Category: Black Lives Matter

Once More, The Monuments Must Fall

Post author By Nick Mirzoeff
Post date June 2, 2020

On June 30, 2015 the Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville, VA, was tagged “Black Lives Matter.”

Tag on the Statue of Robert E Lee, 2015. Photo: Charlottesville Police Dept.

In the ensuing protests against Confederate memorials and other racist statues, only 60 or so came down. Five years later, the protestors in the streets after the murder of George Floyd remember. And from Birmingham, AL, where a Confederate statue came down to Philadelphia where the statue of a racist cop was removed, the monuments are falling. Because these are not “just” statues, they are part of the apparatus of white supremacy. Once more, white people, this is on us: take down the monuments!

WATCH: VIDEO of Former Philadelphia Mayor Frank Rizzo bronze sculpture lifted off then driven away in truck overnight. It looks as if he’s waving goodbye ⁦@FOX29philly⁩ pic.twitter.com/hTxH7dqato— Steve Keeley (@KeeleyFox29) June 3, 2020

Recall how long this war has been going on. What was called the “war on statues” began in decolonized Algeria in 1962. It spread across Africa and culminated with the removal of the statue of Cecil John Rhodes from the University of Cape Town in April 2015. The decolonizing project crossed over the Atlantic and instigated the statue removal movement in Charlottesville and then across the United States. Last November, statues of conquistadors were dethroned in Chile.

Old Targets, New Tactics

In this rapidly-changing moment, old and new tactics and goals are emerging for the monuments movement. In Richmond, Virginia, protestors tagged statues like that of J.E.B. Stuart (below, a Confederate hero who served under Lee), which was also the model for Kehinde Wiley’s nearby sculpture Rumors of War, notably left untouched by protestors.

Photo via Eric Perry NBC12 (@ericpnbc12)

In a targeted act of erasure, the headquarters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the organization that funded so many of the Confederate memorials, was set on fire. Are you outraged? As long ago as 1963, James Baldwin warned America: “the fire next time.” If the statues had been removed, maybe there would not have been these fires.

LOUISVILLE, KY – MAY 29: A statue of Louis XVI missing his right hand in Louisville, Kentucky. Protests have (Photo by Brett Carlsen/Getty Images)

In Louisville, a protestor removed the right hand of Louis XVI (above). The tag on the statue reads: “All Cops Uphold White Supremacy.” The action and the tag condense a historical understanding of sovereignty in plantation culture into a single image. Let’s unpack this work. The king’s surrogate in the plantation was the overseer, whose hand could be raised to punish or kill. By condensation, sovereignty became white supremacy.

JB Du Tertre, “Sugar Mill with Overseer,” detail, from *Histoire des Antilles* (1667)

Like the king, the overseer had two bodies: his own, and a second one that never died and never slept. This second body became the emblem of white supremacy. It was, in effect, a statue that sustained the racialized surveillance of the plantation.

In Louisville, Louis XVI as the emblem of white supremacy continues to survey what Black geographer Kathleen McKittrick calls the “plantation future,” which is to say:

“a conceptualization of time-space that tracks the plantation toward the prison and the impoverished and destroyed city sectors”

Kathleen McKittrick “Plantation Futures,” Small Axe (2013): 2

It is entirely consistent that a protest against police brutality would target the statue of the colonizer king. The tag on Louis’s base understands that the cop and the prison guard are the plantation futures of the sovereign-overseer. Removing the hand of the king is an act of what Christina Sharpe calls “redaction,” a gesture that erases in order to make it fully clear what there is to see.

The Cop-Overseer

Attempting to make Frank Rizzo’s statue fall, Philadelphia. 5-29-20.

It was, then, no coincidence that on the same day, protestors in Philadelphia were attempting to overthrow the oversized statue of notorious police officer Frank Rizzo. Given Rizzo’s long history of racist statements and actions, Black Lives Matter had targeted the statue in 2016 and most residents agreed it should be moved. But it wasn’t. The statue resisted efforts to topple it and city authorities rushed to clean it the next day.

