Context is everything. To begin with, there is the question of intent in the circulation of racialized images, and the way racism may be ascribed to them. To display racialized imagery in America is to open a Pandora’s Box of every conceivable projection and denial. This is not to separate intention from context, but to find ways of reading it that are contextual and historical. Pandora’s Box is an apt metaphor for the racial content of Kara Walker’s work. There was an incident, about a dozen years ago, when her work was to be first shown at the then-quite-stodgy Detroit Institute of Arts. Think of the recent film Get Out as another of Pandora’s Box—the basement and its horror of substitute body parts. Kara Walker was new to Detroit, and the DIA was still a bastion of cultural separatism in the city. In the film, black bodies are used as vehicles for whiteness that has run out its biological course and needs new life. Off hours, a black janitor encountered the work during installation and complained; the show was cancelled. A state of mind called “the sunken place” is introduced in the film as the horror of racial subjectivity. This is the kind of textbook case that organizations such as the National Coalition Against Censorship deal with all the time, from Huckleberry Finn to the controversy of Vanessa Place tweeting 140-line texts from Gone with the Wind. On the other hand, the contrast between that moment to the ramp up of Kara Walker’s career in museums could not be more marked. The art world itself is represented in the form of a blind gallery owner lusting for authentic talent. Her work seemed so out of place in those contexts, with no connection of any sort to community, easily misread at the 1997 Whitney Biennial as an instance of racialized chic. Black cut-out figures against a white ground create an uncanny binarism that generates more disturbance. The abstraction of rights and the white walls of the gallery/museum together yield an effect of deracination as an argument of power. We look for identity in anything we see, but must be content with an identification. However, the exhibition of a Kara Walker film installation at the inaugural exhibition of MOCAD in Detroit passed without comment; indeed it defined the kind of engaged art the museum wanted to show. Concepts such as “double consciousness” and “the veil” may be comprehended, but never from the same place. Lastly, Kara Walker’s monumental sculpture at a Brooklyn warehouse, Sugar Mama, met with high attendance and publicity; at this point her iconography was so well known its provocation had folded into the vocabulary of site-specific sculpture and historical reference. Another register is my teaching: I told my class that I had seen Get Out three times, the first with an all-black audience in Detroit. In my classes at Wayne State, I show images of racial stereotypes when reading texts like Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus stories. My first use of Kara Walker’s work in class was to discuss the unconscious disturbance condensed in the character of Topsy. Discussion of such images takes place openly in a multi-ethnic classroom; in one, we tracked images of Tar Baby through a series of publications, from Joel Chandler Harris to Walt Disney, focusing particularly on a children’s book from the 50s or 60s that depicted the Tar Baby hanging from a tree. Yesterday I pointed out to them the long association of interracial sex with violence, from the Jim Crow period to millennial Brooklyn. The point was how such an image could at any point be blindly perceived as benign, given the history it stood for (and continues, in an unconscious way). Even the slave auction is channeled in the form of a bingo game. I would like to think that my teaching is responsible, and that these images can and must be shown and taught—even from the perspective of a white male professor. The moment of slave revolt happens, too, when the enslaved turns the gun on himself. Now the question is, not that Joel Chandler Harris reduces to Kara Walker, but what is so different between the two? This provides a context in which her work is discussed. If it is simply that Harris is white and Kara Walker is black, then my teaching racial images at Wayne State is as problematic as Harris’s work, and it isn’t. I feel a distinct affective impact from discussing the concept of the racial unconscious to a person who is black or white. At the same time, I hesitated to display the Disney image from The Song of the South on my page, as it could easily be misinterpreted and circulated as a meme from barrettwatten.net as evidence of racist intention; in the context of the out-of-control discourse around race I could be seen as just an-other white conceptualist. Could the same thing be said about this piece as Language writing? What is going on, then, with my account of the degree of racialization in Kara Walker’s images? The most touching moment is when the zombies shed a tear for their former human selves. Can I know anything about them, or from what perspective can I elucidate my lack of knowledge? Is the historical context of racial violence, from the death of Oscar Grant to the present, represented in the film’s final scene? What is the difference between racialized and racist content in all of the above examples, with the absolute certainty that what Kara Walker is doing must be perceptible to anyone who apprehends it? The long history of a painful binary in its cut-out forms still haunts us.

Written to introduce Kara Walker for The Nomads reading series, curated by Stephanie Jean, Hamtramck Public Library, 20 April 2018. The text contains material from my 2015 discussion of the circulation of racial images on the internet, “Speech Acts,” along with references to the film Get Out (2017, dir. Jordan Peele), and reflections on my teaching at Wayne State University.