Poster Gallery: Coming Attractions

British artist Adele Stephenson created the original artwork displayed on the cover and included in the gallery. The paintings and drawings were commissioned for the Stanley Nelson interview and documentary Freedom Riders featured in this issue of Black Camera. Stephenson’s work, a mixture of large and small pieces and a combination of acrylics, collage, and pencil drawing, constitutes her meditation on Freedom Riders. The film itself somberly considers the dramatic history of the freedom rides of 1961 that brought both the burgeoning civil rights movement, and the casual everyday brutality of American racism in the Deep South, to national and international attention. As Stanley Nelson explains in conversation with the editor of Black Camera, Michael Martin, his intention for the film—at this moment of the fiftieth anniversary of the rides—was to cement the legacy of “everyday people—common people—who do something incredible.”

The freedom rides have become embedded in the national narrative of civil rights resistance along with other iconic events such as the Montgomery bus boycott and the Supreme Court’s overturning of segregation in the Brown decision. But narrative easily and frequently slips into myth as the impulse to make order out of the chaotic and contentious events of the past compels us all too often to perceive those critical moments of history—when individual people make deliberate and conscious choices to become agents of their own history—as almost natural and inevitable. That there is nothing inevitable about revolution is a truism, to which we need turn only toward the aftermath of Tiananmen Square for confirmation. It is Nelson’s remarkable achievement that he manages at once to offer a compelling, sense-making historical narrative of the freedom rides while never descending into myth making or straying away from the critical point that this is fundamentally a story of individual people, each of whom made a choice at that critical moment to place themselves on the right—and sometimes the wrong—side of history.

The violent collision between the individual and history is a compelling framework in which to place Stephenson’s response to Freedom Riders. Working in a variety of media and artistic forms she returns repeatedly to the body as a meeting point for the forces of history. Though the body, as a product of culture, is, of course, never silent, it speaks perhaps most clearly and impassionedly at moments of crisis. It is at these critical points that Stephenson situates the body as a site of struggle through which the forces of history are articulated and upon which they are inscribed: “I believe that we often see some of the most compelling ‘truths’ of the body when it is in a state of extremity or contradiction. I therefore attempt to situate the body—by way of an effort to confront the paradoxes of art and reality—in states of hysteria, discord, and unease.”¹ To understand the extent to which representations of the body in extremis are woven inextricably into the fabric of Western visual culture we need only consider the ubiquitous presence and popularity of images of Christian martyrdom and ecstasy. Indeed, the foundational image of Western art—that of Christ on the cross—locates the body in crisis at the center of our cultural and visual registers. But Stephenson is operating also, of course, within a later modern tradition in which the besieged, ruptured, dismembered, hysterical, or disordered body speaks not to the ecstasy of spiritual grace but the bloody terrors of a Godless universe.

It is in that Godless universe that the body itself becomes sacralized. And, as the body becomes a sacred object, it becomes the battleground for the struggle over the promises implicit in the liberal humanism that defines modern Western culture and the constant failings of the state to guarantee those promises. Nowhere is this evinced more clearly than in the history of African America in which the black body has been forced to occupy the ambivalent state of a being that is simultaneously both subject and object. It is this most fundamental of dehumanizing contradictions that the freedom riders set out to challenge and...