Kimberly Lamm
Biographic Data
| ID | 826042 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kimberly Lamm |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kimberly |
| FAMILY NAME | Lamm |
| SIGNATURE | LAMM K |
| AFFILIATIONS | Duke University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 5 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 14 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Self-Fashioning and Sorrow
This article examines three black-and-white portrait photographs of the Harlem Renaissance writer Nella Larsen (1891–1964) by Carl Van Vechten (1880–1964). Dense with intricate patterns and layers of fabric, these photographs evoke Larsen’s engagement with fashion and identify her participation in what I call the Black feminist sartorial imagination, a tradition in which clothing became a medium for claiming the sexual pleasure and freedom of fug…
Amelia Jones, In-Between Subjects
Dear Angela, a/k/a Mrs. George Gilbert
This article examines Coco Fusco's 2004 experimental video essay a/k/a Mrs. George Gilbert and its Black feminist return to the events that made Angela Davis an icon of Black struggle and liberation at the onset of the 1970s. Tracing Fusco's "epistolary aesthetic," I argue that a/k/a Mrs. George Gilbert can be read as a love letter to Davis that evokes the subjective singularity that often disappears behind her iconicity
Reading hieroglyphs behind glass
I Want to Wear It
In this article I focus on the portrayal of fashionable clothing in the 1975 film Mahogany and connect it to the history of African American women engaging with sartorial self-representation as a means to assert their visibility in American culture. My aim is to analyse Mahogany’s emphasis on brightly-coloured highly-ornamented clothing, which has a long history of signifying bad taste and became part of accusations of racial and sexual inferiori…
The Will to Adorn”
This article analyses Nick Cave’s “soundsuits”—striking for their elaborately ornamented forms and vibrant colours—as queer reframings of black masculinity. Drawing on scholarship in African American studies that examines the production of black masculinity in response to racial violence, the article explores how Cave’s soundsuits (produced from 1991 to 2011) can be understood in relationship to the beating of Rodney King that took place in Los A…
Between the open and the hidden
In this article I analyse the photographs Gordon Parks produced for the Life photo-essay The restraints: open and hidden, which depicts Jim Crow segregation in Mobile, Alabama. Drawing on Jacques Derrida's (1996) attention to the archival unconscious and Hortense Spillers’ (1987) concept of ‘ungendering’, I argue that Parks’ photographs of women's and girls’ clothing manifest his background in fashion photography and highlight the counter- archiv…
Texting girls
This introductory essay provides an overview of the arguments and premises of this special issue, Texting Girls: Images, Sounds, and Words in Neoliberal Cultures of Femininity. Situated within the recent historical conjuncture in which “girls” (and all that is suggested by the term) have an unprecedented cultural visibility, the essay argues that the figure of the girl is coerced into performing forms of symbolic work within neoliberalism that di…
The Poetics of Black Aesthetics
The Poetics of Black Aesthetics Kimberly Lamm (bio) Evie Shockley, Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry. Iowa City: University of Iowa, 2011. 260 pp. $39.95. The most compelling antiracist scholarship makes clear what many have known all along—that blackness is an imaginatively resourceful counterclaim to the legalized thefts and systemic denigrations through which racism has been constituted and pra…
Modern spectacle and American feminism's disappointing daughters
Joan Scott's 'fantasy echo' is deployed to analyse the trope of the mother/daughter relationship in contemporary laments about feminism's failures, exemplified by Susan Faludi's 'American Electra: Feminism's Ritual Matricide' (2010). I demonstrate that Faludi's primary argument - that young feminists do not respect the generations that precede them and therefore halt feminist progress - unreflectively relies upon a feminist maternal fantasy and i…
Poetry's Afterlife
Book Review| March 01 2012 Poetry's Afterlife: Verse in the Digital Age Poetry's Afterlife: Verse in the Digital Age. By Stein, Kevin. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press. 2010. xii, 261 pp. Cloth, $70.00; paper, $26.95.Male Subjectivity and Poetic Form in “New American” Poetry. By Mossin, Andrew. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2010. ix, 235 pp. $80.00.Urban Pastoral: Natural Currents in the New York School. By Gray, Timothy. Iowa City: Univ. of Io…
Emily Dickinson and the Labor of Clothing; Edith Wharton and the Making of Fashion
