Tethering the Flag: Visual Aesthetics of Black Citizenship in the U.S.

Black American citizenship--from slavery to Jim Crow to mass incarceration--remains liminal, marred by centuries of colonized subjectivity. In response, Black artists continue to negotiate notions of personhood and citizenship through visual and expressive arts. Within this history of artistic and cultural production, Black artists have often invoked the image and political symbolism of the U.S. flag to gesture toward a material relationship between the flag and the Black body. This paper proposes a theory of tethering, the symbolic act of entangling the formation of the United States with the suppression of Black life. Through close analysis of Whitfield Lovell’s Kin VIII (1619), Abigail Deville’s New York at Dawn, David Hammons’ Injustice Case, and other renderings of the U.S. flag, I argue that Black visual artists tether the Black body to the U.S. flag to highlight vestiges of colonialism in the afterlife of American slavery.