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Abstract
How are artists, and how are disciplines in the arts, humanities and law, responding to the hyper-visuality of racial injustices on American ground? This article explores a set of “groundwork” tactics in the Stand Your Ground Era in the United States. Stand Your Ground laws, first established in 2005, define the right to self-defense, to claim the ground on which one stands if there is a perception of “reasonable threat.” The law disproportionately affects black and brown lives today. The artworks under discussion in this article—Grace Notes: Reflections for Now by Carrie Mae Weems to honor lives lost to racial terror, and the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI)’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice to lynching—prompt the question, What does it mean to not be able to “Stand Your Ground”? What are the representational tools available to show the frequent challenge to this upright position as a statement of sovereignty over one’s own life? How has the manifold meaning of the term “ground”—as both reason, fact, but also soil itself, opened up a mode of critical inquiry to address the injustices wrought at our feet? Just as the field of environmental studies has begun to consider its nexus with racial inequity, this article approaches these representations of the “ground” through the lens of racial formation, art history, and legal study in the United States.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
* This idea of the “arena” alludes to a comment made by sociologist Lawrence D. Bobo at the Vision and Justice Convening in 2019 directly after hearing the meditation by Carrie Mae Weems I discuss in this article. I’d like to thank him for the inspiration his comments offered for this piece. I would also like to thank Joan Kee for her generous, insightful comments, which prompted my decision to focus squarely on the concept of “ground” for this project and for her scholarship in Kee, Models of Integrity: Art and Law in Post-Sixties America (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019), as well as Caroline Light for her expertise on Stand Your Ground law and for her engagement with my fall 2020 Harvard graduate seminar, American Racial Ground, her deft analysis of the conflation between self-defense and defense of property, and for her generous feedback as I prepared this article. I would also like to thank Courtney Baker, Timothy Barringer, Adrienne Brown, Huey Copeland, Robin Kelsey, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Jeffrey Hamburger, Sharon Harper, Joseph Koerner, Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Jennifer Raab, Jennifer Roberts, Jordana Moore Saggese, and Kevin Quashie for their feedback on the broader manuscript project as I formulated this article, as well as my colleagues in history of art and architecture and African and African American studies for their feedback on a draft of this piece for a work-in-progress talk. Finally, I would like to salute Jessica Williams and Janice Moynihan for their invaluable work as research assistants for this project.
1 Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., The Common Law (Boston: Little, Brown, 1881; Project Gutenberg, 2000), 83, 142, 159, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2449/2449-h/2449-h.htm. The terms “grounds” and “ground” appear far too frequently in this text to cite each instance. The idea for this article was prompted, too, by an excerpt from the work of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. In her description of how jurisprudence changed over time in the Hofstra Law Review in 1997, Ginsburg asked: “What caused the court’s understanding to dawn and grow?” arguing that “judges do read the newspaper and are affected, not by the weather of the day, as distinguished constitutional law professor Paul Freud once said, but by the climate of the era.” Her distinction calls us to focus not on whimsical daily changes—the weather—but on climate, an enduring quality that defines an environment. Of all such environment-based metaphors, one of the most often used in legal discourse is that of “ground.” “Constitutional Adjudication in the United States as a Means of Advancing the Equal Stature of Men and Women under the Law,” Hofstra Law Review 26, no. 2 (Winter 1997): 268.
2 A visit to the Aiken-Rhett House in Charleston, which I discuss later in this piece, generated the idea for the conceptualization of groundwork as an engagement with ground, or “Boden” in the Heideggerian tradition, which I mention in another article is connected to a rootedness and territorialism in ways that are distinct from its contemporary valence. See Meyer Schapiro, “The Still Life as a Personal Object—A Note on Heidegger and van Gogh,” in The Reach of Mind: Essays in Memory of Kurt Goldstein, ed. Marianne Simmel (New York: Springer Publishing, 1968), 203–9; Martin Heidegger, Der Satz vom Grund (Pfullingen: Neske, 1957), 191–211; Martin Heidegger, “The Principle of Ground,” trans. Keith Hoeller, Man and World 7, no. 3 (1974): 207–22; and Fred Moten, “The End of the World Picture,” in Julie Mehretu, et al. eds., Julie Mehretu (New York: DelMonico Books-Prestel, 2019), 246–251.
