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RACISM, HUMOR AND REBELLION IN THE WORK OF TWELVE ARTISTS

JODY BERMAN

A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2018

To my son Malakai

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many people have had an impact on this project and their tremendous support deserves special gratitude. I owe my greatest personal and intellectual debt to Dr. Robin Poynor who has mentored and supported me throughout my undergraduate and graduate career. He has always aided my progress, made himself available to me, provided detailed and skillful analysis of my work, and has guided me through the sometimes perilous terrain of this academic journey. More than a professor, I consider him a lifelong friend.

I would like to thank Dr. Paul Ortiz whose knowledge and research into the under-bellied history of the United States are inseparable from his social engagement with issues related to national and international inequalities, past and present. Dr. Ortiz joined my committee as co-

Chair during the time when I need his encouragement and guidance most. His thoughtful insight and critiques have helped shape this project into a broader consideration of themes that relate to all areas of African-American expressive culture.

I have immeasurable gratitude for the guidance of Dr. Gwendolyn Zohara-Simmons.

Without her strength and support this project would not have ever been completed and I would not have matriculated to ABD. Beyond her knowledge regarding African-American cultural and religious practice, Dr. Simmons is a role model for me. She exemplifies the power and responsibility of the individual to affect change in public and personal spaces.

I would like to thank Dr. Maya Stanfield-Mazzi whose vast experience within the study of

Latin American post-colonial cultures has expanded my awareness and knowledge of the ways in which hybridity and mimesis operate in transnational contexts. Dr. Stanfield-Mazzi’s encouragement, guidance and availability to assist, are the markings of an ideal mentor.

I would like to thank Patrick Grigsby and Laura Robertson. I will miss our impromptu campus-conversations regarding the contours of life and the minutia of graduate academia. I am

grateful to the Department of Art and Art History and the Graduate School at the University of

Florida. The support provided, made this project both possible and financially feasible.

Finally, I would like to thank my family: my mother, who has always supported this endeavor and shown enthusiastic interest in my ideas and my father who has taught me the importance of keeping the wondrous in sight. I thank my sister and brother for being sounding boards when life needed processing and offering that certain perspective that only siblings can share. I thank my husband Tim and son Malakai whose infectious, boisterous laughter is my favorite of all sounds to hear. Your encouragement and belief in this project has helped me to see it through to the end. From the bottom of my heart thank you, to each of you.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... 4

ABSTRACT ...... 8

CHAPTER

1 INTRODUCTION ...... 10

Contextual Evidence: Gaps in African American Art Historical Scholarship ...... 12 The Work of Kara Walker as Paradigm ...... 16 Art, Humor, Subversion?: Kara Walker Take Two ...... 23 Analytical Approach and Guiding Scholarship ...... 27 Synopses of Chapters ...... 37

2 LAUGHING TO KEEP FROM CRYING: UP FROM SLAVERY...... 43

The Origins of African American Humor: Laughter, Sedition and Survival ...... 43 The Ballad of the ‘Happy Darky:’ A Double-Edged Ruse ...... 47 Tricksters Gonna Trick: Tales of Sedition and Expressions of Liberation ...... 51 Enter:The Minstrel Show ...... 59 The Clap-Back: Black Humorists and Cutting Ripostes ...... 62 Irresponsible Satire and the Subjectivity of Humor...... 64

3 CRITIQUING AFRICAN AMERICAN ART: LOCKE, DU BOIS AND POST- BLACK HUMOR ...... 68

Locke, Du Bois and Contemporary African American Art ...... 70 21st Century Post-Black Art and the Art of Critique ...... 72 Reinscribing the Racial Stereotype: Matters of Humor and (Mis)Representation ...... 80 Locke, Du Bois and the Post-Black Debate Reprised ...... 87

4 CHANGE THE JOKE, SLIP THE YOKE: MIMICRY, HUMOR AND RE- APPROPRIATION ...... 91

‘Changing the Joke and Slipping the Yoke:’ The Art of Subversion ...... 94 Mining the History of African American Representation: A Visual Reinterpretation of Enslaved Persons Pictured ...... 99 Humor and Cognitive Dissonance: The Racist Joke and its Irreconcilable Implications .....107 Speaking Truth to Power: The Lynching Image, Pictures Do Not Lie...... 112 Black Artists and the Restrictive Frame ...... 117 Recuperative and Redemptive Memory in African American Art ...... 120

5 CONTEMPORARY TRICKSTERS, CONJURING ARTISTS...... 124

The Trickster Journeys West: Lessons Imparted, Assessments Conveyed ...... 124 To Divert the Powers That Be: Defiance and Rejoice in Rebellion ...... 128 The Eshu-Elegba Standard: Everyday Forms of Resistance and Black Self-Articulation ...133 The Trickster as Master of Language Play ...... 139 Subverting the Art/Historical Canon Through the Trope of the Trickster ...... 142

6 CONCLUSION: RACISM, HUMOR AND THE BURDEN OF REPRESENTATION. ...158

Democracy, Humor and the Critique of Power ...... 159 Tragicomedy: Laughing to Keep from Crying ...... 161 Race and Subversive Humor ...... 165 Humor, Laughter and Perilous Terrain ...... 167 Aesthetic Embodiment ...... 174 Transcendence ...... 182

LIST OF REFERENCES ...... 185

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 198

Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

RACISM, HUMOR AND REBELLION IN THE WORK OF TWELVE ARTISTS

Jody Berman

August 2018

Co-chair: Robin Poynor Co-chair: Paul Ortiz Major: Art History

In the following study I investigate the ways in which twelve artists employ humor as a disruptive agent in their work. The artists central to my argument are: Kara Walker, David

Hammons, Jason Musson, Glenn Ligon, Hank Willis Thomas, Carrie Mae Weems, John

Bankston, Willie Cole, Lorraine O’Grady, Keith Piper, Michael Ray Charles and Kerry James

Marshall. These abovementioned artists create works that undermine notions of race in

America’s past in order to expound upon its ramifications within society today. They each incorporate humor to subvert ideas of race, racism and/or identity as dominant aspects of contemporary culture. They utilize humor to interject new perspectives and feature alternative frameworks with which notions of identity and race can be understood.

Throughout this project I explore how wide-ranging forms of Black humor have operated to disrupt forces of oppression historically and contemporaneously. I accomplish this task by investigating how everyday forms of resistance have been utilized within the Black community in the long-standing fight for racial justice and equal footing within society. I do so by exploring folktales, slave-narratives, jokes, aphorisms, anecdotes, poems, lyrics, the trope of the trickster and the ‘change the joke/slip the yoke’ theme; I discuss humor-inflected artworks termed post-

black and institutional critique; I examine how such works have been considered revolutionary and/or regressive to the cause.

Each artwork and strategic intervention included in this project assesses the ironic circumstance whereby the United States has been recognized as the first country to have included inalienable rights and freedoms into its Constitution, yet it was likewise founded on and has continually been involved in the exploitation and dehumanization of Black human beings. While humor has routinely been utilized to convey this absurd and paradoxical condition, not all works included in this project were made to dissent or even to amuse. Broadly each artwork reveals the distinct challenges and triumphs, hopes and aspirations specific to Black individuals and Black communities at large; collectively they each echo the utter fragility of the human spirit and the universal desire to transcend that which separates and imprisons us all.

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

While numerous scholars have contributed greatly to the ongoing conversation regarding the integration of African American artistic production into the field of Modernist practice, their focus has largely been on the ways that African American art has been relegated to the sidelines.

Art Historical scholars have not consistently taken as their starting point an aspect of contemporary culture that has been both integral and largely disregarded in each field to underscore the discourse that has been occurring between them. My project seeks to address this deficiency in that I aim to investigate how artists such as Kara Walker, David Hammons, Jason

Musson, Glenn Ligon, Hank Willis Thomas, Carrie Mae Weems, John Bankston, Willie Cole,

Lorraine O’Grady, Keith Piper, Michael Ray Charles, Kerry James Marshall and others deploy humor as an interventionist strategy in their work. I focus on how these artists examine, question, deconstruct and/or disrupt ideas of race, racism and identity as dominant aspects of American culture. I describe how the humor deployed by these artists reflects the contradictory condition of being both profoundly intertwined with and segregated from the broader context of contemporary culture. The works of art discussed in this project each assess the circumstance whereby the United States has been recognized as the first country to have incorporated inalienable rights and freedoms into its Constitution and yet at the same time, was founded on the extraction of enormous amounts of wealth through the brutal enslavement of Black human beings. This enslavement was and remains a tragedy of epic proportions, but importantly it is also of a personal nature to most of the artists whose works are considered within this project; their ancestors among others bore this heavy burden of dehumanization based on race. The contemporary circumstances of race-based exploitation and exclusion remain an oppressive and damaging force that permeate the entirety of society today. These conditions serve as

contradictions to the notion of America as land of the free; they disprove the idea of equal access for all. I argue that each artist’s work thus functions as a grievance against this absurd and brutal condition.

The artworks explored in this project consistently reflect the precluded condition of living as a non-white citizen within a society that has yet to attain the principles of its own design as reflected in its Constitution. The works included therefore echo the activist-oriented spirit of the

Civil Rights movement, an American crusade and one of the most ethical-centered mass-protests the world has ever seen. This pro-human rights credo is evident within much of the art discussed, yet such works were also often conceived of as expressing positions beyond acts of subversion.

Broadly they reveal the struggles, triumphs and aspirations that reflect the multifarious experience of Blacks in America; largely they reflect the contours and fragility of every human soul. I accomplish this task by examining their artistic works in relation to the projects of Black writers, social critics, comedians and thinkers such as Phillis Wheatley, Alain Locke, W.E.B. Du

Bois, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Zora Neal Hurston, Dick Gregory, Franz Fanon, Stuart

Hall, Paul Gilroy, Richard Pryor, Dave Chappelle, Claudia Rankine and Azie Mira Dungey. I examine how humor has been applied in specific artworks to subvert ideas of race and racial classification. Ultimately, I contend that the strategies of humor employed aspire to achieve what Frantz Fanon proposed in his seminal work Black Skin, White Masks where he wrote,

In order to terminate this neurotic situation, in which I am compelled to choose an unhealthy, conflictual solution, fed on fantasies, hostile, inhuman in short, I have only one solution: to rise above this absurd drama that others have staged around me, to reject the two terms that are equally unacceptable, and through one human being, to reach out for the universal.1

1 Fanon. Black Skin, White Masks, 197.

Contextual Evidence: Gaps in African American Art Historical Scholarship

Contemporary African American art has been a field of study frequently neglected within the art historical debate. Few journals consistently foreground African American art, and there is incomplete research on the subaltern realities that African American artists often express in their work. In an essay titled “Afro-Modernism,” Robert F. Thompson described this dearth along with the ways in which Black and Modernist cultures are inseparable. He maintained that

African American expressive culture is “deeply and creatively embedded in contemporary culture”2 and contended that it should not be relegated to the margins of history. A similar sentiment has been echoed by Mary Ann Calo in her book Distinction and Denial where she wrote, “Critics writing for mass media publications consistently underscored the separateness of

‘Negro Art’ from the overarching category ‘American Art’…and there emerged a set of critical ideas rooted in the discourse of racial difference that functioned to isolate Black artistic production from mainstream cultural practice.”3

This line of critique assesses the strategies through which Black artists and their work are viewed; it recognizes that perspective affects how works are described and defined in the literature. In surveying the literature, many critics have acknowledged that African American art and artists are persistently approached through racially biased and fundamentally reductionist methodologies. Corresponding to Thompson’s and Calo’s claims for instance, Tricia O’keefe, author of “Strategy or Spectacle? Postmodernism, African American Artists and Art

Scholarship,” asserts that when African American art is assigned a specialized category and set apart from the larger field of art history, the entire discipline is undermined and it is brought to

2 Thompson. “Afro-Modernism.” Artforum International Magazine 30 (1991): 94.

3 Calo. Distinction and Denial: Race, Nation, and the Critical Construction of the African American Artist, vii.

an ideological impasse.4 This theoretical model of postmodernism locates such institutionalized issues in the networks between “the scholarship, the exhibition, and the creation of African

American art,” whereby each area is affected by the former and the next. O’keefe also describes the problems of postmodernism in its failure to undermine this deficiency, and claims that under the guise of multiculturalism, postmodernism reinforces the separatist agenda.5

The range of exclusionary practices that effectively restrict the self-determination and articulation of Black artists is detailed by James Smalls in his essay, “A Ghost of a Chance:

Invisibility and Elision in African American Art Historical Practice.” Smalls describes the reasons African American visual art continues to evade public awareness and details the problems within the field, which include: inadequate access and availability of social and cultural materials produced by African Americans (due to non-documentation and a lack of centralization), and a lack of knowledge within institutions on the topic of African American art and its related issues. For Smalls, most distressing is the deficiency in “viable critical art historical and historiographical practice within the discipline” itself. 6 He states, “African

American art is a difficult field in which to build an informative educational course, to do scholarly research, or even to organize an introductory lecture.”7

Smalls outlines certain restrictive approaches to African American art history that have been detrimental and/or have contributed to its “invisibility and erasure.” These include but are not limited to: Alain Locke’s formalist project of working towards legitimizing African

4 O'keefe, Tricia. "Strategy or Spectacle? Postmodernism, African-American Artists and Art Scholarship." Third Text, 617.

5Ibid, 618.

6 Smalls. "Ghost of a Chance: Invisibility and Elision in African American Art Historical Practice." Art Documentation, 3.

7 Ibid, 3.

American art through object-oriented analysis and James Porter’s text Modern Negro Art, which according to Smalls had an assimilationist agenda. Samella Lewis’s textbook Art: African

American and Elsa Honig Fine’s textbook The Afro-American Artist both worked to remedy the omission of African American artists from the canon, but they ultimately fail in their general continuation of the encyclopedic project of yesteryear.8 None of these, according to Smalls, makes any sustained attempt at situating artists/artworks within the larger historical field or creating viable art criticism for the work that they consider.9

In the essay, “Black Representation and Western Survey Textbooks,” Kymberly Pinder makes a related argument. Pinder denigrates the western survey text, and like Smalls, is critical of the practices of selection, omission and creating singular narratives. She underscores the way in which survey texts function to construct race-based identities for African American art and artists and claims that those identities often engender negative stereotypes. She posits that subject matter is often linked to the ethnicity of the artist and she uses the example of Gardner’s Art through the Ages to make her point. According to Pinder, in the Gardner text one genre scene of

Black life by Henry Ossawa Tanner is “[made to] represent his entire oeuvre,” which is historically inaccurate since Tanner made his international reputation as a painter of religious scenes.10 Pinder goes on to postulate that survey texts invariably display and devalue African

American art simultaneously, a type of representation that had been identified by Stuart Hall as one that, “replaces invisibility with a kind of carefully regulated, segregated visibility.”11

8 Ibid, 3-4.

9 Ibid, 4.

10 Pinder. "Black Representation and Western Survey Texts." Art Bulletin, 533.

11 Ibid, 533.

Categorical, essentialist and separatist agendas are consistently reflected within African

American art discourse. In response to this confined condition, Darby English, author of How to

See a Work of Art in Total Darkness, initiated an investigation into identity politics by opening his leading chapter with the generative question: “what becomes of Black art when Black artists stop making it?”12 In this work he described the ramifications of labeling artworks “Black” and interrogated the ways in which this signifier operates as a control on Black artists and their art.13

Like Pinder, he employed Stuart Hall's work on postwar identities and explored the notion of

"Black representational space." According to English, a cultural territory emerged out of the

“struggle over relations of representation”14 and, through the politics of representation, a

“constant policing of Black representational space not only preserves it, but re-naturalizes it.”15

As such, certain achievements are endorsed while others are rejected, which functions to circumscribe Black artistic production to a limited space within contemporary art practice. He also recalls Anne M. Wagner’s quip, “difference determines differently,”16 to underscore the need for scholarship to particularize our view of these artists as individuals, (as opposed to as types) and to diminish the prominence and creation of overly generalized homogenous narratives regarding African American art and artists.17

12 English. How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness, 27.

13 Ibid, 30.

14 Ibid, 29. English cites Stuart Hall as the scholar that identifies “the struggle over relations of representation” in the territory of culture.

15 Ibid, 30.

16 Ibid, and Wagner. Three Artists (Three Women): Modernism and the Art of Hesse, Krasner and O'Keeffe, 286.

17 English. How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness, 15.

The Work of Kara Walker as Paradigm

Through their writing, these aforementioned critics seek to undermine the ways in which

African American art and artists are continually confined to the realm of the “other”. They call attention to the lack of contextualization within the discipline and argue that artworks by African

Americans are frequently isolated from the historicity of art scholarship as a whole. This line of critique however, has not remained exclusively within the domain of the writer. Across disciplines, various artists have initiated projects to particularize and challenge prevalent understanding(s) of African American art. Kara Walker for example, gave her 2017 show the following lengthy, nearly 200-word title:

Sikkema Jenkins and Co. is Compelled to present The most Astounding and Important Painting show of the fall Art Show viewing season!

Collectors of Fine Art will Flock to see the latest Kara Walker offerings, and what is she offering but the Finest Selection of artworks by an African-American Living Woman Artist this side of the Mississippi. Modest collectors will find her prices reasonable, those of a heartier disposition will recognize Bargains! Scholars will study and debate the Historical Value and Intellectual Merits of Miss Walker’s Diversionary Tactics. Art Historians will wonder whether the work represents a Departure or a Continuum. Students of Color will eye her work suspiciously and exercise their free right to Culturally Annihilate her on social media. Parents will cover the eyes of innocent children. School Teachers will reexamine their art history curricula. Prestigious Academic Societies will withdraw their support, former husbands and former lovers will recoil in abject terror. Critics will shake their heads in bemused silence. Gallery Directors will wring their hands at the sight of throngs of the gallery-curious flooding the pavement outside. The Final President of the United States will visibly wince. Empires will fall, although which ones, only time will tell.

In third-person narrative form, this long-winded title bombastically forecasts the public’s reaction to her (at the time) up-and-coming show. Through boastful and melodramatic descriptions such as, “The most Astounding and Important Painting show,” and “the Finest

Selection of artworks by an African-American Living Woman Artist this side of the

Mississippi,” Walker evokes the style of old-timey broadcasts made by theatrical circus

ringleaders and sensation-inducing freak-show announcers. She employs tongue-in cheek humor, which has been a métier within her work. She uses strategies of humor to parody the way in which race and gender have been showcased to construct ‘othered’ identities. By satirizing this restrictive condition, Walker also signals associated sensationalized and othered persons such as Saartjie Baartman (the “Hotentot Venus”), whose pre and post-mortem body was paraded around Europe, as an object of colonial fascination. In doing so, Walker mocks not only the condition of being othered but also the exploitation, racism, ridicule, objectification and commodification of Black human beings that has continually occurred since the onset of

Europe’s colonial enterprise. Of this commodity-fetish effect, this “ever ripe for the plucking” and “biting by the same crafty devils who brought…the African slave trade and Middle

Passage,” Greg Tate commented,

…much of what America sold to the world as uniquely American in character – music, dance, fashion, humor, spirituality, grassroots, politics, slang, literature, and sports- was uniquely African American in origin, conception, and inspiration.18

The absurd nature of this condition is reflected in her show’s title, which targets collectors, scholars, art historians and even students of color; parents, prestigious academic societies, critics, gallery directors and the President of the United States are not spared. By cleverly and theatrically predicting each social commentator’s assessment, Walker disempowers the valuations to be made: the elite’s claim to intellectualism is subjugated; disrupted is the

“cultural annihilation” by students of color that Walker’s work would certainly provoke on social media. Whether arousing applause or inciting scathing scorn, Walker unilaterally lampoons each assessment of her and her work before they can even be made.

18 Tate. Everything But the Burden: What White People are Taking from Black Culture, 2-3.

Walker’s preemptive projection and dramatization of her audience’s reactions operates as much as an exposé as it does an accusation. In underscoring the performative and prescribed nature of their responses, she reproaches the unoriginal predictability and banal aspects of their claims. Correspondingly within her artist statement she acknowledges the sensation expected of her work, exemplified best by the throngs of viewers that flocked to her installation/destination of 2014, A Subtelty, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby an Homage to the unpaid and overworked

Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant, in 2014. This work, like those that preceded it, transformed pained references to America’s slave-based past into twisted, carnivalesque creations reflecting the darkest recesses of subconscious desire and disrepute, revulsion and delusion. Her complete artist’s statement for her Sikkema Jenkins and Co. exhibition reads:

I don’t really feel the need to write a statement about a painting show. I know what you all expect from me and I have complied up to a point. But frankly I am tired, tired of standing up, being counted, tired of “having a voice” or worse “being a role model.” Tired, true, of being a featured member of my racial group and/or my gender niche. It’s too much, and I write this knowing full well that my right, my capacity to live in this Godforsaken country as a (proudly) raced and (urgently) gendered person is under threat by random groups of white (male) supremacist goons who flaunt a kind of patched together notion of race purity with flags and torches and impressive displays of perpetrator-as-victim sociopathy. I roll my eyes, fold my arms and wait. How many ways can a person say racism is the real bread and butter of our American mythology, and in how many ways will the racists among our countrymen act out their Turner Diaries race war fantasy combination Nazi Germany and Antebellum South – states which, incidentally, lost the wars they started, and always will, precisely because there is no way those white racisms can survive the earth without the rest of us types upholding humanity’s best, keeping the motor running on civilization, being good, and preserving nature and all the stuff worth working and living for?

Anyway, this is a show of works on paper and on linen, drawn and collaged using ink, blade, glue and oil stick. These works were created over the course of the Summer of 2017 (not including the title, which was crafted in May). It’s not

exhaustive, activist or comprehensive in any way.19

Written in the aftermath of the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, VA, Walker’s statement reads as an ambivalent and, at turns, maddened testimonial on the state of race and gender relations in the US. Her statement was said to have “poured out” of her following the violent supremacist demonstration and President Trump’s indulgent reaction to the Neo-Nazi participants.20 The gallery released her response almost completely unchanged.21 The frank content and personal nature of it is unconventional, setting the statement apart from those routinely made by other artists. Moreover, Walker does not customarily provide accompanying text to guide viewers’ interpretations. Of this consistent withholding in the past, Glenda Carpio wrote, “Walker’s strongest detractors fixate determinedly on the stereotypes her images emphasize and decry her [repeated] refusal to navigate her viewers in processing their effect.”22

Walker’s shocking depictions of Black men, women and children in sexually explicit and at times violently compromising situations have caused much controversy and debate within and beyond the confines of the Black community. In the past, artists such as Bettye Saar and

Howardena Pindell have spoken out against Walker’s depictions of enslaved Black people.

According to Saar, Walker’s work is revolting, negative, “and a form of betrayal to the slaves, particularly women and children.” She went on to say that Walker’s work “was basically for the

19 Walker. “Artist’s Statement for Sikkema Jenkins and Co…exhibit.” September 7 to October 17, 2017. Sikkema Jenkins and Co.

20Gopnik. “Kara Walker, ‘Tired of Standing Up,’ Promises Art, Not Answers.” New York Times. August 16, 2017.

21 Ibid,

22 Carpio. “A Comedy of the Grotesque:” Robert Colescott, Kara Walker, and the Iconography of Slavery.” In Laughing Fit to Kill, 185.

In the Fall of 1995, Walker’s work was also pulled from an exposition at the Detroit Institute for the Arts because she refused to provide “didactic material” to help viewers understand the her intent.

amusement and the investment of the white art establishment.”23 Correspondingly Pindell stated that Walker’s representations, “consciously or unconsciously… [cater] to the bestial fantasies about Blacks created by white supremacy and racism."24

In reaction to such accusations, Walker has been equally outspoken. She has defended her own work and those of others who have traversed the murky waters of race and representation. Most recently, Walker came out in support of artist Dana Schutz whose abstracted and painterly depiction of Emmet Till was included in the 2017 Whitney Biennial.

Schutz’s depiction sparked outrage, and she was accused of coopting Black suffering for profit and fun.25 The controversy commenced during the show’s opening weekend when artist Parker

Bright stood in protest in front of Schutz’s painting wearing a t-shirt scrawled with the words

“Black Death Spectacle.” This act set off a debate within the art-world and on social media as to whether Schutz, as a white female artist, had the right to invoke an agonizingly painful image of a lynched Black child. Like disputes resulting from Walker’s work, the controversy surrounding

Schutz’s painting led to calls for its removal and campaigns for freedom of expression began in kind. 26

23 Curran Bernard and Hampton. I'll Make Me a World: A Century of African American Arts, PBS video series, 1999.

These statements were made regarding Walker’s work in the past, not this specific 2017 Sikemma Jenkins & Co. exhibition.

24 Pindell, Howardena. Diaspora/Realities/Strategies, 15.

25 In an open letter to the Whitney Biennial Curators, artist Hannah Black wrote, “it is not acceptable for a white person to transmute Black suffering into profit and fun, though the practice has been normalized for a long time.” The entire contents of the letter can be found in the following article: Munoz-Alonso. “Dana Schutz’s Painting of Emmett Till at Whitney Biennial Sparks Protest”. Artnet News. March 21, 2017.

26 In reaction to this censoring call, Walker and a group of other artists also signed an open letter to express their support of Dana Schutz and their condemnation of the call for the removal of her painting. The entire contents of the letter can be found in the following article: Neuendorf. “Coming to Dana Schutz’s Defense, Cindy Sherman and Other Artists Pen an Open Letter to Her Critics.” Artnet News. August 4, 2017.

In direct response to this controversy, Walker posted an anti-censorship statement on her personal Instagram account. Beneath a digital image of Artmesia Gentileschi’s Judith Slaying

Holofernes, Walker wrote:

The history of painting is full of graphic violence and narratives that don't necessarily belong to the artists own life, or perhaps, when we are feeling generous we can ascribe the artist some human feeling, some empathy toward her subject. Perhaps, as with Gentileschi we hastily associate her work with trauma she experienced in her own life. I tend to think this unfair, as she is more than just her trauma. As are we all. I am more than a woman, more than the descendant of Africa, more than my fathers daughter. More than Black more than the sum of my experiences thus far. I experience painting too as a site of potentiality, of query, a space to join physical and emotional energy, political and allegorical forms. Painting - and a lot of art often lasts longer than the controversies that greet it. I say this as a shout to every artist and artwork that gives rise to vocal outrage. Perhaps it too gives rise to deeper inquiries and better art. It can only do this when it is seen.27

This Instagram post along with Walker’s artist statement for her Sikkema Jenkins and Co. show together express an expansive and unconstrained perspective of identity and self- identification. This is conveyed within Walker’s artist’s statement when she described herself as,

“Tired, true, of being a featured member of my racial group and/or my gender niche. It’s too much.” It is echoed in her Instagram post where she wrote, “I am more than a woman, more than the descendant of Africa, more than my fathers daughter. More than Black more than the sum of my experiences thus far.” These deeply personal avowals collectively and successively read like a testimony and an explanation, an acknowledgement and justification. They convey Walker’s reasons for casting off what she seemingly views as a yoke of responsibility to play the game of identity politics, which she is implicated in through her inborn Black and gendered body. Yet where her Instagram post implies that art holds a redemptive potentiality to “give rise to deeper inquiries and better art,” her artist’s statement is much less prophetic and hopeful.

27 Walker. kara_walker_official. Instagram, March 23, 2017. 1:28 PM UTC. Walker (like in many Instagram and tweeted messages, adherence to grammatical rules is not consistent).

A poignant work from the Sikkema Jenkins and Co. exhibit is titled Storm Ryder. It is a

Blackened oval-shaped canvas with a few torn scraps of paper pasted to it. One scrap of paper on the lower right portion of the canvas portrays a small silhouette of a ship with a circular moon above it. The seemingly tossed about and bonded pieces of paper cumulatively reflect the scrawled words of the work’s subtitle: You Must Hate Black People as Much as You Hate

Yourself. It is a concept that approximates the outlook of social philosopher and psychoanalyst

Frantz Fanon, who treated both torturers and the tortured during the Algerian War, claiming that denigration summarily degrades victim and perpetrator alike.28 It is Walker’s way of stating that if beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then so too must be the rest.

This concomitant aphorism hearkens also back again to the human spectacle created in response to Walker’s Marvelous Sugarbaby: throngs of sightseers assembled at the factory to image themselves in selfies with the Mammy-as-sphinx’s breasts and genitalia as the expressed object of view.29 These photographic relics convey that art and life are trapped in a perpetually reflective infinity mirror, imitating each other at each and every turn. It was as if a scene from the film Bamboozled had come [back] to life, leading many to question who was indeed subjugating whom? Had Walker, in fact, also created an installation whereby audience members implicated and incriminated themselves within the convoluted matrix of race and representation?

And if bigotry arises out of un-reflected upon self-loathing, then had the sightseers in fact

28 Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth, 267-269 and Mitter, Siddhartha. The Artist and the Revolutionary. The Village Voice. September 5, 2017. In this article, Mitter states, “Walker knows that oppression degrades victim and perpetrator alike.”

29 For examples of cited imagery see article: Munro. “Kara Walker’s Sugar Sphinx Spawns Offensive Instagram Photos: This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things.” Artnet News. May 30, 2014.

pictured their own bigotry and misogyny and racism in those indelible selfies? Was this the scene Walker had planned?

Within her artist statement for the Sikkema Jenkins and Co. show, Walker acknowledges that she has been considered a provocateur. She wrote, “I know what you all expect from me and

I have complied up to a point.” However, by applying the qualifier, “up to a point,” her tone becomes one of defiance; she concedes that she has delivered said controversy, but not without the implication of the audience that continually delights in the spectacle that she has laid out before them. It is another way of saying, “here is your Pascal lamb, you blood thirsty savages,” and to the bloody sacrifice they thronged. The opening night of the show was a well-attended smash. Write-ups were made in the New York Times and disparaging assessments of her exhibition appeared on social media. Lyric Prince sharply titled her online essay, Dear Kara

Walker: If You’re Tired of Standing Up, Please Sit Down.30 As predicted, the cards that Walker lined up, all fell right into perfect place; and Walker, well she just rolled her eyes, folded her arms and waited. After all, how many ways can a person say racism is the real bread and butter of our American mythology?

Art, Humor, Subversion?: Kara Walker Take Two

Kara Walker’s works have been vital within the ongoing conversation regarding the visual pathology of racism and its enduring, yet fraught relationship to humor. Her artwork exists within the extensive history of satirists employing humor to perpetuate and/or discredit racially motivated ideas; still her works remain an anomaly amongst these. Walker invents beguiling, perplexing, and difficult to ascertain scenes that hearken back to the antebellum era in the South.

30 Prince. “Dear Kara Walker: If You’re Tired of Standing Up, Please Sit Down.” Hyperallergic. August 29, 2017.

Prince is an artist, writer and contributor to Hyperallergic, an online forum and visual art publication.

According to Walker, her grotesque depictions of rape, pedophilia and murder are disguised in a cloak of depraved comedy to generate a “giddy discomfort” in the observer.31 This discomfort however, has perpetuated its own controversies. Her work has prompted certain viewers to make their own outrageous images of themselves pictured alongside hers. Posted onto social media sites, and made to be funny and/or perverse, they have been deemed offensive, disrespectful, racist and/or misogynist.32 They express much in terms of Walker’s audiences’ visceral responses to nudity, the Black and/or female body, labor inequality, and caricatured versions of each, notwithstanding a history that involves the slave enterprise, its casualties, its outcome and its aftermath. In this sense, Walker’s work acts as a conduit: it obliges reactions, which signal the status of race and gender relations in the United States. It provokes precisely because it signifies a shameful, duplicitous narrative that remains unresolved, largely unacknowledged and wholly un-reconciled. In other words, Walker’s imagery denotes the insufferable details of human abjection, which resultantly provokes responses that also elicit the ever-puzzling and reflexive query: does art imitate life or is it the inverse after all?

Through an incorporation of comedic virtuosity, Walker creates work that contributes greatly to the discourse concerning the consequences of humor as it relates to histories of human suffering. Her imagery embodies endlessly imperiled questions of subjectivity and offers no easy answers. She represents the brutality of slavery and its impacts within contemporary culture; she

31 Thompson. Curatorial Statement for Kara Walker’s “Domino Sugar Refinery Installation: A Subtelty or the Marvelous Sugar Baby an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant.” May 10 – July 6, 2014. Creativetime.

32 Munro. “Kara Walker’s Sugar Sphinx Spawns Offensive Instagram Photos.” Artnet News. May 30, 2014. and Callahan. “Reactions to Kara Walker’s A Subtlety Prove a Black Woman Will Be Sexualized, Even in Art.” The Grapevine. May 28, 2014.

Yesha Callahan writes, “History has shown us time and time again how a Black woman’s body was (and sometimes still is) objectified. From the days of the slave trade to even having Black butts on display in music videos, the Black woman’s body seems to easily garner laughs and mockery, even if it’s made out of sugar.”

embraces the comedic effect, an approach darkly echoed in the culture out of which such atrocities arose. She accomplishes this aim by visually translating depraved offenses of the past into scenes of outrageous madness in the present. For her work titled The Daily Constitution

1878 for example, Walker re-inscribed a lynching scene reported on in an 1878 edition of an

Atlanta newspaper with the same title. Depicted in caricature-like form, Walker illustrated how a mob wrenched down a branch of a Blackjack tree, tied a woman's neck to it, and then released the branch, flinging the woman’s body high into the air.33 Of the original murderous act Walker stated, "It's this completely absurd, extreme, violent situation that required so much perverse ingenuity."34 This type of depraved ingenuity is at the core of the entire enterprise of dividing human beings along lines of race. It is reflected in Walker’s works through her focus on the most outrageous aspects of the tragedies that occurred in its wake. Therefore, if Walker’s work ultimately displays humor, it is a sardonic laugh that is enlisted. This may be expressed as a defiant and/or dissociative response to distance one’s self emotionally from the immediacy of the atrocities at hand. Conversely, it may convey a malicious disrespect in keeping with the crimes perpetrated and subsequently represented. Either way, the laugh that Walker elicits remains disturbing and dissonant, for in its ambiguous meaning is echoed the discordant ways in which humans have understood and reflected upon such tragic human histories.

Walker’s use of a disturbing type of humor exists within the context of a long history of oppressed minorities using humor as a means of entertainment and mechanism for survival.

Laughter, by definition however is subjective and its object is difficult to control. Echoed within the debate surrounding Walker’s work are questions concerning how to aptly represent

33 Barnett, Laura. “Kara Walker’s Art: Shadows of Slavery.” The Guardian. October. 10, 2013.

34 Ibid,

unimaginable horrors generated by humankind. Artists and academic scholars have long grappled with this overwhelming issue and it is telling that within mainstream society, the insufferable history of slavery has been vastly disregarded and largely un-reflected upon, outside of strategies of humor. The 2013 30 Americans exhibition for example, included works by

Walker and various other African American artists. It centered upon issues of racial, sexual, and historical identity, and its consequences within contemporary culture. The artwork exhibited expressed views that ranged from quiet reflection, sorrowful contemplation, cynical effrontery, powerful dissent, satirical evaluation and abstract uncertainty. Curators correspondingly solicited audience responses, which were likewise wide-ranging in view.

At that exhibition at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville, Tennessee, the following provocative audience response was penned and affixed to a bulletin board near the exit: “Where is Dave Chappelle when we need him?” The subtext of this response/question is that the comedy of Chappelle, which is centered upon issues of race and racism, provides a comic release from a past littered with depressing and horrific details of human suffering and subjugation. It may suggest that the inscriber had wished to be entertained as opposed to engaged with the grave details that relate to race, racism and the slave enterprise. Such an unwillingness, inability or aversion to such a consideration, conveys a dismissive, callous and/or trivializing position. It broadly demonstrates the conflicted and/or problematic nature of humor, or specifically how humor sanctions and affirms an avoidance of serious engagement with uncomfortable truths. Regrettably, this collective condition of evasion extends endlessly into a future where the weight of the past is suspended, and its misdeeds are perpetuated repeatedly in kind. Laconically, such a perspective encompasses the dangers in transforming the tragic into the

laughable and illustrates how all pained histories and spaces of contemplation and/or introspection, are not meant or made to amuse.35

Numerous researchers have wrestled with the question of whether it is appropriate to translate human catastrophes into visual forms that involve humor. Because Kara Walker traverses this terrain, her work has been regarded in various lights. Additionally, Walker espouses ideas that have been considered provocative. Through statements such as, “Tired, true, of being a featured member of my racial group and/or my gender niche,” she has been considered incendiary and her work has been classified as part of the post-Black movement. She communicates that she rejects limiting and limited narratives that emphasize her race and gender as motivating features and/or factors of her work. She casts off such structures as restrictive restraints made to feature her as an othered object within the frame of her art, which thereby puts conditions on viewer’s perception. This condition that she objects to, is not new. African and

African descended artists have routinely been positioned as separate from the normativities of contemporary practice.

