Preface and Acknowledgments

Powell, Richard J.

Save Cite Share

Free

Preface and Acknowledgments

Richard J. Powell

Going There: Black Visual Satire

~Well into the research, writing, and editing of this book, a new work of art came to my attention and compelled me to revisit several of the premises I initially had about this topic. Shortly after I submitted the book’s outline to Yale University Press, hip-hop musician Donald Glover (in collaboration with...

Author

Richard J. Powell

PublisherYale University Press

PublisherHutchins Center for African & African American Research

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00221.001

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-20668

Preface and Acknowledgments

Well into the research, writing, and editing of this book, a new work of art came to my attention and compelled me to revisit several of the premises I initially had about this topic. Shortly after I submitted the book’s outline to Yale University Press, hip-hop musician Donald Glover (in collaboration with filmmaker Hiro Murai) released the music video This Is America, a strange and beguiling amalgam of images and sounds that immediately captured the imagination of virtually everyone who viewed it in the spring of 2018, including me (see fig. 93). “Its allusions to the Charleston church massacre, to Jim Crow–era minstrel shows, and to police brutality,” wrote GQ correspondent Amy Wallace in November 2018, “seemed a perfect crystallization of our national mood—a grim snapshot of where we are now.” Glover confessed to Wallace about this music video, “There was a lot of room for it to be bad. Like: really, really bad. Like preachy bad. Over-reaching bad. Pretentious, racist-in-a-different-way bad.” Glover’s acknowledgment about the potential pitfalls of an artistic approach that, when exploring African American–related themes, concerns, and sensibilities, might easily flop and tumble into an ethnic harangue or an overly sentimental polemic, was revelatory, and made even more significant by his and Murai’s decision to surround this music video/portrait in an unequivocal African American sarcastic framework.

While the third chapter of this book goes into greater depth about Glover and Murai’s This Is America, it is perhaps useful to take special note of how this music video’s satirical thrust—its patent trivializing of death, its spoofing of performativity, and its locus in a kind of collective madness and nihilism—is inextricably tied to black realities, artistry, and pathos: the narrative threads and parallelisms that, arguably, made This Is America so potent a work of art in the first place. When Glover admitted to how routine and simplistic it would have been to create an opinionated, journalistic, and categorical artistic statement, he was, in effect, conceding to how robust and efficacious another creative path could be—one that employed humor, irony, parody, caricature, exaggeration, burlesque, and derision in undertaking a national exposé, or in revealing the vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings of a society or individuals. This Is America dramatically confirmed that the idea of a black visual satire wasn’t an aesthetic anomaly or an Afrocentric whimsy but, rather, a discursive mode whose artistic endurance and catalytic, even censorious and iconoclastic demands merited an extended, critical study.

As This Is America revealed across the wide spectrum of comments about it in multiple social media platforms, the protean nature of satire and its varying results are further confounded and realigned when the specter of race enters the discourse. The black satirist (or her/his surrogate) is an especially fascinating agent provocateur, frequently directing critiques within the black community (much to the chagrin of the intended targets), or against white supremacy and the customary race-based practices and discriminatory policies of that system. Black satirists and black visual satirists in particular form a unique body of artists/interlocutors who, in the wake of racial stereotyping and the reactive calls to create a positive, racially propagandistic art, instead produced an intriguing and often troubling body of work that prioritized a black cultural perspective within this trenchant, counter-narrative mode. Although a consideration of This Is America came toward the culmination of my approximately five-year investigation into the notion and formal workings of black, visual, and satirical forms of expression, its pulsating criticisms of early twenty-first-century conceit, tawdriness, and superficiality—embodied in Glover’s alter ego, Childish Gambino, and in his expository, coryphaeus-like role—ricocheted and reverberated throughout this inquiry, but with fruitful and expansive consequences.

In retrospect, at the precise moment I received the invitation from Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research to speak in the Richard D. Cohen Lectures on African & African American Art, I was deeply engaged in curating and programming for the Archibald Motley, Jr., exhibition at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. But in my eventual acceptance letter to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard and the director of the Hutchins Center, I had already shifted my outlook for a lecture topic away from Motley proper and toward modern and contemporary artworks that, similar to many of Motley’s paintings, were dedicated to dismantling a racial status quo through the mindsets and mechanisms of satire. A Duke University graduate seminar on black visual satire was already slated for the fall 2014 semester, so that summer—with both the 2016 Cohen lectures and the graduate seminar in mind—I immersed myself in the literature about satire and gathered satirical imagery from across the art historical spectrum.

