Week 1- Modern Medea - Transforming Visions SE2142 PDF

Preview

Summary

Transforming Visions SE2142...

Description

Transforming Visions: SE2142

Week 1: Modern Medea Ekphrasis poems responding to paintings depicting the legacy of slavery in America Ekphrasis explores the relationship between text and image which is more complicated that first implied. Writers often use painting as main inspiration but add meaning and transform the subject. There is a lot of intertextuality and intermedial influences. Often radical changes are made in response to the subject breached. Yusef Komunyakaa:       

Born 1947 in Bogalusa, Milltown in Louisiana on the border of Mississippi in the turbulent background of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950/60's Father abused mother Was a religious man, James Baldwin Nobody Knows my Name (61) reflections of identity as Black African American gave him a lot of inspiration Worked as a journalist in 1965 (enlisted in the war) posted in Vietnam 1994 Pulitzer prize for poetry

The Modern Medea: The Story of Margaret Garner painting by Thomas Noble Thomas Noble:     

Born Kentucky 1835 Born of privilege: son of a hemp rope and cotton manufacturer employed slaves (slave owner) 1865-69 focused on slavery in his paintings His paintings were largely critical on the slavery and the principles he had once fought to protect as a confederate in the Civil War Medea: Greek Mythology, kills her children

Margaret Garner: History Enslaved African-American Woman in pre-Civil war America famous for attempting killing her children instead of allowing the children to be returned to slavery. She escaped with her family in 1856, crossing the frozen Ohio River to Cincinnati but were caught by US marshals acting against the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 There was extreme national interest into her arrest and trial which was for both escaping Slavery and the murder of one of her children. Her court cases were covered by the press. She was a 'mulatto' Her actions are often celebrated as Black-maternal resistance to white power  The way historically her story was changed: Certain claims on her violence were changed to appeal to each audience. Her identity as a mulatto (bi-racial) means her existence was a biproduct of sexual abuse or rape of her mother (slave). Her children were also described as mixed raced and could have been conceived by her 'owner'. Other details about the crime altered were the ages and sex of her children, making them slightly older and male increasing the financial loss that their

Transforming Visions: SE2142 murder would have cost (black males were more profitable than females) by doing this sympathies are laid on the loss of profit of the plantation owner. (Noble)

'a deed of horror had been consummated, for weltering in its blood the throat being cut from ear to ear and the head almost severed from the body, upon the floor lay one of the children of the … couple, a girl three years old, while in a back room, crouched beneath the bed, two more of the children, boys of two and five years, were moaning, the one have received two gashes in its throat, the other a cut upon the head. As the party entered the room, the mother was wielding a heavy shovel, and before she could be secured she inflicted a heavy blow with it upon the face of the infant which was lying upon the floor.'  Account of the Margaret Garner Incident from the Cincinnati Enquirer. Quoted in Steven Wiesenberger, Modern Medea: A family story of slavery and childmurder from the Old South (New York: Hill and Wang 1998), p.73 Modern Medea YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA Apex, triangle . . . a dead child on the floor between his mother & four slavecatchers in a Cincinnati hideout. Blood colors her hands & the shadow on the wall a lover from the grave. She sacrificed her favorite first. He must’ve understood, stopped like a stone figure. Where’s the merciful weapon, sharp

Transforming Visions: SE2142 as an icepick or hook knife? We know it was quick, a stab of light. Treed as if by dogs around an oak – she stands listening to a river sing, begging salt for her wounds.  'apex, triangle' picks up on novels spatial organisation of the painting. The corner and the inverted triangle which The Price of Blood

The theme of the painting is the sale of a mulatto by his father owner, a pile of gold becoming symbolic of the price of the suffering involved in slavery. Connected by the gold, the three characters are bound together by impersonal mechanisms of economic exchange which commodities the mixed race boy. Shocking dehumanisation Noble includes the religious painting, allusion. 

Thus disrupting the racial hierarchies by which slavery legitimised itself by placing white above black....