Analytical Approach and Guiding Scholarship

This dissertation examines works of visual art, oral tradition and writing that confront notions of race and racial difference through strategies of humor. I have relied on a number of sources, including viewpoints as expressed by the artists themselves. Through close readings of artist statements and websites, published interviews, social media posts, and quoted material on gallery websites, I have researched the artists’ intentions in my analyses of their works. I discuss them within the contexts in which they were made and from the perspective that they were made

35 At the same time however, this assertion recognizes that Chappelle’s approach is an effective way to question such inequalities and injustices. Perhaps this is one reason that humor has been a constant in the history of African American existence.

to express. My research has also been informed by socially conscious approaches to art history that incorporate discourse on semiotic critique and intersectionality. I have also drawn on scholarship from fields of cultural and literary studies, history, sociology and musicology. These areas of scholarship are imperative to any project that considers artworks that orient themselves in relation to histories of human suffering and oppression.

For my project I specifically examine works that reflect on histories of racial discrimination in America. I have looked at works written prior to the Civil War, such as the poetry of Phillis Wheatley. I have likewise looked at slave narratives such as the Narrative of

Lunsford Lane, Formerly of Raleigh, N.C. (1842) and Peter Randolph’s From Slave Cabin to the

Pulpit; the Autobiography of Rev. Peter Randolph: The Southern Question Illustrated and

Sketches of Slave Life (1825?-1897). These types of works often incorporate theological interpretations of the world and are marked by the presumption that through the elevation of thought and manners prejudice could be warded off. Later when University trained scholars such as Du Bois and Carter Woodson entered the field, a more analytical approach was taken to the field of African American history generally. In Du Bois’s early writing, such as in his book The

Soul of Black Folk (1903), the contributions that African Americans had made within society

(literary, musical, artistic) are emphasized. In this sense, Du Bois positioned the positivist aspects of black participation as a means of decrying racism and uplifting Black folk. Later on, in his seminal work Black Reconstruction (1935), it becomes clear that he also became concerned with advancing interpretations of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Specifically, he wished to show the ways in which slaves took part in their own emancipation and how the idea of race was deployed to keep power out of the hands of the masses. Du Bois’s ideas thereby evolved towards

a logic of separatism in order to fortify Black self-help and the community’s economic independence. His ideas have been essential to this project.

Just as Blacks fought for integration and equal rights within society, so were scholars writing African American history during the Civil Rights movement. This fight to overturn stereotypes was mirrored in publications such as Herbert Apetheker’s American Negro Slave

Revolts (1936), which explored how rebellions were carried out in resistance to the exploitative and dehumanizing practices of Southern slavery. After the Black Consciousness movement took hold in the 1970s, challenges were likewise made to the liberal, integrationist paradigm present in earlier works. Gendered histories of African American history also emerged in step with the

Women’s Rights movement. These works often look to illuminate the interior lives of slaves by challenging the notion of enslaved people as one-dimensional passive victims in their plight for freedom. Scholars began to look at direct sources left by the enslaved people themselves; they began to scrutinize the ways in which the North also participated in Black exploitation in the past and present.

Since that time, numerous written works have also been published that focus on more nuanced understandings of race, class, gender, LGBTQ issues, social relations, politics and identity. These have emerged out of broader discussions on how society has come to understand what “Black” is, who speaks for “the race,” and on what authority. Larry Neal describes this as a shift from “essential notions of blackness to metanarratives on blackness;” in Anthony Appiah’s work we see the idea of engaging in “identity play,” and others have written and/or are writing on the topic of Blackness in transnational and intersectional contexts as a resistance against a reductive frame. While these works continue to strengthen and bolster the field, they often offer

no easy answers to the questions regarding race and racial subjectivity that they shed light on and bring attention to.

Each artwork discussed in this project was made by an artist of African descent. That being said, I also argue against essentialist versions of racial identity and propose a more nuanced analysis that, instead of foregrounding difference, takes into account aspects of commonality that nevertheless emerge through distinct and complex modes of expression.36 The position I have taken has been exceedingly influenced by Stuart Hall’s ideas on racial categorization, specifically those presented in his paper, “Race, the Floating Signifier.” Through a discursive approach, Hall explains the way meanings are attached to skin color and have changed over time. He argues that race is a social construct, a sliding idea and as such, merely a signifier that is scientifically untenable. Hall simultaneously recognizes, as do I, that racial categorizations have been detrimental to communities of color, irrespective of the falsity of claims regarding inherent qualities of racial difference. Hall has influenced the work of Paul

Gilroy, whose foremost book The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness (1993) has been equally important to my research on race, in a transnational context.

Like Hall, Gilroy’s work is significant within the field of cultural studies, and he too argues against essentialist notions of racial identity. Gilroy also names Du Bois as a contributor to the examination of the transnational Black Atlantic, which is composed of the fusion of Black cultures with the other cultures that they are in proximity to. He employs Du Bois’s idea of double consciousness, or the awareness of existing simultaneously within and outside the dominant culture; Gilroy argues that double consciousness is a defining characteristic of members of the Black Atlantic Diaspora. He likens this consortium of connected peoples to the

36 Barson. “Introduction: Modernism and the Black Atlantic.” In Afro Modern: Journeys Through the Black Atlantic, 8-9.

organizational pattern of a rhizome (having roots, multiple and non-hierarchal). He describes this complex picture of cultural exchange and continuity as rooted in the foundational experience of the Middle Passage.

James C. Scott’s Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (1985) and Robin D.G. Kelley’s Race Rebels: Culture, Politics and the Black Working Class (1994) have also informed my research. These scholars have written extensively on the devices of subversion used among oppressed groups of people. Scott’s work luminously describes the ways in which “hidden transcripts” are created as dissident political strategies that manifest in daily conversations, folklore, jokes, songs and other cultural practices. According to Scott, these appear in spaces controlled by the powerful, but are disguised or veiled to protect those that employ such coded forms of expression. This constitutes what Scott calls ‘infrapolitics’ or that which is beyond the awareness of those in power. Correspondingly, Kelley explores the significance of everyday forms of resistance within the Black working-class community. Written as a “history from below,” he chronicles the inventive ways that Black working-class individuals rebelled against institutions of power. Kelly argues that such actions are performed to maintain and define a sense of racial identity and solidarity. In this sense, he is inspired by Scott’s concept of ‘infrapolitics’ and, like Scott, also contends that such actions are ultimately political.

Works such as Lawrence Levine’s book Black Culture and Consciousness: Afro-

American Folk-Thought From Slavery to Freedom (1977) and Mel Watkins’s two books On the

Real Side: A History of African American Comedy and African American Humor: The Best Black

Comedy from Slavery to Today (1994) have been indispensable to my research regarding histories of African American humor. These two scholars analyze the ways African American communities have employed humor as a strategy for entertainment and psychic survival. Each

scholar traces the history, evolution and methods of such humor and weaves together a picture of

African American cultural traditions that persist in spite of the forces that have sought to upend them. From animal tales, to trickster tales, songs, proverbs, jokes and toasts, Watkins and Levine each convey the importance of African American oral tradition; they contend that despite violent assault, exclusion, segregation and denigration, the Black community has formed cultural traditions distinct from those of the ruling class.

W.T. Lhamon Jr.’s book Jump Jim Crow: Lost Plays, Lyrics, and Street Prose of the

First Atlantic Popular Culture (2003) has aided my understanding of the early stages of blackface minstrelsy and how it also originally reflected class struggle. In this work, Lhamon looked to archives of scripts, newspaper ads and playbills to trace the history of minstrel performances. Through the mining of original source-documents, Lhamon shows how the blackface performance of the Jim Crow trickster character was initially made to address working-class conditions to encourage “blacks and his disaffected white followers.”37 These diverged significantly from the disparaging forms that became so pronounced during the era surrounding the Civil War. Lhamon thus claims that the meaning of blackface minstrelsy shifted over time.

Marvin McAllister’s book Whiting Up: Whiteface Minstrels & Stage Europeans in

African American Performance (2011) likewise tackles a lesser-known aspect of minstrel history. In this book, McAllister contends that whiteface performances have been deliberately made to challenge “America’s racial and political hierarchies by transferring supposed markers of whiteness to Black bodies.”38 In this book he traces the history of this genre from those that

37 Lhamon. Jump Jim Crow: Lost Plays, Lyrics and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Popular Culture, x.

38 McAllister. Whiting Up: Whiteface Minstrels & Stage Europeans in African-American Performance, book jacket.

were performed among enslaved populations in the 18th century, to more contemporary whiteface comic creations. McAllister’s essay, “Dave Chappelle, Whiteface Minstrelsy, And

‘Irresponsible’ Satire” has been equally informative in this regard. He argues that ‘The Chappelle

Show’ sketches that incorporated whiteface performances were more effective at unambiguously and satirically challenging systems of racism than Chappelle’s numerous other skits.

Literary sources such as Zora Neal Hurston’s Mules and Men (1935), Langston Hughes’s

Book of Negro Humor (1966) and Ralph Ellison’s essay An Extravagance of Laughter (1986) are absolutely indispensable within any study of African American humor. The John and Ole’ Massa tales recorded by Hurston convey the stealthy ways that enslaved populations crafted and transferred humorous folktales for the purpose of a cathartic and liberating laugh. Hughes’s book on humor operates along similar lines. He recorded stories, poems, and anecdotes, and thereby made known the perceptive wit of Black communities in Harlem and the Deep South.

On the other hand, Ellison’s essay An Extravagance of Laughter is autobiographical in nature. In it he recalls attending a satirical play titled ‘Tobacco Road’ with Langston Hughes.

The show centered on the absurd condition of America’s racial discourse. While in attendance

Ellison recalls falling into an uncontrollable fit of laughter, which provoked leers from a primarily white audience. This uncomfortable scenario caused Ellison to withdraw and then recollect a custom whereby African-Americans were made to thrust their heads into public laughing barrels if they felt an overwhelming desire to laugh. According to Ellison, “in light of their social status and past condition of servitude [African-Americans] were regarded as having absolutely nothing in their daily experience which could possibly inspire rational laughter.”39

Black laughter therefore was received by the white community as disconcerting, irrational,

39 Ellison. “An Extravagance of Laughter,” 188.

ridiculous, and thus hidden. Of Black humor Ellison surmised, “Brother, the Blackness of Afro-

American ‘Black humor’ is not Black, it is tragically human and finds its source and object in the notion of ‘whiteness.’”40

Glenda Carpio’s book Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery

(2008) cites multiple ideas put forth in Ellison’s essay An Extravagance of Laughter.41

According to Carpio, Ellison called for a comedy of the grotesque to appropriately reflect

“rampant incongruities” in everyday American experiences. She claims this quality of the grotesque is viewable within Robert Colescott’s work, which “caricatures stereotypes by emphasizing their most disturbing aspects and employing a satire that interweaves a wide range of associations.”42 Carpio describes the humor employed by Walker and Colescott and interrogates the relationship their artwork has to grotesque depictions of Black people. In this sense, she explains the function of their works within the broader context of identity politics.

Carpio also correspondingly explains how Colescott and Walker cleverly lampoon slave-era racist propaganda and how their visual parodies hold the propensity to intellectually challenge racist legacies. Conclusively she cautions though that not all of Walker’s works specifically or effectively serve this function and in doing so, Carpio recounts the complex nature of humor as it relates to exceedingly unresolved matters.

James J. Donahue and Derek K. Maus’s book, Post-Soul Satire: Black Identity after Civil

Rights (2014), has also been invaluable to my understanding of contemporary forms of Black humor. This collection of essays focuses exclusively on those that have been termed ‘post-

40 Ibid, 178.

41 The influence of Ellison’s essay “An Extravagance of Laughter” is also reflected in the title of Carpio’s fourth chapter, “‘A Comedy of the Grotesque:’ Robert Colescott, Kara Walker, and the Iconography of Slavery.” In Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery.

42 Carpio. Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery, 142.

Black.’ The post-Black movement has been described as reaction within the Black community against the obligatory reverential treatment for that which relates to Blackness or Black history.

It is a movement of collective questioning, epitomized by artworks such as those by Kara Walker and essays by author Trey Ellis. Through humor, post-Black creations are often made to challenge convention. In the essay “The New Black Aesthetic,” (1989) for example, Ellis irreverently declares “[African American artists] just have to be natural, [they] don’t necessarily have to wear one.”43 This edited collection of essays therefore explores how contemporary forms of African American humor have diverged in significant ways from those of the past; the arguments made have enriched my understanding of the connections and divergences between

African American art past and present.

Finally, works such as W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, Frantz Fanon’s Black

Skin White Masks (1967) and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) have each been indispensible to my consideration of the psychosocial effects of racism on Black individuals and societies at large. Through personal accounts these authors detail the internal conflict that arises when living within a racially suppressive culture; they each describe the destructive consequences that occur when observing one's self through the perspective of the oppressor. In The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois termed this out-of-body phenomenon “double consciousness;” Fanon concluded his manuscript with a plea for “the world to recognize, with

[him], the open door of every consciousness.”44 Rankine on the other hand, candidly portrayed the traumatic condition of being both discriminated against and pressured to disremember the

43 Ellis. “The New Black Aesthetic,” 236 and Maus, Derek C. “Mommy, What’s a Post-Soul Satirist?” In Post-Soul Satire: Black Identity After Civil Rights, edited by Maus and James J. Donahue, xii.

44 Fanon. Black Skin, White Masks, 232.

recurring and lasting experience of such subjection. In perceptive and sincere prose, she lamented, “Yes, and this is how you are a citizen: Come on. Let it go. Move on.”45

Each of these researchers has generated historically grounded, theoretically rich and socially critical scholarship. This study builds on their work, and yet diverges from it in significant ways. Foremost, none have focused exclusively on the ways in which humor and race have been reflected in the visual arts. In employing the ideas advanced by each of these thinkers over the past twelve decades, I have chosen to examine how humor has been applied to subvert ideas of race and racial classification. This study of humor has also been organic in nature; as I delved into one topic, other areas arose that required further exploration. In this sense, the queries that surface in former chapters formed and informed the composition of the subsequent ones.

While this dissertation is positioned within the field of Art History, no imagery of the visual artworks discussed will be included in this project. Because obtaining legal rights to include such imagery is costly and out of reach for most graduate students, a verbal description of such works will be offered instead. I will provide the name of the artist(s), title of the work, date, media and dimensions (as applicable) followed by a visual analysis and description of the work(s), in lieu of images of the actual works. Most of the artists’ works are viewable online.

I arrange my ideas chronologically by first discussing Black humor in relation to the slavery and Jim Crow eras. I do so in order to provide a historical context of oppression for the types of humor considered. I critically assess foundational ideas within the discipline of African

American art, specifically those that were generated during the Harlem Renaissance and thereafter. I analyze the ways in which contemporary works diverge from those of the past and

45 Rankine. Citizen: An American Lyric, 151.

assess how and whether through humor-inflected means, ideas of race and racism are subverted.

In doing so, I explain the way each artwork reflects fiction and truth, joke and observation. I describe how these artists ultimately expose the contradictions and complications of race-based identity and emphasize the ways that a ‘joke’ can oscillate between valorization and vilification, inclusion and exclusion, affirmation and sedition.

Synopses of Chapters

Despite being central to the cultural politics of movements such as Dada, Surrealism,

Performance and Feminism, humor has not received much commentary in reference to its method of operation in art of the last century.46 Moreover, while employed to explore power relations in terms of class, taste, gender sexuality, racial and cultural identities, it has not been viewed as a subject deserving of much serious consideration.47 Understanding the context of humor is requisite. Thus, I begin my project by situating each artist’s aesthetic strategy within the milieu of the history of humor and race relations in the US.

In Chapter 2, I discuss the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the ways in which humor among the enslaved functioned as a safeguard against physical slavery becoming spiritual slavery.48 I recount trickster folk tales and jokes that were communicated exclusively within the confines of the Black community. I detail how humorous slights in these genres were made to covertly condemn the dominant white populace. Finally, I describe how, as time progressed, Black humor became more openly critical of the oppression endured. This was in direct response to the

46 Higgie. The Artist's Joke, 12.

47 Ibid, 12.

48 Levine. Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom, 80.

expansion and restoration of Black freedoms and civil rights, which began in the slave era and progressed, not necessarily undeviatingly, onward.49

Within this chapter, I also discuss the uses of race-based humor in relation to mass media, and thereby read the minstrel show into the fraught history of race relations in the US. This task proceeds from the premise that as the nation’s first form of popular entertainment, the minstrel show operated as an agent of socialization in American culture. It promoted ideas of inferiority on the basis of race, and as a widespread propaganda campaign, resolved the moral and political conflict of allowing slavery in a country founded on ideals of freedom. Most notably, the minstrel show worked to reproduce the dominant norms, values, and practices of American society at that time, and therefore remains a cultural artifact, reflective of the ideals, prejudices, and ideologies shared, through agreement or default, by the majority of the American public.50

Following a discussion of 19th and 20th century minstrel imagery, I describe humor produced by writers such as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and Ralph Ellison. I detail work by comedians such as Dick Gregory and Dave Chappelle. I introduce the problems associated with the subjectivity of humor and describe whiteface performance as a successful interventionist strategy aimed at challenging racist ideas. I conclude this chapter by recounting the ways in which the experience of double consciousness, as termed by Du Bois, continues to be perpetuated within the Black community’s current forms of humor.

49 While Black people are no longer physically enslaved, the restoration of their freedoms has not advanced in a linear fashion. For example, after the close of the Civil War, the Reconstruction era was followed by the Jim Crow era, which resulted in the oppression and deaths of countless Black citizens. More recently and during the years of Barak Obama’s presidency there was resurgence in the popularity of minstrel-type imagery. Much of it was created specifically to malign the first Black President. In the Trump-era, there has been an expansion in the spread of racist ideas, promulgated most notably by alt-right groups. This has led to multiple physical assault and deaths of people who have opposed such racist belief systems.

50 Riggs. Ethnic Notions.

In Chapter 3, I begin by introducing the long-standing debate between Alain Locke and

W.E.B. Du Bois regarding the proposed trajectory and purpose of African American Art. While both scholars agreed that African American Art has the propensity to engender racial uplift for the Black community, Du Bois contended that propaganda should be its primary function. Locke strongly disagreed with this assertion and argued instead that Black art ought to operate outside of political and social motivations. Locke implored the Black community to obliterate any negative perceptions they held about themselves. He urged Blacks to adopt a new perspective, which could be reflected, supported, and promulgated by the arts.

While these differing views were created to guide and influence Harlem Renaissance artists, the positions Locke and Du Bois held continue to resonate even today within debates regarding the appropriate function of African American Art. For example, while during the Civil

Rights era Du Bois’s position on revolutionary art took precedence, in the 21st century post-

Black artworks challenged the idea that Black art need be exclusively aligned with the project of racial uplift. In this sense post-Black works are more closely aligned with Locke’s position.

Nevertheless, they also diverge from Locke’s ideas in significant ways. For example, post-Black works frequently incorporate humor and/or irony, even while engaged with the grave details associated with histories of racial discrimination and human subjugation. In this sense, they may reflect artworks by their forbearers in subject, yet in purpose and intention, significantly diverge.

In this chapter I describe works by David Hammons, Jayson Musson and Kara Walker as in dialogue with this condition. Throughout the chapter, I focus persistently on these artists’ strategies of humor, which link their artworks historically and contemporaneously to other subversive forms of Black expressive culture.

I commence Chapter 4 with a continued discussion on the connections extant between

African American artworks, past and present. I argue that contemporary African American artists have recurrently created works that challenge normative frameworks for understanding

American history; I describe how their works call for reoriented perspectives in order to make space for the re-contextualization of Black experiences. I discuss works by Hank Willis Thomas,

David Hammons, Carrie Mae Weems, Glenn Ligon, Kerry James Marshall and John Bankston in the following ways: I elaborate on how each of these artists creates works that compel alternative readings of contentious imagery. I describe how they pursue such ends through oftentimes humor-inflected means, and by coopting the original visual language-codes associated with racially divisive propaganda. I explain how their combination of imagery, with a transformed purpose, has allowed these artists a means of exploring Black identity, history, racism and

American popular culture. In sum, I contend that Thomas, Hammons, Weems, Ligon, Marshall and Bankston utilize a tactic that Ralph Ellison labeled, “changing the joke and slipping the yoke,”51 and that this stratagem for subversion is one that has been employed in various forms within the Black community for decades.

In Chapter 5, I continue this line of reasoning by investigating the ways in which the trope of the trickster has been articulated within various forms of African American art and culture. I begin by describing how the trickster originally manifested in the New World for the psychological, social and physical survival of the enslaved. I move on to explain the ways trickster tactics endure within masking, signifying and meaningful satire, all of which remain

51 Ellison. “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke.” Partisan Review. 1958. In this essay, Ellison discusses with his friend Stanley Edgar Hyman the relationship between African American literature and folklore. They discuss their differing interpretations and understanding of the trickster, in particular. Hyman understands Blackface minstrelsy as a performance of the trickster; Ellison argues that this interpretation is too one-dimensional, all “too kind,” and negates the humiliating reality of this form of entertainment’s existence. Ellison therefore locates this “darky” character in the realm of white folklore.

crucial to African American social discourse and cultural expression. I discuss works by Phillis

Wheatley, Willie Cole, Hank Willis Thomas, Lorraine O’Grady, Keith Piper and Azie Mira

Dungey to argue that the trickster trope is a timeworn, yet still viable, strategy that has consistently been employed to disrupt notions of race and racial difference; I contend that each act, artwork or otherwise, functions as a riposte to the ironic state and absurdity of living in a society that both exalts sovereignty and persecutes its citizens on the basis of race. In this sense, all of the works discussed thus far express criticism through trickster-inflected means; at the same time, they are each embedded within the contemporary culture that they critically assess.

Undeniably then, they all materially embody what Ralph Ellison described in his 1952 novel

Invisible Man where he wrote, “All it takes to get along in this here man's town is a little shit, grit, and mother-wit.”52

I conclude this study in Chapter 6 by broadly discussing the significance and consequences incurred when humor is attached to issues of race and/or racism. I interrogate the practice of applying humor as a means of protest and examine how issues of the non-critical laugh arise when audiences consume it without reflecting on its intended meaning and purpose. I recount the ways in which Black artists, writers and comedians have repeatedly been cast into the role of victim as a consequence of portraying systems of racial prejudice; I discuss each creator’s response to the broader themes of this study. Works by writers such as James Baldwin and Ralph

Ellison, sketches by comedians such as Richard Pryor and Dave Chappelle and artworks by

Michael Ray Charles are examined as interventionist strategies; they each ultimately provide alternate frameworks for conceptualizing race and identity. Collectively they signal the

52 Ellison. Invisible Man, 176.

complexity and critical cultural baggage of living in a society that has yet to unpack its own history.

CHAPTER 2 LAUGHING TO KEEP FROM CRYING: UP FROM SLAVERY.

Humor is laughing at what you haven’t got when you ought to have it. Of course, you laugh by proxy. You’re really laughing at the other guy’s lacks. Not your own. That’s what makes it funny – the fact that you don’t know you are laughing at yourself. Humor is when the joke is on you but hits the other fellow first – because it boomerangs. Humor is what you wish in your secret heart were not funny, but it is, and you must laugh. Humor is your unconscious therapy.

—Langston Hughes The Book of Negro Humor1

Although the institution of slavery deeply wounded and immeasurably affected the humanity of the enslaved, the spirit of the African American community has never been conquered or destroyed. Through the horrors of enslavement, segregation and race-based violence, the creation of African American folk tales, jokes, and music has abounded, proliferated, and ultimately contributed to the profound wellspring of a culture. The humor and pathos that these art forms reflect and enact are markers of an enduring and collective ethos – a dogged set of values that thwarted the tremendous societal effort to exploit and imprison Blacks altogether.

The Origins of African American Humor: Laughter, Sedition and Survival

African-American humor has, in many ways, developed and been employed as a diversionary tactic for survival and conceptual communal escape from the brutal circumstances of enslavement and other forms of racially motivated violence. Humor became an important tool for the emotional survival of the community and has therefore permeated all aspects of African

American art, music, and literature. Through the skill of imitation or distortion, mirroring and misrepresentation, the humorist challenged society’s commonly held certainties about the world and the oppressive status quo that was perpetuated by a racially stratified society. Likewise, the

1 Hughes. “A Note on Humor” In The Book of Negro Humor, vii.

satirist generated a certain glee through an emphasis on the disjunction between the empirical world, and the way in which the joke represents it to be, or in other cases between society’s expectations and actuality. The slights specific to African American humor are therefore charged and loaded with biting commentary, aimed at the unjust and cruel aspects of a culture marked by racism. Moreover, because humor holds the power to transport its revelers to a divergent reality, even if for just a moment, in the case of African American humor, this propensity was critical.

Facing a cruel system of discrimination and injustice, the Africans that were captured, taken to the New World and enslaved there found themselves in a devastating situation: they had little to no value placed upon their humanity and therefore adopted numerous subversive tactics to, “prevent physical slavery, from [also] becoming spiritual slavery.”2 Subterfuge and lying became necessary for the former’s preclusion, while humor and communal practices, such as song, laughter and religious worship for the latter’s. To delight freely, with the candor and directness that characterized such humor among the un-enslaved, meant to risk overt personal harm, or even death for those enslaved in the New World.

Black laughter has been repressed to varying extents throughout history, due in part to the discomfort of white Americans in the presence of it.3 John Dollard, in his 1937 book Caste and

Class in a Southern Town commented on this phenomenon when he stated, “Negro humor is often so delicate that it is hard to locate, and one comes off with the baffled general feeling that the whites have been lampooned without knowing quite how.”4 The perplexity that whites experienced in the presence of Black laughter can be partially attributed to the routine use of irony, or the subtle use of language to express the opposite of its usual meaning. Irony was a

2 Levine. Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom, 18. 3 Watkins. On the Real Side: Laughing, Lying, and Signifying: the Underground Tradition of African-American Humor That Transformed American Culture, from Slavery to Richard Pryor, 16.

4 Dollard. Caste and Class in a Southern Town, 309-310.

commonly used language-based strategy among enslaved African immigrants, as they had come from oral cultures where clever speech was highly regarded.5 This type of clever-speech was fundamental and foundational to their expressive culture, primarily because it allowed for a release of their inner emotions without the risk of bodily or psychological harm for having done so.

Numerous written accounts demonstrate that during the slave era and thereafter, Blacks were not always free to laugh (or sing) openly, and certainly not loudly in front of their master.

Reports of white Americans’ puzzlement and discomfort with the uninhibited display of Black laughter accounted also for the invention of certain stories such as that of the ‘laughing barrel.’

According to lore, whites in a small town were so disturbed by Black laughter that it was literally restricted to the interior of large barrels, installed throughout town. If an enslaved person felt the need to laugh, he was to suppress the desire until inside the laughing barrel, where he could release it without the fear of punishment for being heard.6

From the era of slavery through the following century of Jim Crow segregation, it became essential that humorous slights be executed in a manner that made them imperceptible as the parodying micro-aggressions that they were. Failure to do so could lead to physical persecution or even death; indeed, the evidence suggests that African Americans used humor to stave off much violence. Social historian Russel B. Nye commented on this phenomenon when he stated, “Over many generations the slave developed techniques of deception that were, for the white man, virtually impenetrable.”7 This occurrence has likewise been affirmed by accounts

5 Watkins. On the Real Side: Laughing, Lying, and Signifying: the Underground Tradition of African-American Humor That Transformed American Culture, from Slavery to Richard Pryor, 1.

6 Dundes. Mother Wit from the Laughing Barrel: Readings in the Interpretation of Afro-American Folklore, xiii.

7Watkins. On the Real Side: Laughing, Lying, and Signifying : the Underground Tradition of African-American Humor That Transformed American Culture, from Slavery to Richard Pryor, 51.

from slaveholders, white observers and the enslaved persons themselves who have collectively expressed that, “[The slave] is never off his guard. He is perfectly skilled at hiding his emotions…His master knows him not.”8 A well-known example of this type of duplicity has similarly been conveyed in the folkloric/bluesman lyric, “Got one mind for white folks to see,

‘Nother for what I know is me; He don’t know, he don’t know my mind”9 and echoed in various other cultural forms such as the policy of ‘puttin on massa,’ the numerous songs that entailed a double-meaning, the trickster folktales, the rhymes, narratives and the daily veiled sayings and aphorisms concerning a lived existence of secrecy for survival. W.E.B. Du Bois, in his seminal work, The Souls of Black Folk, commented on this aspect of slave-culture reflected in song when he stated:

They are the music of an unhappy people, of the children of disappointment; they tell of death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer world, of misty wanderings and hidden ways.10

Slave narratives have consistently been some of the most important resources for attaining insight into the lives and minds of the enslaved. These narratives have routinely reflected and described the survival mechanisms necessary for living within a dominant and often vicious white society. An example of the contrived deference imperative to living amongst white folk (pre and post slavery) was described by Lunsford Lane in his 1848 narrative when he wrote:

I had endeavored so to conduct myself as not to become obnoxious to the white inhabitants, knowing as I did their power, and their hostility to the colored people…First, I had made no display of the little property or money I possessed, but in every way I wore as much as possible the aspect of slavery. Second, I had never appeared to be even so intelligent as I really was. This all colored at the

8 Ibid, 51

9 Levine. Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom, viii.

10 Du Bois. The Souls of Black Folk, 183.

south, free and slaves, find it particularly necessary for their own comfort and safety to observe.11

The Ballad of the ‘Happy Darky:’ A Double-Edged Ruse

The most well-known ruse acted-out by the enslaved came to be known as that of the gullible, happy darky. The former slave and abolitionist leader Frederick Douglas suggested as much, and sociologist Charles S. Johnson accounted for the performance of this survival-tactic persona when he wrote: “A master, unless he was utterly humorless, could not overwork or brutally treat a jolly fellow, one who could make him laugh.”12 This cheerful character-type, however, was also transformed by the dominant white-populace in order to meet their specific needs, ends and purposes. In the hands of those who supported slavery, the happy darky character became an endorsement of the idea of racial inferiority. He was transfigured into proof of the contentment of human chattel and converted into a consolation that resolved the heavy moral conflict of owning human property. Consequently then, the character was a double-edged ruse: for the white populace he became a tool of propaganda that reinforced and justified the subjugation of the enslaved; for the enslaved, he endured in immediacy as a character-ploy to perpetuate good relations with the oft menacing white masses.

While publicly the enslaved were induced to mask their grievances, within the hidden confines of their community, they aired their objections and routinely ridiculed and lampooned the master-class. James C. Scott in his book, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, comments

11 Lane. “Narrative of Lunsford Lane, Formerly of Raleigh,” quoted in Osofky. Puttin' on Ole Massa: The Slave Narratives of Henry Bibb, William Wells Brown and Solomon Northrup, 9.

12 Watkins. African American Humor: The Best Black Comedy from Slavery to Today, 1.

While enslaved people used humor and adopted the light-hearted persona of the “happy darky” in order to negotiate difficult and treacherous life circumstances, it is obvious that such tactical ruses were not always successful. Therefore, those who were enslaved did not have the benefit of sharing Johnson’s sentiment that it unilaterally prevented them from suffering violent attacks.

on this “dialectic of disguise and surveillance”13 when he asserts that, “the more menacing the power, the thicker the mask…,”14 and that it is only through, “assessing the discrepancy between the hidden transcript and the public transcript we may begin to judge the impact of domination on public discourse.”15 While in a power-laden context it is oftentimes impossible to know exactly where a feigned performance of submissiveness, folly or deficiency begins and/or ends, it is known that the survival tactics created by the enslaved necessitated a culture of secrecy. This persisted as an oppositional subtext to the official and dominant transcript of a pastoral Southern plantation, timelessly populated by “happy darky slaves.”

The creation of a separate social space amongst the enslaved was both an act of defiance and an establishment of intellectual freedom, communal understanding and comradeship. Glenda

Carpio commented on this occurrence in her book, Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the

Fictions of Slavery, when she stated,

(African American Humor) developed a Janus-faced identity; on the one hand, it was fairly nonthreatening form that catered to whites’ belief in the inferiority of Blacks but that usually masked aggression; on the other, it was more assertive and acerbic humor that often targeted racial injustice but that was generally reserved for in-group interactions. For Black Americans, humor has often functioned as a way of affirming their humanity in the face of its violent denial.16

The association between violence and comedy is a primal one.17 The enslaved have consistently made this evident through their expressive cultural forms, which oftentimes exhibit a palpable tension between the humor and pathos of their daily existence. An example of one

13 Scott. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, 4.

14 Ibid, 3.

15 Ibid, 5.

16 Carpio. Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery, 5.

17 Vognar. “This Ain't Funny so Don't You Dare Laugh: Navigating the Interplay of Hip-Hop and Humor,” 108.

such tragicomic rhyme was recounted in Frederick Douglas’s 1845 autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave:

We raise de wheat,

Dey gib us de corn;

We bake de bread,

Dey gib us de crust;

We sif de meal,

Dey gib us de huss;

We peel de meat,

Dey gib us de skin;

And dat’s de way

Dey tuck us in;

We skim de pot,

Dey gib us de liquor,

And say dat’s good enough for nigger.18

This mode of ridicule meted to a humorous (albeit embittered) turn of phrase, attests to the way in which the enslaved used storytelling, lyric and humor to create accounts of their lived existence and the inequities and injustices they suffered through. It operates as an affirmation of their humanity and hard work, and at the same time critiques the master’s callous and thankless behavior. Foremost, it reverses the stereotype of Black indolence through an accusation of the equivalent towards the white master-class. In other words, enslaved laborers knew white master- class behaviors intimately and understood just how truly lazy they were.

18 Douglass. Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, 146-147.

Such humor-laden dissidences, while often perpetrated surreptitiously, have been found in numerous other records as well. Of this occurrence Michael Eric Dyson explained,

White folk placed us behind them, in what they deemed an inferior position. As a result, we were able to learn white folk – their beliefs, sentiments, contradictions, cultures, styles, behaviors, virtues, and vices. Black survival depended on Black folk knowing the ways and souls of white folk.

William D. Piersen, in his article, “Puttin' down Ole Massa: African Satire in the New

World” and Lawrence Levine in his book Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-

American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom, for example, both cited this Beaufort, South

Carolina, enslaved girl who was to have stated:

Us slaves watch the white folks' parties when the guests danced a minuet and then paraded in a grand march. Then we'd do it too, but we used to mock 'em, every step. Sometimes the white folks noticed it but they seemed to like it. I guess they thought we couldn't dance any better.19

Although this type of mocking may be considered benign by today’s standards, it is representative of the parodying that enslaved people routinely performed at the expense of the owner/dominant master class. These farces were enacted for communal entertainment among the enslaved and fostered a strengthening of social ties through their shared appreciation of an in- group joke. At the same time, these covertly accomplished slights signaled the degree to which

Black and white populaces were (and continue to be) separated — perpetually living within proximity, but largely existing without the transcultural identification and inclusive understanding necessary for a harmonious and equalized interaction between them.

The continual separation and segregation of groups of people along lines of race and culture has affected Black expressive culture and the collection of it. Therefore, while numerous folktales and humorous anecdotes have been recorded and preserved for future generations,

19 Piersen. “Puttin' down Ole Massa: African Satire in the New World,” 173 and Levine. Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom, 17.

many more have been lost to history. Reasons for this include the delayed entry of folklorists into the field of gathering slave folk humor and the Black community’s inclination towards secrecy, particularly when openly expressing contempt towards whites. Zora Neale Hurston wrote on this in Mules and Men, a collection of folklore, when she stated,

Folklore is not as easy to collect as it sounds…And the Negro, in spite of his open-faced laughter, his seeming acquiescence, is particularly evasive… The theory behind our tactics: “The white man is always trying to know into somebody else’s business…All right, I’ll set something outside of the door of my mind for him to play with and to handle… and he will seize it and go away. Then I’ll say my say and sing my song.20

Tricksters Gonna Trick: Tales of Sedition and Expressions of Liberation

While humor has played a major role in the shaping of African American discourse and history, it is important to realize that nearly all examples of antebellum humor were recorded after the enslaved had been freed. Since under slavery, few would have risked life and limb to relate these aphorisms and tactics to outsiders, the animal tales collected by the white journalist

Joel Chandler Harris, in his Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings, 1880, are an incredible exception. While Harris’s recording of the Uncle Remus tales is critical to the preservation of

Black folklore and humor, they have also been somewhat misleading because of his creation of the fictitious “faithful darky” Uncle-narrator character. In Harris’s version of these tales, the enslaved Uncle Remus recounts these animal stories to a young white child, which is a fictional device that distorts their original social purpose and further obscures the subversive intention of them.21 As the folklorist and historian Charles Joyner notes, “One of the persistent delusions of the slaveholder, of visitors to the plantations, and of several generations of others, was that the

20 Hurston. Mules and Men, 18-19.

21 Watkins. On the Real Side: Laughing, Lying, and Signifying : the Underground Tradition of African-American Humor That Transformed American Culture, from Slavery to Richard Pryor, 73.

trickster tales told by plantation slaves were meant for entertainment.”22 This then, becomes a further example of the intercultural misinterpretation that took place; at the same time, it indicates the extent to which these folktales were context-based and therefore completely mutually exclusive to the communities in which they were relayed as well.

