Black Subject Research Articles

Skin acts: race, psychoanalysis, and the black male performer

In Skin Acts , Michelle Ann Stephens explores the work of four iconic twentieth-century black male performers—Bert Williams, Paul Robeson, Harry Belafonte, and Bob Marley—to reveal how racial and sexual difference is both marked by and experienced in the skin. She situates each figure within his cultural moment, examining his performance in the context of contemporary race relations and visual regimes. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis and performance theory, Stephens contends that while black skin is subject to what Frantz Fanon called the epidermalizing and hardening effects of the gaze, it is in the flesh that other—intersubjective, pre-discursive, and sensuous—forms of knowing take place between artist and audience. Analyzing a wide range of visual, musical, and textual sources, Stephens shows that black subjectivity and performativity are structured by the tension between skin and flesh, sight and touch, difference and sameness.

Beyond the Subject: Anglo-American Slave Narratives in the Netherlands, 1789-2013

In recent years life writing scholars have increasingly linked the autobiographical genre to human rights causes, such as abolitionism. This article aims to historicize and contextualize the presupposed connection between human rights and the human subject of autobiographical discourse by focusing on the cultural mobility of Anglo-American slave narratives. Tracing their presence in the Netherlands since the late eighteenth century, it is demonstrated that slave narratives were considered of no value to Dutch abolitionism and Dutch debates on slavery and its legacy until very recently. Publishers and readers did, however make sense of slave narratives as sensational, gothic literature. Furthermore, the narratives were appropriated by Dutch fundamentalist Protestants advocating the nation’s emancipation from its state of spriritual “slavery”. Only when secularization converged with post-colonial migration patterns new interpretations stressing Black experience, agency, and subjectivity came to the fore in the Netherlands. Inspired by African-American rhetoric, Afro-Dutch migrants appropriated slave narratives in order to break the public silence on the Dutch history of slavery. This article was submitted to the European Journal of Life Writing in June 2014 and published in April 2015.

Hope Against Hope: Queer Negativity, Black Feminist Theorizing, and Reproduction without Futurity

The Black subject in Lee Edelman’s queer negativity is explored here as both absent from and productive of its most radical critiques of futurity. The essay attempts to read a different queer negativity within the tradition of Black feminist theorizing.

Autoantibodies in Systemic Lupus Erythematosus, on Black African Subject, in Abidjan

Aim: To determine the clinical and immunological characteristics of patients with systemic erythematosus lupus in Abidjan. Patients and Method: We studied 117 patients’ files with systemic lupus erythematosus aged 12 to 73 years old, who fulfilled the American College of Rheumatology (ACR)’s criteria. Antinuclear autoantibodies (ANA) were searched by indirect immunofluorescence. Anti-DNA native autoantibodies, extractable nuclear anti-antigens autoantibodies (anti-Sm, anti-SSA, anti-SSB and anti-RNP) and anti-phospholipids autoantibodies have been searched by ELISA technic. Results: The most frequent clinical manifestations were: articular damages (86.32%), cutaneous and mucosal lesions (71.79%) and fever (76.67%). Kidney damages have been noticed in 40.17%. Neurologic manifestations have been observed in 36.75%. Pericarditis and pleurisies have been noticed in 22.22% and 11.97% of cases, and anaemia in 86.32% of cases. ANA have been detected in 94.12% of cases, anti-DNA native’s autoantibodies in 73.53% and anti-Sm autoantibodies in 75% of cases. Anti-SSA and anti-SSB autoantibodies were respectively in 75% and 56.25% of cases. Anti-RNP autoantibodies were in all the patients, and anti-phospholipids autoantibodies were in 37.50% of cases. Conclusion: Systemic lupus erythematosus of Ivorian black subject is characterised by high prevalence of autoantibodies, mostly Anti-RNP.

“Room to breathe”: Narrative Anacrhony and Suffocation in William Faulkner’s “Pantaloon in Black”

