Abstract
In 1994, twenty-four-year-old artist Kara Walker mounted her first exhibition of visual vignettes set in the antebellum South. Composed of life-sized stylized silhouettes cut from black paper, a genteel nineteenth-century art form, they were pasted directly onto the New York gallery’s expansive white walls. Stock racial characters—Mammies, Pickaninnies, Sambos, Jezebels, Southern belles, and Confederate soldiers—cavorted across the walls in lewd scenes that were at once seductive and repulsive, comic and tragic.
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Notes
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© 2010 Bernadette J. Brooten
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Roberts, D. (2010). The Paradox of Silence and Display: Sexual Violation of Enslaved Women and Contemporary Contradictions in Black Female Sexuality. In: Brooten, B.J. (eds) Beyond Slavery. Black Religion/Womanist Thought/Social Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230113893_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230113893_3
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