3 On surveillance, see Jasmine Nichole Cobb, Picture Freedom: Remaking Black Visuality in the Early Nineteenth Century (New York: New York University Press, 2015); Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015); and Mia Fischer and K. Mohrman, “Black Deaths Matter? Sousveillance and the Invisibility of Black Life,” Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology 10 (2016), https://adanewmedia.org/2016/10/issue10-fischer-mohrman/. The literature on the outcomes of SYG laws is vast. A few crucial texts are Justin Murphy, “Are ‘Stand Your Ground’ Laws Racist and Sexist? A Statistical Analysis of Cases in Florida, 2005–2013,” Social Science Quarterly 99, no. 1 (March 2018): 439–52; Marcus Lee, “Originating Stand Your Ground: Racial Violence and Neoliberal Reason,” Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race 16, no. 1 (2019): 107–29. See also John Roman’s study on Florida-specific SYG laws and his findings about racial disparities in rulings and homicides in Roman, “Race, Justifiable Homicide, and Stand Your Ground Laws: Analysis of FBI Supplementary Homicide Report Data,” Urban Institute (July 2013); and Nicole Ackermann, et al., “Race, Law, and Health: Examination of ‘Stand Your Ground’ and Defendant Convictions in Florida,” Social Science & Medicine 142 (2015): 194–201.
4 Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, “Groundwork: Race and Aesthetics in the Era of Stand Your Ground Law,” Art Journal 79, no. 4 (2020): 92–113. This work is also in conversation with the work of colleagues in the discipline of art history who have interrogated the role of the arts for processing and also pointing towards new ways forward in moments of injustice. Darby English has examined the ways in which art sustains the questions that need to be asked in his work, To Describe a Life: Notes from the Intersection of Art and Race Terror (New Haven: Yale University Press in Association with the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, Harvard University, 2019). See also Nicole R. Fleetwood, Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020) and Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).
5 Martha Albertson Fineman, “The Vulnerable Subject: Anchoring Equality in the Human Condition,” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 20, no. 1 (2008): 1.
6 Here I’m thinking of Mark Rifkin’s discussion of the inaccurate framework of time ascribed to “Native peoples … within dominant settler reckonings of time. Either they are consigned to the past, or they are inserted into a present defined on non-native terms. From this perspective, Native people[s] do not so much exist within the flow of time as erupt from it as an anomaly, one usually understood as emanating from a bygone era.” Rifkin, Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), vii. See, too, Bryan Wagner’s framework of blackness as “existence without standing in the modern world.” Wagner, Disturbing the Peace: Black Culture and the Police Power after Slavery (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 1. My thanks to Fred Moten for his thoughts on Wagner’s work on the 2021 Modern Language Association Presidential Plenary: Poetics of Persistence in Black Life on January 8, 2021, chaired by Evie Shockley.
7 Caroline Light, Stand Your Ground: A History of America's Love Affair with Lethal Self-Defense (Boston: Beacon Press, 2017); Jennifer Carlson, Citizen-Protectors: The Everyday Politics of Guns in an Age of Decline (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). For more on the context of antebellum slavery on gun ownership, see Saul Cornell and Eric M. Ruben, “The Slave-State Origins of Modern Gun Rights,” The Atlantic, September 30, 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/the-origins-of-public-carry-jurisprudence-in-the-slave-south/407809/; Leanna Keith, The Colfax Massacre: The Untold Story of Black Power, White Terror, and the Death of Reconstruction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Randall Kennedy, Race, Crime, and the Law (New York: Vintage, 1997); and Kathryn Russell-Brown, “Go Ahead and Shoot—The Law Might Have Your Back: History, Race, and Implicit Bias, and Justice in Florida’s Stand Your Ground Law,” in Deadly Injustice: Travyon Martin, Race, and the Criminal Justice System, ed. D. Johnson, et al. (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 115–45.
