14 * Black Cultural Studies

Abstract

This chapter focuses on books published in the field of black cultural studies in 2008. It is divided into four sections: 1 . Psychoanalysis, Gender and Sexuality; 2 . Black Visual Culture; 3 . Music, Literature, and Culture; 4 . Philosophy and Identity. Part one begins by looking at a recent translation of Frantz Fanon’s first work and a novel that takes Fanon as its subject and develops a theoretical reflection on Fanon’s thought in fiction. The gendered treatment of the images and texts of women in colonial and neocolonial Algeria is discussed as an exposure of the national traumas of shame, secrecy and guilt that continues to confound contemporary France and Algeria. Issues of gender and race stereotyping are further discussed in a history of the veil and a memoir of black male stereotyping. Race in contemporary installation art presented in museums and galleries is explored in part two, and part three looks at new interdisciplinary studies of black expressive cultural forms in the fields of performance theory, theatre history, music and dance. The works in this section chart a transatlantic perspective on black cultural production that illustrates the emergence of a new critical genealogy of black Atlantic modernism. The final section discusses works that address Africana philosophy, war and philosophy and a critique of black intellectual life in the post-civil rights era of United States.