Containment and Racism

The blog entry I read was: Racist cake has Swedish official in hot water

The Cold War era idea of containment culture is still alive in today’s age.  The blog post I read deals with the controversial piece of “art” that potentially put a Swedish official’s government position in jeopardy.  The piece of art was a cake shaped in the mold of the stereotypical body of a black woman.  The cake had the artist’s, Makode Aj Linde, head sticking out covered in a comical black mask.  People at the show, including Sweden’s Minister of Culture, Lena Adelsohn Liljeroth, would go up and slice the cake in the genital region while Linde screamed out in comical pain.  Supposedly this was a racially derived piece of art representing female genital cutting, often referred to as female genital mutilation (FGM).  The only problem with this idea, is that Linde has not actually said what his art was representing, saying it was up to the audience’s interpretation.

            When forming their interpretations, have the audience considered the fact that the cake was representing Sarah "Saartjie" Baartman, the woman who was taken from Africa, brought to Europe and put on display because her body looked different than what European’s were used to seeing?  The Europeans literally contained Saartjie by gving her and English name, and humiliating her by forcing her to display her body to people.  Even after her death, her skeleton, brain, and genitals were kept on display.  By doing this to her, Europeans were not only containing Saartjie, but all African women- and men.  It was thought that all African women had that type of body, and because of that body, sex was all they were good at.  This helped enforce the European idea that Africans were savages and needed to be helped; which ultimately lead to colonization of Africa- another form of containment culture that I am not going to get into. 

            This leads into the idea of female genital mutilation being a form of containment as well.  The idea of FGM can be linked to containment culture by performing this procedure on women so that, on one hand, these women would not be so “sex craved.”  It could also be interpreted that the idea of FGM came to be well recognized as an African woman tradition because of Saartjie Baartman’s role in European society.  Since she was thought to be sexually promiscuous because of her body, and that stereotype was passed on to all African women, FGM may be performed as a direct effect of Saartjie in order to contain the woman’s sexuality.

And then we get to the issue of race, and racism.  The majority of the audience, as far as I have read, seem to interpret this piece of art as a work of racism.  Do these people realize that the artist, Linde, is actually biracial?  Historical, racism was used as a way to contain the “savage, uncivilized people” of Africa and place them in a group separate to the European and American civilizations.  Today, though arguably not as bad as then, racism still plays a major role in the containment.  Most people accept that race is merely just the color of ones skin, and nothing else.  However, racism is still used today as a way to contain and separate people on the basis of their skin’s color.  Today American society tends to view black people as being more dangerous and violent- more likely to be involved in gangs and more likely to commit a crime than white people.  Right, or wrong, as that assumption might be, the idea behind racism is to lump people together based on their physical characteristics and contain them to those misguided and unjust assumptions and stereotypes that are placed on them.

All three of the issues I mentioned could come together an form an interpretation not necessarily my interpretation- of what Linde was trying to prove with his “racist cake.”  By combining a little bit of important African history, the topic of FGM, and the issue of racism, the artist could, as well as addressing each topic individually, be addressing the issue of containment culture in today’s society.  While this interpretation will most likely not be agreed upon by many people, the artist himself did say that his work was open for the audience’s interpretation, and therefore, should be considered as an equally viable option.