“The silhouette says a lot with very little information, but that's also what the stereotype does.”
Kara Walker (Alberro Reference Alberro1996)Can you look at a silhouette of a dancer—a darkened, outlined shape on a white page—and identify the genre of dance represented? How about the name of the dancer? Could you use it as an analytical tool? Joann Kealiinohomoku (also Keali`inohomoku) not only thought you could do this—she thought you should.Footnote 1 By Kealiinohomoku's own account, she made thousands of these images by meticulously tracing photographs of dancers in multiple genres—some easily recognizable, most not. She believed they would revolutionize cross-cultural studies of dance and introduced them formally in 1969 at a Society for Ethnomusicology Conference where, she reported, Juana de Laban called them one of the most innovative tools for dance analysis since her father Rudolf's notation system (Cross-Cultural Dance Resources, Inc. and Kealiinohomoku Reference Kealiinohomoku2004, 2).
Joann Wheeler Kealiinohomoku (1930–2015) is best known for her now-canonical 1970 essay, “An Anthropologist Looks at Ballet as a Form of Ethnic Dance” (hereafter and colloquially abbreviated to “Ballet as Ethnic Dance”): a pull-no-punches attack on white ethnocentrism and racist paternalism in the dance scholarship and criticism of the time.Footnote 2 In it, she systematically challenges the imprecision and racial bias demonstrated by dance scholars when labeling forms as “primitive,” “folk,” “ethnic,” or “ethnological”—categories that uphold racial and cultural hierarchies. Her critiques of dance's reigning intellectual elites are biting: “[Lincoln] Kirstein also characterizes the dances of ‘natural, unfettered societies’ (whatever that means)” (Kealiinohomoku Reference Kealiinohomoku, Dils and Albright2001, 34). Of a contemporary's article juxtaposing “Two Dance Worlds,” she dryly observes, “The captions under the photos of Javanese dancers list no names, but you may be sure that we are always told when Martha Graham appears in a photo” (35). This was a feisty assertion of expertise and revolutionary prose for a woman anthropologist who did not yet have her PhD, writing at the crest of second wave feminism, and she took flack for it. She first presented the critique that became “Ballet as Ethnic Dance” at a 1969 Committee on Research in Dance conference and reported being shouted at in response (Kealiinohomoku Reference Kealiinohomoku2012, 13).Footnote 3
Kealiinohomoku had a forty-year career as a dance scholar after “Ballet as Ethnic Dance.” She was a professor of anthropology at Northern Arizona University; a significant contributor to the oral history archive of hula in Hawaiʻi; cofounder and director of Cross-Cultural Dance Resources, Inc. in Flagstaff, Arizona; the first recipient of the Congress on Research in Dance's Outstanding Contribution to Dance Research Award (1996); and the namesake of an award given by the Southwest Chapter of the Society for Ethnomusicology, among many other achievements and accolades. As the title to her most famous publication indicates, anthropology was central to her intellectual identity. She was also a dancer trained in an impressive range of both non-Western and Western techniques.Footnote 4 The arc of her professional life spanned the emergence and consolidation of dance studies as an academic discipline; the analytical potential of the Silhougraph® was an idée fixe from the beginning of this arc to its end. She laid the intellectual groundwork for it in her doctoral dissertation in anthropology, alluded to it in “Ballet as Ethnic Dance,” trademarked the term, and spent decades advocating for it while trying to secure financial support to bring the tool to the world as both a research method and a coffee-table book.Footnote 5
To contemporary eyes, Kealiinohomoku's unflagging promotion of a method of cross-cultural dance analysis that completely dispenses with both context and actual movement reads as a quixotic endeavor. This article argues that Silhougraphs are worth revisiting, though not as Kealiinohomoku intended. It uses Kealiinohomoku's archival materials, studies of the silhouette, and critical theories of raciontologies and melancholy to argue that the Silhougraph has cautionary potential: demonstrating the ways racialized figurations and genealogies may be unintentionally embedded in idealistic, culturally sensitive research methods and commitments, as well as the perils of unwavering methodological attachments.Footnote 6
This article begins by describing Silhougraphs in detail, including Kealiinohomoku's rationale for creating and promoting them, the supplements she added to increase their rigor, the ways in which they were prescient, and their limited adoption. Next, it situates Kealiinohomoku's efforts within shifting definitions of dance research and anthropological approaches to it during the 1960s and 1970s, as well as within the contested intellectual history of cultural relativism that was central to her research commitments. Following this contextualization, it discusses the racially overdetermined figural and methodological genealogies of the silhouette that compromised Kealiinohomoku's relativist commitments against her intent. Her unintentional redeployment of these genealogies is analyzed using racianalysis: a contribution to raciontology as theorized by anthropologists Jonathan Rosa and Vanessa Díaz (Reference Rosa and Díaz2019). “Raciontology” describes the centrality of race in constituting modern subjects and states of being to white supremacy that is reproduced and circulated by institutions; it is systemic and not simply a matter of individual prejudice. As I introduce it here, “racianalysis” describes the ways research methods implement, and thus further, raciontologies in anthropology and anthropological approaches to dance, irrespective of the researcher's intent. This article concludes with a reflection on Kealiinohomoku's multidecade attachment to Silhougraphs, theorized as a form of methodological melancholy that has political and racial components. As a genre of academic affect and not a personal feeling, methodological melancholy can explain the ways white progressive researchers may contribute to the very raciontologies we attempt to dismantle.
In their essay, “Black Women Respond to a Double Pandemic: ‘The Emotional W(ait)eight,’” dance studies scholars Crystal U. Davis and Nyama McCarthy-Brown observe that scholars have been “talking the talk” about Eurocentric structures in dance departments for decades, citing Kealiinohomoku as an example (2020, 11). This article is more of that talk, though my hope is that it can be actionable. I am one of the white people they describe as “feeling this urgency to learn, see, and change the things that there was not time taken to comprehend before” (2020, 11; emphasis in original). The evidence indicates that Kealiinohomoku was too. My goal for probing Silhougraphs’ genealogies and theorizing them using a critique from her home discipline, as well as methodological, political, and racial melancholy, is to rise to Davis and McCarthy-Brown's decolonizing challenge, that of Rosa and Díaz (Reference Raengo2019, 27), and the one posed in dance studies scholar Nadine George-Graves's (Reference George-Graves2020) silence that speaks volumes (21): to grapple with the racialized epistemological and affective structures that anchor the field and manifest in white progressive scholars’ attachment to it, mine included.Footnote 7 In response to Davis's and McCarthy-Brown's call to “simply speak the truth of where [my] values lie as a starting point,” I state here that I write about Silhougraphs because they are especially legible examples of the ways racialized figurations and histories can unintentionally circulate in US, white, liberal, anti-racist scholarship. I want to know more about this so I do not repeat it.
