![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
Abstract
Exploring the black body usually means delving into endogenous and exogenous imaginaries to deconstruct how it has long symbolized a desired or repelled otherness. In the light of Paul Gilroy and James Clifford's works, one may consider the black body in terms of space and circulation. This analyzes how contemporary cultural, social, and economic interactions between African and Afro-descendant people have turned the black body into a space of encounter which parts become elements to represent a global black self encompassing local, national, ethnic, and diasporan ascriptions. It interrogates the commodification of this body as the predicament of multi-scaled identities and crossed visions of blackness in the twenty-first century. This study explores images formed by the black media and international trademarks and questions the connection between esthetics, politics, and modernity they initiate.
Notes
1. In 1963, the French Government created the BUMIDOM (Bureau for the Development of Migrations from the Overseas Territories) supposedly to remedy poverty and high unemployment in the DOM. Carribean and Reunionese youth were encouraged to migrate to métropole to have training and jobs.
2. S. Hall, ‘Black Diaspora Artists in Britain’, 2.
3. Interviews conducted at the black beauty fair, Beauty Color, Paris, 12 December 2011.
4. The phrase is supposed to be the tirailleur's whose lack of language skills prevents him from pronouncing the phrase correctly: C’est bon Banania! (Banania's Good!)
5. In 2005, deputees from the UMP tried to pass an article (Article 4) in the law from 23 February 2005 on school programs. The article stated the ‘positive role of colonization’. It was vetoed by the Assemblée Nationale and President Chirac.
6. Most magazines are published between four and six years. The lack of affiliated readers led to the disappearance of most. Only Miss Ebène, Black Beauty, and Brune have been published for more than six years. The market is however growing since five new magazines appear every year and show the burgeoning of the black ethnic press.
7. Source: FashizBlack website, www.fashizblack.com.
8. These slogans were printed on the cover of this issue.
9. However, Blum also proposes stereotypical images of black people. She photographed the African-American model, Branden Mitchell, as a hyper-muscular body that represented black manhood.
10. Interviews conducted at the black beauty fair, Beauty Color, Paris, 12 December 2011.
11. Interviews conducted at the black beauty fair, Beauty Color, Paris, 12 December 2011.
12. Roland Barthes explains that photography is at the intersection of three emotions: doing, enduring, and looking shape by the relationship between the operator, the photographer; the spectator, the viewer, and the target, the person photographed (Barthes Citation1980, 22).
13. R. Barthes, La Chambre Claire, 22.
14. ‘Decolonial transmodern esthetics is intercultural, inter-epistemic, inter-political, inter-esthetical and inter-spiritual but always from perspectives of the global south and the former-Eastern Europe’, ‘Decolonial Aesthetics (I)’, 2012, booklet without page numbers.
15. ‘Decolonial Aesthetics (I)’, 2012..