8 The development in American jurisprudence from honoring the “duty to retreat,” to the legal right to “stand one’s ground,” was transformed by cases including the US Supreme Court cases Beard v. United States (1885) and Brown v. United States (1921). Also see Ross P. Luevonda, “The Transmogrification of Self-Defense by the National Rifle Association: From the Doctrine of Retreat to the Right to Stand Your Ground,” Southern University Law Review 35, no. 1 (2007): 1–46. Light interrogates how this work cannot be fully analyzed at a remove from considering how gendered violence has shifted the notion of public and private ground vis-à-vis the home. For more, see Light and Jeannie Suk, At Home in the Law: How the Domestic Violence Revolution Is Transforming Privacy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).
9 See Light, Stand Your Ground and Carlson, Citizen-Protectors, 6. Carlson also discusses how the SYG era coincided with the release in strictures on legal gun ownership (since the 1970s).
10 Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (June 1993): 1707–91. Embedded in this discourse, too, is what Saidiya Hartman has called the “afterlife of property”—lives caught in the conditional terms of slavery, in “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe: A Journal of Criticism 12, no. 2 (2008): 13.
11 Patricia J. Williams, “The ‘Ground’ in ‘Stand Your Ground’ Means Any Place a White Person Is Nervous,” The Nation, August 15, 2016, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/the-ground-in-stand-your-ground-means-any-place-a-white-person-is-nervous/.
12 Sam Levin, “Police Fired 55 Times at Willie McCoy. An Investigation Called It ‘Reasonable,’” The Guardian, June 12, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jun/12/willie-mccoy-shooting-vallejo-police-55-shots.
13 The literature on the history of and contemporary culture that, as Lawrence D. Bobo puts it, gets “routinely mobilized” is vast but speaks to the “wedding of socio-economic, legal-political, and cultural racism.” See Bobo, “Foreword: The Racial Double Homicide of Travyon Martin,” in Deadly Injustice: Travyon Martin, Race, and the Criminal Justice System, ed. D. Johnson et al. (New York: New York University Press, 2015), xi. A few of the salient works are the following: Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow (New York: Penguin Press, 2019); Vision & Justice: A Civic Curriculum, https://visionandjustice.org/civic-curriculum; Nicole R. Fleetwood, On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public Imagination (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015); Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016); Lee D. Baker, From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896–1954 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
14 Desmond Manderson, “Introduction: Imaginal Law,” Law and the Visual: Representations, Technologies, and Critique (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018), 6; Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1982), 61–5.
15 Robin Kelsey once argued that there was a “narrowness” in the cultural scope on art and law, reflecting on the scholarship that was brought together in this volume. I cite these scholars writing on the relationship of law, race, and sight, such as Jasmine Nichole Cobb and others, in order to highlight those who were not necessarily brought into this discussion but whose work is absolutely vital for the intertwined discourse of visuality, legal study, and racial analysis. See Kelsey’s review of Law and the Image: The Authority of Art and the Aesthetics of Law, a landmark volume of scholarship edited by Lynda Nead and Costas Douzinas. Robin Kelsey, “Doing Art Justice,” Art Journal 59, no. 4 (Winter 2000): 103–4; Peter Goodrich, Legal Emblems and the Art of the Law: Obiter Depicta as the Vision of Governance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014). See Maurice Berger, “Are Art Museums Racist?,” Art in America 78, no. 9 (1990): 68; Maurice Berger, White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1999); Maurice Berger, For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); Cobb, Picture Freedom; Fleetwood, Marking Time; W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Deborah Willis, Picturing Us: African American Identity in Photography (New York: New Press, 1994); Deborah Willis, Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers, 1840 to the Present (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000); Deborah Willis and Carla Williams, The Black Female Body: A Photographic History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002); Deborah Willis, Constructing History: A Requiem to Mark the Moment (Savannah, GA: Savannah College of Art and Design, 2008); and Sharpe, In the Wake.
16 Elizabeth Alexander, “The Trayvon Martin Generation,” The New Yorker, June 15, 2020, https://www-newyorker-com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/magazine/2020/06/22/the-trayvon-generation. This essay also appears in Grief and Grievance, the posthumously curated show by Okwui Enwezor. See also Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Anchor, 1990); Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2003); Susie Linfield, The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2010); Sarah Sentilles, Draw Your Weapons (New York: Random House, 2017); Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); and Barbie Zelizer, About to Die: How News Images Move the Public (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). While we are in a moment in which this question is being debated in all quarters, I want to highlight that it is a question that has been asked consistently, and pointedly, by Saidiya Hartman in “Venus in Two Acts.” In this piece, she asks questions such as, “Do the possibilities outweigh the dangers of looking (again)?” and “How does one revisit the scene of subjection without replicating the grammar of violence?”; Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” 4.
