Disgust in Silhouette: Toni Morrison, Kara Walker, and the Aesthetics of Violence

Kara Walker's visual silhouettes illuminate Toni Morrison's representation of violence in her fiction, especially in her 1973 novel Sula. A shared silhouette aesthetic enables Morrison and Walker to destabilize and refract the effects of spectacular violence, which are exemplified in the multivalent media circulation of lynching imagery. As the history of such imagery shows, representations of anti-black violence produce competing emotional responses. The silhouette form highlights the ethical conundrum of representing violence. Through techniques of highlighting and hiding, the silhouette simultaneously elicits and forecloses audiences' visceral engagement with representations of suffering.