Statue of Frank Rizzo removed, June 2, 2020. Photo: City of Philadelphia

Having said that removing the statue was not even in his top 100 priorities, Philadelphia mayor Jim Kenney reversed course overnight on June 2 and had the Rizzo statue removed. Now it’s clear to Kenney that the statue represented “bigotry, hatred and oppression.” And that this is just a beginning. Finally, a North-Eastern city takes a lead on this issue.

The statue issue has long revealed the hypocrisy of white liberalism, condemning the South while leaving its own hateful monuments in place because they are not actually Confederate monuments. Bill de Blasio in New York failed to take down the Roosevelt Statue and the Columbus Monument, or even to remove a marker placed on Sixth Avenue to commemorate a parade for the fascist Marshal Pétain of Vichy that was only installed in 2003. So now the focus is again on New York. Can the city step up?

Memory matters

The removal of the Rizzo statue shows that who and what is, and is not, remembered does matter, as an extension of the thought experiment “Black Lives Matter.” In a lyric essay published via social media, Oglala Sioux poet Layli Long Soldier was prompted by George Floyd’s murder into a reflection into the “old, yet very present energy” of historical accounts.

White liberals have mostly argued that monuments are history and removing them would erase that history. This view consigns history entirely to the past. The monument as past artifact becomes history just by virtue of not being from now.

But for McKittrick and Long Soldier, they are absolutely “now.” And they defend and project a certain vision of the future as settler colonial white supremacy. For Long Soldier, history does not take stone form:

“we remember who we are from our families, from this land, from stories within the community, and from our senses. Yes, from our senses, we remember what’s stored within us already.”

Layli Long Soldier, “On The Murder of George Floyd: For George Floyd, his family, and for all who are deeply affected” (June 1, 2020)

Her “we” is that of the Indigenous community, not mine. But as she often does, Long Soldier does “ask you, warmly, to return to accounts from our Lakota ancestors.” I take that “you” to be the non-Native reader, who needs to reconfigure their understanding of how past experience can be passed on.

She turns to a reflection on the history of the American Indian Movement, founded in Minneapolis. An early AIM-related action was the spilling of blood-like paint over the doubly-racist statue of Theodore Roosevelt outside the American Museum of Natural History in June 1971.

Roosevelt Statue Tagged. Photo: Tyrone Dukes/NYT.

The tags read “Return Alcatraz,” referring to the Indigenous occupation of Alcatraz Island. And “Fascist Killer,” meaning Roosevelt. Six young Indigenous people affiliated with the National Indian Youth Council carried out the action. They’ll be in their 70s now.

The American Museum of Natural History has found time to furlough more than 450 employees already. Let’s make it one more and finish the antifascist action from 1971. Bill de Blasio, reverse the weak decision from 2017 and take this monument down. Along with all the others.

Tags Black Lives Matter; monuments

Black Lives Matter Natural history ornithology race white supremacy

Birds of America

Post author By Nick Mirzoeff
Post date May 27, 2020

Bird watching in Central Park is the latest thing not to do while being Black. NYC Audubon Society board member Christian Cooper asked his namesake Amy Cooper to leash her dog, as required to protect the wildlife. Instead she saw him, not as a person, but as a type, “African American,” as if it was her observing wildlife. Her racialized seeing transformed his spoken request into a violent assault. As used by John Joseph Audubon, for example.

For there are many layers to racialized seeing. Some racist theory can lie beneath familiar categories, like popular culture or advertising for decades, only to suddenly (re)activate, like the racist association of masks with muzzles used for the enslaved. But natural history is always there, with its concept of a hierarchy of the human. And, yes, even birds.

If there was a long historical irony behind the Audubon Society anti-racist statement defending Christian Cooper, there is also a belated recognition that such basic precepts have to be asserted, by people identified and identifying as white, even and especially from such “neutral” spaces as ornithology, until they are, finally, absorbed. The Audubon Society website glosses over their figurehead’s involvement with slavery. Let’s correct that.

American ornithology can’t be understood without Audubon’s Birds of America, a multi-volume assemblage of enormous color plates and a text mingling natural history with autobiography and travel narrative. Audubon’s is an all-American story of debt, reinvention, violence and white supremacy. Born the illegitimate son of a Jewish servant to a planter on Haiti before the revolution, he became a bankrupt slaver, haunted by the double loss of slave-generated wealth. As his last two enslaved persons paddled him down the Mississippi River to New Orleans so that he could sell them, Audubon was “inspired” to become a bird artist and taxonomist. Like many 19th century amateur naturalists, he invented many more species than are now accepted. Including the fugitive from slavery.