In critically revisiting and theorizing Silhougraphs, it is most emphatically not my intent to tarnish Kealiinohomoku's well-deserved legacy in the field or question the sincerity of her personal anti-racist, anti-ethnocentrist commitments. The tool is an example of the systemic insidiousness of racialized genealogies embedded in works that aim to critique them. Herein lies its cautionary potential.
Dance as Contoured Space
What, exactly, do we analyze when we analyze “dance”? For Kealiinohomoku, the answer was obvious: space and shape. A dance's contours indexed both. In her unsuccessful Guggenheim Foundation application, she argued that her long period of preliminary research led her to conclude that the “recognition of contour is critical to the comprehension of dance” (1993, 1).Footnote 8 Silhouettes were ideal tools for studying “the encoded distinguishing features of contoured space” (Cross-Cultural Dance Resources, Inc. and Kealiinohomoku Reference Kealiinohomoku2004, 2). As she wrote in an unpublished 1975 précis for what would become the Silhougraph project:
The fact that a person can look at a silhouette of a Spanish dancer or a classical ballet dancer and be able to identify them solely from a blackened silhouette without cues from color, environment, movement, or music seems so elementary that the viewer might say “so what?” This very “so what?” question reveals the exciting facts that shape alone is perceptually meaningful on the one hand, and diagnostically distinctive on the other. (1975, n.p.)
Kealiinohomoku posited the Silhougraph as a way to operationalize and standardize the methodological potential of the silhouette and thus enable the study of “contoured space.”
In Kealiinohomoku's view, space was “a medium which can be disturbed, arranged and rearranged in recognizable designs,” and facial expressions, colors of costumes, and the like were ultimately “distractions” interfering with the viewer's ability to analyze these designs (Kealiinohomoku Reference Kealiinohomoku1975, n.p.; Cross-Cultural Dance Resources, Inc. and Kealiinohomoku Reference Kealiinohomoku2004, 2). Therefore, she reasoned, Silhougraphs were preferable to photographs and “should be useful to the anthropologist who is interested in the cross-cultural use of space and in the development of typologies, as well as to the dance analyst and to the person interested in graphic and plastic arts” (Kealiinohomoku Reference Kealiinohomoku1975, n.p.). Silhougraphs would establish the contour as a common methodological currency for the systematic and comparative study of dance.
Making Silhougraphs was a meticulous process of creating new representations from preexisting ones by literally tracing images of dance. As she explained in her Guggenheim Foundation application:
The protocol for rendering a Silhougraph from a photo or slide is to trace the image by hand with carbon paper under the photographic image or with tracing paper on top; or from appropriately distanced projection. The tracings are made with great care to include every contour. Although there are computers that can scan photographs for outlines, my experience has shown that the act of tracing is important to the researcher. The eyes and cognitive processes become sensitized as a Silhougraph takes shape from hands-on experience. (Kealiinohomoku Reference Kealiinohomoku1993)Footnote 9
The silhougraphic process was a way to reanimate these preexisting representations of dance, and this was important to Kealiinohomoku as a scholar and a dancer; it was an early recognition that dance research, like dance itself, was a form of physical labor.Footnote 10 Kealiinohomoku did not routinely use live, posed dancers, though, on one occasion, she proposed working with a photographer to record a wide range of dance forms for silhougraphic purposes. Interestingly, her archive does include numerous examples of silhouettes clipped or torn from a wide range of publications, including scholarly journals and advertisements.Footnote 11 Perhaps she felt these images reinforced her view of the medium's analytical utility, ubiquity, and diagnostic potential.
Kealiinohomoku proposed twenty-nine “conditioners” to support and standardize the use of Silhougraphs as a methodological tool (Reference Kealiinohomoku1967, 8). Silhougraphs would be analyzed by noting the ways gestures and costumes operated with respect to the body's central axis and “by that portion of the body which is given the greatest emphasis either by articulation or spatial bulk” (Kealiinohomoku Reference Kealiinohomoku1967, 6). The goal was to generate typologies based on line, distribution in vertical space, and other factors (4). She acknowledged explicitly that Silhougraphs would not aid in interpreting meaning. She added to these analytical tools over thirty years, ultimately creating a “Diagnostic Features Profile” to be used when “decoding” the images. Elements she posited as encoded in Silhougraphs were organized into two categories: “Predictable Direct Evidence” to be read from the images unless “obscured by costumes and paraphernalia,” and “Interpretive Indirect Evidence” to be inferred or garnered through supplementary sources (Kealiinohomoku Reference Kealiinohomoku1995). Predictable Direct Evidence included “phenotype,” “morphology/somatype/physique,” “range of gestures,” “movement quality,” and “alignment/weight distribution”—the latter to be determined by using a plumb line and horizontal guide line. Features of the Silhougraph to be analyzed using Interpretive Indirect Evidence included “energy/force,” “time elements,” and “enculturation.”Footnote 12
This Diagnostic Features Profile, like her trademarking of the term, indicated Kealiinohomoku's scholarly and commercial ambitions for Silhougraphs. On a handwritten list of “Needs” accompanying her 1975 précis for the project, she notes, among other things, the desire to standardize all the figures to ensure they “are comparable as to usable space–formula based on worldwide average size,” “graphics-trained persons,” and the need to “train students” as “judges” (1975, n.p.). She even foresaw a “spin-off” in which versions of the tool could be used “for other testings in psych. [sic] … memory & affect.” Even in this “spin-off,” contour was key (1975, n.p.).
For Kealiinohomoku, the advantages of Silhougraphs over other modes of dance analysis were as obvious as the fact that shape and space were dance's key features. They would enable “cross-cultural evaluations” and typological analyses of dances, which, up to that point, were hampered by the relative dearth of appropriately rigorous tools and reliance on purely descriptive data (Reference Kealiinohomoku1988, 3). They were useful for fixing and then charting diachronic relationships among evolving forms. Compared to both Laban and Benesh notation systems, she argued, Silhougraphs were superior in their capacity to reveal “the cultural values of shaped spaces” and “the corporeality of human bodies” (1988, 3).