Many of the tales documented by Harris, for example, were originally made to render the character Brer Rabbit as a covert representation of the mischievous and cunning enslaved person, and Brer Fox as the gullible and villainous slave-owner. In these stories, Brer Fox remains the physically stronger of the two, yet he is routinely outwitted by his arch nemesis, Brer Rabbit, who is understood as a slave folk hero. It is for reasons such as these that the stories are also termed trickster tales and appear with remarkable similarity all over the South.23 Of this phenomenon Harris asserted, “It takes no scientific investigation to show why he [the African

American] selects as his hero the weakest and most harmless of all animals and brings him out victorious in contests with the bear, the wolf, and the fox. It is not virtue which triumphs but helplessness; it is not malice but mischievousness.”24

These trickster-type tales appealed to the enslaved on a number of levels. Foremost, the folktales express a representation of a world in which the ostensibly disadvantaged and weak succeed and advance beyond their more powerful adversaries. The physically weaker characters do so through consistently exploiting their opponents’ gullibility and therefore continuously succeed by cunningly outsmarting them. While these trickster tales are often humorous, they also

22 Ibid, 73.

23 Roberts. From Trickster to Badman: The Black Folk Hero in Slavery and Freedom, 17.

Additionally, they also exhibited close similarities to those found in African oral tradition, which speaks to the power of oral tradition to be transmitted across time and space.

24 Harris. Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings, 57.

express a grim and significant commentary on the inequities of the enslaved’s existence.25

Lawrence Levine commented on the connections between the trickster character’s actions in folktales and the real-life tactics employed by enslaved people when he stated,

The records left by nineteenth-century observers of slavery and by the masters themselves indicate that a significant number of slaves lied, cheated, stole, feigned illness, loafed, pretended to misunderstand the orders they were given, put rocks in the bottom of their cotton baskets in order to meet their quota, broke their tools, burned their masters’ property, mutilated themselves in order to escape work, took indifferent care of the crops they were cultivating, and mistreated the livestock placed in their care to the extent that masters often felt it necessary to use the less efficient mules rather than horses since the former could better withstand the brutal treatment of the slaves.26

While it is likely that an amount of such recorded descriptions was inaccurate, exaggerated and/or reflective of the abundant race-based stereotyping at the time, it has been established that enslaved people rebelled and pursued such derisive trickster-like acts in order to be granted a reprieve from the difficult conditions in which they lived. This needed reprieve however, can be interpreted in a multitude of ways. These include but are not limited to: being in response to hunger or exhaustion and/or for the purpose of pleasure, adventure or retaliation.

While to the master, stealing was always viewed as defiance and theft, to the enslaved such an act was simply a taking back of the product of one’s own labor and therefore nothing of the sort.27

Post-Emancipation, Black humor began to more openly and directly target the white community. John (sometimes Jack, Golias, Pompey, or Nehemiah) and Massa tales remain one of the earliest examples in Black humor, whereby whites are identified as the expressed object of

25 Harris. “The Trickster in African American Literature.” Freedom’s Story.

26 Levine. Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom, 122.

27 Scott. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, 188.

ridicule.28 Unlike the Brer Rabbit tales, which were veiled critiques of the master-class (and therefore less dangerous to transmit), John and Massa tales were boldly derisive towards the white community and hence strictly imparted to a Black audience and confined to transmission within Black circles. The telling of such seditious tales also aided in group cohesion, an experience that the system of exclusion never meant for them to have. An example can be seen in

Peter Randolph’s 1855 slave narrative, From Slave Cabin to Pulpit:

“Pompey, how do I look?” the master asked.

“O, massa, mighty. You looks mighty.”

“What do you mean ‘Mighty,’ Pompey?”

“Why, massa, you looks noble.”

“What do you mean by noble?”

“Why, suh, you looks just like a lion.”

“Why, Pompey, where have you ever seen a lion?”

“I saw one down in yonder field the other day, massa.”

“Pompey, you foolish fellow, that was a jackass.”

“Was it massa? Well suh, you looks just like him.”29

Humorous tales such as this reflected the Black community’s awareness of the ennobling characteristics that were often attributed to the “happy darky slave” type. Through a utilization of clever language however, the enslaved John turned a compliment into an insult, and thereby denied and contradicted the widespread belief in the simpleton slave, which was a role in which

28 Watkins. African American Humor: The Best Black Comedy from Slavery to Today, 2.

29 Randolph. 1825?-1897, and John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American History and Culture. NcD. From Slave Cabin to the Pulpit; the Autobiography of Rev. Peter Randolph: The Southern Question Illustrated and Sketches of Slave Life, 199.

all Blacks had routinely been cast.30 According to Mel Watkins in his book, On the Real Side,

“Trickster tales were among the most popular and commonly expressed varieties of slave folklore and, outside of physical resistance and rebellion, probably represented the most aggressive and cynical view of white America expressed by slaves.”31

Regardless of restrictions placed on open forms of Black laughter and culture, African

Americans continued to develop their humorous tales and aphorisms in ways that were more openly critical of the white populace than they had formerly been under slavery. For example, the following tale tells of a Post-Civil War interaction between a (former) enslaved person and his (former) master:

Slave Owner: Ah, dear, faithful, loyal Uncle Tom! Lincoln has forced you to accept freedom- against my wishes, and, I am sure, against yours. Dear old friend and servant, you needn’t leave this plantation. Stay here with us; kindly, gentle, self-sacrificing Uncle Tom!

Uncle Tom: Thank you deah, kine, lovin’, gen’rous Massa. I reckon I’ll leave. But befo’ I go I wants you ter know I will allus ‘membuh you az de son uv a bitch you is an allus wuz!

This humorous tale is significant on many levels; it reflects the elaborate masking of emotions and feigning of characteristics that were enacted by the former “Uncle Tom” slave, along with the degree to which the former slave-owner had been deceived by such acts. It also reveals the enslaved person’s true feelings once the yoke of enslavement was lifted and the extent to which it had affected his comportment. As much folklore also denotes, this tale was not so distant from actual incidences. After the Civil War for instance, the real-life Colonel Patrick

Henry Anderson implored formerly enslaved Jordon Anderson to return to the Anderson plantation, which was largely destroyed and in a state of disarray after 32 pieces of human

30 Watkins. African American Humor: The Best Black Comedy from Slavery to Today, xviii.

31 ---. On the Real Side: Laughing, Lying and Signifying _ the Underground Tradition of African American Humor that Transformed American Culture from Slavery to Richard Pryor, 70.

“property” had gained independence and made use of it. In response to the former slaveholder’s request, Jordon wrote this satirical response:

[Excerpt from letter]: … we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future. I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years. At twenty-five dollars a month for me, and two dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars. Add to this the interest for the time our wages have been kept back, and deduct what you paid for our clothing, and three doctor’s visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to. Please send the money by Adams’s Express, in care of V. Winters, Esq., Dayton, Ohio. If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past, we can have little faith in your promises in the future. We trust the good Maker has opened your eyes to the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me and my fathers, in making us toil for you for generations without recompense. Here I draw my wages every Saturday night; but in Tennessee there was never any pay-day for the negroes any more than for the horses and cows. Surely there will be a day of reckoning for those who defraud the laborer of his hire.

In answering this letter, please state if there would be any safety for my Milly and Jane, who are now grown up, and both good-looking girls. You know how it was with poor Matilda and Catherine. I would rather stay here and starve — and die, if it come to that — than have my girls brought to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters. You will also please state if there has been any schools opened for the colored children in your neighborhood. The great desire of my life now is to give my children an education, and have them form virtuous habits.

Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.

From your old servant,

Jordon Anderson32

This letter is significant for many reasons, one of which is that it discloses Jordon

Anderson’s perspective on his previous owner’s behavior and his assessment of his life under slavery. Additionally, it relates the degree to which Jordon’s personhood and outlook starkly

32 Anderson. “Letter to Colonel Patrick Henry Anderson.” August 7, 1865. Reprinted in The New York Daily Tribune. August 22, 1865.

contrasted with that of the happy darky type and demonstrates that Black folk were not the one- dimensional, inarticulate and acted upon that they had been cast as and taken to be. African

American enslaved people instead enacted measures of control over their own existence, which compels an understanding of them as actors and active participators in their own meaning- making right.33

Later on, in the twentieth century, W.E.B. Du Bois continued the struggle against the widespread conviction that “life was joyous to the Black slave, careless and happy.”34 In the

Souls of Black Folk, he described the spiritual life and cultural expressions of African Americans and reflected on the great social injustices that they faced. He introduced cultural metaphors such as “double consciousness” and “the veil,” which, according to Du Bois, became dominant features of Black identity and psychosocial makeup. He stated,

The Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in the American world, — a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness.35

By articulating the psychosocial consequences of living in a nation that defines a person foremost by their race, Du Bois described what generations of Black people have experienced:

‘double-consciousness,’ or the way in which Blacks retain a dual awareness of themselves in the eyes of a white majority, compels an inner unrest and division of being; ‘the veil’ of racial segregation on the other hand, confers a perpetual outsider status to all who subsist beneath it.

33 Levine. Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom, 300.

34 DuBois. The Souls of Black Folk, 207.

35 Ibid, 5.

Together, these precluded positions induce a distinct outlook on human existence and experience; namely, they can also assist in the creation of the humorous.36

It has generally been accepted that the need for laughter exists most urgently among those with the least amount of power and that the tragicomic urge erupts from a desire to place one’s situation into perspective, to exert some degree of control over one’s environment, and to laugh at one’s enemies, or self.37 The system of slavery, and then Jim Crow segregation, lent itself to a great amount of humor on account of the absurdity of its common-law customs and primarily because of the need among community members for a cognitive release, or to “laugh to keep from crying.” From humorous anecdotes about addressing light skinned draft animals as “Mr.

Mule,” to having to call a Ford automobile, “Mr. Ford” on account of it being named after a white man, to not being able to drink white milk, or eat white beans, the racial codes in America were mocked consistently and thoroughly through even straight-faced schemes.38

Moreover, critiques of the entire machinery of (in)justice being biased against the Black community reflected the common knowledge that the American legal system also supported the discriminatory practices of the larger society that it was made up of. Dark-humor laden stories told of men getting sentenced to, “three days for stealing, 87 for being Black,”39 and of a judge intervening in a lynching, only to state, “We’ve always been considered a progressive community and I think we are progressive enough to have a fair trial and then lynch him.”40

Although these types of anecdotes are without the details necessary to be taken as specific

36 Watkins. On the Real Side: Laughing, Lying, and Signifying: the Underground Tradition of African-American Humor That Transformed American Culture, from Slavery to Richard Pryor, 26.

37 Levine. Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom, 300.

38 Ibid, 310.

39 Litwack. How Free is Free?: The Long Death of Jim Crow, 18.

40 Ibid,19.

historical events, they, like the folktales previously discussed, reflect the harsh reality of Black existence in the past and continuing up until today. According to Lawrence Levine, this type of subversive humor initially, “created the necessary space between the slaves and their owners…[and its] salient function was to rob the American racial system of any legitimacy long before the courts and government began that still uncompleted task.”41

Enter:The Minstrel Show

Whereas the Black community’s mockery of racism, slavery and the white populace was concealed in the 19th century, white ridicule and disparagement of the Black populace was openly expressed and popularized at that very same time. The minstrel show is the primary example of this occurrence, and most would agree that it has been the most injurious form of racial categorizing to occur in the history of the United States. Minstrel imagery was a part of a visual convention that was first introduced and popularized by white performer Thomas

Dartmouth Rice after he witnessed a crippled Black man performing an exaggerated and amusing type of slave-dance called the Jim Crow. Subsequently, through Rice’s adoption/adaptation of the Jim Crow character, African American humor, song and dance were appropriated, transformed and parodied for the massively popular entertainment of a primarily non-Black audience.42 Although it was originally inspired by slave-comedy, minstrelsy nearly always distorted or excised the critical and socially aware elements originally present in it.43

Moreover, it served to codify the public image of Blacks as caricatures of distorted types and,

41 Levine. Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom, 80 and 311.

42 Watkins. On the Real Side: Laughing, Lying, and Signifying : the Underground Tradition of African-American Humor That Transformed American Culture, from Slavery to Richard Pryor, 82.

43 Watkins. African American Humor: The Best Black Comedy from Slavery to Today, xvii.

according to W.T Lhamon, Jr. in his book, Jump Jim Crow, it became “the moment when [a caricaturized and demeaning image of] Blackness first became widely popular in America.”44

In order to understand the degree to which the minstrel show was injurious to the Black community, it must be understood within its context of pre and post-Civil War America. As a form of amusement introduced near the end of the slave-era and expanded upon in the post- emancipation years, minstrelsy was much more than America’s first popular form of entertainment. It became an agent of socialization in the dominant norms, values, and practices of American society, and its debased caricatures reinforced the fundamental belief system that slavery was a natural outcome of scientific evolution. At the same time, it also resolved the moral and political conflict of allowing slavery in a country founded on the ideals of freedom.45

For example, the plantation was constantly presented as an idyllic, beneficent, pastoral space, and the enslaved there were depicted as content to work, live and serve their masters. This idea was furthered through characters such as that of the happy Sambo or the Mammy. These types of minstrel images were projected incessantly to white America through novels, songs, and other mediated forms. As the Civil War loomed closer and the debate regarding the institution of slavery intensified however, another minstrel character was introduced: that of Zip Coon. Zip

Coon was created as a mockery of Northern Blacks and portrayed as a comedic character failing miserably in his attempts to assimilate to white customs and norms. According to Marlon Riggs in his Emmy-winning documentary Ethnic Notions,

Together Zip Coon and Sambo provided a double-edged defense of slavery: Zip Coon, proof of Blacks' ludicrous failure to adapt to freedom; and Sambo, the fantasy of happy darkies in their proper place.46

44 Lhamon. Jump Jim Crow: Lost Plays, Lyrics, and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Popular Culture, vii.

45 Riggs. Ethnic Notions.

46 Ibid,

These images were manifested through outrageous readings of Blacks, their communities, and their alleged cultural practices. Through darkened Black skins, protruding lips and bulging eyeballs, minstrel personas took form as garishly dressed and grotesque characterizations.47

Portrayed in impoverished settings with yard fowl, watermelons and the like, these interchangeably backward, shiftless, ridiculous, childish and criminal types were pervasive in the cultural documenta at the time.48 It was part of a massively demeaning propaganda campaign that not only reflected, but also shaped and perpetuated the idea that Black people were innately inferior. It legitimized Jim Crow segregation and the race-based violence that was perpetrated to support that system of exclusion. Through the visual, musical and literary portrayals, whose principal incentive was a derisive and “humorous” view of the “other,” Black/white race- relations in the U.S. have been affected indelibly.

Although every racial and ethnic group in America has been made into caricatures, none of them have been as often or in as many different ways as those that have been made to depict

African Americans. According to Marvin McAllister however,

Well before Blackface minstrelsy emerged as a representational behemoth in early 19th century American theater, skilled African American humorists, signifiers and dancers were cultivating their own whiteface entertainment designed to highlight the seemingly different ways of being “Black” and “white” in the United States.49

47 Powell. Black Art: A Cultural History, 25.

48 Ibid, 25.

49McAllister. “Dave Chappelle, Whiteface Minstrelsy, and “Irresponsible” Satire.” In African American Humor, Irony, and Satire: Ishmael Reed, Satirically Speaking, 118.

Identity has always been affected by how we recollect and [re]configure ourselves in the stories we tell. It is a subjective practice of self-construction and one whereby memories are foundational to the process and outcome. While certain whites that lived during the slave and Jim Crow eras have related accounts of the unfair treatment of Blacks, it is disappointing that such expressions of responsibility and/or remorse are seldom among them; Instead, more often than not Southern whites have offered up diametrically opposed recollections that contradict those of Black people that survived the same era. In the town of New Iberia in southwestern Louisiana for example, segregation was predominately remembered and perceived by whites as a mainly benign social system; race

The Clap-Back: Black Humorists and Cutting Ripostes

Being in proximity had allowed Blacks an unobstructed view of the lives and behaviors of white folk, and they enacted performances of whiteness to challenge America's racial, political and economic hierarchies. An early example of this is evident in the plantation cakewalk, a performance by enslaved people that parodied and transformed a particularly dignified white- bodied minuet into an African American dance tradition. Through its performance, enslaved people not only emulated the European Grand March dance but also replicated the affect and mannerisms of genteel white society. Consequently, through an oft-comedic interpretation of the excessive propriety and pride exhibited by the master class, an alternate view of whiteness was presented. Additionally, as a diametrically opposed act, this performative approach was transformed into an effectual campaign for Black identity as well.50

Black observers had been continuously critiquing “white ways,” and in the 20th century, their views began to be staged more publicly.51 During the Harlem Renaissance for instance,

Black humor took form in Langston Hughes’s character of Jesse B. Simple and assessments of

American racism became prevalent in the work of comics such as Redd Foxx, Moms Mabley, and blues singers such as Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey.

In the 1950s and 60s, the fight for civil rights transformed from a plea to a demand, which was correspondingly echoed in the nation’s humor as well.52 In literature, writers such as

Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright came to the fore with candid depictions of street humor, which

relations were similarly described as more tranquil during that time, “because blacks and whites understood their place within the social order.” Source: “Whites Remember Jim Crow.” American Radioworks.

50 McAllister. Whiting Up: Whiteface Minstrels & Stage Europeans in African American Performance, 34.

51 McAllister. “Dave Chappelle, Whiteface Minstrelsy, and “Irresponsible” Satire.” In African American Humor, Irony, and Satire: Ishmael Reed, Satirically Speaking, 118.

52 Watkins. African American Humor: The Best Black Comedy from Slavery to Today, 213.

emphasized themes of social justice and race relations.53 Through the actions and comedic conceptions of Dick Gregory, the nexus between humor and Civil Rights became literal. As an activist, Gregory became personally and financially involved in the movement and according to

Charles M. Payne in his book, I’ve got the Light of Freedom: the Organizing Tradition and the

Mississippi Freedom Struggle, if a cop called Gregory the n-word he might say:

Come here, boy, let me tell you something. I could take you back to Chicago today and let you walk through my home, then come back here and walk through your home, and out of the two of us you’d know which one was the nigger. 54

In his comedic work, Gregory also became nationally recognized for jokes that sharply attacked racial prejudice. In the delivery of his routine to white audiences, he pulled no punches.

Of the state of race-relations in America, he irreverently joked:

What a Country! Where else could I have to ride in the back of the bus, live in the worst neighborhoods, go to the worst schools, eat in the worst restaurants – and average $5000 a week just talking about it.55

These subversive and rebellious acts were a huge leap from the indirect trickster tales of enslaved people, and from the furtive John and Massa stories told amongst in-group associates solely. Toasts and the dozens later arose in the inner-city streets, Black Stand-Up Comedy programs on television, and consequently literary, poetic and artistic manifestations of Black humor brought national attention to the ever-rising sense of Black empowerment in America.

53 For example, in Richard Wright’s autobiography Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth, 71 he recounts the following street corner dialogue:

“Man what makes white folks so mean?” “Whenever I see one I spit.” “Man, ain’t they ugly?” “Man, you ever get right close to a white man, close enough to smell im?” “They say we stink. But my ma says white folks smell like dead folks.” “Niggers smell from sweat. But white folks smell all the time.”

54 Payne. I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle, 172.

55 Watkins. On the Real Side: Laughing, Lying, and Signifying: the Underground Tradition of African-American Humor That Transformed American Culture, from Slavery to Richard Pryor, 502.

Irresponsible Satire and the Subjectivity of Humor.

This feat, however, has not been unwavering or uniform in its success. Comedians such as

Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle, and artists such as Kara Walker and Archibald Motley have been accused of “trafficking in stereotypes” and practicing an irresponsible, racially charged cultural satire that exacerbates rather than resolves representational maladies for African Americans. Examples include assessments of each comedian’s use of the n-word and their heavy-handed reliance on an ostensibly limitless repository of racial stereotypes in their acts. The artworks of Walker and Motley have been assessed in much the same ways, except for their visual reliance on such themes. As Black cultural satirists, they have each thus been accused of creating works that uphold rather than diverge from 19th century minstrel-type productions. Of this aspect of her work, Walker herself conceded, that for viewers, it is difficult “to decide just how hard to laugh.”56

Since humor is highly subjective, its ultimate interpretation is impossible to control. This aspect has caused the humorist’s position — as a socially and culturally conscious satirist — to be considered tenuous at best. For reasons such as this, whiteface performances have been understood as more effective at defeating Black cultural stereotypes than the invoking of them has been. Through whiteface performances, customs of whites have been mocked and the absurdity of white supremacy and America’s media-driven constructions of Blackness contested.

In engaging with racial stereotypes broadly, whiteness is equally exposed as a culturally constructed race.57 Marvin McAllister commented on this in regard to Dave Chappelle’s use of whiteface in his performances when he stated,

56 Walker. “Kara Walker Interview.” By Alberro. Index Magazine, 1996.

57 McAllister. “Dave Chappelle, Whiteface Minstrelsy, and “Irresponsible” Satire.” In African American Humor, Irony, and Satire: Ishmael Reed, Satirically Speaking, 119.

This hackneyed hideous mask is an obvious play on centuries of white performers “Blacking up,” purely superficial whiteface hardly designed to fool anyway. If anything, Chappelle’s photonegative minstrel mask might draw attention to the ridiculousness of cross-racial impersonations and the equally absurd yet dangerous “truths” that we attach to the performance of race, onstage and offstage.58

An example of this is viewable in Dave Chappelle’s sketch titled Racial Draft. In this skit, ethnic groups “choose” the racial standing of certain Americans, “once and for all.” Black constituents draft Black/Asian Tiger Woods, who in his acceptance speech states, “So long fried rice, hello fried chicken!” The Jews draft Lenny Kravitz and the Latinos, Elian Gonzalez —“so the whites don’t try and adopt him first!” An uptight, rigid whiteface-donning Chappelle then drafts African American Colin Powell, to which the Black constituency only accepts on the condition that they take Condoleeza Rice too [where exactly was she during Katrina?]. The

Asian group continues the white group’s initiation of outside-of-their-race-selection by claiming the entire Wu Tang Clan for themselves, a pronouncement that concludes the sketch and ultimately throws all race-affiliations into ambiguity.

Through this skit, the racial codes and racist attitudes that have circumscribed Black existence are contested, and profound and socially attuned levels of Black identity are invoked and grappled with. Du Bois’s “veil” is illustrated through a listing of the discriminatory life events experienced by the now “officially” Black Tiger Woods. (These include: losing his endorsements, death threats and dating a white woman, to which the telecaster excitedly comments, “sounds like a Black guy to me!”). Du Bois’s “colorline” is crossed through an appropriation of ‘white’ behaviors, and with that, the duality of double consciousness is imaginatively and climactically resolved.

58 Ibid, 123.

Chappelle, like African American humorists before him, targeted the cultural baggage of

American racism and at the same time, satirized the way in which Black people have had to enact roles defined by whites, for the entirety of their lives.59 This aspect signals what has been described as ‘the quintessential Black experience in America,’ in that the Black community has maintained a double-consciousness as a method for survival when amongst the white majority.

It is an experience detectable in much Black expressive culture including within the opening passage of Ellison’s novel Invisible Man whereby the main character’s grandfather gives him the deathbed admonition to “overcome ‘em with yeses, undermine ‘em with grins, agree ‘em to death and destruction, let ‘em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open.”60 It is the classic utterance of a ‘yes,’ that accomplishes the expressive ‘no’61 and ‘change the joke and slip the yoke’ scheme that recalls the old folkloric command to ‘play the fool to catch wise.’ Foremost it reveals and exemplifies, “the traditional wisdom of the jester — that satire is safer and more effective when veiled as coming from the mouth of a fool.”62

In the subsequent chapter, Critiquing African American Art: Locke, Du Bois and Post-

Black Humor, I introduce the debate between Alain Locke and W.E.B. Du Bois concerning the recommended course and objectives for African American Art. These scholars’ perspectives on art were formulated during the Harlem Renaissance, yet remain relevant today within contemporary art historical discourse. I discuss the ideas that Locke and Du Bois advocated within the context of contemporary art practice; I consider the ways in which the post-black movement has incorporated humor and/or irony as a break from African American art in the past.

59 Litwack. Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow, xiii.

60 Ellison. Invisible Man, 16.

61 Ellison. "Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke," 220.

62Piersen. "Puttin' Down Ole Massa: African Satire in the New World," 174.

I detail works by David Hammons, Jayson Musson and Kara Walker to show how their works remain in dialogue with this disputed condition. Throughout the chapter, I focus on these artists’ strategies of humor, which link their artworks historically and contemporaneously to other dissident practices within Black expressive culture.

CHAPTER 3 CRITIQUING AFRICAN AMERICAN ART: LOCKE, DU BOIS AND POST-BLACK HUMOR

Is this more the generation of the prophet or that of the poet; shall our intellectual and cultural leadership preach and exhort — or sing?

—Alain Locke Art or Propaganda1

Approaches to creating and critiquing African American art have been transformed in various ways over time. During the Harlem Renaissance for example, Alain Locke and W.E.B.

Du Bois believed in the propensity of the arts to bring about racial uplift yet maintained differing perspectives on the purpose and direction that African American art should take. While Du Bois claimed that all African American art should operate as “propaganda for gaining the right of

Black folk,”2 Locke contended that “propaganda perpetuates the position of group inferiority, even in crying out against it.”3

Alain Locke put forth his ideas and ideals in his book titled Negro Art: Past and Present.

In this work, Locke argued for a positivist racialized identity and sought to claim a place for

Black artists in American culture. He urged Blacks to disband timeworn modes of perceiving the world and to embrace a 'new psychology' and a 'new spirit'. More directly he implored the “New

Negro” to “smash” the racial, social and psychological impediments that had long obstructed

Black achievement.4

1 Locke. “Art or Propaganda,” 1.

2 Du Bois. “Criteria of Negro Art” The Crisis.

3 Locke. “Art or Propaganda,” 1.

4 Huang. “The Harlem Renaissance: Alain LeRoy Locke, W.E.B. Du Bois and the “American Dream.”” 3.

Like Locke, Du Bois also argued in support of African American art and viewed the humanities as a sign of racial maturity.5 Locke’s Negro Art: Past and Present and Du Bois’s

Criteria for Negro Art both reflect a belief in the propensity of the arts to bring racial uplift to the

Black community and engender a greater amount of respect for them. In Du Bois’s Criteria of

Negro Art, he stated, “With the growing recognition of Negro artists in spite of the severe handicaps, one comforting thing is occurring to both white and Black. They are whispering,

‘Here is a way out. Here is the real solution of the color problem.’” 6

While there are numerous similarities between the art-related theories and aims of these two great thinkers, there are a multitude of dissimilarities as well. For example, Du Bois deliberately collected the works of artists that reflected the progress of African Americans since the Civil War and believed that the finest works by African Americans demonstrated core middle class American values.7 Further, Du Bois proclaimed during a conference with the National

Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1926 that all art should operate as propaganda to improve the condition of the race. He argued that in order for art to work in the direction of racial advancement, it must employ ‘truth’ and encourage ‘universal understanding’ and ‘goodness’ to ‘engender sympathy and human interest.’ Du Bois stated, “I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda. But I do care when propaganda is confined to one side while the other is stripped and silent.”8 Locke however, disagreed with Du Bois and in his 1928 response essay, Art or Propaganda, contended propaganda “perpetuates the position of

5 Calo."African American Art and Critical Discourse between World Wars," 581.

6 Du Bois. “Criteria of Negro Art.” The Crisis. Paragraph 18.

7 Schur. "Post-Soul Aesthetics in Contemporary African American Art," 641.

8 Du Bois. The Conservation of Races the American Negro Academy, Paragraph 29.

group inferiority even in crying out against it.”9 Through this essay and his other writings, Locke argued that New Negro artists should be free to pursue aesthetic goals outside of social and political motivation. As such, Locke privileged the individual aspirations of the artist and a certain aestheticism over the communal interests of racial uplift that Du Bois sought to manifest.

Locke, Du Bois and Contemporary African American Art

While these disparate ideas were generated to address the aims and intentions of Harlem

Renaissance artists, they continue to resonate today in a myriad of ways. For example, as the

Civil Rights movement took hold in the 1960s and as African American intellectuals insisted that

Black art ought to support revolutionary struggle, Du Bois's stance on art with a political purpose became paramount. The Black Arts Movement was the artistic branch of the Black Power movement at that time and thereby responded to Du Bois’s call for art as propaganda. Cultural critic and playwright Larry Neal wrote The Manifesto for the Black Arts Movement in which he proclaimed Black Arts to be the “aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept.”10

Consequently, these empowerment-centered ideas presumed that artistic imagery had the ability to improve social relations and bring about a change in racial consciousness. Yet according to

Richard Schur, in his essay Post-Soul Aesthetics in Contemporary Art, Black Power transcended both Lockean and Du Boisean views. He stated,

Black Power not only deployed visual culture for political purposes but demanded that artists and audiences alike re-think the definition of beauty and thus art itself. Neither images of respectability (like Du Bois’s [collected] images) nor the [Lockean] African-derived aesthetics of Aaron Douglas or Jacob Lawrence challenged power relations sufficiently.11

9 Locke. Art or Propaganda, 1.

10 Neal. "The Black Arts Movement," 29.

11 Schur. "Post-Soul Aesthetics in Contemporary African American Art," 641.

Bracketed section not included in original essay.

African American art today is reflective of the historical debate between Locke and Du

Bois along with the present ideas and contexts that continue to shape it. Since the late 1970s, there has been a rise in critical theory, a focus on language and structure, and a move away from romanticized images of heroes going to battle against a racist society. Taken together, these may lead one to be inclined to believe then that a rather Lockean vision now prevails.12 This presumption however, could not be further from the truth. African American art and discourse today has, in many ways, moved in such mindboggling directions that it has caused a complete re-thinking, re-definition and re-conceptualization of the role of race, aesthetics, propaganda and uplift in African American art-making altogether. Where Du Bois would prescribe art with a pointed message, he may today find obfuscation in the work of Kara Walker. Where Locke would propose art with an Africanized aestheticism, he may be guided through the cavernous pitch-dark room of David Hammons’s conceptual installation — Concerto in Black and Blue.

In a 1991 essay titled “Afro-Modernism,” Robert Farris Thompson furthered this discussion when he proposed a completely reoriented understanding of Modernism altogether, that neither privileged nor held aloft the theories of Kant, Hegel or Foucault over, “Zen, Yoruba,

Ifa divination or Australian dreamtime.”13 Thompson proposed a Modernism that remained inclusive and encompassing; his (re)definition accounted for the impact of creative Blackness on

Modernism and worked against the marginalization of “Others” through exclusion, deletion, enshrinement or half-hearted attempts at corrective measures aimed at cancelling the colonial

“self.”14

12 National Humanities Center vol. III.

13 Thompson. “Afro-Modernism,” 91.

14 Ibid, 91.

Cognizant that much criticism excluded Black artists from contested territories of

Modernist practice Thompson aimed at correcting the disenfranchisement that has continually taken place. In doing so, he called attention to Black artists’ power over self-definition (or lack thereof) in their interaction with and within non-Black spaces. According to Olu Oguibe in his essay “Art, Identity, Boundaries: Postmodernism and Contemporary African Art,” “This [type of exclusionary] frame has its origins in colonial ethnography and the colonial desire for the faceless native, the anonym. The faceless native, displaced from individuality and coalesced into a tribe, a pack, demands and justifies representation because she stands for lack.”15

Therefore, when normative Modernist historicism omits or diminishes Black artists from within its scope, the policed colonies of Western desire are re-enacted and the correlative of

Fanon’s ‘palatable negro,’ the tolerable, consumable “Other” is resurrected.16 Mindful of such issues, Thompson sought to expose the ways in which art by “Others” has been indelibly,

“deeply and creatively embedded in contemporary culture.”17 He argued that, “Black and

Modernist cultures were inseparable long ago,” and heralded the limits of postmodernity. In doing so, he coined the term ‘post-Black’ to propose, “a retelling of Modernism to show how it predicts [that] the triumph of the current sequences reveal that ‘the Other’ is also your neighbor.”18

21st Century Post-Black Art and the Art of Critique

While Thompson first coined the phrase ‘post-Black’ in 1991 to signal the ways in which

Black expressive culture has been a part of Modernist practice all along, it wasn’t until the 2001

15 Oguibe, Olu. “Art, Identity, Boundaries: Postmodernism and Contemporary African Art,” 20-21.

16 Ibid, 23.

17 Thompson. “Afro-Modernism,” 94.

18 Ibid, 91. According to Tanya Barson, “This reasoning was also echoed in Frank Bowling’s preceding assertion that, “the Black soul, if there can be such a thing, belongs in Modernism.”

Freestyle exhibition by Harlem Museum curator Thelma Golden and artist Glenn Ligon that the phrase was popularized. In Ligon and Golden’s account, the phrase ‘post-Black’ was expanded and transformed; it came to describe the way in which work by emerging Black artists signified a substantial departure from that of their forebears; it refers to a time after Black Power, but one that is likewise fraught and embroiled in a complex relationship to the notion of liberation.19

Oftentimes infused with humor and irony, post-Black artworks have routinely broken from the past by demonstrating how previous generations relied too heavily on overused types or modes of representation.20 David Hammons seemingly addressed this issue when he stated, “I hate the system, every Black man does, but too much work about racism is redundant. You’ve got to take your anger and make it beautiful, like Dr. J going to hoop or like Duke Ellington.”21

While Hammons’s work clearly falls under the post-Black appellation by way of

Thompson’s description, it remains debatable as to whether it is applicable in Ligon/Golden’s sense of the term as well. His artwork has been understood as a literal and visual manifestation of the ways in which African and African-American aesthetics operate within the realm of the

Modern and his work thereby demonstrates and expresses multiple and multifaceted modernities.

More recent critiques of his artworks have also in turn reflected a deeper exploration into the cultural specificity of Hammons’s practice, as opposed to an assessment of his art as simply

Black content applied to a Duchampian and Arte Povera methodology.22 These factors have each

19 Murray. “Post Black and the Resurrection of African American Satire,”16.

20 Schur. "Post-Soul Aesthetics in Contemporary African American Art," 641.

21 Sill. David Hammons in the Hood, 20. Quote taken from a series of conversations between Hammons and Sill, June 1991.

22 Fusco. “Wreaking Havoc on the Signified: David Hammons.”

contributed to a deeper understanding of his art as post-Black in Thompson’s sense of the phrase, as offering a new dimension to the Modern.

Hammons’s 1996 work titled Too Obvious is an ideal example of this manifestation in that it makes apparent the interwoven relationship between the Westernized and the African

(David Hammons, Too Obvious, 1996, 7 x 12 x 14 inches, cowrie shells and porcelain ceramic).

This work, comprised of a ceramic pink piggy bank, cracked open to reveal cowrie shells spilling out from it has been interpreted by Manthia Diawara as a, “Western trope [the piggy bank] signifies both childhood innocence and a lesson in capitalist upbringing…. the broken bank represents danger and the violation of innocence. And the way Hammons isolates five cowrie shells from the rest is also a reference to exile in West African tradition”23 It is significant that instead of containing coins, the interior of the shiny pink piggy bank holds cowrie shells, traditionally a West African form of currency. The work therefore also conveys the fact that much Western wealth has been generated from African sources — a view not always acknowledged, until the faultless surface of things is cracked open. Many critics including

Thompson have applied a likened viewpoint to Moderism as well: a tear in a Picasso revealing the African sculptures sourced for inspiration, an analysis of rock n roll that reveals its roots in

African American music and the pastoral Southern Plantation, a deceptively charming and idyllic location, maintained and built through the exploitation of enslaved persons’ labor.24 It is a

23 Diawara. “Make it Funky: The Art of David Hammons,” 127.

24 Titus Kaphar’s work also operates under similar valences through his exploration of slavery and racism. One work for example, Behind the Myth of Benevolence, 2014, oil on canvas, 59 x 34 x 6 inches, features a silver haired man painted on an unstretched canvas that is draped across a stretched one. Only half of his face is observable on the section that hangs down. In appearance and costume, he resembles one of the founding fathers. Painted beyond this draped portrait of him, and on the stretched canvas behind him is an image of a black woman with a curious expression on her face. Her head is wrapped in a green and yellow scarf, but she appears to be wearing no other clothing. Her bare shoulder and knee peek out from behind the other draped portrait of a white, stately appearing man. A golden bowl rests on the carpeted red floor beneath her and a gold pitcher set on a matching plate is placed on a blue clothed table behind her. A set of pulled dark curtains appear in the distance. This work in particular, is made to expose the connections between the history of slavery and the story of the founding of the US. History is

reoriented understanding that operates as a retelling of the history of westernization; an expanded and inclusive history of Modernism that Black artistic expression has always remained a part of.

