African Body Research Articles

The revenge of history: Indian indenture and its afterlife in South Africa

ABSTRACT The aftermath of the 150th anniversary in 2010 of the arrival of the first indentured migrants in Natal saw an explosion of family and community histories. While some academic historians question the credibility of such histories, carefully sifted and cross-referenced, they can provide a wealth of new information, allowing for deeper insights into indentured migration and Indian settlement in South Africa. Family histories help in building intergenerational histories that go beyond indenture. This expansion of the historical archive provides a fuller story of Indians who, for a large part of their existence, were written out of the history books or written in as a festering sore to be lanced from the South African body politic through mass repatriation. While digging deeper into individual family histories, the story is situated within the broader context of racist exclusion, showing how these boundaries were reinforced as much as they were challenged and trespassed.

The anatomical variations of the cubital tunnel in a South African body donor sample

PurposeThe ulnar nerve (UN) courses through the cubital tunnel, which is a potential site of entrapment. Anatomical variations of the cubital tunnel may contribute towards cubital tunnel syndrome (CuTS), however, these are not well described. The aim was to compare the range of variations and dimensions of the cubital tunnel and the UN between sexes and sides of the body.MethodsSixty elbows from 30 embalmed bodies (17 males and 13 females) were dissected. The prevalence of the cubital tunnel retinaculum (CuTR) or anconeus epitrochlearis (AE) forming the roof of the tunnel was determined. The length, width, thickness, and diameter of the cubital tunnel and its roof were measured. The diameter of the UN was measured.ResultsThe AE was present in 5%, whereas the CuTR was present in the remaining 95% of elbows. The tunnel was 32.1 ± 4.8 mm long, 23.4 ± 14.2 mm wide, 0.18 ± (0.22–0.14) mm thick, and the median diameter was 7.9 ± (9.0–7.1) mm, while the median diameter of the UN was 1.6 ± (1.8–1.3) mm. The AE was thicker than the CuTR (p < 0.001) and the UN was larger in elbows with the AE present (p = 0.002). The tunnel was longer in males (p < 0.001) and wider on the right (p = 0.014).ConclusionThe roof of the cubital tunnel was more frequently composed of the CuTR. The cubital tunnel varied in size between sexes and sides. Future research should investigate the effect of the variations in patients with CuTS.

‘Blackness’, the Body and Epistemological and Epistemic Traps: A Phenomenological Analysis

ABSTRACT This paper has two objectives. The first objective is a decoupling of the African body from ‘blackness’—a discursive formation—that was attached to the body by the slave and the colonial regimes. The second aim is a critique of modern epistemic and epistemological regimes that give ‘blackness’ its modern currency. To achieve these goals, I use phenomenology, a philosophy of self-responsible beginning according to Edmund Husserl, to return to the African body before colonialism and slavery. Through phenomenology I can ‘bracket’ what the above regimes and their legacies have been conditioning the African to see and know about the body. The paper is therefore an attempt at a liberatory epistemology aimed at overcoming what Achille Mbembe has referred to as a ‘dungeon of appearance’. Since ‘blackness’ is continental and diaspora Africans (CADA) seen through discursive colonial eyes, phenomenology provides an epistemological freedom to observe the body in-time.

Grammars of Progress and Pathology: A Recursive History of Africa, Cancer, and "Diseases of Civilization".

The phrase "disease of civilization" and concomitant lexicons, such as "pathologies of modernization," frequently surface across public and global health discourses. This is particularly the case within the framework of cancer research in Africa. In this article, the authors trace the emergence of these grammars of progress at the beginning of the twentieth century as a biomedical lens through which to analyze and frame cancer in Africa. Arguing with Ann Stoler for a recursive understanding of colonial and postcolonial history, the authors follow in detail the lexical shifts and recursions across the twentieth century, as these grammars move from diseases of civilization to development and modernization. In tracing these lexical shifts, they place them within the broader understandings of Africa and the African body as an other against which Euro-America frames itself.