In other words, these written systems record movements as if performed by skeletons or mechanical figures; they do not give evidence of the three-dimensionality of bodies that move in cultural contexts, wear special clothing, and use special paraphernalia. The notation systems do not take into consideration the diagnostic features of the DFR [Diagnostic Features Profile]. While the information recorded by notation systems is of value, the use of Silhougraphs would significantly augment scholarly research on the contextual use of space as expressed by the space/time/energy triumvirate of both cultural and individual behavior. (1988, 3)
In keeping with her critiques of ethnocentrism, Kealiinohomoku also pitched them as gauges of cultural appropriation, stating in her Guggenheim application that they could “demonstrate incorrect copying of a cultural dance form by naïve outsiders” (1993, 2).
Though I argue later in this article that Silhougraphs’ figural and methodological genealogies irrevocably compromise them, in some respects Kealiinohomoku's use of the silhouette was prescient. Contemporary multimedia technologies employ them to analyze and classify dance datasets for teaching purposes and to facilitate cross-cultural and historical comparisons, just as she had proposed (Golshani, Vissicaro, and Park Reference Golshani, Vissicaro and Park2004; Kesiman, Maysanjaya, Pradnyana, et al. Reference Kesiman, Maysanjaya, Pradnyana, Sunarya and Suputra2020). Silhouettes also serve as data points in gesture capture systems (Bevilacqua, Schnell, and Alaoui Reference Bevilacqua, Schnell, Alaoui, Klein and Noeth2011).Footnote 13
Silhougraphs can also be viewed as a precursor to later posthumanist approaches to material culture, especially for the ways they decenter both the human body and presumptions of an autonomous dancing subject within the images.Footnote 14 In Silhougraphs, the boundaries between the dancing body and its paraphernalia are indistinguishable within the contour; it is sometimes unclear where the former ends and the latter begins. As American studies scholar Anne Cheng persuasively argues in Ornamentalism, such a fusion of a body and its prosthetic extensions “articulates an allegory for the crisis of personhood that the modern ideal of an integrated, organic, individual person was meant to alleviate.”
If we think of the European conceptualization of modern personhood as indebted to an Enlightenment notion of natural and integral bodies … then we are tracing here another kind of body, one that not only poses a challenge to this ideal but also insists on the primacy of aggregated objectness in the experience of the human. (Reference Cheng2019, 99)Footnote 15
By insisting that “aggregated objectness” was intrinsic to both dance and dance analysis, Kealiinohomoku challenged modern dance's presumption of interiority made manifest in the expressive body as essential to “meaning”: a challenge underscored by the lack of individualizing facial expressions. From this perspective, the silhouette was a reasonable methodological choice because, as art historian and curator Asma Naeem observes, “the detail, aesthetic meaning, and intrinsic value live on the outer edges of a silhouette” (Reference Naeem2018, 23).
Despite reports that Kealiinohomoku's conference presentations about Silhougraphs were enthusiastically received, the tool was not widely adopted (Miller and Wood Reference Miller and Wood1996, 111). Major foundation support never came. Kealiinohomoku's essay on hula space in the Dance Research Annual (Reference Kealiinohomoku and Jones1985), and an MA thesis completed by her student at Northern Arizona University (Knox Reference Knox1984), are the only scholarly works using the tool.Footnote 16
Contours in Context
Kealiinohomoku developed Silhougraphs as scholars in the United States were professionalizing dance studies as a field; a review of key developments in this foundational period is useful for situating her methodological ambitions. As Katja Kolcio documents in her book Movable Pillars, in the 1950s and 1960s, US academics, critics, and practitioners “began to organize into special-interest groups dedicated to promoting various areas of dance activities” and, in the process, grappled with a foundational question: “What constitutes dance research?” (Reference Kolcio2010, 46). There was no single answer. As Kolcio recounts, in this formative period there were disagreements between scholars embracing multidisciplinary approaches to dance analysis and those advocating dance-specific methods. A 1968 statement from the Dance Division of the American Association of Health, Physical Education, and Recreation advanced the former position: “New research in dance will be generated by the explosion of knowledge in related fields” (Kolcio Reference Kolcio2010, 50). Those cited include “neuromuscular learning, physiology, psychology of learning, sociology, social change, and new technologies of media and multilevel experience.”Footnote 17 Juana de Laban, who reportedly praised Silhougraphs, exemplified the call for a discipline-specific approach, using the emerging field's interdisciplinarity to make her case.
Dance as a universal mode of expression must accept the challenge also to devise its own methods of research, and the need for research in dance becomes clearer when we survey the other inter-related fields of study such as anthropology, sociology, and ethnomusicology which have initially pin-pointed the influence of dance in their scholarly investigations. (In Kolcio Reference Kolcio2010, 51)
Further divides around exactly what constituted dance's “own method of research” were ultimately reflected in the emergence of organizations devoted to specific methodological investments and identities. The Committee on Research in Dance (CORD), which was an especially congenial home for Kealiinohomoku, was founded in 1964; the Dance Critics Association in 1974; and the Society of Dance History Scholars in 1978.
Anthropological approaches to dance research were also proliferating and evolving in this same period, drawing on ethnomusicology, folklore, linguistics, musicology, and studies of nonverbal communication. Adrienne Kaeppler (Reference Kaeppler2000) offers a valuable review of the scholarship of this period, noting that the entire enterprise got off to a slow start:
A 1972 “review of the field” for the Committee on Research in Dance (CORD), by Anya Peterson Royce, attempted to make the anthropological study of dance interesting and relevant to individuals in the wider discipline.… Yet at the 1976 meeting of CORD only six papers focused on dance ethnology. (31–32)
While a complete summary of all anthropologically inflected approaches to dance analysis in the 1960s and 1970s exceeds the scope of this article, works by two of Kealiinohomoku's contemporaries—Kaeppler herself and dancer and choreographer Pearl Primus, as well as those of her mentor, pioneering dance ethnologist Gertrude Kurath—offer insights into some of the methods used, further situating her ambitions for Silhougraphs.Footnote 18
Kaeppler, research anthropologist and curator for the Pacific Islands in the Department of Anthropology at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, received her PhD in anthropology from the University of Hawai‘i, Manoa, in 1967: two years before the first presentation of “Ballet as Ethnic Dance.” Kealiinohomoku cites Kaeppler's work in her dissertation, which laid the foundation for Silhougraphs, including “Method and Theory in Analyzing Dance Structure with an Analysis of Tongan Dance” (Reference Kaeppler1972). This essay combines extensive fieldwork with linguistics-based dance analysis. In it, Kaeppler adapts phonemes and morphemes to examine movement particulars, coining the terms “kinemes”—significant units of movement—and “morphokines”—“the smallest unit that has meaning in the structures of the movement system” (176; 185). Interestingly for Kealiinohomoku's purposes, Kaeppler notes that “kinemes only include the contour of movement” (176; emphasis added). “Method and Theory” presents the results of Kaeppler's field studies in lists of kinemes organized by body part, supplemented with illustrations; morphokines are similarly presented in list form within specific categories (e.g., “environment,” “narrative”). These lists are highly detailed, though atomizing, making it difficult to imagine the dancing body in its entirety. Kealiinohomoku critiqued elements of this linguistic approach in her dissertation, arguing that speech was fundamentally different than gesture (1976, 308–310).Footnote 19 She may have seen the silhougraphic image as advantageous in comparison because it depicted the body's full contour, including accoutrements, albeit not in motion.