Features of Hammons’s work can also be understood as post-Black in Ligon/Golden’s sense of the term since much of Hammons’s art signals the staid topic of Black-white race relations through the valence of the humorous, the mocking and the clever. Characterized by elements of juxtaposition and incongruity, Hammons’s work is predominantly satirical in nature.

Through his use of puns as titles, Hammons visually and ideologically signals power imbalances that have been created through class and race-based distinctions. Through his repeated utilization of the detritus of urban life (liquor bottles, bottle caps, Venetian blinds, brown paper bags, dirt, rubber, chicken bones, fallen hair etc.), he sardonically calls attention to the trappings of

"whiteness," “Blackness,” and the normalized practice of value-placement constantly at play within our society. Coco Fusco explains,

[He] has often been characterized as a sophisticated junk dealer who breathes life into paper bags, bottle caps, frizzy hair, snowballs, rocks, broken appliances, old clothes, rugs, grease and half-eaten ribs. He is, in actuality, a masterful investigator of how an oppositional Black cultural identity can be generated through a dialogue with 'high' culture, particularly as it is articulated through standard English. His method relies on punning and other kinds of word games that short-circuit the dominant cultural interpretation of any given object or term to be redirected for his own purpose.25

often whitewashed to privilege narratives that glorify the past and obscure or erase its sins. Kaphar’s work operates to contradict such regimes of misinformation and deliberate ignorance. Specifically, he aims to reinstitute the presence of black individuals and communities in our collective understanding of the past and present. Of his interest in creating such works that do so, Kaphar stated, “I’ve always been fascinated by history: art history, American history, world history, individual history, how history is written, recorded, distorted, exploited, reimagined, and understood. In my work I explore the materiality of reconstructive history…In so doing, my aim is to perform what I critique, to reveal something of what has been lost, and to investigate the power of a rewritten history.”

Quoted material above sourced from Jack Shainman gallery website.

25 Fusco. “Wreaking Havoc on the Signified: David Hammons.”

Hammons’s use of puns allows him to employ levity and sidestep the didactic approach that many works concerning such serious matters subsume.26 Instead of offering up directives,

Hammons invites his audience to make their own connections between the verbal, ideological and the sociopolitical. His work Fly in the Sugar Bowl, for example, is literally comprised of a zipper-pull tossed into a bowl of granulated sugar (David Hammons, Fly in the Sugar Bowl,

1993, ceramic bowl, sugar, zipper fly). As a visual/verbal pun, it suggests the social instance wherein a Black person is surrounded by a group of white people. Positioned in a gallery setting, the work can also be viewed as a microcosm of the predominately white art world, which

Hammons’s work (and the artist himself) exists within. It is an outsider condition similarly echoed in Zora Neale Hurston’s How it Feels to be Colored Me when she reflected,

I feel most colored when thrown up against a sharp white background… I feel my race. Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, and overswept, but through it all, I remain myself. When covered by the waters, I am; and the ebb but reveals me again.27

An additional work by Hammons made to effect coy mockery of dominant cultural constructions and clichés about otherness is his, How Ya Like Me Now? billboard. 28 For this work, Hammons created a 14-by-16-foot portrait-bust of a pink-skinned, blond and blue-eyed

Jesse Jackson. Jackson is featured wearing a light blue suit-jacket, white collared shirt and cherry-red tie. The work’s title is emblazoned in black graffiti on the lower–central section of the bust-like depiction.

26 Yau, “Why David Hammons Might be Elusive and Difficult.”

27 Hurston. "How it Feels to be Colored Me," 215.

28 “How Ya Like Me Now?” is a line from a rap song performed by Kool Moe Dee. It is also the title track of his second and best-selling album. The lyrics can be classified as ‘battle rhymes,’ a type of rap that is centered around much braggadocio-type content and put-downs, insults or disses targeting real or imagined adversaries. Much of battle rapping was performed spontaneously and live by two opponents. In the case of this song, the target was LL Kool J, (whose distinctive Kangol hat was placed beneath the front tire of Kool Mo Dee’s Jeep, on the cover image of his album with title track name). This type of verbal battling in hip hop was preceded by the African-American oral tradition of competing in ‘the dozens,’ a competition in which two people (generally male) throw good-natured insults at one another until one gives up. This game has been connected to African precedents in Ghana and Nigeria.

The sizeable work was originally installed in a downtown public parking lot as part of a show sponsored by the Washington Project for the Arts. Shortly after its installation, it was attacked with sledgehammers by a group of African-American men who felt the painting disparaged Reverend Jackson. Since that attack the work has been exhibited within museums and gallery spaces, standing upright on the floor with a white wall to its rear. Sledgehammers surround the portrait standing on their heads, equidistant apart like a fence guarding the work.

An upright American flag, topped with a golden eagle, is placed on a stand to the left of the work. The handle of one of the sledgehammers is wrapped in a Lucky Strike cigarette wrapper.

According to Hammons, the attack on the work with sledgehammers was "a lucky strike" because it got him national publicity (David Hammons, How Ya Like Me Now?, 1988, 14 x 16 feet, tin, plywood, paint, sledgehammers, Lucky Strike cigarette wrapper, and American flag).29

Of the portrait, Mr. Jackson took no offense. He stated, “The reaction is an extension of the art… you drop a big rock in the water —the issue is not just the rock. It's also the ripples.

This is a big rock."30 As for Hammons, he was reportedly amused by the defacement of the piece, an act that signaled the emotionally difficult subject matter that his work continuously brings to the forefront. Manthia Diawara commented on this aspect of his work in the essay titled

Make it Funky when he stated,

By making a stereotype literal, Hammons' work takes a perverse pleasure in showing things in their nakedness and producing the quick disavowal that follows the recognition of a stereotype. He "dumbs down" the cliché until it loses its immanence and becomes transtextual… In fact, Hammons' work teases us because it is what it is: just an image with a floating irony. 31

29 Wallach, ART: Rubble-Rouser, Los Angeles Times.

30 “Jesse Jackson Responds to Portrait of Him as White,” LA Times.

31 Diawara. “Make it Funky: The Art of David Hammons,” 126.

Through a process Hammons has called the, “brilliance in dumbing down,” he confronts the legacy of race-based categorizations; he manipulates their attendant stereotypes by amplifying their features; in doing so, he compels his audience to recognize the seductive deceptions that they subsume while he concurrently exposes the ways in which we all consume and are consumed as images and stereotypes.32 Hammons once reflected on his own confined condition to this effect when he stated, “Everyone knows that I am Black, so my work doesn’t have to shout it out any more — I am Black. The work will automatically be thought of as a part of my African-American culture.”33 In this sense Hammons makes use of his audience’s reception of his work; by using this aspect to his own ends he becomes the consummate moralist

—undoubtedly the most old-fashioned and non-post-Black artist of all.

As noted by Golden, an aim of post-Black artists is to keep the critic’s gaze on their work, instead of as objects themselves within the frame of it; in doing so, they claim authority over it and reject the ‘othering’ that characterizes much art-world and art historical discourse. Of this aspect she wrote, “[Post-Black] was characterized by artists that were adamant about not being labeled as 'Black' artists, though their work was steeped, in fact deeply interested, in redefining complex notions of Blackness.”34 While their artworks frequently foreground the way in which fixed notions of art and beauty perpetuate racial and gender inequality, the artists have concurrently peddled the image of the stereotype all the same. An example of this is evident in the Youtube video series “Art Thoughtz” created by and starring Brooklyn-based artist Jayson

Musson. Wearing a baseball cap, an oversized watch and at times, double-necklace pendant chains, Musson performs as the urban Black persona, Hennessy Youngman — a mash-up stage-

32 Ibid, 126.

33 Stern. “A Fraction of the Whole.”

34 Golden, Thelma, Hamza Walker, and Studio Museum in Harlem. Freestyle, 14.

name referencing the standup comic Henny Youngman and Hennessy, a common cognac-type mentioned in popular hip-hop music.35 According to Musson, the character became a “talking head,” a “rap art pundit,” and “a way of coping being in school, dealing with a history of ideas that I didn't feel a part of.”36

Aimed at undermining the culture of pretentiousness and elitism permeating the art world, Musson’s videos create humor through the supposedly incongruous: the urban Black youth and the lily-white art-world sophisticate. Of this aspect of his performance he stated,

In terms of the vacillation between slang and jargon, I mean, this isn’t something new to Blacks. Black people and other people of color exist within multiple worlds; they’re hybrid cultural citizens who develop methods of speech in order to traverse the white man’s world while still maintaining the voice of their own culture. It’s a survival tactic that precedes me by a vast amount of years.37

In his ‘How to be a Successful Black Artist’ episode for instance, Hennessey satirically instructs Black artists that to be successful, you should appear, “angry, unpredictable and exotic to white folks…” In an urban-inflected Black dialect he states, “If you got nothing up your sleeve — you at the poker table of the art-world — pull out slavery: Bl-owe! Full house, royal flush!”

Despite his character’s outsider status, the slights Musson unleashes on the art-world are both astute and incisive. He zeroes in on the art establishment’s timeworn penchant for favoring certain types of artworks by Black artists (which is satirized by Musson into a ‘formula for success’) and the ‘othering’ of them (by way of the art establishment’s expectations of Black artists and Black citizens at large). An example of this occurrence can be seen in the career of

35 Considine, “Biting Humor Aimed at Art.”

36 Cavaluzzo. “Jayson Musson is more than Hennessy Youngman.”

37 Musson. “Interview: Jayson Musson Talks His New Comic-Inspired Exhibit at Salon 94 and the End of Hennesey Youngman.” By Silverman.

Abstract Expressionist Norman Lewis. While Lewis was included in the Venice Biennale the same year that Pollack and De Kooning were, Irving Sandler’s The Triumph of American

Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism (1970) and The New York School: The Painters and Sculptors of the Fifties (1978), both of which are considered definitive histories of that period, do not even footnote him. Dore Ashton, who has also written extensively on Abstract

Expressionism, hadn’t mentioned him either. He was correspondingly excluded from many

African American art exhibitions because his artwork was regarded as “too abstract,” and Social

Realism was viewed as a more fitting movement for Black artists to participate in. In effect,

Lewis’s work simply didn’t fit with the ‘art-world criteria’ commanded of Black artists that

Musson so aptly satirizes. Of this condition Lewis stated,

I think amongst themselves that as white artists (Pollack, Reinhardt, Kline, Newman, de Kooning) —I make this distinction because there is a difference between being white and Black which is quite obvious —their problems and my own never coincided — despite the fact that we were fighting for, say, a better world... And I was constantly being investigated by the FBI and when we picketed, being harassed by the police, that there is something different. I mean their harassment and being bothered by the police was entirely different from the Black cat being beaten by the police…We were trying to set up the unions, teaching unions. We had an artists' union and yet many things that they benefitted from I am still fighting for...38

Reinscribing the Racial Stereotype: Matters of Humor and (Mis)Representation

While this interview was conducted decades ago, the same societal issues Lewis faced in

1968 remain today. Many artists like Musson focus their works on such ills, and yet their artworks have been viewed as reifying those timeworn conditions, all the same. According to

Jonathan P. Rossing in his essay, A Sense of Humor for Civic Life: Toward a Strong Defense of

Humor, “When satirists attack oppressive knowledge constructions or social practices, they

38 Lewis. “An Interview of Norman Lewis.” By Ghent, 1968.

inspire hand-wringing over an uninformed public who will uncritically accept the jokes as confirmation of dominant beliefs.”39 Rossing gives a July 21, 2008, New Yorker cover illustration titled “The Politics of Fear” by Barry Blatt as an example. The cover image was a composite of the multiple popularized racist discourses regarding Barack and Michelle Obama:

Obama in Middle Eastern garb and Michelle as an Afro-donning Black Power radical armed with an assault rifle.40 It was a satirical conglomeration of the race-based suspicions held by certain sectors of the American public; however, many reviewers cautioned against the possibilities of the image’s effects. Critics feared that the bewildered masses could read the image as an endorsement or confirmation of such errant beliefs rather than as an actual attempt to discredit them.

It is difficult to argue that humor-intended race-based imagery is innocuous, as the minstrel image, as an example, has had such devastating effects. Irrespective of intent, caricatured versions of the Obamas and of Black urban youth turned art-aficionados are part of that history for they too rely on a visual code of otherness and the performance of race. Since several artists have routinely adopted such stereotyped and racialized images in their work, they have been taken to task and accused most punitively of “making their reputations and large sums of money off of their own people’s suffering.”41 In the award winning book Citizen: An

American Lyric, writer/poet Claudia Rankine contends that Musson’s ‘How to be a Successful

Black Artist’ video communicates the idea that, “Black people’s anger is marketable,” since,

“[he] advises Black artists to cultivate ‘an angry nigger exterior’ by watching among other

39 Rossing. "A Sense of Humor for Civic Life: Toward a Strong Defense of Humor," 5.

40 Ibid, 5-6.

41 Anonymous. “Extreme Times Call for Extreme Heroes.”

things, the Rodney King video while working.”42 The essential problem with this, according to

Rankine, is that, “the commodified anger his video advocates, rests lightly on the surface for spectacle’s sake…and is tied solely to the performance of Blackness and not to the emotional state of particular individuals in particular situations.”43

The “quotidian struggle against dehumanization” is one that Rankine intentionally connects to the individual’s experience;44 this relates also to the critique the encompassing term

‘post-Black’ has been subjected to in that it is an ostensibly totalizing classification for contemporary Black artists that obscures/negates the experiences of the individual. Cathy Byrd recounted such a sentiment in her essay “Is There a Post-Black Art?” when she relayed one artist’s contention: “As a person who is very proud of being 'Black' or of African heritage, I would be reluctant to ever describe myself as 'post-Black' in any sense"45 An associated assertion by Golden that was hotly contested was her sound-bite-type-quip, “Post-Black was the new

Black."46 To this assertion, a contributor to an online forum had the following sarcastic response: “Does this mean the Negro is no longer in vogue? Is brown the new Black? Is brown

Black? Is trans-inter-multi-culturalism the new Black? I could dig being post-Black if I weren’t constantly reminded — for better or and for worse — of how Black I am.”47

Alongside the heated debate concerning the post-Black appellation, there has been much controversy surrounding many of the artists whose works are described by it. The work of Kara

42 Rankine. Citizen: An American Lyric. 23.

43 Ibid, 23.

44 Ibid, 24.

45 Byrd, Cathy. “Is There a ‘Post-Black’ Art? Investigating the Legacy of the ‘Freestyle’ Show.” 38.

46 Golden, Thelma, Hamza Walker, and Studio Museum in Harlem. Freestyle. 14.

47 Taylor, Paul C. "Post-Black, Old Black," 628.

Walker remains the most well-known example of this sensation. She has been accused of having a cavalier, mocking, and disrespectful attitude towards her own history, most notably through her statement that, “All Black people want to be a slave a little bit.”48 As the most notorious artist of the so-called post-Black era, she has not only ignited a debate among critics and viewers, but from fellow African American artists as well. This firestorm surrounding Walker’s work commenced when Betye Saar launched a campaign to protest Walker’s exhibit, which Saar believed showcased the most egregious forms of racial stereotyping.49 Saar’s work and protest of

Walker’s art, however, was not above its own critical assessment, and she was accused of hypocrisy for her own ironic utilization of surviving stereotypical images within American popular culture. Critics pointed to Saar’s best-known work, The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, 1972

(Betye Saar, The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, 1972, 11 3/4 x 8 x 2 3/4 inches, mixed media and found objects), to underscore the way in which Saar too, peddled in the trappings of racism.

This work by Saar is comprised of a collection of objects, including a central smiling

‘mammy’ figurine armed with a rifle and a broom. Pasted to the rear wall behind the figurine, is a collection of square-shaped, red-tinted Aunt Jemima product labels. On the mammy figurine’s skirt, a postcard depicting another ‘mammy’ holding onto a mulatto baby behind a white picket fence is affixed. In front of the fence, Saar painted a raised black fist, a charged symbol of the black power movement. A wooden box-like frame encloses the entire assemblage of objects.

According to Saar, she co-opted the derogatory ‘mammy’ image “to empower the black woman by making her a revolutionary… rebelling against her past enslavement.”50 While in doing so she does employ the visual codes of minstrelsy, Saar’s aim of ‘change the joke and slip the yoke’ is

48 Saltz. “Kara Walker: Ill-Will and Desire,” 82.

49 Murray. “Post Black and the Resurrection of African American Satire,” 10.

50 Saar. “Influences: Betye Saar,” Frieze.

made clear in arming the oft-objectified Aunt Jemima with a gun. Of this intention for the work

Saar wrote,

I had a lot of hesitation about using powerful, negative images such as these — thinking about how white people saw black people, and how that influenced the ways in which black people saw each other. What saved it was that I made Aunt Jemima into a revolutionary figure…I was recycling the imagery, in a way, from negative to positive, using the negative power against itself.51

Walker’s work also involves biting commentary, but her target is progressively more complex and at times difficult or even impossible to discern. Her silhouette cutout installations emerged from an ethos whereby Black culture is neither held aloft, nor perceived as beyond the possibility of critique. Walker’s 1997 silhouette panorama, ‘Slavery! Slavery! Presenting a

GRAND and LIFELIKE Panoramic Journey into Picturesque Southern Slavery or "Life at 'Ol'

Virginny's Hole' (sketches from Plantation Life)" See the Peculiar Institution as never before! All cut from Black paper by the able hand of Kara Elizabeth Walker, an Emancipated Negress and leader in her Cause,’ for example presents 19th century figures —of black and/or white racial categorization, enslaved and/or slaver — as shamelessly engaged in acts such as farting, vomiting and copulating publicly outdoors. These doings unfold in a Southern gothic-like landscape framed by large Spanish moss-covered trees. A crescent moon partially covered by clouds divides the expansive panorama and signals the mystique and psychological darkness of that bizarre night. The deranged figures Walker implicates participate in senseless activities, recalling those that abound in Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. Succumbing to primal urges, each becomes embroiled in a carnivalesque scene of perversion, tumult and chaos through their lack of civility, sense and shame.

51 Ibid.

Of this consistent quality within Walker’s oeuvre Saar stated, “I felt the work of Kara

Walker was sort of revolting and negative and a form of betrayal to the slaves, particularly women and children; that it was basically for the amusement and the investment of the white art establishment.”52 While Saar’s assessment was meant as a disparagement, she was not misguided. Walker’s works have largely been collected and circulated among an affluent white audience, which according to Miles Unger has created an “uneasy alliance between white privilege and Black self-examination.”53 Walker’s artwork seamlessly transposes revulsion to desire, which is also thereby linked to the commodification of her artwork, and thus the perpetuation of Black objectification for consumption by a white audience.

She creates larger than life cycloramas that exhibit a world in which all characters (Black and white) are implicated in an absurd form of race-relations; in doing so, she lays the one- directional dichotomy of Black/white power relations by the wayside.54 Of this topsy-turvy quality of her work, Walker stated, “What I want to happen in my work, the action I want to set in motion,” is to have the viewer “go from a place of recognition, of the familiar, to a place of fiction, make believe, back into fact and then through a place of hyperreality, a place of the absurd, the ‘too weird,’ the ‘too out-there.”55 These bewildering features of brutality, horror and libidinal desire that her work showcases have continually caused much dispute; in the fall of

1999 for instance, her work was pulled from a show at the Detroit Institute because she would not include “didactic material” that would help viewers “understand the work and the artist’s

52 PBS, I'll Make Me a World: A Century of African-American Arts.

53 Unger. “Contested Histories.”

54 Maus, Derek C. and James J. Donahue. Post-Soul Satire: Black Identity After Civil Rights, 10.

55 Walker. “Interview with Kara Walker.” By Alberro.

intent.”56 Of this aspect Unger went on to state, “One would think that the bizarrely fantastical nature of Walker’s work would free it from the type of political vetting to which history textbooks are subject, but the work still manages to offend those literalists for whom the fictive dimension of art does not exist”57

While in truth, Walker does not claim to mirror the realities of the Black experience in

America in her depictions; reactions to her oeuvre signal the state of race relations in America nonetheless. For many, this quality gets at the essence of post-Black art itself: the propensity of it to straddle the intersection between history and the human psyche — along with its propensity to publicly single out, scrutinize and assess the sacred cows of its previous generation’s era.

Author/blogger Patrice Evans, took up this quandary concerning satire in mainstream Black culture when he farcically posed the questions:

Why does it seem like Black people are missing the boat — treating SS Satire like a slave ship? Sometimes it feels we only get the joke if it’s the lowest common denominator, otherwise we have to put on our suits and let Oprah or Tyler Perry hold our hands and make sure there’s heavy Maya Angelou level of respect?58

However, what is humor when it is couched in stereotypes, which were built from racist ideas? What are its limits and should it be limited — and if so, by whom? The late writer and humorist David Foster Wallace took up such a quandary when he stated that he once heard that,

“irony is the song of a bird that has come to love its cage. And even though it sings about not liking its cage — it really likes it.”59 The message of this sentiment begs the crucial question: does race-based satire function as a call to action or an anesthetic? Is it a way to merely pretend

56 Carpio. Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery. 185.

57 Unger.“Contested Histories.”

58 Excerpt from essay titled: “The Assimilated Negro” posted online by Evans. Quoted in Maus Post-Soul Satire: Black Identity After Civil Rights, xi.

59 Wallace. “David Foster Wallace on Humor and Infinite Jest.”

to protest? Is humor a way to cope with actual pain or a way to transfigure it? These issues are a correlate of the dispute regarding the post-Black appellation and whether it indicates that

Blackness itself has been superseded. It is a position and concept summed up through the statement by Golden that for her, “to approach a conversation about ‘Black art,’ ultimately meant embracing and rejecting the notion of such a thing at the same time.”60 Paul C. Taylor however disputed this line of thinking in his essay, Post-Black Old Black, whereby he wrote,

Golden's line leaves me wondering: How can post-Black be the new Black? Postmodernity is precisely not the new modernity; and ditto for post-colonialism and colonialism. And if post-Black can be the new Black, in what sense is it really "post" Blackness at all? Why isn't it just a new stage of Blackness? And, if it is just a new stage of Blackness, then why not name it accordingly?61

Locke, Du Bois and the Post-Black Debate Reprised

These questions taken together return African American cultural criticism to the debate between Locke and Du Bois and at the same time imply that to be post-Black is to experience a certain contingency and fluidity of Black identity. In the efforts of grappling with questions of how to orient one's being to the various manifestations of Black self-consciousness, the post-

Black artist re-imagines and reenacts the cognitive dissonance created by Du Boisian double consciousness. In emancipating Blackness from its historical burdens, while at the same time becoming empowered by them as well, Locke’s New Negro ideas are re-materialized. Most readily they recall his assertion that the aim of African American art is, “not only establishing new contacts and founding new centers, it is finding a new soul.”62

60 Golden, Thelma, Hamza Walker, and Studio Museum in Harlem. Freestyle. 14.

61 Taylor, Paul C. "Post-Black, Old Black," 627.

62 Locke. “The New Negro,” xxvii.

This new soul is expressed through a multitude of realities; viewed comprehensively, they become an expression of a metaculture, which, by definition, is comprised of a complex network of continual cultural exchanges. Paul Gilroy has described this phenomenon succinctly in his book, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. In this work, Gilroy argues against essentialist versions of racial identity and racial nationalism, and instead focuses on fostering an understanding of African American expressive culture through transnational and intercultural perspectives. According to Tanya Barson in her essay Modernism and The Black

Atlantic:

This does not impose an all-encompassing and totalizing homogeneity on what he calls ‘black Atlantic expressive culture,’ but rather proposes a subtle analysis that, instead of foregrounding difference, takes into account aspects of sameness that nevertheless surface in diverse and complex ways and in different contexts as ‘the changing same.’63

According to Gilroy, this ‘sameness’ is an indication and manifestation of the double consciousness or split-subjectivity of experience first designated by Du Bois in his manuscript,

The Soul of Black Folk64 and referenced by artist Jason Musson in his reflection on traversing the bridge between slang and jargon. It is the umbrella-term, the nomenclature of understanding and ocular space through which all African American art can be literally and metaphorically seen and seen through. At the same time, it remains a reflection and inflection of the artists’ self-division, which has been described by Fanon in his seminal work Black Skins, White Masks, as, “the direct result of colonialism.”65 Its effects are viewable in the corporeal works of David Hammons, such as his The Door (Admissions Office), 1969 or Carrie Mae Weems’s You Became a Scientific

63 Barson, Tanya, Peter Gorschlüter, and Petrine Archer Straw. Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic, 9.

64 Ibid, 10.

65 Fanon. Black Skin White Masks, 17.

Profile/An Anthropological Debate/A Negroid Type/ & A Photographic Subject, 1995 or Lorna

Simpson’s Guarded Conditions, 1989. These works all refer to the colonized body, whether through referencing its abuse, exclusion, and/or objectification. Through these works, the artists reveal their reactions to the current and past climate of racism, as they themselves remain the epigenetic progeny of past and current socio-cultural conditions. And in turning (back) an eye to the past, a look deeper into the morass is compelled; further into the soul — one that has been marked by the traumatic experiences of heir forbears; deep down to where ancestors carry more with them than just memories; all the way to the molecular structure, where, according to researchers in behavioral epigenetics, adhering to DNA there are scars from traumatic experiences in our past or in our recent ancestors’ past.66 In the book Citizen: An American Lyric,

Claudia Rankine poetically reflected this phenomenon when she wrote: “The world is wrong.

You can’t put the past behind you. It’s buried in you; it’s turned your flesh into its own cupboard. Not everything remembered is useful but it all comes from the world to be stored in you.”67 This understanding of African American artists sheds light on the ways in which they have routinely been cast as both marginal and hero — as saved and savior. It gets at the unique position of these artists, whose personhood is viewed as embedded within the work — for better or for worse. It is the frame through which it is seen and understood, an inescapable circumstance that both sanctions and precludes. It is a classification system that extends to its interpretation and invests not only in, “the grosser physical differences of color, hair and bone.”68

It is a reading of the visual as a text; a text in which we are readers of race; we are readers of

66 Hurley, “Grandma’s Experiences Leave a Mark on Your Genes.”According to the new insights of behavioral epigenetics, traumatic experiences in our past, or in our recent ancestors’ past, leave molecular scars adhering to our DNA. Therefore, our ancestors carry more with them than just memories.

67 Rankine. Citizen: An American Lyric. 63.

68 Du Bois, “The Conservation of Races the American Negro Academy,” 7.

social difference; we invoke the body as if it were a transcendental signifier.69 It is what Stuart

Hall was referring to when he stated, “They are the visible difference. They are beyond dispute. They appear in the field of vision where seeing is believing;”70 or in the related sentiment by Howard Winnant that, “Race is not only real, but also illusory. Not only is it common sense; it is common nonsense. Not only does it establish our identity; it also denies us our identity;”71 It is detectable even within our most American comedian Richard Pryor’s expletively expressed statement that, “We may not be literate, but we visual than a motherfucker.”72

In the next chapter, Change the Joke, Slip the Yoke: Mimicry, Humor and Re- appropriation I resume my discussion of the links between African American artworks past and present. I detail how the long-standing ‘change the joke, slip the yoke’ trope has been utilized within the African American community to challenge forces of oppression. I describe how

African American artists such as Hank Willis Thomas, David Hammons, Kerry James Marshall,

Carrie Mae Weems, Glenn Ligon and John Bankston have usurped racist imagery and set it to divergent ends. I explain how such works operate as challenges to histories of racism within

American culture. I explain how this seditious type of stratagem has been employed in various contexts within the Black community for decades.

69 Hall, “Race the Floating Signifier.”

70 Ibid.

71 Winnant. “Racial Dualism at Century’s End,” 90.

72 Pryor. “Live on Sunset Strip.”

CHAPTER 4 CHANGE THE JOKE, SLIP THE YOKE: MIMICRY, HUMOR AND RE-APPROPRIATION

Little axe cut down big tree.

—African American proverb1

Aboard a train to Mexico, Langston Hughes crossed over the Mississippi River and began to contemplate the significance of rivers throughout history. He wrote, “Then I began to think about other rivers in our past — the Congo, and the Niger, and the Nile in Africa — and the thought came to me ‘I’ve known rivers.’2 With this simple yet profound understanding of the interconnectedness of his experience, Hughes wrote what was to become one of his most celebrated poems.

I’ve known rivers ancient as the world

and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.

I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.3

This selection of Hughes’s The Negro Speaks of Rivers poem, written in 1920, conveys a sentiment that remains relevant today within the study of African American art and culture.

Through this poem, Hughes denies the way in which history has been constructed as linear, forward moving and singular. By equating the blood within human veins to the tributaries of rivers, Hughes recalls the notion of “roots” both physically and across history. His poem also supplants a single flow of time with Jetzeit, or what Walter Benjamin referred to as, “a past

1 Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom, 121.

2 Hughes. “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.”

3 Ibid.

charged with the time of the now.”4 For Benjamin, this understanding of time is detached from a continuum of history, which has been understood as chronological, progressive and a true reflection of the “the way it really was.”5 Instead, Jetzeit is charged with revolutionary possibility, poised, filled with energy, and positioned to take a “tiger's leap” into the past.6 Of this Benjamin wrote in his Theses on the Philosophy of History,

History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogenous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now [Jetzeit]. Thus, to Robespierre ancient Rome was a past charged with the time of the now which he blasted out of the continuum of history. The French Revolution viewed itself as Rome reincarnate. 7

For Benjamin, it is the intervention of the artist or revolutionary that produces this disruption by ‘blasting’ history free from the ceaseless flow in which it would otherwise be trapped. Hughes achieves this by making the break with the continuum of history his poem’s subject and in doing so, manifests Benjamin’s contention that one should, “stop telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary. Instead…grasp the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one.”8 The earlier constellation described by Hughes is an ancient one, and he thereby fuses Black life in Mississippi with that of his ancestors along the river Congo, Nile and Euphrates. Hughes accomplishes this through the written and voiced repetition of the simultaneously collective and deeply personal “I,” which signals the fraught history he and his people have both endured and inherited.

4 Benjamin. “On the Concept of History,” xiv and Mirzoeff. “Transculture: From Kongo to the Congo,” In An Introduction to Visual Culture, 129.

Mirzoeff makes comparison between Hughes’s poem The Negro Speaks of Rivers and the concepts presented in Benjamin’s Theses On the Concept of History.

5 Walter Benjamin. On the Concept of History, VI.

6 Ibid, IX.

7 Ibid, XIV.

8 Ibid, Addendum A.

The rivers he references have been the passageways on which the transportation of goods and people has been made possible; in the case of African Americans, they have been considered both. Hence, when The Negro Speaks of Rivers, it is a physical, spiritual, symbolic and metaphorical journey that is spoken of; one that defies temporal history as direct and one- directional and is instead made up of a confluence of watersheds that flow seamlessly between past and future events. In its watery depths we see the merger of history and memory, heritage and human existence. In its course, we hear the accumulated wisdom of the sage,9 and the voices of the many others who have taken (and been taken on) the journey before. It is a perspective that privileges historical context and reads the past events into the present and future ones. It is a view that challenges any uniform view of history and resolutely refutes the ‘homogeneous empty time’10 of the ruling class, or where the outlook of the victors perseveres.

Hughes’s act of writing exemplifies this, along with the way in which the conveyance of ideas is linked with autonomy, power and influence. His poem makes specific claims on cultural meaning and is thereby conceived of with political intent. He signals the other and othered stories beyond the mainstream context and puts pressure on deeply embedded historical narratives that have worked to delimit the connections African Americans have made with their past. This feature imbues Hughes’s real life-journey with added meaning and at the same time establishes his personal perspective on how the past should be remembered. In doing so, he successfully intervenes in the chronicling of American history by reading the Black experience into it; this ultimately presents as an oppositional and transgressive way of seeing and being. It is an objective that visual artists have sought to accomplish as well.

9 Oktenberg. “From the Bottom Up: Three Radicals of the Thirties." In A Gift of Tongues: Critical Challenges in Contemporary American Poetry, 83-111.

10 Benjamin. “On the Concept of History,” xiii.

‘Changing the Joke and Slipping the Yoke:’ The Art of Subversion

African American visual artists have recurrently made connections to their past through their work; at the same time, they have resisted the omission of their community’s significance from the national historical record. In doing so, they have expressed the subaltern realities of their experience and visually confronted the ideological distortions and physical violence of a racially stratified society. Remarkably, many artists have pursued such ends by employing the original visual language-codes associated with blackface minstrelsy and/or other racist propaganda. Their juxtaposition of an image, with an altered implication, has allowed them a means of exploring Black identity, history, racism and American popular culture. It is a long- standing oppositional strategy that Ralph Ellison would memorably name, “changing the joke and slipping the yoke.” 11

Artists have utilized this tactic of detournment in order to modify the ridicule their communities have been subjected to, so that it targets supporters of racial discrimination instead.

It is accomplished through a process by which an artist takes a freighted image or piece of archival material and revises it to tell an antithetical story. In doing so, they aim to empty racially divisive media of its charged content and expose its associated ideologies as denigrating fallacies. Furthermore, it makes obvious the ways in which race has been mistakenly deciphered as an indicator of certain timeless, eternal essences of individuals, but in reality merely denigrates people based on skin color and maintains stereotypes.

11 Ellison. “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke.” In this essay, Ellison discusses with his friend Stanley Edgar Hyman the relationship between African American literature and folklore. They discuss their differing interpretations and understanding of the trickster, in particular. Hyman understands Blackface minstrelsy as a performance of the trickster, Ellison argues that this interpretation is too one-dimensional, all “too kind,” and negates the humiliating reality of this form of entertainment’s existence. Ellison therefore, locates this “darky” character in the realm of white folklore.

In the 1957 essay Myth Today, Roland Barthes termed these unfounded ideologies the

“what goes without saying,”12 and described how these canards possess an illusion of being eternal and absolute. In presenting race as a fixed guarantee, societies actively construct ethnic hierarchies through notions of racial difference. As a result, we are tempted to use “Black” as a sufficient label for a whole host of characteristics that operate to reify a race-based classification system.13 According to Stuart Hall in his essay What is This “Black” in Black Popular Culture?,

The essentializing moment is weak because it naturalizes and dehistoricizes difference, mistaking what is historical and cultural for what is natural, biological, and genetic…we fix that signifier [of Blackness] outside of history, outside of change, outside of political intervention. 14

To an insidious extent, popular culture recurrently affirms and encourages these types of deep-seated prejudices and has persistently re-fashioned slave caricatures in the service of selling new products.15 Artist Hank Willis Thomas creates work that challenges such distortions, most notably in his advertisement-based series Unbranded: Reflections in Black of Corporate America

1968-2008.Through this series Thomas re-presents actual advertisements with their original product branding removed. This minor alteration however, has a significant outcome in that it makes overt the thinly veiled racism apparent in American popular culture. One of Thomas’s best-known pieces in the series, Smokin’ Joe Ain’t J’mama, depicts the late heavyweight boxing champion Joe Frasier from the chest up, seated at a beige-colored table (Hank Willis Thomas,

Smokin’ Joe Ain’t J’mama, From the series Unbranded, 1978-2006, 1978/2006, 31 x 29.5 inches, digital print). He is pictured wearing an evergreen sweater, an emasculating blue bonnet

12 Barthes. “Myth Today.” In Mythologies, 16.

13 Hall. “What is This “Black” in Black popular culture?” 104.

14 Ibid, 108.

15 Godstein. “Hank Willis Thomas on the Art of Talking about Race.”

and is poised, seated behind a plate stacked high with pancakes. A tall clear cylindrical glass of milk rests on the placemat near his left outstretched hand, while his other arm is upright with his right cheek resting on his relaxed closed fist. Syrup and a small white and blue porcelain bowl of oatmeal are set before him; his figure is spotlighted in what appears to be a pitch-black room.

The expression on his face is sweet, melancholic, direct and almost imploring. The original promotional image for Blue Bonnet margarine included text and was made to be humorous through its incongruous juxtaposition of a man known for his strength and the cap that he wears which conventionally women have worn. With the pretext of advertising removed however, an explicit image of a heavyweight champion transformed into a 19th century ‘mammy’ slave caricature is all that remains.

Because Thomas’s work pictorially references and yet conceptually disputes racially divisive advertisements, it has been understood as polemical; it calls attention to the way that marketing continually embeds and affirms creeds of racial difference and inferiority; it exposes how advertising communicates visually that Blacks are buffoonish and meriting of disrespect. Of this aspect Thomas stated, “Although race does not exist, we can’t see beyond it…I see advertising as a form of brainwashing, and I think about the ways in which it affects the way we see the world…it makes it easier for us to be trained into what we believe... I wanted to see, kind of, what's really for sale.”16 To this extent his series functions as an exposé on the racist patterns and practices of the advertising industry. In its entirety, his work can be understood as an ignoble snapshot: timeless in its recollection of the past and time specific in its depiction of our present- day struggle with an unsettled and possibly irreconcilable history.