Scenes of Enslavement

In 1831, Audubon observed what he called the Snowy Heron near Charleston in South Carolina. He saw them in flocks of hundreds of birds. As he observed, they reach as far north as Long Island, where I still see them, only now in twos and threes.

Rice Hope Plantation from the background of *Snowy Heron*

In the background, Audubon painted a plantation and himself, out shooting birds as usual. The plantation was Rice Hope, in Moncks Corner, South Carolina, where the enslaved cultivated rice. None are to be seen here. Instead, Audubon, oddly masked in modern style, is out hunting. The bird metonymically represents all this: settler colonialism, the Second Amendment, white supremacy, and the invisibility of African American labor. You can buy originals and reproductions all over the internet, teaching racialized vision, one print at a time.

Audubon casually shows how practices of enslavement affected even common songbirds. The blue jay was a prolific species with a habit of eating crops, so that in Louisiana

the planters are in the habit of occasionally soaking some corn in a solution of arsenic, and scattering the seeds over the ground, in consequence of which many Jays are found dead about the fields and gardens.
Audubon, “Blue Jay,” Ornithological Biography 1834

Audubon did not need to mention that Louisiana planters were slave owners but followed this account with a fantasy entitled “The Runaway,” also set in Louisiana. Audubon imagined that as he crossed the bayous, he was challenged by a maroon, a fugitive from slavery. But from “long habit of submission,” the fugitive at once calls him “master.” They travel to the fugitive’s hideout in a canebrake, a thicket of grasses reaching over 20 feet. Here Audubon hears the story of how the fugitive was sold, following his “owner’s” bankruptcy, as were his wife and children to different purchasers. Determined to reunite, the fugitives escaped but now they lacked food. Audubon’s reverie ended with him leading the fugitives back to slavery, where they were repurchased by a friend.

As so often, Audubon was repurposing his own history. He was the slaveowner who had become bankrupt and sold his people in New Orleans. Perhaps, too, he was remembering vaguely that at the end of the 1811 German Coast Insurrection of the enslaved in Louisiana, the final revolutionaries had been hunted down in the swamps. For him, the restoration of benevolent slavery, as visible in Snowy Heron, was a happy ending. There was no illustration to The Runaway.

Racism and racialized seeing

I don’t suppose Amy Cooper was thinking about Audubon. Any more than she considered that the Ramble–the “woodland retreat” where she let her dog run–was adjacent to Seneca Village, an African American community that was demolished to make the Park.

Seneca Village, though, faces the American Museum of Natural History, which all Park-adjacent New Yorkers have visited. This museum tells a story of racial hierarchy from the Roosevelt statue at the door to the racist “Pygmy” (Mbuti or Twi) diorama on the second floor. I bet you Amy Cooper went there.

As Fanon taught us long ago in reflecting on his own incident of being seen as a “Negro” on a French train around 1950, by the time the person is visually identified and named as a “type,” now updated to “African American,” nothing can stop what will happen. Amy Cooper probably believes she is not a racist. But her way of seeing is and when it took over because she panicked, so was she.

abolition Black Lives Matter decolonial race

All The Monuments Must Fall #Charlottesville

Post author By Nick Mirzoeff
Post date August 14, 2017

Durham NC August 8, 2017. Photo: Derrick Lewis

In the aftermath of the white supremacist terrorism at Charlottesville, all the monuments must fall. The murder of Heather Heyer was prompted by the proposed removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. These statues are material nodes in the network of white supremacy. They are the visible form of the established order of racial hierarchy. No longer “unseen,” they are active and violent in and of themselves. The work of decolonizing has been by-passed and now it has returned with a vengeance. Taking our cue from South Africa, they must now fall. When I first wrote this post on Sunday August 13, it was in hope. That Monday, August 14, people in Durham, North Carolina, came to the same conclusions (entirely separately, as far as I know) and pulled down the Confederate memorial in their town. It’s on.

seeing the unseen monument

The Charlottesville statue in question is a 1924 equestrian monument to Robert E. Lee designed by Henry Merwin Shrady and finished by Leo Lentelli. Shrady, a New Yorker, had designed the Washington DC memorial for Ulysses Grant. His statue of George Washington is in Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn. In the 1996 application to place the statue on the National Register of Historic Places, no historical claim relating to the Civil War was made. Rather, the work was held to be an

important art object that exhibits the figurative style of outdoor sculpture produced by members of the National Sculpture Society

Which is to say, it’s not that important, really, as a sculpture. It has no historical value because it was not made in the period in which its subject was alive and the artists had never met Lee. As a work of art, it is derivative, and in poor condition. Other, better works by Shrady remain in place.