In contrast to Kaeppler's linguistic approach, Pearl Primus (1919–1994) opted against developing standardizable tools to analyze her field data. Primus was awarded her PhD in anthropology from New York University in 1978, two years after Kealiinohomoku received hers. Ruth Benedict and Franz Boas were her professors and her friends (Primus Reference Primus1978, x; Schwartz and Schwartz Reference Schwartz and Schwartz2011, 159). In her dissertation, “An Anthropological Study of Masks as Teaching Aids in the Enculturation of Mano Children,” she describes seven masks used by the Mano people of Liberia, including their roles in secret societies; investigates the masks as a mode of nonverbal enculturation within families; examines their use in Mano education; and argues for their potential in US education. Her field accounts are thickly descriptive and strongly—often compellingly—narrative, with an emphasis on “masks-in-action”: neither only sculpture, as art historians had posited, nor only dance (1978, 50–51). Primus is clear about her means for ensuring scholarly rigor: years of fieldwork, a wide range of field interlocutors, direct participation as an adopted member of the Mano, and her own positionality “as a person of African ancestry and as a woman” (1978, 29). She does not attempt to “quantitatively prove hypotheses” using analytical tools from other disciplines and does not offer her own (29). Unlike Kaeppler's essay, Primus's dissertation would not serve as a guide for replicating the performances she observed—indeed, in some cases this would be anathema—nor does it provide the basis for generalizable cross-cultural comparisons; these were not her goals. Though it is not clear that Kealiinohomoku knew about Primus's dissertation, she might have imagined Silhougraphs as mediating between an atomistic, linguistic approach and a purely descriptive, empirical one, and perhaps as an analytical supplement to both.
No pioneering or peer dance anthropologist was more important to Kealiinohomoku's emerging career than Gertrude P. Kurath (1903–1992), who ultimately became her dear friend, mentor, and collaborator. Kurath was a leader of efforts to develop dance ethnology as a systematic and scientific study at midcentury. She documented and studied Native American dances, with particular attention to those of the Tewa Pueblo, prolifically publishing articles in folklore and anthropology journals, encyclopedia entries, and coauthored books without the benefit of an official academic appointment in her own right.Footnote 20 Kurath's career exemplifies both the increasing professionalization of dance studies and the fluidity of anthropologically inflected dance research from the 1950s to the mid-1970s, adding further context to Silhougraphs. She affiliated with the Society for Ethnomusicology, which was founded in 1955, and was later honored by CORD, along with Marian van Tuyl, for the organization's third conference, “New Dimensions in Dance Research: Anthropology and Dance—the American Indian” (1972). In 1960, Kurath characterized her scholarship as both “choreology,” which “recognizes the cultural setting of dance, including the cultural position of individuals and of the sexes, and patterns of social organization and economic activity,” and “ethnology” (Reference Kurath1986a, 18).Footnote 21 The latter, she notes, “has come into being only in the last few decades” and was defined as “the scientific study of ethnic dances in all their cultural significance, religious function, or symbolism, or social place”—acknowledging the “controversial” use of “ethnic” that would so rankle Kealiinohomoku a decade later (1986a, 13, 17). By 1966, however, Kurath was equivocal about both dance ethnology's status as a clearly defined discipline and its relationship to anthropology, writing,
Though I have used the term “dance ethnology,” I am not too sure of its existence at present. Rather, it seems to be taking shape as a scholarly pursuit. If I had a hand in its formation, it was accidental, the result of two decades of fumbling. Each year, the procedures become clearer and the prospects for personnel seem brighter. But I, for one, am still far from achieving the aims I set for myself. These are similar to those of anthropologists, but also different, because of the nature of dance. (Reference Kurath1986b, 407)Footnote 22
Even the method's object of analysis was in flux. Kurath defined the subject matter of dance ethnology as “a great variety of kinetic activities, many of them expressive, rhythmical, and esthetically pleasing” (Reference Kurath1986a, 16): productively vague but, by her own admission, leaving the scope of the enterprise “unsettled.”Footnote 23 Dance had emerged as a unique object of analysis, but what this meant for standardizing methodological practice, or a shared specific set of analytical terms, was not yet fully clear.
Kurath's ethnological scholarship looks strongly formalist to contemporary eyes, with thick descriptions of movement particulars and relatively limited discussion of context. The final outcome of her inquiry—one Kealiinohomoku heartily embraced—was “intercultural comparison” based on close readings of movement motifs and other elements (Reference Kurath1986b, 410). Kurath relied heavily on notation—both her own and Labanotation—as well as recordings and photographs. Analysis using these methods was surely time consuming to execute and required collaborators, making Silhougraphs appear highly efficient by comparison. This period of flux around both the definition of “dance research” and anthropological methods for conducting it, was an open invitation to an ambitious and passionate methodologist eager to build on her mentor's example. In 1976, a decade after Kurath published her equivocal view of the status of dance ethnology, Kealiinohomoku received her PhD in anthropology from Indiana University; the title of her dissertation, “Theory and Methods for an Anthropological Study of Dance,” signals that she saw her approach as combining both anthropological rigor and a dance-specific approach.
Cultural Relativism
Situating Silhougraphs within evolving definitions of dance research and the diversity of anthropological approaches to it contextualizes Kealiinohomoku's ambitions for them. However, setting the tool within the contested intellectual history of American cultural relativism is essential for understanding Kealiinohomoku's reasons for creating it, its ethnomusicological precedents, and its status as a cautionary tale.
