The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 23 (2012)

Toni Morrison and Kara Walker:
The Interaction of Their Imaginations

Keiko MIYAMOTO*INTRODUCTION
Kara Walker (1969– ) is an internationally recognized African American
artist who works in a variety of media. She is best known, however, for
her racially and sexually coded controversial silhouettes that represent
life-size human ﬁgures. They are physically placed within occasional
clumps of landscape and psychologically placed within the fragmented
narratives of the antebellum South. Made of black paper, most of thehuman ﬁgures are literally black, but within what Walker calls her “plantation family romance” it is possible to distinguish the “white” ﬁguresfrom the “black” ones according to their stereotypical proﬁles, postures,
and attire. Walker’s silhouettes exhibited in the form of wall installations
create a spectacular space that often renders the viewer disoriented andspeechless, leading to both fascination and repulsion, as she interweaves
fantasy and reality in her tableaux of ﬁctionalized scenes of slavery.
Walker’s use of the medium of the silhouette is subversive in termsof its nineteenth-century gendered status as well as its historical linkage
to racism and American slavery.1 Silhouettes prevailed as folk art inEurope and America during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In
the American South, it became especially popular as a “ladies art” among*Professor, Seinan Gakuin University

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the middle-class. Walker ironically uses a “ladies art” to create raciallyand sexually provocative works. Black-paper silhouettes were also ameans of preserving images of one’s loved ones. Such images served as
family portraiture before the advent of photography. Walker’s silhouettes, then, evoke memories of the antebellum South in that they are thekind of images available to people living at that time. Moreover, by using
the medium of paper cut-outs as a family portrait and creating the scenes
inhabited with black and white ﬁgures battling with each other, Walker’s
silhouettes radically suggest that antebellum black-white relations werelike an “extended” and “dysfunctional” family.2 It is also signiﬁcant thatthe use of silhouettes seems to have originated with the rise of racial
anthropology, particularly the eighteenth-century pseudoscience ofJohann Casper Lavater’s physiognomy. Lavater’s theory states that
facial features–the silhouette lines of the forehead, nose, and chin–not
only reveal a person’s natural and “national” character but also give evidence pertaining to the individual’s moral disposition. Back in the lateseventeenth century, American slave traders used silhouettes as “bill ofsale” identiﬁcation for slaves and “a mug shot” that would facilitate identiﬁcation in the case of escape. Thus, Walker’s use of the silhouette
explores race and its means of representation in a way that extends far
beyond the surface African American stereotypes of the cut-outs into
consideration of the origins of racism itself.
Walker’s silhouettes are frequently referred to with regard to Toni
Morrison’s Beloved (1987). Gwendolyn Dubois Shaw, for example,
ﬁnds in Walker’s silhouettes “a shadowy fantasy of Morrisonian rememories.”3 Dinah Holtzman refers to the artist and her work as “the art
world’s Beloved.”4 Walker herself has acknowledged Morrison as asource of inspiration, stating in a 1999 interview, “Toni Morrison has
had an obvious inﬂuence on my work from the beginning.”5 Art critics
often refer to Morrison’s inﬂuence on Walker, but such statements rarely
extend beyond the description. A comparative study of their works has
centered only on Beloved, and the interaction of their imaginations has
not been fully explored.
It is possible to assert that Walker’s career as artist has developed
along with Morrison’s historiographical love trilogy—Beloved, Jazz
(1992), and Paradise (1998). Walker’s group exhibition history starts in
1991, four years after Beloved was published, and her solo exhibition
history starts in 1995, three years after Morrison’s publication of Jazz.6
Since then, Walker’s slavery-themed works have been exhibited in major

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museums both domestically and internationally. It was in 1997, when
Walker received the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s“genius” grant, that an anti-Walker campaign was initiated by black
senior artists—many of those in Morrison’s generation—such as Betye
Saar, who wrote a letter to more than two hundred artists and politicians
warning about the “negative images produced by the young African
American artist, Kara Walker.”7 Howardena Pindell has accused
Walker’s art of “betraying the slaves of the antebellum South, recycling
stereotypes of African Americans that were born in the post-Reconstruction days of lynching.”8 On the other hand, critics who support
Walker consider her work as ironic and a conscious intervention in racial
iconography. Henry Louise Gates Jr. praised Walker’s art as “the postmodern, signifying, anti-racist parody” and “a profound act of artistic
exorcism.”9 In short, during the period Morrison was working on Paradise, Walker made her debut in the mainstream art world and became
one of the most successful and controversial contemporary young artists.
Morrison must have been well aware of Walker, who has cited Morrison’s
work as a source of inspiration.
In this article, I explore Morrison’s inﬂuence on Walker’s visual arts,
or the interaction of their imaginations, focusing on Morrison’s love trilogy—Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise—and Walker’s silhouettes. I elucidate the ways in which Walker’s visualization of traumatized history has
strong afﬁnities with Morrison’s writing, demonstrating how both artists
represent motherhood under slavery, the myth of the antebellum South,
and the cultural and social construction of race and gender.
I.

REPRESENTATION OF MOTHERHOOD UNDER SLAVERY

Many critics point out that Walker’s silhouettes, like Morrison’s
Beloved, represent the unspeakable horrors of slavery. They make visual
the horriﬁc experiences that slave narrators such as Harriet Jacobs, theauthor of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), could not convey
because of censorship and the traumatic nature of sexual and racial
oppression. In Beloved, Morrison gives voice to the interior life of slave
women, especially focusing on the psychological damage inﬂicted bywhite masters’ sexual exploitation. Sethe, the protagonist of the novel,
is tormented by humiliating memories of how “they took [her] milk,”
how they treat her like an animal, and, as she learns later, how her husband was driven mad as a result of witnessing such a degrading scene:

