Black Body / White Archive:
Visual Discipline, Iconography and the
Hu(Man)
by
Breone N. Sanders
12141054University of Amsterdam
Literary Studies: Comparative Literature
MA
Get(ting) Out of Western Humanism’s Black Body
Body-trafficking. White occupation. The corporeal infrastructure of racial violence. On many fronts, Jordan Peele’s inaugural film, Get Out (2017), is the story of the black body that we have (not quite) heard before. Chris, a black man, travels with his white girlfriend to meet her parents at the family’s home. As this is 2017 and not Sydney Poitier’s
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), Chris is received warmly by a white, liberal,
middle-class couple whose racial progressivism includes employing a black domestic staff, use of the black vernacular (my man!) and voting for Barack Obama.
Not quite. As the visit progresses, Chris notices cracks in a delicate façade. His future mother-in law forces him to quit smoking through a psychologically coercive scene of hypnosis. The house staff betrays a curious schizophrenia. At a gathering, where family friends infatuate themselves with Chris’s features and traits, a black attendee seems to abruptly blink out of a trance, frantically urging Chris to leave the house. The film’s story arc reveals the climax that viewers and horror connoisseurs could not possibly have anticipated: embodiment, not murder and gore, lies at the center of terror. White ownership and embodiment of the black corporeal domain becomes the focal point of Peele’s psychological thriller which draws its most poignant cinematic moments from the contemporary visual and political treatment of the black body.
In the critical view of this study, Get Out is also the story of modern western humanism’s identity crisis and its inseparable relationship with the black body. His girlfriend, Rose, and her family --white, western and initially professing universalizing ideals that affirm recognition of his humanity --become perpetrators of a plot where he is to be kidnapped, disembodied and subject to dehumanizing technologies. Chris’s consciousness is to be separated from his body via hypnosis and neurosurgery, allowing white auctioneers to inhabit its corporeal space and
meaning. And yet, for all of Peele’s innovative story craft, masterful symbolism, and
experimental treatment of racial horror, one cannot deny another subliminal register: a nagging intuition, that we have indeed seen this story before.
The nineteenth century, historic locus of our contemporary humanist lexicon, stands as a period where the West aggressively produced knowledge of human and racial
difference. From this era, a defining narrative emerged about the place of the western ‘Man’ in relation to the black body. Black bodies, kidnapped and separated from corporeal agency,
representation. The western ‘Man’, enshrined in a mythology of whiteness, nationalism and evolutionary progress, emerged as arbiter of a global humanity where his own was
positioned “at the apex of human history” (Sauvage 5). Additionally, nineteenth century racializing technologies, such as the ethnographic museum and other means of visual control, afforded the West its own visual archive to document, surveil and discipline the black body into this stratum of humanity. The result was a robust iconography and enduring visual inhabitance/occupation of the black body that affirmed the humanity of whiteness.
Recent scholarship examines the centrality of the black body to western humanist discourse and contemporary theories of the human. George Yancy, drawing on Fanon and R.J.C. Young’s writings on race and colonialism, has long noted the fundamental
contradictions in western humanism revealed by the West’s colonial project. He writes,
“The irony is that this universal humanism was shaped through an ideology of exclusion and misanthropy. Indeed, the development of ideas regarding the nature of humanity and ‘the universal qualities of the human mind as the common good of an ethical civilization occurred at the same time as those particularly violent centuries in the history of the world now known as the era of Western colonialism’’” (5).
Yancy rightly alerts us to a curious historical condition, one where expressions of colonialism and racial violence towards black bodies occurred even as western nations were advancing a vocabulary of universal humanism. His writing falls in line with similar critiques he has made concerning the conception of humanism via whiteness, the ubiquity of the white gaze on racial others, and the violence accorded to the black body by this discourse where “Whiteness is deemed the horizon of all horizons, unable to recognize the imaginary “racial” dualism that it has created” (221). By contrast, Alexander Weheliye’s theorizing shifts focus from the body to the flesh to explore how one might understand how the flesh and blackness are used as currency in contemporary expressions of state-sponsored racial violence. Like Yancy, Weheliye calls attention to western humanism’s “governing conception of humanity as synonymous with western [white] Man” (5). He goes further however, to show the constitutive nature of black enfleshment, via racialization to the West’s project of a stable, essentialist view of the human rooted in its own white, male subjectivity (8). Weheliye writes, “If racialization is understood not as a biological or cultural descriptor but as a conglomerate of sociopolitical relations that
discipline humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans, then blackness designates a changing system of unequal power structures that apportion and delimit which humans can lay claim to full human status and which humans cannot” (3). This characterization
of race, allows for understanding of its disciplinary function (racialization) in the subject making of the human/ hu(Man).
Under Weheliye’s analysis, ‘the human’ in modernity, as constructed from the vantage point of white, western ‘Man’ --characterized here as hu(Man)-- becomes embedded in race with
blackness a fundamental construct. Racialization, deploying blackness to maintain the
ontological cohesion of white humanity, becomes the means by which perimeters of the human are policed (8). Black feminist theorizing, with its analysis of interlocking systems of race and power, figures highly into Weheliye’s organizing logic. His positioning of Black feminist critique underscores his argument that epistemological traditions found in Black studies have been integral to expanding perimeters of the human (8). Indeed, Weheliye’s inclusion of racialization to foreground a critique of western humanism’s ‘Man’ both exposes its
“Eurocentric, masculinist epistemology” (Collins 771) and centers what Tryon Woods describes as “...the distinct positionality of blackness and the necessity to center blackness for an accurate account of any form of state power” (439).
Building on Weheliye’s understanding of racialized blackness as a constitutive component of western delineations of the human, this thesis considers how this concept is further complicated by the western visual archive’s treatment of the black body. The West is used in shorthand here to designate western civilization and its various hegemonic locales. Specifically, I argue that the West’s visual and discursive documentation of the black body has not only served to arbitrate designations of the human/ nonhuman in modernity but that its racialization, as operating and securing its range via disciplinary visual practices, has accorded a type of occupation of the black corporeal domain. To note, this analysis deviates from Weheliye in that the flesh and the body are situated as part of the same infrastructure whereby racialization administers its violence. Additionally, focus is given to the
blackbody’s visual tra[ffi]cking through modernity and what this condition reveals about the dissemination of western humanist mythologies that privilege whiteness as “master
subject”(8). At issue are two questions central to this thesis’s exploration: What does an understanding of the western visual archive do for conversations began by Weheliye? How are black, diasporic cultural producers disrupting the violence of the West’s visual tra[ffi]ck of the black body through counter-signifying practices that re-imagine black body’s
Black creators, this project also enlists the theoretical interventions of Black feminist theory. As Black feminist thought has held a long tradition of theorizing alterity and restorative practices in the wake of physical and discursive racial violence, this project references the analysis of several leading Black feminist theorists. Simone Browne’s work on racialized surveillance and the archive of transatlantic slavery provides a crucial theoretical lens in this project’s mediation on race, power and the disciplinary modes of visual control. Browne considers how the black body, as a site of surveillance and object of the racializing gaze, complicates our present understanding of surveillance and discipline in western nations. Drawing from the archive of slavery, Browne examines how technologies, policies and artifacts have worked to track, monitor, document and subordinate black bodies. Browne’s expansive archival excavation motivates this project’s situation of the western visual archive to consider how its repository of image reveals similar methods of supervision, documentation and visual control of black bodies.
