ABSTRACT
It is safe to say as a statement of incontrovertible fact that Kara Walker’s artwork is disturbing. 1 Consisting of images of the collective unconscious of plantation slavery, Walker recasts the stock of Black antebellum characters, creating narrative tales of a twisted and literally perverse history of the economic, sexual, and representational depravations of American racial slavery. Walker’s silhouette art is dark and awful. It is violent, sexually explicit, scatological, and irreverent. Indeed, if you have a sense of humor, it could give new meaning to the term “black humor.” In reworking various popular cultural forms and images, it tries to constitute a countermythology to a range of race, class, and gender-based romanticizations of American racial slavery. And it does so by presenting, to turn a phrase by George Frederickson, the Black image up against the white wall. 2