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KEIKO MIYAMOTO“I am full God damn it of two boys with mossy teeth, one sucking on mybreast the other holding me down, their book-reading teacher watching
and writing it up. . . . There is also my husband squatting by the churnsmearing the butter as well as its clabber all over his face because themilk they took is on his mind.”10 Such horriﬁc scenes abound in Walker’s
silhouettes of sexually abused and brutally violated black bodies.
It is insufﬁcient, however, simply to assert Morrison’s inﬂuence on
Walker based on surface resemblances. Morrison and Walker share considerable afﬁnities not only in subject matter but also in their use ofimagery, motifs, and themes. If we look at the visual elements that repeatedly appear in Walker’s art11—items such as water, birth, shoes, knives,and mother’s milk—they recall many of Morrison’s literary elements.
Among them, those most explicitly inﬂuenced by Morrison can be foundin Walker’s images of mothers, infants, and childbirth. Walker’s silhouettes contain peculiar and disturbing scenes of childbirth as well asof children in vulnerable situations: women giving birth standing up;
infants falling lifeless to the ground, dangling from delicate umbilicalcords (ﬁgs. 1 and 2); a mother throwing babies away (ﬁgs. 3 and 4). Such
scenes imply abortion or infanticide, which could be the slave woman’smeans of revolt against “forced breeding.”12 As Yasmil Raymond argues,
Walker’s representation of mothers and infants “epitomizes the sufferingand sacriﬁce of slaves while simultaneously alluding to the disturbing
and conﬂictive role that motherhood played in the lives of female slaves.
In literature, this dilemma is keenly personiﬁed in the character of Sethein Toni Morrison’s Beloved.”13
Walker’s disturbing images of mother and child also remind us of theway in which Morrison reworks the maternal love and the victimized
child from Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Harriet Beecher Stowe foregrounded theenforced separation of mother and child to evoke public sympathy forthe abolitionist cause. In order to convey the devastating effects of slavery, writers of slave narratives and abolitionists have also utilized thepathos of the suffering mother and child.14 Moreover, the Margaret
Garner case in Cincinnati in 1856, an actual incident that inspired
Beloved, is also utilized in abolitionist discourse as a heroic act of maternal love. Sethe’s repeated assertion of maternal love, equation of motherhood with freedom, and her remorseless claim that “what she had done
was right because it came from true love” (B 162, 251) echo the abolitionist discourse of ﬁgures such as Frederic Douglass and Lucy Stone,
who took Garner’s side as part of their indictment of slavery.15

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Figure 1

Kara Walker, Untitled (1995). Cut paper on canvas, 48 \ 54 inches (121.9\ 137.2 cm). Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.

Figure 2

Kara Walker, Negress Notes (1995). Collage, ink, gouache, graphite, andwatercolor on paper, 6 \ 9 inches (15.2 \ 22.9 cm). Courtesy of Sikkema
Jenkins & Co., New York.

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KEIKO MIYAMOTO

Figure 3

Kara Walker, An Abbreviated Emancipation (from the Emancipation Approximation) [detail] (2002). Cut paper on wall, 9 \ 89 feet (2.7 \ 27.1
meters). Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.

Yet such conﬂation of infanticide with maternal love is problematizedby the ﬁgure of Beloved, who appears not as an innocent child victim but
as a vengeful spirit or a spiteful reincarnated ghost of Sethe’s deaddaughter. Simultaneously, the text undermines Sethe’s maternal love,describing another kind of infanticide committed out of rage and hatred.
Sethe’s own mother killed all the children fathered by whites who had
raped her during the Middle Passage and afterward: “She threw them allaway but [Sethe]. The one from the crew she threw away on the island.
The one from more whites she also threw away. Without names, shethrew them” (B 62). Ella, representative of the community women, also

Figure 4

Kara Walker, Untitled (2002). Cut paper on wall, 8.5 \ 21 feet (2.6 \ 6.4 meters). Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins& Co., New York.

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killed her baby, as she spent her adolescence as the sex object of her master and his son. She refused to nurse the “hairy white thing, fathered by‘the lowest yet’ ” until it died after ﬁve days “never making a sound” (B
258–59).
As if echoing Morrison’s maternal ﬁguration, Walker chooses to cut
the moment of infanticide into her silhouette, a detail (ﬁg. 4) from Walker’s
2002 exhibition For the Benefit of All the Races of Mankind (Mos’Specially the Master One, Boss): An Exhibition of Artifacts, Remnants,
and Effluvia EXCAVATED from the Black Heart of a Negress III. The
woman in the long billowing skirt is tossing babies into the air. One baby
has already fallen dead to the ground in front of the ﬁgure of the slave
catcher or master. He grieves not over the dead baby but over the loss of
his property, indicated by the coins falling out of his pouch. Anotherbaby is ﬂying through the air, upside down, his chest open to the sky,
while the woman is poised to deliver a third to the same fate. A toddler
stands behind her, looking at the arc of the ﬂying baby. The woman’s
tossed-back head and her gaping mouth reveal the agony of the slave
mother who has been compelled, for whatever reason, to throw herbabies away to certain death.
Walker’s image reminds us of Sethe’s mother who threw her babies
away, yet an association can also be made with Sethe herself. While thissilhouette does not exactly correspond to Sethe’s infanticide scene, several of the visual elements resonate with Morrison’s text. Walker’s
woman resembles Sethe because of the ﬂying movement of her body,the beaked nature of her face, and the headcloth tied in the shape of hummingbird wings, all of which recall the bird imagery with which Setheis associated in her act of infanticide. The former slave Stamp Paid, who
has witnessed Sethe’s ﬂight from slave catchers, recalls “how she ﬂew,
snatching up her children like a hawk on the wing; how her face beaked,
how her hands worked like claws” (B 149). In an attempt to put her act
into words, Sethe also remembers:
When she saw them coming and recognized schoolteacher’s hat, she heard
wings. Little hummingbirds stuck their needle beaks right through her headcloth into her hair and beat their wings. And if she thought anything, it was
No. Nono. Nonono. Simple. She just ﬂew. Collected every bit of little she
had made, all the parts of her that were precious and ﬁne and beautiful, andcarried, pushed, dragged them through the veil, out, away, over there where
they would be safe. And the hummingbird wings beat on. (B 155)TONI MORRISON AND KARA WALKER

239

Moreover, Rebecca Rae Peabody indicates that Walker’s image repeats“the arc of [Sethe’s] swing,”16 which appears when schoolteacher witnesses Sethe’s attempted murder and Stamp Paid’s intervention: Sethe“simply swung the baby [Denver] toward the wall planks, missed andtried to connect a second time, when out of nowhere . . . the old nigger
boy . . . snatched the baby from the arc of its mother’s swing” (B 149).
Such details seem to give evidence that Sethe directly inspired Walker’s
imagery for the woman.
If this woman is Sethe, what is signiﬁcant is the way in which Walker’s
silhouette evokes Morrison’s methodology of speaking the unspeakablethrough absence. Morrison leaves a blank in Sethe’s infanticide scene
by excluding not only the actual moment of killing, when Sethe pulls thesaw across the neck of her daughter, but also by leaving out any description of what is inside the character’s mind at that moment. While exploring the means of speaking about the unspeakable experiences of a slave
woman, Morrison simultaneously includes absence by refusing to ﬂesh
out the details. This blank, as Mark Reinhardt argues, is “the mark ofrespect for [Margaret Garner’s] humanity and the necessary condition ofan ethical and politically fruitful telling of this story of slavery.”17 Like
Morrison, Walker does not represent the actual murder—despite the factthat such horriﬁc scenes of mutilation are not unusual in her silhouettes.
Moreover, Walker creates absence in the huge blank space under the
beautiful arc of the mother’s swing. In this way, she signiﬁes Morrison’s
ethical writing, which, in the phrase of Giorgio Agamben, “bear[s] witness in the name of the impossibility of bearing witness.”18 Walker’s silhouette also confronts the viewer with this impossibility.
What remains disturbing is the cherubic appearance of the children inthis silhouette. How do we interpret the appearance of these children,
who are far different from Sethe’s “blood-soaked child” or “two boys
bled in the sawdust and dirt” (B 141)? Do they imply Sethe’s “precious
and ﬁne and beautiful” children? Why does the ﬂying baby look so
serene? Is it because she is, as Sethe and Margaret Garner assert, goingto a place “where they would be safe”? Why does the child behind themother look as if he is waiting for his turn? Given that this silhouetterepresents an infanticide scene, the ludic atmosphere produced by thischild is problematic for many viewers and a source of controversy, as isoften the case with Walker’s silhouettes.
In terms of Walker’s postmodern critique of the legacy of slavery, thischerubic child ﬁgure may be “signifying on” in a Gatesian way or