“Room to breathe”: Narrative Anacrhony and Suffocation in William Faulkner’s “Pantaloon in Black” antaloon in Black,” the third chapter of William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses (1942), is separated into two sections—first, a section focal­ ized through a black laborer named Rider, and second, one focalized through the white deputy who was “officially in charge ofthe business” (GDM 116) ofclearing away Riders body after the unrepresented lynching that divides his section from the first. Although Faulkner presents the central scene of violence as itself “unnarratable” (Prince 2), an as yet unstudied narrative phenomenon depicts Riders physical experience as anticipating his unseen murder: before actually being lynched, Rider repeatedly experiences suffoca­ tion. Following from the death of his young wife Mannie and his resulting loss of autonomy, Riders attacks function as a link between his eventual death by hanging and his disenfranchisement as a black man—unable to protect, or to afford to care for, his loved one. While an integral element of the story arc of “Pantaloon in Black,” Riders suffocation also functions structurally. Because it anticipates the central act of unrepresented violence, Rider’s experience can be conceived of in terms of Genette’s “prolepsis” (67) as ordering the chapter towards the hanging, suggesting that Riders life and death contain the same potential choked out by post-Emancipation white supremacy. “Pantaloon in Black” is not Faulkner’s first fictional attempt to grapple with the legacy of American lynching. Prior to the publication of Go Down, Moses, three texts had already struggled with the question of how to represent racist mob violence, and whom to hold accountable for its proliferation. The short story “Dry September” (1931) and the novels Sanctuary (1931) and Light in August (1932) introduced lynching as a repeated motifin Faulkner’s oeuvre be­ fore the publication of Go Down, Moses. However, it is in “Pantaloon in Black” that Faulkner makes his most overt criticism of lynching practices. The shift represented by the third chapter ofthe novel not only concerns a lynching that does not result from accusations of sexual violence—the usual representation of lynching in his previous work and elsewhere—but it also importantly wid­ ens the field ofreflection on racist violence that the earlier three texts explored. While an obvious critique of the Southern ideologies that justify vigilante vio­ lence is still present in the novel, Go Down, Moses attempts more than many of Faulkner’s earlier works to capture both black subjectivity and the ways racism 49 50 Sarah E. Stunden “Room to breathe” in “Pantaloon in Black! makes access to that subjectivity impossible, inconceivable, or merely inconve­ nient for members ofwhite society. Contrasting Riders murder with Faulkners three earlier representations of lynching, Edward Clough argues that in “Dry September,” Sanctuary, and Light in August, Faulkner “typically read lynching as a white phenomenon. . . . Yet when [he] returned to the theme a decade later in Go Down, Moses, he... instead presented lynching as fundamentallya traumatic black experience, a threat to do­ mesticity and individual subjecthood” (394). As Clough notes, it is important for this reason that the reader of“Pantaloon” actually witnesses the crime for which Rider is murdered (as distinct from the earlier texts), as well as the traumatic frame of mind that results in his resistance to an abusive system of wage labor. Together, the erroneous assumptions of guilt that result in Will Mayes’s (“Dry September”) and Lee Goodwins (Sanctuary) deaths, or the misunderstanding surrounding Joe Christmas’s murder (but not rape) of Joanna Bundren (Light in August), demonstrate an unbridled white supremacist thirst for blood that is driven more by the need to kill than by any desire to restore justice. In contrast, although “Pantaloon” also centers upon the erasure of Rider’s legitimate criti­ cism ofsystematic labor oppression, it does so only after giving the reader access to what had previously been an unrepresentable black consciousness. While the original three lynching narratives veer away from the internal experiences ofthe black characters who will suffer most violently from Jim Crow racism, the focalization of “Pantaloon in Black” through Rider illustrates his emotional and physical reality prior to his death. Offsetting the intentional ab­ sence ofthe lynching from the narrative...

