Kara Walker: Dissecting Bodies/Looking for Organs

• In Event: Unsettling Bodies: Power, Desire, and Abjection in Decolonial Visual and Performance Art

Abstract

This paper explores two specific themes that emerge in Kara Walker’s book of sketches MCMXCIX: first, the way Walker sketches the space between real and imagined physical encounters between white men/black women. I suggest that these violent “touchings” are designed to make us rethink human hierarchies. Secondly, I explore the theme of white male dismemberment and dissection at the hands of black women, particularly how black women excavate the chest cavity of white men. I argue that both themes—violent touchings and excavations—show the never-ending historical interaction, overlap, and forced fusion of white male and black female bodies.

Presenter

• Maria del Guadalupe Davidson, The University of Oklahoma