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parodying the political and cultural appropriation of historical icons ofslavery in the past, as readers of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Margaret
Garner case will recall. Walker may also be making an ironic reference
to the cultural consumerism of historical trauma, including Morrison’s
Beloved, which has been adapted as a ﬁlm, an opera, and, self-reﬂexively, into Walker’s silhouette.19
Yet, in light of Walker’s engagement with Morrison, this child can beinterpreted as Walker’s reworking of the victimization of children in thepresent-day conﬁguration of “postmemory.” With its ubiquitous presence of mothers and infants, Walker’s art, like Beloved, addresses the
crucial issue of postmemory, that is, how to represent the memory of historical trauma that is not experienced but inherited. As is suggested bytrauma studies, the foregrounding of the suffering mother and vulnerable child is a feature often found in representations of historical trauma,
like slavery, war, the Holocaust, famine, and natural disaster. According
to scholars like Claire Kahane and Marianne Hirsh, this staging of
mother and child not only utilizes pathos to evoke the sentimental sympathy of the public but also functions as “a kind of screen or a cover-up”
for the terror of confronting “more crucial implications—context, speciﬁcity, responsibility and history—of the traumatic event.”20 Moreover,as Hirsh argues, “the obsessive repetition of these images in itself is an
example of acting out and the compulsion to repeat, which interfere withefforts at working through the traumatic past.”21 While Morrison rewrites
the innocent child victim into the vicious and vengeful Beloved, Walker
in turn transforms it into the ludic and serene cherubic ﬁgure. Walker’s
representation of the child not only parodies victimization of the angelic
child but also functions to distance the viewer’s subjectivity from thetraumatic past, which is necessary for the working through. If the beautyof this silhouette is “the lure” for the viewer, as Walker intended,22 theserene and ludic child in such a horriﬁc scene encourages the viewer towork thorough the historical trauma.
Finally, I suggest that Morrison’s maternal ﬁguration also inﬂuenced
Walker’s methodology of representation. Art critics often explain Walker’s
imagery in terms of Julia Kristeva’s notion of abjection, which is deﬁned
as a reaction to the confrontation with our own materiality—mutilated
or fragmented bodies, the corpse, urine, feces, blood, and images of giving birth. Walker’s art, of course, reﬂects the abject art movement of theUnited States in the 1990s, which reveals not only what we have “abjected” (thrown away) or repressed in order to construct our subjectivity

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or agency but also what we have oppressed and marginalized in order tostructure our society. In this respect, abject art often evokes politicaldebate, as is often the case with Walker’s art. Here, I assert that bothMorrison and Walker share abject imagery in their representations of theatrocious effects of slavery on the enslaved people.
According to Kristeva, the abject imagery triggers our gut sensationsuch as nausea, disgust, horror, and fascination, and destabilizes our subjectivity/agency, returning us to an archaic psychic space where boundaries between subject and object are blurred. The abjection for Kristeva
is closely related both to religion and to art, which she considers as twoways of purifying the abject: “The various means of purifying the abject—the various catharses—make up the history of religions, and end
up with that catharsis par excellence called art, both on the far and nearside of religion.”23 In other words, art is the privileged space that enables
us to enact the abjection and the sublimation: through art, we can explore
the boundaries of our subjectivity/agency and subsequently reemerge as
newly reconstructed or reafﬁrmed.
In Beloved Morrison also utilizes the Kristevan notion of abjection, especially staging its process of not only abjection but also sublimation.
Walker’s abject imagery reminds us of the scene in which Baby Suggs,
Sethe’s mother-in-law, evokes abject images in her healing ritual that she
terms “Call.” It is for the ex-slaves who suffer from the corporeal depredations of enslavement long after they are freed. Baby Suggs commences her
ritual by evoking how their bodies are treated as abjects by white masters:“In this here place, we ﬂesh; ﬂesh that weeps, laughs: ﬂesh that dances onbare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your ﬂesh.
They despise it. They don’t love your eyes; they’d just as soon pick em out.
No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they ﬂay it. . . . They
do not love your neck unnoosed and straight. . . . And all your inside parts
that they’d just as soon slop for hogs, you got to love them.” (B 88–89)

Here, Baby Suggs’s use of the word “ﬂesh” implies not only abjection
but also sublimation. What she calls “ﬂesh” is the body in pieces, andshe tells them to love each of their bodily parts, including invisible internal organs. Baby Suggs’s message shows that the body is not simply the
product of cultural construction. Even if the bodies of ex-slaves are constituted as “abjects” in white supremacist sociocultural narratives andmetaphors (such as those of the animal, the breeding stock, and of

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commodities), Baby Suggs returns their bodies to “ﬂesh,” which implies
a raw, volatile, bodily materiality outside of or prior to cultural inscription. Her message to “love your ﬂesh” means more than claiming selflove and self-ownership. As psychoanalytic insight clariﬁes, “ﬂesh”
suggests something that resists symbolization—some residue in ourorganic body.24 If language is saturated with white supremacist patriarchal ideology, how do black people reemerge as newly speaking subjects within the master’s language? Baby Suggs addresses her listeners
with the words “We ﬂesh” because as “ﬂesh” black people resist such
symbolization. Simultaneously, “ﬂesh” as a verb signiﬁes the body’s
ﬂuid processes enacted as a communal healing, which implies recovering the individual body’s capacity for pleasure and love, the possibilityof black subjectivity/agency.
Baby Suggs’s “Call” functions in correspondence with the workingsof abjection and sublimation within an already constructed subject of the
ex-slaves. Walker’s debasing ﬁgures are often criticized in exactly theway white supremacist culture is described. Yet, like Baby Suggs’s ritual, Walker’s silhouette not only reminds us of how black bodies areconstructed as abject under slavery, but it also explores a way of resistingsuch symbolization.
II.

