UnBecoming: The Poetics of Rupture in Visions of Black Girlhood

Abstract

UnBecoming: The Poetics of Rupture in Visions of Black Girlhood examines twentieth and twenty first century American art and visual culture—specifically the work of artists Faith Ringgold, Deborah Roberts, and Clarissa Sligh—to reveal how discourses of race, gender, and vision shape perceptions of Black girls and their civic sovereignty. This dissertation proposes a study of rupture as a method of constructing meaning in art history to center the critical and elusive space of raced childhood. I contend that as these artists foregrounded race and childhood, they evince Black girlhood as a subject that is central to questions of nationhood, citizenship, and ultimately what it means to be human. For this project, I developed the term “poetics of rupture” to name and interrogate the artists’ use of collage, constructed photography, and quilting to disrupt and effectively reorder the visual narratives surrounding childhood. Here poetics, or poesis, describes the process by which something is conjured or brought into existence. My consideration of rupture builds upon Fred Moten’s theorization of the break as a site of “radical breakdown” that generates new possibilities. Together, the poetics of rupture captures the productive practice of unmaking, the breaking open that allows for the emergence of something new. In the introduction, I chart the emergence of Black girls onto the public stage through the visual economy of the civil rights. The body of the dissertation moves across three artist-specific case studies. Chapter One, “Sutured Visions: The Aesthetics of Redress in the Work of Faith Ringgold,” examines Faith Ringgold’s paintings and story quilts as a Black feminist postmodern practice of aesthetic redress that centers the Black girl child. Chapter Two, “Remnants and Returns: Intimate Fragments of Girlhood, turns to Clarissa Sligh, arguing that her constructed photographs and artist’s books mobilize fragmentation, annotation, and archival return to challenge the narratives that secure childhood innocence and family coherence. Chapter Three, “Refiguring Citizenship: Deborah Roberts’s Countervisual Archive of Black Girlhood,” argues that Deborah Roberts’s collaged figurations, text based works, and installations construct a countervisual archive that fractures dominant regimes of beauty, vision, and citizenship, repositioning Black girls at the center of American civic imagination. I conclude with a consideration Freedom Square: The Black Girlhood Altar (2023-2024). UnBecoming bridges art history, Black studies, and feminist studies to further scholarship on vision as a racialized regime of domination that Black women and girls subvert through art making. The subjects of this project put forth ways of seeing and being that contest the limits of citizenship and national belonging—a discursive move necessary for the advancement of art history. UnBecoming aims to show how art history and visual culture can better register acts of repossession—often of one’s image or narrative—to expand discourse around the visual rhetoric of selfhood and belonging in the United States.