Hot Topics Introduction

 

For almost 20 years, I have considered myself a student of "negrophilia". This means that I spend much of my time scrutinising how white and black people relate to each other, trying especially to understand their attraction to each other. My scrutiny can be quite personal, focusing on how I, as a black woman, interact with others around me, particularly when I am working in abroad; but my exploration is also often stimulated by my time in Jamaica, where the legacy of colonialism has ensured that race relations are a constant touchstone of Caribbean existence. The articles below represent my thoughts about Negrophilia within contemporary culture. Unlike, Negrophilia [the book] that is art historical these hot topics are  about race and our present day experiences.

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Afro Modern & Dissident Surrealism

 

Beyond art history, the task of examining many of racist constructs in visual history has been taken up by contemporary artists of the Diaspora who have been prepared to explore the fictions and frictions around the black body to understand what and how they signify. They have embraced the stereotypes of blackness in their own work in order to dismantle them from the inside out using what Stuart Hall has theorized as ‘the turn’ – a strategy that calls for a risky journey into the morass of their origins.1 He describes how these artists are using the black body as a moving signifier “– first, as an object of visibility which can at last be ‘seen’; then as a foreign body, trespassing into unexpected and tabooed locations; then as the site of an excavation. This is the body as a space or canvas, on which to conduct an exploration into the inner landscapes of black subjectivity; the body, also, as a point of convergence for the materialization of intersecting planes of difference – the gendered body, the sexual body, the body as subject, rather than simply the object of looking and desire.”

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Competing Histories

 

Even though it is three years since the bi-centennial anniversary of the abolition of slavery, a recent interview with Andrea Levy about her new book The Long Song on the BBC, and the enjoyment I experienced last weekend rummaging through colonial style furniture at Kingston's Antiques & Collectibles Fair set me thinking about how there can be no single story to tell the history of the Jamaican people. Our memory and perceptions of the past will differ according to colour, class or culture and our vested interests in that history. Here, many histories like that of slavery's wealth; colonialism's civilising mission; maroon resistance; slave rebellions; abolitionist's zeal or institutional oppression, compete for attention. The dominant history is normally the one recorded by those who have power and access to our textbooks, our archives and the media. Andrea Levy's life affirming and even humorous new book which looks to be another best seller, and the popularity of our local antiques fair for its wealthier patrons, suggests that a revised, sanitized, and even positive version of slavery and colonialism is on the rise. But does this mean all is forgiven and that we can begin to treat that era as a tourism product with cruise ship passengers lining up at Falmouth Pier to visit our plantations? I doubt it...

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Bearing Gifts: Haile Selassie and the European Racial Imagination

This brief essay explores constructs of Ethiopia held by others in the West, and to consider how these were visible in the years leading up to the Italo-Ethiopian war in the 1930s. By comparing two images of HIM Haile Sealssie, we can suggest that historically and especially since Italy’s defeat at Adwa in 1896, Ethiopia has been a site of contention because of its strategic geographic position within Africa and because of the precarious psychological space that it has occupied in the European racial imagination. As a result, Ethiopia has long borne the desires of Europe, and the distortion of its own image in the West. By especially reviewing photographs leading up to and during the war, I want to make a case for the continued repatriation of artifacts to Ethiopia, not as gifts but as restitution of its cultural heritage and historical status.

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Black on Black

 

Filmmakers Zulema Griffin and Sherie L. Weldon directors of Deux Conceptualist Noir recently visited Kingston as part of their new project Ink Bleach a film that highlights issues related to race, black fashion and history. Their stark minimal styling using simple African influenced fabrics as backdrops requires that interviewees (who are in the main women) speak directly to the camera about subjects such as the sexualised black body, the politics of black hair and exploitation of black fashion throughout history. But these are not stream of consciousness conversations, rather, they are intimate monologues that are pointedly constructed and tightly edited to provide a contemporary understanding of female blackness from past to present. The film's narratives are compelling especially since they tell us something we as black women have always known but have rarely discussed. Ink Bleach is an ambitious project that might just succeed in its goal of being screened at the next Sundance Festival especially because the directors have been prepared to do the leg work traveling through the African diaspora talking to women who have been dealing with these issues whether as models, academics or victims of fashion. But even without mainstream acclaim by using digital technology and the internet, Deux Conceptualiste Noir have already opened up a space for talking about race and reconceptualising blackness. To view clips and more about the film, click here Ink Bleach.

