Going "There": Black Visual Satire by Richard J. Powell (review)

Richard J. Powell's Going "There": Black Visual Satire offers a historical survey and detailed analysis of black visual satire during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The book, which originated from Powell's 2016 Richard D. Cohen lectures on African and African American art at Harvard University, explores topics such as "black visual satire," "racial stereotypes as a tool in satire," "painter/satirist Robert Colescott," and black editorial cartoonist Ollie Harrington (ix).

In the first chapter, "More Than a One-Liner," Powell offers a strong theoretical grounding and background for Black visual satire. He argues that "the art of satire not only has a long-standing and infamous place in world culture, but that it also has a distinctly African American lineage and presence in modern and contemporary visual art" (4). A variety of complex issues feature in this history, including "the notion of creative risk and how satire relentlessly puts the artist and the artworks' audience in an antagonistic relationship," "the logic and rationale behind deploying stereotypic and racist referents in black satirical art, and whether this strategy achieves the artistic objectives of its creators," and how "the dialectical paradigms that the art of satire invariably brings to the surface … complicate a straightforward understanding of this form of discourse" (4). Going "There " provides biographical and historical contexts that can help interpreters "analyze satire's active ingredients" and measure "its overall effectiveness" (4).

Powell argues that the targets of Black visual satire are almost always multiple. While racism has often been its "target or primary foil," it has also focused on the "social hypocrisies, political compromises, and moral failures of African Americans" (23–24). Black visual satirists have taken care to situate these "inward-directed" critiques within a "black vernacular context" (26). Thus, "black" visual satire is not only satire by Black satirists but also satire aware of the rhetorical contexts of a distinctly "black vernacular." While it is always possible for the satirist to be misunderstood, Black visual satire presented in Black vernacular is doubly risky in that it can land on "audiences who remain clueless about the satirical intent or effect of the artistic critique or attack" (31). The "ideal audience for these works" is one with "a certain level of African American cultural comprehension and the ability to appreciate each work's ironies and visual puns in order to grasp the satirical intent and impact" (36). Much of the tension of black visual satire—and its success—arises from the gap between these two audiences in different contexts and for different artists.

In the second chapter, "Drawing the Color Line: The Art of Ollie Harrington," Powell covers the long career of cartoonist Ollie Harrington (1912–95). Harrington's series Dark Laugher (later renamed Bootsie) as well as his cartoons for Eulenspiegel during his exile in East Germany are the primary focus in this chapter. Powell argues that Harrington's satirical thrust can be deciphered by "paying special attention to the uncanny relationship between relatively straightforward yet condensed compositions and their sparing yet incisively captioned adjacent texts and/or explanations" (56). Powell introduces the term "satiracy" to detail what was required for audiences to determine Harrington's meaning. Satiracy—combining satire and literacy—is a "cultural competence in reading 'between the lines,' and an insider's one-upmanship in decoding the visual signs and clues that satirists such as Harrington embedded in their art" (69). In his satire, which Powell calls "both pugnacious and artistic," Harrington worked to "fuse these two impulses" (101).

The third chapter broadens the perspective of Going "There" by taking up the "minstrel stain" that haunts Black visual satire. Powell argues that many African American artists since the 1960s have utilized minstrel imagery in their art in order to draw on the viewers' "presumptive knowledge" of these images as well as their "visual acuity, judgement, and a 'satiracy' so that the work of art could achieve its intended objectives" (104). Powell provides the historical...