Full Description
This book is an outgrowth of an international conference - The Black Body: Imagining, Writing, and Re(Reading) - held at DePaul University, Chicago in 2004. The various contributing authors critically examine the changing discourses on the black body to address how it has been constituted as a site for construction and maintenance of social and political power. Drawing examples from Europe, Africa, the United States as well as other places in the Black Diaspora, the subject matter in this book discusses the raced, gendered, classed and culturally produced discourses about the black body. Through its examination of these and related issues, this book contributes to a dialogue across various disciplines about the black body, its meanings and negotiations as read, interpreted, and imagined in different frames of perception and imagination.
Print editions not for sale in Sub-Saharan Africa. This book is part of Routledge's co-published series 30 Years of Democracy in South Africa, in collaboration with UNISA Press, which reflects on the past years of a democratic South Africa and assesses the future opportunities and challenges.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
Introduction
1. Displaying Africans at l'Exposition Coloniale
Internationale de Paris, 1931
2. Aestheticisation of the Sentient Black Body: Jean Rouch and Jean Genet
3. Seeking the Dry Bones of My Father: Race, Rites, Ritual and the Blackmale Body in Baldwin, Wright and Ellison
4. The Black Body as Medical Commerce
5. Unshackling Black Women's Bodies
6. 'All the Women Must Be Clothed': The Anti-nudity Campaign in Northern Ghana, 1957-1969
7. Blackwomen's Bodies as Battlegrounds in Black Consciousness Literature: Wayward Sex and (Interracial) Rape as Tropes in Staffrider, 1978-1982
8. Reading the Text of Josephine Baker
9. Buried in a Watery Grave: Art, Commemoration and Racial Trauma
Charmaine Nelson
10. Black Bodies and the Representation of Blackness in Imagined Futures
Index
