CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 9/25/2013

Kara Walker: Dust Jackets for the Niggerati

"Urban Relocator" (2011) is reproduced from Dust Jackets for the Niggerati, Gregory R. Miller's new monograph on Kara Walker. For the book, Walker solicited texts from four writers—Kevin Young, Hilton Als, James Hannaham and Christopher Stackhouse—to illustrate recent drawings that she had conceived as potential book covers for unwritten essays, works of fiction and missing narratives of the black migration. On her own dust jacket, printed to fold out as a poster, she writes, "Niggerati—a firebrand fusion of Nigger and Literati—was coined with acerbic wit by novelist Wallace Thurman to describe the bohemian vanguard of young black writers and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance. In meetings (at Thurman's rooming house described as "Niggerati Manor"), the younger set broke with Alain Locke's controlled message of uplift and embraced sexuality, rage, intra-racial diversity and modernism."