African Vernacular Symbols of Black Intersex Children in Sinethemba Ngubane's Installations (2007-2016)

African Vernacular Symbols of Black Intersex Children in Sinethemba Ngubane's Installations (2007-2016)

Mabanckou’s Carnivalesque World in Verre Cassé

This article examines images of the body and laughter in Alain Mabanckou’s novel Verre Cassé (2005). Using Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalesque, this discussion highlights how carnivalesque humor operates in the novel through scatological imagery and informal diction. The novel’s eponymous writer-protagonist documents tragic tales of his compatriots in a bar that Verre Cassé himself frequents. Through this alcoholic writer wallowing in his own excrement, Mabanckou suspends conventions of literary and social propriety. Images of excretion and copulation, and familiar speech of the “marketplace” punctuate the novel, as Mabanckou draws laughter from the fate of the novel’s suffering heroes. I argue that this carnivalesque idiom makes possible an ambivalently utopic world—the black Other who rejects social decorum exists free from but also outside conventional society. As the bar’s patrons consume their lives away in alcohol, they forego social decorum, living as social pariahs in the margins of society. By portraying the suffering that afflicts the black African body in resolutely ludic terms, Mabanckou transgresses the grim image of African literature. This ambivalent gesture carnivalizes the dreary realities of postcolonial Congo wrought by both colonization and internal conflict, all-the-while injecting levity where there seems to be no place for it.

Black bodies, Black queens, and the Black sisterhood on social media: perspectives from young African women in Australia

ABSTRACT African Australian diasporic literature has drawn attention to the highly racialised experiences that Black African women encounter living in bodies that are raced as Black in Australia. Within their (in)visibility and ‘otherness’ – they are looked upon in suspicion and yet also ignored, silenced and excluded. Their bodies are involuntarily marked as ‘deficit’ and ‘deviant’, resulting in disadvantage, alienation, and non-belonging. Through the theoretical lens of (in)visibility, we centre the racialisation of the Black African body as crucial to the digital practices that young Black African women in Australia engage in on social media. In drawing on a multi-method approach involving social media ethnography, the ‘scroll-back’ interview method, and sustained, ongoing dialogues on social media, this article explores the everyday social media practices of nine young Black African women in Australia. The findings indicate that social media is used to visibilise and (re)claim contemporary Black African womanhood, amongst a global digitally mediated community of Black African women. These, Black female-centred empowerment digital communities are important spaces in which young Black African women in Australia can unlearn, resist, and reject the harmful racialised ideologies that they have endured (and continue to endure) in white Australia.

How does Maya Angelou perceive the African female body?

How does Maya Angelou perceive the African female body?

Hakuna Mhou Inokumira Mhuru Isiri Yayo: Examining the Interface between the African Body and 21st Century Emergent Disruptive Technologies

Colonially depicted as a region distinctive for fables and fabrications, Africa has ever since not been allowed to reclaim anything original. Dispossessed of their original wealth, Africans have been forced to live in fabled and fabricated houses, eating fabled, and fabricated food—closer to animals. Similarly, dispossessed of their original human identities, Africans have been forced to adopt fabricated identities. With the 21st century not promising any return to original African human identities, Africans are set to be further nanotechnologically (using tiny nanoparticles) fabricated into cyborgs that speak to ongoing posthumanist and transhumanist experiments with emergent disruptive technologies. Inhabiting not only fabricated houses but also increasingly inhabiting nanotechnologically fabled and fabricated bodies, Africans should learn to, in terms of the Shona (a people of Zimbabwe) proverb, hakuna mhou inokumira mhuru isiri yayo (no cow lows for a calf that is not its own), repossess original mastery over their own lives.

African Realities in Motion: The Role of Dance in Vieyra’s Films in Constructing Intersubjective African Identities

This article examines how Vieyra's treatment of his subjects' intersubjective realities serves as a critique of the normative ethnographic film genres of the era that served to "other" African peoples and cultures. Using examples of dance in Vieyra's films, the article demonstrates how depictions of the African body in motion explicitly served to cultivate his uniquely African film aesthetics and ethics. This exploration of Vieyra's awareness of the interconnectedness of film, ethnography, colonialism, and dance seeks to articulate a new way for scholars of film and dance to understand the role that dance plays in African film.

