Fear of a Black (Southern) Planet: Kara Walker's Night Conjure

Abstract:

Black folk have a dubious relationship with landscapes of the American South, where the living dead—Indigenous, enslaved, Confederate, and everyone in between—saturate the natural world with unresolved trauma. Kara Walker has long explored the complexity of race relations during the rise and fall of the plantation economy, and in Night Conjure (2001), she inverts the iconography of Black fright against a white cotton field to envision other ways in which the South begat terror and for whom. Walker picks up the seemingly contradictory relationship between women of African descent and geographic sites of oppression and unbearable cultural memory.