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Suppose I were to read Juan de Pareja’s Saint Matthew as carefully as Foucault does Velázquez’s Las Meninas. What can I say? Where will my discourse fit, or fail to fit? Foucault recognizes that a tour de force requires its analogue in writing, and dutifully obliges. What would be my mirroring gest…

I’m not simply interested in reminding the world of Pareja’s existence, or in complicating our reception of Velázquez, although those might be excellent ancillary benefits. Nor am I suggesting that Pareja’s painting is necessarily a neglected masterwork that secretly rivals the image of the Old Mas…

There is a common misconception that Foucauldian critique is a reductive reading of a work of art to show how it is merely a product of its time. It’s just the opposite: the idea is to show how time itself, historical epochs, or epistemes, are produced and organized by (and through) the language of…

For Foucault, Las Meninas is much more than a simple representation of the infantas and court attendants of Velázquez’s royal patron, the king of Spain, Philip IV. It expresses the rise of European Man as a sovereign subject at the height of imperial and colonial power. Its famous trompe l’oeil pre…

We know that violence always threatens to hold our creativity hostage, but it is no less incumbent, for ourselves as much as for anyone else, not to allow the “oasis,” as Du Bois called black culture, to dry up, or, worse, turn into a mirage. I am convinced the urgency of this role has become more …