We start with a story. In 2002, while researching the dissertation from which my first book, Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America, would emerge, I had the opportunity to pose for the artist Lorna Simpson. Her practice had already become a locus of my thinking about aesthetics, slavery, and the aporias of representation, so I eagerly agreed to serve as her model. With characteristic economy, Simpson made good use of the photographs resulting from our session, eventually deploying them in a range of artworks that together comprise her 2002-03 exhibition Cameos and Appearances. Yet however reproduced, framed, or occluded, those initial Polaroid images are also documents of an encounter in which the "art historian" became the "subject" of "his artist's" "objective" gaze, leaving each of the quoted words estranged from itself and underlining an entanglement in the artistic procedures that I set out to describe. 1 Estranged and entangled: these terms begin to articulate not only the queer experience of belatedly gazing at myself through Simpson's lens but also that of reading the critical engagements with Bound to Appear commissioned by Small Axe and penned by two black literary scholars, Stephen Best and Hortense Spillers, whose work has long mattered to my own.Like Simpson's photographs, my book bears the name of a single author, but it is necessarily a collaborative affair: every writer will admit-at least in his acknowledgments if not through his method-that his work is a condensation of social, conceptual, and material relations that encompass an array of attitudes, objects, practices, and interlocutors. The present company 1 I here revisit thematics first explored in Huey Copeland, "Outtakes," Art Journal 67, no. 4 (2008): 20-32.
Small Axe
Published by Duke University Press
Flow and Arrest
|is no exception. Best, whom I first encountered while a graduate student at Berkeley, makes brief but vital appearances in the book's first chapter on Fred Wilson and the third on Glenn Ligon, whose art provides the opening frame for his remarks here. The field-turning scholarship of Spillers, whom I met only recently, has been an invaluable touchstone for my thinking and that of countless others with an investment in black thought and emancipation. Unsurprisingly, then, the means of argumentation and modes of address that these two writers adopt in reading Bound to Appear refract not only their own intellectual commitments and personal dispositions but also those of the book itself. 2 Spillers's and Best's divergent responses make for a generative pairing that reveals the dynamic tensions within black cultural discourse today and that begins to suggest the flows and arrests that animate the book. In attempting to move away from the models of "historical ontology" that, by his lights, undergird Bound to Appear as well as his own previous scholarship, Best offers a white queer understanding of radicalism meant to intervene both within African American studies broadly construed as wel...