17 Also see Elizabeth Alexander, “Can You Be BLACK and Look at This? Reading the Rodney King Video(s),” Public Culture 7 (1994): 77–94. In this text, Alexander asks if there is room for “a bottom line” in her analysis of publicized anti-Black violence: “The bottom line here is that different groups possess sometimes-subconscious collective memories which are frequently forged and maintained through a storytelling tradition, however difficult that may be to pin down, as well as through individual experience. When a black man can be set on fire amidst racial epithets in the street because he inhabits a black body, as recently occurred in Florida, there must be a place for theorizing black bodily experience within the larger discourse of identity politics,” 80. What Alexander calls the bottom line, these artists address as the conditions of the figure/ground relationship. See also Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008). Courtney Baker, Elizabeth Alexander, and Karla F. C. Holloway are among the many scholars who have incisively analyzed the ethical dimensions of looking in the context of violence against Black bodies in the United States. See Baker, Humane Insight: Looking at Images of African American Suffering and Death (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2015); Leigh Raiford, “Burning All Illusion: Abstraction, Black Life, and the Unmaking of White Supremacy,” Art Journal 79, no. 4 (2020): 76–91, DOI: 10.1080/00043249.2020.1779550; and Rose Salceda’s book project, Unrest: An Art History of the 1992 Los Angeles Riots.
18 Light, Stand Your Ground, 3, 6. See also Carlson, Citizen-Protectors. I would also like to thank Huey Copeland for a productive conversation about the periodization implied in my focus on Stand Your Ground law.
19 Light, Stand Your Ground, 3, 6.
20 Martha Albertson Fineman, “The Vulnerable Subject: Anchoring Equality in the Human Condition,” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 20, no. 1 (2008): 1–2. On sovereignty, see Juliet Hooker, “Black Lives Matter and the Paradoxes of U.S. Black Politics: From Democratic Sacrifice to Democratic Repair,” Political Theory 44, no. 4 (August 2016): 448–69; Danielle Allen, Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship Since Brown v. Board of Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 41; and Imani Perry, Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018).
21 Judith Butler, “Between Grief and Grievance, a New Sense of Justice,” in Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America (New York: Phaidon, 2021), 11.
22 All quotations are from Weems’s statements in the version of Grace Notes at the Vision and Justice Convening of Harvard University, April 25, 2019, unless stated otherwise. For the extraordinary work that it took to put on this convening, I would like to thank the staff who hosted and helped organize the event at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, the Harvard Art Museums, and the American Repertory Theater; the Ford Foundation, and the Lambent Foundation, my colleagues at the Peabody Museum at Harvard; the registrars of the Departments of the History of Art and Architecture and African American Studies, Giovanna Micconi and Ann Janik; the advisory committee for the event, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Lori Gross, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Elizabeth Hinton, Robin Kelsey, Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Yukio Lippit, Jennifer L. Roberts, Tommie Shelby, and Damian Woetzel; as well as Dean Tomiko Brown-Nagin.
23 I received a call from Spoleto director Nigel Redden in 2015 asking if I would identify an artist who might create a work of art that could allow the local community to process this hate crime. At the time, I was standing beneath the Jefferson Davis mansion, on a break from research at what was then the Museum of the Confederacy (now the American Civil War Museum). Just two weeks before my visit, Bree Newsome had taken down the Confederate Flag, the emblem Dylann Roof chose to pose with in a self-portrait before his murder of the nine members of Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. On that call, Redden asked if I needed time to deliberate. I told him that I did not. He needed to commission Carrie Mae Weems.
24 Weems’s series also resonates with the #SayHerName campaign, originated by the Center for African American Policy Forum and the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies, focusing on the Black women and girls killed by police. See, https://www.aapf.org/sayhername.
25 Kevin Quashie, Black Aliveness, Or a Poetics of Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021), 13.
26 Manderson, “Introduction,” 4. Also see Chiara Bottici, Imaginal Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 13–31.