Patricia Collins theory of alterity in the creation of knowledge for black subjects also guides the decision to consider Afro-diasporic cultural production. In her canonical text “The Social Construction of Black Feminist Thought”, Collins writes,
“African-American women not only have developed distinctive interpretations of Black women’s oppression but have done so by using alternative ways of producing and validating knowledge itself […] An alternative epistemology challenges all certified knowledge and opens up the question of whether what has been taken to be true can stand the test of alternative ways of validating truth.” (746, 773).
Through Collins’s grounding of alternative epistemology, one begins to understand how cultural production performs the work of clearing space - for contestation, affirmation and resistance. Collins’s work of on alternative epistemological claim is situated in this study to argue the necessity of interventionist knowledge creation concerning black subjectivity.
Collins’s theorizing draws parallels with Tina Campt’s, whose work on refusal and pivotal question: “how do we build a radical visual archive of the African Diaspora” (3) holds immense urgency to this project. Centering visual artifacts of black subjects, Campt’s work often
examines how their narratives intersect with theoretical concerns of representation, racial discourse and the archival documentation of black life. Her analysis of archive offers a critical vocabulary to this study that stands in rebuttal to claims that archival retrieval and reclamation are “marked by the clash between the imperative to recover the past and the impossibility of doing so”(Best 159). Campt’s work shows the necessity to map a contemporary visual archive
for black subjectivity while challenging us to listen to the discursive interventions of diasporic visual practices.
It is this revisionist formulation of archive, that I assert is at the center of Black, diasporic cultural productions. More pointedly, I argue that by examining Afro-diasporic interventionist strategies (specifically those that are forging a politics of image around the black body), we see the emergence of a radical visual archive. We also see a future terrain where blackness and imaginings of the human can arise from alternative, epistemological claims. The work of black visual creators begins the task of decolonizing modernity’s visual frontier, where the residual “atrocities of the flesh” (Weheliye 11) continue to move, tra[ffi]ck and shape representations of the black body in the contemporary racial gaze. This visual sphere, historically used by the West to locate racial, human difference and represent hierarchies of the corporeal, is becoming
grounds to contest and politicize representation.
Overview
The thesis argumentation is structured into three chapters governed by the study’s two leading questions: how has the western visual archive constructed the black body in its disciplinary frame? How have black cultural productions intervened for alternative
contemporary imaginings of black humanity? Attention is given to nineteenth century visual technologies that aggressively produced the ontology of racial difference and blackness within the western discursive purview. We will consider the consequence of this production through the western archive’s racialized iconography of the black body. Racialization, as operating through the visual control of surveillance, representation and the white
disciplinary gaze, is then placed in conversation with theories of counter-scription, alterity and resistance. Lastly, the visual practices of Black cultural producers are considered for radical interventions strategies towards visual discipline and reimagining of the human.
Chapter 1: “A Case Study in Visual Discipline: The Africa Museum”, positions the ethnographic museum as a nineteenth century visual technology to ground understanding of how a racialized representation of the black body occurred in tandem with a modern lexicon of human difference . Through a close analysis of Belgium’s Royal Museum for Central Africa, the chapter considers the concept of visual discipline and how visual disciplinary technologies produced the racialized images that continue to occupy the black body. By investigating ethnographic museums specifically, the representation of blackness and its constructed corporeal, racial difference by the human science, is understood as positioning
western hu(Man) frame of reference.
Chapter 2: “Surveillance, Blackness, and Visual Tra[ffi]cking” considers the
theorizing of Simone Browne’s as a way to further analyze how the western visual archive has accomplished disciplinary objectives through its visual construction and occupation of the black body. Centering slavery’s historical archive, Browne’s critique examines the technologies and policies that have worked to surveil and submission black bodies. Through a chronology of early surveillance practices, she illustrates how power, both in a scopic and discursive sense, has operated on the black body via surveillance. Her theorizing is placed in conversation with Claudia Rankine’s work Citizen: An American Lyric and Situations to examine visual discipline’s connection to surveillance, racialized iconography and the movement of colonial ideology via the black body’s visual tra[ffi]ck. The chapter attempts to theorize the contemporary ways that representational control of the black body continues to operate.
Chapter 3: “Towards a Radical Black Visual Politics” addresses the contemporary visual practices of Black creators for examination of Campt’s concept of radical archive. The chapter centers the Same, Same but Different - International Arts Festival on
Decolonisation and Identity to observe contemporary Afro-diasporic responses to western
visual discipline. Centering founding collaborators Black Speaks Back, installation artist Nastio Mosquito and the festival’s curative dynamics, this chapter examines how emerging black cultural production forges a representation and politics, amounting to what Celeste Bernier describes as a “new visual language[and]life not only to the corporeal and visceral but also to the imagination and artistic realities of black lives” (1004). The chapter suggests that Afro-diasporic practices evidence Weheliye’s and Yancey’s claim that “different modalities of the human come to light” (8) when a “euro-humanism […] grounded in the ideology of whiteness” is rejected (5). In this vein, the experimental, visual aesthetics of the artist Nastio Mosquito are enlisted as means to re-imagine the human. Cumulatively, the segment argues for a re-evaluation of the western visual archive through the festival’s disruptive, interventionist knowledge production.
It is the aim of this study to both contribute to and pivot the conversation within cultural studies and critical theory concerning the role of racialized blackness in theories of representation and ‘the human’. As Alexander Weheliye’s scholarship illustrates, present discourses examining the construction of the ‘human’ in relation to western, humanist
precepts fail to adequately analyze the fundamental component of racialized blackness to our modern understanding of ‘the human’, read western, white ‘Man’ (8). His argument masterfully positions the centrality of blackness in understanding and interrogating the emergence of a stable, essentialist construction of the human subject rooted in whiteness. This study however, takes Weheliye’s critique of western humanist discourse in modernity as a point of departure and considers modes of visual control found in the western visual archive, that have deployed representations of the black body to delineate lines of the hu(Man), human and nonhuman. What does a thorough analysis of the black body in the western visual archive offer to present discourses of representation, disciplinary power and the arbitration of the human in modernity? How do the expressions of black cultural producers help to locate and perform alternative theories and knowledge creation? This project attempts to formulate new understandings and directions for these questions through an engagement with Black feminist theories of representation, power and conceptions of human alterity.
