I Know, You Know, We Know: Recognition and Misrecognition as Possibilities for Education in the Example of Kara Walker’s Art

Abstract

What happens when the perennial misrepresentation suffered by some minority groups is revealed in an aesthetic experience? This article explains that the experience of being called on for recognition, and reparation for misrecognition, turns into a work of self-education on the ways of remembering and of forgetting the past one shares with others. My analysis of Axel Honneth’s explanation of the difference between cognition and recognition develops into a phenomenology of the experience of mutual recognition, sketched through an interpretation of Odysseus’s narrative: there we can find elements to understand the issue of a lack of recognition or of misrecognition on the level of individual and communal self representation. I offer an interpretation of artist Kara Walker’s narrative cycles about the history of slavery and emancipation in the antebellum South as embodying the struggle for recognition. I suggest that the experience of this art, through the realization of a lack of recognition, provides the possibility for the individual to cultivate in herself a disposition towards recognition of others.