REWRITING THE MYTH OF THE ANTEBELLUM SOUTH

Morrison’s inﬂuence on Walker can be also found in their critiques ofSouthern mythology. Both Walker and Morrison rework the myth of theantebellum South, such as that of the benevolent agrarian society, harmonious plantation life, and loving relations between masters and slaves.
In this section, I would like to elucidate how Walker’s silhouettes of theantebellum South correspond to Morrison’s representation of a rural
plantation in Beloved and her narrative of the Southern past in Jazz.
In her 1997 mural, 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(ﬁg. 5) Walker explicitly quotes the scenes from Eastman Johnson’s oil
painting Old Kentucky Home—Life in the South (Negro Life at the South),1859 (ﬁg. 6). Johnson’s picture, a famous example of antebellum genre
painting, is a picturesque scene of a plantation on a leisurely afternoon

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Figure 5 Kara Walker, 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 neverbefore! All cut from black paper by the able hand of Kara Elizabeth Walker,
an Emancipated Negress and leader in her Cause [detail](1997). Cut paperon wall, 11 \ 85 feet (3.4 \ 25.9 m). Installation view: Kara Walker: My
Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love, Hammer Museum, Los
Angeles, 2008. Photo: Joshua White. Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co.,New York.

when a white mistress enters the yard of the slave quarters and ﬁnds aslave man playing the banjo and a slave child dancing with his mother.
Johnson is known as “a painter of black scenes” who introduced theperspective of African American slaves into his pictures and created an
ambiguous image of slavery that was acclaimed by both antislavery andproslavery advocates.25 Produced two years before the outbreak of the
Civil War, however, Johnson’s Old Kentucky Home has been generally
recognized as perpetuating the myth of a harmonious plantation life
while disguising the inhumane treatment of slaves that deﬁnes the peculiar institution of American slavery.26
In Walker’s silhouettes (ﬁgs. 5 and 7), the scene of afternoon leisurein Johnson’s picture is transformed into an unsettling nightscape undera crescent moon. Outside the slave quarters, most of the ﬁgures are in

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Figure 6

Eastman Johnson, Old Kentucky Home—Life in the South (Negro Life at theSouth), 1859. Oil on canvas, 36 \ 45 inches. Accession #S-225. Collectionof the New-York Historical Society.

motion—some are walking, others are dancing, and the shoes they wear
signify the possibility of escape.27 An older man with a pitchfork prepares
his family to ﬂee by hiding the children inside a hay wagon. A young
woman eating an apple is at the head of the procession carrying an infant
on her back. For a naked woman, precariously hanging over the edge ofthe roof in the background, a fall might be the only escape from the whiteboy’s sexual assault.
Walker’s reworking of Johnson’s picture evokes Morrison’s representation of Sweet Home, the Kentucky plantation in Beloved. Ownedby the generous Garner family, Sweet Home ﬁrst appears as a harmonious rural plantation like that created in Johnson’s picture. Especiallyfor Sethe, it is almost like an Edenic place where she ﬁrst experiences
love and protection, bears her three children, and creates a family withher husband. Yet, it is also at this Sweet Home that she learns of theatrocity of slavery. After Mr. Garner’s death, Sweet Home slaves are

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Figure 7 Kara Walker, Slavery! Slavery! Presenting a GRAND and LIFELIKE Panoramic Journey . . . [detail] (1997). Cut paper on wall, 11 \ 85 feet (3.4 \25.9 m). Installation view: Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My
Oppressor, My Love, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2007. Photo: Dave
Sweeney. Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.

brutally treated by schoolteacher: They are tortured, hanged, burned todeath, driven mad, or quickly sold. Paul D, the only male survivor, ismanacled, shackled, collared, ﬁtted with a bit, and ﬁnally sold. He ends
up working on a chain gang. In Walker’s silhouettes, we can easily ﬁndthese ﬁgures of tortured, abused, humiliated, and mutilated slaves. Indeed, Sweet Home is ironically named to highlight these brutal aspectsof slavery as well as “to expose its illusory nature.”28
According to Alexis L. Boylan, “all attempts to reimagine or redeﬁne
the South and plantations were forever altered by the phenomenon thatwas Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936).”29 Indeed, Mitchell’s
novel became a Pulitzer Prize–winning bestseller that sold more than 30
million copies worldwide. Along with its equally popular 1939 ﬁlm
adaptation, Mitchell’s mythologized depiction of the period as a genteel
and benevolent agrarian society ﬁxed in the American psyche a distorted
account of the American South.

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As if to challenge the seductive power of such mythology, Walker subverts and parodies the Southern romance in her 1994 mural, Gone, An
Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred between the Dusky
Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart (ﬁg. 8). As the title evokes
Mitchell’s novel and its ﬁlm version, the work seems to represent, at ﬁrst
glance, the iconography of the plantation romance. Yet, such a sentimental impression is soon undermined by the legs of somebody else, probably a young male/female lover, hiding beneath the belle’s garment. Here,the hoop skirt, “a symbol of morality and virtue of Southern women,”30
does not protect their virtue but disguises their repressed desire. The
man’s sword also points to the bottom of a little black boy with hair bobs
like the devil’s horns. He displays a strangled bird to a female ﬁgure
whose lower body is disproportionally elongated. According to the art
critic Annette Dixon, this black boy holds up a swan, which symbolizes
racial mixing in Walker’s silhouettes.31 Does the boy’s gesture imply the
miscegenation between this gentleman and the black woman ﬂoating on
the river? As we move our attention to the right, a landscape of lustfulevents unfolds and the silhouettes become more and more difﬁcult to
decode. Although objects like a sword, a bust, a pumpkin, and a broom

Figure 8

Kara Walker, Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as it Occurred
between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart [detail](1994). Cut paper on wall, 15 \ 50 feet (4 \ 15 m). Courtesy of Sikkema
Jenkins & Co., New York.

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suggest fairy-tale illustrations, the overall impression of their doings is“sex” between the master class and enslaved blacks, whether under coercion or by mutual consent (ﬁg. 9).
Walker’s reworking of the Southern romance, especially her foregrounding of interracial relations, evokes Morrison’s narrative of theSouthern past, Golden Gray’s story in Jazz. Golden Gray is an eighteenyear-old youth, the illegitimate son of Vera Louise Gray, a Southernaristocrat exiled from her family plantation for carrying a black child as
a consequence of her covert relationship with a black slave, Henry
Lestory/LesTroy, known as Hunters Hunter. Due to his light skin color,
Golden Gray has been raised as white and was only recently informedthat “his father was a black-skinned nigger.”32 In order to conﬁrm his
self-identity as a white gentleman, he sets out on a patriarchal adventure,seeking to kill the black father who had had illicit sex with his whitemother. During his trip from Baltimore to Virginia, Golden Gray encounters a pregnant black woman, who is later called Wild. Wild plays a crucial role in altering the Faulknerian oedipal scenario. For, according to
the narrator, Golden Gray did not “kill . . . his father” (J 143) or “blowFigure 9

Kara Walker, Gone, An Historical Romance . . . (1994). Installation view:
Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love, Hammer
Museum, Los Angeles, 2008. Photo: Joshua White. Courtesy of Sikkema
Jenkins & Co., New York.

