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Strategies of Il/legibility: Lorraine O’Grady, Gayatri Spivak, and Visual Decipherment
Abstract
This essay seeks to explicate a practice of visual reading that respects the dissembling practices of the artist Lorraine O’Grady and the scholar Gayatri Spivak. It interrogates the promise of a visual reading praxis that could respect the opacity and illegibility of women of color in performance and images as strategic complications of hegemonic interpretation. The essay argues for a practice of reading that leans into both the promise and the productive frustration of incomplete decipherment. It maintains that such reading can function as an ethical praxis of criticism and analysis.