Abrading Boundaries: Reconsidering Barbara Chase-Riboud's Sculpture, Fiction, and Poetry

Abstract

Abrading BoundariesReconsidering Barbara Chase-Riboud's Sculpture, Fiction, and Poetry Suzette A. Spencer (bio) and Carlos A. Miranda (bio) Edgy, epic, oft-times controversial, always boundary-crossing—Barbara Chase-Riboud has attracted international attention as a sculptor, novelist, and poet for the past fifty years. This issue of Callaloo features creative work by Chase-Riboud alongside critical engagements with her creative writing, poetry, and sculpture. Few Americans, certainly few women or African Americans, have excelled across the genres of sculpture, poetry, and fiction simultaneously and received the acclaim Chase-Riboud has consistently garnered. While there is an overwhelming tendency to concentrate primarily on her sculpture, the time has now come, we believe, to reconsider Chase-Riboud as more than a sculptor. The critical essays assembled here in Callaloo navigate across Chase-Riboud's capacious oeuvre. One of our central aims in this gathering of creative and scholarly work is to impress the dynamism, diversity, and breadth of Chase-Riboud's artistic compositions. We aspire to abrade the boundaries that have compartmentalized her work. To date, Chase-Riboud has published two books of poetry and five historical novels, in addition to sculpting and drawing. Her poetry books include From Memphis & Peking and Portrait of a Nude Woman as Cleopatra, both of which bear a synthetic relation to her sculptural work. Her novels include Sally Hemings (on Thomas Jefferson and his slave mistress), Valide: A Novel of the Harem (on gender and power in the Ottoman Empire), Echo of Lions (on the 1839 Amistad ship mutiny), The President's Daughter (sequel to Sally Hemings), and Hottentot Venus (on the life of Sarah Baartman), a complement to her prizewinning sculpture Africa Rising at the African Burial Ground in Manhattan, New York. In 1986, Chase-Riboud won the Carl Sandburg Award for her poetry, an honor she shares with notables such as Nikki Giovanni. In 1989, the Connecticut State Legislature and the governor of Connecticut recognized Chase-Riboud's Echo of Lions for outstanding contribution to Connecticut state history. Most recently, in 2004, her novel Hottentot Venus won the American Library Association's Black Caucus Award for fiction and was nominated for the prestigious Zora Neale Hurston-Richard Wright Legacy Award, alongside novels by Austin Clarke, Nalo Hopkinson, Edward P. Jones, Mat Johnson, and Caryl Phillips. Chase-Riboud's sculpture Africa Rising at the African Burial Ground was awarded the Best Public Arts Design Award for art produced between 1993 and 1998. Barbara Chase-Riboud's work is as challenging as it is inspiring. She is an artist who is unafraid of contradiction, conflict, and multiplicity. "If you have to have acceptance," she says, "then you shouldn't be an artist. There is no such thing as an 'acceptable artist.'"1 Her literary and sculptural provocations are thus as unsettling as they are revelatory of the [End Page 711] silences, hauntings, and paradoxes that shape the making of the past, whether we think of Africa or the Americas. In this Special Issue we revisit these provocations by juxtaposing excerpts from Chase-Riboud's novels alongside selections from her poetry, images of her sculptures, and critical essays from an interdisciplinary group of intellectuals who address all of these key areas. We also include a comprehensive interview with Chase-Riboud in which she talks frankly about the relationship between her sculpture and her creative writing and the intricacies of her craft. Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1939, Chase-Riboud divides her time between Paris, France, and Rome, Italy, and has lived in France for the past forty years. She is part of a long line of cosmopolitan African American artists who, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, have traveled to Europe in search of artistic opportunities and training and in contestation of United States racial proscriptions. In fact, she is part of a trajectory of African American women artists—several also from Philadelphia—for whom Europe represented possibilities that far exceeded those available in the United States. This trajectory includes artists such as Anne E. Anderson Walker (1855–1929), Mary Edmonia Lewis (1843–1911), Meta Warrick Fuller (1877–1968), Laura Wheeler Waring (1887–1948), Lois Mailou Jones (1905–1998), Augusta Savage (1892–1962...