“I have a funny problem with humor…because I don’t consider it fun. I remember cartoons on TV that were old, pre-Mickey Mouse cartoons. These mysterious black-faced mice. I saw new prints of old Bill Durham ads with these coon scenes, genre scenes, sitting on the porch with all these animals. It’s strange but this is somebody’s idea of the good life…full of people with a kind of peasant worship—-these humorous, clown coon images…these black characters.” — Kara Walker

This anthology is an excellent compendium of critical writing on Kara Walker’s iconic ideas in storytelling and visual media. In addition to the notorious silhouettes, ink drawings, graphics, sugar sculptures and performances are analyzed. Throughout, a variety of popular media forms from Harlequin romances to Looney Tunes to Hollywood movies are deftly rolled into commentary on Walker’s visual invectives most of which target events as told in American history when it comes to Black people and their lived experience.

Pretty clear from this volume is that Kara Walker’s art defies easy critique. Rather her work sparks a diversity of perspectives on meaning and history. Medium, color, form, subject matter —all highly challenging to art historians and art writers—are worked anew when addressing Walker’s astonishing focus, critical eye, and ability to render oppression in visible, symbolic manner. Stories of the South’s slave economy and the sexual oppression of women and children obviously, in the history of art, cannot be discussed simply in formal terms, even when the medium used repeats and is highly artful, as are her arresting silhouettes. Rather her shadow puppets, silhouetted tableaux, performances and projections, become gigantic sugar baby figurines, move into film and in this selection of essays, generate a fitting complexity of response.

Most recently, with Walker’s new commission, Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (2024) she presents larger-than-life mechanical puppets, which in their sheer scale, blow away traditional associations of careful handling of a ‘small’ puppet and the ‘skilled’ precision of the craft. They suggest, by contrast, a world of brutal, programmed automation: the 19th c. Industrial Revolution and a world of servitude stuck in time. Editor Vanina Géré, has pulled together nine essays, which cover 20 years of Walker’s works. The scholarship examines the specific ways she sustains critique of the slave economy in the American south and observes her art through symbolism and signifiers, slavery and sexuality, and details of racist stereotypes. Each essay responds to the power of Walker’s vision to illustrate a circus of policing, humiliation, and plantation life as told with her peculiar wit: as a story book romance. Jerry Saltz’s interview with Walker from 1996, is an overview covering her work in graduate school and looking at the specific meaning of her methods: cut-outs and silhouettes, in other words what gives meaning to her work and to her artistic intentions. Other essays critique ideas within specific works or offer transatlantic readings of figures of such as ‘The Nanny of Maroon’ and sugar industries. Throughout the volume, what Walker has tried to accomplish is underscored and carefully contextualized. One comes away with much better and more adroit comprehension of Walker’s work in the context of Black experience, art history, and critical race history. Growing up, Kara Walker’s father was a painter, and they went to Black art exhibits together. She was raised on Black pride and personal issues, but refers to this at times, as her sensing a complexity of ‘troubling” issues, which she wanted to illustrate in a way to attract the viewer. This is how the ‘silhouettes’ came about, for instance (Saltz in Géré, 1). Saltz draws upon the silhouette medium, and how it functions in his early questions, to which she responds, “it’s polite” and she goes on to describe the medium aesthetically as from the light world of the middle class, adding how silhouettes talk about “profiles of people” and “side-long glances” of “the unreliable woman” - the negress - which she also sometimes uses in her signature, signing an installation as, “From the Bowels of the Bosom, A Reconstruction by Miss K. Walker, A Free Negress of Noteworthy Talent” (Ibid 1).

This interview, and all of the essays in this volume, are scholarly pieces and Walker’s themes and interlocking narratives are elaborated upon with great skill. For the enthusiast or admirer or critic of Walker, the volume is an initial glimpse into her ideas, if not into herself. That signature she tells Saltz is “a play on slave narratives from another era. Well-meaning abolitionists would make some sort of testimonial. It was the antithesis of racism, a higher than uplift of the oppressed peoples.” (Ibid, 3) This “historical phraseology” in the titles (which are hugely long) and her signature lets Walker include herself hesitantly as in “Noteworthy Talent” as if speaking of someone else, “as a stereotype or as a silhouette”. (Ibid, 3) She is not directly who she claims, thus the ‘unreliable Negress’ a trope worth exploring. Referring to the silhouettes, as like a stereotype, and as shadows of real people, Walker brings up language: “shadows of things that maybe there is only a written description of.” (Ibid 3) It makes the artworks more powerful to read how invisibility has affected her as a Black woman and as an artist.

As it turns out, black paper silhouettes, for which she is so known, are a kind of goth Victorian shorthand for stories found in Deep South novels, like The Clansmen: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, by Thomas Dixon Jr, from 1905, is a novel rife with exaggerated Negroid features and all kinds of racist bodily grotesqueries about Black people which then occupy the reader’s imagination (Ibid 3). Thus framed, what Walker sets out to do is clear: “go back to nineteenth century historical fiction in order to critique it” and why “it is recurring” (Ibid 4). Saltz’s interview explores themes in the work from memory, horror, and romantic fiction to other tropes of populist literature and its racist oeuvre.