27 See John Stauffer, Zoe Trodd, and Celeste-Marie Bernier, Picturing Frederick Douglass: An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth Century’s Most Photographed Man (New York: Liveright, 2015). All of Douglass’s speeches about pictures are reproduced in this volume, making it an invaluable publication, while of course, they also remain in the holdings of the Library of Congress. Also see Frederick Douglass, “Pictures and Progress,” in John W. Blassingame, ed., The Frederick Douglass Papers, series 1: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, vol. 3: 1855–1863 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Frederick Douglass’s Camera Obscura: Representing the Antislave ‘Clothed and in Their Own Form,’” Critical Inquiry 42, no. 1 (Autumn 2015): 31–60; Laura Wexler, “‘A More Perfect Likeness’: Frederick Douglass and the Image of the Nation,” in Maurice O. Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith, eds., Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 18–40; and Ginger Hill, “‘Rightly Viewed’: Theorizations of Self in Frederick Douglass’s Lectures on Pictures,” in Maurice O. Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith, eds., Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 41–82. I also have discussed these speeches by Douglass in Sarah Lewis, The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014) and “Vision & Justice,” Aperture 223 (2016).
28 Kathryn E. Delmez, “Introduction,” in Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video, ed. Kathryn E. Delmez (Nashville: Frist Center for the Visual Arts; New Haven: Yale University, 2012), 9.
29 Ilisa Barbash, Molly Rogers, and Deborah Willis, eds., To Make Their Own Way in the World: The Enduring Legacy of the Zealy Daguerreotypes (Cambridge, MA, and New York: Peabody Museum Press and Aperture, 2020).
30 The history of this series is vast. For more on the history of the potential legal case that resulted from Weems’s use of the Zealy daguerreotypes, see Yxta Maya Murray, “From Here I saw What Happened and I Cried: Carrie Mae Weems’s Challenge to the Harvard Archive,” Unbound: Harvard Journal of the Legal Left 8, no. 1 (2012–2013): 1–78. Carrie Mae Weems discusses her response to Harvard University in the Art 21 episode 2, season 5, “Compassion,” Art in the Twenty-First Century (2009); Sarah Elizabeth Lewis with Christine Garnier, eds., Carrie Mae Weems (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2021); Cherise Smith, “Carrie Mae Weems: Rethinking Historic Appropriations,” Nka 44 (May 2019): 38–50; Deborah Willis, “In Conversation with Carrie Mae Weems,” in Barbash, et al., To Make Their Own Way in the World, 395–405.
31 Martin A. Berger, Sight Unseen: Whiteness and American Visual Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Maurice Berger, “Are Art Museums Racist?,” 68; Maurice Berger, White Lies; Maurice Berger, For All the World to See; Édouard Glissant, “For Opacity,” in Over Here: International Perspectives on Art and Culture, ed. Gerardo Mosquera and Jean Fisher (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 2004); Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness in the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992); Shawn Michelle Smith, American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); Nicholas Mirzoeff, Diaspora and Visual Culture (Florence: Taylor & Francis, 1999); Mitchell, Picture Theory; Michele Wallace, “Modernism, Postmodernism and the Problem of the Visual in Afro-American Culture,” in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures (New York: MIT Press, 1990), 39–50. Among the many volumes by Deborah Willis, see Reflections in Black and Constructing History.
32 Karla F. C. Holloway, Legal Fictions: Constituting Race, Composing Literature (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). This discourse about sovereignty is extensive. See Imani Perry, “Excerpt from Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 56, no. S1 (2018): 76–92.
33 “Carrie Mae Weems: Grace Notes: Reflections for Now,” Art21, August 2016. LaCharles Ward also reflects on this moment in his sensitive reading of Weems’s work in a discussion of the layering of image of text in “‘Keep Runnin’ Bro’: Carrie Mae Weems and the Visual Act of Refusal,” Black Camera 9, no. 2 (Spring 2018): 82–109.
