In the past, she made an embroidered canvas of Paris Hilton's face, an Amy Winehouse portrait made of plastic bags, entitled Corner Drug, as well as a sculpture of the Michelle Obama's arms titled A Vision in White that speaks of the "white gaze on a black body".
This meant writing free from the "white gaze", Grant said.
Being a black man means being subject to the white gaze.
"The white gaze – it is a phrase that resonates in black American literature.
"James Baldwin, so unflinching, so unbowed, a man writing free of the white gaze".
The rest of it was trying to write without what I call a white gaze.
"As Morrison – a Nobel Laureate – once said: 'Our lives have no meaning, no depth without the white gaze.
"What I'm interested in is writing… without the white gaze," she said in a recent New York Times profile.
But then the respectability politics started creep in, and Obama brought the white gaze right into the Black Mecca.
What she gleaned from Mr. Achebe's work, she said, was not simply to write against the "white gaze," but outside it, so as to "postulate its irrelevance".