“Modern museums as we know them were composed according to a colonial paradigm.” -Alexandra Sauvage
The Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium (also known as the Africa Museum) surveys a collection of over 120,000 ethnographic objects from the Congo, Rwanda, Burundi and other African countries. Established in 1898 by King Leopold II, the institution dates to the earlier colonial exhibit of 1897, which showcased Belgium’s material profits from the Congo region (Africa Museum 2019). In 2013, the museum closed for renovation
following escalating public criticism over its representation of African people and colonial narratives. Since its reopening in 2018, it continues to be at the center of a heated public debate over issues of colonial representation, the history of ethnographic collections and the depiction of black bodies within its institutional walls.
In this study’s examination of the black body as documented and disciplined in the western visual archive, the European ethnographic museum provides a politically salient case study. Through an analysis of how western visual regimes came to locate black subjects within the non-human, we begin to see the unique position of the ethnographic museum – both as a discursive vehicle of the human sciences and an early visual technology for seeing racial difference. What “representational paradigms”(Campt 2019) are at work in the ethnographic museum and how does it document the black body? What opportunity does this yield in understanding how depictions of black bodies were integral to a human ‘master subject’
(Weheliye 8) rooted in the white, western male subjectivity? How do contending visual politics over ethnographic collections index competing claims of ownership and knowledge creation as it relates to the black body?
This chapter explores the ethnographic museum as a nineteenth -century visual disciplinary technology and its appropriation of the black body. As we consider the
ethnographic museum as both a producer of racial discourse and racialized imagery, we will examine how its framing (past and present) accords a distinct visual practice locating
blackness in the nonhuman. To navigate these concerns, the chapter is divided into four sections. The first section revisits Foucault’s theory of discipline to better formulate how power and subjecthood are engaged through visual discipline. The second section examines the ethnographic museum and its problematic representation through George Yancy’s concept
of the colonial gaze, here defined as “how colonialsm[…] shap[ed] colonized bodies through powerful processes of inscription” (2). The section explores the ethnographic museum’s contentious academic status before examining how its visual and discursive processes position the black body. Particular attention is given to how such representational practices continue to ‘still’ (or reduce the agency, control and mobility of) black bodies within a colonial paradigm. From here, the text moves to a close reading of the Africa Museum and its methods of
representation post- renovation. The section investigates instances where black bodies are ‘stilled’ and depicted within a racializing iconography. The chapter concludes with a final section on the ideological purpose of the ethnographic museum’s documentation,
(pre)occupation and appropriation of the black body.
Revisiting Foucault’s theory of Discipline
Foucault’s canonical text, Discipline and Punish, along with his 1982 publication, “The Subject and Power” have largely dominated writing and cultural analysis examining the human subject as a site of discourse, power relations and social conditioning. With Foucault, we see the human subject as fashioned by power that codes subjectivity within objectifying discourse, language and other modalities. The human subject, as an object of knowledge creation, becomes mediated through binaries and hierarchies, transcribing the subject. Binaries in particular, allow the relational hierarchies that organize society at large (i.e. criminal vs. noncriminal, guilty vs not guilty).
For Foucault, the role of discipline is understood as shaping the human subject via power relations organized by these binaries. In Discipline and Punish, he writes that, “Discipline is an act of rank, a technique for the transformation of arrangements. It individualizes bodies by a location that does not give the fixed position, but distributes them and circulates them in a network of relations” (196). In this view, discipline becomes a means to stratify human groups and requires the exercise of power on the body to do so. Foucault makes use of several
historical references to illustrate this point, the most iconic being his Panopticon analogy. With the panopticon, a prison model containing a watch tower and revolving cell doors, Foucault attempts to show how power and discipline operate in modernity on human bodies via carceral punishment. Surveillance is positioned as a means of social control, one where bodies are objectified by a concealed, omnipresent gaze. The human subject becomes molded by the supervision of this gaze, the imposition of its norms and threat of its punitive response. The threat of punishment conditions a self-regulation of behavior. In Foucault’s panopticism, we see
non prisoner) and in the conditioning of hierarchal relations (prisoner/ guard) allows institutions to order, stratify and condition human subjects. Panopticism also illustrates what Foucault describes as technologies of power, or the systemic modes in which bodies become disciplined (the panopticon/ penitentiary).
Foucault’s theory of discipline is not without its limits and must be expanded in light of the critical concerns of this study. With Foucault, we see a universalizing of the human subject and also the assumption that power operates and disciplines all subjects equally. This reading of the human subject does not consider how racialization complicates and historically fragments notions a stable human category. There is also the problematic characterization of discipline as a non-violent social practice secured by social conditioning, internalization of norms and self-executed hierarchical relations. Lastly, Foucault’s discipline stems from the logic that individuals have a certain function and participation within society that is maintained by social control. This requires some form of agency and participation by the individual as illustrated by the self-regulated actions of the prisoners in the Panopticon analogy. Even in Foucault’s panopticism, where the human subject is conditioned to behave as a prisoner believing itself supervised, the subject still has agency to act as such. How does this concept of discipline change when we consider racialization and the processes by which large populations of human life were denied agency and participation? Particularly, if we understand racialization through critical theorist Alexander Weheliye’s framing, how does this complicate the function of discipline as deployed on racialized bodies? In short, what does a conception of discipline look like when deployed on the body of one located within the racialized perimeter of the non-human? This chapter’s consideration of visual discipline attends to this question. The black body, as an object of
knowledge in the nineteenth century, becomes the site of a hypervigilance in the human sciences and visual discursive production. Unlike the function inferred in Discipline and Punish, a
function where the human subject retains some measure of agency even in actions conditioned by surveillance, the black body –as a site of racializing, visual technologies, remains object. In this condition, we see the hierarchical distinction, between the human and nonhuman, most vividly. The black body, as an object of study, racialization, capitalistic consumption and
colonial representation, is accorded a distinct visual discipline –one that makes the body not only docile but divorced from its own use and divorced of the utility afforded human subject. Visual technologies – instruments where visual discipline is deployed –administered its corporeal use in a unique form of social control not accorded to whiteness and the hu(Man)subject. By this
study’s completion, will further understand the ideological purpose of this racializing visual discipline –both in the production of the black body within the western visual archive and in the hierarchal relations of the human /non-human binary.
(Still) Colonial Gazing
“To enforce its invisibility through silence is to allow the black body a shadowless participation in the dominant cultural body.”
