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“The End is the Beginning and Lies Far Ahead”:Time and Textuality in African American Visualizations of the Historical Past, 1990–2000

Elstob, Isobel

Authors



Contributors

Lawrence Aje
Editor

Nicolas Gachon
Editor

Abstract

This chapter examines artworks produced in the 1990s by Carrie Mae Weems, Glenn Ligon, and Lorna Simpson that combine historical and contemporary signifiers to visualize American history and its afterlives. Using literary and narratological models of analysis, the chapter discusses the artists’ creative deployment of anachronism, authorial agency, and narrativity in response to postmodernist methods and attitudes towards history’s textual and temporal representation. Focusing on works that combine both images and text, the chapter explores the formal devices used by Weems, Ligon, and Simpson to interrogate the ethical distancing between past and present attitudes and actions that historiographical representation implies. In doing so, the chapter argues that each artist exploits commonly employed representational tropes from the period—such as simulacra, temporal flatness, and intertextuality—in order to subvert established methods of depicting the historical past.

Citation

Elstob, I. (2019). “The End is the Beginning and Lies Far Ahead”:Time and Textuality in African American Visualizations of the Historical Past, 1990–2000. In L. Aje, & N. Gachon (Eds.), Traces and Memories of Slavery in the Atlantic World. Routledge

Acceptance Date Nov 27, 2017
Online Publication Date Jun 28, 2019
Publication Date 2019
Deposit Date Nov 30, 2018
Publicly Available Date Mar 28, 2024
Publisher Routledge
Book Title Traces and Memories of Slavery in the Atlantic World
Chapter Number 14
ISBN 9780367321277
Public URL https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1340688
Publisher URL https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9780429316807/chapters/10.4324/9780429316807-15
Additional Information This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge in Traces and Memories of Slavery in the Atlantic World on July 2 2019 available online: https://www.routledge.com/Traces-and-Memories-of-Slavery-in-the-Atlantic-World/Aje-Gachon/p/book/9780367321277

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