This dissertation is grounded in an encounter with three case studies of contemporary artists whose work critically engages the persistence of blackness as spectacle in representations of race. Resisting totalizing notions of spectacle, this project aims to elaborate how the fundamentally social and public dimension of display invites the re-narrativization of the historical subjections put on display. The dissertation begins with a reading of Venus, by Suzan-Lori Parks, a play that restages the iconicity of Saartjie Baartman as an object of central import to the production of racial categories. The play's critical re-enactment makes explicit present-day attachments to the structures of display and domination that the story of Venus embodies. The following chapter turns to the visual art of Kara Walker, whose work is a complicated and compelling instance of the dialectical tensions between nostalgic longings and critical memory. Her artistic practice relies on gracefully simple visual vocabularies and tools, in ways that succeed in folding the viewer into the spectacle on display, to ultimately expose the subjective and complex affective processes by which we interpret race as a visual code. Finally, I consider the multi-disciplinary performance and installation practices of William Pope.L, whose interventions into gallery and public spaces expose the centrality of race in mediating broader social relations and contests.;Taken together, these three are examples of contemporary art that is fundamentally committed to interrogating racial meaning in the US, through the reification of blackness as a conceptual paradigm. Their works rely on formal innovations to render historically subjugated spectacles of embodiment into occasions for contradictory affective responses and resistant critical narratives.
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