Book Review| March 01 2011 Emily Dickinson and the Labor of Clothing; Edith Wharton and the Making of Fashion Kimberly Lamm Kimberly Lamm Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2011) 83 (1): 205–207. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2010-076 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Kimberly Lamm; Emily Dickinson and the Labor of Clothing; Edith Wharton and the Making of Fash…
Reinventing Empire, Celebrating Commerce
Lewis and Clark: The National Bicentennial Exhibition. Curated by Carolyn Gilman. Missouri History Museum, St. Louis, January to August 2004; Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, November 2004 to March 2005; Denver Museum of Nature and Science, Denver, May to September 2005; Oregon Historical Society, Portland, November 11, 2005, to March 11, 2006; National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, May to September…
Visuality and Black Masculinity in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Romare Bearden's Photomontages
Placed together, Stuart Hall and Cornel West's statements not only attest to the malleability of bodies and the almost irrevocable fixity of racism's traumatic incisions; the shared trope of the canvas implicitly asks for an analysis of the relations between racism, the sexed and gendered economies that underpin the visual and physical signs of race, and visual art. 2 While contemporary cultural theorists have demonstrated the necessity of seeing…
Modern spectacle and American feminism's disappointing daughters
Joan Scott's 'fantasy echo' is deployed to analyse the trope of the mother/daughter relationship in contemporary laments about feminism's failures, exemplified by Susan Faludi's 'American Electra: Feminism's Ritual Matricide' (2010). I demonstrate that Faludi's primary argument - that young feminists do not respect the generations that precede them and therefore halt feminist progress - unreflectively relies upon a feminist maternal fantasy and i…
I Want to Wear It
In this article I focus on the portrayal of fashionable clothing in the 1975 film Mahogany and connect it to the history of African American women engaging with sartorial self-representation as a means to assert their visibility in American culture. My aim is to analyse Mahogany’s emphasis on brightly-coloured highly-ornamented clothing, which has a long history of signifying bad taste and became part of accusations of racial and sexual inferiori…
The Will to Adorn”
This article analyses Nick Cave’s “soundsuits”—striking for their elaborately ornamented forms and vibrant colours—as queer reframings of black masculinity. Drawing on scholarship in African American studies that examines the production of black masculinity in response to racial violence, the article explores how Cave’s soundsuits (produced from 1991 to 2011) can be understood in relationship to the beating of Rodney King that took place in Los A…
Visuality and Black Masculinity in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Romare Bearden's Photomontages
Placed together, Stuart Hall and Cornel West's statements not only attest to the malleability of bodies and the almost irrevocable fixity of racism's traumatic incisions; the shared trope of the canvas implicitly asks for an analysis of the relations between racism, the sexed and gendered economies that underpin the visual and physical signs of race, and visual art. 2 While contemporary cultural theorists have demonstrated the necessity of seeing…
Visuality and Black Masculinity in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Romare Bearden's Photomontages
Placed together, Stuart Hall and Cornel West's statements not only attest to the malleability of bodies and the almost irrevocable fixity of racism's traumatic incisions; the shared trope of the canvas implicitly asks for an analysis of the relations between racism, the sexed and gendered economies that underpin the visual and physical signs of race, and visual art. 2 While contemporary cultural theorists have demonstrated the necessity of seeing…
Reinventing Empire, Celebrating Commerce
Lewis and Clark: The National Bicentennial Exhibition. Curated by Carolyn Gilman. Missouri History Museum, St. Louis, January to August 2004; Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, November 2004 to March 2005; Denver Museum of Nature and Science, Denver, May to September 2005; Oregon Historical Society, Portland, November 11, 2005, to March 11, 2006; National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, May to September…
Emily Dickinson and the Labor of Clothing; Edith Wharton and the Making of Fashion
