DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.

Kara Walker's silhouettes represent antebellum American history and southern plantation life. She mixes history with fantasy and fiction and does not often display much truth in her pieces. She even reveals just how white-washed the truth of plantation and slave life is by mirroring the blended and blurred truth of her pieces with the equally blurred truth of African Americans' lives in the South around the Civil War. Slaves' accounts were almost always disregarded as false accounts and are often overlooked by historians. Likewise, rape of slave girls by white men was prevalent, but there were few cases documented. By using sexual, emotional, and racial struggles for power Kara reveals this dark history. She even reveals how disturbing the time was for people by using graphic images that are violent, sexual, and disgusting in order to mimic the gruesome conditions for slave life. 

 

Kara Walker continues her blurred history through her clever choice of titles. Her work 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 even sounds like a "piece of nineteenth century flummery" according to Robert Hobbs. In this piece Kara Walker even mimics the Jim Crow stereotypes of the time. Jim Crow, which was the nickname for the laws dealing with racial segregation, letter became a show character from the 1830's who was portrayed as elderly, crippled, and clumsy. Kara Walker creates characters who further these stereotypes in order to illustrate how history seems to reinforce them through its lack of truth and perspective from the slaves themselves due to the white-washing of history. Similarly, Walker mocks the film and novel Gone with the Wind in her piece titled Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred b'tween the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart. Both the film and novel depict plantation slaves as happy and blissfully ignorant, so in response Kara Walker reclaims these stereotypes through irony. She pokes fun at how the novel seems to romanticize the time when civil war and harsh slavery was rampant through the south by illustrating a man and woman romantically joining hands before a lake. Kara furthers her critique of the book in juxtaposition to the reality of the time by having the sword of the young man pointing down to his son he fathered with a slave.

Furthermore, Walker utilizes images of grotesque violence and sexuality to further her idea of blurred history by mocking the romanticism that white people use to hide the true brutality of the history of slavery. By depicting the slaves as committing horrendous acts that are seen by the viewers as disgusting she mirrors how the conditions and lives of the slaves were during the Civil War era. Kara Walker mocks how shocked her audience should be by slavery and the conditions slaves endured through these graphic images. White men raping young slaver girls was, sadly, a very common occurrence on plantations, however very few cases were ever actually reported. Kara Walker illustrates this idea throughout her piece by either depicting the children as a result of the rape, like how she did in her work Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred b'tween the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart,  or by illustrating the various sexual acts between men and women of the two races. However, she often recreates history by enabling the black slave girls to be in charge and in control of the affairs. In her work Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred b'tween the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart she not only alludes to these rapes through the little boy, who was fathered by the man standing near him, but also through the slave woman who is giving birth on the opposite side of the installation.

 

Most of her images and overall ideas are influenced by Harlequin romance novels, slave narratives, minstrel shows, and other memorabilia from the time period. However, in both Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred b'tween the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart and The Emancipation Approximation Kara Walker alludes to the mythological story of the Greek god Zeus taking the form of a swan in order to rape Leda, who gives birth two four children as a result. This is seen in the first work of the little boy, discussed earlier, and by the swans in the Emancipation Approximation. In ancient Greece the gods were often seen as uncaring, harsh, fickle, and often uninterested in the lives of the mortals, who they often used as puppets for their own entertainment, this could allude to the white plantation owners who treated their slaves in similar ways. Similarly, Kara Walker could be alluding to the white-washing of history, in both the story Greek mythology and American history, where the rapist seems to be seen as a hero. By alluding to this story Walker furthers her point of blurred history in order to reveal the importance of understanding history from the slaves' point of view as well as that of the white man.

 

In conclusion, Kara Walker utilizes stereotypes and disturbingly graphic images along with her idea of blurred history in order to illustrate the importance of understanding the truth of the history of slavery that has to long been romanticized by the white-washing of history. 

 

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.