'Save the Trauma for your Mama': Kara Walker, the Art World’s Beloved

In the 1990s Kara Walker was the focus of contentious public debate around contemporary black artists’ recuperation of racist imagery. Elder artists Betye Saar and Howardena Pindell denounced Walker and her art as products of a “plantation system and mentality.” Viewing the conflict between the three women as a dialogue-as-battle between two generations of female artists reframes the debate as an intriguing subversion of the white male Modernist artistic cliché “In art one must kill one’s fathers.” This essay reexamines the debate through the lens of Mae Henderson’s model of black women writer’s tradition as dialogism, arguing that Toni Morrison’s Beloved can be read as inverting the classical psychoanalytic Oedipal complex, recast with three black women. Rather than a battle between father and son for access to the mother’s body, Beloved details the struggles of a mother and her two daughters to claim ownership over one another in the wake of slavery. Because Beloved posits a struggle to come to terms with the ghosts of slavery and ancestors, I propose that the struggles between Walker, Saar, and Pindell should be interpreted as an inevitable dialogue between generations about how to negotiate histories and representations of slavery and ancestral trauma. I argue that it is not just Walker’s grotesque tableaux that performs a “return of the repressed” but that the artist has chosen to embody a Beloved-like persona in her role as controversial art celebrity, so that, like Morrison’s Beloved, Walker attempts a metaphorical matricide of her artistic mothers.