Christina Sharpe: I\u2019m very interested in how the painting functions versus how the actual photographs of Emmett Till function. Mamie Till Mobley makes the decision, against much advice, to have those photographs of her son published. It was not mainstream media \u2014 or white media \u2014 that published those images. It was Jet magazine. And those images had nothing to do with white consciousness. They were for Black people, because Jet was a Black publication. They weren\u2019t meant to create empathy or shame or awareness from white viewers. They were meant to speak to and to move a Black audience.<\/p>\n
So Mamie Till refuses to have those images not be shown. And she says (this isn\u2019t a direct quote): Look at what they did to my son. This is my son. Look at what they did to him. She insists that the violence that he has been subject to be seen, unobscured. It seems to me that what Dana Schutz has done is to take that unobscured violence and make it abstract. Mamie Till wanted to make violence real. And that thing \u2014 white supremacy, violent abduction, murder \u2014 that Mamie Till wanted to make absolutely clear is abstracted in Schutz\u2019s work, and in her defense of the work.<\/p>\n
…Wake work is the work that we Black people do in the face of our ongoing death, and the ways we insist life into the present. I think it\u2019s really powerful that those Black young people put their bodies in front of that painting. For me, that is a wake. Those young Black people are keeping watch with the dead, practicing a kind of care.<\/p>\n
…There\u2019s an intimacy that you have as the perpetrator of violence, and an intimacy that you have as people who have suffered violence. An illustration: There\u2019s the intimacy of, let\u2019s say, an enslaved community; then there\u2019s the intimacy of the master, who, when a member of that enslaved community runs off, puts an ad in the paper describing that person in all kinds of detail. That\u2019s an intimacy of violence. So there are at least two intimacies in relation to looking at that painting, which is looking into a casket. Is it the intimacy of the woman who has now said she made the shit up [Carolyn Bryant, Emmett Till\u2019s accuser], or is it the intimacy of Mamie Till? More here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Christina Sharpe: I\u2019m very interested in how the painting functions versus how the actual photographs of Emmett Till function. Mamie Till Mobley makes the decision, against much advice, to have those photographs of her son published. It was not mainstream media \u2014 or white media \u2014 that published those images. It was Jet magazine. And … Continue reading \u201cWhat Does It Mean to Be Black and Look at This?\u201d A Scholar Reflects on the Dana Schutz Controversy<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[12,15,14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11425"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11425"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11425\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11426,"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11425\/revisions\/11426"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11425"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11425"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11425"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}