Race, nose, truth: dystopian odours of the Other in American antebellum consciousness

ABSTRACT It was in 1835, in the wake of the Nullification Crisis that shook the United States with the threat of civil war over federal law, state’s rights and the Slave Power, that Jerome Holgate, under the pseudonym ‘Oliver Bolokitten’, published his dystopian fiction A Sojourn in the City of Amalgamation. It posited the existence of an African body smell that would make anti-odour machines essential if American societies fell prey to the potential ravages of racial miscegenation. Two decades after Holgate offered his dystopian world-view of smell and race, ‘Cephas Broadluck’, a pseudonym for the American author Allen Gazlay, published Races of Mankind: With Travels in Grubland (1856), an allegorical attack on comparable forms of sensory and sexual ‘amalgamation’, also proposing olfactory detection as a racial protection for the white body politic. The antebellum era dystopias of Holgate and Gazlay combined ideas of truth and race through the sensory experiences of the nose, which had previously been socially conditioned to sense racial Others through a false consciousness about the smell of Africans throughout the Atlantic World. Despite the efforts of academics to deconstruct such absurd beliefs and experiences in the modern world, olfactory racism continues in the languages of both current political leaders and within the bowels of the Internet. Because these prejudicial perceptions continue through what seems for many racists to be biological experiences of truth, scholars must focus much more on analysing embodied perceptions of Othering if academic arguments about the social construction of race are to make any inroads against the return of racist, technologized and fascist modernity in the contemporary West.

The role of the female body in contesting and negotiating space in sports for women in rural and urban Zimbabwe

This article examined attitudes, knowledge, behavior and practices of men and society on Gender bias in sports. The paper examined how the African female body was made into an object of contest between African patriarchy and the colonial system and also shows how the battle for the female body eventually extended into the sporting field. It also explored the postcolonial period and the effects on Zimbabwean society of the colonial ideals of the Victorian culture of morality. The study focused on school sports and the participation of the girl child in sports such as netball, volleyball and football. Reference was made to other sports but emphasis was given to where women were affected. It is in this case where reference to the senior women soccer team was made to provide a case study for purposes of illustration. Selected rural community and urban schools were served as case references for ethnographic accounts which provided the qualitative data used in the analysis. In terms of methodology and theoretical framework, the paper adopted the political economy of the female body as an analytical viewing point in order to examine the body of the girl child and of women in action on the sporting field in Zimbabwe. In this context, the female body is viewed as deeply contested and as a medium that functions as a site for the redirection, profusion and transvaluation of gender ideals. Using the concept of embodiment, involving demeanor, body shape and perceptions of the female body in its social context, the paper attempted to establish a connection between gender ideologies and embodied practice. The results of the study showed the prevalence of condescending attitudes towards girls and women participation in sports.

African body marks, stereotypes and racialization in eighteenth-century Brazil

ABSTRACT This article analyzes new dimensions of the process of racialization in eighteenth-century Brazil. It argues that colonial society did not racialize Africans as a homogeneous mass but used several social technologies to make sense of the diversity of their origins. The creation of blackness involved an intense production of knowledge on their origins by means of cultural and visual markers (mainly scarification) associated with the stereotyping label ‘nação’ (nation), and at the same time the use of phenotypic markers that functioned as common denominators of their difference from Europeans. The article contends that these two dimensions of the construction of African difference were not successive, as if one were a stage of the other, as if society first dealt with the diversity of origins and then reduced them to the category ‘negro’. In fact these two instances were interdependent, relational, and hence facets of the same historical phenomenon.

Productive docile bodies in Zimbabwean dance training: the African body in classical ballet training at Afrikera Arts Trust

ABSTRACT In this paper, we deploy Foucault’s theories of power to interrogate body politics in ballet training in Zimbabwe. To achieve this, we critically examine instances of ballet-related discourse-induced docility occurring in the Afrikera Professional Dance Training (APDT) students’ bodies during training. From a Foucauldian perspective, we interrogate how a ballet dancer’s body that has been timeously ‘subjugated’ to a standard of expected behaviour by the society and has acclimated to a normalized African body posture which is conditioned to become ‘ideal’ through APTD’s ballet training. Through the intensive case study examination of the Afrikera Professional Dance Training ballet process, we observe possible shortfalls in Foucault’s theories of bio-power in social and community development advocacy.

