Looking at black bodies in pain

In 1994 Elizabeth Alexander, in an anguished response to the police beating of Rodney King, “Can You Be BLACK and Look at This? Reading the Rodney King Video(s),” linked the spectacularity of black pain to American national identity: “Black bodies in pain for public consumption have been an American national spectacle for centuries” (78). Indeed, slavery produced a visuality of the black body in pain that was paradoxically circulated by the sentimentalist rhetoric of abolitionism and has continued into the 21st century. In 2017 a painting by Dana Schutz in Whitney Biennial sparked a hot controversy on the limits of artistic freedom, with protesters standing in front of the work to obscure it from view and asking for its removal and destruction. The white artist was apparently unaware that she had tapped the spectacle of black suffering. The painting, entitled “Open Casket,” was inspired by the well-known photograph of Emmett Till’s tortured body in his casket, which his mother had decided to leave open so that “The whole nation had to bear witness to this” (quoted in Christine Harold and Kevin Michael DeLuca, “Behold the Corpse: Violent Images and the Case of Emmett Till,” in Visual Rhetoric: A Reader in Communication and American Culture, ed. by Lester C. Olson, Cara A. Finnegan and Diane S. Hope, SAGE 2008, p. 262). The debate mainly focused on representation, but it had to do with more complex issues than cultural appropriation. Saidiya Hartman, in “Venus in Two Acts,” invites scholars to avoid providing closure to slavery in acts of memorialization and calls for an “ethics of historical representation” that respects what we cannot know and refuses to replicate “the grammar of violence” (4). As Christina Sharpe has remarked, the issue is not so much “who has the right to represent black pain” but rather intimacy and our relationship to violence. On a slightly different note Claudia Rankine commented, “I don’t think it has anything to do with the race of the artist. It’s more about your positioning in relation to the material.” Is silence and/or invisibility the only possible way to deal with the troubling relationship between black bodies, pain, and visuality? Is the construction of a radical politics of gaze that does not reproduce the subjugation of black people possible? This essay deals with the current circulation of images of enslaved black bodies in pain that is central to the contemporary rememorying of slavery in literature, film and the arts. It investigates the possibility of a countervisuality of the black body in the context of the long history of spectacularity of black pain, and in light of our living in “the afterlife of slavery” (S. Hartman). Contemporary representations of the abused enslaved body, even when they engage in bringing about a countervisuality of blackness, are inevitably enmeshed in the tradition that pornotropes the black body (Hortense Spillers) and makes it a conduit for white benevolence. This essay analyzes strategies used by contemporary black artists and writers who refuse to “come to terms” with slavery, narrate the past as an “incomplete project of freedom” through stories that speak to and of the present, and revisit the scene of subjection in order to “transform the no-place of the archive into the no-place of a utopia” (Hal Foster), and manage to do so “without replicating the grammar of violence.”