Book Review| March 01 2011 Emily Dickinson and the Labor of Clothing; Edith Wharton and the Making of Fashion Kimberly Lamm Kimberly Lamm Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2011) 83 (1): 205–207. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2010-076 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Kimberly Lamm; Emily Dickinson and the Labor of Clothing; Edith Wharton and the Making of Fash…
Poetry's Afterlife
Book Review| March 01 2012 Poetry's Afterlife: Verse in the Digital Age Poetry's Afterlife: Verse in the Digital Age. By Stein, Kevin. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press. 2010. xii, 261 pp. Cloth, $70.00; paper, $26.95.Male Subjectivity and Poetic Form in “New American” Poetry. By Mossin, Andrew. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2010. ix, 235 pp. $80.00.Urban Pastoral: Natural Currents in the New York School. By Gray, Timothy. Iowa City: Univ. of Io…
The Poetics of Black Aesthetics
The Poetics of Black Aesthetics Kimberly Lamm (bio) Evie Shockley, Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry. Iowa City: University of Iowa, 2011. 260 pp. $39.95. The most compelling antiracist scholarship makes clear what many have known all along—that blackness is an imaginatively resourceful counterclaim to the legalized thefts and systemic denigrations through which racism has been constituted and pra…
Modern spectacle and American feminism's disappointing daughters
Joan Scott's 'fantasy echo' is deployed to analyse the trope of the mother/daughter relationship in contemporary laments about feminism's failures, exemplified by Susan Faludi's 'American Electra: Feminism's Ritual Matricide' (2010). I demonstrate that Faludi's primary argument - that young feminists do not respect the generations that precede them and therefore halt feminist progress - unreflectively relies upon a feminist maternal fantasy and i…
Between the open and the hidden
In this article I analyse the photographs Gordon Parks produced for the Life photo-essay The restraints: open and hidden, which depicts Jim Crow segregation in Mobile, Alabama. Drawing on Jacques Derrida's (1996) attention to the archival unconscious and Hortense Spillers’ (1987) concept of ‘ungendering’, I argue that Parks’ photographs of women's and girls’ clothing manifest his background in fashion photography and highlight the counter- archiv…
Texting girls
This introductory essay provides an overview of the arguments and premises of this special issue, Texting Girls: Images, Sounds, and Words in Neoliberal Cultures of Femininity. Situated within the recent historical conjuncture in which “girls” (and all that is suggested by the term) have an unprecedented cultural visibility, the essay argues that the figure of the girl is coerced into performing forms of symbolic work within neoliberalism that di…
The Will to Adorn”
This article analyses Nick Cave’s “soundsuits”—striking for their elaborately ornamented forms and vibrant colours—as queer reframings of black masculinity. Drawing on scholarship in African American studies that examines the production of black masculinity in response to racial violence, the article explores how Cave’s soundsuits (produced from 1991 to 2011) can be understood in relationship to the beating of Rodney King that took place in Los A…
I Want to Wear It
In this article I focus on the portrayal of fashionable clothing in the 1975 film Mahogany and connect it to the history of African American women engaging with sartorial self-representation as a means to assert their visibility in American culture. My aim is to analyse Mahogany’s emphasis on brightly-coloured highly-ornamented clothing, which has a long history of signifying bad taste and became part of accusations of racial and sexual inferiori…
Amelia Jones, In-Between Subjects
Dear Angela, a/k/a Mrs. George Gilbert
This article examines Coco Fusco's 2004 experimental video essay a/k/a Mrs. George Gilbert and its Black feminist return to the events that made Angela Davis an icon of Black struggle and liberation at the onset of the 1970s. Tracing Fusco's "epistolary aesthetic," I argue that a/k/a Mrs. George Gilbert can be read as a love letter to Davis that evokes the subjective singularity that often disappears behind her iconicity
Reading hieroglyphs behind glass
Self-Fashioning and Sorrow
This article examines three black-and-white portrait photographs of the Harlem Renaissance writer Nella Larsen (1891–1964) by Carl Van Vechten (1880–1964). Dense with intricate patterns and layers of fabric, these photographs evoke Larsen’s engagement with fashion and identify her participation in what I call the Black feminist sartorial imagination, a tradition in which clothing became a medium for claiming the sexual pleasure and freedom of fug…
Art (12 works) · Sociology (9 works) · Art history (8 works) · Gender Studies (8 works) · History (7 works) · Aesthetics (6 works) · Law (5 works) · Literature (5 works) · Political science (5 works) · Psychology (5 works)