248

KEIKO MIYAMOTO[his] head off,” as he initially intended to, because “the girl [Wild]changed his mind” (J 173). Later, it is suggested that Golden Gray lives
with Wild in a rock cave (J 184).
Deliberately imitating the formula of Southern romance narratives,33
Morrison parodies the mythic values and iconic ﬁgures attributed to the
Old South. Golden Gray is depicted as a “white” feminized Southern
gentleman who is ironically awakened to manhood and chivalry by his
encounter with the “black savages,” Wild and Hunters Hunter (J 160).
Vera Louise Gray, who is impregnated by a black man, is apparently aparody of the white lady ﬁgure whose physicality is traditionally deﬁned
by the “ideology of purity and modesty.”34 Like the Southern belle in
Walker’s silhouette, she uses her garment to disguise her desire: shewears the “green dress” during their aventure to “make it hard to see her
in the grass” (J 172). Being a rebellious daughter disowned by her patriarchal father, she gives no thought about the need “to look for a husband”
and enjoys a luxurious life as a single mother, “taken up completely withbook reading, pamphlet writing and the adoration of the orphan [herbaby]” (J 139). Yet her autonomy and single motherhood are possible
due to the devotion of her faithful servant, True Belle. As a black mammy
ﬁgure of the Old South, True Belle is also complicated. Wise andthoughtful, she plays a crucial role in the survival of not only her mistress but also her own family members. Yet she has an essentialist notionof race (as is suggested in her parable of “the irrevocable nature of therattler” [J 155]) and has internalized a white supremacist notion of beauty(as her name ironically means the “true” Southern “belle”/white lady).
Adoring Golden Gray’s creamy skin color and yellow hair, she embeds
such notions of beauty in the mind of her young granddaughter, Violet(J 139).
It is not difﬁcult to ﬁnd Morrison’s parodied iconic ﬁgures in Walker’s
other silhouettes. For example, in The Rich Soil Down There (1999–
2000) (ﬁg. 10), Morrison’s True Belle–like ﬁgure is carrying a Southernbelle on the head like an enormous bundle of laundry. White liquids covering the black ﬁgures suggest their internalized white supremacy. Morerecently, in her mural The Long Hot Black Road to Freedom, a DoubleDixie Two-Step (2005–8), a Vera Louise–like white woman holding ababy puts her booted leg on the chest of a black man whose lower partis underground (ﬁg. 11).
There is ambiguity in the interracial “love” between Hunters Hunterand Vera Louise. As Angela Burton argues, their interracial love sub-

TONI MORRISON AND KARA WALKER

Figure 10249

Kara Walker, The Rich Soil Down There (2002). Cut paper and paint onwall, 15 \ 33 feet (4.5 \ 10 m). Installation view: Tempo, Museum ofModern Art Queens, Queens, NY, 2002. Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins &Co., New York.

verts the convention of miscegenation stories in which “a white slave
owner overpowers and impregnates his black female slaves, characteristically without the women’s consent and in situations more analogous
to rape than seduction.”35 Hunters Hunter (a black male slave) is sexuallydesired by Vera Louise (a white lady), and their sexual act is a mutual
seduction. Vera Louise never mentions the name of the baby’s father,and Hunters Hunter keeps her “green dress” for eighteen years (J 172).
Implying nothing more, however, Morrison foregrounds only the mutual
sexual attraction between the former slave and the white lady. Likewise,
Morrison leaves ambiguity in the relation between Golden Gray andWild. Golden Gray is sexually attracted to Wild, and Wild also hungers
for his golden hair (J 167). Yet, despite their togetherness and cohabitation, nothing more is revealed or suggested.

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250

Figure 11

Kara Walker, The Long Hot Black Road to Freedom, a Double-Dixie TwoStep [detail] (2005–8). Cut paper and paint on wall, 15 \ 150 feet (4.6 \45.7 meters). Installation view: Kara Walker: The Black Road, CAC
Málaga, 2008. Photo: José Luis Gutiérrez. Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins &Co., New York.

According to Arlene Keizer, Walker is related to literary counterparts
like Gayle Jones, Carolivia Herron, Octavia Butler, and Alice Randall
through her representation of enslaved black women who have sexualdesire for the white men who dominate them. Keizer features such desireof black women in Walker’s silhouettes as “a breaking of the last taboo”
in the black community.36 Yet, concerning the desire of black female
subjectivity, Walker’s silhouettes are more ambiguous and complicatedin many cases. Although Keizer does not mention Morrison’s name,
Walker’s silhouettes of interracial love are also closely related toMorrison’s representation, especially in its ambiguity.
III.

DISASSEMBLING THE RACIALIZED AND SEXUALIZED BODY

Morrison’s Paradise tells the story of lost women living in the Convent at the edge of an all-black town called Ruby. The novel begins witha scene of a horriﬁc massacre of the Convent women, and reveals how

TONI MORRISON AND KARA WALKER251

the patriarchs of Ruby repeat the violence that they themselves havesuffered and sought to evade in their dream of constructing a safe haven
without white persecution. At the same time, through the story of theConvent women who are marginalized and victimized in a racist and sexist society, Morrison explores the possibility of being freed from the traumatized past as well as of creating a community “which is not based on
exclusion.”37 In other words, Paradise addresses the issue of a black
community constructed on traumatized history, which is also the issue
Walker is forced to confront in creating her art.
In a sense, Walker is doing what Patricia Best, a light-skinned schoolteacher of Ruby, cannot do in the novel Paradise. As an unofﬁcial
historian of the town, Patricia creates the genealogies of the ﬁfteen“founding” families of Ruby, which in turn becomes an attempt to ﬁll inthe blanks of the “town’s ofﬁcial story.” This project allows her to realize
the unspeakable of the community’s racial sexual politics and her own
alienated position in town: she ﬁnds that the town’s racial “purity” hasbeen preserved by the oppression of light-skinned people, especiallywomen like her own mother and daughter, as well as consanguineous—sometimes semi-incestuous—marriages among the founding families.
Patricia eventually burns her history due to the silent resistance of thetownspeople and her fear of ostracism and violence.
Unlike Patricia, Walker represents what the black community has repressed in its traumatized history—especially sexual oppression of black
women. Moreover, Walker’s use of racial and sexual stereotypes in her
silhouettes evokes Morrison’s representation of the Convent women.
Like Walker, Morrison explicitly utilizes stereotypes in order to emphasize that the Convent women function as the feminine Other for the Ruby
men: Consolata, the central ﬁgure at the Convent, is basically a maternal
ﬁgure who always accepts visitors and gives them necessary care. Yet,
having once had a passionate love affair with a Ruby man, she is also
seen as a sexually uninhibited woman, an image of “Salome,”38 witch,and vampire; Mavis, who accidentally suffocates her babies, is seen asa negligent mother and battered wife; Gigi is a sexually enchanting
woman who suffers from a violent memory of the civil rights movement;
Seneca, abandoned by her teenage mother, grows up as a victim of childmolestation; Pallas, emotionally abandoned by her wealthy parents,
becomes a rape victim. The stories of the Convent women reveal how
their identities are reduced to cultural and social stereotypes in a societylargely governed by patriarchal and racist ideology.

