The “Unreliable Narrator of a Historical Manifesto”
Reimagining and Re-historicising Depictions of Sexual Violence During American Slavery in Kara Walker’s Testimony: Narrative of a Negress Burdened by Good Intentions
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 22064576 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Ginevra Bianchini (0000-0002-6743-1687, Hertie School, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 20 |
| Publication date | 2025-01-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Angles (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2274-2042 • E-ISSN: 2274-2042 |
| Publisher | OpenEdition (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.4000/159ot |
| OpenAlex | W4416949168 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 9 |
In an interview from 2013 with the Camden Arts Centre, African American visual artist Kara Walker defined herself as “an unreliable narrator of a historical manifesto,” positioning her work in a conflation between fact and fiction – as Ilka Saal defined the artist’s production. The historical retelling Testimony: Narrative of a Negress Burdened by Good Intentions (2004) is a black-and-white silent film Walker created to reconsider the topic of sexual violence within the context of slavery, and comment on the contemporary struggles of African American women with high rates of gendered violence. This short film gives the opportunity to debate over the re-historicising of rape-revenge narratives – turning them into fantasies instead – and the retelling of the Black female body’s exploitation during American slavery. In a compelling turn of events, Testimony’s narrative does not show violence inflicted on enslaved women; instead, Walker bothers and disrupts established histories by portraying sexual violence enacted on white men by Black women, in a reversal of roles, as she animates her iconic silhouettes into a puppet show. The aim of her artistic production is to understand how history and storytelling have intertwined in the creation of stereotypical ideas around blackness within the American cultural imaginary, while bringing her audience’s attention to how this act of fictionalising history has taken place. The artist reconceptualises slavery through an historiopoetic lens that allows her to build a fantasy “ethnoscape” where her viewers experience healing from intergenerational trauma. With this background in mind, this article will analyse, through the case study of Testimony, how Walker reimagines a history of violence by implicating her viewers in her decolonial artistic project
Comics · Conflation · Fantasy · Mythology · Narrative · Storytelling · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism · Theatre and Performance Studies
| Highly cited | No |
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