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...political theorist Franz Fanon, builds upon Freudian psychoanalysis and Lacan's theory of dialectical identity to expose the underpinning mechanisms of racism in contemporary American society. Walker's catalogue book, riddled with references to the "Other," the "gaze" and "perversion," tackles the psychological foundations of racism in the context of a history of slavery. She successfully uses theories that have been applied to a colonial history to create a conceptual framework that addresses the unique perversities of a racism grounded in slavery. This is no small feat...
...songs Unwound chose to play from their Kill Rock Stars arsenal. At first, the music suffered from its surface awkwardness and appeared to have no direction, no substance, no reason. But Unwound wouldn't let you leave the room without closing up the gaps in the musical context. A dissonant run-on melody may have dragged out interminably and lost your attention or the grinding repetitiveness of a discordant thrash tune could have sent your mind a flitter, but Unwound always successfully brought the listener back into their sonically disturbing realm...
Classics concentrator Jennifer T. Stager '00 pointed out that while she was "in favor of making the translation more faithful to the original text, you have to concede something to the social context of the reader, who may or may not belong to that of the author...
Outside the context of contemporary art, the present debate surrounding Walker's work elicits even eerier deja-vu in light of the black literary tradition to which Walker owes so much. Over fifty years ago, Richard Wright argued against Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, claiming the book perpetuated stereotypes of blacks as "happy darkies" and minstrels. When asked about this parallel Walker answered, "The black arts community is still really young. We keep bringing up the same themes to trash each other...
...that can be ignored or brushed off, no matter how much of a "better" person you are than the person using it. But as I thought about it, I realized that it isn't the word itself that inflamed me, it was the history behind it and the social context within which it was used...