Gander, Catherine (2020) Black and White Landscapes: Topographies of Disorientation in the Works of Carrie Mae Weems and Claudia Rankine. Journal of American Studies, 54 (3). pp. 517-540. ISSN 0021-8758

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Abstract

n this essay, I explore how the contemporary black female artists Carrie Mae Weems and Claudia Rankine work with photography and text to develop what I call, after the famous American landscape photography exhibition, a new, anticolonial, topographics. Connecting the geographical and anatomical meanings of the word “topography,” I approach their works via the phenomenology of Sara Ahmed and Frantz Fanon, tracing how the two artists decentre and throw into relief what Ahmed terms “whiteness as orientation.” Enacting an affective, visual politics of discomfort and disorientation, Weems and Rankine, this essay contends, open new terrain from which to encounter the American landscape in visual, corporeal, and phenomenological terms.

Item Type:	Article
Keywords:	Black and White Landscapes; Topographies; Disorientation; Carrie Mae Weems; Claudia Rankine;
Academic Unit:	Faculty of Arts,Celtic Studies and Philosophy > School of English, Media & Theatre Studies > English
Item ID:	15864
Identification Number:	https://doi.org/10.1017/S002187581900094X
Depositing User:	Catherine Gander
Date Deposited:	25 Apr 2022 12:01
Journal or Publication Title:	Journal of American Studies
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies
Refereed:	Yes
URI:	Publisher
Use Licence:	This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

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