson suggested to Ponsonby that he “thought
for the creation of the prince’s bust. The choices it would be admirable for the Queen to see it before
were J. W. Ramsden’s post-mortem photographs of I cast it into plaster.”22
Alemayehu and E. H. Speight’s portraits taken a few Nine days later, Queen Victoria examined
months before the prince’s death.18 Williamson’s bust at Windsor Castle.23 Soon after
Williamson, the queen’s designated sculptor, Williamson’s audience with the queen, Ponsonby
found the post-mortem photographs “exceedingly scribbled a note for himself. The note read, “The
good.”19 The queen concurred. In a letter to Sir Robert Queen wants the mask at any price.”24
Napier, the general who had brought the young Ponsonby contacted Professor Ransome
prince to Britain, she wrote: “She cannot refrain from posthaste. Loath to identify Throp by name and
sending him [Lord Napier] this beautiful Photograph averse to bestow imperial largesse on the intractable
taken of him after his death. It is so calm and so unlike sculptor, the queen’s private secretary wrote: “Is there
death.”20 Ponsonby, however, was not impressed any means of obtaining the cast taken of Alamayou’s
with the memento mori. He bid Williamson to use face by the Artist at Leeds? I would purchase it or
Speight’s portraits of the animate prince instead.21 ask for it on any reasonable terms the Artist might

Demissie Nka • 177


The Right Honorable General Sir Henry Frederick Ponsonby, the Privy Purse
and private secretary to Queen Victoria, Vanity Fair, March 17, 1883. Carica-
ture 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-of-
fact 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.
178 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
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
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 Nka • 179

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.
180 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
9 Francis John Williamson, 1833–1920, British portrait sculptor.
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

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

182 • Nka DOI 10.1215/10757163-3641843 © 2016 by Nka Publications
BENDING
HISTORY
Maaza Mengiste
I
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 occu-
pation 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 monu-
ments 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.
■ ■
I have been in Rome, Italy, for the last six months
to research and write about Fascist Italy’s 1935 inva-
sion 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 propa-
ganda 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, fol-
lowed 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 occupa-
tion—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 Nka • 183
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.
■ ■
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 pres-
ent 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 con-
queror? The folded arms or the carefully positioned
184 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
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 man-
hood. 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, straight-
backed 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 unfin-
ished 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.
 In early 1937, Mussolini had established racial it were always meant to do so, as if he were born
segregation laws in Italy’s colonies, banning min- that way. With each new moment, I move toward
gling between Italians and native populations at complexity, toward uncomfortable truths that this
the risk of imprisonment for Italian citizens. All photograph hints at but cannot voice. No story is
children of mixed heritage lost their Italian citizen- ever simple. Every photograph extends beyond the
ship and were no longer considered legitimate. That frame. Each eye shapes what it sees, and history
same year saw a succession of orders and rules that bends to fit our needs.
progressively strengthened Italy’s racist policies,
creating a system of apartheid thirteen years before Maaza Mengiste is a Fulbright Scholar and the
racism was institutionalized in South Africa. award-winning author of  Beneath the Lion’s Gaze,
Nineteen thirty-seven was the year of massacres selected by the Guardian as one of the ten best con-
and continued bloodshed. Though the war was temporary African books.
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 dif-
ficult 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

Mengiste Nka • 185

DIFFERENT, BUT
NOT ABNORMAL
“OUT” IN AFRICA

Lyle Ashton Harris

I
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 fundrais-
ing 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
186 • Nka 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 Nka • 187

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 pub-
lishing 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 fos-
tering 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 self-
portraiture. In 2000 the New York Times Magazine
commissioned the untitled work reproduced here,
188 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
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 station-
house 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 mortal-
ity. 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
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 accompa-
nying 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 con-
nections 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.
Blow Up IV (Sevilla), 2006. Mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist. © Lyle Ashton Harris
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 fear-
lessly 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 dis-
cussed publicly. To give an example, at the 2013 con-
ference 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, clas-
sism, 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 ele-
ments: 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
Harris Nka • 189
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 news-
paper and features an unidentified brown-skinned
man who bears a striking resemblance to me. When
I first encountered the ad in print, it strongly sug-
gested itself as a focal point for the entire piece. The
figure representing my double appears to be servic-
ing (if you will) the French Algerian celebrity foot-
baller Zinedine Zidane; the pose bears an uncanny
resemblance to Manet’s painting Olympia. As repro-
duced 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 rela-
tion and racial hierarchy implied in the ad as well
190 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
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.
White Ebony, 2008. Acrylic on Ghanaian funerary fabric, 72 x 44 in. Courtesy
the artist. © Lyle Ashton Harris

Harris Nka • 191

 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
192 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
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,
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 reflec-
tions, 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 Nka • 193
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 read-
ings 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
194 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
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 environ-
ment. 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 commu-
nity networks, public expressions of gay identity
and resistance have increased as people speak out
against social repression. The potential of foment-
ing 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.
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, dismember-
ment, necrophilia, and cannibalism on seventeen boys and men
between 1978 and 1991.