Shrady & Lentelli, “Robert E. Lee” (1924)

The statue was dedicated in 1924 after three years of organizing by the KKK in the area. The ceremony was organized by “the Confederate Veterans, Sons of Confederate Veterans, and the United Daughters of the Confederacy.” Lee’s great-granddaughter pulled away a Confederate flag to reveal the sculpture. And then the sculpture began its work as part of the unseen operations of enforcing consent, what Frantz Fanon called “the aesthetics of respect for the established order.” Military ceremony is key to these aesthetics, as are these usually “unseen” monuments, testifying here to the naturalizing of white supremacy.

the whiteness of statues

Consider the statue in itself. Formally, the sculpture evokes that of Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, whose Meditations were one of the books Lee took with him to war. The 1895 US edition was dedicated to Lee by the English translator. Trump’s defense secretary Mattis also carries the book with him. White nationalism sees itself as embodying the legacy of Rome. The violent polemicist Richard Spencer has even imagined Trump’s regime as a new Roman Empire.

As so often, there is also a racist dog-whistle here, made visible in the film Django Unchained–the purported unlikeliness of an African American riding a horse. The statue is intended as a portrait of Lee’s horse Traveler. It marks the dominion of whiteness over both inferior races and non-human “brutes.”

Other than Lee’s name, the statue has no contextualizing or historical information. The content of the statue as an art work is thereby expressed through its form. It is, to use the American semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce, only loosely indexical because it was made from illustrations and photographs. While Lee may be a key figure in the Confederate imaginary, the sculpture is not iconic in the strict sense that it shares qualities with Lee. It is strongly symbolic, not of Lee as a person, but of white supremacy.

That whiteness is both overwhelmingly visible and not present. Statues have been used in polygenic natural history for two centuries. In this now-discredited view, there are multiple species of humans, who exist alongside each other in a ranked hierarchy. At the top, as illustrated Julien-Joseph Virey’s Natural History of Man (1801) were Greek sculptures, representing whiteness.

This idea was widely circulated in the United States and was used extensively in pro-slavery positions.

In the past, I’ve made fun of this, pointing out that no actually existing whiteness can be found, only statues. But now I see it differently. Classically-influenced statues can be found across the Atlantic world. They form a material network of whiteness, one of its fundamental infrastructures. Whiteness does not adhere to any particular aspect of these sculptures but rather to the entire monument.

In the case of Lee, there was a debate as to whether the base of the sculpture was sufficiently large. At the unveiling, a speaker agreed but said:

Let it stay that way. The planet as a pedestal would be too small for Robert Edward Lee.

“Whiteness,” said Du Bois two years later in 1926, “is ownership of the earth for ever and ever, amen.”

***

It was only after the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2012 that local people began to ask questions, leading to the base of the statue being tagged “Black Lives Matter” in 2015 (still visible in the photo). Earlier this year, young African American Vice Mayor Wes Bellamy led a movement to remove the statue, despite a persistent campaign of harassment led by Justin Kessler, who also organized Unite The Right.

The resistance has been persistent, first legal and now violent. For the statue is doing new work. The Trump administration is dominated by white nationalists (Bannon, Miller, Sessions) and generals (Kelly, Mattis, McMaster). Monuments like Lee’s naturalize the connection between the extreme right between white supremacy and war. This articulation has reached a new degree of tension in the unlikely conjuncture of North Korea and the murder of Heather Heyer. At all costs, it must not become naturalized.

Replace us

So far more is at stake here than the classification of a second-rate sculpture.

