Richard J. Powell’s Going “There”: Black Visual Satire offers a historical survey and detailed analysis of black visual satire during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The book, which originated from Powell’s 2016 Richard D. Cohen lectures on African and African American art at Harvard University, explores topics such as “black visual satire,” “racial stereotypes as a tool in satire,” “painter/satirist Robert Colescott,” and black editorial cartoonist Ollie Harrington (ix).
In the first chapter, “More Than a One-Liner,” Powell offers a strong theoretical grounding and background for Black visual satire. He argues that “the art of satire not only has a long-standing and infamous place in world culture, but that it also has a distinctly African American lineage and presence in modern and contemporary visual art” (4). A variety of complex issues feature in this history, including “the notion of creative risk and how satire relentlessly puts the artist...
