A History of Olympia’s Maid in Contemporary Poetry

How can poetry and visual art reembody and amplify an object that has been reshaped by the historical white gaze? Claudia Rankine will embrace art historian Denise Murrell’s research on Édouard Manet’s Olympia (1863) and Saidiya Hartman’s concept of “critical fabulation” as springboards to discuss the work of a few contemporary poets and artists who similarly view this painting/object as a place of intervention.

A writer and researcher, Claudia Rankine establishes a critical-reactive dialectic through her work, connecting historical and contemporary events associated with the perpetuation of structural racism in American culture. She is a professor of poetry at Yale University, Connecticut, and in 2016 she co-founded the interdisciplinary collective The Racial Imaginary Institute (TRII).

Photography: Renato Cruz Santos