Flights of Principled Fancy Dress: Steve Prince's Katrina Suite and the Neo-Slave Narrative

Wakes are processes; through them we think about the dead and about our relations to them; they are rituals through which to enact grief and memory. Wakes allow those among the living to mourn the passing of the dead through ritual; they are the watching of relatives and friends beside the body of the deceased from death to burial and the accompanying drinking, feasting, and other observances; a watching practiced as a religious observance. But wakes are also "the track left on the water's surface by a ship; the disturbance caused by a body swimming, or one that is moved, in water; the air currents behind a body in flight; a region of disturbed flow; in the line of sight of (an observed object); and (something) in the line of recoil of (a gun)"; finally, wake also means being awake and, most importantly, consciousness.

—Christina Sharpe, "Black Studies: In the Wake"

Blackness is a movement of the between . . . an interstitial drama on the outskirts of the order of purity. It is an improvisatory movement of doubleness, a fugitive announcement in and against the grain of the modern world's ontotheological investment in pure being, or pristine origins, and of the modern world's orchestrations of value, rule, and governance (i.e., sovereignty) in the project or the ongoing exercise of inscribing pure being.

—J. Kameron Carter, "Paratheological Blackness"

Artist and New Orleans native Steve Prince ended a 2005 visit to New Orleans just before Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast and resurgent tides of anti-blackness swelled with floods flowing both from breached levees and decades of neoliberal neglect and corruption. To heal in the wake of it all, Prince created The Katrina Suite: graphite, linoleum cut, bronze, leather, and paper pieces that draw upon the black New Orleans funereal traditions of the sorrowful Dirge journey to the gravesite and the joyful Second Line return. Much of the Suite portrays these sonic and kinetic traditions realistically. For instance, the linoleum cut Requiem for Brother John represents a brass band Dirge march as it mourns the passing of a specific human being who died in Katrina's wake: the sculptor John Scott, mentor who taught Prince to "see that creative potential was within everything all around me" ("Interview"). On the way to the cemetery, marchers lean on each other for support. Through somber music and movement, they inhabit sacred grief and sadness. Prince's craft spins the piece slowly. Furrowed faces cast eyes up towards the sun and down towards earth and sea in a churn suggesting the cycle of life and death in general, and that in particular of Scott, whose image graces a memorial flyer while his eyes meet the viewer's gaze steadily. In Second Line: Rebirth, Prince depicts a funeral procession returning transformed. Leaving the storm and gravesite literally and figuratively behind, a dancing, umbrella-wielding Second Line procession moves towards rebirth signaled both by a cap's inscription and a dove. Looping in sorrow and joy consistently throughout The Katrina Suite, these linocut images of the Dirge and Second Line communicate one part of the lesson that Prince teaches. Always more—both wider and deeper—than the revels that many have misread them as, these Crescent City performances provide frameworks that help to keep human body, spirit, and community together amid forces trying continuously to fling them apart.

Limbo (2012) by Steve Prince. Linoleum cut (6" x 12").

© Steve Prince

This essay focuses less, however, on The Katrina Suite's realistic elements and more upon its fantastic ones, namely the series' towering, hybrid horse/men. As a quartet swirling periodically throughout the Suite, the horse/men signal Prince's visual work as tributary to the neo-slave narrative. Understood largely as a post-1960s genre comprising fiction and poetry, the neo-slave narrative has interrogated what Ashraf H. A. Rushdy has called a "neo-conservative" (and, certainly, neoliberal) present. In the United States, Rushdy observes, the genre illuminates both "just what the first...