Silhouetting the Past: Politics, Public Memory, and Aesthetic Ambiguity in Kara Walker’s (Mis)representations

This essay won or received an honorable mention for The Boothe Prize for excellence in first-year writing. The Boothe Prize recognizes and rewards outstanding expository and argumentative writing by undergraduate students in first-year classes that satisfy the WR 1 requirement. In each award-winning essay, student writers demonstrate clarity of argument, excellent integration of research-based evidence, and compelling prose style.
In this essay, George Porteous argues that art can contribute to public memory and historical understanding in ways that national and regional memorials have failed to do. Through a careful reading of works by artist Kara Walker, Porteous shows that “aesthetic ambiguity stirs a powerful response in the viewer that strictly rational discourse rarely attains.” Aesthetic intervention, he suggests, “upends political debate altogether.”