Decolonizing the Language of Displayed Art: Kara Walker's Fons Americanus

Starting with a reflection on the role of public sculpture as a catalyst of political debate, this chapter explores the possibility of decolonizing knowledge both within Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA) and through the work of Kara Walker, with a focus on her monumental installation Fons Americanus (UK, 2019). While MCDA has advanced a strong critique of logocentrism, it remains imbricated in a critical perspective that, apart from a few interventions, is still predominantly dominated by the visual. Therefore, this chapter explores ways of decolonizing this bias through a focus on the senses and on materiality capable of displacing the logocentrism and ocularcentrism of the Western tradition. Similarly, Walker’s installation not only highlights the contemporary legacies of Western colonialism in the form of racism and intellectual and material colonization but enables the emergence of alternative and marginalized narratives through a decolonial process – encapsulated in the concept of ‘critical fabulation’ – that makes the artist an ‘unreliable narrator’ (in her own words). This process is the result of a decolonial pedagogy that draws on the Black feminist tradition to shed light on the political imbrication of history, race, and gender in contemporary forms of ongoing colonialism as a way of opening up the way to a multiversal and global-centric perspective.