Abstract
Figurations of the Middle Passage have presented the body as an archive of a history that attempts to deal with the want of a continuum of cultural memory. Artists’ reliance on a history that has to be constructed and imagined is reflected on a marked black body. In her painting Autobiography: Water/Ancestors/Middle Passage/Family/Ghosts (1988), Howardena Pindell positions herself at the center of her autobiographical account. Her face emerges clear from the water, but her body is submerged in a blue sea of a personal history that is made more from scraps than from a continuous narrative thread. Sinking her own body in deep water, the central figure in the canvas establishes a link between her contemporary self and that of the forebears. The ancestors appear as broken figures—disembodied hands, limbs, the occasional partial or blurred head—but the figure that dominates the image is the eye. The eye is cut from the face, but nonetheless imposes a significant gaze on the viewer.
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© 2010 Carol E. Henderson
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Nunes, A. (2010). Disembodiments. In: Henderson, C.E. (eds) Imagining the Black Female Body. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230115477_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230115477_3
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