Every essay investigates something unique in Walker’s work as well as her motivations, frequently overlapping with each other in their topics. Several talk about early works form the 1990s when Walker was first becoming known. Hamza Walker, for instance, explores inspirations from James Baldwin and the contrast of the silhouettes with the literature of Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Toni Cade Bambara. The author calls the installations “a psycho-sexual mess of Looney Tunes proportion” (Walker in Géré, 21). This essay illuminates the slave economy and the economy of sex in several works: You Do, 1994, The Battle of Atlanta: Being the Narrative of a Negress in the Flames of Desire— A Reconstruction, 1995, Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as it Occurred between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart, 1994, The End of Uncle Tom and the Grand Allegorical Tableau of Eve in Heaven, 1995, Before the Battle (Chick’n’ Dumplin), 1995, and more. Throughout, the writer examines the conflation of historical fact and fiction through contrasting narratives in the artist’s work.

Minute details of symbolic meaning are taken on by Yasmin Raymond, who writes on ‘maladies of power’ found in the paper pieces, and detailing individually each symbolic element in the form of a “lexicon of symptoms, tools, weapons, and ordeals” to articulate “the amorphous nature of power and of morality which drives Walker’s efforts to visualize the histories of injustice” (Raymond in Géré, 82). Starting with ‘hoop skirts’ Raymond elucidates roles that these many, seemingly innocuous symbols play, and looks at the context of their use. Boots and shoes’, ‘knives, razor blades, ropes’, ‘water’, ‘birth, ‘feces and semen’ ‘mother’s milk’ all seem simple enough, yet, in the context of the slave economy, and in the context, arguably, of the racist imagination, they are monstrous, debilitating, lethal, infantilizing. A Black child wears an oversized adult shoe. This is an encumbered child; a child taking too much responsibility for an adult world. This is the essence of being enslaved to ideas or ideology. The detailed focus upon iconography in Walker’s world lends much useful depth to our understanding of Walker’s intentions and meaning. That said, all the essays have dimensions which contribute. They take us in and out of Walker’s inimitable complexity. Several authors refer more to the classic white-wash of enslavement, Gone with the Wind and to plantation daughter ‘Scarlett O’Hara,’ whose only motivation is the Deep South, to undermine history-as-a-rendition and the hyper-normalization of racism in popular media history.

Zadie Smith, from the United Kingdom, engages with Walker’s commission for the Tate Modern turbine room, A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the corn fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant, 2014. The sculpture is a gigantic Negress made of pure white sugar (she fabricated at the Domino sugar factory in Brooklyn). The Negress figure is crouched on her knees, legs under her and feet behind her. Akin, from the front, to the Great Sphinx (another woman of color) and from the back to sexual vulnerability and supplication.

This essay, entitled Kara Walker: What do we want history to do to us? Touches upon the role of the British Empire in the slave and sugar trades. Smith describes several of the plethora of nationalistic, royal and empire statuary sitting confidently around London, made of white marble. She writes about how these sculptures exude permanence and wealth-making on the backs of colonies, enslaved, and oppressed peoples. Describing one of Walker’s ink drawings of Scarlett O’Hara, lassoed at the waist by a rope attached to a large, kerchiefed Black women, Smith inaugurates a discussion about cultural differences from England to America. Instead of a “Mammy” as Americans might read the large female figure, is ‘the Nanny of the Maroons’, a corollary to the American ‘Mammy’ trope, but having separate connotations - The Nanny was an escaped slave and leader of peoples (Smith in Géré, 205). Such distinctions in the text and imagery point out how the work speaks, to whom, and for what reasons. In this case, Smith has identified a strong thread of meaning between herself, her location and Walker’s work. Inclusion of this text also articulates some silent assumptions frequently omitted in our education, the history of art, and the history of slavery, thus, Walker achieves a global critique with her work.

Walker emerged as an artist on the back of a multiculturalism in American life in the 1990s. This multiculturalism was predicated on a general idea of inclusion and critiqued Ronald Reagan’s push for a grand, white-bread historical narrative for ‘America’. While only one essay dives much into Walker’s film and video projection work, the amount of popular culture referenced is useful and a provocative terrain of middle-brow literature with racist tropes and caricatures. Thus, this comprehensive volume covers much scholarly ground and represents the early decades of Walker’s perturbing and unique body of work. In these trying contemporary times, the effort to de-colonize historical perspectives and understand their recurrence, while enjoying new uses for old media has a certain clout. Kara Walker has figured out how to see through the past, and this book of essays offers much interpretation of her efforts.

Notes

Saltz, J. (1996) Ill-Will and Desire, pp. 1–16.

Walker, H. (2006) Cut it Out (1997) /A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Waste. pp. 17-42. Raymond, Y. (2006) Maladies of Power: A Kara Walker Lexicon. pp. 81-128.