ABSTRACT
The perfect body in Western culture was sustained and made imaginable by the imperfect body of the racial Other. This chapter and the one following examine the impact of racialized thinking on two very different forms of visual practice, colonial photography in the Belgian Congo and graffiti painting in 1980s New York. Whereas the photographer Herbert Lang sought to create an irrefutable visual record of racial difference, Jean-Michel Basquiat tried to imagine being an African-American painter whose work was not marked by the codes of race. These specific case studies have been chosen both in order to resist the generalization that is so character-istic of racialized thought, and because the very contrast between them illustrates the dramatic impact that race has had upon twentieth-century visual culture.
