Body Without Form: The Specter of the US Citizen in Modern Art
Date of Award
Spring 2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
History of Art
First Advisor
Mercer, Kobena
Abstract
What does it mean to arrive at a border without the proper forms to secure state recognition? This project connects modernist abstractions of the body to material histories of United States citizenship and its exclusions. Combining close formal analysis with archival case studies from within and without US borders, I reveal how bodies without form haunt the work of Black/Chinese painter Wifredo Lam in Cuba; Japanese/White-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi in the US; and white shipping heiress turned anti-colonial activist Nancy Cunard in Britain and France. Through examinations of Chinese Exclusion in the 1940s (Lam), Japanese American internment during WWII (Noguchi), and African American incarceration in the 1930s (Cunard), I show how forms of state violence are embedded in these artists’ figurations and deformations of the body. While media scholars have focused on infrastructures of circulation over the material consequences of immobility, art historians have romanticized exile as a condition of modernism’s possibility. Bringing together both disciplines, I address the vicissitudes of racialized citizenship in mid-century America by putting Lam, Noguchi, and Cunard in conversation for the first time.
Recommended Citation
Tang, Jenny, "Body Without Form: The Specter of the US Citizen in Modern Art" (2023). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1348.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1348
