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In this conversation, the authors converse on skin colour politics and the white beauty standard. Reflecting on the resurgence of white supremacist ideas in the US American public sphere and its underlying imaginary that denies Black beauty, dignity and grace, Shirley A. Tate asserts that beauty is not just a matter for the individual, but socially constructed. As such, it has always been a political issue for Black thinkers, engaged in thinking through what Black anti-racist aesthetics could and should be about. In spite of decades of collective struggles against hegemonic beauty norms, the authors conclude that colonial conceptions of skin colour and beauty continue to haunt us, even if these may now include ‘mixed looks’ rather than just whiteness.

Black beauty shame emerges within the Black/white binary because of the beauty values sedimented in our structure of feeling since African enslavement. This article does not start from white beauty as the ideal, but focuses on the performativity of Black beauty shame as it transforms or intensifies the meanings of parts of the body in Jamaica and its UK diaspora. Using extracts from interviews with UK Jamaican heritage women, the discussion illustrates how Black beauty shame produces such intensification. First, where white beauty is iconic and reproduces the Black other as ‘ugly’, and second, where the Black ‘mixed race’ body is constructed as ‘other’ because of Black Nationalist discourses on beauty. The women’s critique of the shaming event shows that shame is undone through dis-identification as speakers draw on alternative beauty discourses to produce new beauty subjectivities. Dis-identification illustrates the transformational potential of shame as new Black beauty positionings emerge within the diaspora, drawing on beauty ideologies and models from Jamaica and thus destabilising the Black/white binary.

There is a myth which still circulates in feminist writing on beauty. That is, that all ‘Black women want to be white’ because white beauty is iconic. As such Black women are reproduced as possessors of damaged psyches, as pathological. This myth is part of the cultural melancholia of Black beauty with its origins in imperialism, slavery and postcolonial dependency within the USA, UK, Latin America and the Caribbean (Tate 2009). ‘Black women want to be white’ persists even in the face of twenty-first century beauty hybridities produced through stylization and identification.

This chapter destabilizes the Manicheanism of iconic whiteness and authentic Blackness in skin bleaching’s racialized gender, political and libidinal economies. The discussion begins with ‘white face’ in Europe, the Caribbean colonies and the United States before looking at the complex meanings of the practice among Black women in different Black Atlantic sites, which takes us beyond the usual tropes of ‘self-hate’ and ‘low self-esteem’. The chapter thinks through ‘post-race’ skin bleaching within the ‘third space skins’ of Dencia and Mshoza. Neither of these women want to be white but to embody a lightness that is not antithetical to Blackness and a part of it. Third space skins emerge in the interstices of white supremacy and Black nationalism, as women embrace artifice through ‘post-race’, self-affirming, aesthetic enhancement and choice.

Dark skin shade and natural afro-hair are central in the politics of visibility, inclusion and exclusion within black anti-racist aesthetics. This article focuses on black beauty as performative through looking at how the discourse of dark skin equals black beauty is destabilized in the talk of ‘mixed race’ black women. A dark skin shade and natural afro hair become ambiguous signifiers as the women's talk leads to a mobility of black beauty. Their talk is thus an interception in which there can never be a definitive reading of black beauty while also pointing to the binaries of the black anti-racist aesthetics on which they draw. Thus, while women are rooted in racialized and racializing notions of beauty they expand the boundaries of the beautiful black woman's body. Black beauty as an undecidable resists binaries without ever constituting a third term and arises through the disidentification and shame of cultural melancholia.

Adilifu Nama, SUPER BLACK: AMERICAN POP CULTURE AND BLACK SUPERHEROES, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011, 180 pp., $24.95 (paper) In this book Adilifu Nama sets as his task the exploration of...