Violence and Injury

The violence of enslavement and its afterlives cannot be reduced to physical punishment and torture. As the palimpsests in this room show, such brutality has often been mediated through the use of animals or through myths and stereotypes that fix people of African descent in states of dispossession, commodification, or sexual deviance. By making explicit these types of injury, however, Afrodescendant artists make us confront their enduring power.