I was ably assisted that summer by Michael Tauschinger-Dempsey, then a PhD candidate at Duke in visual and media studies, and a research-based artist working at the intersection of visual culture, anthropology, and social studies. The fall 2014 graduate seminar covered a range of topics, from satire in antiquity and early modern Europe to the clowns and satirists in many West African performance traditions and a host of subtopics (for example, theatrical and cinematic satires, satirical strategies in African American literature, “post-black” satire, blackface minstrelsy in 1970s African American art, and monographic studies of artists such as Robert Colescott, Renée Cox, Jeff Donaldson, Ollie Harrington, Spike Lee, Melvin Van Peebles, and Kara Walker). Seminar participants Anita Bateman, Mora Beauchamp-Byrd, Ivana Blago, and Shahrazad Shareef were central in helping to formulate a theory of black visual satire and fundamental to the seminar’s overall success.

Skip Gates was a gracious host at Harvard, and my three Cohen lectures—an introduction to black visual satire, an examination of racial stereotypes as a tool in satire, and a discussion about painter/satirist Robert Colescott—elicited many thought-provoking comments for each of the lectures, especially from professors Suzanne Blier, Wallace Chuma, Cheryl Finley, Patricia Hills, Sarah Lewis, and from Skip Gates. Yale University Press editors Patricia Fidler and Amy Canonico were also present, and it was there that a preliminary outline for the book was conceived.

Along with transforming the lectures into book-length chapters, Yale University Press and I agreed that the book would have one more section—on the legendary black editorial cartoonist Ollie Harrington—so the next two years were spent conducting research, much of it in libraries and archives across the United States and abroad. At the invitation of Anne Lafont, directrice d’étude, L’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, I spent the fall of 2016 at the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art (INHA) in Paris, where I studied, among other topics, Harrington’s initial years of exile in Paris. Oddly enough, it was during my residency at INHA that I was fortunate enough to discuss Harrington’s life and career with several knowledgeable individuals, such as Wendy Kay Johnson, Robert G. O’Meally, Daniel Soutif, Hervé Télémaque, and Walter O. Evans, MD, the latter one of the world’s leading collectors of African American art and Harrington’s American patron and advocate in the cartoonist’s final years.

In 2017–19 research I conducted at several libraries and archives yielded an abundance of information, especially about Harrington’s early Harlem career, his student days at Yale, and his tremendous cartoon output in American newspapers and German magazines. Librarians and archivists at the following institutions were quite helpful: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University; Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection, Chicago Public Library; Joseph Regenstein Library, University of Chicago; Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin–Madison; Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library; Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University, Atlanta; and the Bibliothek für Sozialwissenschaften und Osteuropastudien–Zeitschriftenabteilung, Freie Universität, Berlin. Sarah W. Duke, curator of Popular and Applied Graphic Art, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, kindly guided me through the library’s important collection of original Harrington cartoons. And several librarians at Duke have been instrumental in helping me locate certain newspapers, especially Carson Holloway, librarian for History of Science and Technology, Military History, British and Irish Studies, Canadian Studies and General History; Heidi Madden, librarian for Western European and Medieval/Renaissance Studies; and Lee Sorensen, librarian for Visual Studies and Dance. A special thanks goes to Marvin Tillman, manager, Duke University Library Service Center, for facilitating access to literally decades of bound volumes of the U.S. Communist Party’s weekly newspaper, the Daily World.

Scholarly exchanges with Christine McKay, archivist and the author of a forthcoming biography of Harrington, and Gerald Horne, John J. and Rebecca Moores Chair of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston, were very informative, as were my conversations with Harrington’s widow, Dr. Helma Harrington, their son, Oliver Harrington, and one of his daughters, Dr. Judy Kertesz. As with the three Richard D. Cohen Lectures at Harvard, I also delivered a lecture about Harrington’s life and career on the occasion of the Yale University Art Gallery’s annual Andrew Carnduff Ritchie Lecture, which served as a basis for this additional chapter. Jock Reynolds, the gallery’s former Henry J. Heinz II Director and a longtime friend and past collaborator, kindly extended the invitation to deliver this talk in the spring of 2018.

The renowned printmaker and former Bay Area artist Margo Humphrey introduced me to Robert Colescott in Oakland, California, many years ago, which initiated my interest in him and in his delightfully irreverent paintings. Over the years, the writings of curator, art historian, and Colescott specialist Lowery Stokes Sims have kept me apprised of and constantly querying what motives lay behind Colescott’s radical and satirical imagery: intellectual nourishments for which I am eternally grateful. Duke alum and Nasher Museum of Art board member Jason Rubell opened my eyes in 2008 to Colescott’s pictorial and narrative audacity, and I profusely thank him and the Rubell Family Collection for their 30 Americans exhibition, one of the first clarion calls in the twenty-first century for something black and fresh in contemporary art. Elizabeth Brown, a PhD candidate in Duke’s Department of Art, Art History and Visual Studies, kindly assisted me with some northern California library research, and, more recently, I have benefited from Colescott’s biographical and visual records at Blum and Poe Gallery, Los Angeles, with special thanks to Nicoletta Beyer, Patricia Liu, and Minna Schilling. Jandava Cattron, Colescott’s surviving wife, has championed her husband’s work for years, and I deeply appreciate her insights and support.

