Black Women's Bodies and The Nation ─ Race, Gender and Culture

Black Women's Bodies and the Nation develops a decolonial approach to representations of Black women's bodies within popular culture in the US, UK and the Caribbean and the racialization and affective load of muscle, bone, fat and skin through the trope of the subaltern figure of the Sable-Saffron Venus as an 'alter/native' (Truillot, 2003). Enslavement, colonialism and settlement in the metropole created the Black woman's body as both other/same and deeply affective whether read as fear, disgust, contempt or fascination. Her body draws attention to the negotiations through which the semblance of consensus on the citizen body is created at the same time as Black women's bodies as Sable-Saffron Venus alter/natives rupture the collective body formed through the (re)iteration, (re)interpretation and (re)presentation of the meanings of muscle, bone, fat and skin. This dismantling of body norms reveals other modes of being through disalienation's (Cesaire, 2000) refusal of the racial epidermal schema (Fanon, 1967).

Shirley Anne Tate is Associate Professor in Race and Culture and Director of the Centre for Ethnicity and Racism Studies at the School of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Leeds, UK and Visiting Professor in The Institute for Reconciliation and Social Justice at the University of the Free State, South Africa.