Art History

Dr. Howie specializes in modern and contemporary art with an emphasis on the history and theory of photography. She co-edited,
with Ann Millett-Gallant, Disability and Art History (Routledge, 2016), which includes her essay “The Dandy Victorian: Yinka
Shonibare’s Allegory of Disability and Passing.”

Registration Required: https://suny-edu.zoom.us/meeting/register/ytuli6BDTwemjo0HtisydA

Abstract: Yinka Shonibare’s Diary of a Victorian Dandy, a series of five large Chromogenic photographs, depicts the revels of a black dandy holding court in a luxurious nineteenth-century manor, admired by ladies, gentleman, and servants alike. The serious subject matter of these charming and delightful images concerns two characteristics, one more visible than the other, that make Shonibare’s dandy quite unusual: the historical unlikelihood that a black dandy would be such a success in the Victorian era, and what is far less visible, the effects of Shonibare’s having contracted transverse myelitis as a teenager. This condition caused partial paralysis, leaving him at times in need of an electric wheelchair or cane, and with his head tipped permanently to the right. Rather than the paralysis and impairment with which he lives every day, Shonibare the dandy displays vigor, strength, fortitude, thwarting a pathological reading. He is the object of admiring gazes, not curious stares. To pass as non-disabled, to disavow a body with limitations, may seem to be a form of complicity with society’s biases. How, then, are we to read Shonibare’s simultaneously singling himself out as unique by appearing as a black Victorian dandy while apparently hiding the disability that is quite obvious in his everyday life? A dandy is the perfect vehicle for the recuperation of the gaze, for an expert managing of the spectacle of disability: the making of the dandy is accomplished through his powers of observation; the dandy’s keen scrutiny has made him who he is. Not only is he observed, but he observes as well, and clearly the importance of looking is emphasized in the Diary. Shonibare is quite deliberately playing with the issues of the gaze, the stare, and disability, and when society does and does not deem sustained looking acceptable. His exploration of dandified passing is not a reinvention of a self that denies another aspect of identity, but instead one that powerfully contests the containments of identity that so often structure how we think about each other.