The African American artist Kara Walker's controversial silhouette figures of often disgusting antebellum scenes with caricatured, negative stereotypes of black figures to the fore have created quite a furore in the art world and beyond over the last decade. This has led to criticism from such established black artists as Betye Saar, who accused the younger artist of “selling us down the river”. Gwendolyn Dubois Shaw in her comprehensive monograph on Walker devotes an interesting chapter to the controversy, discussing how the stereotypes – far from reinforcing attitudes – are very obviously intended to critique them. Walker outlines how “if anything, my work attempts to take these pickaninny images and put them up there and eradicate them”. As such her work is intended to use the images against themselves, a kind of guerrilla intervention against the dictatorship of the binary in the iconography of race and slavery so that she can demonstrate in Miles Ungar's words “the extent to which the very concept of race is a powerful fiction based on the construction of a mythical other upon whom we project our irrational fears and compulsive desires”. In this context, the work's power is in confronting the audience with historical stereotyping discourse that still has immense resonance in American cultural interactions between blacks and whites. The silhouettes spread around large white rooms become in Walker's own words “a kind of history painting encompassing the whole room … confronting spectators with their own psychological repression of negative historical imagery”.

In terms of contextualization, Dubois Shaw is assured in discussing Walker's fine-art antecedents – see especially an interesting discussion of Cut (1998); however, the interdisciplinary angle is rather underplayed: Uncle Tom's Cabin and Gone With The Wind are discussed, but with less aplomb and notable opportunities for multiple-layered interpretations are thus missed. In terms of cultural contextualization, there are significant lacunae too. Thus cannibalism is discussed through a postcolonial/Brazilian Dadaism perspective rather than an African American/black Atlantic frame that could have brought in a range of authors from Olaudah Equiano through Frantz Fanon to Toni Morrison. Even more curiously in a book about an African American artist, the Hegelian master–slave dialectic is discussed without reference to Paul Gilroy's reframing of the discussion in The Black Atlantic. This surprising omission is compounded by a framing that is very much confined to American concerns so that there are no comparisons to the black British artists whose controversial 1980s works are dynamic precursors. Sometimes Dubois Shaw's discussion seems a little hagiographic (for instance in the discussion of her portrayal of a lactating John Brown (1996)), but overall this is a measured and always interesting account of what is constantly challenging work.