Beyond Mimesis. Claudia Rankine and Toyin Ojih Odutola in Conversation

Abstract

Poet Claudia Rankine and visual artist Toyin Ojih Odutola place blackness at the center of their artistic practice. Having both relocated respectively from Jamaica and Nigeria to the US at a young age, they’ve matured a first-hand experience of how identity is constantly being shaped and re-shaped by context. Through hybrid poetic forms and tonal fields, Rankine and Odutola resort to the artist’s tools not only to subvert US cultural narratives that reduce blackness to a signifier of race, but more relevantly to enlist color as both the subject and the main question of their work. Juxtaposed to one of Citizen’s central poems on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Odutola’s drawings appear in the collection as a gateway for engaging and privileging a new language, structure, and semantics for blackness.
On the one hand, Rankine’s multimodal collection works at the edge of a canon, with acts of racism crowding the book through poems, photographs, and portraits to expose and undermine the white external gaze. On the other hand, Odutola works from photography only to move beyond it. While her human-size portraits are photograph-inspired in terms of subject matter, they are portrait-specific in terms of the materials she uses: black ballpoint, graphite, and acrylic fuel her drawings, outlining “a new grammar for blackness” (2016). She moves beyond her photographic source to re-tell the story of blackness through the line’s travels and lock the external gaze to the portrait’s matter. As Rankine states in an article dedicated to Odutola’s work, “her artistic project demands the preeminence of the mark which […] renders a peripatetic blackness” (2016), both materially and epistemologically. Borrowing from Èdouard Glissant’s theorization of a “poetics of relation” and from Barbie Zelizer’s coinage of the “subjunctive voice” to describe how spectators engage with or complete the suspended narrative often captured in photographs, I will also engage with lyric and art theory to explore how the artists’ formal choices allow readers/viewers to inhabit the work’s subjunctive dimension, complicating the historical pull in a white supremacist frame that views blackness as a racial demarcation.