34 R. C. Jebb, Sophocles: Plays, Antigone (London: Bristol Classics Press, 2004), 149.
35 Ibid., 2.
36 As Holloway argues, “African Americans’ particular vulnerability to an untimely death in the United States intimately affects how black culture both represents itself and is represented.” Holloway, Legal Fictions, 2. Also see James Van Der Zee, Harlem Book of the Dead (Dobbs Ferry: Morgan & Morgan, 1978); W. E. B. DuBois, Souls of Black Folk (New York: G&D Media, 2019) (specifically “Of the Passing of the First Born”); Siddhartha Mitter, “What Does It Mean to Be Black and Look at This?: A Scholar Reflects on the Dana Schutz Controversy,” Hyperallergic, March 24, 2017, https://hyperallergic.com/368012/what-does-it-mean-to-be-black-and-look-at-this-a-scholar-reflects-on-the-dana-schutz-controversy/; Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018); Claudia Rankine, “On Racial Violence: The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning,” New York Times, June 22, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/22/magazine/the-condition-of-black-life-is-one-of-mourning.html.
37 Sharpe, In the Wake, 13, 18.
38 Butler, “Between Grief and Grievance, a New Sense of Justice,” 13.
39 Gwendolyn Du Bois Shaw, “The Wandering Gaze of Carrie Mae Weems’s The Louisiana Project,” Panorama 4, no. 1 (Spring 2018).
40 Kimberly Juanita Brown, The Repeating Body: Slavery’s Visual Resonance in the Contemporary (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015). I’d like to thank Kevin Quashie for an exchange that took place while finishing this piece that allowed me to reconsider my reading of this painting by placing it in conversation with Hortense Spillers’s conceptualization of “ground” in “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” which I do in greater length in the manuscript version of this article.
41 For more on the history of aesthetic imperfection, such as blur used deliberately, see Robin Kelsey on Julia Margaret Cameron and Eastlake in Kelsey, Photography and the Art of Chance (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015), 64–65. One could argue that what Kelsey aptly defines as a distinction between “blur” and “glitch” is eliminated in Weems’s practice, in that the blur for Weems becomes an index of her labor as both artist and subject. See Kelsey, Photography and the Art of Chance, 69, 195–6.
42 Kelsey, Photography and the Art of Chance, 86. In Black Aliveness, Quashie theorizes the idea of “aliveness” as a quality, a tactic used by Black artists to circumvent being proscribed out of the category of being human.
43 Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
44 Here I am also thinking of the idea of a related aspect of suspension, that of the ever-caught nature of escape. As “the whole point about escape is that it’s an activity. It’s not an achievement,” Moten has stated. “You don’t ever get escaped … And what that means is that what you’re escaping is always after you. It’s always on you.” See Moten and Hartman, “The Black Outdoors,” in Conversations with J. Kameron Carter and SJC, 9/23/16. For more on suspension as idea of “unsettlement … A reimagining of Black life unmoored from the axiomatics of (self) possession,” see Sarah Jane Cervenak and J. Kameron Carter, “Untitled and Outdoors: Thinking with Saidiya Hartman,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 27, no. 1 (2017): 48.
45 Here, I consider the frameworks that Martha Minow deftly explores as the main avenue through which cultures respond to mass atrocities in Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998).
46 Lukas van der Berge, “Sophocles’ Antigone and the Promise of Ethical Life: Tragic Ambiguity and the Pathologies of Reason,” Law and Humanities 11, no. 2 (2017): 208–9, 215.
47 See van den Berge, “Sophocles’ Antigone and the Promise of Ethical Life,” 2, 205–27. Martha Nussbaum, Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995); Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); and Martha Nussbaum, Therapy and Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). See G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); and Martha Minow, When Should Law Forgive? (New York: W.W. Norton, 2019).
48 Ward, “‘Keep Runnin’ Bro,’” 82–109.
49 For the full set of remarks see Lawrence D. Bobo. “Vision & Justice, Thursday, Part II,” 2:04:00, https://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/video/vision-justice-thursday-part-ii, and at https://visionandjustice.org/convening-videos/.
50 For the Urban Plantation tradition model exemplified by the Aiken-Rhett House, see John Michael Vlach, “The Plantation Tradition in an Urban Setting: The Case of the Aiken-Rhett House,” Southern Cultures 5, no. 4 (Winter 1999): 52–69; Susan L. Buck, “Paint Discoveries in the Aiken-Rhett House Kitchen and Slave Quarters,” in Building Environments: Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture, ed. Kenneth A. Breisch and Alison K. Hoagland (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2005).
