Beneath Notice

Jon Woodson argues for a global approach toward the interpretation of Dave the Potter’s multimedia works. A concern for the Afrocentric phenomenology of Dave the Potter’s poetics unifies Woodson’s close readings of numerous inscriptions. The chapter offers focused applications of historical contexts to analyze the material aspects of the poetry and to envision Dave the Potter working both within and against other literary and craft traditions. Woodson opens by reading the inscriptions as examples of tactics as defined by theorist Michel de Certeau as Dave the Potter uses his handiwork to manage his enslaved condition, and goes on to interpret the inscriptions both as material forms of lyric subjectivity and as texts in dialogue with the American nineteenth-century sampler tradition.