Artists’ Books and Critical Literacy Pedagogy: Kara Walker’s Freedom: a Fable

Abstract

Centered within library instruction, Kara Walker’s Freedom: a Fable: A Curious Interpretation of the Wit of a Negress in Troubled Times (Freedom: a Fable) activates students’ interdisciplinary engagement and deeply enriches their understanding and appreciation of Black American identity through an art historical lens. The artwork engages with the history of the silhouette form in America and its complex relationship to racial identity and expression, recalling the works of Auguste Edouart (1789–1861) and formerly enslaved silhouette artist Moses Williams (1777–c.1852), and functions as challenging indictment of racism, human subjugation, and flattening by intervening upon the slave narrative tradition though the work’s formal elements. In instruction, Freedom: a Fable encourages students toward critical engagement with the visual narrative form and challenges held notions about Black American history, identity, and representation.