After the Deluge chronicles the same-titled exhibition Kara Walker organized at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the spring and summer of 2006. With the horror of Hurricane Katrina as its impetus, the collection of paintings and works on paper asks the viewer to reconsider the disaster as the most recent in a series of waterborne tragedies that have contributed to America's racial divide. It was, after all, the Atlantic Ocean that first bore a stolen people to this soil.

In the months after Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast, the media began to use grandiloquent phrases such as "after the deluge" to describe the catastrophe. Walker appropriates this language and its implicit outlook to situate her trademark silhouettes within a continuum of popular portraiture and perception. In turn, she creates a context for understanding both her own work and the traditional portrayal of black bodies in American art and culture.

The volume begins with a richly decorated Kongolese male power figure — a cultural symbol literally plucked from Africa by imperial forces. This sculpture is followed by J.M.W. Turner's painting Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing the Dead and Dying, Typhoons Coming On) (1840), which depicts sailors callously casting the enslaved off a ship during the middle passage. To round out this historical survey, Walker also features the equally upsetting illustration of slaves bludgeoning a ship's captain from John Warner Barber's book A History of the Amistad Captives (also dating from 1840).

These three images serve as the foundation for Walker's silhouettes and collages. In each piece, she magnifies stereotypes about black Americans, depicting them as depraved, lascivious, and cannibalistic animals. At the end of her episodic portraits, Walker then invites the reader to reconsider Bill Haber's photograph of a black woman treading through oily hurricane floodwaters. Walker's survey of the traditional treatment of black Americans ultimately contextualizes the failed response to this most recent tragedy.

-Adda Birnir