On my first visit to Berlin some years ago, I went to the Reichstag. I’m of Jewish descent and so I was startled to see the racialized inscription Dem Deutschen Volke (The German Race) still in place. It gave me some sense of what a person of color might feel when confronted with a statue like that of Lee. At that time, I thought to myself: “We’re still here, you lost.” On Friday, white supremacists at the University of Virginia chanted, as if in response: “Jew Will Not Replace Us.”

The slogan was coined by the fascist website The Daily Stormer, which translates the title of the Nazi propaganda sheet Der Stürmer. In the chants, “you” and “Jew” were interchangeable, just as “us” also stands for US. The replacement of the statue by “you” (the racially inferior from African Americans to Jews and more) was understood as a challenge to be resisted by force.

#AllTheMonumentsMustFall

What, though, if anti-fascists took “replace us” as a challenge? Not “replace white people,” because many of us are white. But the statues. It’s time to say “all the monuments must fall.” Because it’s the form that sustains white supremacy, not just the individual objects.

While some people are not able to engage in the street contestations, many academics, artists and activists–the kind of people I imagine might be reading this–know of such monuments in their cities and campuses. It’s time to take action against them not as individual “works” but as a class–these are violent and dangerous objects.

Putting them in museums is not in and of itself a solution. The Elgin Marbles are the epitome of classical whiteness and colonial power. No British government has imagined returning them to the empty museum that awaits them in Athens. To do so would be to finally end the colonial imaginary in the UK. Or at least admit that it was time to do so.

There would have to be a new way of displaying these immense objects in the circuits of power, knowledge and aesthetics that sustained the established order of white supremacy, without accidentally allowing the statues to continue to do that work.

In Germany, I do not remember seeing any statues of Nazi-era generals or politicians. There was a minor rehabilitation of the Nazi sculptor Arno Breker in the 2000s and now US neo-Nazi websites have posted extensive galleries (caution: highly offensive website) of his work, including a portrait-bust of Hitler. In other words, these things are hard to contain.

Any such action would be an expansion and extension of the #Fall movement in South Africa that began with the removal of the statue of Cecil Rhodes from the University of Cape Town and expanded to defeat the government over proposed tuition increases in #FeesMustFall. Now the agenda is to decolonize the curriculum.

In following the South African lead, those of us who are identified as white and/or as intellectuals need to heed a warning. At the end of the challenging 2016 film Metalepsis in Black about #FeesMustFall, a Black South African student speaker (above) castigates those academics and intellectuals who write about the movement but do not participate. She says:

It’s no longer good enough to write…It’s time to take bolder action…We do not need your sympathy, we need action, real action.

statues are falling

The Durham activists heeded that call. They did not hear it directly. When there are social movements, they create a counter-power that has its own “common sense.” In Durham, that lead to direct action. So far, no one locally appears inclined to criminalize it. In Lexington KY, the mayor has directed that Confederate memorials be moved to a site where they can be repurposed. Let there be diversity of tactics. But recognize that it was direct action that created the possibility of that diversity.

The statue brought down in Durham was also dedicated in 1924, at a time of “unprecedented growth” for the Ku Klux Klan in the state. I suspect the national Klan resurgence in the 1920s sparked a wave of such memorials. Whereas the Charlottesville statue had some B-list claim to artistic merit, the Durham one is far more interesting fallen than it ever was on its pedestal.

Yet no sooner had the statue fallen, than certain elements on the white left began decrying the action. So once again: the Fall movement does not erase history, it reveals it. In this case, we are learning that Ku Klux Klan activism created and engaged with the 1920s Confederate memorials, which I at least did not know before. If these statues are not “just” in defense of white supremacy but in active support of the Klan, is there still a case that they should stand? Really?

The work ahead is not limited to the former Confederacy by any means.

Here’s a memorial to Lee on General Lee Avenue in Fort Hamilton, Brooklyn, NY. The Army has consistently refused to change the name, and did so as recently as last week. It might be time to ask again in whatever way necessary.

There will be retaliations, as there were in South Africa, by white nationalists, like the attack on Boston’s Holocaust memorial yesterday. Already we’re seeing the so-called “respectable” Republican right trying to cauterize its connection to white nationalism. Partly they want to isolate and undermine Trump and partly they know that being on the side of Nazis and Holocaust memorial vandals is not acceptable, even to whites that go along with dog-whistle anti-blackness. So this assault raises issues for those identified as white.