The anthropological perspective known as cultural relativism was birthed in the same twentieth century interwar moment as Kealiinohomoku herself: part of a broad intellectual coalition of efforts historian Andrew Jewett calls “scientific democracy.” According to Jewett, “scientific democracy portrayed the scientific enterprise—the whole complex of practices, institutions, knowledge claims, and persons—as a concrete manifestation of an underlying ethical orientation that was perfectly suited to the needs of a modern democracy” (2012, 10). It was particularly strong in the human sciences, including anthropology, and its “center of gravity lay in universities” (Jewett Reference Jewett2012, 13).
Though a complete intellectual history of cultural relativism and its variants is beyond the scope of this article, a summary of its major presumptions reveals how central it was to Kealiinohomoku's career and her unflagging advocacy of Silhougraphs. Cultural relativism was first developed by Franz Boas after World War I and popularized by his midcentury students: Ruth Benedict (1887–1948), Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960), Margaret Mead (1901–1978), and especially Melville Herskovits (1895–1963). Herskovits was a mentor to Hurston and to Katherine Dunham (1909–2006), who studied with him at Northwestern; indeed, as Joanna Dee Das (Reference Dee Das2017) notes, he was the “greatest influence” on her work as an anthropologist (31).Footnote 24 He later became Kealiinohomoku's advisor and mentor. As anthropologist Micaela di Leonardo notes, “Clearly the term bears some connection to Einsteinian relativity and to other High Modernist schools of thought recognizing the intersubjectivity of knowledge” (Reference di Leonardo1998, 339). Boas saw this orientation as a direct challenge to both the irrationality and devastation of World War I nationalisms and the racist science of the period, particularly the use of physical characteristics to construct putatively immutable racial categories and hierarchies. It was a liberal anti-racist reform project (Anderson Reference Anderson2019). Indeed, both Boas and Herskovits used the methods of racist social science, specifically skull measurements, to debunk them. As Herskovits wrote later in his career, in a critique of physical anthropologists still attached to the idea of racial phenotypes: “The outstanding factor in the study of physical types is variability” (In Gershenhorn Reference Gershenhorn2004, 55; emphasis in original).Footnote 25 Interestingly, though he vehemently rejected a connection between physical type and racial hierarchies, his biographer documents his use of “discredited classification methods [long- and short-headedness] as determinants of racial category” while arguing against Jewishness as the latter (Gershenhorn Reference Gershenhorn2004, 54.) In this instance, Herskovits's attachment to phenotype as an analytical tool foreshadows Kealiinohomoku's, though hers proved more persistent.
Herskovits is best known for helping to establish African Studies in US universities, for positing cultural continuities across the African diaspora, and for giving classical cultural relativism its methodological specificity in the 1940s and 1950s. In Herskovits's own words, “The principle of cultural relativism, briefly stated, is as follows: Judgments are based on experience and experience is interpreted by each individual in terms of his [sic] own enculturation.… Evaluations are relative to the cultural background out of which they arise” (Reference Herskovits1948, 63; emphasis in original). From this principle there followed several corollaries: an ethnographer must interpret a culture “on the basis of its own internal web of logic” (Brown Reference Brown2008, 355), must bring to bear both empathy and detachment to data collection and analysis, and must repudiate rankings of cultures on an evolutionary scale.
Anthropologist Michael F. Brown observed that there is a “characteristically American flavor” to this “classic” articulation of cultural relativism, in part because “the US legacy of slavery and racial segregation and the ongoing challenge of assimilating large numbers of immigrants into a hybrid society gave [… it]—and particularly its theme of intercultural tolerance— a political resonance that it lacked in much of Europe until late in the twentieth century” (2008, 365). However, Herskovits's cultural relativism was also hotly contested by US academics.Footnote 26 He was very specific in his view that it was a methodological position, not a philosophical one. It was a “matter of praxis” (Fernandez Reference Fernandez1990, 141). When attacked by philosophers, especially his Northwestern colleague Eliseo Vivas, Herskovits argued forcefully that cultural relativists did not escape the norms and values of their own societies and, further, that a society's moral “oughts” are a “consequence of enculturation” (Fernandez Reference Fernandez1990, 145). Contrary to the assertions of the right-wing culture warriors of the 1980s and 1990s, the classical cultural relativism Herskovits advocated was not moral relativism. It was, in his view, scientific: a way to ensure the objectivity that he viewed as the hallmark of rigorous research.
Kealiinohomoku was Herskovits's student, first as an undergraduate theater major (BSS, 1955) and later as a graduate student in anthropology at Northwestern University. He served as advisor of her MA thesis, “A Comparative Study of Dance as a Constellation of Behaviors among African and United States Negroes” (1965), which directly reflected his diasporic view. Another of his students, pioneering ethnomusicologist Alan P. Merriam, directed her dissertation in anthropology (Reference Kealiinohomoku1976) at Indiana University. It is impossible to overstate Herskovits's influence on Kealiinohomoku's career. Indeed, he gave disciplinary specificity to her ambitions. When she read in one of his undergraduate textbooks that dance “was grossly ignored by scholars on all sides of the anthropological world,” she wrote in the margins: “That's it! That's what I'll do” (Celichowska Reference Celichowska2008, 113). In her telling, he literally embraced her and her eagerness to study dance from an anthropological perspective. Though parsing and qualifying cultural relativism became a minor industry in anthropology as early as the 1960s, Kealiinohomoku hewed closely to the classical version she learned from Herskovits, including its valorizing of objectivity. Indeed, “Ballet as Ethnic Dance” is a paradigmatic classical cultural relativist manifesto.Footnote 27
In addition to numerous philosophical and political challenges, including those by white supremacists resisting desegregation (Baker Reference Baker2010), cultural relativism presented a series of pragmatic methodological problems for scholars studying non-Western expressive cultures in the 1950s and 1960s. If a culture's expressive forms demanded engagement on their own terms, what did that look like as a matter of notation and vocabulary? Charles Seeger's melograph, a machine he designed in the 1950s to record the pitch and intensity of vocal and instrumental performances, was one attempt to operationalize the cross-cultural study of music using relativist principles. The device produced “melograms”: “two traces on a strip of graph paper,” with one representing frequency and the other fluctuating intensity (Gjerdingen Reference Gjerdingen1988, 39). Seeger hoped the melograph would facilitate objective cross-cultural comparisons. Undoubtedly, its gauges and dials were part of its techno-aesthetic appeal: visual evidence of its rigor. It certainly looked scientific. Given the considerable breadth and depth of Kealiinohomoku's connections to ethnomusicology, including her doctoral work with Merriam, it is highly likely that she was familiar with the melograph. The machine might have contributed to her goal of creating an objective means of cross-cultural dance analysis. Despite institutional, disciplinary, and gender privilege far greater than Kealiinohomoku's, Seeger's melograph ultimately fared no better than Silhougraphs. As ethnomusicologist Robert O. Gjerdingen pithily observes, “Most ethnomusicology departments do not own one. And it is the rare ethnomusicologist who has ever used one” (Reference Kealiinohomoku1988, 39). Even by the mid-1970s, it was clear that the machine was both impractical and unable to capture the intricacies and complexities of the music it attempted to graph.
