The Lower Stratum of History

Abstract

The late 1990s were watershed years for two young African American artists—one a celebrated playwright, and the other a critically acclaimed visual artist—who employ and rework racist stereotypes in their work. In 1996, Suzan-Lori Parks’s play Venus premiered at Yale Repertory Theatre. The following year, Kara Walker won a MacArthur Fellowship and had her work chosen for inclusion in the Whitney Biennial, among other high-profile exhibitions during that time. Their rise to prominence and ensuing successes, however, were marked by controversy surrounding their work’s incorporation of grotesque stereotypes, a debate that still reverberates in discussions of their art. In a 1997 article, Jean Young accused Parks of the “re-objectification and re-commodification” of Venus’s historical antecedent, Saartjie Baartman. The same year, The International Review of African American Art charged Walker with repackaging damaging stereotypes and selling them to white audiences. Amid dismay at “offensive” images, a Walker piece was pulled from a show at the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1999 (Newkirk 45). The women were part of a postmodern resurgence of minstrelsy (insofar as it ever went away), a trend that Spike Lee was to take advantage of in his film Bamboozled (2000).