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Abstract
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.
Notes
1. Black here is very narrowly defined in terms of people who are of British Caribbean heritage as this is the group from which the data were drawn. Black anti-racist aesthetics arose from the ‘black is beautiful’ concept and so places black within the wider African diaspora.
2. The participants were of Caribbean and Caribbean and white English heritage and lived in London, the Midlands and Yorkshire. For this paper I have chosen abstracts from some of the ‘mixed race’ women who participated in the project.
3. By pigmentocracy I mean to say that status, life chances and very often freedom were based on skin colour and that skin colour itself was also a matter of official record and surveillance.
4. His view is that the women he met in France and the Antilles were obsessed with becoming white or with at least having white partners so that they would have children lighter than themselves.
5. Hunter (2005) also speaks about this in the context of the Unites States as ‘colorism’.
6. In the context of the United States, historically, young women with ‘milky white skin, long blonde hair and slim figures were deemed to be the most beautiful and therefore the most feminine women. Within this interpretive context, skin color, body type, hair texture and facial features become important dimensions of femininity’ (Collins Citation2004:194). These beauty standards mean that African American women are largely rendered less beautiful or at worse, ugly (Banks Citation2000; Collins Citation2004; Hobson Citation2005; Hunter Citation2005). A good deal of women's beauty is associated with their hair so this is important in the process of constructing hierarchies of femininity (Collins Citation2004).
7. Aesthetics in this period was based on a definition of blackness which stressed naturalness and the rejection of hair straightening and skin bleaching (Weekes Citation1997; Banks Citation2000). Women who continued with these practices were perceived as victims of self-hatred (Weekes Citation1997).
8. By ‘indigenous’ here I take Taylor to mean that this critique has developed organically through black anti-racist politics.
9. For more on the idea of ‘racializing’ see Tate (Citation2005). What I mean by it here is that black beauty is performative and becomes visible through practices which ‘enrace’ body and hair.
10. This is, of course, not new as there was also a ‘mainstreaming’ of the afro in the 1970s.
11. Butler, J, (1999).
12. The etymology of this word is unclear but it is more than likely derived from dancehall lyrics in Jamaica. One suggestion is that this term emerged in the1980s at a time at which there was greater political awareness about the growing imbalances in class in Jamaica (Mohammed Citation2000:45).
13. Or, one might add, even a polluting presence because of the ‘mark of whiteness’ on the skin and hair of ‘mixed race’ women.
14. For Sarah Ahmed (Citation2004:45) affect ‘does not reside in an object or sign, but is an effect of the circulation between objects and signs (=the accumulation of affective value). Signs increase in affective value as an effect of the movement between signs: the more signs circulate, the more affective they become’.