Chapter 12 - Reading Race Along the “Bounding Line”

Summary

Lauren Dembowitz’s chapter focuses on race and visual culture, drawing on Blake’s notion of the “bounding line” with its “infinite inflexions and movements” that recast the visual image without relying on the inhumanity and philistinism of mass production. These “inflexions and movements” allow us to imagine new possibilities for familiar images, such as that of the “Hottentot Venus,” Sarah Baartman. Rather than write off these images as racist stereotypes, we can, with Dembowitz’s Blakean method, attend closely to how the material history of the visual text is imbricated with the history of race, which is subtly transformed with each new iteration. As Dembowitz powerfully concludes, the image compels us to “contend with the ways we are ‘intimately connected’ with, ‘bound up in,’ and ‘dependent upon’ that figure and the real women she overwrites for understanding how racial capitalism lives on in our present.”