Craig Brewer and Kara Walker: Sexing the Difference and Rebuilding the South

摘要

This article treats Kara Walker's antebellum silhouettes as a theoretical framework for interpreting how film director Craig Brewer attends to the melancholic bind that racial inequalities create between white and Black people in the South in Hustle & Flow and Black Snake Moan. Brewer's and Walker's cultural productions attempt to make both the past and the South inhabitable spaces, literally and figuratively for U.S. citizens across racial lines and in doing so, Walker and Brewer challenge the ways in which Black and white bodies have been raced and gendered in U.S. popular culture. Positioning Walker's and Brewer's art as participating in critical gender and critical race discourse demonstrates how their art is more than the spectacle and titillation that frames popular perceptions of their work.