Search

This special issue emerged out of the continuing concern with how best to deal with institutional racism in higher education institutions (HEIs) that we have long shared as colleagues in the Center...

This introduction constructs a Black decolonial feminist approach to Black beauty shame. Black feminisms-US, UK, Caribbean, Indo-Caribbean, African and Latin American—illustrate that intersectional racism/racialization matter for theorizing which centres Black women. A Black decolonial feminist approach to beauty and ugliness draws on Wynter, Espinosa Minoso, Glissant, Cesaire and Oyĕwumi in thinking from/through Black women’s experiences, their affective lives, and their becomings.

Affect is racialized with respect to Black beauty shame because beauty/ugliness is a socially constructed, culturally specific binary and within the ‘structure of feeling’ in the Global North/South West anti-Black African descent racism structures our experiences within racialized assemblages. Shame is attached to judgements of Black beauty/ugliness. It is an affect which is at once silenced, even whilst it aims to silence and produce silencing on the connections between beauty, ugliness and racialization.

Looking for shame when it is not uttered motivated an analysis that incorporated conversation analysis with discourse analysis to produce an ‘ethnomethodologically inclined discourse analysis’ (eda). Interviews with UK Black and Black-white ‘mixed race’ women were transcribed using a conversation analytic transcription to capture the intensification of shame within talk surrounded by speech disturbances such as in-breaths, out-breaths, pauses and loudness, to show Black beauty shame’s silence/silencing and speakers’ agency in talk-in-interaction.

Black beauty shame matters in global racial capitalism. Global racial capitalism depends on Black ugliness as a source of surplus value through its over-exploited hyper-visibility which maintains white and Black lighter-skinned beauty norms. There are colonial and Black Nationalist aesthetic formations which necessitate that we develop ways of becoming and relating outside dominance if we wish to avoid shame. Rastafarian ‘livity’ is important if Black beauty shame is to be erased through dis/aliention from dominance.

Black liberation thought is foundational for Black Critical Race Theory (BCRT) which in turn is crucial for unpicking the operation of white power in organizations. Such unpicking is urgent given the observation that in organizations racism melts into thin air even as it permeates their very walls. ‘I just can't quite put my finger on it’ engages with the struggle to identify racism's invisible touch. In the academy, postrace sensibilities present us with slippages where ‘race’ no longer matters, racism does not exist and BCRT is not theory whilst teaching on ‘race’ and racism is mainstreamed. Racism is transmitted through the flinching away from Black touch, whether as theory or body, a movement away which contains contempt/ disgust. This is the ordinariness of racism where BCRT is aligned with the Black body so as to alienate it from sociology as a discipline and erase its decolonizing impetus.

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.

Skin bleaching/lightening/toning, a transracial multi-billion-dollar global enterprise, involves transnational pharmaceutical/cosmetics companies and local entrepreneurs. About 15 % of the world’s population consumed skin lighteners in 2014, with sales projected at US 19.8 billion dollars by 2018 (Neilson 2014). Japan is the largest market and pills, potions, creams, soaps, lotions, suppositories, injections, lasers and intravenous drips are global lightening technologies. Irrespective of its globality and transraciality, skin bleaching/lightening/toning as pathological sticks to African and African descent women’s skins whether poor ‘bleacher’ or ‘celebrity lightener/toner’ because of colourism and post-enslavement’s skin colour preferences for lightness/whiteness. As consumers, women enter the global market in lightness in a beauty culture which negates the racialised gender power relations and social structuration of colourism, positioning bleached skin as ‘post-Black feminist’. Specifically bleached skin counters second-wave Black feminism’s embrace of Black anti-racist aesthetics’ ideology of ‘naturalness’. This epistemological break challenges hegemonic Black feminist aesthetics as well as denoting a new racialised aesthetic sensibility in the contested ‘post-race’ afterlife of 1970s Black feminism as it comes up against neoliberal discourses on individualism, choice and empowerment (Gill and Scharff 2011). For some, going beyond the politics of ‘natural skin’ reproduces post-feminist Blackness as a site of political vulnerability when skin is devalued by bleaching/lightening/toning. However, I will argue that bleachers’ readings of the global skin trade do not mean that they have fallen prey to white supremacy as they ‘shade shift’. Instead, this change is a critique of existing pigmentocracy enabled by their post-Black feminist self-positionings.

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.

The debate on Michelle Obama’s ‘right to bare arms’ illustrates that American cultural politics is far from ‘post-racial’. Through reading ‘Michelle O’ as a body out of place, at once exoticized, fetishized, and affective, this article shows the continuing location of the First Lady as white as well as exploring how stylization revisions the raced, gendered, and classed space of the First Lady’s body. It argues that, as a corporeal negation of the norms of both white upper/middle-class respectability and ‘the Black Venus’, Obama creates a space of resistance that enables a black First Lady to emerge through performativity.

The down-low stabilized in the early 2000s as a discursive practice that links black sexuality with duplicity. Although the term includes Latino men, it continues as a black sexual phenomenon withi...

