FICTIONAL ROUTES TO RECOVERING BLACK ROOTS: ZADIE SMITH, KARA WALKER AND BLACKFACE MINSTRELSY
FICTIONAL ROUTES TO RECOVERING BLACK ROOTS: ZADIE SMITH, KARA WALKER AND BLACKFACE MINSTRELSY

Summary/Abstract: This paper examines Zadie Smith’s novel Swing Time (2016) and the black paper silhouettemurals of Kara Walker (since the mid-1990s) as works that demystify cultural practices underpinned by whitestereotyping of black people and generally challenge mainstream historiography of slavery. The two artists donot create alternative historiographies, but, by critically re-viewing cultural products and attitudes, proposea route to retrieving the lost past which simultaneously casts a new light on the present too. Smith and Walkerchallenge complacent audiences to finally see (sic) the white ventriloquism of black voices within cherishedcultural practices and traditions which have sanitised or displaced racism sometimes under the guise ofhumour. One such tradition is blackface minstrelsy, which the artists either analyse against the grain (Smith)or mimic most exaggeratedly (Walker) to reveal minstrelsy’s long shadow over the post-slavery collectiveimagination in the West. However, unlike the Jamaican-English novelist, the African American artist walks astep further than unmasking traditional historiographic representations of the black or faux whiteacknowledgement of black cultural contribution. Walker demythicises the western Enlightenment myth ofrational humanity and unimpeachable civility. Her grotesque compositions featuring antebellum slaveryscenes reveal all characters involved as equally driven by instincts, hence as perfectly interchangeable.Walker, I submit, uncovers the “dark” roots of humankind, which no process of civilisation has ever“reformed” but only abjected (in Kristeva’s sense) and projected onto the social other.

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