Harris Nka • 195

RECLAIMING
HISTORY
A VISUAL ESSAY
Elizabeth Colomba
B
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 egalitar-
ian existence in a story from which the black body
is painfully absent. When a work of art depicts a
figure (mythical, biblical, allegorical) the narra-
tive is identified with the help of pictorial codes.
Eros would be recognized by his arrows, Psyche
Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
196 • Nka DOI 10.1215/10757163-3641865 © 2016 by Nka Publications
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 differ-
ent 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.
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

Colomba Nka • 197

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

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

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

Colomba Nka • 199

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

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

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

Colomba Nka • 201

FROM BODY TO
DISEMBODIMENT
Jean-Ulrick Désert
F
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 proj-
ect, 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)
Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
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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 soccer-
hooligan 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 fig-
ures 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,
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

Désert Nka • 203

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

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

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

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

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

Désert Nka • 207

 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

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

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 dev-
astating 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 bien-
nial (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 full-
scale, 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 crowd-
control 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 Nka • 209

 Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
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BLACK PRESENCE
IN FRANCE
I
n January 2013, I came to Paris for the first time
Lewis Watts in forty years to present work at the first Black
Portraiture(s) conference. I had planned to pho-
tograph 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 back-
ward 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 reso-
nated 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 challeng-
ing 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 ques-
tions 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

Watts
Watts Nka • 211
212 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 38–39 • November 2016
Barbès Rochechouart, 2013. Archival pigment print, 44 x 30 in., framed. Courtesy the artist

Watts
Watts Nka • 213
 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

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

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

Watts Nka • 215

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

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

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

Watts Nka • 217

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 Courtesy University of California Press
or methodological proposals to the
fields of American art, African American most like other expressionists of the his back on such stability and chose
art, and/or contemporary art, based period, even while she is critical of the instead to live more precariously, and
on the prodigious research she has primitivism with which other critics a young and successful man who could
undertaken on Basquiat’s work. have labeled the artist. Likewise, she afford to buy and wear the Armani
The introduction sets the stage agrees that Basquiat did not have the power suit even while he could not
for contemporary readers to grasp the institutional training that some of his hail a cab because of his brown skin
art world of the 1980s. As she lays it colleagues received, yet she pushes and dreadlocked hair.1 Such multiple
out, the art world quickly became an back on the notion that the artist was identifications defined Basquiat’s
increasingly commercial institution: naive and unschooled. life; it is nonetheless difficult for the
artists jockeying for galleries and col- Similarly, though the author historian to reanimate them in order
lectors; galleries forming stables of allows that the artist is most often to provide a rich and textured account
artists; gallerists selling works at ever- compared to modern European artists of his milieu.
increasing prices; collectors cherry- and that he, in fact, places himself In chapter 1, “‘The Black Picasso’:
picking artists and artworks; and banks within this lineage, she admits that Jean Michael Basquiat and Questions
and corporations participating as col- a diasporic consciousness informs his of Race,” Saggese walks what feels like
lectors, investors, and insurers. At the work. Thinking of Basquiat in relation a rather careful line in order to delin-
same time, a stylistic sea change oc- to “multiconsciousness,” diasporic eate where precisely blackness can be
curred in which the heady, cool, and consciousness, or ambivalence is assigned to Basquiat and his work. She
anticommercial practice of conceptual- one of Saggese’s best contributions, admits that he was the most successful
ists was replaced by the emotional, im- for it accounts for his experiences black artist of the time, even while he
passioned, and market-driven practice as a person of African descent who did not acknowledge the existence of
of neo-expressionists. was born and raised in the United other African American visual artists.
Saggese positions Basquiat States but whose parents hail from She asserts that he performed an artis-
between these and other trends. She the Caribbean, an individual with a tic persona that reinforced stereotypes
acknowledges that his work appears middle-class background who turned of blackness while simultaneously

