Living Objects: How Contemporary African American Puppet Artists “Figure” Race

According to Moten, Marx first imagines the commodity object speaking in its own voice and then projects the voice of classical economists as speaking through commodity objects. Enslaved Black bodies had an exchange value as commodity objects but were accorded no human value. [...]a slaveholder coul...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Theatre symposium 2022, Vol.29 (1), p.16-34
Main Author: Richards, Paulette
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
African Americans
American history
Commodities
Culture
Douglass, Frederick
Festivals
Hartman, Saidiya
Material culture
Puppetry
Race
Slavery
Visual artists
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Summary:According to Moten, Marx first imagines the commodity object speaking in its own voice and then projects the voice of classical economists as speaking through commodity objects. Enslaved Black bodies had an exchange value as commodity objects but were accorded no human value. [...]a slaveholder could kill a slave with impunity even though the slave as commodity object might have been worth hundreds of dollars. Nate is biracial with fair skin and curly hair. [...]he effectively dissipated layers of tension that his physical being provokes by throwing his voice into a figure. Africans who disembarked in the Americas after surviving the arduous Middle Passage had definitely experienced abduction by aliens. [...]Hart figures among the "Flying Africans in Spaceships" that Soyica Diggs Colbert identifies in Black Movements: Performance and Cultural Politics.7 Hart's performance did not overtly reference the harsh labor and oppression African Americans experienced under slavery. [...]her visual image was polished, professional, and unapologetically Black.
ISSN:1065-4917
2166-9937
2166-9937
DOI:10.1353/tsy.2022.0002