Abstract

This thesis is a close reading of a body of work entitled "The Queen’s English," 2014, by Martine Syms. The Queen’s English is an exhibition and reading room inspired by the distribution of information within Black feminist communities in the United States during the 1970s and 1980s. Produced in cooperation with photographer Cat Roif and designer Jeff Cain, "The Queen’s English" was on view at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena’s Mezzanine Gallery between July 13 and August 31, 2014. This thesis traces the inquiry into individual and collective Black embodiment that this work undertakes, understood as the layout of a methodology which repeats itself throughout Martine Syms’ work. Methodologically, it follows Syms’ introduction of the work as an intergenerational “dialogue about language and representation,” interweaving the two strings of visual analysis and theories of language to understand "The Queen’s English" as a body of work in the literal sense. The thesis examines this body in its double existence as a body of (epistemological, statistical, digital, biometrical) data and as a material body. It argues that thereby, Black Vernacular as used by the figure of the Bibliographer allows Syms to envision and enact reproduction as a form of reciprocal production, rather than as a replication of the same.