Black Redactions and Annotations in Pink: Sadie Barnette’s “Dear 1968…” as Revolutionary Daughtering

Framed as an address to the Black radical movements of the late 1960s and specifically to her father, Rodney Barnette, who was a member of the Black Panther Party’s chapter in Los Angeles, artist Sadie Barnette’s multi-media project “Dear 1968...” (2017) re-works two contrasting archives. One, the 500+ page surveillance file the Federal Bureau of Investigation collected on Rodney Barnette in the late 1960s, and the other, a grouping of family ephemera such as candid photographs and letters. Barnette modifies these materials throughout the installation through bright magenta pink markings, punctuated with objects and icons that reference her girlhood in the 1980s such as Hello Kitty.

In “Dear 1968...” Barnette enacts her own redactions to mediate what information she is willing to share about her father with the viewer, and thwart the spectacularization of Black suffering that such documents can convey. The femme significations of pink and rhinestones simultaneously redact information while annotating the file with her artistic gestures as a form of intimate recognition, love (for her father and Black people), as well as a Black feminist critique of the white supremacist state and heteropatriarchal ethno-nationalisms. This approach reflects what Christina Sharpe theorizes as Black redaction and annotation “toward seeing and reading otherwise; toward reading and seeing something beyond a visuality...subtended by the logics of the administered plantation” (2016,117). Thus, we can understand Barnette’s pink annotations and redactions in “Dear 1968...” as a labor of revolutionary daughtering (Gumbs 2016), a counterpoint to the brutal architectures of anti-blackness.