Barthes’s Black Soldier: The Making of a Mythological Celebrity

This article examines Roland Barthes’s representation of the African body and the theoretical use of blackness in one of his most famous texts, Mythologies (1957). More specifically, it examines the implications of the paradigmatic status conferred to the so-called “black soldier” based on the analysis of a popular French magazine photography. It argues not only that Barthes’s original representation is fraught with misreadings of the image, but also that the mythological celebrity of the black soldier has been deployed through the uncritical repetition of this initial take. Finally, the article points to existing or potential reexaminations of this celebrity in film and photography.

Kuvaa na kuvalia: maana yake nini? Covering and Uncovering the Female Body in Tanzanian Fashion

The article takes into examination how customs, clothes and the conception of African female body have changed over time in Tanzania, highlighting the wide system of symbols that are involved in them. Starting from the assumption that clothes and body are expression of the social and cultural reality, and a means of modelling powers and relationships, the article follows linguistic, semiological and psychological analytical approaches. Particular attention is given to fashion as an emerging industry in Tanzania, revealing how fashion designers envision their endeavours as a pathway both for pursuing their passion and for revitalising failing clothing industries.

Jesus Comes to South Africa: Black Twitter as Citizen Journalism in South African Politics

ABSTRACTThis is a qualitative study where purposefully sampled hashtags and memes gathered through virtual ethnography as shared on Twitter during the Local Government Elections 2016 (LGE2016) and the 105th anniversary celebrations of South Africa’s ruling African National Congress (ANC) are analysed as political communication. Through the use of qualitative content analysis and the concept of “citizen” and “voter” voice, which neatly links with citizen journalism, I argue that new media in politics suffuses political relationships between citizens and leaders in ways that cannot be ignored. While in some cases social media-assisted citizen activism as a practice has wrought positive influences in society, in others it has been detrimental. However, the concern here is on how Black Twitter negotiated mainly ANC’s political messages and how they used Twitter as an alternative public sphere and counter-hegemonic tool to express their voting patterns, their “political” identities, frustration, and understandings or readings of political ideologies and citizen power in the South African body politic.

A Re-Examination of African American College Women's Body Image Pathology

A Re-Examination of African American College Women's Body Image Pathology

Dancing to a resistant imaginary: reconfiguring female (a)sexualities through Zorbitality

ABSTRACT In the twenty-first century, asexuality has become synonymous with sexual orientation, being described as a ‘lack’ of sexual attraction. At this juncture, a study of female (a) sexualities is long overdue. First, little has been written on the topic. Second, with the rise of a postfeminist culture, asexual-identified women are being framed within static narratives of frigidity or spiritual devotion. In response, this paper develops the concept of Zorbitality. Zorbitality is a resistant imaginary, which seeks to reconfigure female (a)sexualities through collective ecstatic motion. It harnesses the historical transformation and cultural hybridity of Afro-diasporic rhythms, to interrogate the Western thought systems that constrain women’s ecstatic movement. The paper draws on two methodologies: Deleuzian feminist cartographies and collective biography. These methodologies speak to a posthuman concern with reaching an enhanced sense of the collective, through the affective intensity of each moment. Two dance narratives frame the analysis: Stravinsky’s twentieth-century ballet, The Rite of Spring, where a sacrificial ‘virgin’ dances herself to death, and West African Yoruba dance, characterised by solo dance within a collective. These narratives interweave in the memory of my research respondent, Martha. This memory evokes the uncreolised African body, which enables Martha to ethically open to human and non-human others.

‘Ain’t I a Woman?’ Grace Nichols and M. NourbeSe Philip. Re-Membering and Healing the Black Female Body

The black African body is a highly historicised space as it has been tortured and traumati sed through the processes of enslavement and colonialism. As for the black female body, a raced and gendered space, it has been even more exploited, objectified and fragmented by hegemonic and patriarchal systems. In diasporic Caribbean women's literature, the black fe male body is often depicted as a site of tension, and a complex entity struggling to make itself heard outside of historical spaces of oppression and mutilation. This body needs to transcend traumatic memory in order to renew and heal. Grace Nichols's 'The Fat Black Woman's Poems' and M. NourbeSe Philip's 'She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks and A Genealogy of Resistance' allow the black female body to be heard beyond intersectional oppressions. This paper seeks to demonstrate how these women writers embody resistance as they assert corporeal visibility and allow transcultural bodies to speak and heal through creative discourse.