16 Godstein. “Hank Willis Thomas on the Art of Talking About Race.”

David Hammons is an additional artist who has made work in response to popular culture’s representation of African American icons. His 2009 installation, Which Mike do you want to be like…? for instance, consists of three different types and vintages of freestanding microphones set at varying heights. Their respective cords are twirled on the floor or around their respective bases (David Hammons, David Hammons, Which Mike do you want to be like...?,

2001, electric microphones, metal stands, and electrical cords dimensions variable). As is with much of Hammons’s work, the title operates as a humor-inflected pun and alludes to matters beyond the literal subject presented. Michael Jackson, Michael Jordan, and Mike Tyson are personified by the tall overarching microphones, subsequently conveying the idea that their successes are out of reach for most. Furthermore, the mikes as Mikes imply that Black icons are dehumanized by the pop culture industry, which exploits and controls the way their talents are disseminated to the masses. According to John Yau in his article, Why David Hammons Might

Find It Necessary to Be Elusive and Difficult,

[The Mikes] aren’t presented as personalities, but as mikes, bodiless instruments used to amplify your voice... Another way is to see the piece as a cold commentary on a society that holds these figures up as role models, while also — most notably in the case of Jackson and Tyson — making fun of them. For an African American child growing up in America, are singing and dancing, playing basketball or boxing really the best options?...If an artist is the elite of the servant class, what’s a boxer, basketball player, or pop star?17

This work confronts such issues through Hammons’s selection and display: He chooses a visual symbol of the entertainment industry to stand in for Black individuals. In doing so, he signals how the media has governed the portrayal of Blacks. In positioning three microphones of varying heights as otherwise indistinguishable, Hammons calls attention to how our society essentializes Black figures and makes them interchangeable. These features ground the work as a

17 Yau. “Why David Hammons Might Find It Necessary to Be Elusive and Difficult.”

critique of race-based exploitation, a phenomenon inaugurated in the minstrel era, “when [a caricaturized fabrication of] Blackness first became widely popular in America.”18

Hammons’s reliance on language play in the titling of his works — from popular culture

(Orange Is the New Black) to racial epithets (Spade) — is an outcome of his broader interest in the sliding distinction between what is visible and invisible within society.19 His preoccupation with what it means to be seen/not seen is concomitant to his interest in power imbalances and the resultant ideological battles occurring within society today. He demonstrates this by presenting work that emphasizes an oppositional Black cultural identity through a discursive engagement with popular culture ephemera. He inhabits this insider/outsider position by acknowledging its centrality to his art-making practice. Of this aspect he stated,

Artists have allowed themselves to be boxed in by saying “Yes” all the time because they want to be seen, and they should be saying “No.” I do my street art mainly to keep rooted in “Who I am.” Because the only thing that’s really going on is in the street; that’s where something is really happening. It isn’t happening in these galleries…[And] the art becomes just one of the objects that’s in the path of your everyday existence. It’s what you move through, and it doesn’t have any seniority over anything else.20

Hammons embraces this outsider position and at the same time critiques social institutions that construct perceptions of difference and disproportionately channel resources, power, status and wealth outside of the reaches of the majority of the Black community. In confronting conventions of representation that uphold such disparities, artists such as Hammons and Thomas force viewers to become active readers, rather than passive consumers of mediated cultural imagery. They achieve such ends by calling attention to the latent biases that popular

18 Lhamon. Jump Jim Crow: Lost Plays, Lyrics, and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Popular Culture, vii.

19 Yau. “Why David Hammons Might Find It Necessary to Be Elusive and Difficult.”

20 Hammons. "Interview with David Hammons." Brown University.

culture actively creates, promotes and disseminates. This unveiling seeks to elevate the awareness of the viewer and compel a more attuned understanding of how popular culture conditions belief. In this way, their art works toward engendering racial equanimity and embodies Du Bois’s pronouncement that, “Thus all art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of Black folk to love and enjoy.”21

Mining the History of African American Representation: A Visual Reinterpretation of Enslaved Persons Pictured

The debate surrounding whether art should function as propaganda or favor more aesthetic goals has had particular resonance within the African American community. At various moments in history it has operated more or less as a vehicle for racial uplift or as a critical commentary on a racially stratified society. For better and for worse, this system of race-based inclusion and exclusion has also been the lens through which African American art and artists have been viewed. In seeking to destabilize this confined condition, several artists have created works to problematize the narratives concerning what physical racial differences purportedly signify. This has involved an examination of the discourses that surround race, such as the analysis of metaphors, anecdotes, stories and jokes concerning physical differences.

Like Thomas and Hammons, Carrie Mae Weems takes a discursive position toward cultural products that reinforce such beliefs and she therefore also mines the history of African-

American representation. Her work From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried is a foremost example. For this series, Weems included four daguerreotypes that were originally commissioned during the slave-era in 1850 by Louis Agassiz, to challenge ideologies of racial

21 Du Bois. “Criteria of Negro Art,” The Crisis, Paragraph 29.

inferiority (Carrie Mae Weems, From Here I saw What Happened and I Cried, 1995-96,

Chromogenic color prints with sand-blasted text on glass, 29 works toned prints, various sizes).

Aggasiz was one of the best-known scientists in 19th century America and is significant to the history of slavery in that he is responsible for developing a theory of separate creation — that there are various types of species (as opposed to races) of man. The daguerrotypes he commissioned in 1850 consisted of fifteen images, which show the front and side views of seven enslaved people from the Taylor plantation in Columbia, North Carolina. The images were created to exhibit the physical differences between European whites and African Blacks to

“prove” the superiority of the white race.22

Aggasiz claimed that the various species of mankind were, “well marked and distinct,” and did not originate from a, “common center…. nor a common pair.”23 This theory ignited a firestorm of controversy among the conservative clergy at the time, and Agassiz was compelled to stress that his view of creation did not contradict the biblical notion of a unified origin.24 To defend his claim, Agassiz argued that the Biblical story of creation only referred to the Caucasian inhabitants of the earth. According to him, all other “species” of man had evolved in “unique” ways.25 While Agassiz tried to divorce himself from the political implications of his theory, his views directly championed the widespread view that Blacks were inferior, sub-human and meant to be enslaved.

22 Wallis. “Black Bodies, White Science: Louis Aggasiz’s Slave Daguerreotypes,” 40.

23 Aggasiz quoted in Reichlin, “Faces of Slavery: A Historical Find,” 4 and Wallis. “Black Bodies, White Science: Louis Aggasiz’s Slave Daguerreotypes,” 44.

24 Wallis. “Black Bodies, White Science: Louis Aggasiz’s Slave Daguerreotypes,” 44.

25 Aggasiz. “The Diversity of Origin of the Human Races,” 113 and Wallis. “Black Bodies, White Science: Louis Aggasiz’s Slave Daguerreotypes,” 44.

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Aggasiz recorded the first names of the pictured enslaved persons, along with some kinship information, but outside of that, no further information regarding them is known. They were photographed through a type of scopic aggression and dehumanizing “scientific” uniformity that reflects the utter lack of autonomy that the enslaved held over their own bodies or general existence. These daguerreotypes are part of only a small collection of surviving images of enslaved people since they were infrequently documented through the photographic image.

Brian Wallis remarked on the historical visual exclusion of them in his essay, Black Bodies,

White Science when he stated, “'Few slaves, however, had the luxury of projecting any look at all. That slaves were denied individual identity in the antebellum South is merely underscored by the near-total absence of photographs depicting them.”26

Aggasiz’s daguerreotypes of enslaved persons have been consistently described as captivating, disturbing and revealing, but most of all they raise compelling questions about the construction of, and social investments in, categories of “race,” “science,” “photography” and exhibit.27 He proposed theories (and commissioned imagery) in support of race as a theoretically viable system of scientific human classification and because of photography’s purported technological objectivity, it was utilized to document “factual” racial difference. Rather than recording the existence of race however, photography in many ways actually helped choreograph and construct the concept of race and racial distinctions. This is significant in the sense that no other means of representation has been used more thoroughly to describe and formulate the

American self, and yet issues of race have also largely circumscribed and defined identity and access to full citizenship.

26 Wallis. “Black Bodies, White Science: Louis Aggasiz’s Slave Daguerreotypes,” 56.

27 Ibid, 40.

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With such issues in mind, Weems co-opted and altered four of Aggasiz’s images for her

From Here I saw What Happened and I Cried series. Each of the four images appropriated from

Aggasiz features an enslaved man or woman nude from the chest up. The first is of a woman in profile. Her hair is shorn, her eyes are downcast and her expression is forlorn and dejected. The next two images feature men, the first older, the second younger. Both individuals are positioned frontally and stare directly out at the viewer; the inconceivable strife of their lives has worn deep creases into their faces. Both men are sinewy and muscular. The older gentleman exhibits a serious and distant expression; the younger man is taller, his eyes more sad, imploring and deep.

The last of the four images Weems appropriated from Aggasiz features a young woman facing forward; her eyes stare outward, her mouth is pursed and her expression is curious yet desolate.

Weems combined this quartet of Aggasiz-commissioned images with twenty-three other pictures. She appropriated one of Josephine Baker for instance, and another of an enslaved man’s whip-scarred back. Weems enlarged twenty-seven of these images made for Aggassiz and others, tinted them an evocative red, matted them to obscure certain aspects of the original imagery and framed each as if an original portrait of the pictured individual(s). Bracketing the series are also two identical blue toned enlarged profile images, from the chest up, of a Nubian woman. The woman wears a necklace but is otherwise nude; she is pictured wearing an elaborate hairstyle and a status-denoting headpiece. Each of the two identical portraits is a mirror-image bookending the start and finish of Weems’s series.

Weems further augmented the set of re-appropriated images by etching narrative text on the glass that was placed over them. The composed script runs across the entire sequence and directly signals the humanity of the pictured subjects and the historical context that the images recall and reflect. Across the middle region of the series a continuous narrative is revealed; when

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read uninterruptedly the sequence states: FROM HERE I SAW WHAT HAPPENED—YOU

BECAME A SCIENTIFIC PROFILE — A NEGROID TYPE —AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL

DEBATE — & PHOTOGRAPHIC SUBJECT — YOU BECAME MAMMIE, MAMA &

THEN, YES CONFIDANT - HA — DESCENDING THE THRONE YOU BECAME FOOT

SOLDIER & COOK— YOU BECAME UNCLE TOM JOHN & CLEMENS’ JIM — DRIVERS

— RIDERS & MEN OF LETTERS— YOU BECAME A WHISPER A SYMBOL OF A

MIGHTY VOYAGE & BY THE SWEAT OF YOUR BROW YOU LABOURED FOR SELF

FAMILY & OTHERS — FOR YOUR NAMES YOU TOOK HOPE & HUMBLE — BLACK

AND TANNED YOUR WHIPPED WIND OF CHANGE HOWLED LOW BLOWING ITSELF

- HA – SMACK INTO THE MIDDLE OF ELLINGTON’S ORCHESTRA BILLIE HEARD IT

TOO & CRIED STRANGE FRUIT TEARS —BORN WITH A VEIL YOU BECAME ROOT

WORKER JUJU MAMA VOODOO QUEEN HOODOO DOCTOR — SOME SAID YOU

WERE THE SPITTING IMAGE OF EVIL —YOU BECAME PLAYMATE TO THE

PATRIARCH — AND THEIR DAUGHTER —YOU BECAME AN ACCOMPLICE —(music notes for song cover this portrait) —OUT OF DEEP RIVERS MIXED-MATCHED

MULATTOS A VARIETY OF TYPES MIND YOU - HA SPRANG UP EVERYWHERE —

YOUR RESISTANCE WAS FOUND IN THE FOOD YOU PLACED ON THE MASTER’S

TABLE - HA —YOU BECAME THE JOKER’S JOKE &— ANYTHING BUT WHAT YOU

WERE - HA —SOME LAUGHED LONG & HARD & LOUD — OTHERS SAID “ONLY

THING A NIGGAH COULD DO WAS SHINE MY SHOES” — YOU BECAME BOOTS,

SPADES & COONS — RESTLESS AFTER THE LONGEST WINTER YOU MARCHED &

MARCHED & MARCHED — IN YOUR SING SONG PRAYER YOU ASKED DIDN’T MY

LORD DELIVER DANIEL? — AND I CRIED.28

28 I have used the em-dash to indicate and separate the beginning and end of the text overlaid on each image. These

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According to Weems, each image with transcribed text is made to stand alone, but cumulatively they convey a complex story of oppression and human subjugation, grief, loss and remembrance. Each image reflects something of the text written across it and of the history that they collectively signal. Through the repurposing, reproduction and re-contextualization of these photographic relics, Weems disrupts the stories created about what physical differences mean. In doing so, she not only alters the meaning of these (mis)representations, but also transformed the cold, distant objectivity of Aggasiz’s pseudoscientific documentation specifically, into provocative portraits of individuals, abused and exploited through the slave-based system. In other words, she slipped the yoke.

Weems additionally incorporated derisive humor in this series. She signaled how enslaved persons rebelled against their oppression and exploitation; she conveys how enslaved people were also the subject and object of the white gaze and laugh.29 To expand, a heavier-set black woman wearing a handkerchief on her head is featured in the series. With an up-turned chin and side-glancing eyes, the woman communicates strength, skepticism and defiance. Over the central region of the portrait Weems had etched: “YOU BECAME MAMMIE, MAMA &

THEN, YES CONFIDANT – HA.” The progression of the terms mammy to mama indicate the way in which distance was maintained between enslaved people and slave owners through debasing identifiers such as “mammy.” In practice though, the relationship between such persons often progressed toward familial terms such as “mama” within the intimate environment of the family household. Weems’s inclusion of the words “confidant” and “HA” however, signals the paradox of such an absurd equation; one whereby the enslaver exploited and oppressed an

em-dashes are not included in Weems’s From Here I saw What Happened and I Cried series.

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individual that had become akin to his or her own mother, the mother to one’s own children and finally as a confidant to thy self and or family members. It is a bitter and ironic laugh that

Weems enlists. It is expressed at the enslaver’s expense, for the rapport of confidant flowed in one direction and one direction only.

This “HA” is repeated on other images including one of a white family with an elder enslaved-woman pictured. While the family-members are dressed in clothing suggestive of status, the enslaved woman wears a dress, apron and handkerchief on her head, indicative of her position as a domestic unpaid servant within the household. Over the central region of the image it reads: “YOUR RESISTANCE WAS FOUND IN THE FOOD YOU PLACED ON THE

MASTER’S TABLE – HA.” Again, the laugh Weems employs is directed at the master-class and indicates the subversive lengths to which enslaved people went to free themselves psychologically and momentarily from the exploitative circumstances that defined their daily existence, HA!

While Weems’s inclusion of such sentiments was based on the humor reflected in the lived experiences of enslaved people, Weems also indicates the ways in which Blacks became the subjects and objects of racist humor within normative white American popular culture. To express this, Weems appropriated a disparaging minstrel-inflected image of two black men that was originally made for the entertainment of a white audience. To the men’s left shoulder, the mocking smile of a white woman peaks out from beneath the circular mat that Weems has overlaid on it. On etched glass it reads, YOU BECAME THE JOKER’S JOKE &. The subsequent image in the series completes the sentence and reads — ANYTHING BUT WHAT

YOU WERE – HA.” This follow-up image depicts a presumably black male’s limp penis revealed beyond the confines of his trousers. This ensuing image suggests the ways in which the

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black body has been sexualized and objectified; specifically how whites have projected and constructed various fantasies regarding black male masculinity. The humor and laugh enlisted however is more forced and tragicomic, but ultimately triumphant; it expresses that white racism is not based in truth or indicative of anything present within black humanity. It redirects the gaze back onto the white community and indicts the inhumanity of racism perpetuated also today. In this sense, Weems, effectively changed the joke and slipped the yoke.

As a sequence, the portraits function like a slide show created to convey an account of the past that re-humanizes those pictured and gives an unflinching view of slavery, segregation and racism; importantly, it disputes any account that has sought to romanticize or downplay the barbarism entailed in such a system. Moreover, in employing the pronoun “YOU” in the text portion, Weems blurred the distinction between past and present, victim and victimizer, spectator and beheld. With this inclusion, the subjects are reconstituted as individuals rather than as ‘types’ and the pictured subjects are, above all else, memorialized for their humanity and harrowing experiences. Foremost, Weems’s project aims to provoke an empathic reaction in the observer and thus reveals the ways in which it is the viewer (as opposed to the maker) that determines the definitive meaning of an image. This mutually inclusive circumstance reveals how Weems’s project evokes, embodies and illustrates Marcel Duchamp’s statement that it is ultimately “the viewer [that] completes the work of art.” 30 Further, her work demonstrates how the creators of an image (and the societal conditions out of which it arose) are forever implicated within the frame of it. Of this aspect of the series Yxta Maya Murray in here essay “From Here I saw What

Happened and I Cried: Carrie Mae Weems’ Challenge to the Harvard Archive,” wrote:

In Weems’ hands, these works bear witness to how these crimes actually happened. In so doing, they elicit an immense catharsis from the viewer. This

30 Rush. New Media in Art, 15.

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emotional response encourages a view that the present moment remains haunted by those past crimes.

Humor and Cognitive Dissonance: The Racist Joke and its Irreconcilable Implications

While her series From Here I saw What Happened and I Cried focuses on the early pseudoscientific underpinnings of racial categorization, her series Ain’t Jokin calls attention to the cultural consequences that such a belief system created and maintains. Specifically Weems targets the casual appeal and denigrating outcome that contemporary racist humor has had. She does so by interweaving the text of racist jokes, rhymes, sentiments and sayings with the thoughtful portraiture of Black individuals. Of this aspect of her work she stated,

For me the vast majority of the Ain't Jokin series is constructed in that way, so there will always be a third kind of tension between what you see within the photograph and what you see beneath it, with the text always cutting through. Hopefully, then, for the viewer, there would be a curious pull between what you see and the way this subject has been flipped and undermined by the power of humor, of the racist joke.31

This inconsistency between text and image is designed to cause a cognitive dissonance and discomfort in the viewer. The irreconcilable differences compel the observer to make a choice: to believe what they’re seeing in the pictorial aspect of the works (i.e. in the humanity of

Black folk), or in the text underneath that effectively subjugates and denies the pictured subjects’ personhood. By arranging these contradictory views within a single frame, Weems aims to subvert the everyday narratives regarding the significance and categorical function of race. In this way she renders the language of racism dysfunctional and visually illustrates Ferdinand de

Saussure’s assertion that signs (such as race) are arbitrary, circumstantial, and based foremost on convention, rather than inherent nature or fact.

31 hooks. “Talking Art with Carrie Mae Weems” In Art on my mind: visual politics, 82-83.

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Her image from the series titled Mirror, Mirror operates under such valences. It is composed of a self-portrait of the artist, holding a mirror to her face, with her back toward the viewer, eyes downcast. Reflected in the mirror is an image of a light-skinned racially ambiguous, apathetic-looking evil queen-like figure, holding a silvered star. Beneath the photograph it reads: LOOKING INTO THE MIRROR, THE BLACK WOMAN ASKED,

"MIRROR, MIRROR ON THE WALL, WHO'S THE FINEST OF THEM ALL? "THE

MIRROR SAYS, "SNOW WHITE, YOU BLACK BITCH, AND DON'T YOU FORGET IT!!!"

Taking obvious inspiration from the fairytale of Snow White, this picture underscores the way that culture conditions perspective and signals the daily racist undertones ubiquitous in contemporary society. Weems’s photograph aims to subvert such narratives by emphasizing how such stories actively construct notions of goodness and beauty, or more specifically, how contemporary society is conditioned to view Blackness as undesirable. These sentiments are undoubtedly consequences of the legacy of slavery, gender oppression, and colonialism.32 Of this aspect Susan M. Wood wrote,

[Weems] uses these devices as tools of resistance against [the] powerful and enduring spectatorial practices, thereby participating in a longstanding tradition of African American mimicry, humor, and re-appropriation as a means of asserting personal dignity and collective identity.33

Weems accomplishes this objective by constructing a photograph of herself as a precluded Black woman. In doing so she subverts the recounted racist joke and its associated stereotype’s claims to truth and authority. Moreover, she signals the psychosocial trauma of being devalued as a Black woman in a racially stratified society. This is made evident through

32 Wood. Seeing Into the Mirror: The Reality of Fiction in the Work of Carrie Mae Weems, 20.

33 Ibid, 3-4

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the disparaging remarks of the evil queen-like figure, which are aimed at the artist herself, and the Black community at large. This mirror-reflected aspect of the work calls attention to the

Black community’s internalization of the denigrating ‘white gaze.’

The white gaze idea is a theme that is repeated in the text portion of an additional image in the Aint’ Jokin series. Beneath a picture of a small Black child gazing quizzically outward toward the viewer it reads: WHEN ASKED WHAT HE WANTS TO BE WHEN HE GROWS

UP, THE BLACK BOY SAYS,"I WANT TO BE A WHITE MAN CAUSE MY MAMA SAY,

'A NIGGER AIN'T SHIT.'" This reoccurring premise of ‘airing house business’ causes the series to function concurrently as a critique of white racist bigotry and as a successful intervention into

Black subjectivity and self-articulation. In this way Weems accomplishes a two-pronged critique and puts forth what Du Bois described in his Criteria for Negro Art when he wrote,

If a colored man wants to publish a book, he has got to get a white publisher and a white newspaper to say it is great; and then you and I say so. We must come to the place where the work of art when it appears is reviewed and acclaimed by our own free and unfettered judgment. And we are going to have a real and valuable and eternal judgment only as we make ourselves free of mind, proud of body and just of soul to all men.34

Glenn Ligon is an additional artist whose work targets racist forms of humor and the ways they operate seditiously within society. Like Weems, much of Ligon’s art relies on language and text, but he accomplishes his subversion of racist humor through a more concept- centered approach. Ligon has taken much inspiration from the standup comedy of Richard Pryor.

He appropriates selections of Pryor’s routines and stencils them onto canvases in order to call attention to the long history of racial typecasting in America. In his work Cocaine (Pimps) and

Mudbone (Liar) 1993 for example, Ligon deliberately chose jokes from Pryor’s comedy performances that play on the image of the Black man as well-endowed and preoccupied with his

34 Du Bois. “Criteria of Negro Art.” The Crisis, Paragraph 35.

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own sexual power (Glenn Ligon, Cocaine (Pimps), 1993, 32.1875 × 32 × 1.5 inches, Oil stick, synthetic polymer and graphite pencil on linen) (Glenn Ligon, Mudbone (Liar), 1993, 32 x 32 inches, Oil stick, acrylic and graphite pencil on linen). These jokes are re-presented by Ligon in the exact word-for-word vernacular style as they were originally performed; when stenciled onto canvases though, the words’ blithe humor is transformed into wretched pathos. On a bright red background, in searing orange typewriter face the Cocaine (Pimps) canvas bluntly reads:

Niggers be holding them dicks too…

White people go “Why you guys hold your things?”

Say “You done took everything else motherfucker.”

In their original context, Pryor’s jokes were meant to be heard rather than read, and listened to rather than looked at.35 Put to canvas and exhibited within the contemplative space of the museum, they take on new and added meanings and force viewers to face the underlying rage that such jokes reference and subsume. According to Richard Meyer in his essay Borrowed

Voices: Glenn Ligon and the Force of Language,

Resituated as text paintings, the jokes become dissociated from Pryor's voice and linked instead to the viewer’s. It is the viewer who must now read this script, who must mouth, however silently, these words. In rewriting Pryor's jokes as text paintings, Ligon forces us to consider the vehemence of their stereotypes, the rage barely veiled beneath their humor, and the power of their obscenity in the face of a dominant (white) culture that simultaneously desires and dehumanizes Black manhood.36

Ligon’s paintings therefore are not solely distressing because of their controversial content but because they induce the viewer to participate in the racist joke Pryor was signifying on through their viewing/reading of them. He employs Pryor’s brand of humor to signal the scourge of race relations in America; he intentionally makes viewers exert themselves in

35 Meyer. “Borrowed Voices: Glenn Ligon and the Force of Language.” In Glenn Ligon: un/becoming, 19.

36 Ibid, 19.

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deciphering the typescript's meaning. Ligon does so in Cocaine (Pimps) by smearing and smudging the sizzling-colored text and by placing the bright colored words on a jarringly hued background. Through this mode, the words take on a vibrating effect, which visually echoes and emphasizes the searing potency of the bigotry that they signal. Of this, Ligon stated, “The Pryor paintings allowed me to deal with formal issues like color, but they also allowed me to engage in a deep critique on American society, a critique that in some ways can only be said with humor.”37

This conceptual chromatic technique is viewable in Ligon’s other Pryor-based works as well. In his work, When Black Wasn’t Beautiful #1 from 2003, the electric blue colored canvas includes baby blue transitioning to red pulsating text. In the same smudged typewriter case as

Cocaine (Pimps) it reads:

was being cool. I remember it wasn’t back in those days cause Black wasn’t beautiful yet. Remember? You couldn’t even say Black. You call a dude Black: I don’t play that. Don’t call me Black. I remember when Black wasn’t beautiful. Black guy come through the neighborhood saying “Black is beautiful! Africa is your home! Be proud to be Black!” My parents go “That nigger crazy.”

Interestingly, Ligon uses the light color blue at the start of the ‘joke,’ as if echoing visually through color the words, “was being cool.” He transitions the color blue to a searing shade of red though beginning with the sentence, “I remember when black wasn’t beautiful,” and follows through with the red text through the quips tragicomic end: “My parents go ‘That nigger crazy.’” Like Weems’s Mirror, Mirror photograph, this work thus calls attention to the way that

Blackness has been viewed as a detrimental trait, even within the confines of the Black

37 Koerner von Gustorf. ““The art world is not a utopian free space…” Glenn Ligon’s AMERICA.” Artmag.

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community. By visually reproducing a joke regarding the initial rejection amongst Blacks of racial-uplift ideas, Ligon transforms Pryor’ humorous anecdote into a poignant reflection on the vulnerability and contingency of living as a non-white person in America. He transmutes Pryor’s self-protectionist humor into laid-bare anguish, conveying visually and tragically James

Baldwin’s reflection that “You know, it’s not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself.”38

Speaking Truth to Power: The Lynching Image, Pictures Do Not Lie.

While each of the abovementioned contemporary artists have utilized the ‘change the joke slip the yoke’ scheme to challenge racist ideologies, this subversive tactic has numerous precedents within African-American history and discourse. To “speak truth to power,” countless dissident actions have been undertaken to condemn the dominant class and the conditions of inequality that they perpetuate. Early visual examples include John Walker’s commissioned- image of the branding forcibly made to his palm in the 19th century, for his attempt at liberating enslaved people. Walker was imprisoned, fined and branded with the letters “SS,” marking him as a slave stealer.39 He however celebrated this physical consequence by commissioning and disseminating a photograph of it. This caused his branding to be re-interpreted as “slave savior,” which challenged his dismissal from law-abiding ethical public citizenry. The picture also effectually memorialized, in perpetuity, the inhumane injustice levied against him and the enslaved-community at large.

38 Baldwin and Giovanni. A Dialogue, 17.

39 Azoulay. The Civil Contract of Photography, 20.

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Created during the Jim Crow era, lynching images have also been used to similar ends and they too occupy a crucial place within the visual culture of Black existence in America. Like

Agassiz’s daguerreotypes of enslaved people, they were originally created with a type of scopic aggression meant to malign the Black populace and to thwart any possibility of sympathetic identification between the viewer and the victim. The lynching images were disseminated like tourist’s keepsakes that attested to one’s presence at the murderous event. Many lynchings were publicized in advance by local newspapers, supported by railroads that ran special excursion trips to the event and promoted by schools that let out for the day to allow people to attend en masse.40

These murderous celebrations regularly concluded with a display of the body and dismembered parts and a frenzied post-mortem souvenir gathering.41

Through the duplication of the lynching souvenir cards, the threat of lynching and its assertion of white power reached far and wide. The photographs were sent to prominent African

Americans as a warning that they should “stay in their place” and the bodies of the victims were occasionally brought to Black neighborhoods as an admonition and to terrorize.42 Foremost, it conveyed to African Americans that whites control the law and it demonstrated that Blacks could not depend on the legal system for protection. According to Dora Apel in her essay, Lynching

Photographs and the Politics of Public Shaming, the lynching event was meant to “disseminate, heighten, and legitimate the rhetorical power of the white supremacist racial narrative that held

Blacks to be different in kind from and inferior to whites.”43

40 Apel. “Lynching Photographs and the Politics of Public Shaming.” In Lynching photographs, 44.

Between 1880 and 1930, there were 4,697 reported lynchings, but the actual number is most surely higher.

41 Ibid, 44.

42 Smith. “The Evidence of Lynching Photographs.” In Lynching photographs, 24.

43Apel. “Lynching Photographs and the Politics of Public Shaming.” In Lynching photographs, 44.

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Although lynching has always been illegal, its perpetrators have unilaterally gone unpunished.44 As lynching photographs such as this make clear, white mobs have understood and even flaunted their knowledge of this phenomenon of illegal protection.45 An example of this can be seen in the lynching image taken by Lawrence Beitler in August of 1930. Beitler’s image presents two young African American men hanging by ropes from a large maple tree. The victims’ clothing is tattered and bloodstained and their faces are marred and gashed. Below their hanging bodies stand a crowd of white men and women. Some acknowledge the bodies above while others smoke and stand in conversation. A young woman looks directly at the camera and thereby the viewer, while a middle-aged man aggressively points with his left arm at the hanging victim on the right.

Yet while the lynching images were successful to the degree that they intimidated and provoked fear in the Black community, these ghastly images were also (re)appropriated by

African Americans as evidence of white oppression and racial violence. This is viewable in Ida

B. Wells anti-lynching books as well as in Crisis, the official magazine of the NAACP. In these civil-rights contexts, the lynching and the attendant images were utilized to fight against such horrific, racially motivated acts. The original photographs no longer functioned as weapons of fear and intimidation. They instead were re-purposed as rallying images for civil rights and provided evidence of murderous race-based crime. 46 Shawn Michelle Smith in her essay The

Evidence of Lynching Photographs noted that in the Chicago Defender, a lynching image was run under the title “American Christianity… Pictures do not lie.” The article stated,

44 Smith. “The Evidence of Lynching Photographs.” In Lynching photographs, 16.

45 Ibid, 16.

46 Smith. “The Evidence of Lynching Photographs.” In Lynching photographs, 24.

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Although members of the mob… couldn’t be identified according to police, here is a picture which shows plainly any number of guilty persons…..Christian America must know that all the world points with scorn at a country that spends millions to Christianize other countries while at home barbarians hold their lynching picnic at regular intervals…47

The Defender also went on to suggest that just as the man in Beitler’s lynching photograph points at his victims, so too will the world point at that man and those party to this murderous crime.48 Therefore if the pointing man’s gesture originally invited viewers to read the image as a lesson to the lynched, The Defender inverts the lesson to those individuals pictured, beneath the hanging bodies.49 The picture became evidence not of vengeance, but of brutal murder and the entertainment value of the original image becomes a yoke implicating all who are pictured beneath the victims. 50

This same image of Beitler’s was also reprinted in the October 1930 issue of the Crisis magazine with the caption “Civilization in the United States, 1930: The lynching of Tom Shipp and Abe Smith at Marion, Indiana, August 7, by part or parties unknown.”51 Like the Defender,

Crisis refuted the lie that the perpetrators could not be identified (since there they stood in photographic display). Through reproduction of the image, Crisis also demonstrated that corrupt law enforcers had refused to prosecute their ‘own’ and they reconfigured the image as proof of the lawless privilege of the white community.52

47 Chicago Defender. “Indiana Mob Murders Two; Police Aid K.K.K Hoodlums.” Aug. 16, 1930. P.1, col. 1. Also recounted in Smith, Shawn Michelle. “The Evidence of Lynching Photographs.” In Lynching photographs, 20.

48 Ibid, 20.

49 Ibid, 20.

50 Ibid, 20.

51 Ibid, 20.

52 Ibid, 20.

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Hence, while lynching images were originally created from the murderer’s point of view, society’s understanding of the imagery has obviously changed over time. Ever dependent on who is viewing the photographs and to what ends, the meaning is therefore not only governed by the maker, but also by the viewer. Jaqueline Jones commented on the contingency of this same lynching image in her essay titled “How Come Nobody Told Me,” when she stated,

In each context, the message seemed to be different, the faces in the crowd changed: at times, they were laughing; at others, they took on demonic proportions. At a reluctantly desegregated high school, the photograph was inflicted on us by a white teacher, like a subliminal lashing. At a Black college, it was trotted out, like a Nazi war crime…But in each case, it devastated, because it made concrete in one moment the brutal history, the living legacy of human bondage and racial tyranny that Americans, both Black and white, would prefer to forget.53

This Beitler image to which Jones refers was re-purposed by Crisis and The Defender to expose the barbarity of lynching; it was later re-appropriated by artist Kerry James Marshall in his work Heirlooms and Accessories and re-deployed to ends not intended by its original maker.

Marshall enlarged and manipulated Beitler’s photo, replicated it three times and exhibited it in a triumvirate sequence like that of a triptych. The focus was transformed by Marshall so that it would be on the faces of three white women who were in the crowd and thus complicit in the murderous act. The background of the lynching-scene is bleached out, with the exception of a different woman’s face, on each of the three prints. This whitened effect is perhaps meant to signal the race of the crowd and also the surreal, blinding camera flash at the moment the picture was taken. A vintage locket frames each of the selected women’s faces to create a portrait of three generations of women. A gold necklace coils up from each portrait-locket and it connects, overlaps or encircles one of the two bodies of the lynched victims. The centrally featured

53 Jones. “How Come Nobody Told Me…” In Picturing Us: African American Identity in Photography, 156-157.

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necklace is arranged pictorially to align with the rope of the noose wrapped around one of the two men’s necks.

Because jewelry is both an accessory and an heirloom, it is something passed on to future generations. The term accessory also suggests that these women were an accessory to a crime and that is the legacy left to their children.54 Shawn Michelle Smith discussed this implication in her essay, “The Evidence of Lynching Photographs.” Of Marshall’s triptych she wrote that it

“encourages us to ask what else might be passed down with material wealth, with necklaces and lockets? As a young woman puts the necklace that is Marshall’s symbolic noose around her own neck, is it not haunted? Does it not become a noose for her?”55 As such, Marshall’s work highlights the role of white women in the lynch mob and compels the viewer to question the role of white womanhood in the lynching ritual.56 Marshall reveals how lynching in particular and racism in general is the inheritance left to future generations. In this sense, Heirlooms and

Accessories pictorially, emblematically and literally changes the joke (in this case the original entertainment-value of the lynching spectacle pictured and disseminated through Beitler’s image), into a yoke around the necks of those implicated through their participation, memorialization and or denial of such an overtly gruesome, ghastly and racist scene.

Black Artists and the Restrictive Frame

To the same extent that Black citizens have brought attention to the historic and present- day oppression of their communities, Black artists have sought equal footing within the global art-world context. Their works have never consistently been portrayed or exhibited beyond

54. Kerry James Marshall makes these claims about the interpretation and meaning of his work as cited also in Smith “The Evidence of Lynching Photographs.” In Lynching photographs, 29.

55 Ibid.

56 Ibid.

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frames of difference and the artists (and by extension their works) have therefore, repeatedly been constructed as existing outside of the normativities of contemporary practice. Du Bois conjectured that equality might be attained if works by African American artists were held in the same esteem as their non-Black counterparts when he stated,

Just as soon as true art emerges; just as soon as the Black artist appears, someone touches the race on the shoulder and says, "He did that because he was an American, not because he was a Negro; he was born here; he was trained here; he is not a Negro -— what is a Negro anyhow? He is just human; it is the kind of thing you ought to expect.”57

Du Bois believed that the recognition of Blacks as artists is concomitant to their recognition as human beings. Contrariwise, to put limits on Black artists’ power to self-articulate is to adversely affect the discourse on their work. In an essay titled Afro-Modernism, Robert F.

Thompson similarly described this confined condition along with the ways in which Black and

Modernist cultures have been entirely inseparable. He maintained that African American expressive culture is “deeply and creatively embedded in contemporary culture”58 and contended that it should not be relegated to the margins of history. A similar sentiment has been echoed by

Mary Ann Calo in her book Distinction and Denial where she wrote, “Critics writing for mass media publications consistently underscored the separateness of “Negro Art” from the overarching category “American Art”…and there emerged a set of critical ideas rooted in the discourse of racial difference that functioned to isolate Black artistic production from mainstream cultural practice.”59

57 Du Bois. “Criteria of Negro Art.” The Crisis.

58 Thompson. “Afro-Modernism,” 94.

59 Calo. Distinction and Denial: Race, Nation, and the Critical Construction of the African American Artist, 1920- 40, vii.

