Kara Walker

In this volume, Kara Walker uses laser-cut pop-up silhouettes to tell the story of N—, an African American enslaved woman freed in the 1800s. The book begins with a ship and ends with a surreal childbirth scene, suggesting the ship as an important starting place literally and metaphorically for African American identity. Walker writes, ”This ship, with its uncertain destination is much like a woman’s sex,” serving as a kind of “birth canal” that refashions human beings into slaves, comparable to the way that perpetual slavery was enshrined in colonial America by legally tying the status of newborns to the status of the mother. Even after N— is freed, she is still reduced to her ability to reproduce. This book asks: is freedom achievable for Black women, or is it an American fable?