Tavia Nyong'o Racial Kitsch and Black Performance - Ferris State ...

Figure 7:The Sambo family eating Tigers. Reproduced with permission from the collections of
the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, Yale University.
is collected and used to fry up a delicious meal for Sambo and his parents
(see Figure 7). The story defers and ultimately disavows its desire
to eat Sambo, making a visual meal of the threatening tigers instead.
This popular story was made into at least one play for the children’s
theater, and is still in print today. 18
If the cute black child is good enough to eat, she is also tough as
nails.This toughness is suggested not so much in actual children, who
are neither hard nor brittle nor invulnerable to pain, but rather in the
materiality of the ceramic figurine.The racialized function of the figurine
within consumer culture dates back to the dissemination in the
late 1780s of the Jasperware Wedgewood medallion that famously portrayed
a kneeling slave declaring “Am I not a man and a brother?” 19
The historical and ideological links between this sort of abolitionist
collectible and the commodification, beginning with the popular appropriation
of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, of the racist kitsch figurine, have yet
to be fully traced. I want to suggest that the material dynamics of the
figurine, which invite the enjoyable practices of abuse, and which also
anticipate and accept the abuse that our revisionary and oppositional
practices enact upon them, form the concrete obstacle to any utopian
regime of non-racist visual enjoyment. 20
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