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KEIKO MIYAMOTO

In order to be freed from these culturally constructed bodies, the Convent women create body art like Walker’s in the healing ritual conductedby Consolata. In the womblike maternal space of the Convent cellar,
Consolata returns the women’s subjectivity to the archaic disposition,
reducing their bodies to mere silhouettes: “In the beginning, the mostimportant thing was the template. Consolata told each to undress and lie
down. They tried arms at the sides, outstretched above the head, crossed
over heads or stomach. . . . When they each found the position she could
tolerate on the cold, uncompromising ﬂoor, Consolata walked aroundher and painted the body’s silhouette” (P 263). As “the templates [draw]
them like magnets” (P 264), they start to ﬁll in the empty spaces of thetemplate with the images of what haunts them or their unspeakable experiences. Their etchings of body parts and of haunting memories represent their experience of abjection; however, transforming the abject
images into body art, they overcome this unnamable loss, which in turnleads them to a talking cure:
They spoke to each other about what had been dreamed and what had beendrawn. [. . .] January folded. February too. By March, days passed uncut fromnight as careful etchings of body parts and memorabilia occupied them.
Yellow barrettes, red peonies, a green cross on a ﬁeld of white. A majestic
penis pierced with a Cupid’s bow. Rose of Sharon petals, Lorna Doones. A
bright orange couple making steady love under a childish sun. (P 265)

Through this process of abjection and sublimation, the Convent women
begin to transform themselves: they become aware that the bodies theywear are culturally constructed/symbolic bodies, that is, dead ones; they
have “to be reminded of the moving bodies they wore, so seductive were
the alive ones below” (P 265); they become “calmly themselves” andare “no longer haunted” (P 266). Then, ﬁnally, their sublimation/resubjectiﬁcation culminates in their sensual and ecstatic dancing in the rain,that is, in jouissance.
While one of the women of Ruby witnesses the Convent women’sbody art as “the turbulence of females trying to bridle, without being
trampled, the monsters that slavered them,” the men of Ruby report it as“the pornography” and “Satan’s scrawl” (P 303), accusations that
Walker’s art has received. Here, we might be tempted to imagine that
Walker’s art, in turn, has inﬂuenced Morrison’s representation of theConvent women in Paradise. In fact, it is probable that Morrison saw

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253

Walker’s art while she was working on Paradise. As mentioned, the period during which Morrison was working on Paradise coincides with
Walker’s debut in the mainstream art world, and especially in 1997, theyear before the publication of Paradise, Walker became one of the mostcontroversial art world celebrities in the United States. In order to explore the possibility of Walker’s inﬂuence on Morrison, I would like tofocus on one of Walker’s most impressive large-scale silhouettes: “Thethree suckling women” detail in her 1995 mural The End of Uncle Tom
and the Grand Allegorical Tableau of Eva in Heaven (ﬁg. 12), which
was exhibited from March 30 to June 1, 1997, at the Whitney Museumof American Art in New York.
Walker’s The End of Uncle Tom is full of radical images of violenceand sexual transgression. As many critics point out, the most striking
image is at the left side of the installation: the arrangement of three black
female ﬁgures suckling each other. The three women, probably slaves,are naked from the waist upward, either nursing or being nursed. One
woman stoops a little to suckle the breast of a second woman, who also
stands on tiptoes to suck the breast of a third woman, balancing a large
watermelon behind her back. On the knees of a ﬁrst woman, an infant isstraining to get her teat. But all three women are too intent on satiating
their own thirst to placate the infant. Walker’s women seem to be enjoying themselves, with their bodies no longer being used by others, by men
or even by babies.
Shaw generally reads this life-size silhouette installation as a “rememory of slavery” that offers “a haunting visualization . . . of the personaland collective trauma of slavery.”39 Especially by linking the three suckling women to “Morrison’s gothic novel Beloved,” Show argues that “thedepiction of sexual self-reﬂexivity” and mutual nursing in Walker’s
silhouette visualizes “a mother hunger” imposed by the institution ofslavery, “a desire for the lost maternal nurturing.”40 Indeed this silhouette evokes Sethe’s claim for the stolen milk as Show suggests, but theterm “mother hunger” simultaneously reminds us of Violet’s “mother
hunger” in Jazz as well as that of the Convent women who are equally
abandoned by or separated from their mothers in Paradise. Shaw also
indicates in this silhouette “transgression of sexual and gender roles”
repressed in the black community—that is, lesbianism and child neglect.
Yet, when Shaw explains these taboos in terms of “standard gothic
tropes,”41 these women rather evoke the Convent women who gather at

Figure 12 Kara Walker, The End of Uncle Tom and the Grand Allegorical Tableau of Eva in Heaven (1995). Cut paper on wall,13\ 35 feet (4 \ 10.5 m). Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.

254
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255

the gothic mansion of the Convent and explore their identities/subjectivities through their conﬂictive but sensual relations.
Moreover, if we focus on the ways in which Walker reworks Stowe’s
novel as is suggested in the title, the link between this silhouette andParadise becomes more evident. Walker has reworked Stowe’s characters. For example, Walker parodies Stowe’s “feminized” Tom by his actof giving birth. Also, angelic Eva is represented as a violent girl who
holds an axe backward over her head. Peabody argues that, unlike in
Stowe’s novel and its popular illustrations, Eva and Tom are physicallyseparated, as if Tom’s newborn baby were the result of their illicit
relation. Tom and Legree stand back-to-back, but their symmetricalarrangement suggests their similarities. According to Peabody, Walker’s
three suckling women are identiﬁed as Eliza, Cassy, and Emmeline, thethree main female characters in Uncle Tom’s Cabin: they are meant “toelicit desire by way of their beautiful, sexualized bodies.” Walker’s silhouette “represents three young, nubile, semi-naked women who—with
their arched backs and slender bodies—refocus the viewers’ attention on
Stowe’s use of sexual desirability as a way of establishing viewer empathy.”42 Yet, being aware of their own beauty and sexualized bodies,
Walker’s women ironically refuse to grant the viewer the same pleasurethat Stowe would.
Peabody’s interpretation of the three suckling women illuminates, I
would argue, that Walker’s silhouettes signify not only Stowe’s novel
but also Morrison’s reworking of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. As we have seen,
Morrison’s inﬂuence on Walker is found in her representation of mothers, infants, and childbirth. Here, even this signature image of childbirthis “queered” by Uncle Tom’s act of giving birth. While Morrison has
reworked Stowe’s maternal ﬁgures, especially Eliza and Cassy, into
Sethe, Walker reworks Stowe’s women into the three suckling women,signifying with their sexual transgression the heteronormative endingsthat occur in both Beloved and Jazz. At the end of these novels, both
female protagonists are united with their male partners. Then, in Paradise, Morrison seems to be responding to Walker, with her representation of the Convent women who free themselves from the racialized andsexualized bodies by creating abject body art like that of Walker. Moreover, the women reconstruct themselves through the sensual and erotic
female bond, which is especially articulated in the lesbian relation between Gigi and Seneca.