Reading Heading South as a decolonial romance reveals anxiety about the liminal location of young male citizens in 1970s Haiti caught within the necropower of state terror and US imperialism. Focusing on young men selling “romance” on the beach within the continuing colonial relations between the United States and Haiti and black and white bodies, the film engages with the limits of transracial, heterosexual romance in sex tourism. The impossibility of romance shows that for Haitian citizens, nationalist redemption lies in politics not in transracial intimacies. However, politics is itself necropolitical, since death is the only passage to narratable citizenship. As a decolonial moment, death speaks about the necropower of daily existence for Haitian citizens caught between state terror and US imperialism; asserts agency in the “will to death in order to be free”; and highlights the disposability and (un)grievability of poor, young black bodies in Baby Doc Duvalier’s Haiti.

The conclusion decolonizes the racialized gender political, and libidinal economies of skin by asking, Can Black people construct skin colour tastes for Black bodies, rather than having such tastes always rooted in white supremacy? What would happen if those who are a negative aesthetic space occupy that space? What can be done to resist fetishistic objectification but also rank darker and lighter skin colour equally? Can affective orientation be shaped to favour all skin colours being of equal aesthetic value, and to transform skin colour taste by habitually thinking and acting on this premise? If skin colour taste resists rational persuasion and is also attached to negative and positive affect, how can the negative orientation towards Black darker skin be changed?

The focus of this article will be on inserting the words of older women in prison into debates on time, agency and gendered identities in total institutions. Specifically, the article will address the complexity and contradictions of the time of ‘a mediated real’, and how this impacts on embodied identities within prison timescapes. This will be explored through looking at how prison-time as a ‘somatic identity cipher’ functions performatively in the construction of older women’s identities. The article will also examine how female elders in prison become agents and negotiate techniques of discipline. The role of prison-time will be shown to be simultaneously experienced as further punishment while also being resisted as we draw out the relationship between temporality, spaces of incarceration and identification. First, we will locate the field in terms of issues of theory and method. Then we will look at performativity, identity and time in negotiating, acquiescing to and resisting the identity ‘prisoner’. This will enable us to understand the role and meaning of time in relation to how females in prison are compelled to reiterate and negotiate the identity ‘prisoner’ within the discipline of ‘the time of incarceration’. We hope to demonstrate through the voices of the women that there is no single abstract imprisoned body. These are real bodies, fleshy, sensate bodies that experience real pain; at the same time, these bodies are not simply given but also interpreted, mediated and in part constituted in social and cultural meanings. This enables us to show that the body can be both a generator and receptor of meanings.

Across this region the contemporary construction of multiracial nationalisms belies the lived dynamics of coherent, well-understood, highly structured hierarchies of skin colour that constitute contemporary racial Caribbeanization. Racism in the post-emancipation Caribbean is ‘an iniquitous protean monster’, a living, dynamic social force (Premdas, 1995). This and subsequent chapters will draw on a variety of island experiences and their nationalist projects in examining the longevity of processes of racialization in the Caribbean. In Cuba, for example, the power of cubanidad, the inclusive multiracial Cuban nationalism which recognized the centrality of blackness as a depoliticized form, has been key to mitigating the intensification of racisms that have been experienced in other post-communist and post-colonial contexts. Even here the reinscription of new racisms is evident as neoliberal markets replace state activity. This chapter focuses on the four most populous Caribbean states, which illustrate a set of highly differentiated positionings of race and the nation, privileging aspirational whiteness (Puerto Rico), inclusive blackness (Haiti), anti-blackness (Dominican Republic) or post-racial ideologies (Cuba). This chapter does not seek to provide a history of post-slavery migration; its focus is on the intersections, operations and workings of post-slavery racial states.

British Caribbeans manifest both a “global” and a “local” identity through complex language behavior including codeswitching. It is the Creole which most connects “globally” — to other speakers of Creole, to the British youth culture which now accepts Creole/patois as an element, and to the world-wide Black music culture. Meanwhile “English” for black speakers is more likely to mean a local variety of English, for example, London, Birmingham, or Manchester, which identifies the speaker as a member of the local community. In this paper we start from the viewpoint that “identities” are texts of social practice based on the identifications made in interactions between individuals(in this case, conversations). Looking both at the content of discourse( what is said) and the medium used(the l anguage or language variety used in an utterance) we attempt to illustrate how global diasporic discourses of identity are reproduced at the local level. We argue that the “global” and “local” identities of British Caribbeans manifest and reproduce themselves through everyday discourse, and are constructed through identifications in which the choice of language and the choice of words interact and are both significant.

The body is capable of being fashioned to become a representation of the self, a signifier of personal identity. The specific body which is of interest here is that which has been inscribed by women with ‘the masculine’ through the rigorous diet and exercise regime of weight-training for muscular gain. Using Black and white women’s narratives as data, I look at the power of the women I researched to redefine ‘the feminine’ and ‘the erotic’. I focus on how women construct transgressive femininities by subverting stigma (Goffman, 1984), redefining physical capital (Bourdieu, 1978) and negating the beauty model (Tseelon, 1995), through building their bodies to their own design. This design is based on a ‘latent’ inner image which allows the women to become their own significant others, to challenge the gaze of others and to ‘be for themselves’. Their bodies, therefore, become sites of empowerment.