-Toni Morrison Debates over the ethnographic museums and their representation politics boast an enduring scholastic discussion. Academic literature examining the museums alongside questions of appropriation and (post)colonial representations often note their historical relationship to articulations of national identity and a western subjectivity read as ‘Man’. Alexandra Sauvage has written perceptively on how the emergence of ethnographic museums in the nineteenth century revealed a shift in the social purpose of the museum and its accommodation of the colonial agenda (5). Both representing the spoils of colonialism and the material evidence of human sciences, ethnographic museums came to disseminate a nationalist ideology –one underscored by a ‘narrative of progress’ locating western ‘Man’ as heir to modernity and colonial subjects on the outskirts of its purview (4). Anne Coombes has also explored how museums, as colonial, educational institutions, framed representations of black subjects in such a way that enforced perceptions of racial difference and the “illusions of homogenous” national identity (66). With Coombes’s analysis, the material culture of black colonial subjects allowed a viewing public across various class backgrounds to receive a cohesive message about their own nationality and western subjecthood. In light of these historical underpinnings, ethnographic museums are often positioned as contemporary relics of colonial paradigms by critical scholars. Njabulo Chipangura has noted that as “a site of knowledge construction […]” the museums stand as an example of how “[…] ethnography and anthropology were used to cement racial binaries” (190). Others caution that these institutions continue to “maintain borders and privilege
particular ways of knowing” that reinforce their own authority and status in the West (Lynch and Alberti 1).Though these scholars collectively direct us to consider the ethnographic museum’s contentious place in discussions of colonialism and nationalism, they do not examine the ethnographic museum in the context of a visual technology with enduring repercussions on the black body. Indeed, their overwhelming characterization of the museum as advancing a typology
subjects within the nonhuman and thus stabilize a western hu(Man) subject. This omission forfeits a compelling opportunity to not only consider the ethnographic museum as disseminator of nationalist narratives enshrining the western ‘Man’ but in understanding how its visual racialization of black bodies works to arbitrate a human/nonhuman binary.
This study’s positioning of the ethnographic museum as a visual technology affords several considerations to the present discussion of its politics. Firstly, it breaks with certain scholastic commentary that sees the ethnographic museum as simply a utilizer of visual technology (Poole 2005) and considers such museums as part of larger epistemological infrastructure that govern how knowledge is created and visually applied to disciplined
subjects. By doing so, one is able to further investigate the broader workings of its disciplinary logic as it relates to visual processes of racialization, subject making and the place of black bodies within the human/ nonhuman binary. Secondly, it continues a conversation began by George Yancy’s writing on “Colonial Gazing”, where he explores the “process of ideological structuring, [whereby] the colonizer and the colonized are deemed opposites in an
ontologically hierarchical structural relationship”. (1). In this chapter analysis, colonial paradigms and their representational matrixes are understood as acting on the black body for a distinct social purpose and in ways that manifest enduring hierarchical relations within the institution. In this aspect, I position the ethnographic museum as a unique visual apparatus that legitimizes representation of the black non-human other within its colonial gaze. By doing so, the ethnographic museum’s visual disciplinary methods as they relate to racialized black bodies becomes identified. In this chapter’s analysis, such mechanism’s collectively manifests the concept of the ‘still’ –the black body’s in-animation, appropriation and reduction of mobility within the ethnographic museum’s colonial and racializing logic.
In this chapter’s analysis of the Africa Museum, the ‘stilling’ of the black body --its appropriation, in-animation and reduction of agency --are made visible through three key representational methods: Body plasters/ statues, colonial photography and cultural artefacts locating black bodies in a motionless, pre-modern past. Concerning this condition of the ‘still’ in visual disciplinary practice, the place of material culture in racial discourse and the politics of archive gain a contemporary dynamic. Indeed, much of the public debate over ethnographic collections center around the ethics of ownership and its relation to the material culture housed in museum institutions. Proponents of a future where ethnographic museums continue as
educational institutions often invoke a revisionist history concerning material culture, one where such collections allowed the public a benevolent window into world cultures. Clare Harris and Michael O’Hanlon are among such proponents and have redemptively suggested that “[i]n the 19th century, for those who did not (or could not) read ethnographic literature, the museum provided a window onto the disciplines and a space where the tangible forms of the societies studied by anthropologists could be displayed” (8). This rendering however, often neglects the repressive methods by which material culture was acquired, the ideological assumptions apart of their framing and its representation of racialized others. By contrast, this study looks at material culture in tandem with other representational methods that appropriate black bodies. More interrogatively, it considers how certain examples of this visual practice (in the case of plaster molds) come to take on what Simone Browne has examined as “biometric technologies” (91) in the museum’s documentation of the black body. Brown, writing on the role of the biometric in racializing blackness, describes “biometrics, in its simplest form, [...] a means of body
measurement that is put to use to allow the body, or parts and pieces and performances of the human body, to function as identification” (91). She further conceives of how this
documentation, within a framework of supervision and discipline, advances a “racial framing of blackness as property” (91). As we consider the representation methods of the Africa Museum and its treatment of the black body, we will look at how such methods continue to document and discipline blackness within the ‘still’ of its colonial gaze.
The Africa Museum
The area of the Africa Museum open to the visitors spans an impressive 11,000 square meters. It includes a glass paneled visitor center, a sub-level gallery, and a reworked scenography that takes patrons through the basement introductory exhibit toward the permanent collections on the ground floor (Africa Museum 2019). The museum’s reopening in 2018 comes after five years of renovation to the museum’s interior, additions of the lower floor, changes to the collection displays and the relocation of the offensive imagery. The Africa Museum’s website offers a timeline of the renovation’s progression along with stated intent to “present a contemporary decolonized vision of Africa in a building which had been designed as a colonial museum” (Africa Museum 2019). This segment will focus on the Introductory Gallery: A Museum in Motion and the sections of its permanent exhibit dealing with ethnographic artefacts, colonial history and independence. We will consider the museum’s use of body plasters, statutes, artefacts and colonial photography as representation modes depicting black bodies.
Statues and Plasters
Entrance into the Africa Museum begins at the visitor’s center where patrons are able to make their way through the underground gallery towards the introductory exhibit. A long, white corridor, where the expansive frame of a hand crafted perigot, greets attendees before
transitioning to the museum’s basement floor. In the Introductory Gallery, visitors are met with a panoramic image of the building exterior and grounds, a section on curatorial and research support offered to African nations and a wall display articulating the new institutional vision. The narration gives a brief history of the museum’s colonial origins, its connection to the 1897 World Fair along with the assurance that the museum has “evolved from a colonial institution” to one making “an important contribution to dissemination of knowledge about Africa”(Wall post: Intro). To the left of the introductory corridor, a secondary room housed a collection of body plasters and statues that have been removed due to their racially offensive imagery. As one enters the room, one is able to see the collection centrally located behind a partitioning rail. The
sculptured and plastered images, largely consisting of naked African natives in positions of rest and contorted movement, depict various instances of native life. On a shelf facing the entrance, one also able to see the strikingly realistic body plasters of African natives. The plaster cover the face, shoulders and upper chest area of the black subjects. Nearby, an interactive touch screen charts the history of the sculptures and plasters observed. The screen’s text educates visitors on the significance of the plasters to pro-colonial messages and imagery. It is revealed on one screen that natives were made to still for long periods covered with the plaster material, risking
suffocation. Photographs accompany the history of the busts, showing the museum’s early directors presenting them to the public.