The Seeger melograph was not the only such attempt to operationalize relativist commitments. In the 1950s, folklorist and ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax began to develop “cantometrics” to facilitate comparative analyses of music and to formulate relationships between musical style and culture.Footnote 28 Cantometrics dispensed with conventional musicological categories in favor of a group of thirty-seven “style factors” Lomax developed with a range of specialists; Kealiinohomoku's Diagnostic Features Profile and conditioners for Silhougraphs might have drawn on cantometrics as a model. In collaboration with Laban movement analysts Irmgard Bartenieff and Forrestine Paulay, Lomax published a Reference Lomax, Bartenieff, Paulay and Lomax1968 essay on “choreometrics.” This was an attempt to measure and scientize the cross-cultural comparative study of dance by coding movement on film—another indicator of the proliferation of “objective” analytical tools for studying dance. Bartenieff's notes indicate specific choreometric attention to “interrelationships of body parts and spatial … aspects,” a formulation that might have contributed to Kealiinohomoku's emphasis on the same elements in Silhougraphs (Reference Bartenieffn.d., n.p.). While praising Lomax as an “innovative thinker” who asked “important questions,” Kealiinohomoku harshly and persuasively critiqued choreometrics, arguing that Lomax's connections between dance and culture relied on generalizations from limited samples, and confused correlation with causation (Reference Kealiinohomoku1974, 23). His hypothesis that dance was a component of everyday behavior presumed “homogenous societies, rather than societies that have dance as an institutionalized specialization” (Reference Kealiinohomoku1974, 21). Simply put, Lomax was “not a dance scholar,” so failed to understand the wide array of relationships between dance and diverse cultures, or even basic differences between solo and group dances (Reference Kealiinohomoku1974, 24, 22). Bartenieff and Paulay came in for less criticism but a bit more condescension. They “could not be expected to know their film samples were so inadequate” because they were “not trained in the theoretical concepts of anthropology,” including cultural relativism (Reference Kealiinohomoku1974, 23). Perhaps unsurprisingly, Kealiinohomoku concluded her critique of choreometrics by legitimating both her own position as a dance anthropologist and, by extension, Silhougraphs as an analytic tool: “The lesson to be learned [from choreometrics] is that the ethnochoreologist should be trained in both dance and anthropology, especially if that person is designing and directing ethnochoreological research” (Reference Kealiinohomoku1974, 24).
Dance Analysis in Black and White
Silhougraphs were Kealiinohomoku's attempt to solve several methodological problems in the cross-cultural analysis of dance: systematically and rigorously operationalizing classical cultural relativism in an analytical tool, including moving away from a vocabulary rooted in the Western concert dance criticism she had challenged; reducing reliance on purely descriptive data that could not support the generalizable cross-cultural comparisons she fully endorsed; and enabling objective isolation of the features that made a dance culturally particular while attending to the entire dancing body and its accoutrements. They were her version of the melograph and canto- and choreometrics. However, in choosing the silhouette as the basis of her method, and in failing to reckon with its historical and semiotic entanglements and racial overdetermination, she unintentionally undermined her own relativist objectives and perpetuated the connection between phenotype and racist pseudoscience that Boas and Herskovits explicitly repudiated.
As critical studies of its history in Western Europe and the United States reveal, the silhouette is not simply a value-neutral genre of portraiture.Footnote 29 The form's racial work in the United States from the eighteenth century forward is both fraught and fascinating. As Naeem argues in Black Out: Silhouettes Then and Now, “Silhouettes offered, somewhat equivocally and unsuccessfully, the expression of identities and conditions occupying the shadows of Early American visual culture” from before the founding of the nation (2018, 32). By the middle of the nineteenth century, though, “the blackness of silhouettes had reached a point where its coloration was directly relational to period racial politics” (2018, 30).
The American racial politics conjured by the silhouette was intertwined with that of the Enlightenment “science” of physiognomy, especially the work of Swiss minister Johann Caspar Lavater (1741–1801). Lavater's books and translations, published between 1775 and 1799, used the silhouette as visual evidence for discerning moral and spiritual truths from the contours of the human profile. As art historian Joan K. Stemmler states, “Basic to Lavater's physiognomical theory is the belief that the physical body is an image of the spiritual essence of God and the necessary form of the essence of the divine in the material world” (Reference Stemmler1993, 153). Morality, beauty, and intellect were written on, and became readable from, the contours of the face. Moreover, Lavater maintained that physiognomy was a science: indeed, a way to unite Enlightenment science with spiritual concerns (Rutherford Reference Rutherford2009, 38). It will likely come as no surprise to critical dance studies scholars that his physiognomic ambitions both relied upon and advanced racial hierarchies. Art historian David Bindman notes Lavater's indebtedness to his contemporary Pieter Camper's charts of comparative skulls: Camper's system “was enormously influential on ideas of racial difference in the nineteenth century” (2011, 392). Lavater used a similar schema in his “evolutionary series” and, when describing different “varieties” of humans, placed “the ‘Angolan Negro’ … among the animals, a strategy that was adopted by later racial scientists” (Bindman Reference Bindman2011, 392). Though his theory was attacked at the time, Lavater's heavily illustrated publications were enormously influential and circulated widely among Anglo-Europeans; they inspired a “cultlike frenzy” of interest in physiognomy and its readability through the contour and silhouette (Donato Reference Donato2001, 88). An abridged version of his book, Physiognomische Fragmente zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntnis und Menschenliebe, with engraved plates, was published in the United States in 1794 under the title Essays on Physiognomy. American studies scholar Frank Mehring notes that cheap paperback editions greatly extended its reach in the country (Reference Dee Das2017, 186). As a result, Naeem argues, “Silhouettes could never discard the residue of this discourse of racial typology” (Reference Naeem2018, 27). Lavater's and Camper's racist typologies and their descendants were precisely what Boas's and Herskovits's cultural relativisms were designed to refute.
