Includes bibliographical references (pages 172-182) and index.
Contents:
Looking at the Sable-Saffron Venus: Iconography, Affect and (Post)Colonial Hygiene -- Batty Politics: Desire and Rear Excess -- When Black Fat does not Signify Mammy: Disparagement Humour and Sexualization -- Fascination: Muscle, Femininity, Iconicity -- Pleasure Politics: The Cult of Celebrity, Mullatticity and Slimness -- Skin Lightening: Contempt, Hatred, Fear -- Coda- Decolonization and "Seeing Through" Black Women's Bodies.
Summary:
Black Women's Bodies and the Nation develops a decolonial approach to representations of Black women's bodies within popular culture in the US, UK and the Caribbean and the racialization and affective load of muscle, bone, fat and skin through the trope of the subaltern figure of the Sable-Saffron Venus as an 'alter/native' (Truillot, 2003). Enslavement, colonialism and settlement in the metropole created the Black woman's body as both other/same and deeply affective whether read as fear, disgust, contempt or fascination. Her body draws attention to the negotiations through which the semblance of consensus on the citizen body is created at the same time as Black women's bodies as Sable-Saffron Venus alter/natives rupture the collective body formed through the (re)iteration, (re)interpretation and (re)presentation of the meanings of muscle, bone, fat and skin. This dismantling of body norms reveals other modes of being through disalienation's (Cesaire, 2000) refusal of the racial epidermal schema (Fanon, 1967).
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.