Gone Astray in the Flesh: Kara Walker, Black Women Writers, and African American Postmemory

In the vigorous debate over Kara Walker's art—in particular, her life-size, black-on-white depictions of psychosexual fantasies seeded by American slavery—much attention has been paid to the objections raised by African American artists belonging to a generation older than Walker's. These older artists, including Betye Saar, Faith Ringgold, and Howardena Pindell, as well as commentators like Juliette Bowles, are often highlighted as Walker's main detractors, rendering the attack on her work a form of internecine, intergenerational warfare in African American intellectual and cultural life. This articulation of the debate obscures the extent to which themes and figures in Walker's oeuvre link it to the work of numerous African American women whose writing began to appear in the early 1970s. Walker is connected to literary counterparts like Gayl Jones, Carolivia Herron, Alice Randall, and Octavia Butler through her construction of characters marked by their sexual involvement with the master class. How these characters manage a set of exploitative relationships—in other words, how they explore their sexualities in the context of coercion—establishes them as a literary and visual sisterhood. Because Walker's silhouettes and other creations have been exhibited to large, integrated audiences in some of the most august international and domestic museums, they have provoked more comment and wider protests than the novels of contemporary African American women writers, but the differences in cultural reception mask the deep similarity between these bodies of work.