All of my colleagues at Duke University have been unstinting in their advice and counsel related to this book, but three deserve special mention. N. Gregson Davis, Andrew W. Mellon Research Professor of the Humanities, generously guided me through the classical literature concerning satire and, in some instances, translated key Latin texts. Neil McWilliam, Walter H. Annenberg Professor of Art and Art History, has intelligently written about French, English, and American political caricatures, and our conversations about this subset of Western art history have been invaluable to my research. Toril Moi, James B. Duke Professor of Literature, Romance Studies, English, Philosophy, and Theatre Studies, and director of Duke’s Center for Philosophy, Arts, and Literature, provided me at a crucial moment with a key translation of and an extended exegesis about an important interview pertaining to the 1972 film Georgia, Georgia in an obscure Swedish film journal.

Words can’t express how grateful I am to all of the copyright holders who allowed me to publish the artworks and images under their reproduction rights and privileges. I am especially appreciative of the artists and their representatives who had enough confidence in me, or in their inspired genius, to permit their creations to appear alongside my thoughts and, thus, to provide a visual counterpoint to the stated theories, critiques, and interpretations.

The final edits and requests for rights and reproductions for this book were completed with the administrative support and institutional input of the faculty and staff at the National Gallery of Art’s Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA). While serving as the spring 2019 Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor at CASVA, I was aided in resolving the book’s remaining editorial prerequisites by my adept CASVA assistant, Megan Driscoll. And thanks to CASVA deans Elizabeth Cropper, Peter Lukehart, and Therese O’Malley, many of the outstanding questions and issues about my manuscript were given an invaluable forum for critical examination and clarification. My editor at Yale University Press, Amy Canonico, has been a champion for this book project from the start, and I am forever beholden to her for her advocacy, editorial guidance, and confidence in bringing this complicated and at times provocative topic into print. Special thanks to Raychel Rapazza, Sarah Henry, Laura Hensley, and Heidi Downey at Yale University Press. Without question, the thoughtful comments and wise suggestions that the anonymous reviewers provided greatly improved this manuscript.

As is the case with any long-term research and writing project, conversations with colleagues and friends over these past few years have yielded plenty of insights, thoughtful questions, demands for amplifications, and emotional support. For this unstinting encouragement I thank Lamonte Aidoo, Elizabeth Alexander, P. Elizabeth and Norman Anderson, Davarian L. Baldwin, Nada Ballator, Dawoud Bey, Lonnie G. Bunch III, Randall Burkett, Clifford Charles, Jasmine Nichole Cobb, Diego Cortez, Kareem Crayton, David C. Driskell, Allyson Duncan, Darby English, Teresa Grana, Michael D. Harris, Ranjana Khanna, Robert and Amy Lehrman, Pellom McDaniels III, Kobena Mercer, Amy Mooney, Derek Conrad Murray, Mark Anthony Neal, Steven Nelson, Nell Irving Painter, James T. Parker, Rebecca Roman, Kimerly Rorschach, John Staddon, Kristine Stiles, Greg Tate, Ruth Turner, and Bill Webb. My family has borne the greatest burden in connection to my “wood-shedding” and years of labor on this book. Lisa, Michael, C. T., and Latté (2004–2018) have been a real blessing in this regard.

In the midst of my research, and while sharing with my wife, C. T., many of the more scathing and sarcastic artworks under discussion, she reminded me about the public’s varying responses to this incendiary material and, paraphrasing a character from Alice Walker’s novel Meridian (1976) who finds herself in a somewhat similar, politically incorrect creative enterprise, she caringly and half-jokingly said to me, “You’ll pay for this.” C. T. might be right. But, given the significant number of artists, past and present, who have intrepidly made their work a platform for an affective satirical statement within an African American cultural context and, as a result, faced critical bewilderment, unforgiving reviews, forms of censorship, or worse, this artistic phenomenon is clearly a subject worthy of serious study, and a scholarly enterprise that I want to believe is a meritorious one for facing the possible consequences—and the art historical rewards—of critically “going there.”

Previous chapter

Base text size -

Chapter images ()