Two transatlantic examples from the same interwar moment in which Boas and Herskovits developed cultural relativism illustrate the deeply racialized “paradoxes” of the silhouette (Mehring 2019, 197). In the first, it is an aesthetic of and for Black self-assertion. Though silhouettes circulated primarily as either cheap portraits for new European immigrants or as representations of white bourgeoisie during the 1920s, Harlem Renaissance artists—especially Black illustrator, muralist, and book jacket designer Aaron Douglas (1899–1979)—deployed them against their physiognomic history. Douglas was first exposed to silhouettes through the work of the German émigré artist and teacher Winold Reiss (1886–1953), who had made ethnographic portraits (Mehring Reference Mehring and Brunet2017, 194; Raengo Reference Raengo2013, 138). In stark contrast to physiognomic or ethnographic depictions, however, Douglas's silhouettes are often of full bodies rather than isolated parts, bold, and angular: combining conventions of classical Egyptian representations (head in profile, body and shoulders turned to the viewer halfway at the waist) with those of art deco and art nouveau. As visual studies scholar Alessandra Raengo notes, they “are not modelled after ethnographically depicted bodies but after art styles …” (Reference Raengo2013, 138). These are images of Black elegance, modernity, and power, reinforced in his book jacket designs by the texts they enclosed: Langston Hughes's The Weary Blues (1926) and Not without Laughter (1930), James Weldon Johnson's God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (1927) for which he created a series of paintings, and many others.Footnote 30
The second example, from the social sciences, gestures directly back to Lavater and, disturbingly, forward to Silhougraphs. In 1928, anthropologists Ida McLearn, G. Morant, and Karl Pearson published an essay featuring silhouettes produced using the very same process Kealiinohomoku would employ half a century later: the tracing of preexisting photographs. Their goal was to advocate for the medium as a tool of “racial characterization”: “type silhouettes prepared in a standardized manner may be of considerable anthropological value, and might legitimately replace much of the very unsystematic measurement of native races [sic] at present undertaken by anthropologists” (Reference McLearn, Morant and Pearson1928, 400). Working in the Galton Laboratory, a eugenics research facility in London, they found that “to obtain good racial type silhouettes, especially of native races [sic],… we have to appeal to the camera” (392). The people whose images they traced were African World War I prisoners photographed by Austrian anthropologists Rudolf Pöch and Johann Weninger. The “norm” against which the prisoners’ aggregated silhouettes were compared were English and white. Though the images reproduced in the study are not darkened, the literal blackness and whiteness of the comparators is figured by the medium. As Raengo argues, in such overdeterminations, the silhouette operates as both carnal and categorical.
Carnal because in the social sciences the silhouette is used to map those bodies that do not have access to the disembodied notion of personhood underlying bourgeois subjectivity. Categorical because of its function as a criterion of classification of a subject's position within the Great Chain of Being. The silhouette of the social sciences, in other words, is burdened with the “spectral” presence of the white male normative body, while being filled with the carnality of the racial Other. (2013, 148)
In process, though not in intent, McLearn et al.'s eugenicist use of the form was a direct ancestor of Silhougraphs.
Though the racist, eugenicist history of deploying the silhouette as an analytic tool is sufficient as a disqualifier, the specific aesthetics of Silhougraphs are not redemptive. Their very anonymity—a function of eliminating facial expressions as a distraction—unintentionally echoes the racial and racist valences of nineteenth-century silhouettes representing African Americans, including those by abolitionists, as well as those in McLearn et al. As Naeem persuasively argues from the example of abolitionist John Warner Barber's engraving in A History of the Amistad Captives (1840):
Even though all silhouettes are devoid of detail, the lack of specificities for white sitters was compensated by the ways in which they were created as objects of affection and, subsequently, how they were preserved as familial documents. The biographical specificities of silhouettes of white individuals, in other words, were also centrifugal, created outside the objects themselves. Conversely, the lack of such compensating externalities for silhouettes of black sitters “blacked out” their personhood. (2018, 28)
While some of Kealiinohomoku's Silhougraphs are identified by name, others are identified by genre and culture only: their individuality “blacked out.” This was the result of her decision to copy—and thus reiterate—preexisting images. Still, subsuming the person in the contour—the prescient element of Silhougraphs that anticipates a posthumanist approach to dance accoutrements—also reproduced the very dynamics Kealiinohomoku critiqued in her peer's work identifying Martha Graham in photographs but not the anonymous others of non-Western dance. Contrast this anonymity with Douglas's modernist Black self-assertion and contemporary artist Kara Walker's arresting silhouettes depicting the “palpable subjectivities” of African Americans who “move and revolt and seize the viewer's imagination with horror and disbelief” (Naeem Reference Naeem2018, 43).
As Herskovits's student, Kealiinohomoku would have been no stranger to critiques of racist “science” like Lavater's or McLearn et al.'s. Further, in her dissertation she mentions phenotype as a potential analytic tool while acknowledging this as “not presently popular” (Reference Kealiinohomoku1976, 218). She could have foreseen the risks of using this tool in Silhougraphs. However, in choosing the silhouette for dance analysis, and in not subjecting that choice to ongoing scrutiny, Kealiinohomoku unwittingly rejoined phenotype to physiognomy: undermining her relativist commitments and, more importantly, reinscribing a history of racist typology and hierarchy she would have found completely anathema.
Silhougraphs’ entanglements with the racially overdetermined history of the silhouette, especially their physiognomic and eugenicist forbears, position them as examples of racianalysis. As introduced here, racianalysis contributes to anthropologists Jonathan Rosa and Vanessa Díaz's larger theorizing of raciontologies to analyze ways institutions “operate as actors in (rather than simply sites or vehicles for) the reproduction of white supremacy …” (2020, 125):
The notion that institutional policies, rules, regulations, and norms “operate” emphasizes the ways nonhuman entities’ capacities for action are not simply derivative of human practices. Thus, rather than absolving or condemning individuals for the racist acts in which they engage, a focus on institutional enactments of racism makes it possible to understand not only the orchestration of such behaviors but also how they co-articulate with forms of racism that supersede the individual. (122)
Thinking raciontologically includes a critique of “privileging anthropological empiricism” (2020, 127). Racianalysis applies this critique to nonempirical methods and tools, especially those framed as objective and unbiased, positing that they function as vectors through which structural racism can circulate within academic disciplines and projects. Specifically, it makes legible Silhougraphs’ operationalization of racialized epistemologies and figurations against Kealiinohomoku's intent, and irrespective of their relatively limited circulation.
