How to Read Now

by Elaine Castillo

When we talk about positive representation, we have to ask: positive representation for whom? Is Representation Matters Art made for us, the minority community being represented positively? Do we really want to see only the corporate hotel art version of ourselves? Or is that art only for the omnipresent gaze Morrison was pointing toward in her critique of Ellison’s supposedly “invisible” man (invisible to whom?); the idea that says us seeing each other means nothing if white people don’t see us, too; the idea that when our stories enter the mainstream, we must send the brightest of us, be on our best behavior, the way our parents turned on their “white people voice” when speaking to teachers and taxmen alike? Representation Matters Art is still, ultimately, just another armed wing of the attritive arts of white supremacy: it’s the kind of art you make when someone has told you to prove you’re a human—and you agree. It’s art that makes us stupider, the way white supremacy makes us stupider: it was bad enough to rob us of life, land, and language, but style, too, babe? It’s the kind of art you make when every impulse you have is a conditioned fear response to some imaginary white specter in the audience, in the mirror. Whoever the audience, Representation Matters Art accomplishes the singular feat of being both tailor-made for it and utterly unworthy of it. The point of positive representation is to give us visions of the world like an immigrant’s sofa in the eighties: vacu...