In an 2018 interview with the New York Times, Guido Gryseels, director general of the Africa Museum, stated that the relocation of the statues and plasters to the side room has allowed the institution to “distance itself from the past without denying it”(2). The continued presence of the imagery however, implicates an enduring representational practice. Scholars writing on ethnographic museums and their dissemination of colonial ideology have noted that “in their displays of material culture from the colonies, it was common practice to include photographs, casts of the face or of the figure, or even skeletons and skulls. These were supposed to demonstrate more nearly the relationship between the inherited and cultural features of any race…”(Coombes 62). In light of this observation, the continued use of statues and plaster molds
FIGURE 2 : “Removed” Statues and Plasters. Photo by the author.
in the Africa Museum, indexes several telling dynamics about the way black bodies are positioned in its representational apparatus. With the statues, the depiction of black bodies as naked natives, registers an enduring colonial trope of the African as located in a primitive culture. The statues, with their detailing of bodily muscles, limbs and facial expressions, manifest a fixation with the black corporeal domain within the western field of vision. The anatomy of the black body is given approximation and shown in various scenes of native life. One of the rooms most iconic statues, the Leopard Man, shows the profile of a black man garbed in a leopard printed cloth, crouching over a sleeping native. The juxtaposition of the black body alongside the bestial is another colonial trope that continues to belie the museums
representational logic and displays. More unsettling is the presence of plaster molds and busts of black native subjects. The facial contours, suspended of expression, depict the visage of native subjects with striking realism. The place of the plasters and busts in the museum indexes a past where the ethnographic museum positioned such objects as evidential support for racial
discourses in the human sciences. Busts and plaster molds were often displayed to substantiate claims regarding the physiological and phrenological differences among the races. Despite the museum’s renovation, the continued use of the items implicates a past where such institutions indeed made a “contribution to the dissemination of knowledge about Africa” (Wall post 1: Intro) but from the vantage point of an objectifying, Eurocentric ideology. Representations of
black bodies became inscribed with discourses in the human sciences attempting to stratify the colonial other into typology and classificatory system documenting the black subject. Simon Browne has also suggested a reading of such objects as the plaster mold, with its bodily
measurement and function as identification derived from the black body, as an early example of biometric information technology that “frames blackness as property” (91). When considering the function of the body plaster within ethnography and within the institutional ownership of museums, we see instance of where the black body becomes the intellectual property of the museum. Body plasters, both in how they were created and their position within the ethnographic museum’s knowledge creation show a relation to the black body that suspends its agency and subjugates its form to the discursive command of the institution. The statues and molds reveal this concept of the still, showing quite demonstratively the way the black body is made into an inanimate object of colonial discourse, scientific study and representational hierarchies that continue to be at work in its appropriation.
Artefacts
Moving towards the ground floor, visitors enter the permanent collections which are sectioned into areas covering rituals and ceremonies, language and music, colonial history and
independence as well as the pre-colonial history of central Africa. The artifacts and ethnographic objects housed in its entirety exceed 120,000 objects, most coming from the Democratic
Republic of Congo and derive from military campaigns, collecting, scientific expeditions, missionaries, art trading, acquisitions and western inhabitants in the Congo during the colonial era (Africa Museum 2019). Display of ethnographic objects and artefacts are present throughout the ground level floor, which is ordered according to thematic sections. In the section titled “Long History”, visitors are introduced to the early pre-colonial history of Central Africa. Among its collection are masks, drums, talismans, headdresses and other tribal relics deriving from various cultures in the region. The artefacts are accompanied by textual descriptions dating the object and describing its function and cultural significance. Many of the museums earliest ethnographic objects are housed on the ground floor and narrate the customs of native people. The rituals and ceremonies section, displays artefacts such as headdresses, human coffins and attire, alongside video accounts of Congolese, Rwandan and Burundi people describing cultural traditions and rituals that continue to be practiced.
The presence of a historical ethnographic collection of artefacts draws our attention to what Sauvage has written as the “cultural competition” of colonial powers to acquire large collections, often representing black colonial subjects as “primitive people” (5). The collection housed at the Africa Museum is a particularly immense one with most objects acquisitioned during the
direct us to a pervasive imagery within ethnographic institutions, where black subjects and their material culture are often situated in a past that is “timeless” (Chipinagura 190), motionless and outside of modernity. Sauvage and others have noted that the representation of natives,
suspended in a fixed, pre-modern past underscores the messaging of a colonial paradigm where white, western subjects are positioned on the correct (read modern) side of history (Sauvage 2009, Coombes 1988).
FIGURE 5 : Burial Statues. Photo by the author
In this ‘narrative of progress’, the lack of modernization conjures an image of natives as existing in the state of nature and outside the advances of industrialization and Enlightenment rationality. The material culture of the ‘primitive native’ then comes to locate the black body in a ‘temporal still’, even as evidence of the contrary (black subjects in modernity) exists in the contemporary. The Africa Museum, citing the inclusion of narratives by Congolese, Rwandan and Burundi people ,has stated their attempts to correct this narrative. This gesture however, comes into question when one considers how much of the institutional decision concerning curation, collection and archival management continue to be done by westerners. One can argue that the inclusion of African interlocutors is also mired with politics as they are positioned to accord a certain ‘authenticity’ to the display of ethnographic objects. There is also the fact that the material culture showcased alongside this narration remains the institutional property of the museum. In light of this appropriation, the place of black bodies and subjectivities remain in a discursively fixed narrative of subjugation in the museum’s collection. They also remain object of the museum’s ownership.
Colonial Photography
The section on colonial history and independence is also housed on the ground floor. The section traces the history of slavery, colonialism, and independence in the central African region, relying heavily on colonial photographs as historical documents. Entering the corridor, one immediately sees a display historicizing the slave trade. The display included a documentary photograph of an enslaved male, the layout plan of a slave cargo ship alongside slave chains and shackles dating from the 19th century. The textual descriptions provide context to the duration of the slave trade,
Post 2: Slavery). Behind the display, the corridor extends into the segment on colonialism. Colonial photography is abundant and charts the dynamics of colonial administration in the region. There are images of black colonial subjects in various documentary portraits. One photograph shows a group of leopard men gathered for public sentencing. Another shows a group of young girls knitting in a missionary while a woman in white stands behind them. Other photos show the amassing of black bodies into labor camps. Towards the end of the corridor, the section on colonial independence comes into view. A large, unglassed display features news clippings along a timeline documenting the route to independence. The display included textual descriptions of noted figures such as Lumumba. Several wall posts and stations nearby educate visitors on the colonial use of photography in shaping propaganda and racial images on colonial subjects.
FIGURE 6 : Slavery Display 1. Photo by the author FIGURE 7 : Slavery Display 2. Photo by the author.