When statues fall, it opens the way to re-thinking the infrastructures of racial hierarchy, as we saw in South Africa. Rhodes Must Fall became Fees Must Fall became Decolonize. Here the intersectional issues of reparations, the abolition of mass incarceration, respecting the treaties with Indigenous nations are both clear and seemingly far from being attainable. When I look at the three young African Americans in Durham raising Black Power salutes next the fallen Confederate statue, they suddenly seem a little closer.

abolition Black Lives Matter Grenfell neoliberalism photography race

For The Abolition Image #GrenfellTower #PhilandoCastile

Post author By Nick Mirzoeff
Post date June 19, 2017

Khadija Saye. "Dwelling" (not to be used commercially)

Here we go again. A killer cop acquitted. Migrants and people of color in London dead in a completely preventable inferno. And still they come–cops kill a Black woman with mental health issues in Seattle. A “white” English man drives his van into a crowd of Ramadan worshippers. The images are terrible.

Again, we must learn. It’s not enough to “see” what happened or to call for “changes.” It is, as it has been for so long, time for abolition. Of the police and the “real” (meaning “royal”) estate they defend. The “people” are the necessary product of the sovereign image, its excluded other. Which has nothing to do with actual people.

Abolition images make subjects who are not subject to the rule of others but have subjectivity. And that subjectivity is rooted in their mutual knowledge of others, human and non-human. It creates power, not to dominate but to enable. More exactly, these images convey and contain the potential for that movement to occur. They do not cause such kinetic happenings but can participate in them.

Not icons. Not history (paintings). Abolition.

abolition history

You will perhaps be skeptical, and rightly so, for have we not been here before? Many times, yes. Can we learn from this repetition compulsion? History says not. Sometimes there is a virtue to being ahistorical and trying to live in a present not wholly circumscribed by the nightmare. That present has many names, even recently: Tahrir Square. Black Lives Matter. And anywhere where abolition is the agenda.

But that history, though. Twenty years ago, another Kensington resident died and the people came out on the streets in their thousands for her. Nothing will ever be the same, it was said. Tony Blair said, “the people’s princess” and those who were called the people settled for that and got nothing more from the death of Diana.

It could have been the moment to carry out the task set for us by Foucault, “to cut off the King’s head.” Not the head of the person called the king but the head of the King, Kingship, and Majesty. Subjection, in a word. Without that abolition–whether there is a person called the king or not–no liberation is possible.

The sovereign image is the icon, the image that is the very thing it depicts. So the icon of a Christian saint “is” the saint, because we have never ceased to believe in magic. Here’s the risk–it’s easy to make icons and the “people” like them. Diana the icon, England’s rose, queen of our hearts, delivered the country to Blair and the war in Iraq.

Abolish royal estate

Grenfell Tower must not become an icon. Its power is stark and clear in each and every image I have seen. In a terrible irony, its Brutalist architecture now stands freely. What we saw previously was not what was designed by Clifford Wearden and Associates in the 1960s. Mrs Thatcher’s government had already set aside the 1961 standards proposed by Sir Parker Morris in favor of “densification.” Then new flats were added on the ground floor that had been open. The result was 120 families inside the Grenfell with only one stairway.

What burned was not the concrete structure but the neo-liberal “cladding,” designed by architects Studio E and contractor Rydon Construction. What should also burn is the shiny illusion it represents that there is opportunity for all, that wealth trickles down, that there’s no racism here.

What must not be allowed to happen is to make the site sacred and pass just a limited set of bureaucratic modifications–banning the (apparently already banned) cladding, putting in sprinklers, and the like. It’s not that these things shouldn’t be done but that they are window dressing the dynamic that underlies “royal” estate-based capitalism worldwide.

This ownership incarnates colonial sovereignty and makes it possible for a corrupt financier of such capital to be elected to the US presidency. Abolition has always been about land from the demand of the Haitian revolutionaries for small-holdings to the US call for “forty acres and a mule” and the {r}evolution in Detroit.

Black Lives Matter tweeted today: “Today is #Juneteenth, honoring the June 19, 1865 announcement of the abolition of slavery. And today we take back land and reclaim space.” It’s still abolition time.

