Thursday, March 8, 2018

Duval-Carrie's Approach to Sublimity

Edouard Duval-Carrie’s “Decolonizing Refinement” features a collection of artifacts that tell the story of African diaspora through the usage of different art mediums (sculptures, window frames) and photographs. The exhibit not only features art from Duval-Carrie but also historical photographs from local slave plantations throughout north Florida. The different “genres” used in the exhibit are not literary genres but instead genres of art varying from oil paintings, plexiglass frames, sculptures, and actual tools and replicas of slave ships used during slavery in the 19thcentury.

The memory windows were a prominent part of the exhibit with multiple variations created by Duval-Carrie. The reflective glass windows were used as a canvas and then divided into sectionals with each one representing a different aspect of slavery in north Florida. The purple backlight used by Duval-Carrie made the frames shine with an almost heavenly glow. The themes behind every memory window ranged from the real-life heinous acts associated to slavery including lynching and iron masks to mythological ones with a mermaid being featured in a single frame. This mix of real and fantastical themes creates an impression that Longinus would define as “sublime.”

In Longinus’s “On the Sublime,” the author defines real sublimity as “food for reflection” and that genuine sublimity is “impossible to resist, and makes a strong and ineffaceable impression on the memory.” (350) Longinus says that the first and most important source of sublimity is the power to conceive great thoughts followed by strong and inspired emotion. These two sources are applicable to the work of Duval-Carrie in his exhibition. Originally born in Haiti, Duval-Carrie has been a resident of south Florida for more than 20 years. This collection of work is the first time that he has focused on the northeast region of Florida, an area that Duval-Carrie is not native to. Despite this fact, Duval-Carrie is still able to convey an emotionally powerful collection of work that stays true and faithful towards it subject. The audience of this exhibit comes from different trainings and ways of life but the work by Duval-Carrie is still universally admired by critics.

Bawarshi talks about the genre function replacing the author-function in “Genre and the Invention of the Writer.” Bawarshi theorizes that the genre functions as “a site of action which writers, articulate, and potentially resist motives to act.” (45) Even though Duval-Carrie is of Caribbean descent, he is still able to effectively operate in the realm of colonial slavery (particular to north Florida) by drawing on his own story of African diaspora. The genre of this collection allows him to mold the rhetorical situation because, as Bawarshi puts it, genres help us “potentially change the situations within which we communicate by functioning at the intersection between the acquisition and articulation of desires to act.” (25)

Duval-Carrie’s use of rhetorical visualization brings an urgency and passion to his words that oratory simply couldn’t do. According to Longinus, an orator using visual elements makes a factual argument that is beyond the limits of mere persuasiveness (357) Duval-Carrie’s “Decolonizing Refinement” presents visuals, mixed with fact and truth, yielding a final product that is viewed as both poetic and fabulous.

Sources:

Devitt, Amy J. “Generalizing about Genre: New Conceptions of an Old Concept.” College Composition and Communication 44.4 (Dec. 1993): 573-86.

Longinus. “From On the Sublime.” The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present, Second Edition. Ed. Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2001. 344-58.

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