A racianalytical-raciontological perspective reinforces the fact that Silhougraphs are not simply idiosyncratic. They are a semiotically potent figuration of American anthropology's—and specifically Boasian and Herskovitsian cultural relativism's—decidedly mixed record in combatting US structural racism, but they are not unique. As anthropologist Lee Baker argues, Boas's initial “scientific move [in challenging racist typologies] was important in terms of promulgating public policy, bolstering court decisions, and forcing many Americans to rethink notions of inferiority,” but the pioneer of cultural relativism was an assimilationist, not an active anti-racist (2010, 219). Though classical cultural relativism caused anxiety verging on hysteria for white supremacists, its legacy ultimately “obscured the idea that race and racism are very important socially, culturally, economically, and politically” (Baker Reference Baker2010, 219). Feminist anthropologist Kamala Visweswaran goes further, arguing that Boas and his students actually “helped to legitimate the scientific study of race, thereby fueling the machine of scientific racism” (Reference Visweswaran1998, 70). Herskovits himself was challenged repeatedly on the “neutrality” of his scientism in the face of structural racism by African American scholars he dismissed and, in some cases, actively undermined. By the 1970s, while Kealiinohomoku was refining her analytic tool, cultural relativism had such compromised intellectual capital that, as di Leonardo observes, it became a point of defensiveness for anthropologists (Reference di Leonardo1998, 344).
Conclusion: Methodological Melancholy
There is something mildly creepy about Silhougraphs, and something disappointing about Kealiinohomoku's unwillingness or inability to subject their genealogies to the same rigorous critique she demonstrated in “Ballet as Ethnic Dance.” As noted in the introduction, my intent in critically revisiting them, and in registering this disappointment, is not to tarnish her legacy. This is not a call to cancel her contributions to the field. Silhougraphs are a methodological cautionary tale precisely because, as stated above, they are representative of cultural relativism's and, by extension, liberal anti-racism's larger shortcomings. Kealiinohomoku knew the dangers of phenotype as an analytic, yet she just could not let her creation go. This persistence demands theorizing beyond an understandable personal attachment to one's research to illuminate Silhougraphs’ cautionary potential for white progressive scholars committed to anti-racist analysis, myself included.
I read Kealiinohomoku's unflagging investment in Silhougraphs as what Anne Cheng, in The Melancholy of Race, calls a “melancholic formation”—the combination of figuration and frustrated desire manifesting as an unresolved and unresolvable attachment to a compromised ideal that nevertheless refuses substitution (Reference Cheng2001, 7–8)—and characterize this specific variant as “methodological melancholy.” This is not a personal diagnosis but rather a description of a genre of affect routinely produced by academic structures of disciplinary identity, prestige, and investment in specific scholarly lineages and projects. This methodological melancholy can be further described using political theorist Wendy Brown's reading of Walter Benjamin's “left melancholy”: illuminating the affective affinities linking melancholic methodological attachments—especially those animated by progressive impulses like cultural relativism—to melancholic political and racial ones.
Benjamin (Reference Benjamin and Osborne1977) meant “left melancholy” derisively; it was an epithet.Footnote 31 As Brown defines it in her analysis of the phenomenon:
left melancholy represents not only a refusal to come to terms with the particular character of the present.… It signifies, as well, a certain narcissism with regard to one's past political attachments and identity that exceeds any contemporary investment in political mobilization, alliance, or transformation. (1999, 20)
Moving beyond Benjamin's derisiveness, she presses a question about the left's political unconscious that resonates with Kealiinohomoku's unwavering attachment to classical cultural relativist ideals and Silhougraphs: “Is there also an unavowed loss—the promise that Left analysis and Left commitment would supply its adherents a clear and certain path toward the good, the right, and the true?” (Brown Reference Brown1999, 22).
Certainly, cultural relativism, as initially posited by Boas and Herskovits, offered a liberal variant of this promise of a clear and certain path toward the good, the right, and the true: one championing “objectivity” and methodological rigor in the study of culture against overtly racist typology. Another version of this same promise likely powered the ambitions of mid- to late twentieth-century dance studies pioneers during the consolidation of the field. Methodological melancholy arises from both an understandable, even laudable, attachment to these promises and the unwillingness or inability to reckon with the inadequacies of the tools and presumptions used to deliver on them.
In the case of Silhougraphs, though again not uniquely here, methodological melancholy operates in tandem with larger melancholic operations of whiteness. As Cheng eloquently argues:
Dominant white identity in America operates melancholically—as an elaborate identificatory system based on psychical and social consumption [of racial others] and denial. This diligent system of melancholic retention appears in different guises. Both racist and white liberal discourses participate in this dynamic, albeit out of different motivations. The racists need to develop elaborate ideologies in order to accommodate their actions with official American ideals, while white liberals need to keep burying the racial others in order to memorialize them. (Reference Cheng2001, 11)
Silhougraphs figure this operation through whiteness of the page and the dark, undifferentiated racial others buried within their anonymous contours so as to be more effectively analyzed. Such pairings of methodological, political, and racial melancholy can provide the affective ballast that helps make raciontologies go.
It would be reassuring to simply consign Silhougraphs to the archive of unsuccessful experiments, or dismiss them as a curious historical artifact or even personal idiosyncrasy, but that is too easy. The melancholy and raciontologies haunting Silhougraphs should generate an urgent, necessary, and productive anxiety, especially for progressive white anti-racist scholars. They are an invaluable reminder of the imperative to unrelentingly identify and interrogate the racianalytics and raciontologies lurking in our work, as well as our own methodological and white racial attachments, as part of our ongoing efforts to repudiate and dismantle white supremacy in our work. And they press the question: Can we—can I—ever bring enough intellectual rigor, self-reflexivity, and ferocity to the creation of genuinely anti-racist scholarship? Silhougraphs’ shortfall is clear in hindsight. How clear will mine be?