That is to say: abolition is to decolonize; which is to create a relationship of power, knowledge and subject. And that is to be done by creating space, liberating land and ending colonial domination. Since 1492, there has been a convenient fiction that it is possible to apply Roman law to the entire planet for the benefit of those with such sovereignty. Or to put it more simply, this “law” allows the colonizer to claim unused land as their own. The colonizer says, “in my view, you’re not using this land, so it’s mine now. Go away.”

dwelling

It is, then, shattering to remind ourselves that the young Black British artist Khadija Saye, who died in the Grenfell fire with her mother Mary Mendy, had produced a stunning set of work with the title: “Dwelling: in this space we breathe” (2017). Her series of tin-types were decolonial because they addressed Ghanaian knowledges in ways that are not transparent to outsiders. Because she worked collaboratively with Almundena Romero to make the pieces. Because the work does not limit power to the human. And because it knows that life is living breath together, not dead capital or royal estate.

A tin-type is one of the oldest low-cost forms of creating a permanent image from light-sensitive materials, using wet-plate collodion on tin (rather than the more expensive glass). The tin creates mysterious and unpredictable patterns, imbuing the plate with non-human agency. The spiritual practices–not known to me–that Saye depicts as her subject are, then, of a piece with her materials.

And yet the title of the series cannot but open this work to the Black Atlantic world.The tin-type was a form that formerly enslaved human beings had used to capture their likeness. From the top of the Grenfell where she lived and worked, Saye could see the Westfield Mall in Shepherd’s Bush, where activists held a die-in, chanting “I can’t breathe” in November 2014.

i can’t breathe

Detail from the drawing of HMS Brookes slave ship (1783)

If there was ever an abolition image, it was (from the white side of abolition), the drawing of HMS Brookes. I’ve seen it twice this summer, oddly, once in Copenhagen and again in Lisbon. And what I noticed is that the first thing that I (and many others) usually say about it was wrong. The figures of the enslaved human beings are not abstracted at all. As you can see above, each figure is distinct and separate. Perhaps that’s a good place to start: that white people looking for abolition images are more often wrong than not.

The Brookes drawing makes it clear that not being able to breathe was a condition of Atlantic slavery (and indentured servitude). If it helped bring about the abolition of the legal slave trade, the drawing could not change that condition. Nor should we expect it to, it’s just a drawing.

History painting claimed to be that form. In this year’s now notorious Whitney biennial there was, in addition to that painting, one by Henry Taylor, depicting the death of Philando Castile at the hands of Officer Yeronimo Janez. Who was just acquitted on all charges.

Henry Taylor, “The Times They Are A Changin Not Fast Enough” (2017)

Taylor’s picture is a transposition of Diamond Reynolds’ Facebook Live video that I have written about at length here. The painting is large scale, opening the small phone-generated image into the imagined space of History. It creates a greater sense of openness and space in the car than the video and withdraws Yanez’s gun so that it seems to be outside.

Most notably, it changes the deep red splashes of blood on Castile’s T-shirt into yellow and green drips that rhyme with the other colors of the canvas. For some critics, this move was “transcendent.” I’m not sure that transcendence was the artist’s goal here. Certainly, Reynold’s repeated invocation “Please don’t tell me he’s gone” implied that Castile has a spirit or soul. But while that spirit can depart, can we transcend this scene? More to the point, should we?

History painting implies that shift into the register of the sacred and the sovereign. The little patch of blue sky does open a space outside the killing zone of the car. Castile is not sovereign in human terms, although his posture might be taken to indicate that of the dead Christ in the pietà. Only here the fallen is supported not by the Virgin Mary but by the passenger seat. Perhaps it’s too early to tell what Taylor’s work means. If it enters one of the temples of white “civilization,” aka a permanent collection, perhaps it can subvert the meaning of those quiet halls.

Outside, it was the fifty-third time Castile had been stopped. His luck just ran out in what is still a violent white supremacy and for all his practiced skill in addressing the gun, it still fired at him, as it will do eventually. Castile need not be made into an icon. He was just a good person, who helped children to dwell and breathe, remembering their allergies and taking care of them.

now

And so the time of abolition comes to be now. Or it should be.