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Negrophilia: On Baker and Beyonce

BeyonceBeyonceFor the stereotype to be effective it has to be both fixed and fluid: to appear unchanging, but also to remain open to manipulation. Homi Bhaba considers this act of repetition conjoined with fixity to be a deliberate strategy used by the West when creating stereoptypes. He defines this process as ‘a form of identification that vacillates between what is known and something that must be anxiously repeated’.1 In the visual arts and visual media this process is evident. A fascinating aspect of the study of the primitive and exoticism is just how basic its imagery actually is . Within the realm of black culture its signifiers revolve around a few basic props, bulging eyes, bottoms and bandanas. A role call of popular black female entertainers from Josephine Baker, Dorothy Danedridge, Eartha Kitt, Grace Jones to Queen Latifah and Beyonce shows that the primitive is alive and well. They are all variations on the same theme.

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Negrophilia: Change We Can Believe In...

“This is where we are right now. It's a racial stalemate we've been stuck in for years...” Barrack Obama, ‘A More Perfect Union’, March 2008 This past year, I have been glued to US cable news, following the presidential campaign and Barack Obama’s election. During the primaries, I was struck by the debates surrounding Barrack Obama and his relationship to his pastor Jeremiah Wright which Obama handled so deftly and conclusively severing his relationship because of his pastor’s controversial sermons. Even so, while the debate was still raging, I came to see that its unfolding narrative had parallels in the Caribbean. You see the people of the Caribbean share with African Americans a similar history related to slavery, violence and racial discrimination because we are all part of the same black Diaspora. Our racial identities and sense of 'blackness' follow a similar path traced from the western coastlines of Africa, through to the auction blocks and plantations of the New World.

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Negrophilia: On Eminem and History

CunardMy reading of primitivism within popular culture is essentially about western culture and its perceptions of difference. It focuses on white people and their perspectives rather than their exoticised black subjects. Often, when I am asked to discuss Primitivism, I find that white audiences warm to discussions about blackness. They are entertained by my anecdotes about people like Josephine Baker, thrilled at the mention of jazz, hip hop et al and positively transported when we get into the parallels between blacks and sexuality. But inevitably the subject becomes less amusing when it is clear that primitivism is not about black culture at all but about how the west dumps its anxieties and fantasies onto others. We need to avoid these more straightforward and entertaining examinations of how blacks are represented in the popular media and instead consider the processes behind that representation.

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Negrophilia: On Nancy Cunard and Hurricane Katrina

I had been in America only two weeks when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. Having lived in the Caribbean long enough to know the devastation that hurricanes can cause as they sweep through the region, I had been tracking it as it approached the coast line. When it hit, I sighed with relief. That sigh was perhaps a day too soon because nothing prepared me for the events that would follow in the next days and weeks. And, I am not talking about the hurricane, rather I am talking about the callous and dehumanising way that black people were treated as they struggled to survive in the face of institutional racism.

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Negrophilia: On Beenie Man

The Jamaican dance hall is little more than a yard, an open space bordered by booming cavernous speaker boxes where, in the main, men gather to listen to and demonstrate their outlaw cowboy prowess by riding rhythms like bucking bronco’s that parody the ills of Jamaican society. Much of dance hall’s initial style was fashioned off popular 1960’s wild western movies and a macho posturing that seemed to sublimate the history of black male powerlessness and submission that stretched back to slavery.

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