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Subtle Resistance: On Sugar and the Mammy Figure in Kara Walker's A Subtlety and Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose
African American Review ( IF 0.3 ) Pub Date : 2019-01-01 , DOI: 10.1353/afa.2019.0025
Raquel Kennon

Kara Walker’s 2014 installation, A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, offers a stunning twenty-first-century artistic rejoinder to the infamous 1923 proposal to erect a statue “in memory of the faithful colored mammies of the South” on the National Mall.1 Renowned maker of the provocative cut black paper silhouettes affixed to sprawling white gallery walls depicting seething antebellum scenes of racial violence, Walker claims agency over a haunting tradition of racist imagery and stereotypical caricatures embedded in American visual culture.2 In this essay, I analyze primarily the hybrid representational valences in A Subtlety within and against the peculiar historical precedent of white Southern congressmen’s nostalgic longing to memorialize the enslaved African American woman caretaker in a monument for posterity at the Capitol of the United States to reveal the stakes of remembrance, race, representation, and resistance. Secondly, I revisit a pivotal scene in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose (1986) to interpret a hotly debated moment of contested identity of a Mammy figure between two main characters, Dessa and Rufel, enslaved and free, which makes interracial collaboration against patriarchal systems possible during slavery. I argue that reading these distinct genres together—Walker’s monumental sugar-coated Mammy-Sphinx sculpture, A Subtlety, alongside Williams’s novel Dessa Rose—presents a strong critique of the cult of Mammy and larger memorialization projects articulated in the 1923 congressional Mammy monument proposal.3 Neo-slave narratives or contemporary narratives of slavery rework, reimagine, and “reinvigorate the slave narrative form,” according to Aliyyah AbdurRahman in Against the Closet, “to provide more complete accounts of slave life at times us[ing] the trope of silence or impossible disclosure to get at the sexual violence at the heart of slaves’ experience” (30). While Williams’s Dessa Rose clearly falls within this recuperative genre, Walker’s œuvre famously commingles image and textual influences and visually embodies the neo-slave narrative, revealing and revising the perverse subtexts and contexts of classic literature, historical records, and personal experience. As Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw contends in her masterful Seeing the Unspeakable, Walker creates “a fantastically horrific narrative out of racial stereotypes, nostalgic themes, and historical mythology” (5). Walker’s large-scale, evanescent public sculpture and the complex scene in Williams’s novel, then, problematize enduring impulses to memorialize a fictive icon of the loyal, enslaved black woman. This resistance exposes the Mammy figure as “a sign that should be interrogated, a locus of contradictions,” to borrow Hazel V. Carby’s insightful formulation (15), and registers the intriguing ways producers of imaginative literature and visual culture at once transgress and reconfigure Mammy by denying her existence in racist iconography.

中文翻译:

微妙的抵抗:卡拉·沃克的《微妙》和雪莉·安妮·威廉姆斯的《德萨·罗斯》中的糖和妈咪形象

我主要分析了 A Subtlety 中的混合表现形式,并与南方白人国会议员怀旧渴望在美国国会大厦的后裔纪念碑中纪念被奴役的非裔美国女性看守人的特殊历史先例相反,以揭示纪念的利害关系,种族、代表和抵抗。其次,我重温了雪莉·安妮·威廉姆斯 (Sherley Anne Williams) 的 Dessa Rose (1986) 中的一个关键场景,以解释被奴役和自由的两个主要角色 Dessa 和 Rufel 之间激烈争论的妈咪形象身份争议时刻,这使得反对父权制的跨种族合作成为可能奴隶制期间。我认为将这些不同的流派一起阅读——沃克的巨大糖衣妈妈狮身人面像雕塑,微妙,与威廉姆斯的小说 Dessa Rose 一起提出了对 1923 年国会妈妈纪念碑提案中阐明的对妈妈的崇拜和更大的纪念项目的强烈批评。 3 新奴隶叙事或奴隶制改造、重新构想和“重振奴隶叙事形式”的当代叙事, ”根据 Aliyyah AbdurRahman 在“反对壁橱”中的说法,“有时我们会使用沉默或不可能披露的比喻来提供对奴隶生活的更完整的描述,以了解奴隶经历核心的性暴力”(30)。威廉姆斯的《德莎·罗斯》显然属于这种康复体裁,而沃克的作品以融合图像和文本影响而著称,并在视觉上体现了新奴隶的叙事,揭示和修正了经典文学、历史记录和个人经历的反常潜台词和语境。正如格温多琳·杜波依斯·肖 (Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw) 在其精湛的《看见无法言说》(Seeing the Unspeakable) 中所争论的那样,沃克创造了“一种基于种族刻板印象、怀旧主题和历史神话的极其恐怖的叙事”(5)。沃克的大型、消逝的公共雕塑和威廉姆斯小说中的复杂场景,然后,对纪念忠诚的、被奴役的黑人女性的虚构偶像的持久冲动提出了问题。借用 Hazel V. Carby 富有洞察力的表述 (15),这种抵制将妈咪形象暴露为“一个应该受到质疑的标志,一个矛盾的场所”,并记录了富有想象力的文学和视觉文化的生产者同时超越和重新配置的有趣方式Mammy 否认她在种族主义肖像中的存在。沃克创造了“一个基于种族刻板印象、怀旧主题和历史神话的极其可怕的叙事”(5)。沃克的大型、消逝的公共雕塑和威廉姆斯小说中的复杂场景,然后,对纪念忠诚的、被奴役的黑人女性的虚构偶像的持久冲动提出了问题。借用 Hazel V. Carby 富有洞察力的表述 (15),这种抵制将妈咪形象暴露为“一个应该受到质疑的标志,一个矛盾的场所”,并记录了富有想象力的文学和视觉文化的生产者同时超越和重新配置的有趣方式Mammy 否认她在种族主义肖像中的存在。沃克创造了“一个基于种族刻板印象、怀旧主题和历史神话的极其可怕的叙事”(5)。沃克的大型、消逝的公共雕塑和威廉姆斯小说中的复杂场景,然后,对纪念忠诚的、被奴役的黑人女性的虚构偶像的持久冲动提出了问题。借用 Hazel V. Carby 富有洞察力的表述 (15),这种抵制将妈咪形象暴露为“一个应该受到质疑的标志,一个矛盾的场所”,并记录了富有想象力的文学和视觉文化的生产者同时超越和重新配置的有趣方式Mammy 否认她在种族主义肖像中的存在。问题化持久的冲动,以纪念忠诚的、被奴役的黑人女性的虚构偶像。借用 Hazel V. Carby 富有洞察力的表述 (15),这种抵制将妈咪形象暴露为“一个应该受到质疑的标志,一个矛盾的场所”,并记录了富有想象力的文学和视觉文化的生产者同时超越和重新配置的有趣方式Mammy 否认她在种族主义肖像中的存在。问题化持久的冲动,以纪念忠诚的、被奴役的黑人女性的虚构偶像。借用 Hazel V. Carby 富有洞察力的表述 (15),这种抵制将妈咪形象暴露为“一个应该受到质疑的标志,一个矛盾的场所”,并记录了富有想象力的文学和视觉文化的生产者同时超越和重新配置的有趣方式Mammy 否认她在种族主义肖像中的存在。
更新日期:2019-01-01
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