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KEIKO MIYAMOTO

Finally, Joan Copjec’s explication of Walker’s silhouette further illuminates how Walker’s art and Morrison’s work resonate with each other.
Walker explains that this silhouette is a metaphor for “history . . . a constant need to suckle from history, as though history could be seen as anendless supply of mother’s milk represented by the big black mammy ofold.”43 Yet Walker’s image does not show the stereotypical corpulent
body of the black mammy. Rather, as Copjec argues, “the internal void
left by the deﬁnitive loss of the mammy can account for the replicationof the woman, or the splitting of the image from itself.” Walker in her
artwork breaks from “the commonplace of the superabundant motherthat prevails . . . in the vulgar imagination” and conceptualizes themother, on the contrary, “as a void, a hollow.”44 If this silhouette is a
metaphor for history as Walker explains it, history is represented as themother who holds the void, that is, “the never present” of the traumatic
event. The three women suckling the milk of history encounter the void,and at the same time, they are connected through the void. According to
Copjec, Walker’s reworking of “the big black mammy” into the selfreﬂexively repeated ﬁgures of women reveals “a rupture that constitutes
the never present origins of a race” and opens up “the possibility of conceiving racial identity as repeated self-difference.”45
Copjec’s reading of Walker’s silhouette reminds us of Morrison’s
remark that she created the Convent women “to write race and to unwrite
it at the same time.”46 Morrison renders the racial identities of theConvent women ambiguous, especially by never disclosing the identityof the white girl who is killed in the opening line of the novel. Also,
countering the story of an all-black “racially pure” town that is constructed on the historical trauma, the story of the Convent women suggests the possibility of identity/subjectivity as well as of community that“is not based on exclusion.”47 Like Walker’s silhouettes that create “anerotic disassembling” of stereotypical ﬁgures, “a mad and vital tussle tobreak away from their stale scent and heavy burden,”48 Morrison gathers
the stereotypical women in the maternal space of the Convent and renders their painful but rapturous break from the traumatized past as well
as from the cultural and social construction of race and gender.

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257

CONCLUSION
According to W. J. T. Mitchell, Sethe’s “rememory” is not simply amatter of ﬁlling in the gaps of history but “the very act of telling which
has the potential to produce a re-experiencing of the original event.” Yet
the act of telling is immensely complex, as Mitchell’s questions indicate:“What if the materials of memory are overwhelming, so traumatic thatthe remembering of them threatens identity rather than reconstituting it?
What if identity had to be reconstituted out of a strategic amnesia, a selective remembering, and thus a selective dis(re)membering of experiences?”49 As Beloved ends with repeating the ambiguous phrase, “this is
not a story to pass on,” Morrison reveals both the necessity and the difﬁculty of “passing on.” Walker’s almost obsessive visualization of traumatized history and its controversial reception also reveal that Walker
shares this difﬁcult task with Morrison.
Both Morrison and Walker continue to explore the possibility of“passing on” as an important role for contemporary artists. In 2002, theinteraction between Morrison and Walker was realized in their collaboration, Five Poems, in which Morrison’s poems are illustrated byWalker’s silhouettes. Five Poems was published in a limited edition toraise funds to secure freedom for writers whose voices are mufﬂed bycensorship and persecution.50 In 2006, Morrison hosted at the Louvre a
multidisciplinary program entitled “The Foreigner’s Home,” which
focused on “the pain—and rewards—of displacement, immigration andexile.” In her special exhibition and lecture, Morrison featured Théodore
Géricault’s 1819 oil painting, The Raft of the Medusa, which shows desperate sailors struggling to survive after a shipwreck. Morrison ﬁnds thisimage the perfect metaphor for those millions who are wandering insearch of new homes.51 Walker reworked the same picture by Géricault
into her silhouette made in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, which
revealed the continuing difﬁculty of solving the racial problems of theUnited States. Walker’s Katrina-Adrift (after Géricault) (ﬁg. 13) appeared on the cover of the post-Katrina issue of the New Yorker on
August 27, 2007. In the interaction of Morrison’s and Walker’s imaginations, we ﬁnd articulations of the crucial roles that artists can play inthe contemporary world.

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KEIKO MIYAMOTO

Figure 13 Kara Walker, New Yorker Cover Aug. 27, 2007, Katrina—Adrift (after
Géricault) (2007). Cut paper on paper, graphite, 25.625 \ 19.875 inches(65.1 \ 50.5 cm). Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.

NOTESThis article is the outcome of a research project supported by a kakenhi Grant-in-Aid
for Scientiﬁc Research (C) (22520284) from the Japan Society for the Promotion of
Science. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the 6th Biennial Conferenceof the Toni Morrison Society held at Université Paris, 8 Vincennes-Saint Denis, on
November 5, 2010, and at the 61st Annual Conference of the Kyusyu Branch of the
English Literary Society of Japan at Fukuoka University on October 25, 2008.
1
For the history of silhouette art, see Emma Rutherford, Silhouette: The Art of the
Shadow (New York: Rizzoli, 2009). Also, for a detailed discussion of Walker’s use of
silhouettes, see Gwendolyn Dubois Shaw, Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara
Walker (Durham: Duke UP, 2004); Anne M. Wagner, “Kara Walker: The Black-White
Relation,” Kara Walker: Narratives of a Negress, ed. Ian Berry, Darby English, Vivian
Patterson, and Mark Reinhardt (New York: Rizzoli, 2007).

