Talking Back to Virginia Woolf in Her Own Words: Gendered, Racial, and Literary Passing as Forms of Counter-Interpellation in Kabe Wilson’s “Dreadlock Hoax”
On 19 May 2014, British multimedia artist Kabe Wilson presented the result of a five-year-long creative endeavour, as he displayed for the first time his literary and artistic recycling of A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf’s landmark 1929 feminist essay. Yet, more than a mere exhibition, Wilson st...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Centre de Recherche "Texte et Critique de Texte"
2024-06-01
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| Series: | Sillages Critiques |
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| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/sillagescritiques/15985 |
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| Summary: | On 19 May 2014, British multimedia artist Kabe Wilson presented the result of a five-year-long creative endeavour, as he displayed for the first time his literary and artistic recycling of A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf’s landmark 1929 feminist essay. Yet, more than a mere exhibition, Wilson staged a performance art piece entitled “The Dreadlock Hoax” during which the artist, dressed up as Virginia Woolf, proclaimed a speech which questioned our ability to appropriate and negotiate past literary texts and authors. Unbeknownst to his audience, Wilson’s speech was yet another literary recycling, this time of Woolf’s 1937 essay, “Craftsmanship”. Wilson’s performance thus highly relied on both the notion and practice of passing, in terms of gender, race, and language. This article analyses how Kabe Wilson’s multifaceted and multi-scaled creative passing enables him to talk back to Virginia Woolf in her own words, and acts as a form of counter-interpellation through which Wilson reclaims his agency both as a reader and as an artist, while questioning the contemporary relevance of Woolf’s words and recycling them for the twenty-first century. |
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| ISSN: | 1272-3819 1969-6302 |