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The Harlem Studio Museum kept pace with this argument when it opened the show

Freestyle in 2001. As the name connotes, this exhibit was not meant to thematize the work that was included within it. Instead, the show incorporated works that operated within a myriad of valences that include but are not limited to: history, identity, feminism, popular culture and notions of Blackness. John Bankston’s artwork was exhibited there and operates within several of these themes. He creates work that combine elements of 19th century slave narratives, Igbo masquerade, humor, homoerotic fantasy, fairy tales and science fiction.60 In his work The Letter for example, Bankston created a genre-landscape whereby a phantom of the past on the left (as indicated by the black and white portion of the canvas), meets two fantastic, hyper-color costumed characters on the right. The young plain-clothed Black male looks to be posturing an affect of deference; the style he is painted in recalls woodblock prints created during the slave- era. The central imaginative character wears a light blue shirt and shoes, purple pants, a canine mask and is depicted in profile, smiling a sharp toothy grin. A single green glove, positioned on a rod and placed in an orange-hued pitcher, separates the two individuals and signals the bare hand of the canine character, un-tinted and as white as can be. At the canine masquerader’s back, a pink bunny-costumed brown-skinned individual stands, left hand lifted in a partway-up gesture.

The symbolism of the scene is ambiguous, the sentiment it evokes a puzzle: are we to interpret it as a children’s tale of costume-games in a forest? Have the characters met at a fantastical location, where two disparate worlds collide in such imaginings? Is this work referencing a historically and/or culturally contextualized narrative as well?

The garishly costumed individuals do correspond to the most well known animal characters in African American folklore. The white-skinned canine of Bankston’s image

60 Golden, Kim, Walker and Sirmans. Freestyle, 23.

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comports a wicked disposition like that of Brer Fox; the presumable Brer Rabbit trickster however seems bereft of any outwardly apparent guile. This inconsistency produces a visual reading whereby the dichotomies between good and evil and protagonist and antagonist collapse.

In this way Bankston himself becomes the trickster, compelling the subsequent question, “where exactly is this bespoken Letter after all?” For curator Thelma Goldin, this quality is indicative of the contemporary moment of African American art. She states, “Like the generation before,

[these artists] resist narrow definition…[which] speaks to individual freedom that is the result of the transitional moment… in the evolution of African American art and ultimately to ongoing redefinition of Blackness in contemporary culture.”61

Recuperative and Redemptive Memory in African American Art

Blackness in contemporary culture is an ever-evolving phenomenon as reflected in the work of Hank Willis Thomas, David Hammons, Kerry James Marshall, Carrie Mae Weems,

Glenn Ligon and John Bankston. Each of these artists creates works to compel a new consciousness inclusive and reflective of the Black experience in the US. By creating works that imaginatively transport viewers to a place where the present is affected by the past, but not wholly beholden to it, each artist connects their work to a long-standing tradition of recuperative and redemptive memory ever-present within the African American tradition. These artists accomplish this through disparate projects, but with related aims.

The practice of merging the past with the present for example, has been a central feature of Thomas’s, Weems’s and Marshall’s artwork. They each purposefully create works through the adoption and adaptation of past visual expressions of racism; they do so in order to disrupt such discriminatory narratives in the present, through postcolonial means. David Hammons’s and

61 Ibid, 15.

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Glenn Ligon’s works convey a related rebuke — a counter-history if you will. They have made work referencing African American male celebrities to reveal the overall vulnerability and besieged status of Black masculinity at large. Like Thomas, Weems and Marshall, their objective is accomplished through their participation within the enduring tradition of African American mimicry, humor, and re-appropriation and through their work they each aim to (re)shape the national historical record and contribute to their community’s collective identity. In this way their art can be considered, in the words of Du Bois, “as new as it is old and as old as new.”62

While these four artists successfully intervene in the canonization of historically and traditionally white American narratives, it is John Bankston’s work that most effectively embodies Langston Hughes’s vision of blurred boundaries between cultures, across disciplines and throughout space and time. As reflected in Hughes’s poem The Negro Speaks of Rivers,

Bankston’s artwork visually represents the collective cultural memories that endure within contemporary society and he imaginatively transports viewers to a visual place where, “the pure power of the dead brings its radiance to the present.”63

According to Freud in his groundbreaking work, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, we don’t simply live in the present, fully understanding all at once. Rather we are products of our past experiences and thereby subject to them accordingly.64 This sentiment is resonated within a myriad of other literature including Faulkner’s novel Go Down Moses, and within the opening

62 Du Bois. “Criteria of Negro Art.” The Crisis, Paragraph 37.

63 Thompson. Face of the Gods: Art and Altars of Africa and the African Americas, 48-49. The thing that unites all Kongo altars in Africa is that they indicate the turning point where the pure power of the dead brings its radiance to the present. The tomb marks the parting of the way; it flags the vanishing point where the village meets the forest, where the river meets the sea. The cosmogram expresses the way that the dead cross this world and the world of the spirit, the line between land and water, the journey of the soul in the spiral of the seashell. In this way, it can be likened to the way in which Bankston depicts the past and present meeting at a specific locale, with symbolic referents.

64 Freud. Psychopathology of everyday life, 163.

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lines of Hughes’s wayfaring poem The Negro Speaks of Rivers. Just as Hughes penned, “I’ve known rivers. I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins...,”65 Faulkner inscribed the telling sentence, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”66 These artists and scholars offer a view of how the past affects the present, and regards the boundary in between as indelibly fluid. They collapse time and geographical distance; in doing so a more inclusive and comprehensive understanding of the present is realized. This perspective affects our view of our contemporary moment and helps us make meaning out of our shared history. It also illustrates the complex connections between art and society and demonstrates that all art is part of the general culture, not autonomous or above it. Each of these artists has created works that have disrupted the status quo through ‘change the joke, slip the yoke’ means; their art operates much like a fragmented memory, reflective of a host of experiences, spanning the makeup of Black consciousness. This multilayered and multidimensional perspective engenders the construction of a radical new identity, beyond the

65 Hughes. The Negro speaks of Rivers.

66 The original quote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” occurred in Faulkner’s novel titled, “Requiem for a Nun,” but it is his novel Go Down Moses to which my use of it refers. In the chapter titled “Delta Autumn,” the character Ike McCaslin (now in his 80s) is in bed when his nephew’s lover enters the room. She is also a family member (cousin) of the McCaslins, through a sexual encounter had with an enslaved person. In the book, it is apparent that the struggle with the past is too much for Ike. Faulkner however, tries to convey that it is a part of us, and we must live with it; he also describes the fear that his characters have in confronting it.

Excerpted from the chapter: "That's right. Go back North. Marry a man in your own race. That's the only salvation for you--for a while yet, maybe a long while yet. We will have to wait. Marry a black man. You are young, handsome, almost white; you could find a black man who would see in you what it was you saw in him, who would ask nothing of you and expect less and get even still less than that, if it's revenge you want. Then you will forget all this, forget it ever happened, that he ever existed--" until he could stop it at last and did, sitting there in his huddle of blankets during the instant when, without moving at all, she blazed silently down at him. Then that was gone too. She stood in the gleaming and still dripping slicker, looking quietly down at him from under the sodden hat."Old man," she said, "have you lived so long and forgotten so much that you don’t remember anything you ever knew or felt or even heard about love?"

In other words, he says wait. The younger woman tells him unequivocally that he is wrong. But the struggle with the past is overwhelming.

Faulkner. Go Down Moses, 346-347 and “Requiem for a Nun,” 535.

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limits of American history proper; it is a liberating perspective, which generates the ultimate triumphant transcendence of the most colonizing eye.67

In the subsequent chapter Contemporary Tricksters, Conjuring Artists, I explore how the trope of the trickster has been articulated within various forms of African American art and expressive culture. I initiate this discussion by describing how folkloric stories of tricksters supported the psychological, social and physical survival of the enslaved. I move on to discuss how trickster tactics endure within masking, signifying and meaningful satire, all of which remain central to African American social discourse and cultural expression. I describe works by

Phillis Wheatley, Willie Cole, Hank Willis Thomas, Kehinde Wiley, Lorraine O’Grady, Keith

Piper and Azie Mira Dungey to detail the ways in which the trickster trope has recurrently been employed to disrupt views of race and racial difference; I contend that each act, artwork or otherwise, functions as a challenge to the ironic state and absurdity of living in a society that both declares the unalienable rights of freedom and equality for all, while persecuting its citizens on the basis of race, creed and gender.

67 hooks. “In our Glory” In Picturing us: African American identity in photography, 53.

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CHAPTER 5 CONTEMPORARY TRICKSTERS, CONJURING ARTISTS.

Now you are going to hear lies above suspicion.

—Zora Neale Hurston Mules and Men1

This chapter broadly considers the way in which the trope of the trickster has been manifested within various forms of art and culture. Looking at literary and visual sources, it features works that have been made to amuse, inform, ridicule and attack; it describes how diverse expressions of folk-hero antics collectively function to produce meaning, humor and political/social criticism. In the past, the trickster functioned as a contrivance to aid in the psychological, social and physical survival of the enslaved. In our present moment such performances endure within strategies of masking, signifying and meaningful satire, all foundational elements of African American social discourse and cultural expression. Artists such as Willie Cole invoke the trickster’s position as ruler of the crossroads and master of beguile;

Phillis Wheatley, Hank Willis Thomas, Glenn Ligon and Kehinde Wiley create works that demonstrate how trickster-inflected acts can be employed to challenge notions of race and racial difference. Finally, Lorraine O’Grady, Keith Piper and Azie Mira Dungey use folk-hero type ruses to negotiate and contest the imbalanced power relations, which have been constructed within (and beyond) museum spaces. Altogether, each manifestation defies conditions of race- based subjugation and exclusion through dynamic, resourceful and consequential means.

The Trickster Journeys West: Lessons Imparted, Assessments Conveyed

Rooted in African tradition, African American trickster tales were transferred to the New

World via the Black Atlantic slave trade. By way of oral tradition, these animal stories were

1 Huston. Mules and Men, 19.

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created by a multitude of ethnic groups in Western and Central Africa and were adapted and transformed in the New World to reflect the unique circumstances of the enslaved populace. In the New World, these tales largely lacked the sacred dimensions present in the Yoruba people’s

African tricksters tales, such as those regarding Esu-Elegbara. Nevertheless, in the New World these trickster-characters became semi-mythic actors through which the trials of living as an oppressed people were psychically processed and hypothetically overcome.

African-American trickster tales can be organized into two main groups: those that are made up of animal characters and those composed of human characters.2 Both tale-types describe the disadvantages of the main character and the tactics employed in overcoming their plights. According to Lawrence Levine, in Black Culture and Black Consciousness, while the physically weaker animal characters used their wit, cunning and cleverness to overcome their stronger adversaries, in the human tales the subjugated enslaved characters used common-sense mother wit to secure their fate.3 Further Levine notes,

These stories were not simply clever tales of wish fulfillment through which slaves could escape from the imperatives of their world. They could also be painfully realistic stories, which taught the art of surviving and even triumphing in the face of a hostile environment.4

2 The slaves created tales in which assortments of animals (such as the rabbit, fox, bear, wolf, spider, turtle, snake, and possum) were endowed with human characteristics. In the tales, the rabbit (known alternately as B’rabby, Brer, Buh, or Bruh Rabbit) used his cleverness and wit to outsmart his more powerful adversaries (such as the bear, fox and wolf). The rabbit tales became largely preferred amongst those relayed; the enslaved community identified with the rabbit’s plight and pinned their hopes and dreams to the various predicaments that Brer Rabbit routinely negotiated successfully.

Later on and likely post-Civil War, the slave character (typically named John) appeared as the prototypical trickster folk hero. He also frequently overcame unequal power dynamics. In the tales of his exploits, John would outsmart Old Massa, the cantankerous yet simpleton slave owner; John oftentimes attained his freedom at the story’s conclusion as well.

3 Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom, 113-114 and Davis. “African Trickster Tales in Diaspora: Resistance in the Creole-Speaking South Carolina Sea Islands and Guadeloupe, French West Indies,” 49.

4 Ibid, 115,

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Not all such tales include a trickster figure, but all seem to teach lessons. An example of a lesson-based cautionary tale is viewable in the slave story, ‘The Rooster Goes Away In a Huff,’ recounted in Roger D. Abrahams’s Afro-American Folktales. In this tale, the admonition against being greedy, rude or finicky in regard to food is relayed through the character of the Rooster. So the story goes that when the Rooster was served a plate of cornbread, he snubbed his fellow farmyard fowl at a supper-party and went off in a huff, exclaiming that he could get all the cornbread he wanted at home. Unbeknownst to him however, the cornbread was filled with delicious bacon and greens and so up to this day, “whenever Rooster sees some food in front of him, he always scratches [it] with his feet… and never leaves off scratching until he gets to the bottom of it.”5

While this story is not immediately discernable as one offering up a lesson in survival, in the context out of which it arose, it is nothing short of it. The daily rations doled out to enslaved populations were, at best, stark and led to a high level of malnourishment and hunger. Therefore it should come as no surprise that a plentitude of folktales concerning the securing of food have been recorded in the Western Hemisphere, and the importance of developing such life-lessons is made clear.

Corresponding to this fare-related theme, there have been just as many reports by enslaved people who employed devious means in order to attain food for survival, as there have been trickster tales that have described such means, and slave-owners who have complained of it.

Charles C. Pinckney acknowledged as much when he estimated that 25% of his rice crop went

5 Abrahams, Afro-American Folktales: Stories from Black Traditions in the New World, 175.

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missing annually,6 and an ex-slave by the name of Robert Falls relayed such an account, reported in Yetman’s Life Under the ‘Peculiar Institution.’ Falls stated,

They didn’t half feed us either. They fed the animals better…Learned us to steal, that’s what they done. Why we would take anything we could lay our hands on, when we was hungry. Then they’d whip us for lying when we say we don’t know nothing about it. But it was easier to stand when the stomach was full.7

Such an adversarial situation produced countless trickster tales, which contemptuously ridiculed the white man’s ownership of human beings and his callous behavior towards his human property. One well-known story told of an enslaved person caught butchering and eating one of his master’s pigs. The enslaved mockingly justified his act by maintaining that since both he and the pig were his master’s property, nothing was forgone.8 Upon being exposed, the enslaved soberly responded to his owner’s accusation: “Yes, suh, Massa, you got less pig now but you sho’ got more nigger.”9 Of this anecdote Levine wrote, “In this popular joke we can see a paradigm for an entire strain of Afro-American humor which produced laughter by carrying the whites’ claims [for the justification slavery] to their logical and absurd conclusion.”10 In this sense, the trickster aspects of such humor are predicated upon the enslaved person’s straight- faced, seeming acceptance and acquiescence to the institution of slavery; the jokes’ subversive force therefore dismantles the logic in slaveholding, by adopting and adapting the peculiar and contradictory reasoning routinely used to uphold such an oppressive force.

6 Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom, 311.

7 Ibid, 122.

8 Ibid, 309.

9 Ibid.

10 Ibid.

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Summarily then, trickster tales not only provided a means through which the enslaved population could be entertained, but these tales also reflected the daily survival tactics of the enslaved, reinforced a sense of community among those who told and listened to such stories, provided psychic release and instilled everyday life lessons in survival to those oppressed under the Trans-Atlantic slave system. Most importantly they registered an intellectual argument in contradiction to the logic of slaveholding, which reflected the worldview and lived experience of the enslaved; these yarns cast the oppressed as everyday folk-heroes, and described the incessant battle that they surreptitiously fought with an oft-contentious and malicious dominant white society.

To Divert the Powers That Be: Defiance and Rejoice in Rebellion

Outside of the literal trickster folktales and ways in which such trickster tactics were employed, the trickster character has also been made manifest in much of the material and literary culture of the Black-Atlantic Diaspora. For example, in Babacar M’Baye’s essay titled,

African and Puritan Dimensions of Phillis Wheatley’s Poems and Letters, M’Baye compares

Senegambian Wolof folktales, praise poetry and satire with Wheatley’s poems, letters and other

African American narratives drawn from slave culture. M’Baye specifically uses Phillis

Wheatley’s poem titled, On Being Brought from a Pagan Land, to underscore the strategy of trickery present in her work. The poem is as follows:

'Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,

Taught my benighted soul to understand

That there's a God, that there's a Saviour too:

Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.

Some view our sable race with scornful eye,

"Their colour is a diabolic die."

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Remember, Christians, Negros, Black as Cain,

May be refin'd, and join th' angelic train.11

While an inflection of white colonial and missionary history is certainly clear in this poem, Wheatley’s strategy can be likened to that of the venus-fly trap. For example, Wheatley’s naming Africa, “my Pagan land” reproduced the historic device of terming the continent as such, in order to reinforce the tenets of slavery as part of a divine plan of Christianity. Further,

Wheatley also notes a certain “refinement” through her being brought out of Africa, which is an indication of the widespread colonial enterprise that labeled Africa and its constituents through markers of difference and inferiority. Conversely however, Wheatley turns these ideas on their heads when she concludes the poem stating, “Remember, Christians, Negros, Black as Cain,

May be refin'd, and join th' angelic train.” Through this last line, Wheatley reminds the presumably Christian audience that heaven does not discriminate on the basis of skin color and it is therefore immoral to do so.

This trick-laden end was achieved through the use of the verbal cues and ideological resistance strategies present also in many African American trickster tales. Through her adoption of the language created by champions of race-based segregation, Wheatley drew her targeted audience in. In reaching the final line however, her true intention is made clear – and she hence used the African-American strategy of ‘changing the joke and slipping the yoke.’ This use of language, with an altered implication, allowed Wheatley to explore issues of Black identity, history and race-based ideologies. This form of resistance is also known as “Signifying,” which

11 M’Baye. The Pan-African and Puritan Dimensions of Phillis Wheatley's Poems and Letters, 35.

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remains a well-recognized trope within African-American written and oral discourse. It is a means for disguising her views by using subtle forms of language to convey a message.

Henry Louis Gates wrote of this tactic in his book, The Signifying Monkey, and argued that “to Signify” is to use indirection in rhetorical strategy and play with “the figurative difference between the literal and the metaphorical, between surface and latent meaning.”12

Wheatley’s poetry has likewise been described as employing the approach of the “hidden transcript,” which is a theory put forth by James C. Scott in his book titled Domination and the

Arts of Resistance.13 This “hidden transcript” tactic is one in which the oppressed person uses at their disposal a myriad of strategies to divert the powers that be. According to Scott, “Every subordinate group creates, out of its ordeal, a ‘hidden transcript’ that represents a critique of power,”14 and if the trickster, and by extension Wheatley, is culpable of anything, it is of luring those with power in, only to slam closed the trap-door behind them!

Through the publication and popularity of Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus Tales in

1860, the trickster folk-hero began his transformative sojourn into the mutable trajectories of mainstream American culture. During the Jazz Age of the Harlem Renaissance, the trickster character was re-transmuted into the theatrical performance of stage actors. He was broadcast to

America through the medium of film, at a time when society itself was also gravitating towards defiance and rejoicing in rebellion. In the musical film Stormy Weather 1943, a sharp-tongued trickster was showcased through the performance of Fats Waller. In his ad-libbed version of the song “Ain’t That Right,” Waller improvised a multitude of quick-witted responses that put his

12 Gates.The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism, 82. 13 M’Baye. “The Pan-African and Puritan Dimensions of Phillis Wheatley's Poems and Letters.” In The Trickster Comes West: Pan-African Influence in Early Diasporan Narratives, 52.

14 Scott. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, xii.

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antagonist on the defensive. Just as the supporting actor asks him, “Baby, baby, what’s the matter with you?” Waller retorts, “One never knows do one?” And in response to, “You got the world in a jug,” Waller quips back, “Yeah but where’s the stopper?”15 Such plays on words had rarely made it to the medium of film prior to Waller’s performance,16 and so it was that the trickster folk-hero had entered mainstream American consciousness, through a big-screened debut.

Later on, in the 1950s and 60s the civil rights movement took hold and public forms of trickster tactics were further disseminated in the public domain. Alternate forms of economic repression had eclipsed the slave enterprise, and discrimination on the basis of skin color persisted. The campfire folktale gatherings became mainly a practice of the past, yet new forms of Black humor were generated in their place. In the 1950s, Folklorist Roger Abrahams collected poems known as “toasts,” for example, which were directly linked to the animal tales previously relayed during the slave era. Through collection and publication, Abrahams brought stories of the Signifying Monkey to the attention of the American public; his work contradicted the claim that folklore initiated and dispersed from across the Atlantic was in decline in the Americas.

Resembling Eshu Elegba, the Signifying Monkey, like Bruh Rabbit before him, was a cunning expert of ruses and a master of guile. Known for using verbal strategies, he frequently instigated conflict between animals physically stronger than himself; he did so for reasons that ranged from revenge and malice to amusement and boredom.17 These signifying tales reflected the myriad of monkeying-around schemes that such a trickster character would manifest. One toast emblematically expressed his central creed:

15 Watkins. On the Real Side: Laughing, Lying, and Signifying: The Underground Tradition of African-American Humor that Transformed American Culture, from Slavery to Richard Pryor, 264. 16 Ibid, 264.

17 Levine. Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom, 378.

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Deep down in the jungle so they say

There’s a signifying motherfucker down the way.

There hadn’t been no disturbin’ in the jungle for quite a bit,

For up jumped the monkey in the tree one day and laughed,

“I guess I’ll start some shit.” 18

From the music of Otis Redding, who made the Black influence in the Rolling Stones’ song “Satisfaction” apparent,19 to the more openly hostile expressions of the trickster as the

Signifying Monkey, it became apparent that the trickster would continually transform in response to the lived conditions and psychic needs of the African American community. As the level of oppression lessened, the trickster folk hero became more outwardly outspoken and openly destructive. This feature became literally expressed in the form of the ‘Bad N****’ and hero/anti-hero of 1970s Blaxploitation films. The manifestation of the badman folk-trickster envisioned the “law” as his adversary, which was no happenstance or insignificant accident.20

Since emancipation, the power of the white populace was maintained and amassed under the law, and it remains today the greatest threat to the African-American community since slavery.

Blacks continue to struggle with a prejudiced legal system in order to attain basic social, economic and political parity.21 Consequently, the badman emerged as a sort of comic-book type

18 Ibid, 378.

19 Examples of white adoptions of Black music forms are numerous. Furthermore, there has been a systematic and public erasure of the Black roots of much of the history of American music. According to Greg Tate in his edited book Everything Except the Burden: What White People are Taking from Black Culture, “Our music, Our fashion, Our hairstyles, Our dances, Our anatomical traits, Our bodies, Our souls continue to be considered ever ripe for the plucking and biting by the same crafty devils who brought you the African slave trade and the Middle passage” 2. He provides examples from the music industry including: Paul Whiteman being crowned the King of Jazz, Elvis as the King of Rock and Roll and Eric Clapton being awarded the title of the world’s greatest guitar player which overlooks the many contributions of black artists to the foundation and evolution of these genres.

20 Roberts, From Trickster to Badman: The Black Folk Hero in Slavery and Freedom, 215.

21 Ibid, 215.

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folk-hero who offered up stories of unlawful avenging objectives and triumphant outcomes.

Equally, stories of the badman have been interpreted literally as cautionary tales against defiant behavior or alternately as the law’s indifference to the community’s welfare. Most insidiously though, as John Roberts points out in his book, From Trickster to Badman, the “bad n****” can today be seen as representing the “image in the white mind that every Black person is a potential badman.”22 Either way or collectively, the badman trickster arrived in a take-no-prisoners, no- holds barred posturing, and there’s no going back now.

The Eshu-Elegba Standard: Everyday Forms of Resistance and Black Self-Articulation

At the core of the trickster trope is a shifting dynamic ever-responsive to the needs of the

African American community; his tactics have been recurrently reproduced in social commentaries regarding living under conditions of racial oppression. His acts have been accomplished in response to circumstances of subjugation. Such works continue to reflect and affect our understanding of the present and help us make meaning of our shared history. Because any transmission of ideas is an expression of autonomy, a contestation has continuously occurred regarding what will be remembered and how it will be characterized. Efforts to write “history from below” by the likes of W.E.B. Du Bois in his groundbreaking work Black Reconstruction and C.L.R. James in his radical reading of the Haitian Revolution in Black Jacobins, both consign race, culture, and the agency of African and African descendants to the center of history.23 This reoriented telling of Western revolutions dismantles long-held racial hierarchies and the mythologies that express and reinforce Black subjugation. Like the trickster-tales, they report social accounts that cast the Black working class into the role of actor instead of acted

22 Ibid, 215.

23 Kelley. Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class, 5.

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upon and provide the public with a more nuanced reading of how race affects culture and politics today.

While these two important historians, Du Bois and James, have in many ways, set the standard for social histories of Black struggle, their written accounts cannot be separated from the myriad of everyday forms of resistance acted out by the general Black populace. The grins and lies, coded humor and subversive jokes all compound the effect of Black opposition and in this sense, are politically motivated. Each action is inseparable from the historical context out of which it arose. An explicit example of such an ideological battle being fought today is evidenced by the recent debate in St. Petersberg, Florida, over the appropriate subject matter for a public mural.

In February of 2016, the city invited artists to propose murals to be installed at its City

Hall. This call, however, was a belated response to an event during the Civil Rights movement in which activist Omali Yashitela ripped an existing painting off of the wall and dragged it through the streets, before being arrested. Yashitela targeted the work because of its blatantly racist minstrel-type depiction of Blacks entertaining whites, along with its endorsement of such ideas by the municipality due to its location in a government building. Yashitela served two and a half years in prison for his act and has most recently rejected the plan to replace the mural with one that shows, according to him, “the progress and inclusivity that has occurred in this city since that time.”24 According to Yashitela, the city must first acknowledge the race-based ills of its past and honor the way civil protest has affected change. He also refutes the idea that there has been (enough) progress and inclusivity and therefore views the proposed imagery for the mural as a non-lived reality for the St. Petersberg Black community. Finally, he feels that it is the Black

24 Waveney. “Why a Painting of White Sunbathers Still Haunts St. Petersburg’s City Hall.” Tampa Bay Times. February 3, 2016.

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community that should determine how they are represented, not a board of City Hall members, regardless of their respective racial categorization. In making these points, Yashitela recognizes the power of imagery to convey subjective accounts of history. In calling attention to the necessity of Black self-articulation, Yashitela signals the way imagery operates to define identity in much of the same ways that Du Bois explained in his Criteria for Negro Art where he wrote,

I do not doubt that the ultimate art coming from Black folk is going to be just as beautiful, and beautiful largely in the same ways, as the art that comes from white folk, or yellow, or red; but the point today is that until the art of the Black folk compels recognition they will not be rated as human. And when through art they compel recognition then let the world discover if it will that their art is as new as it is old and as old as new. 25

Seeds of the past continually propagate, like dandelion florets blowing in the winds of time. Such is the case and is reflected in the visual artwork of artists such as Willie Cole, who has been captivated by the imagery and character of the trickster. Cole has been drawn to the overall theology and philosophy of the Yoruba religion and its Cuban derivative, Santeria/

Lukumi, and has found a great deal of artistic inspiration in Eshu-Elegbara, the original African trickster. This African deity is central to the Yoruba and by extension the Santeria/Lukumi pantheon of gods, and according to their belief system, Eshu-Elegbara remains ever-present, in all decision-making situations. Whether at the marketplace or during divination, Eshu-Elegbara is eternally present and it is to him that all first offerings are to be made. He is the gatekeeper and stands guard at the crossroads; he is viewed as a character defined by and through a myriad of contradictions. Henry Louis Gates aligned Eshu-Elegbara with the double-voiced discourse that defines the African-American Signifying Monkey version of the trickster when he stated,

The figure of writing appears to be peculiar to the myth of Esu, while the figure of speaking, or oral discourse densely structured rhetorically, is peculiar to the myth of the Signifying Monkey…As figures of the duality of the voice within the

25 Du Bois, “Criteria of Negro Art.” The Crisis, Paragraph 37.

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tradition, Esu and his friend the Monkey [represent the]…tension between the oral and the written [surfaces]…26

Cole first employed the Eshu-Elegbara figure in a 1995 installation titled, The Elegba

Principle. In this work, a 1950s three-colored lawn jockey (red, Black and white) was included at the façade of the installation piece, which was composed of a series of upright audience- interactive wooden doors of various muted colors. The lawn jockey’s coloring is significant in that it relates to the exact colors associated with Elegba. Of the jockey, Jean Borgatti, author of the 2009 essay, Willie Cole’s Africa Remix: Trickster and Tribe, stated,

The lawn jockey is a form of statuary suggesting servility and the low status of African servants as “boys,” [and] linked to Elegba by color symbolism and characteristic functions, just as forced African migrants to the Americas identified Yoruba spiritual forces with Catholic saints. 27

Each door behind the jockey bears a word, which through the viewer’s participation becomes a symbolic physically acted-out interpretation of the trickster, as the presenter of many choices. The doors are also grouped in multiples of four, a number that implies order, and as the alternate of chance, further conveys the significance of the trickster deity.28 Moving through the doors of the exhibit space, the participants make freely associative choices then, either based on a word regarded on a door or simply through an intuitive sense of the way. Regardless of the mode, each and every choice signals the way one often passes through life and the numerous crossroads presented by Eshu-Elegba.29

26 Gates. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism, 21.

27 Borgatti. "Willie Cole's Africa Remix: Trickster and "Tribe,”” African Arts, 18.

28 Ibid, 18.

29 Ibid,18.

Cole’s ultimate goal is for this work to remain in a permanent location in which participants can truly get lost, compelling in them decisions that have real-world consequences. For Cole, this would allow for the closest approximation of the Elgeba principle.

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Hank Willis Thomas has also created trickster-inspired artwork that operates under a similar premise. In Thomas’s color photograph, Eshu at the Crossroads, artist Sanford Biggers appears costumed and painted (Hank Willis Thomas, Eshu at the Crossroads, from the Wayfarer series, 2012, 17.5 x 15 inches, Duotone Lithograph on Rives BFK paper). He is featured wearing a bifurcated half black, half white top hat, tux, and corresponding face paint divided vertically by color. Biggers stands with his fingers interlaced and elbows folded at his sides. His eyes are downcast and he stands in front of a marble paneled wall on one side of a room. The photograph is captured from a frontal perspective.

Biggers’s appearance and the title of the work reference the Yoruba deity of the crossroads Eshu-Elegba, along with the liminality and hybrid nature of the trickster’s charm. The transitional realm is believed to be Eshu’s domain, and Thomas visually manifests this quality in all of the works from this Wayfarer series. In another photograph succinctly titled Crossroads, for example, Biggers is featured twice in a similar bifurcated black and white suit, top hat and face paint (Hank Willis Thomas, Crossroads, 2012, sizes vary, C-print). Biggers is featured in profile twice from the waist up with his gloved hands clasped in his lap; both appearances of him are oriented to face one another and each portrait of him is the opposite in color from the other

(black and white costume and face paint). Biggers appears to have a quizzical expression on his face in each portrait and the images of him are also slightly blurred. From a central vantage point, the doubled portraits of Biggers appear sharp and well defined, yet as the viewer moves away from and around the image, the outlook transforms. The figures become increasingly abstract, indistinct, and ghostlike, until Biggers is barely recognizable as himself at all. Through this optical metamorphosis, the image is transformed into an examination in perspective; as one’s viewpoint changes, so too does the interpretation of what one sees.

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This subjective perspectival theme is one that is prominent in many Eshu stories in

Yoruba country as well. Such stories illustrate Eshu’s role as trickster but also underscore the idea that he is a paradox that cannot be explained. This is best exemplified in the most well- known story regarding Eshu and his effect on the relationship between two friends. The story relays that one day Eshu walked between the farmland of two friends wearing a multicolored cap

(variously described as red and white; red, white and blue; or red, white, green, and black). 30

Eshu likewise arranged his pipe at the nape of his neck and hung his staff over his back to create an illusion regarding his appearance i.e. whether he was facing forward or backward at any given time. 31 As Eshu walked, passing back and forth between the friends’ farms, the friends quarreled regarding the direction he was walking; they eventually came to blows. 32 Later, when the disputants petitioned Eshu to court, he confessed to the trick, boasting that sowing “dissention between friends is greatest delight” as he exits the scene laughing.33

For Thomas, the visual transfiguration of Eshu that he employs in his work also operates as a broader metaphor for the increasingly indistinct boundaries along which racial lines are drawn.34 Of this aspect of the work, his subject Biggers stated, “I think it’s an American knee- jerk response to equate black and white with literally Blacks and whites. I want to find a way for

30 Pelton, The Trickster in West Africa: A Study of Mythic Irony and Sacred Delight. 141 and Consentino, Who Is That Fellow in the Many-Colored Cap? Transformations of Eshu in Old and New World Mythologies, 262-263.

31 Ibid.

32 Ibid.

33 Ibid.

34 Wolff. “Hank Willis Thomas Stages a Photo Shoot 10/24/12 7:00 Am: How Sanford Biggers came to strike a pose as a two-faced dandy.”

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it to be more nuanced.” Thomas advanced this notion when he further commented, “I’ve always felt more comfortable in the gray space, I think it’s closer to the truth of any given scenario.”35

By invoking Eshu, Thomas capitalizes on this ‘gray space’ and also signifies the

Africanisms present in the Diaspora. In this way Thomas, like Cole, can be likened to the trickster Eshu himself whose ruses function to reveal the limited state of human perception and who employs deception to disclose broader truths to humanity about their existence. Thomas accomplishes this task by incorporating vivid contrasts and enigmatic photographic effects in order to provide an immersive visual experience. His image compels viewers to witness a visual metamorphosis, in sync with their changing vantage point. Through this perspectival game,

Thomas represents the impossibility of race itself, by revealing the way in which race is an indefinable construct; his picture thereby becomes a meditation on the multiple identities and perpetual subjectivity of all perception. In this way he demonstrates how life itself is a matter of perspective.

The Trickster as Master of Language Play

Ideas, mindsets, biases and misconceptions persistently get dispersed over the ages.

Regarding trickster-inflected artwork, this phenomenon is also featured in Glenn Ligon’s art through his focus on language as a reflection of cultural stasis and constancy. In his 1993

Runaway series for instance, he demonstrates language’s consistency and the way in which it reaffirms misconceptions regarding racial markers; Ligon focuses his series on language’s critical inability to capture the multidimensional essence of actual human beings. In this sense, his work is both revelatory and reflexive; by conveying the inadequacies of language itself,

Ligon exhibits his own confined condition as a Black subject and as an artist who relies on said

35 Ibid.

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text to convey his ideas. In this way, Ligon’s runaway series effectively epitomizes Zora Neal

Hurston’s paradoxical concept of “hitting a straight lick with a crooked stick,” surely one of the trickiest feats of all (Glenn Ligon, Runaway series, 1993, Portfolio of ten lithographs, composition: various dimensions; each sheet 16 x 12 inches).

Ligon advances his trickster agenda through several stratagems. By adopting the format of the 19th century fugitive slave advertisement, Ligon recalls America’s slave-based past; by adapting the text-portion to his own ends, Ligon indicates how race-based ills continue to plague society today. In this sense, the series upholds the long-standing African American tradition of signifying or of using subtle forms of language to convey antithetical views. Like Wheatley and the folktale telling enslaved persons of yore, Ligon is able to explore issues of racism, Black identity and history through subversive trickster acts of inflection and indirection; through these strategies, he manipulates the surface and latent meaning of historical signs originally intended for the apprehension and oppression of the enslaved Black populace.