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259

2
Arlene R. Keizer, “Gone Astray in the Flesh: Kara Walker, Black Women Writers,and African American Postmemory,” PMLA (October 2008): 1665.
3
Shaw, Seeing the Unspeakable, 64.
4Dinah Holtzman, “ ‘Save the Trauma for your Mama’: Kara Walker, the Art World’s
Beloved,” in Revisiting Slave Narratives II, ed. Judith Misrahi-Barak (Montpellier, FR:
Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2007), 377–404.
5
Hans Ulrich Obrist, “All Cut from Black Paper by the Able Hand of Kara Elizabeth
Walker . . . ” Artorbit (Feb. 1999), http://www.artnode.se/artorbit/issue4/i_walker/
i_walker.htm/- (accessed May 11, 2011).
6
As for Walker’s exhibition history, see Berry et al., eds., Kara Walker: Narrativesof a Negress, 185–89.
7
Shaw, Seeing the Unspeakable, 114–15.
8
Quoted in Juliet Bowles Harris, “Extreme Times Call for Extreme Heroes,” International Review of African American Art 14, no. 3 (1997): 12.
9Henry Louis Gates, Jr., quoted in Harris, “Extreme Times,” 5.
10
Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), 70. All subsequentquotations from this edition will be cited in text in parenthesis as B with a page number.
11
Yasmil Raymond, “Maladies of Power: A Kara Walker Lexicon,” in Kara Walker:
My Compliment, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love, ed. Hatje Cantz Verlag (Minneapolis:
Walker Art Center, 2007), 347–69.
12
See Patricia Morton, Disfigured Images: The Historical Assault on African American
Women (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1991); and Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social
Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982).
13
Raymond, “Maladies of Power,” 359.
14
Claire Kahane, “Dark Mirrors: A Feminist Reﬂection on Holocaust Narrative andthe Maternal Metaphor.” in Feminist Consequences: Theory for the New Century, ed.
Elizabeth Bronfen and Misha Kavka (New York: Columbia UP, 2001), 161–88.
15
Concerning the Margaret Garner case and its abolitionist responses, see Levi Cofﬁn,
Reminiscences of Levi Coffin, 1876 (New York: Kelly, 1968); and Mark Reinhardt, Who
Speaks for Margaret Garner (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010).
16
Rebecca Rae Peabody, A Strategic Cut: Kara Walker’s Art and Imagined Race inAmerican Visual Culture (Ann Arbor, MI: University Microﬁlms International, 2006),
141. My account of this silhouette is indebted to Peabody’s excellent monograph, although her explanation of the novel Beloved is incorrect in some details.
17Mark Reinhardt, “Who Speaks for the Margaret Garner? Slavery, Silence, and thePolitics of Ventriloquism,” Critical Inquiry 29 (Autumn 2000): 119.
18
Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (NewYork: Zone Books, 1999), 34.
19
Peabody, Strategic Cut, 129–44.
20
See Kahane and Marianne Hirsh, “Projected Memory: Holocaust Photographs in
Personal and Public Fantasy,” in Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, ed.
Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer (Hanover: UP of New England, 1999), 3–23.
21
Hirsh, “Projected Memory,” 16–17.
22
Thelma Golden, “Thelma Golden/Kara Walker: A Dialogue,” in Kara Walker: Pictures from Another Time, ed. Annette Dixon (New York: Distributed Art, 2002), 43–49.
23
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez(New York: Columbia UP, 1982), 17.
24Charles Shepherdson, Vital Signs: Nature, Culture, Psychoanalysis (New York:
Routledge, 2000).

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25
Maurie D. McInnis, “The Most Famous Plantation of All: The Politics of Painting
Mount Vernon,” in Landscape of Slavery: The Plantation in American Art, ed. Angela
D. Mack and Stephen G. Hofﬁus (Columbia: U of South Carolina, 2008), 107–9.
26
Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 483.
27
Raymond, “Maladies of Power,” 351.
28
Howard W. Fulweiler, “Belonging and Freedom in Morrison’s Beloved: Slavery,
Sentimentality, and the Evolution of Consciousness,” in Understanding Toni Morrison’s
Beloved and Sula: Selected Essays and Criticism, ed. Solomon O. Iyasere and Marla W.
Iyasere (New York: Whitston, 2000), 118–19.
29
Alexis L. Boylan, “From Gilded Age to Gone with the Wind: The Plantation in Early
Twentieth Century Art,” in Mack and Hofﬁus, eds., Landscape of Slavery, 132–34.
30
Raymond, “Maladies of Power,” 348–49.
31
Annette Dixon, “A Negress Speaks Out: The Art of Kara Walker,” in Dixon, ed.,Kara Walker, 11–25.
32
Morrison, Jazz (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), 143. All subsequent quotations
from this edition will be cited in text in parenthesis as J with a page number.
33
See Jill Matus, Toni Morrison (Manchester, UK: Manchester UP, 1998), 136; andJ. Brooks Bouson, Quiet as It’s Kept: Shame, Trauma, and Race in the Novels of Toni
Morrison (New York: State U of New York P, 2000), 175.
34
Diane Roberts, The Myth of Aunt Jemima: Representations of Race and Region(New York: Routledge, 1994), 5.
35
Angela Burton, “Signifying Abjection: Narrative Strategy in Toni Morrison’s Jazz,”
in New Casebooks: Toni Morrison, ed. Linden Peach (New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1998), 179.
36
Keizer, “Gone Astray,” 1666. It is worth noting that in the 1970s Morrison worked
as an editor for Carolivia Herron at Random House and highly admired Gale Jones’s
Corregidora as one of her most favorite novels. See Toni Morrison, “Toni Morrison ona Book She Loves: Gayle Jones’s Corregidora,” in What Moves at the Margin: Selected
Nonfiction, ed. and intro. Carolyn C. Denard (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2008), 108–10.
37
Oprah Winfrey Show, “Paradise.” Ophra Book Club site,
http://www.oprah.com/obc/pastbooks/toni_morrison/obc_pb_19980116_a.html(accessed March 5, 2008).
38
Morrison, Paradise (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 280. All subsequent quotations from this edition will be cited in text in parenthesis as P with a page number.
39
Shaw, Seeing the Unspeakable, 64.
40
Ibid., 41.
41
Ibid., 48.
42
Peabody, Strategic Cut, 209.
43
Kara Walker, “Big Black Mammy of the Antebellum South Is the Embodiment ofHistory,” in Kara Walker, exhibition catalogue published by the Renaissance Society at
the University of Chicago, Jan.12–Feb.23, 1997, not paginated.
44
Joan Copjec, Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 2002), 107.
45
Ibid., 100–102.
46
Ibid., 107.
47
James Marcus, “This Side of Paradise,” interview with Toni Morrison, Literatureand Fiction, Amazon.com, http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/feature/-/7651/
104–7286901-1554360 (accessed March 5, 2009).
48
Copjec, Imagine, 107.

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261

49
W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation(Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994), 200–203.
50
Morrison, Five Poems, silhouettes by Kara E. Walker (Las Vegas: Rainmarker
Edition, 2002).
51
Morrison, “The Foreigner’s Home,” pamphlet for the lecture, Louvre Museum(Nov. 6, 2006).