In Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker, Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw contextualizes the production and interpretation of Kara Walker’s fantastical depictions of slavery as produced in installation silhouettes, prints, and drawings between the years 1995 and 1998. Through five well-paced chapters, Shaw investigates the personal and art-historical origins of Walker’s art, analyzes three of Walker’s most dense and widely-circulated silhouettes, and addresses the passionate and complex reception to Walker’s challenging images. At the beginning of her text, Shaw reveals her own stunned reaction to seeing Walker’s artwork for the first time in 1997. Following her encounter, Shaw immediately sought any information available about Walker’s art including meeting the artist herself. As Shaw describes, “I wanted to understand better how she [Walker] could tap both the latent and the virulent racist icons of the visual and textual past in order to make her audience ‘see the unspeakable’” (5). Shaw calls on the work of literary scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., to connect the practice of signifying in Walker’s art to a much longer tradition of doublespeak in the African American literary tradition. Walker’s depictions of life on the Southern plantation exemplify doublespeak in that they provide enough visual data to...