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
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 & Humanities > 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: |
|
| 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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