51 Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
52 Daina Ramey Berry, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved from Womb to Grave in the Building of a Nation (Boston: Beacon Press, 2017), 7.
53 Bryan Stevenson, Keynote, Vision and Justice Convening, April 26, 2019, Harvard University, Sanders Theater.
54 A new report released by EJI documents that “during the 12-year period of Reconstruction at least 2,000 Black women, men, and children were victims of racial terror lynchings.” Equal Justice Initiative, Reconstruction in America: Racial Violence after the Civil War, 1865–1876, 2020, https://eji.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/reconstruction-in-america-report.pdf.
55 I am thinking of the sensitive analysis Jacqueline Goldsby gives to the aesthetic template and rhetorical strategy of lynching photography. See Jacqueline Goldsby, A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
56 Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015).
57 Christina Sharpe, quoted in “Podcast Transcripts, Antiblack Weather vs. Black Microclimates: A Conversation with Christina Sharpe,” The Funambulist: Toxic Atmospheres (December 2017): 49–53.
58 Ida B. Wells knew it—and it is why it was of such significance that her work garnered a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 2020. It is why we salute the writing of Jacqueline Goldsby, Ken Gonzales-Day, Sherrilyn Ifill, Koritha Mitchell, Bryan Stevenson, and many others who consider the contemporary outgrowth of this history, including Michelle Alexander and Isabel Wilkerson.
59 Recently, there has been an intensification of scholarly debate about the location of or justification for Confederate monuments. Much of this gestures towards a public reckoning with what geographer Kenneth Foote has called symbolic accretion and part of what political scientists have termed “norm cascades” and moral revolutions, as discussed by scholars including Kwame Anthony Appiah and Cass Sunstein. See Kwame Anthony Appiah, “I’ve Protested for Racial Justice. Do I Have to Post on Social Media?” New York Times Magazine, June 30, 2020; and Cass R. Sunstein, “Social Norms and Social Roles,” Columbia Law Review 96, no. 4 (May 1996): 903–68.
60 I’m grateful to Light for our generative conversations about my concept of suspension while drafting this piece. In the context of abstraction and white supremacy, Leigh Raiford, paraphrasing artist Torkwase Dyson, has offered a careful, probing analysis of a complimentary idea about the counterweight of abstraction. See Raiford, “Burning All Illusion,” 83. See also Torkwase Dyson, “Black Interiority: Notes on Architecture, Infrastructure, Environmental Justice, and Abstract Drawing,” Pelican Bomb, January 9, 2017, http://pelicanbomb.com/art-review/2017/black-interiority-notes-on-architecture-infrastructure-environmental-justice-and-abstract-drawing.
61 Shatema Threadcraft, “North American Necropolitics and Gender: On #BlackLivesMatter and Black Femicide,” South Atlantic Quarterly 116, no. 3 (2017): 553–79.
62 At the time of publication, Amy Sherald had worked to ensure that her painting would remain in public in Kentucky, and it is in the process of being acquired jointly by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., and by the Speed Museum in Louisville. The funding for this joint acquisition, a $1 million gift, was donated by the Ford Foundation and the Hearthland Foundation.
63 T.J. Clark, “Painting at Ground Level,” Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Princeton University, April 17–19, 2002 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2004), 135.
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Sarah Elizabeth Lewis
Sarah Elizabeth Lewis is an associate professor at Harvard University in the Department of History of Art and Architecture and the Department of African and African American Studies. Her research focuses on the intersection of African American and Black Atlantic visual representation, racial justice, and representational democracy in the United States from the nineteenth century through the present. Her “Vision & Justice” issue of Aperture magazine received the 2017 Infinity Award for Critical Writing and Research from the International Center of Photography and launched the larger Vision and Justice Project. In 2019, she became the inaugural recipient of the Freedom Scholar Award, presented by The Association for the Study of African American Life and History. Her forthcoming publications include Caucasian War: How Race Changed Sight in America (Harvard University Press, 2022), The Vision and Justice Project (One World/Random House), and a manuscript focusing on the “groundwork” of contemporary arts in the context of Stand Your Ground Laws. Her research has received support from the Ford Foundation, the Hutchins Center at Harvard University, the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, the Whiting Foundation, and the Lambent Foundation.