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Kara Walker's visual silhouettes illuminate Toni Morrison's representation of violence in her fiction, especially in her 1973 novel Sula. A shared silhouette aesthetic enables Morrison and Walker to destabilize and refract the effects of spectacular violence, which are exemplified in the multivalent media circulation of lynching imagery. As the history of such imagery shows, representations of anti-black violence produce competing emotional responses. The silhouette form highlights the ethical conundrum of representing violence. Through techniques of highlighting and hiding, the silhouette simultaneously elicits and forecloses audiences' visceral engagement with representations of suffering.
Keywords: violence / disgust / silhouette / Toni Morrison / Kara Walker
Although copies of Five Poems, an artist's book written by Toni Morrison and illustrated by Kara Walker, are held at the Museum of Modern Art and sold to collectors as a "curiosity" on the fine art and antique website 1stdibs, few people are aware of its existence. Published in 2002, the collaborative effort crystallizes deep convergences between the preeminent living American novelist and the notorious visual artist. Five Poems illuminates their shared aesthetic tendencies; the poems and illustrations, when read alongside each other, enrich our understanding of Walker's narrative structures and Morrison's visual aesthetics. In this essay, I want to draw out the broader implications of the pairing enacted in Five Poems by comparing other works by the two creators: Walker's cut-paper silhouette installations from the 1990s and Morrison's 1973 novel Sula. Together these define a shared silhouette aesthetic used to depict violent encounters. The silhouette aesthetic, I argue, enables these artists to theorize dynamics of looking at anti-black violence and to rework overdetermined attachments of black embodiment to strong emotional responses, particularly disgust.
Emerging in the same Enlightenment moment when philosophers were both debating the role of disgust in aesthetic theory (Menninghaus 103) and developing systems of taxonomy and morphology that reified racial hierarchy (Vigarello 16), the silhouette "revealed a precise moment in western culture, when the highly individual nature of appearance was the subject of investigation, the body itself providing a focus for unprecedented study" (21). Silhouettes were traditionally composed by cutting a profile portrait from black paper and mounting it on a white background. Backlit subjects would have their profiles traced on upright, framed paper, which was then...