Sixteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

Art is central to Claudia Rankine’s recent play, “The White Card,” (2018). Rankine’s stage is a kind of museum which houses works of painting and photography that represent police violence against Blacks. A white art-collecting couple invites a Black female artist to their home in the hopes of commissioning work from her. However, she comes to understand that whiteness, not blackness ought to be the subject of her work. In this paper, I explore Rankine’s effort to redirect white “help” from consumer and spectator of black victims to something else. I especially look at the way Rankine’s inclusion of Marshall’s “Heirlooms and Accessories” inflects the final tableau of the play, which is a revision of a scene of a female slave at auction. Rankine shows us that in order to have art that has any chance of expressing something like a Black point of view, we need to reframe the entire enterprise.