Betye Saar, "Sock It To 'Em," 2011. Mixed media assemblage.
In this mixed media
assemblage by Betye Saar, she reflects on the notion of time, violent reaction
and rebellion, and black stereotyping. While we normally think of the mammy
figure as a smiling black woman, here Saar turns that image on its head (or
rather, it’s fist), and declares that times are changing. The mammy figure in
this piece is ready to fight, and because she includes the red boxing glove, we
know the rebellion will be violent. In her mixed media assemblages, Saar often
uses the color red to symbolize violence, passion, and to catch the eye. In
this piece, the color red is extremely fitting for the implications of
well-deserved violence.
We have seen through our
readings that insurrections were violent, and that violent rebellion is an
important component to the history of African American activism. Because Saar
incorporates a clock in the glove, she asks her audience to reconsider the
notion of the “Old Negro” and the “New Negro.” She dashes that by placing a
small statuette of a mammy at the head of the glove – she stands defiantly,
reshaping our preconceived notions about the smiling black servant figure. Saar
breaks down the performance of race and makes a prediction for the future of
activism by acknowledging the history of insurrections. This mammy figure is
not afraid of violent rebellion.
I think this piece also serves as an interesting commentary on the sense of fear that pervaded white Southerners' relationship to black people both before Emancipation and, as we can see in the Jim Crow-era efforts to cripple the ability of the black community to organize and attain any level of equality, long after it. It seems that a large part of the reason that white society created the "mammy" archetype and its male equivalents was from a deep-seated fear of getting what was coming to them; the perhaps unconcious knowledge that they were proufoundly mistreating a people who vastly outnumbered them created a culture of unspoken fear on the part of white slaveowners that informed much of their construction of "appropriate" black subservient roles and behaviors ensured to quell fears of black resistance. I think this piece speaks to the actual fact of a mammy figure as a "ticking time bomb," both in whites' fears and, to a degree, in the internal life of the "mammy" figure herself, who is not as content with her position of subordination as she is forced to pretend.
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