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

218 • Nka DOI 10.1215/10757163-3641898 © 2016 by Nka Publications
lampooning them. Perhaps most effec-
tive is Saggese’s fleshing out of sty-
listic 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 Ameri-
can male athletes such as Sugar Ray
Robinson and Jersey Joe Walcott. Ac-
cording to the author, blackness, or a
diasporic subjectivity, can be discerned
in the artist’s interest in bebop-era im-
provisational jazz. Looking to Stuart
Hall, Saggese suggests that it is most
useful to imagine Basquiat construct-
ing an identity for himself, based on
his multiple identifications pulled from
his various heritages, and synthesiz-
ing different heterogeneous cultural
strands—African, Haitian, European,
urban, and rural among them.2
“Creativity Found and Made,” the
book’s second chapter, directs atten-
tion 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 prac-
ticed by musicians such as Dizzy Gil-
lespie, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and
Max Roach, bebop featured moments of
improvisation punctuated by the riffing
of elements appropriated from founda-
tional sources. The author points to
the fact that bebop pioneers commu-
nicated 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 racial-
ization 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 in-
stinct/rationality that are often used
to categorize and dismiss certain art-
ists 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 read-
ings, and artistic biography. Yet in
other ways she expands the method-
ological canon, bringing literary criti-
cism, improvisation theory, and music
history to the table. The author does
not hide that she employs those meth-
ods—and use them well, she does—
but she also does not reflect critically
on the politics of employing such ap-
proaches. For example, what are the
pitfalls and advantages of considering
an artist’s biography; what can the
author say about the privilege of hav-
ing been up-close-and-personal with
so many Basquiat paintings; and what
lessons does this study on Basquiat
teach art history, Latino studies, or Af-
rican American studies?
Even though moments of the manu-
script do not stray far enough from the
language and argumentation of disser-
tation-stage writing, Reading Basquiat
contributes greatly to scholarship on
an artist whose work continues to be
simultaneously highly valued (mon-
etarily) and undervalued for its artistic
merit.
Cherise Smith is an associate professor
of art history and African and African
diaspora studies at the University of
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).
Smith Nka • 219
 ary orbit of his chosen vocation by (itself produced by David’s studio in
REVIEWS
A NEW REPUBLIC inserting b-boys into compositions five versions) has been replaced with
lifted from Western art masterpieces, a similarly rendered, urban warrior
KEHINDE WILEY not unlike Robert Colescott did three tricked out in camouflage. The clashing
decades earlier in cartoonish, satiri- of “Williams,” as the subject is identi-
cal paintings like George Washington fied on the canvas above the names of
Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page those rulers preceding Napoleon, noted
BROOKLYN MUSEUM OF ART from an American History Textbook on the David, and the Eurocentric-pat-
FEBRUARY 20–MAY 24, 2015 (1974–75), highlighted in Black Male. terned, wallpaper-like backdrop brings
Beyond their diametrically opposed a postmodern visual bling to the remix
painting sensibilities, Wiley’s embrace of representational status and power.
Since the turn of the new millennium, of art pedagogy, similar in an obvious Not visible in most reproductions, in
Kehinde Wiley, American celebrity artist way to his predecessor, is interesting. person Wiley’s Napoleon reveals minute
of the moment, has delivered a broadly Such art historical pastiche, by Wiley sperm-shaped squiggles woven into
appealing oeuvre to the center of the and more broadly, has been critiqued the faux-fabric pattern. Also repeated
art world on a silver platter.1 Like other as variously clever and engaging, and on an ornately carved, Wiley-designed
fans, a majority of art cognoscenti have old hat, if not gimmicky. Yet in my frame, this element outs masculinity
been seduced by Wiley’s celebratory, view the very transparency of the mode themes latent in the tradition signi-
formal portraits of self-styled young complements Wiley’s strong social mes- fied by the David. What Wiley has been
black men set against bright, patterned sages as well as the veneer effect of his doing, again pretty much from the
backdrops. Some, however, have been painting surface. start, is overlaying his African Ameri-
skeptical of not only the accessibility So, in Wiley’s Napoleon Leading the can, male, gay subjectivity and agency
of his imagery, but also his retro- Army over the Alps (2005), a climac- onto this artistic lineage with which he
photorealist technique and resultant tic example of this type in the show, identifies closely.
“superflat” style.2 In the midst of the cutout conqueror in Jacques- Wiley’s near exclusive turn to hip-
continuing widespread commentary Louis David’s propagandistic portrait hop subjects, facilitated by the sartorial
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 high-
profile 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 contex-
tual 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 Kehinde Wiley, Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps, 2005. Oil on canvas, 130.5 x 121 x 12 in.,
Los Angeles in the Rodney King era, framed. Courtesy Kehinde Wiley and Sean Kelly, New York; Roberts and Tilton, Los Angeles; Galerie
cut this reality into the exclusion- Daniel Templon, Paris/Brussels; and Stephan Friedman, London. © Kehinde Wiley

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

220 • Nka DOI 10.1215/10757163-3641909 © 2016 by Nka Publications

220 • Nka

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 artist-
conceived, 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 post-
colonial, 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 sub-
jects, 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 cre-
ative milieu for Wiley. The diva couture
and exaggerated fertility symbolism
of densely foliaged backdrops con-
jures futuristic Botticellian goddesses.
Linked to this series in the center
Cutler Nka • 221
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

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

222 • Nka
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 nine-
teenth-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 pre-
dictable but well compatible with
Wiley’s by now autonomous art think-
ing. Another new direction on display
was the substitution of landscape
backgrounds for some of the large-
scale 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 publi-
cized through these years that would
have better added this dimension to a
retrospective (notwithstanding logis-
tics 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 multira-
cial 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 por-
traits in their evocative constellation
of culture, class, gender, commod-
ity, and slick joie de peintre—brightly
packaged for the masses.
Jody B. Cutler is an art historian affil-
iated with St. John’s University in New
York City.
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.
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).
Cutler Nka • 223
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