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The Flood Last Time: “Muck” and the Uses of History in Kara Walker's “Rumination” on Katrina

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 August 2010

MICHAEL P. BIBLER
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Abstract

Kara Walker describes her book After the Deluge (2007) as “rumination” on Hurricane Katrina structured in the form of a “visual essay.” The book combines Walker's own artwork and the works of other artists into “a narrative of fluid symbols” in which the overarching analogy of “murky, toxic waters” holds the potential to “become the amniotic fluid of a potentially new and difficult birth.” This essay considers Walker's use of history within this collection of images to show how the book opens up ways to interrogate Katrina's particular significance as a wholly new, and yet eerily familiar, historical “event.” Nuancing a reading of Walker's book with reference to James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time (1963), to which After the Deluge implicitly alludes, the essay examines Walker's artistic challenge to the notion that history is a narratable account of a past that precedes the present and demonstrates how that challenge encourages us to think about the potential uses of history within civil rights discourse after Katrina.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 44 , Issue 3: Hurricane Katrina: Five Years After , August 2010 , pp. 503 - 518
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

1 James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (London: Penguin Books, 1990; first published 1963), 71. Hereafter cited by page numbers in the text.

2 In an interview with Harvey Blume, Walker challenges Blume's description of a figure in one of her silhouettes as a “black woman,” claiming, “That's an assumption! Keep in mind they're images, not men, boys, or girls. We're looking at pictures that respond to other pictures, rather than the actual thing.” Harvey Blume, “Q&A with Kara Walker,” Boston Globe, 2 April 2006, http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2006/04/02/qa_with_kara_walker/. In the case of Burn, we should also note that Walker provides no facial features in this silhouette, making it difficult to determine how she expects us to interpret the image racially. Given Walker's attention to black women in so much of her work, it is safe to assume that this girl is also “black,” as long as we also remain open to the possibility that the image could be read as “white” as well.

3 Kara Walker, After the Deluge (New York: Rizzoli, 2007), 7, hereafter cited by page number in the text.

4 A. C. Thompson, “Katrina's Hidden Race War,” The Nation, 17 Dec. 2008, http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090105/thompson?rel=hp_picks. See also idem, “New Evidence Surfaces in Post-Katrina Crimes,” The Nation, 11 July 2009, http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090720/thompson; and Rebecca Solnit, “The Grinning Skull: The Homicides You Didn't Hear about in Hurricane Katrina,” TomDispatch.com, 22 Dec. 2008, http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175016.

5 Pratt, Lloyd, “New Orleans and Its Storm: Exception, Example, or Event?” American Literary History, 19, 1 (Spring 2007), 251–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 251. See also idem, “In the Event: An Introduction,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 19, 2 (2008), 1–8; and Hayden, White, “The Historical Event,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 19, 2 (2008), 9–34Google Scholar.

6 Pratt, “New Orleans and Its Storm,” 251–52, original emphasis.

7 Ibid., 254, 251.

8 Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Random House, 1992), 44.

9 See my article “Always the Tragic Jezebel: New Orleans, Katrina, and the Layered Discourses of a Doomed Southern City,” Southern Cultures, 14, 2 (2008), 6–27.

10 Clyde, Woods, “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans? Katrina, Trap Economics, and the Rebirth of the Blues,” American Quarterly, 57, 4 (2005), 1005–18Google Scholar, 1007.

11 Blume, “Q&A with Kara Walker.”

12 Philippe Vergne, “The Black Saint Is the Sinner Lady,” in idem, ed., Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2007), 22, 23.

13 Kevin Young, “Triangular Trade: Coloring, Remarking, and Narrative in the Writings of Kara Walker,” in Vergne, Kara Walker, 45.

14 Deak, Nabers, “Past Using: James Baldwin and Civil Rights Law in the 1960s,” Yale Journal of Criticism, 18, 2 (2005), 221–42Google Scholar, 227, original emphasis.

15 Ibid., 234–35.

16 Ibid., 236–37.

17 Ibid., 238–40.

18 For example, see Field, Douglas, “Looking for Jimmy Baldwin,” Callaloo, 27, 2 (Spring 2004), 457–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Robert Carleton Hobbs, Kara Walker: Slavery Slavery! (Washington, DC: International Arts and Artists, 2002).

19 Woods, 1005.

20 Roberta Smith, “Kara Walker Makes Contrasts in Silhouette in Her Own Met Show,” New York Times, 24 March 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/24/arts/design/24walk.html?_r=1&oref=slogin#.