Shirley Anne Tate

Black beauty: Shade, hair and anti-racist aesthetics

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 womens 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 womans body. Black beauty as an undecidable resists binaries without ever constituting a third term and arises through the disidentification and shame of cultural melancholia.

Racial affective economies, disalienation and ‘race made ordinary’

This paper speaks against tolerance as an instrument of institutionalized anti-racism within academia where collegiality is a minimal expectation in interpersonal interactions. Through auto-ethnographic readings, the discussion focuses on the racial affective economies produced in universities as tolerance ‘makes race ordinary’. Within this reading, ‘making race ordinary’ is shown to produce unliveable lives because of its racial affective economies animated by contemptuous tolerance, disgust and disattendability. These negative affects emerge within the epistemology of ignorance produced by the racial contract and have affective and career consequences for racialized others placed outside of organizational networks. The paper argues that to destabilize the white power in networks that decide on access, tenure and promotion and to enable liveable lives within universities, the transformative potential of the transracial intimacy of friendship must be engaged. This entails ‘race made ordinary’ through disalienation-estrangement from the ‘raced’ subject positionings of the racial contract.

Building the anti-racist university: next steps

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...

You know what I mean? Agreement marking in British black English

Abstract Evidence is produced to show that in London Jamaican, a type of Jamaican Creole, Bradford Jamaican, another variety of Jamaican Creole, and the London English of Caribbean adolescents, the tags you know what I mean and you know are used to perform rather than to elicit agreements, as they do in better-studied varieties of English. The evidence rests on conversational data collected by the authors in different parts of London and in Bradford, in the course of two separate research projects. It is argued that the sequential placement of you know what I mean and you know , and the responses to them by other participants in the conversation, require them to be treated as instances of agreement marking.

The performativity of Black beauty shame in Jamaica and its diaspora: Problematising and transforming beauty iconicities

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: Post-feminist Bleaching Culture and the Political Vulnerability of Blackness

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.

Michelle Obama’s Arms: Race, Respectability, and Class Privilege

Abstract 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.

Heading South: Love/Sex, Necropolitics, and Decolonial Romance

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.

TRANSLATING MELANCHOLIA: A poetics of Black interstitial community

This paper is about the (im)possibility of ‘the Black community’. Specifically it is about how the process of translating melancholia in talk on life stories makes ‘the Black community’ (im)possible. Its (im)possibility arises because translating melancholia leads to critical agency (Khanna, 2003) in Black womens and mens talk on identity, belonging and community. I deal centrally, therefore, with ‘the Black community’ and affect. As affect, melancholias ‘object of emotions can be ideals [such as “the Black community”] and bodies, including bodies of [communities which] can take shape through how they approximate such “ideals”’ (Ahmed, 2004, p. 16). To this extent then translating melancholia is performative, as Black community takes shape in talk. I use talk on life stories to show that there is an ideal in the form of a dominant discourse on ‘the Black community’ which is constantly disturbed and re-made by melancholic translations at the level of the everyday. This disturbance constitutes what I call a poetics of Black interstitial community. By poetics I mean how community means, not just what it means to its members. I am then not talking about physical boundaries when I say ‘the Black community’, but those of affect. These boundaries are circumscribed by a politics of ‘race’ which underlie inclusion in the Black collective and are continually re-negotiated through talk on belonging. Here, the significance of essentialist notions of ‘race’ for inclusion within the Black community can be no longer taken for granted. Last, I consider what this means for the continuation of Black anti-racist politics.

A Brief Black/White/Light History of Skin Bleaching/ Lightening/Toning

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.