Colonial photography offers much to the analysis of representational paradigms at work in the visual disciplining of black bodies. Specifically, if we understand photography as an early
example of documentary realism (Sekula 1986) then we begin to see the purpose of colonial photograph as three fold: a historical document, an ethnographic document and a document of colonial propaganda. Hahns Peter has written on the perception of photography in the 19th
century as a “widely accessible mediatized means of documenting historical Facts” (93).
Photographs were understood as historically objective documents of a past, where the veracity of an account could be shown in all its visibility. As colonial photographs reveal, however, this history of the West was depicted through a certain narrative, one where black subjects were cast in an imperialist view. Nicole Fleetwood has charged that this “legacy of representing blacks in social documentary photography evidences the multitiered ways in which the photograph gets employed to make sense of history” (45). The colonial photography’s hypervigilance of black bodies, as depicted in labored conditions, missionaries, conditions of enslavement and public sentencing, shows the imperialist narrative of the West as submissioning the ‘dark continent’ while also substantiating ‘factual’ accounts of the project to civilize the region. As an
ethnographic document, colonial photographs were also deployed through an assumption that their intended “visual empiricism” (Wright 401) could authentically represent the racial
difference of black subjects. Under the objectifying lens of the camera, the black body of African natives became observable to a western public and with it, the evidence of scientific discourses stratifying a human hierarchy. Clarifying the connection between photography and the social sciences, Christopher Pinney writes “Photography came to play ‘a central and complicitous role
in what became the dominant concern of late 19th century anthropology, the articulation of race [...] because ‘Photography was paramount in the formation of a particular discourse of race which was located in the conceptualization of the body as object of the anthropological knowledge’’ (58). Pinkney astutely recognizes how the body, as an object of knowledge, becomes the site of racializing discourse in the human sciences, made visibly authenticated via photography. Some have argued that the suspicion around visual representations of race has always shaped anthropological understandings of evidence (Poole 2005). This position however, ignores the way visual evidence was marshalled to substantiate anthropological and ethnographic accounts of racial difference. It also elides the ‘visual empiricism’ (Wright 401) attributed to photography, in documenting black, colonial others.
With the history and deployment of colonial photography, we see how black bodies were more rigidly aligned with racializing knowledge creation of the human sciences. Lastly, colonial photographs as instances of propaganda allowed western viewers to see the work of empire within a framework justifying the subordination of black bodies within the colonial project. As stated prior, images of the colonial other supported a rationale, one placing Africans as primitive people to be managed and the business of administering their land the responsibility of the empire. Within the power negotiations of colonial photography, we see quite starkly the visual racialization of the black body within interlocking ideologies of colonialism, nationalism and scientific racism. We also see the dual occupation of the black body by both colonial
administration and colonial paradigm. This representational matrix continues at the Africa Museum post renovation. It is worth noting that despite the museum’s acknowledgement of its early use of colonial photography as propaganda, the section on colonial independence in central Africa remains a dwarfed one when compared to the exhibit on colonial history. A walled time line of newspaper clippings, unprotected, stands besides glassed displays of colonial photographs enshrining a colonial past. We are reminded again of a temporal torpor of a persistent quality that leaves narratives of independence, agency and black subjects at the helm of their own modernity neglected within the museum’s frame.
“While black men and women are struggling to throw off the images that whites have made of them, white men and women are equally bound to and implicated in these representations that stem from their own irrational anxieties and fears.”
-Gloria Wekker What understandings do we traverse when we consider the black body as an object of knowledge in the western field of vision and discursive tracking? As a relic of modernity, the ethnographic museum is an institution whose historical formation lies at the nexus of
colonialism, racial capitalism and the advent of the human sciences. It is also an early
disseminator of knowledge engendering the modern human as “Man” (Western male subject). It is important to note that though this chapter has focused on the ethnographic museum’s visual politics specifically, its construction of ‘Man’ in the western imaginary also owes to the multiple ways in which it has shaped knowledge –as research facility, as a conflux of the human sciences, as an arbiter of human typology and as an epistemological infrastructure in shaping the ontology of the modern hu(Man) and racialized others. Alexander Weheliye and other cultural theorists in Black studies have argued that the advent of the modern notion of ‘Man’, in the West, is deeply entrenched in a co-constituting relationship with the processes of racialization, which he defines as “an ongoing set of political relations that require, through constant perpetuation via
institutions, discourses, practices, desires, infrastructures, languages, technologies, sciences, economies, dreams and cultural artifacts, the baring of nonwhite subjects from the a category of human as it is performed in the modern west”(3).
It is from a similar critical assessment that this chapter has considered the ethnographic museum –not only as an institution of the human sciences but as a visual disciplinary technology that racializes the black body. Here, discipline has been expanded from its Foucauldian origins to consider how a disciplinary logic may be accorded to bodies denied human subjectivity and made the perpetual ‘stilled’ object of discursive, visually ascriptive, racializing manifestations of power. In the case of the ethnographic museum, we see this most vividly in the treatment of the black body as an object of knowledge enclosed in colonial paradigms and systems of
representation. These paradigms and systems continue to relegate black subjects to a primitive/ colonial other, a motionless, premodern past, a denial of agency and movement into the
contemporary. Indeed, in the analysis of the Africa Museum, we see the black body presented at a ‘still’ –a fixed, (pre)occupation and temporal torpor that preserves the black subject in the similar taxidermical fashion that one would an elephant, giraffe and other rarities on display in the Landscapes and Biodiversity gallery of the museum. Within the appropriation, objectification and in-animation of the ‘still’, the problematic representational politics of the ethnographic museum register more acutely along with its underlying ideological origins and continued function. The black body, as documented, disciplined and represented within the visual/
epistemological apparatus of the ethnographic museum is not afforded subjecthood in the way that Foucault’s disciplined subjects are. Instead, it remains an inert object, enclosed in a century’s long archive that has housed and created knowledge concerning its place and antithetical position to the modern hu(Man). Weheliye directs us to the enduring contention between epistemological traditions in the west and those found “in the tradition of the oppressed” over how blackness should be positioned in imaginings of the human. For the purposes of this chapter, the ethnographic museum makes tangent the processes of racialization via disciplinary technologies and the central nature of such infrastructures to the modern disciplining of non-hu(Man) others.
On the relationship between blackness, the white imagination and the power of images, Claudia Rankine stated in a 2015 interview with The Guardian, “When white men are shooting black people, some of it is malice and some an out-of -control image of blackness in their minds” (1). A year prior, Rankine published the book Citizen: An American lyric, a work lauded for its contemplation of the black body’s status in American racial politics. The visibility of blackness and the bodies that inhabit that space, is a subject that figures heavily into Rankine’s work which spans through poetry, photographs, artwork and social criticism. In addition to the publication, Rankine has worked with husband John Lucas to co-produce the digital installation titled
Situations. The videos combine experimental audio and cinematography to conjure the themes
and observations of Citizen. In the segments, Rankine can be heard in the voice-over, reading the film scripts found in her book, as images of black bodies and urban life shift in and out of the camera’s view.
