Guest Editor's Introduction: The Bodies of Black Folk: The Flesh Manifested in Words, Pictures, and Sound

Abstract

And, finally, need I add that I who speak here am bone of bone and flesh of flesh of them that live within Veil'? --W. E. B. Du Bois (xxviii) Nigger. Darky. Coon. Slave. Refugee. Nappy-headed hos. Welfare Mama. Mammy. Video Vixen. Monkey. Buck. For long there has been an America, bodies of black folk have been co-opted by language and images meant to distinguish their presence American citizens indeed human beings--within context of global body politics. Such repositioning of flesh, result of what Stuart Hall, invoking Michel Foucault, calls the fatal couplet of 'power/knowledge' (Hall 299), brings into view imaginary fullness of cultural identity and its interplays. Many of terms spoken above have circulated in popular in some form or fashion. Don Imus's arrogant assumption that he could call, for example, members of Rutgers women's basketball team nappy-headed hos speaks to referential systems of representation coded in performances of race. Imus's attempt to withdraw (racial) currency from those patented images deposited in our cultural vault speaks to brilliance of this system and its simultaneity--the ways black body and its identity are seized upon and made markers for grounding of social limits. (1) In these intercultural contexts, we come to understand continuous migration of symbols of culture, history, and power along contours of black flesh. As Hall ascertains, regimes of power and representation are emboldened by positioning of human beings subjects or groups of people for express purpose of constructing--through memory, myth, fantasy, and narrative--cultural identities that judiciously efface one's true self' or shared culture, creating in its stead shifting and superficial doppelganger that cripples and deforms. is one thing to position people as Other of dominant discourse, writes Hall. It is quite another thing to subject them to that 'knowledge,' not only matter of imposed will ... [but] by power of inner compulsion and subjective to norm (299). In other words, doppelganger cons suspecting quarry--convincing those ensnared in dominant discourse to believe that knowledge presented by regime of power is true, and these individuals spend rest of their lives convincing themselves that they will or will not become what someone else tells them they are. This combative struggle to appropriate their minds--their inner spirits--is key to understanding mind and body dynamic: if one can affect way one thinks, body will soon follow. Thus flesh and mind must unite in tumultuous performance of unreconciled strivings, of imposed wills and inner compulsions, revealing in embodied form peculiar sensation of always looking at one's self through eyes of others (Du Bois 3). We position this special issue in sutures of production of identity and con-formation to norm. Of key concern to our authors are ingenious and revolutionary ways disempowered reinvent social politics of their bodies through word, act, and deed. Such engagements seek to symbolically disrupt cultural practices that subjugate their identities. Not all attempts to thwart pathological meanderings of obsessed with black flesh are successful. As Carlyle Van Thompson aptly determines, the violation of black bodies continues to be pervasive issue in American society and requires sustained discussion of complex ways black people negotiate their agency within a white supremacist culture (15). Thompson goes on to argue that social, political, and legal narratives produced by and about African American people reveal how black bodies are not only owned, but also consumed within multiple racial and sexual cultural systems; these same systems, I argue, expose strategies of intersubjectivity employed by artists and critics alike who must reinvent themselves (and their linguistic idioms) in public spaces from which they speak. …