Black on Black with
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As I move into the interior of the book, I pass across these layers
that mediate between the cover and its interior content. I am cutting
across the frame. My interest has been in how this frame has been
constructed, what are its terms and assumptions, and what is the excess
that it excludes as its ground. These questions continue as I reach
the very inside of this frame: the foreword by Jack Travis. This
foreword is a line of suture between interior and container, the inside
of the frame, the outside of that which is contained. Jack Travis
is represented as simultaneously the container and the contained of the
book, both and yet neither. His photograph on the page that precedes
the foreword isolates him from the photographs representing the other individuals
contained within the book. Yet his statement, in spite of the fact
that it is sequentially placed first, is presented as simply one of a collection
of similarly formatted essays documenting the architectural experience
for African-Americans, a fabrication that might be read as revealing an
effort to defer to the group the author is intending to represent while
attempting to construct the apparent neutrality of his own position as
editor. This neutrality, however, is only apparent, and my intent
here is to expose the inner workings of that frame.
Jack Travis opens his discussion by introducing "Mr. Fellows," who is
not only the first black American architect that he meets, but who comes
to embody for Travis the stereotypical black architect: "a simple man with
a small practice and a real sense of social responsibility"—a representation
that for Travis negatively connotes the potential looming invisibility
and lack of success (equated with the lack of a name) against which
he and other blacks seeking a future in architecture will have to struggle.
He refers to "the plight of every black man, during the 1950's and early
1960's" and continues by acknowledging the difference that his generation
can make by improving upon the situation because "men like Mr. Fellows
fought through so many hardships" (p. 7). Unfortunately Travis's
unwitting references to the assumed maleness of architects that
passed before him does a disservice to female architects such as Norma
Merrick Sklarek (BArch 1950), who is profiled in his book. In her
efforts to become the first black female member of the the American Institute
of Architects in 1966, Sklarek had undeniably to fight even more difficult
battles against invisibility than her black male counterparts because of
her double minority status, evidenced by the fact that she must continue
to fight these battles today, even against men who apparently claim a heightened
sensitivity to issues of exclusion and marginalization. |