In many ways, Rankine’s work engages the ideas presented in Simone Browne’s text,
Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Browne considers how the black body, as a site
of hypervigilance and an object of racializing processes, complicates our understanding of surveillance practices, disciplinary power and control. Browne’s explication is a tour-de-force through adaptations of panopticism, slavery’s historical/discursive archive and Black feminist theorizing. Central to her project is the situating of blackness as necessary locus to observe how surveillance operates as an appendage to racialization. In this study’s examination of the black body’s visual treatment in the West, Browne’s concept of ‘racializing surveillance’, instances where “surveillance [reifies] boundaries along racial lines” (8) offers a compelling take on the black body’s present visual politics. In what ways are the politics of the black body given tension when we consider surveillance as a contemporary visual disciplinary practice? How does
racialized surveillance partake in the visual production of the black body within the western hu(Man) imaginary?
This chapter positions the image aesthetics of Citizen and Situation 7 in conversation with Browne’s theory of surveillance for an understanding of how the black body’s visual discipline has evolved from the stilled frames of nineteenth century ethnographic museums into the visual body tra[ffi]cking of the contemporary. As illustrated in chapter one, visual discipline is used to describe how the black body becomes the site of knowledge and visual discursive production by racializing systems of power. By situating surveillance as a contemporary visual disciplinary practice, this chapter attempts to show how such practice produces and
re-appropriates the symbolic registers that code, represent and identify the black body’s status in the western visual archive. As we consider the effects of this racialized iconography- the collection of iconic myths and racialized images expressive of cultural attitudes towards blackness – we will explore how this iconography proximates the black body to enduring ascriptions rooted in colonialism and the economy of slavery. We will further consider how this representation continues to visually tra[ffi]ck the black body from its discursive formations in modernity into the contemporary. Visual tra[ffi]cking is termed here to describe the compounded ways in which the black body continues to be trafficked (via representation) and tracked (via surveillance). The work of Rankin and Lucas is centered to observe how such images are mediated and disrupted by contemporary visual practices. With Situation 7 specifically, attention is given to instances where the black body becomes politicized as a site of hypervigilance to confound the logics of racializing surveillance.
Chapter two begins with an exploration of Browne’s theory of surveillance to better clarify its connection to racialized iconography and visual tra[ffi]cking. From here we move to the image aesthetics of Rankine’s Citizen and its engagement with the racialized iconography of the United States. The analysis centers the gendered, racialized tropes concerning the
representation of black male and female bodies. A close reading of Rankine and Lucas’s work
Situation 7 follows to explore how contemporary cultural productions enter disruptive,
counter-signifying practices against the black body’s visual discipline. The chapter concludes with thoughts on surveillance, visual narrative and the status of blackness in contemporary imaginings of the human.
Racialized Surveillance, Iconography and Visual Tra[ffi]cking
To foreground an analysis that links race and surveillance, Browne begins her theorizing with the prevailing frameworks that governs understanding of surveillance as an expression of power. Foucault’s panopticism and its use of surveillance in the conditioning of human subjects is both a point of reference and deviation in her theorizing. Placing her analysis within an ongoing tradition of scholastic evolution of the Panopticon (Didier, Mathiesen), Browne begins with a explication of Foucault’s Panopticon, his distinction of sovereign power from disciplinary power and the relevance of this to black subjectivity. Browne charges that “while Foucault argued that the decline of the spectacle of public torture as punishment might have marked ‘a slackening of the hold on the body,’ […] when that body is black, the grip hardly loosened
other acts of racial terrorism” (38).
Central to Browne’s critical intervention is the insistence that an alternative model must be conceived, along with an “alternative archive from which to understand the hold of both disciplinary and sovereign power on black life under slavery” (38). In order to conceptualize power that links surveillance with the formation of black subjectivity, Browne revisions the Panopticon as the slave ship –an emblem of power in modernity where the technologies of supervision and tracking of black bodies first originated. The slave ship becomes the conceptual prism in understanding power and the origin of surveillance practices on the black body. It also becomes the metonym to speak about the historical archive of slavery and the controlling
metaphor in understanding the processes by which the black body, with its “violent regulation of blackness as spectacle and discipline […] in the racializing surveillance system of the slave system” became “legible as property” (42). Under this rendering, surveillance, as an instrument of racialization, comes to the fore. Browne terms racializing surveillance as those instances where “Racism and anti-blackness undergird and sustain the intersecting surveillances of our present order” (9). Not only this but the surveillance of blackness continues into slavery’s aftermath, producing additional modes of monitoring blackness, tracking its identification and managing its visibility within hierarchal controls. Referencing black feminist Patricia Collins, Browne further examines how surveillance ultimately produced a ‘representational practice’ rooted in the subordination and social control of black bodies (57). To illustrate this, Browne uses the iconic image of black female servility, and writes:
“The mammy as a representational practice relies on the circulation of stereotyped images and ideologies of black womanhood that seek to position the black woman as ‘the faithful, obedient domestic servant’[…] Such exaggerated representational strategies work to rationalize the economic exploitation and sexual subjugation of black domestic workers and of those who labor in low-paying conditions of in the service sector” (58).
Here we see how surveillance works to reinforce a visual construct and hierarchal norm
concerning black female otherness –one where, as Browne and Collins note, the iconic image of the ‘Mammy’ (present in film and other facets of visual culture) represents the “dominant group’s perception of the ideal Black female relationship to elite White male power” (58). As Collins deduces in her text Controlling Images, this representational practice of the ‘Mammy’ is not only exemplary of the visual construction of blackness but derivative of the very real social oppression and institutional racism that organized black female labor and bodies under
segregation. More succinctly, the “controlling image” of the Mammy’ indexes both a visual discursive control and a social control where the everyday surveillance and management of black life was necessary for a racializing system to sustain (58).
Browne and Collins offer invaluable understandings to this study’s examination of visual discipline and the western visual archive’s treatment of the black body. Browne’s framework of surveillance in particular, helps us to see how this study’s concept of visual discipline may manifest in contemporary ways that continue to render the black body object of the West’s knowledge making processes. Collins also allows us to see how image tropes, as produced under conditions of systemic racialization, take on ideologically embedded meanings about blackness. This chapter takes the theorizing of both scholars a step further by placing surveillance as a visual disciplinary practice within the Western visual archive’s documentation and discursive formation of the black body. Specifically, I argue that surveillance not only serves as a means to identify the black body within the contemporary racial gaze but polices the boundary of the human/ nonhuman binary. I further demonstrate how a racialized iconography of the black body (here, not merely a circulation of image tropes but an expansive visual register that documents, identifies and mythologizes blackness within the western imaginary) not only operates as a functionary of surveillance but as an enduring representational control in the West’s visual discursive production of blackness. This ultimately brings us to an understanding of the black body’s visual tra[ffi]cking – or its continued visual appropriation, commodification and the racialized iconography that results. To do this, I position the image aesthetics of Citizen and
Situation 7 to observe the above theoretical tensions and also consider how the contemporary
engagement and production of image practice by black cultural producers are issuing a response to the West’s visual discipline.