Each of the ten lithographs includes an inky black text portion encased within a square frame; atop this text-box, illustrations are provided, presumably to represent the runaway (and in one instance also the anticipated white captor). By evoking fugitive slave placards and symbolic abolitionist-movement illustrations, Ligon recalls how slave-era conventions persist within the culture of the present. Just as 19th century announcers at slave auction blocks shouted descriptions of Blacks onto the pages of history, so too did they bellow their versions of Black worth into the consciousness of the American public. This hollered out accounting reverberated through time like a bewildering and incessant echo without a place to finally rest. It cast Black people into a narrative of race-based stereotypes, and into a maze from which they have yet to emerge. To feature this occurrence, Ligon solicited ten friends to compose physical descriptions

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of him, under the pretense that they were filing a missing person’s report. Beginning with the phrase “Ran away, …” each Black and white lithograph describes Ligon as alternately, “Black,”

“pretty dark-skinned,” “medium-brown skin,” “medium complexion (not ‘light skinned,’ not

‘dark skinned,’ slightly orange).” This aspect of the series imparts the subjective nature of skin color classification; through phrases such as “Very articulate, seemingly well-educated, Nice teeth, loud laugh,” it recalls the language of advertising humans for sale or apprehension, and the attendant racism and micro-aggressions oftentimes attached to such weighted “complimentary” signifiers. Glenda Carpio, author of Laughing Fit to Kill commented on this type of sociological association when she wrote, “The major ideology of slavery—that the human body is a commodity—persists in the marketability of racial stereotypes now.”36

Ligon’s series indicates how the white populace regarded Blacks and how they operated a surveillance system charged with the capture of escaped human property. The slave-owners directed their efforts by offering rewards for the return of fugitive slaves and clues to aid the search. The ads themselves oftentimes provided glimpses into the difficult events that preceded the enslaved person’s plight. On June 5, 1788, for example, an ad ran in the Virginia Herald and

Fredericksburg Advertiser looking for a woman named Patty, approximately 18 years old, five feet high whose “back appears to have been used to the whip.”37 Another described Antoine with

“a large burnt scar on the chest, a piece of ear bitten off,” and Mary who absconded with, “a small child six months old, which she commonly carries with her.”38 Like Ligon’s Runaway series, the ads often began with a description of the subject’s skin color and even include details

36 Carpio. Laughing Fit to Kill: Black humor in the Fictions of Slavery. and Lambert, “Laughing at Stereotypes,” Harvard Magazine.

37 Brown. “Hunting down runaway slaves: The cruel ads of Andrew Jackson and ‘the master class.’”

38 Ibid

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such as markers of the absconded person’s speech-pattern. The March 13, 1848, New Orleans

Daily Picayune for example, sought after Thomas, “5 feet five inches high, a light bacon color, stoutly made, full face, bushy hair, has a very slight stoppage in his speech, and has been badly whipped.”39 While these ads were originally made to recoup the economic loss of a runaway slave, they are today viewed as evidence of the brutality and barbarity of the practice of human enslavement. Although this is a modern interpretation of the slave-enterprise, it is one that must not have been far from the consciences of slave owners for they often included the ironic clause,

“ran away without cause,” to cast themselves as the righteous in pursuit. Through the trickster strategy of signification and recollection however, Ligon’s series dispels such myths, and reminds viewers of the humanity that Blacks have recurrently been denied.

Hank Willis Thomas and Glenn Ligon create works that call attention to the historical burden of slavery and its effect on race relations today. Each applies the trickster trope of indirection and signification, which allows the content of their work to be liberated from formalist and didactic transmissions of history. Like Cole, their work allows space for viewers to make their own connections and come to their own conclusions; they collectively and cleverly direct viewers toward what to look at, but not necessarily what to see.

Subverting the Art/Historical Canon Through the Trope of the Trickster

Recognizing the correspondences between such artists’ work and the trope of the trickster, artist Kehinde Wiley created a sequence of portraits of contemporary Black artists for his 2017 series aptly titled Tricksters. Featuring artists such as Glenn Ligon, Hank Willis

Thomas, Kerry James Marshall and Carrie Mae Weems among others, Wiley departed from his practice of painting anonymous sitters. In doing so, Wiley also sustained his confrontation with

39 Ibid

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the Western art canon, which has persistently excluded Black people from art historical narratives. In this way Wiley’s oeuvre can also be likened to acts of a trickster in that he too has deployed his artwork to subvert normative art historical practices. Regarding his interest in the trickster and the trickster’s connection to African-American expressive culture Wiley stated,

The trickster element points directly to the African-American tradition of using shapeshifting as a means of survival: in the ways that they speak, in the ways that they sing, this kind of coded language that begins in American chattel slavery like talking behind the master’s back and continues on into blues and jazz, and even arguably hip-hop culture, which is now being beamed out into the rest of the world.40

One portrait in the Trickster series titled Glenn Ligon/Hermes features Glenn Ligon seated on a tree that has been cut near its base (Kehinde Wiley, Glenn Ligon/Hermes, 2017, Oil on canvas, 130 1/6 × 82 1/2 × 4 1/2 inches). Ligon is portrayed wearing a midnight blue long- sleeved buttoned-down collared shirt and charcoal grey jeans that are rolled at the cuffs. He wears black slip-on shoes without socks, black-rimmed glasses and two rings on his right hand.

His left hand is bent at the elbow and is positioned on his left hip. His right hand is positioned on the back of a tortoise that rests casually on his right thigh and knee. Ligon confronts the viewer’s gaze with a skeptical sidelong glance. His mouth is closed, and his strong jaw-line is accentuated by a chiaroscuro effect as light enters the painting from the featured sitter’s left side. Behind

Ligon, a collection of boulder-like rocks is arranged atop one another; a tree and blue cloud- filled sky are viewable in the distance. Beyond Ligon’s bald head, a burnt orange fabric is draped; it is woven with a Baroque floral design. The cloth appears as though it has been hung over the stacked rocks, which reflect the orange glow of the fabrics billowy layers.

40 Rosen, “View a series of portraits of extraordinary black artists,” Dazed.

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Wiley likens Glenn Ligon to a trickster through his titling of the work Glenn

Ligon/Hermes. In both the ancient Yoruba and Greek religions, the trickster/Hermes god was considered the divine emissary and messenger of the gods; this is further signified on through the inclusion of the tortoise as a symbol of tricksterism in Greek and West African mythology. Like

Eshu-Elegba, Hermes was also considered “the god of boundaries” and “of the transgression of boundaries.”41 They both have been described as moving freely between the worlds of mortals and the divine; they are protectors and patrons of roads and travelers.42 In some myths, Hermes acts as a trickster that outwits other gods for his own satisfaction or for the sake of humankind.43

Through his Trickster series, Wiley explores how artists have engaged with, explored and exposed the circumstances and conditions of the world around them. Wiley views the artists he depicts in this series as having, “navigated, pushed and redefined boundaries to establish a new canon within the history of Western art.”44 According to the press release for the exhibition of this series Wiley,

employs the mythological trickster trope––existent in nearly every culture’s folklore––to not only examine how artists disrupt the status quo and change the way in which we think, but as a signifier of how people of color navigate both real and symbolic social boundaries inherent to their blackness.45

In this sense, the Black artists included in his Tricksters series embody the role of the trickster and his ability at coercing audiences into recognizing uncomfortable truths by navigating boundaries originally made to preclude.

41 Burkert, Greek Religion, 158. To be clear, Burkert describes the attributes of Hermes as the trickster g-d, but makes no comparison with him to the West African trickster, Eshu-Elegba.

42 Ibid.

43 Ibid.

44 Press release for Tricksters exhibition at Sean Kelly gallery.

45 Ibid.

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Much African American visual culture centers on disassembling notions of racial inferiority and/or difference. Through postcolonial means, such works explore the visual pathology of racism and aim to undo the stereotypes and exclusionary tactics that hegemonic practices engender. Examples are viewable in the work of artists such as Lorraine O’Grady who in 1981 made her first public foray into institutional critique. Wearing a formal white dress costume made of nearly 200 pairs of white gloves, O’Grady invaded art openings as the persona

Mlle Bourgeoise Noire (Miss Black Middle Class). This self-appointed title was embellished in black letters and draped across her body on a silky white commemorative sash. Carrying a white cat-o-nine-tails made of sail rope and studded with white chrysanthemums, she enacted a humor- inflected alternate persona in the vein of performance art, but with activist aims. Through her disruptive act, O’Grady sought to undermine the pervasive race-based exclusionary practices of the art-world standard. In doing so, she interrupted emblematic spaces for bolstering and emboldening distinctions between high and low art. Furthermore, she brought attention to divisions routinely drawn along race and/or class-based distinctions.

By adopting devices of Performance and Conceptual art, O’Grady ‘signified on’ works such as those created by Carolee Schneemann, Hannah Wilke and Valie Export; by adopting a farcical persona with activist aims, she anticipated interventionist strategies by the likes of the

Guerilla Girls who have also brought attention to the exclusionary effects endemic within the art world. She embodied the Mlle Bourgeoise Noire persona through her personal experiences as a

Black female artist. She enacted the Miss Black Middle Class identity to personify the ways

Black artists have continually been subjugated to the realm of the ‘other,’ and to underscore how their works are rarely exhibited in the same context or at the same frequency as their non-Black peers. In doing so, she targeted institutional negation or a type of representation that had been

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identified by Stuart Hall as one that “replaces invisibility with a kind of carefully regulated, segregated visibility.”46 In effect she continued the long-standing African American tradition of signifying through self-determination and trickster-inflected means.

Like O’Grady, Fred Wilson and Keith Piper have also created installations that critique and parody the practices and politics involved in the exhibition of material culture. Their work exposes the constructed and subjective nature of “historical” exhibitions. Like Yashitela, Du

Bois and C.L.R James, their works function as attacks on the hierarchies of knowledge, control and assumed “truths” that such institutions create. Artist Fred Wilson has made work that confronts the impartial curatorial practices readily apparent within historical museum exhibition spaces. In 1992 at the Maryland Historical Society, Wilson created his best-known installation:

Mining the Museum. Of this work Wilson stated, “What they put on view says a lot about a museum, but what they don’t put on view says even more.”47

While the Maryland Historical Society’s exhibit spaces had previously included accounts of slavery and abolitionism, its primary focus had been on the sumptuousness of society wares and the class of people that the objects were made to ennoble. His best-known exhibit from the installation, Metalwork, arranged beautifully rendered silver servingware with a set of slave shackles (Fred Wilson, Metalwork, From the Mining the Museum exhibition, silver vessels in

Baltimore Repoussé style, 1830-80, maker unknown; salve shackles, ca. 1793-1872, maker unknown, made in Baltimore, 1992.). The work signaled the violence and oppression that the slave-based economy involved. It challenged the notion of “civil” society and the nostalgia that museumgoers often projected onto this era in the past. It suggested the intimate nature of

46 Hall. “What is this "Black" in Black popular culture?” 24.

47 Karp and Wilson. “Constructing the Spectacle of Culture in Museums,” In Thinking About Exhibitions, 255.

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domestic servantry and the bodily persecution of those enslaved. Wilson’s project thus

(re)presented the museum’s collection in a divergent and critical light. Deploying subversive trickster strategies such as irony and satire, he (re)assembled the Museum’s collection in nontraditional ways. His installation disrupted the Museum’s exclusionary narrative by emphasizing the slave economy that allowed and enabled a high society to exist and persist.

In a related vein, Keith Piper created Lost Vitrines, an installation commissioned by

London’s Victorian Albert Museum to commemorate the bicentennial of the abolition of the

Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, (Keith Piper, Lost Vitrines, 2007, multimedia assemblage, various sizes). This site-specific exhibit was situated amongst the permanent collection of the Museum’s eighteenth-century galleries. It was made to expose the dark underbelly of the enlightenment period and to satirize the myopic and fractional narrative that museums routinely perpetuate through curatorial devices such as selection and display.

By offering a corrective addendum to the conventional exhibit of such high-society wares, Piper exposed and put on exhibit what museums had routinely and emblematically cast aside as a history worth forgetting. Amid the museum’s collection of highly venerated, ‘genteel’ society effects, his Lost Vitrines installation signaled the violent and dehumanizing slave enterprise that made such a society possible. His site-specific work functioned as an “excavation of imperial memory” by mimicking the methodologies, mythologies and context of the historical museum exhibit. 48

Piper duplicated the visual conventions of 18th century artifacts in creating his own set of likened objects; positioned throughout the galleries in glass cases, his creations were made to be

48 Piper. Lost Vitrines. 2012. A Documentary Record on Issues, 13.

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visually indistinguishable from the museum’s permanent collection. 49 According to Piper, this

“functioned to open a dialogue around the systems of encoding the memory of a historical epoch within the established archive, and the extent to which alternative and counter narratives of an epoch can be strategically absented.”50 The Lost Vitrines installation specifically highlights the exclusion of the narrative of Black people from the exhibition space; his work operates as a visual anathema, recuperating the erasure and denial of said experiences of slavery. Foremost, his work projects the practice of enslavement back onto the era in which it occurred,51 and fundamentally tricks the viewer into recognizing more completely what transpired then.

Through the production of books, pamphlets and other small objects, Piper invented fictional slave and planter-class communities for which his utilitarian objects were purportedly made. One object in particular, Miss Mary’s Micro-Resistance Toolkit concerned the covert acts of tricksterism carried out by enslaved persons. The kit was ostensibly made for the enslaved consumer. It was comprised of an opened wooden box that contained a sumptuous cream-colored silk folded lining and a red protective base. Several small bottles are set in the box and labeled for the collection of the enslaved person’s bodily excretions. A small discreet book of instructions for the application and use of the enslaved person’s secretions is also included in the kit. The manual is made to look aged; the left page has a framed box with the title of the kit. It is exhibited opened to a selection that reads:

i Collect Materials

ii In the case of fluids, store in containers directly

iii In the case of solids, allow to dry. Finely chop or crush. Place in container.

49 Ibid,

50 Ibid,

51 Ibid,

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iv Store containers in a secure and discrete position

v Wait for a symbolically poetic moment.

vi At such a moment, secretly sprinkle a small quantity of material into food or drink being prepared for the Slave Holder or associates of the Slave Holder.

vii Serve food or Drink in the customary manner.

viii Stand back and observe consumption.

ix Savour the moment.

In recognizing that “stripped of material property the slave resort[ed] to use of one of the final domains of which limited control remains possible, the abject excretions from their own bodies,” 52 Piper created this kit in order to parody the pretension and duplicitous nature of eighteenth century society. Mindful of the limited circumstances that led to such recourse, Piper effectively demonstrated that such exploits were, at their core, attacks on control. Such undertakings generated a certain glee in the perpetrator, which was at the expense of the oppressor. These actions caused the beset person’s life under the yoke, to be at least more momentarily bearable; such acts as this have been portrayed in various other forms of Black expressive culture as well.

Piper for instance, was partly inspired by a scene in Alex Haley’s 1977 novel and television series Roots in which the title character Kizzie vengefully and covertly spits into a cup of water that she poured for a white woman who had snubbed her. According to Piper, like countless other slaves, “Kizzie’s initial youthful optimism had been systematically and cruelly ground out of her by the brutal rigors of 19th century slave plantation society.”53 Of the

52 Piper. “Antebellum Acts: Trickster Depictions and the American Plantation.” Vimeo. 2013.

53 Ibid,

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association between Kizzie’s act of resistance and the historical underpinnings of the scene,’

Piper stated,

In societies in which racial paranoia saw a single drop of Black blood as sufficient to pollute the genetic lineages of whiteness, the symbolic power of covertly tricking a member of the planter class to ingest a single droplet of Black spit resonates. As we know both from history, and Kizzie’s own life story, the power of the white male planter to deposit his genetic material into the body of the slave through acts of rape were repeatedly exercised. This limited, but symbolically charged act of reversal, is expressed through Kizzie’s final smile and carries the memory of thousands of undocumented small acts of resistance on the part of plantation slaves.54

Piper’s Lost Vitrines work intervenes in the construction of knowledge manufactured by the historical museum exhibition. As an institutional critique, his work assesses the way such exhibits expunge the practice of slavery from the era that they purport to represent. In this way,

Piper’s work illuminates how the historical exhibit itself is a work of fiction, one that memorializes the grand aspects of eighteenth century high society while strategically absenting the human cost that underpinned the epoch’s material wealth. Interestingly and perhaps ironically, it is only through Piper’s fictionally historical addendum pieces that the Museum’s eighteenth-century exhibition becomes a more complete and accurate representation of the era. It is a fiction within a fiction that moves such a representation closer to the truth.

The onset of the web has allowed for the further democratization of information- dissemination, and Black histories have, as a result, gained currency and exposure through auxiliary avenues. An additional contemporary, yet historically grounded, example of ‘history from below’ is viewable in the Ask A Slave web series, hosted by Lizzie Mae, the “plucky”55 housemaid to George and Martha Washington. This series is based on the creator Azie Mira

54 Ibid,

55 “Plucky” descriptor taken from Dungey’s Ask A Slave website.

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Dungey’s actual experiences and interactions with visitors, while working as a living history slave character at the historic Mount Vernon site.

The online show developed as a space for Dungey to openly deride the ill-informed and often-offensive queries she was recurrently confronted with while acting as Caroline Branman, the actual housemaid-slave to the Washington family. The Ask A Slave series operates as a response to such inquiries and as a broader critique of the systemic racism that has led to the objectification and exploitation of Black people. Through humor, mockery, derision and subversion, Dungey’s series acts as a forum for the open expression of such grievances and features United States history from an African American perspective. Of this quality of her Ask A

Slave creation, Dungey stated, “I love playing Lizzie Mae because I get to reimagine these scenarios where I feel a little more empowered and I also feel like I am, in a weird way, empowering those people that didn’t have a voice at that time.”56

By imaginatively performing the otherwise masked aspects of slave culture, Dungey registers an exacting critique of the duplicitous nature of “polite” 19th century society. By executing an antithetical and trickster-inflected presentation, she exposes the undercurrent of depravity that allowed, promulgated and maintained human enslavement. The series thus successfully contradicts the timeworn “glorious” and emblematic stories regarding America’s founding and refutes the incomplete and discriminatory histories such accounts convey.

Primarily, her series refutes, in stark relief, the illusion that enslaved persons “ran away without cause,” which has been an account continually proclaimed by self-deluding members of society.

Of this she stated,

56 “Ask A Slave And Get A Real Answer.” here & Now with Robin Young and Jeremy Hobson. Friday September 6, 2013.

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Visitors wanted to act out their fantasies of what slavery was like… [and] we elevate history to an extreme extent…But we don’t take the time to understand…the story of what was considered a less valuable history, which is African-American history.57

In the first episode, Dungey illustrates how the bucolic plantation has been a site for the romanticization of slavery and the antebellum era generally. She achieves this by re-enacting actual scenarios in which Mt. Vernon visitors had posed questions to her as Caroline Branman.

One gentleman queried her, “How did you get to be housemaid for such a distinguished founding father? Did you see the advertisement in the newspaper?” To emphasize the tactless and brutal nature of his question however, Lizzie Mae in the Ask A Slave series sarcastically retorts,

Why yes it said wanted, one housemaid, no pay, preferably mulatto, saucy with breeding hips. Must work 18 hours a day, 7 days a week no holidays, but you get to wear a pretty dress and if you’re lucky, you just might carry some famous white man’s bastard child. So you better believe I read that, and ran right over and said, “sign me up.”58

In another instance, Dungey/Branman is confronted with the abysmally subjective statement, “Yeah Uh I just wanted to say that if you look at it honestly, slavery isn’t that bad

(shoulder shrug)…”59 To this, Lizzie Mae breaks from her outwardly reserved demeanor and sets into a litany of bleeped-out expletives: “Oh no that m’(bleep)‘fer did not come up in here talking that (bleep) good damned shit and…” Not ten seconds later though, she snaps back into her composed character, sipping tea, smiling demurely and asking politely, “Now what was that you were saying?” Lizzie Mae’s dualistic response brilliantly illustrates the masked and unmasked reactions that slaves routinely had to perform in the circumstances in which they lived. Each

57 Ibid,

58 Dungey. “Meet Lizzie Mae.” Ask A Slave: Season one: Episode 1.

59 Ibid, “You Can’t Make This Stuff Up.” Ask A Slave: Season one: Episode 3.

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enactment was an approach to survival that hinged on the presence and attention of an oft- antagonistic dominant white class. It is a long-standing strategy eloquently described by Paul

Lawrence Dunbar in his tragic 1896 poem We Wear the Mask, where he wrote,

We wear the mask that grins and lies, It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,— This debt we pay to human guile; With torn and bleeding hearts we smile, And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Why should the world be over-wise, In counting all our tears and sighs? Nay, let them only see us, while We wear the mask.

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries To thee from tortured souls arise. We sing, but oh the clay is vile Beneath our feet, and long the mile; But let the world dream otherwise, We wear the mask!60

While within the Black community signifying began as the enslaved person’s trope,61 it has remained an effective strategy for subversion ever since. Just as Dungey performs the language and mannerisms of 18th century genteel society, so too did the enslaved before her, in order to parody or trick the dominant master class. Through a shared appreciation of a joke, a sense of community and commiseration were fostered. Through acts of mockery and derision, a sense of empowerment and self-determination was regained. Dungey lodges her criticism through unmistakably feigned courtesy and outright sarcasm; enslaved persons could not be so bold in their acts of sedition without risking personal harm. In this way, the devil resides in the details, for the degree to which their signifying derision is veiled, reveals something of the white

60 Dunbar, ""We Wear the Mask." In The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar, 71.

61 Gates. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism, 286.

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community as well. According to James C. Scott in his groundbreaking work Weapons of the

Weak,

These practices, which rarely if ever called into question the system of slavery as such, nevertheless achieved far more in their unannounced, limited, and truculent way than the few heroic and brief armed uprisings about which so much has been written. The slaves themselves appear to have realized that in most circumstances their resistance could succeed only to the extent that it hid behind the mask of public compliance.62

The enslaved utilized acts of resistance such as feigned ignorance, sabotage, foot dragging, false compliance, flight and, not the least significant of the bunch, cultural resistance.63

Like Phillis Wheatley before her, Dungey utilizes the trickster’s trope of signifying and thereby communicates her dissent through the language and customs also practiced by the dominant class. Like artists such as Cole, Thomas and Ligon, she creates work that addresses parallel, and yet often overlooked, aspects of American culture. Dungey employs her own feats of tricksterism to undermine long held narratives that have denied the perspective and personhood of African

American people. A factually based example of subversion undertaken by the enslaved is re- enacted when Lizzie Mae’s runaway slave friend Emma asked her to, “Put a little hemlock in

[the mistress’s] tea for me will ya? Just enough to make her sick.” In indication of the frequency with which such stunts were undertaken Emma added, “Just like old times,” to which Lizzie Mae sentimentally replied, “Nothing would give me greater joy.”64 This scene illustrates Dungey’s interest in guises and disguises, the ploy and the trickster, masking and unmasking, the visible and the invisible, all African American strategies for survival that perpetuate within society today. According to Dexter Gordon in his essay Humor in African American Discourse:

62 Scott. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, 34.

63Ibid, 34.

64 Dungey. “New Leaf, Same Page.” Ask A Slave. Season One: Episode 4.

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Speaking of Oppression, “Although there is a repetition of some Western traditional concepts in aspects of African American humor, in such cases it is, in Gates’s terms, a repetition with a difference, a signifying black difference.”65 This difference has much to do with the circumstances Black humor was created to speak to and out of which it arose; its distinctive features address the discriminatory practices, which commenced in the slave era, and the context of racism and intolerance that remains. According to folklorist J. Mason Brewer, these types of

“games of humor are part of the humor that continues to fulfill the need for a sense of power in the midst of misery, the need for both a morale booster and amusement in Black culture.”66

The relationship between humor, tricksters’ acts and survival has perpetually been reflected in various forms of Black artistic expression. In Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, one character states, “All it takes to get along in this here [white] man’s town is a little shit, grit and mother-wit;”67 in the Ask A Slave series it is echoed in the myriad of ways that Dungey makes visible the invisible in order to undermine the systems and symbols of oppression to empower the powerless. Through her colonial-inflected lilt and saccharine grin, Lizzie Mae expresses anger, frustration and exasperation at the indifference shown towards the humanity and histories of Black people. Her acts of outspoken self-determination are reactions to queries such as, “What is your favorite part of the plantation?” and “Why don’t you just go to Massachusetts and go to school?”68 In reprisal she responds in kind; in doing so she brings attention to the vast divide between the questioners’ whitewashed American dream and the respondent’s blacklisted reality.

65 Gordon. “Humor in African American Discourse: Speaking of Oppression,” 259 and Gates, “Criticism in the Jungle.” In Black literature and literary theory, 3.

66 Spalding, Encyclopedia of Black Folklore and Humor, xii.

67 Ellison, Invisible Man, 176.

68 Dungey. “Meet Lizzie Mae.” Ask A Slave. Season One: Episode1.

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She airs these objections openly, without fear of societal consequence; she does so through a mocking sort of humor, which has historically been a safe and effective method of protest for members of the Black community. Put another way, Lizzie Mae, like the folk heroes before her, functions as the candid and sovereign alter ego of Branman and Dungey; she is unfettered and free of the yoke of repression that the others have perpetually been tethered to.

The trickster dares to find humor in the midst of misery and ventures to laugh in the face of the mighty. He utilizes euphemistic lies to dupe and cunning antics to succeed. At turns trickster tales reflect humor and pathos, tragedy and comedy; time and again her ruses expose slavery as the ultimate absurdity. The stories of his conduct compel laughter amidst misery and exemplify the limited resources at an enslaved person’s disposal. In this way he personifies the confined condition: given sovereignty he would run; given an army, he would battle; but given only tricks he is compelled to fight, ideologically.

Each artist and writer discussed in this chapter has likewise subsumed some aspect of the trickster’s charm. Through games of humor and guile, they create works that reveal the systemically racist aspects of society. Through meaningful critique, they express counter- narratives that speak truth to power and embody opposition. Their works serve as rebukes to the deleterious and incomplete records chronicled and disseminated by “historical” institutions; they express the collective need within the Black community for a storyline in which they, as the ostensibly disadvantaged, overcome nearly insurmountable challenges. In effect, each subversive action (past and present) becomes part of the larger dialogue, induces an incarnation of sovereignty and perpetuates an utterly transcendent delight. Foremost they convey the clever, tenacious and infallible qualities of the human spirit to express joy amidst oppression and to thwart forces that seek to dim or extinguish its light. The trickster, as a manifestation of these

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things, conveys the vital human conviction or delusion that there remains a better future than what one is experiencing now. Primarily the trickster-character recuperates the human spirit from the wreckage of forgone dreams.

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CHAPTER 6 CONCLUSION: RACISM, HUMOR AND THE BURDEN OF REPRESENTATION.

Laughter has a deep philosophical meaning, it is one of the essential forms of the truth concerning the world as a whole, concerning history and man; it is a peculiar point of view relative to the world; the world is seen anew, no less (and perhaps more) profoundly than when seen from the serious stand-point.

—Mikhail Bakhtin Rabelais and His World1

What is of consequence regarding humor that plays on stereotypes and alludes to racist ideas? What are its limits? Should it be limited, and if so, how? Is the application of humor an effective means of protest? Or is it more a coping mechanism contrived for the suppression or release of one’s psychic pain? The crucial question of this particular study is: does race-based satire operate primarily as a defiant challenge or as an anodyne to the critical state of race relations in the US? These questions taken together signal the complexity and critical cultural baggage of living in a society that has yet to come to terms with its past. After all, America is the land of the free, built by slaves, holding a quarter of the world’s prisoners. 2 It is a surveillance state erected to protect your freedoms; it is, “democratic destruction in the name of unknowns.”3

Through the efforts of grappling with such conflicts and contradictions, humor has become the answer to the cognitive dissonance created. It straddles the intersection between history and the human psyche; it emancipates Blackness from its historical burdens, while at the same time becoming empowered by them. It allows for a ‘change the joke, slip the yoke’ scheme that deals in parallax truths – able to hold disparate meanings for different audiences, and

1 Bakhtin. Rabelais and His World, 66.

2 Hamilton. “Paradoxical Truths of an Isolationist Empire.”

3 Ibid,

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become adaptable to the moment it’s in.4 These important issues are at the crux of any study of

Black humor, which wields its revolutionary force within the realm of socio-politics. Its critical analysis thus necessitates an understanding of the broader contexts that continue to influence its artistic development.

Democracy, Humor and the Critique of Power

Because it is practiced and predicated on a person’s freedom of expression, the degree to which humor is tolerated or repressed can be construed as a measurement of a subject’s or group’s liberties. This is particularly true regarding articulated forms of satirical humor, which are routinely utilized to critique systems of authority. In this sense, the social contract of humor relates closely to power because it holds the ability to influence. To persuade one toward laughter is to bridge an intellectual divide; to share in a laugh is to both concur in agreement and nod in understanding at a jest’s meaning. The collective laugh therefore conveys a symbiotic relationship that signals a form of social communalism, which is concomitant to the cultural code of societies worldwide.5 Ethologist Konrad Lorenz in his book On Aggression wrote of this phenomenon when he described how laughter concurrently forms connections and creates boundaries between individuals and groups. He wrote that shared laughter generates a,

strong fellow feeling among participants and joint aggressiveness against outsiders. Laughter forms a bond and simultaneously draws a line. If you cannot laugh with the others, you feel an outsider even if the laughter is in no way directed against yourself or indeed against anything at all.6

4 Partial sentence phrasing adopted from Hamilton essay, “Paradoxical Truths of an Isolationist Empire,” but put to divergent ends.

5 Morreal. The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor. 254.

6 Lorenz. On Aggression. Bantam Books, 2002. p. 284.

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Hence, if a person can make you laugh, he or she can cause you to see things, in an instant, just as they do. This point is not lost on those who wield its force or suffer the fallout following its use.7

Humor has often been defined as a mode of communication that “levels hierarchy”8 in such a way that all is considered comparable.9 Historically however, while Black Americans have existed within purported democracies, they have not been considered equal citizens under the law or consistently afforded the privilege of exercising open critiques of power. As a result, their humor has, out of necessity, differed in significant ways. Black communities have routinely and invariably been made aware of the risk that attacks on authority pose; this circumstance has prompted a tradition of emotion masking, which has also been reflected in various coded forms of Black expressive culture. Some of the best historical examples that reveal this were collected by Zora Neal Hurston and published in her work titled Mules and Men. For this oral history project, Hurston travelled to Black communities within the south in the 1930s, where she

7 In various instances the consequences of such humor have made national and international headlines: Sony Pictures Entertainment for example, created a satirical film titled The Interview that lampooned and lambasted North Korean leader Kim Jon Un. In response, the company’s servers were cyber-hacked, embarrassing emails were leaked to the public and its target, Kim Jong Un, called the film “an act of war.” In France, the reaction to the publication of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, left 12 people dead from terror attacks, carried out at the paper’s offices in retribution for its purported heretical depictions. Domestically on the other hand, in objection to Saturday Night Live’s improvisational parody of Donald J. Trump’s presidency and staff, the 45th president has posted an onslaught of bitter tweets. He has also threatened to sue comedians like Bill Maher and Rosie O’Donnell for defamation of character and accused satirical newspaper The Onion of false reporting. During this administration comedian Kathy Griffin was also investigated by the FBI for being photographed with a farcical decapitated head that resembled Trump and DJT himself made a foray into joke- telling when he tweeted, “Why would Kim Jong-un insult me by calling me "old," when I would NEVER call him ‘short and fat?’ Oh well, I try so hard to be his friend — and maybe someday that will happen!” According to Maggie Hennefeld in her essay Laughter in the Age of Trump, “He cannot take a joke precisely because he is a joke.” Michael Moore, the documentary filmmaker on the other hand, called for an Army of Satire to defeat Donald Trump and his overtly xenophobic administration policies. While each of these examples denotes, to various extents, the seriousness with which such humor is wielded and/or received, they also reflect the degree to which such critiques are permissible within public spheres. This consent however, has never been uniformly granted among state-subjects and has not consistently improved for those said groups over time.

8 Douglas. Implicit Meanings. London: Routledge, 1999.

9 Bakhtin. Rabelais and His World, 89. Bakhtin writes of the feast of fools as an example and states that it was a “temporary suspension of the entire official system with all its prohibitions and hierarchic barriers.”

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recorded folktale performances that communicated how emotions were both masked for self- preservation and openly aired for transcendent survival. In the tale titled Big Talk for example, a scene unfolds whereby one enslaved person tricks another into affronting their joint master. An excerpt of it reads:

“Thought you tole me, you cussed Ole Massa out and he never opened his mouf.” “Ah did” “Well, how come he never did nothin’ tuh yuh? Ah did it an’ he come nigh uh killin’ me.” “Man, you din’t go cuss ‘im tuh his face, didja?” “Sho Ah did. Ain’t dat whut you tole me you done?” “Naw, Ah didn’t say Ah cussed ‘im tuh his face. You sho is crazy. Ah thought you had mo’ sense than dat. When Ah cussed Ole Massa he wuz settin’ on de front porch an’ Ah wuz down at de big gate.”10

Through this tragicomic tale, the physical persecution of enslaved people is signaled, and the sly behaviors performed to navigate systems of persecution are conveyed; it instructs on how to communicate frustration openly and in a safe manner; it exhibits how stories allowed enslaved people to “laugh to keep from crying” and survive a persecutory chattel system. One Black musician later echoed a correlated sentiment during the post slavery era when he stated,

I’ve known guys that wanted to cuss out the boss and he was afraid to go up to his face and tell him what he wanted to tell him, and I’ve heard him sing those things—sing words, you know – back to the boss.” --- “yeah blues is a kind of revenge, you know… signifyin… couldn’t say it so sing it.11

Tragicomedy: Laughing to Keep from Crying

Blacks in the democratic United States of America have consistently existed within a contradictory system that has simultaneously extoled its subjects’ freedom while oppressing;

10 Hurston. Mules and Men, 77-78.

11 Litwak. How Free is Free, 31.

Quote originated from folklorist Alan Lomax’s published recording titled “Blues in the Mississippi Night,” where he interviewed musicians Memphis Slim, Big Bill Broonzy, and Sonny Boy Williamson in 1946. Memphis Slim is credited with the statement.

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moreover, Black people have endured a paradoxical reality whereby they, “were often said to be lazy; on other occasions however, they are dumb enough to ‘work like a n***.’ Similarly doubled and oxymoronic labels were stupid but crafty, humble but scheming, cowardly but reckless, innocent but lascivious.12 While these stereotypes were first formulated during the slave-era, they have been disseminated in various forms ever since.

Whether through politically wielded phrases such as that of the “welfare queen,” or within popular culture in the form of H&M ads that display a Black child wearing a hoodie emblazoned with the phrase “Coolest Monkey in the Jungle,” racist ideas have been promulgated since the dawn of colonialism and the advent of the African slave trade. Disparaging, racist and contradictory stereotypes have continually devastated communities of color by reducing groups of people to a set of one-dimensional traits, irrespective of a person’s character or by virtue of their deeds. This absurd categorical system has also lent itself quite vigorously to humorous critique and induced those affected to convey their positions through oftentimes tragicomic means. Comedian Trevor Noah for example, survived the South African apartheid system only to be confronted by other transmuted forms of racism in the US. In his performance as host of the

Daily Show and within his standup routines, he consistently confronts such circumstances. As a reaction to a rash of videos depicting police brutality against Black people and the daunting prospect of being confronted by police himself, Noah lamentably joked, “I don’t know how NOT to die.”13 This darkly comedic quip signaled not only the abhorrent tragedy of the multitudes of

Black men and women murdered by police without cause, but also the ways in which Black

12 Lowe. Jump at the Sun: Zora Neale Hurston’s Cosmic Comedy, 17.

13 Noah. Lost in Translation. 2015.

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people are so often condemned to physical persecution for no other reason beyond their skin color.

Prior to Noah’s comedic sketch, many other Black comics have registered similar accounts to this regard. Legendary comedian Richard Pryor for instance, performed a sketch to communicate the effects of police brutality and unfair policing practices on entire communities of color. One skit centered upon how Black and white people react differently in the presence of police officers. Whites, Pryor suggested, tended to see the police as friendly, while Blacks have been intuitively fearful of them because of the damaging policing practices that have occurred within their neighborhoods. To illustrate this dichotomy, Pryor performed how a white man and a Black man react inversely to being instructed by an officer to get out of the car.

Pryor: Cops put a hurtin on your ass man, you know? They really degrade you. White folks don’t believe that shit, don’t believe cops degrade.

White man: “Ah come’on sweetie, those [sic] people are resisting arrest…”

Pryor: Cause the police live in your neighborhoods see? And you be knowing them as officer Timson.

White man: “Hello officer Timson. Going bowling tonight? Yes ahh, nice Pinto you have hahaha…”

Pryor: White folks get a ticket they pull, over…

White man: “Hey officer, glad to be of help.”

Black man: “I- am -reach-ing- in-to- my—poc-ket---for- my- li-cense. Cause I don’t want to be no mother-fucking accident!”14

In this sketch, Pryor went on to describe a Black couple being pulled over and an invasive body search performed on the male passenger. To this Pryor stated, “What n*** feel

14 Pryor. Pryor Convictions and Other Life Sentences,137.

Both McCluskey. in her lecture “Richard Pryor’s America: Comedy, Social Criticism and the Ascendancy of African American Culture,” and Carpio in her book Laughing Fit to Kill, 91-92 detail this sketch as well.

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like having fun after that? Go home beat your kids and shit. Gonna take that shit out on somebody.” While there was much laughter in reaction to this remark, there is nothing about this circumstance that is, in actuality, funny. Pryor makes mention of parental violence towards children and signals the stress of a father’s degradation by a white officer as an immediate cause.

