Race and the National Body

This essay uses the concept of translation to examine the relation of alterity to cultures of violence in late twentieth century visual and literary enactments. I proceed by looking at women artists and writers working mostly in the United States. Within this essay, the main examples of a relation between translation and representation will be drawn from the artist Kara Walker and the writer Toni Morrison. Early allusions to artists such as Renee Cox and writers such as Louise Erdrich and Maxine Hong Kingston work to establish relations between languages and cultures and the representational status of the female body. The works produced by these women emphatically stage problematic, sometimes cross-species reproduction and sexual violence as the conceptual problems for women as they retell complex histories in allegorical terms.