Rankine’s Citizen and Images of Blackness
“On your way home, your phone rings. Your neighbor tells you he is standing at his window watching a menacing
black guy casing both your homes. The guy is walking back and forth talking to himself and seems disturbed. You tell your neighbor that your friend, who he has met, is babysitting. He says no, it’s not him. He’s met your friend and this isn’t that nice young man. Anyway, he wants you to know he’s called the police.”
-Citizen: An American Lyric, Claudia Rankine The poetry of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen is at times lyrical. Other times it is socially critical and prosaic. At all times, its meditations on race, blackness and the politics of the body emit an uninterrupted signal feed from a uniquely American stream of consciousness. Rankine charts the psychic register of U.S. racial politics through deeply intimate observations,
white) decrying that he is being forced to hire more black writers even though so many more qualified writers remain available. There is a scenario in a restaurant where a group of
rambunctious black youths are referred to by a racial slur by a nearby stranger. Throughout the text’s progression, the “image of blackness” (1)- as mediated through expressions of everyday racism, social surveillance and public discourse –remains under constant examination.
Moreover, Citizen’s use of images –historical, contemporary and artistically rendered –bring the condition of black visibility into the text in thematically profound ways. For the purpose of this study, the image aesthetics of Citizen are explored in relation to this chapters dominant
concepts of surveillance, racialized iconography and visual tra[ffi]ck. Through my analysis, I posit that Citizen’s visual mediation of “the image of blackness”(1) –a racialized image enforced through surveillance –allows understanding of the black body’s racialized iconography and continued visual tra[ffi]ck. To do this, we will examine two visual icons in Citizen: Hennessy Jones and the “Angry Nigger exterior” (61) and Caroline Wozniacki imitating Serena Williams. Through a close reading of these images and their textual correlates, we will further examine how the black body continues to be depicted by enduring visual archetypes rooted in slavery and colonialism.
The Angry Black/ Venus Hottentot
Hennessy Youngman and Caroline Wozniacki’s photographs of are found in chapter two of
Citizen, which examines themes of black visibility and black anger through a reading of Serena
Williams’s tennis career. Rankine uses Hennessy Youngman as an entry point and describes the controversial web persona’s recommendation- that those seeking to become successful black artists should “cultivate ‘an angry nigger exterior’ (61). Youngman, a black man, is placed in conversation with moments in Serena Williams’s career where her anger is met with penality, public reprimand and mocking. On that last fact, the image of tennis player Caroline Wozniacki is featured imitating Serena’s body. The photographs of Youngman and Wozniacki manifest Rankine’s examination of blackness, its public spectacle and how black anger in response to racialized experience is schizophrenically deemed both “marketable” and policeable (60). The photographs also direct us to this section’s central concern of how “the image of blackness”(1) – as mediated through representations of the black male and female body –is entrenched in a certain iconography and surveilling visual discipline. Indeed, as we consider the rationale of this representational logic, the photos --and the “image of blackness”(1) they evoke from a “western racial imaginary” (89)-- are situated in the analysis of visual tra[ffi]cking.
Hennessey Youngman’s photograph shows him clad in a basketball cap, white sleeveless shirt and chained necklaces. Below him, the words read “Be Angry”. We learn in the text that Youngman is a web persona of the series “Art Thoughtz” which gives art and cultural criticism through a stylized, satirical street vernacular. The photo is a still from his segment “How to become a successful Black artist” where Youngman encourages black viewers to assume a persona of aggression (read as the “Angry Black”) if they hope to become marketable in the art world. A cursory glance at his online pressence reveals Youngman listing other means to channel this aggression such as watching images of racial violence (i.e. the Rodney King and Emit Till incidents). Both Youngman’s satire and his image navigate stereotypes concerning blackness in relation to white image consumption. Rankine writes, “Youngman’s suggestions are meant to expose expectations for blackness[…] The commodified anger his video advocates rests lightly on the surface for spectacle sake[…] it can be engaged or played like the race card and is tied solely to the performance of blackness” (62). An important distinction to note is the treatment of this ‘commodified anger’ (62) in caricature versus genuine black rage and public outcry.
Youngman’s stylized “Angry Black” speaks both as satire and metanarrative concerning beliefs about an acceptable image of anger expressed through a black body.
of aggression as performed through the black male body is one that has persisted in iconic images for centuries in the American locale of the western visual archive. The Buck, the Mandango, the black rapist and the black criminal are various emanations of Youngman’s “Angry Black” and comprise an enduring visual lexicon engendered by the transatlantic slave trade (Smithsonian Institute 2019). Youngman’s historical correlative- the Buck- was an image of the black male as physically aggressive yet marketable to the labor desires of white plantation owners. The Mandango, an extension of this archetype, married fetishized beliefs about the black male’s physicality to social anxiety about black lust, moral deviance and sexual transgression. Scholarship examining the pervasiveness of these image tropes, during slavery and after, have noted how the circulation of these stereotypical images produced and rationalized a fear of the emancipated black man which in turn legitimized the deployment of racial violence to control black social movement (Smithsonian Institute 2019). Youngman’s choice of dress, an
exaggerated b-boy style modeled after black male rappers- is not outside of this history. Indeed, his reference to present hip-hop culture –a sphere where black masculinity and aggression often take center stage --indexes the way visibility and movement of black men’s bodies have evolved in the public eye. It is crucial to note that Youngman, whose real name is Jason Massoum, is a performance of the stereotypical image of the black male body. Not only this but his
“performance of a blackness” (62)- rooted in a sustained, visual history of ascriptive racial beliefs- reveal how the visibility of the black male continues to be negotiated across contending meanings and modes of appropriation.
Caroline Wozniacki is pictured in Citizen with exaggerated additions to her chest and shorts. She is motioning to her backside, tennis racket in hand, grinning proudly. In the text, the moment is described as occurring shortly after Serena Williams is titled WTA Player of the Year.
Wozniacki’s mockery is placed as the culmination of slights, penalties, undermining and verbal assaults on Williams’s body by the predominantly white sphere of international tennis
competition. Prior to the photo, Rankine describes instances where Williams and her
embodiment of anger and racial difference in the white imagination earns her a unique treatment in relation to Wozniacki and others. As Rankine meditates on the over- penalizing and
discrediting of Williams’s anger, we are made aware of the hypervisibility of her black female body. This hypervisibility is co-opted by Wozniacki’s caricatured impersonation and described by Rankine as “giv[ing] the people what they wanted all along by embodying Serena’s attributes while leaving Serena’s “angry nigger exterior behind” (113).