In doing so, he effectively conveys the subjection experienced by Black men and how brutality towards the less powerful gets perpetuated. In this sense, Noah and Pryor’s humor contradicts the

American myth of freedom and equality for all its citizens. Such jests instead emphasize the ways in which a person’s phenotype directs the trajectory of one’s life and tragically at times, one’s death. This is supported by the fact that the relationship between the police and communities of color has changed little since Pryor’s performance in 1974; this is further evidenced by the numerous horrific video recordings of Black individuals being killed by police officers that have since emerged and are to which Noah’s quip morbidly refers. Such reports, humor-inflected or otherwise, cause the distance between first and second-hand accounts to shrink and reveal the criminal justice system’s role in maintaining and perpetuating racial hierarchies in the United States. In this sense, the source of much Black humor has not been gaiety and delight, but sorrow and mourning.15 Its tragicomic nature erupts from a deep pathos resulting from the limited terms of one’s existence. It is a condition extant in numerous other forms of Black cultural expression as well. Of blues music for example, Langston Hughes remarked that,

15 Carpio. “Introduction.” In Laughing Fit to Kill, 7.

American humorist Mark Twain has made similar assertions regarding the source of all humor. In the Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar entry preceding chapter 10 of his book Following the Equator for example, he stated, “Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of Humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.” Twain, Mark. Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World. Hartford: The American Publishing Company, 1897.

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They always impressed me as being very sad, sadder even than the spirituals, because their sadness is not softened with tears but hardened with laughter, the absurd, incongruous laughter of a sadness without even a god to appeal to.16

Race and Subversive Humor

Within and beyond the confines of the Black community, humor has been used to promote or discredit stereotypes regarding swaths of people that have been pigeonholed because of their race. This practice has become a defining characteristic of the most adept and astute

American humorists. From T.D. Rice to Mark Twain and Dick Gregory to Dave Chappelle, strategies of humor have been applied to effectually endorse and/or challenge racially motivated characterizations and caricatures. Within this domain, Black humor has exemplified the potential of wit to both disrupt authority and entertain an audience. This facility has caused it to be an ideal vehicle for critiquing racist practices because it effectively penetrates barriers of emotionally difficult and socially challenging subject matter. Of this Glenda Carpio asserted that

Black humor is “a vehicle for catharsis,” that aims to “release racial tensions,” “purge racist attitudes” and a medium through which one can symbolically “redress chattel slavery and its aftermath.”17

Nevertheless, laughter associated with representations of racially charged matters remains an especially risky and challenging realm to traverse. In instances where satirical targets are

16 Hughes. letter to Carl Van Vechten, qtd. in Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes: Volume 1: 1902- 1941: I, Too, Sing America, 111.

17 Carpio, Laughing Fit to Kill, 73. Tense changed to match sentence context and phrasing. This quote was specifically applied by Carpio to describe the comedy of Richard Pryor. Carpio discusses humor’s power to give rise to a form of catharsis and its capacity to be applied to redress themes of racism in regards to Richard Pryor’s comedy specifically. She writes, “seeking catharsis, Pryor uses his power…to stage rituals of redress with respect to American slavery.” 72-73.

In Laughing Fit to Kill 14, Carpio also applies Freud’s theory of humor prompting a form of catharsis as formulated in his work Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (1950/1960). According to Carpio, Freud argued that jokes can “give voice to that which is taboo and allow the energy involved in keeping it in place to be released through laughter.”

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clear-cut, and the elicitation of laughter is aimed strictly at the absurdity of racially motivated ideas, humor remains unambiguous, efficient and effective at challenging such systems of marginalization. In instances where it is not, debates have ensued regarding its appropriateness, purpose and/or alleged negative effects. This circumstance is evidenced by the public reception and demonstrated outrage that works by artists such as David Hammons, Jason Musson and Kara

Walker have inspired. For critics, the humor exhibited draws away from the devastatingly real consequences of a racist society. This conviction has also, in many ways, been affirmed by the art world’s own inert response to its complicity in upholding systematic structural inequalities. It has, after all, been a field more captivated by the aestheticization and/or exploitive nature of racism than in implementing the necessary work to become a more inclusive and less racially biased domain. In turn, the art world itself has correspondingly been confronted and mocked by

Black artists through sardonic and/or humor-inflected means. Installation works by Keith Piper and Fred Wilson, performances by Lorraine O’Grady and Adrian Piper and referential paintings by Mickalene Thomas and Kehinde Wiley have each conveyed alternative narratives to challenge prevailing biases within art world practice. Nevertheless, such works have often been considered aberrations within the normativities of contemporary practice and have likewise often been exhibited in ways that support this prevailing idea. Moreover, while the inclusion of such artworks in major exhibits is a step in the right direction, it can never fully counter or rectify the longstanding and perpetual omission of Black artists from the art historical canon. Consequently, while sardonic forms of humor are effective and instrumental in affecting change, it is not an all- powerful curative to the behemoth set of issues that it draws attention to and critiques.

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Humor, Laughter and Perilous Terrain

According to French theorist Henri Bergson, one of the most important functions of comedy is to, “expose pretense, vanity, arrogance, and to bring the powerful down to size.”18

While numerous Black artists have employed humor to attack systems of power, this persuasive weapon remains an unwieldy one. To the extent that such comicality is perceived as in line with, or unthreatening to, an audience’s value system, their comedic works have been considered benign and/or ‘funny.’ To the degree that such comicality is associated with divergent themes such as race and racism, its incendiary force is compounded and is at times, called into question. Moreover, the final and definitive laugh remains a subjective thing, untrustworthy and never entirely within a humorist’s grasp or control. This feature causes humor to be considered compelling, alluring and, most of all, provocative. It also causes it to be an unmanageable and imprecise tool for conveying meanings because its implications deviate from what is intended by the purveyor, according to the biases of the receiver.

Richard Pryor famously and directly realized this consequence in the course of his comedic career and then altered his performances accordingly. Pryor’s sketches principally reflected Black working-class culture, disparaged the powerful and humanized the underdog through various nuanced character sketches. According to Audrey Thomas McCluskey, author of

Richard Pryor’s America: Comedy, Social Criticism, and the Ascendency of African American

Culture,

Telling stories rather than jokes, Pryor brought to a nation adjusting to the demands and disappointments of the waning Civil Rights Movement an acceptance of Black culture on its own terms, without apology.19

18 McCluskey. “Richard Pryor’s America: Comedy, Social Criticism and the Ascendancy of African American Culture,”5 and Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, 5, 20-21, 174.

19 McCluskey. “Richard Pryor’s America: Comedy, Social Criticism and the Ascendancy of African American Culture,” 5.

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His sketches were littered with profanity; unlike Black comics that preceded him, he routinely incorporated the n-word in his performances. Of its use, in his autobiography Pryor

Convictions he claimed,

Nigger. And so this one night I decided to make it my own. Nigger. I decided to take the sting out of it. Nigger. As if saying it over and over again would numb me and everybody else to its wretchedness. Nigger. Said it over and over like a preacher singing hallelujah…Saying it changed me, yes it did. It gave me strength, let me rise above...20

While Pryor’s embrace and use of this word has been perpetuated in a myriad of ways within contemporary linguistic forms of Black expression, Pryor ceased using the term decades before the close of his comedic career. Of this modification he stated that it is a “wretched word” and that after travelling to Africa, he left

regretting ever having uttered the word on a stage or off it…. Its connotations weren't funny, even when people laughed. To this day I wish I'd never said the word…It was misunderstood by people. They didn't get what I was talking about. Neither did I....So I vowed never to say it again. 21

Pryor’s statement suggests that he began to question the utility of the word and the ethics of its use. With and without it in his act however, he was able to navigate the difficult terrain of racially charged, serious topics through an innovative and groundbreaking comedic voice. He was able to bring an unabashed form of Black cultural expression to the mainstream public and through socially aware sketches, to critique his audiences into fits of laughter. The circumstances of doing so however, particularly within a society that had yet to fully deal with its own racist, slave-holding past, did not come without a cost. At one point, he expressed his ambivalent relationship to his position through a performance in the opening scene of his 1977 self-titled show. For it, Pryor cast John Belushi as a whip-wielding captain of a slave ship; Pryor played an

20 Pryor and Gold. Pryor Convictions and Other Life Sentences, 116-117.

21 Ibid, 175.

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enslaved man, who was additionally punished into having his own NBC special. McCluskey, commented on the scene that, “In this short skit Pryor manages to compare his predicament in the white controlled world of corporate television to slavery.”22 In many ways the two are forever linked by the profits made from histories of Black exploitation.

According to Leon Litwack in his powerful essay, “Fight the Power! The Legacy of the

Civil Rights Movement,” “How the United States chose to confront the problems of poverty and race is instructive: it expanded its prison industry, thus finding another way to isolate the centers of power from the devastation they had caused.”23 Pryor was acutely aware of and affected by the disastrous retrenchment of racism that was happening all around him; he was painfully cognizant of the ways in which citizens of the US (politically appointed and otherwise) had worked to neutralize the fragile gains accomplished by the Civil Rights movement. After all, in much of the rural South, unspoken codes of conduct maintained what was once enshrined in law and Jim Crow signage.24 In the North, such racist acts were made manifest in other insidious ways. These included but were not limited to the creation of ghettos through city planning and the perpetuation of educational inequalities and school segregation by income and residence. Of this predicament one black activist commented in 1985,

Everything has changed, but nothing has changed. In the 1960s Bull Connor threw us in jail, sicked dogs on us, turned the water hose on us. Today Birmingham has a black mayor. Last year he picked me up at the airport and gave me a key to the city. But in the shadow of City Hall I saw black people still living

22 McCluskey.“Richard Pryor’s America: Comedy, Social Criticism and the Ascendancy of African American Culture,” 17.

23 Litwack. “Fight the Power! The Legacy of the Civil Rights Movement.” 18.

24 Ibid. 7.

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in slums.... Downtown I met blacks of the expanding middle class. In the shadows of downtown, I observed a growing underclass.25

Aware of these circumstances, Pryor utilized his comedy to bring to the fore the many ways society had not come to terms with its racist past, present and by all accounts what was to be its future. Feeling the weight of these circumstances, Pryor quit performing mid-show at one point in his career, and reportedly walked off stage telling the audience to “kiss [his] happy, rich

Black ass.”26 It seemed that Pryor had come to feel the force of the conflicted realization that the laugh of others is a subjective, uncontrollable entity, and in his own words that, “there's a thin line between to laugh with and to laugh at.”27

Dave Chappelle, who has been called Pryor’s comedic heir, also infamously and abruptly took a sojourn from comedy. Of this Chappelle joked that he didn’t “[walk] away from the money,” (a 50-million-dollar contract to be exact), but from the circumstances involved in creating a racially themed comedy series. He described a revelatory tipping point at the height of his show’s success when he stated,

I was doing sketches that were funny, but socially irresponsible. I felt like I was deliberately being encouraged and was overwhelmed. So it’s like you’re getting flooded with things and you don’t pay attention to things like your ethics… Like there’s this one sketch we did that was about this pixie that would appear whenever racist things happen. Whenever someone would make you feel like they

25 Luix Overbea, "Rosa Parks Took Her Stand for Civil Rights—By Sitting Down," Christian Science Monitor, November 29, 1985, pp. 1, 56 (quotation); William E. Schmidt, "Selma, 20 Years after the Rights March," New York Times, March 1, 1985, pp. A1, A12.

26 Saul “Richard Pryor: Meltdown at the Hollywood Bowl.” The Guardian, January 11, 2015 and Ibid, 7. During his performance at the Hollywood Bowl on 18 September 1977, Richard Pryor closed his act with this inflammatory statement. The Hollywood Bowl was organized to benefit homosexual rights, but prior to his performance, Pryor simmered backstage when he witnessed acts of racism toward other black performers. He viewed this circumstance as hypocritical since he was performing at a supposed “human rights” event. Just before uttering that memorable line Pryor told the audience, “When the niggers were burning down Watts, you motherfuckers were doing what you wanted on Hollywood Boulevard, didn’t give a shit about it.” Also of note is that during this performance Pryor spoke openly about his own sexual experience with a man. According to Saul, “With that confession, Pryor became perhaps the first major Hollywood celebrity to talk graphically about his own positive experience of gay sex – and certainly the first to do so in front of tens of thousands of people.”

27 McPherson, “The New Comic Style of Richard Pryor.” New York Times, April 27, 1975.

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were calling you that N-word, but don’t say it. It was funny and the premise of the sketch was that every race had this like pixie, this like racial complex, and uh but the pixie was in blackface. Now blackface is a very difficult image, but the reason I’d chosen blackface at the time was because this was going to be the visual personification of the N word… It was a good spirited [sic] intention behind it. But, what I didn’t consider is how many people watch the show and how the way people use Television is subjective… so then when I am on the set and we’re finally taping the sketch someone on set that was white and laughed in such a way, I know the difference between laughing with me and laughing at me. It was the first time I had gotten a laugh that I was uncomfortable with…I didn’t want Black people to be disappointed with me for putting that out there...It’s a complete moral dilemma.28

In fact, Chappelle’s statement above mirrors much of what Pryor had stated in terms of his position in traversing the murky terrain of humor’s subjectivity as it relates to issues of race and racism. Both comics considered the non-critical laugh an issue and described the problems associated with viewers consuming their comedy without any reflection on the satirical aspects of their work. Each created sketches to critique the diabolical weight of racism and its ill effects, but concluded that in certain circumstances their humor was misinterpreted and misconstrued as supporting ideas that they were actively trying to degrade and/or correct. This was particularly evident when their performances incorporated stereotypes that involved racist ideas. Visual artworks that recall the history and legacy of racism have been misread along the same lines.

Michael Ray Charles for example, creates paintings that ridicule partial accounts of

America’s history and romanticized descriptions of the South’s “charm and values.” He achieves this by co-opting minstrel-inflected imagery and re-inscribes it to divergent ends. His work titled

The NBA is Tantastic from his Forever Free series for instance, explores the way in which racist stereotypes operate and endure within popular culture (Michael Ray Charles, The NBA is

Tantastic, From the Forever Free Series, 1995, acrylic latex, stain and copper penny on paper,

60.5 x 36 inches). Using an advertising format and visual codes reminiscent of the minstrel-era,

28 Chappelle. “Oprah Interview of Dave Chappelle.” By Winfrey. The Oprah Winfrey Show. February 3, 2005.

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Charles depicted a wide-smiling sambo-like black-faced character on a flat greyish blue background. The caricatured male figure is depicted wearing a white and blue basketball uniform emblazoned with the number one; he is pictured wearing cartoonish white gloves while running and dribbling a basketball. Eight uniformly equidistant braids sprout from his head. The caricatured figure’s smile is bright, white and maniacal. Streaming out from a white ribbon are seven dollar signs placed by the figure’s left ear. At the bottom of the work, a play on the motto,

‘NBA is fantastic’ is placed in white and black lettering. The f however, has been exchanged with a t, making the slogan read tantastic instead. Presumably Charles made this letter adjustment to signal the overwhelmingly black male involvement in the sport. According to

Gwendolyn Du Bois Shaw in her book, Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker, this work

…echoes David Hammons installation piece Higher Goals (1986), in which basketball hoops have been extended to unreachable heights to emphasize the dysfunctional relationship between sports, education, and achievement in African American culture.29

Like other artists and comics that preceded him, Charles does employ wit and irony to attack such systems of degradation but admits that, “A lot of Blacks don’t want to see images like mine; perhaps they bring up too much pain.”30 Of his work artist Elizabeth Catlett remarked, “Do we really want to take these images into the 21st century?’’31 Her critique suggests that his work is too reliant on its propagandistic and racist roots to be effectively legible as countering the racist views they reference. At the same time, Charles himself has been

29 Du Bois Shaw, Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker, 34.

30 Charles, “Michael Ray Charles on Racial Stereotypes,” 205.

31 Gooden. “An evening with Michael Ray Charles.” International Review of African American Art, 62.

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disturbed that people don’t always read his representations as fictitious caricatures or rightly interpret the criticality and/or socially aware meaning behind his work. Instead of recognizing the historical and present-day injustices that the work represents, Charles has been confronted with questions along the lines of, “So tell me about the Black woman in this painting.” Inquests such as these reveal presumptions or more specifically the way people too-often read grotesque caricatures of racism as true-to-form representations of people; they don’t see such depictions as exemplifications of belief systems that have shaped American culture for the worse; they don’t view these caricatures as anything but Black people themselves.

Nevertheless, it is the inflammatory aspects of such humor that unfortunately garner the most attention. There has been much discussion of the offense that the works considered thus far have caused, but not even nearly enough discussion of the offenses to which they refer. Pryor, like other humorists, had been made acutely aware of this duplicitous circumstance. Upon being asked about the explicit content of his jokes, he had the following cutting rejoinder: “You know what's obscene to me? The president of the United States stands on television and tells people that we are helping to fight communism in South America by killing the people. I would never do that.” Through this riposte, Pryor exposed society’s outrage at his jests as misdirected and hypocritical in nature; in doing so, he deflected the accusatory terms of the original query back onto those powerful figureheads that continually perpetrate severe transgressions against humanity. Pryor underscored the way in which human causalities as the result of oppression and imperialism are routinely excused; he signaled how the public has focused more on controversies of less consequence (such as the lewd aspects of his jokes) rather than on the type of human subjugation that such humor recalls and recollects. These points are worthy of consideration in regard to subversive humor in all forms, for the principal aim of those who wield its force have

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effectively participated in transgressing boundaries, spoken truth to power and/or compelled audiences to contemplate how and why systems of persecution exist and persist. Regarding this condition and artists’ use of humor to underscore symbols of racism, Glenda Carpio wrote, “The conjuring artist says, ‘I’m going to bring these things fully alive in front of you, and make them bigger and louder and get you to ask what it is that drives these stereotypes.”32

Aesthetic Embodiment

Conveying racism’s relevance, or even existence, to those not afflicted by its malaise, rests on an audience’s awareness of specific histories, the success of a humorist’s delivery and the capacity of an audience to experience a sense of benevolence toward the artist/performer and the subjects to which he or she refers. For some viewers, if the touchstone of shared experience of subjugation is absent, the obstacle to empathy and understanding remains insurmountable. For them, the satire involved in the representation of stereotypes is often entirely misconstrued as a perhaps exaggerated, but ultimately literal, representation of what is. Tragically, the effect of the humor’s criticality is interpreted as opposing that to which it was originally intended. It is a belief system that conscious or not, holds Blacks as other, deficient and even subhuman in order to justify their subjugation in untold insidious forms. This conflicted condition is reflective of the socio-historical indoctrination that commenced with the advent of colonialism; it was perpetuated through slavery, disseminated though propaganda campaigns like minstrelsy and is preserved in a myriad of harmful and discriminatory practices that afflict society today.

This has been made manifest through the expansion of American neoliberal policy

(economic examples include: privatization, fiscal austerity, deregulation, and privileged reductions in government taxation designed to assist economic growth in the private sectors);

32 Carpio. Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery. and Lambert, “Laughing at Stereotypes,” Harvard Magazine.

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this policy is directly linked to the concept of race in that it operates to de-emphasize the history of racism in this country, while at the same time reinforcing the credos and realities of said inequality. According to Randolph Hohle in his manuscript, Race and the Origins of American

Neoliberalism, neoliberalism is detrimental to people of color and the non-elite classes of society; he states it is, “a political project which is designed to create conditions for the capital accumulation based on the upward redistribution of resources, and an ideological adherence to meritocratic notions of individual success and personal responsibility.”33 Angela Davis builds on this idea and adds that it relies on the assumption that, “history does not matter,”34 even while it is readily apparent that we continue to inhabit troubled histories of racial discrimination in detrimental ways. After all, it has taken over a century since the close of the Civil War for the erection of a national museum to honor African American history generally and those that lost their lives to slavery and Jim Crow practices specifically; meanwhile monuments to Confederate generals and soldiers have been plentiful across the US for decades and protests persist when they are dismantled, or Confederate flags are removed from government office buildings. In her

2008 “Vice Chancellor's Oration on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination,” Angela Davis stated that in the neoliberal model,

democracy emerges as a synonym for capitalism, which has reemerged as the telos of history. In the official narratives of U.S. history, the historical victories of civil rights are dealt with as the final consolidation of democracy in the United States, having relegated racism to the dustbin of history. The path toward the complete elimination of racism is represented in the neoliberalist discourse of "color-blindness" and the assertion that equality can only be achieved when the law, as well as individual subjects, become blind to race. This approach, however, fails to apprehend the material and ideological work that race continues to do.35

33 Hohle. Race and the Origins of American Neoliberalism, 1.

34 Davis. “Vice Chancellor's Oration on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.”

35 Ibid.

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In the phrasing of David Foster Wallace, this is the water we swim in. This conflicted condition remains part of our cultural consciousness and is recurrently revealed in how meanings are applied to things. While shared meanings do permit us to make sense of the world, according to Stuart Hall in his critical lecture Representation & the Media,

If you want to begin to change the relationship of the viewer to the image, you have to intervene in exactly that powerful exchange between the image and its psychic meaning, the depths of the fantasy, the collective and social fantasies with which we invest images, in order to, as it were, expose and deconstruct the work of representation which the stereotypes are doing.36

Artists, comedians and social critics have made powerful strides in this regard. Their works have been deployed in mainstream media contexts and have been utilized as weapons in the fight against entire systems of racism.37 The same dynamics at play within works by Black artists, writers, comedians and social critics have also been present within the works of other denigrated groups of people that have been maligned in similar ways. In America, Jewish humorists are likely the most well-known group to have utilized laughter in the fight against racism. In the spirit of Adam Sandler’s comical Hanukah song, which recounts famous Jews, the list of Jewish humorists includes but is not limited to: Groucho Marx and the Marx Brothers,

Sholom Aleichem, Lenny Bruce, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Rodney Dangerfield, Andy

Kaufman, Gene Wilder, Gilda Radner, Joan Rivers, Larry David, Jerry Seinfeld, Adam Sandler,

Jon Stewart, Sarah Silverman and Seth Rogan. Each has used his or her platform and talent to make audiences laugh in general but have at the same time, often underscored the experience of exclusion experienced by Jews in particular.

36 Hall. “Representation & The Media,” 21.

37 Campaigns such as Black Lives Matter and the #MeToo movements for example have deployed such tactics of humor to attack systems of racism. Much of these have occurred on social media platforms.

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There has been a long history of Jewish humor being used as a type of psychic resistance with respect to systems of oppression and subjugation. Some of the most tragic forms were created during the Holocaust. Viktor Frankl, the Aushwitz survivor and founder of logotherapy wrote that a number of songs, poems and jokes were created with “underlying satire regarding the camp. All were meant to help us forget, and they did help.”38 One song from the

Sachsenhausen camp, for example, described the beatings that were a daily occurrence there.

Through irony and bitter type of laughter it was recounted:

The first kick and you will feel much better,

They bash your face— do not raise a sweat,

The third kick, really is a laughing matter,

After the fourth — your pants are rather wet!

Four big bullies kick you in good rhythm,

Spit six of your teeth out when they are quite done,

The seventh heel is dancing on your tummy,

It stamps on it, and it is really fun!39

Other examples targeted the illogical nature of anti-Semitic ideologies that precipitated such horrific acts in the first place:

A Jew was stopped on the street by a bully and challenged to say whose fault it was that Europe was in such a mess. “The Jews,” said the Jew, knowing his audience and being no fool, “and bicycle riders.” “The bicycle riders?” replied the bully, nonplussed. “Why the bicycle riders?” “Why the Jews?” the Jew replied.40

38 Dauber, Jeremy. Jewish Comedy: A Serious History, 31.

39 Ibid. 30.

40 Ibid., 27.

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Latinx, Asian, Indian, Pakistani and other minority groups have likewise created works that respond to conditions of marginalization. Those that have created works specific to such conditions in America include but are not limited to works by Latinx poets such as Martin

Espada and Willie Perdomo and stand-up routines by Asian comics such as Margaret Cho and

Ali Wong, by Indian comics such as Aziz Ansari and by Pakistani comics such as Kumail

Nanjiani.41 Each has created works that challenge racist ideologies through humorous and caustic assessments of the majority culture. An example of subversive humor meant to critique racism targeting Latinx communities is viewable within Martin Espada’s poem titled “The New

Bathroom Policy at English High School:”

The boys chatter Spanish

from the bathroom

while the principal

listens from his stall

The only word he recognizes

Is his own name

and this constipates him

So he decides to ban Spanish

from the bathrooms

Now he can relax.42

This poem humorously draws attention to the paranoia of presumably white, non-Spanish speaking communities, particularly when they are in the presence of native Spanish speakers. At the same time, it contemporaneously relates to the various ways in which Black individuals have

41 In the case of Cho and Wong, they have also been accused of supporting Asian stereotypes in their comedy.

42 Espada.

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also been criminalized while performing everyday activities such as sitting in a Starbucks, leaving an AirBNB residence with their suitcases, or barbequing in a park. Unfortunately, it correspondingly recalls the racist and xenophobic rhetoric exhibited by Donald Trump in the lead up to and advancement of his eventual presidency.

Subversive humor has consistently and covertly been utilized to critique such contemporary ideas and actions involving racism. One example was performed by rebel multimedia artist Robin Bell (also known as bellvisuals). Bell’s seditious act was disseminated on social media in confrontation with President Trump’s remarks deriding the protections and people immigrating from countries he deemed “shitholes.” According to Trump, “shithole” countries included Haiti, El Salvador and African countries. Trump also suggested that the

United States should instead bring more people from countries such as Norway. While supporters claimed his remarks were conceived of as economic in nature, it was obvious that the countries he grouped together as “shitholes” have populations of primarily non-white origin.

This was just another instance in the litany of racist remarks and actions made by Trump over the years. Other examples include but are not limited to: advertisements he took out calling for the death penalty for members of the Central Park Five; his false claim for years that Barack Obama was not born in the United States; his personal attacks on protesting black athletes and his claim that there were fine people "on both sides" after neo-Nazis rioted in Charlottesville, VA in 2017.

Gorilla artist bellvisuals however, had the last laugh at Trump’s expense in the first instance. Bell created a video-collaged projection of the word “SHITHOLE” with floating happy faced turd icons flowing out from the central region. This larger than life projection was briefly aimed at the entrance of the Trump International Hotel and a videoed recording of the event was made to be disseminated to the masses on social media. Other videographers also responded to

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Trump’s “shithole” remark, editing together for example, bits of newscasters across mainstream media repeating the word “shithole” on national television. Each of these videoed collages succinctly and effectively emphasized the absurd turn that national politics had taken. Each took the paradigm of Trump as the ambassador of “straight talk” and savior from the pretense of liberal notions of political correctness and respect to its most pathetic and crude extreme; they succinctly exposed the buffoonery and disrepute that had beset what had once been thought of as the revered office of the President.

The Empire however, has also struck back in its own manipulative and insidious ways.

For example, while Trump amiably described some Neo-Nazi protestors in Charlottesville as

“fine people,” Black NFL players who took a knee in protest of police brutality during the national anthem were described by the political right as “disrespecting the flag,” and according to Trump, “maybe they shouldn’t be in the country.” The narrative of an act of solidarity in empathy with and protest of Black American citizens wrongfully killed by the police, was thus twisted into a narrative that vilified those players as unpatriotic and thereby undeserving of citizenship. It moved from a focus on the victims, to the treasonous acts of Black players. This encompassing consequence has not been limited to sports figures. Nearly all of the artists, comics and writers discussed thus far have applied such interventionist strategies in their work to defeat the insidious nature of racially classifying systems. Often to their detriment however, they themselves have been further pigeonholed and viewed as living embodiments and expressions of that which their works represent. In the case of those Black artists who depict the ill effects of racism, they have often been perceived as tragic casualties of a discriminatory societal system.

This limiting condition is one that many Black artists, writers and performers have commented on and also sought to transcend. Ralph Ellison expressed such an idea in regard to Black arts in

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his 1963-64 essay titled The World and the Jug. Foremost, Ellison argued for the preeminence of the role of the artist’s intention for a given work and/or the objective value of the work itself rather than assessing works through a reading of the circumstances of a writer’s life. He cautioned against looking “at a Negro [and seeing] not a human being but an abstract embodiment of living hell.”43 He supported this statement by qualifying it in explaining,

“because it is his life and no mere abstraction in someone’s head.”44 Ellison also noted the peril of understanding writers and their artistic works strictly through frameworks of racial classification. He used James Baldwin’s writing as an example, noting that Baldwin himself hoped to “prevent himself from becoming merely a Negro; or even, merely, a Negro writer.”45

This demand has likewise been resonated by visual artists as well. In the essay titled The Negro

Artist’s Dilemma, Romare Bearden argued that works by Negro artists reflect “the trends of the times” and that no single characteristic indicates the race of its maker.46 Like Baldwin, he concluded:

…the artist, of whatever race, must explore with integrity and sensitiveness the processes of life that he sees and feels. The Negro artist must come to think of himself not primarily as a Negro artist, but as an artist. 47

Many contemporary artists have continued to echo such demands on viewers and the art- world at large. Recall that Kara Walker expressed, “I am more than a woman, more than the

43 Ellison, “The World and a Jug,” 112.

Ellison wrote “The World and a Jug” in response to an essay by Irving Howe titled “Black Boys and Native Sons,” which appeared in the Autumn 1963 issue of the magazine, Dissent. According to Ellison, he and James Baldwin were vilified in Howe’s essay as “”Black boys” masquerading as false, self deceived “native sons.” Richard Wright on the other hand was positioned as the spiritual father of all Black writers and is praised by Howe for his “honesty” and his protest as a literary genre (108).

44 Ibid, 112.

45 Ibid, 110.

46 Bearden “The Negro Artist’s Dilemma,” 21.

47 Ibid, 22.

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descendant of Africa, more than my fathers daughter. More than Black more than the sum of my experiences thus far”48 She, like Ellison, Baldwin, Bearden and numerous others, has aspired to have her work and personhood recognized and understood within and beyond the parameters of the African American marker. This sentiment has been reiterated in the positioning of the post- black movement and the Freestyle and 40 Americans exhibitions that were inspired by such demands; it is resonated within all calls for recognition of the interconnectedness, embededness, and contributions that Black individuals have made, culturally, artistically and materially within society past and present. Most of all, it is an appeal that their own humanity be beheld and understood within that of all others. After all, Ellison most eloquently wrote, “What moves a writer to eloquence is less meaningful than what he makes of it. How much, by the way, do we know of Sophocles’ wounds?49”

Transcendence

In the essay The Role of Feminist Aesthetics in Feminist Theory, Hilde Hein argues, “If experience is to be more than the inscription of what is momentarily given and gone, it must be aesthetically embodied…That is how we are carried from experience to reflection.”50 While she was referring to concerns specific to feminist art and aesthetics, the point she makes is relevant across the gamut of human rights issues. Enduring artworks, written accounts and performances affect our understanding of the present and help us make meaning of our shared history. The works hold the capacity to convey ideas and transport audiences to realities that are beyond the viewer’s direct experience. This transcendent quality remains a defining characteristic of the arts, and yet it is often described as in conflict with expressions of opposition. Poet Claudia Rankine

48 Walker. kara_walker_official. Instagram, March 23, 2017. 1:28 PM UTC.

49 Ellison, “The World and a Jug,” 111-112.

50 Hein. “The Role of Feminist Aesthetics in Feminist Theory,” 284.

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wrote of this struggle between the personalized obligation to create works that communicate resistance and the need to express one’s imaginative contemplation aimed at earthly transcendence. Of this conflict within her work Dan Chiasson commented, “A poet wants to say more than ‘no, no, no’ all the time, but in the great poems we often find this conflict between song and reprimand, beauty and exposé.”51 Before Rankine, Baldwin had expressed a similar conflict, specifically in his manuscript Everybody’s Protest Novel. In it, he noted the importance of surpassing the reductive frame of oppositional art and similarly expressed that

The failure of the protest novel lies in its rejection of life, the human being, the denial of his beauty, dread, power, in its insistence that it is his categorization alone which is real and which cannot be transcended.52

According to Baldwin, works must communicate more to audiences than resistance; they must endeavor to reveal love, joy, anguish and all that encompasses the spectrum of our shared human experience. They must strive to connect deeply to an audience’s sense of self, which works against any sense of separation between “them and us.” It is an interventionist strategy that can be employed for subverting the forces of dehumanization that racism necessarily entails and at the same time remains a practice of radical honesty and revelation, meant to work against that which holds any individual or group of persons as fundamentally inferior.

The projects of many of the artists, writers, comics, folklorists and musicians discussed in this document overlap with the terms of this entreaty in significant ways. Each, through their own manner of storytelling, has created works that impart essential truths about the human condition, which resonate within and beyond frameworks of opposition. In these works, a

51 Chiasson. “Color Codes: A Poet Examines Race in America.” The New Yorker.

52 Baldwin. Everybody’s Protest Novel, 23.

In this early work, Baldwin considers “protest fiction” such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, incapable of adequately conveying the Negro experience.

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commitment to sincerity and candor has been expressed and meaningful interventions of resistance have been made. They have communicated the significance of exceeding strictures of externally assigned identities. They have applied strategies of humor to appeal to an audience’s unguarded willingness and motivation to laugh, while having surreptitiously called attention to that which has otherwise been repressed or ignored.

Some, like Jason Musson, Kara Walker and Michael Ray Charles have toyed with the smug laughter of cynical disavowal, while others, like David Hammons, Glenn Ligon, Hank

Willis Thomas, Carrie Mae Weems, Lorraine O’Grady and Keith Piper have deployed the cutting humor of incisive satire. Their wit has thus acted as an anesthetic and antidote.

Nevertheless, they have created access points to an acknowledgement and reckoning with what is and what has been; they have invoked humor for lucidity and as an act for transcendence. In this sense, to grasp the gravity of their humor is to understand both its consequences and its truth(s); for through fiery depths that the legacy of slavery and colonialism has wrought, broader truths about a world teeming with life and loss, humanity and inhumanity, freedom and oppression have been conveyed. Richard Pryor himself reflected on the dynamism and shifting qualities within the wit of the beset, when of his own comicality he pointedly affirmed, “What I’m saying may be profane, but it is also profound.”53

53 Robbins and Ragan, Richard: Black and Blue, 30.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Jody Berman's research on the Arts of Africa began when she was an undergraduate at the University of Florida, studying under Dr. Robin Poynor. Because of her interest in the discipline, she continued her studies in the area, receiving a master’s degree in the field. Jody’s research in the field has focused on the Arts of the African Diaspora and specifically on the art of blacksmith Yaw Owusu Shangofemi. Yaw began smithing as an apprentice to National Treasure,

Philip Simmons of Charleston, S.C., but his work departs from that of Simmons's in that Shangofemi’s work is strongly influenced by the Yoruba religion, which he has practiced since becoming involved with Oyotunji Village decades ago. Through numerous interviews with

Shangofemi, Yoruba and Lukumi (Santeria) practitioners, Jody was able to gain knowledge of the Africanisms that exist within the communities of Florida today.

Jody has also involved herself in curating exhibitions of African Art at the University of

Florida. At Grinter Gallery, she co-curated the exhibit: Africa Across the Atlantic, Cultural

Vibrations from Nigeria to Florida. The focus of the exhibit was the African Diaspora as it exists in Florida, and the artworks that have arisen in the African Diaspora as a result of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

Jody worked with the African Art collection at the Harn Museum of Art. There she conducted research and co-edited the ACASA (Arts Council for the African Studies Association) newsletter. She presented at the University of Florida Art History Symposium: Art for the Dead and assisted inaugural Carter Fellow, Professor Joan Frosch in the planning and execution of the

The Gwendolyn M. Carter Conference: Movement (R)evolution Dialogues: Contemporary

Performance In and Of Africa. The conference featured premiere international dance companies who held performances and were hosted as artists in residence at the University of Florida.

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Upon graduating with Highest Honors from the Art History program, she moved to New

York City where she managed Laurence Miller Gallery. Laurence Miller Gallery specializes in vintage and contemporary photography. Through working at the gallery, she became increasingly interested in the field.

She has since left New York and has been living in Gainesville, Florida where she has been working toward her PhD in Art History under Dr. Robin Poynor and Dr. Paul Ortiz. Jody’s present research focuses on African American Art and History. She has presented her research at several conferences including the 2015 International Summit on Human and Civil Rights in

Atlanta and the 2017 American Humor Studies Association & MLA Conference: Boundary

Conditions conference in Philadelphia.

She has helped to raise money for a rod-iron gates project in her neighborhood. Three gates were built by Shangofemi, for the community organic garden known as Dreamers Garden.

To date, over $20,000 has been earmarked for the project. Most recently with her colleague Dr.

Ade Ofunniyin she also co-curated the exhibition ‘Sixteen Crowns: Manifestations of Ase’ at

City Gallery in Charleston, South Carolina. According to Yoruba belief, when the world was created, it spread out from an original palm tree that stood at the center of the world with sixteen branches, forming four cardinal points and the sixteen original quarters of Ile-Ife. The selected works for the exhibit reflect this system of belief that has inspired millions of Yoruba people within Nigeria and throughout the African diaspora.

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