Ilka Saal

"Collusions of Fact and Fiction is the first book-length study in the field to discuss the works of Suzan-Lori Parks and Kara Walker in conjunction with each other and to establish them as exemplary for a larger generational shift in how late twentieth century African American artists have been addressing the histories and legacies of New World slavery"--

Performing Slavery in the Works of Suzan-Lori Parks and Kara Walker

Collusions of Fact and Fiction

Katrin Horn

Leopold Lippert

Pia Wiegmink

This book investigates transnational processes through the analytic lens of cultural performance. Structured around key concepts of performance studies––commons, skills, and traces––this edited collection addresses the political, normative, and historical implications of cultural performances beyond the limits of the (US) nation-state. These three central aspects of performance function as entryways to inquiries into transnational processes and allow the authors to shift the discussion away from text-centered approaches to intercultural encounters and to bring into focus the dynamic field that opens up between producer, art work, context, setting, and audience in the moment of performance as well as in its afterlife. The chapters provide fresh, performance-based approaches to notions of transcultural mobility and circulation, transnational cultural experience and knowledge formation, transnational public spheres, and identities’ rootedness in both specific local places and diasporic worlds beyond the written word. This book will be of great interest to scholars and students of American studies, performance studies, and transnational studies

Commons, Skills, Traces

American Cultures as Transnational Performance

Bertram D. Ashe

From Kara Walker?s hellscape antebellum silhouettes to Paul Beatty?s bizarre twist on slavery in The Sellout and from Colson Whitehead?s literal Underground Railroad to Jordan Peele?s body-snatching Get Out, this volume offers commentary on contemporary artistic works that present, like musical deep cuts, some challenging ?alternate takes? on American slavery. These artists deliberately confront and negotiate the psychic and representational legacies of slavery to imagine possibilities and change. The essays in this volume explore the conceptions of freedom and blackness that undergird these narratives, critically examining how artists growing up in the post?Civil Rights era have nuanced slavery in a way that is distinctly different from the first wave of neo-slave narratives that emerged from the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. Slavery and the Post-Black Imagination positions post-blackness as a productive category of analysis that brings into sharp focus recent developments in black cultural productions across various media. These ten essays investigate how millennial black cultural productions trouble long-held notions of blackness by challenging limiting scripts. They interrogate political as well as formal interventions into established discourses to demonstrate how explorations of black identities frequently go hand in hand with the purposeful refiguring of slavery?s prevailing tropes, narratives, and images. A V Ethel Willis White Book

Slavery and the Post-Black Imagination

From Kara Walker’s hellscape antebellum silhouettes to Paul Beatty’s bizarre twist on slavery in The Sellout and from Colson Whitehead’s literal Underground Railroad to Jordan Peele’s body-snatching Get Out, this volume offers commentary on contemporary artistic works that present, like musical deep cuts, some challenging “alternate takes” on American slavery. These artists deliberately confront and negotiate the psychic and representational legacies of slavery to imagine possibilities and change. The essays in this volume explore the conceptions of freedom and blackness that undergird these narratives, critically examining how artists growing up in the post–Civil Rights era have nuanced slavery in a way that is distinctly different from the first wave of neo-slave narratives that emerged from the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. Slavery and the Post-Black Imagination positions post-blackness as a productive category of analysis that brings into sharp focus recent developments in black cultural productions across various media. These ten essays investigate how millennial black cultural productions trouble long-held notions of blackness by challenging limiting scripts. They interrogate political as well as formal interventions into established discourses to demonstrate how explorations of black identities frequently go hand in hand with the purposeful refiguring of slavery’s prevailing tropes, narratives, and images. A V Ethel Willis White Book

Ilka Saal

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