In our presentation today, my focus was on artists within our own collection at the Davis that illustrate intervention into the history of black female bodily representation. I have chosen to focus on the methods used by Renée Stout. Stout is an African American artist from Pittsburg that uses art to both bring to light and explore religious practices of the African diaspora. Her art is very much a reflection of her own spiritual journey. At first I was quite confused by Stout because she often bounces from faith tradition to faith tradition in her art. One minute she’ll be exploring ideas of black femininity through a Congolese Nsiki, the next numerology, and the next creating an alter ego of a Haitian root worker named Fatima Mayfield.

There is a tension in the Black American community often times between exploring your “African” roots and being appropriative. I was concerned that Stout’s work crossed this line since researching Stout I know that she grew up in the Christian tradition and did not have access to exploring these belief systems until later in life. I was concerned that her representations of different African belief systems had the potential to either misrepresent these faith traditions, or appropriate something deeply personal for many people, like religion, for her own artistic expression.

However, the more I thought about this idea of exploration vs. appropriation I realized that it was not such a clear cut question. The Thompson reading discusses how artists based in African countries like South Africa utilized other more general ideas of African femininity, expressing them through objects that were not necessarily a direct part of their personal, or their countries’, experience. And yet, their use of these different objects effectively expressed the ideas of beauty, femininity, masculinity, and diaspora that they were trying to communicate. Furthermore, stereotypes of Black bodies in the U.S. have derived from a history of African colonialism and the relationship of the “West” to the African continent. With the transatlantic slave trade those ideas and relationships have literally been transplanted into the Americas.

This leads me  to conclude that the entirety of the African diaspora has had such a transnational experience, to the point where you can’t simplify a discussion about authenticity, and thus appropriation as it relates to members of the African diaspora relating and communicating with each other. The conversation involves acknowledging that people were literally colonized and this caused people to convert or remix their faith traditions accordingly because of where they were being located, their safety, or simply how the politics of the region influenced their faith.

Furthermore, the article also often used the term “African women” in a way that implied it was talking about women of the entirety of the African diaspora because of overarching themes that impacted most African peoples given shared histories of colonialism and white supremacy. Situating the work of Renée Stout in this larger historical context of remixing as a way of responding to history and creating locations for self-empowerment, the way that she as an female of the African diaspora utilizes faith traditions and objects in her art makes more sense.