Introduction

Introduction L. H. Stallings (bio) As a follow-up to Black Camera’s Special Issue on Sexuality and Eroticism in volume two, number two, this Close-Up continues to examine how black cultural imagination has learned to revel in the fluidity of sexuality and the nourishing impact of eroticism in as many ways as possible, despite Western patriarchy’s deployment of sexuality as power and violence. This alternative utility of sexuality and eroticism occurs in films thematically concerned with black sexual subjectivity. Black people have moved beyond simply wanting to see themselves and their sexual desire represented on screen in Hollywood: they have moved on to creating what they would like to see. Characters such as Mandingo, Sweet Sweetback, Foxy Brown, Nola Darling, and Mr. Marcus, and films such as Looking for Langston (dir. Isaac Julien, 1989), Tongues Untied (dir. Marlon Riggs, 1989), and Young Soul Rebels (dir. Isaac Julien, 1991) are from a bygone era of independent black filmmaking, though their cinematic tropes often land in other films and their political platforms and artistic ideals arise in classrooms. If the proliferation of hundreds of black sex tape scandals, the massive production of black-themed porn, the Afrocentric sexual instruction videos from the Adam and Eve production company, the R. Kelly child pornography trial, or the big-screen adaptation of erotic writer Zane’s Addicted (dir. Bille Woodruff, 2014) doesn’t convince us that black sexuality in film, video, and new media matters to black communities and art, then perhaps Silence: In Search of Black Female Sexuality in America (dir. Mya B., 2004), Afrodite Superstar (dir. Venus Hottentot and Candida Royalle, 2006), A Good Day to Be Black and Sexy (dir. Dennis Dortch, 2008), Karmen Geï (dir. Joseph Gaï Ramaka, 2001), The Aggressives (dir. Daniel Peddle, 2005), Mississippi Damned (dir. Tina Mabry, 2009), Children of God (dir. Kareem Mortimer, 2009), Pariah (dir. Dee Rees, 2011), and Gun Hill Road (dir. Rashaad Ernesto Green, 2011), can better substantiate the growing importance of black sexuality and eroticism in black film. These films serve as evidence that filmmakers’ concerns [End Page 163] and approaches to sexuality and eroticism have moved beyond representation politics and onto consider questions of agency, subjectivity, and the interiority of black life. Analysis of these complex elements has led to more radical conversations about sexuality in black film scholarship over the last two decades. Academic research and knowledge, in addition to mass popular conversations on black sexuality, have shifted the terrain from the approaches of arguing for proper and normative representations in Hollywood films or independent cinema. The new crop of film scholars learned a lot from Jacqueline Jones and bell hooks, but they also began incorporating other fields’ examination of sexuality and eroticism into their analysis of black film. Mia Mask’s Contemporary Black American Cinema insists, Since the early 1990s the field of Cinema Studies has grown considerably to encompass a wider array of scholars researching and studying black American cinema and cinemas of the black diaspora. The field now encompasses scholars situated squarely within the discipline of Film Studies and those who are located in other fields (i.e., Anthropology, Sociology, Cultural Studies, Political Science, Education, Art History, Queer Studies) but who publish interdisciplinarily. Across the United States, and internationally, there are growing numbers of scholars invested in Cinema Studies as a discipline.1 Mask’s statement about interdisciplinarity in Black Film Studies cannot be overstated, since the growth and evolution of Black Film Studies hinged on its founding critics’ ingenuity in rejecting “white” Film Studies early complicity with disciplinarity and elitism. Manthia Diawara, Clyde Taylor, Ed Guerrero, Mark Reid, Valerie Smith, Tommy Lott, Jacqueline Bobo, Phyllis Klotman, Michael Martin, bell hooks, Jacqueline Stewart, Haile Gerima, and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster are now joined by the likes of Mia Mask, Kara Keeling, Keith Harris, Norma Manatu, Terri Francis, Angelique Harris, Christine Achman, Akin Adesokan, N. Frank Ukadike, Yvonne Welbon, and Regine M. Jean Charles, who also emphasize interdisciplinarity. The list grows when you include recent porn scholars such as Mireille Miller-Young, Jennifer Nash, and Ariane Cruz. Thus to avoid further reinscriptions of white supremacy and patriarchal gazes embedded within the analytics of traditional film scholarship and...

Beyond Black and Blue: BDSM, Internet Pornography, and Black Female Sexuality

Feminist Studies 41, no. 2. © 2015 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 409 Ariane Cruz Beyond Black and Blue: BDSM, Internet Pornography, and Black Female Sexuality I have been the meaning of rape I have been the problem everyone seeks to eliminate by forced penetration with or without the evidence of slime and/ but let this be unmistakable in this poem is not consent I do not consent —June Jordan, Poem about My Rights Introduction: The Evidence of Slime Slavery, itself a kind of “slime,” remains an active marketplace for the production of Black female sexuality and its representations.1 The impact of chattel slavery and the pervasive rape of Black female slaves on modern 1. In using the term “Black women,” I am referring to African American women for whom the history of chattel slavery in the Americas has produced the socio-historical conditions that uniquely inform Black female subjectivity and sexual politics. My use of this term is not to essentialize Black American womanhood; rather, like Black feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins, I use the term to gesture to a Black women’s standpoint influenced by the condition and experience of gendered and racialized abjection, a “common experience of being Black women in a society that denigrates women of African descent.” Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment (London: Routledge, 1990), 22. In this essay, I focus on Black women who practice BDSM, a small but nonetheless heterogeneous group of women in the already-marginalized larger kink community. 410 Ariane Cruz constructions and representations of Black women has been well theorized , in particular by a number of Black feminist scholars who have worked to rupture what Darlene Clark Hine terms the “culture of dissemblance ,” the politics of silence shrouding expressions of Black female sexuality.2 While the antebellum legacy of sexual violence on Black women is substantive, what has not been effectively considered is how Black women deliberately employ the shadows of slavery in the deliverance and/or receiving of sexual pleasure. That is, how the “slime”—a staining sludge of pain and violence—becomes a type of lubricant to stimulate sexual fantasies, access sexual pleasure, and heighten sexual desire. In this paper, I explore how Black women facilitate a complex and contradictory negotiation of pain, pleasure, and power in their performances in the fetish realm of BDSM.3 Situating my analysis in the context of hardcore BDSM Internet pornography and the controversial praxis of race play, I argue that BDSM is a critical site from which to reimagine the formative links between Black female sexuality and violence. Race play is a BDSM practice that explicitly uses race to script power exchange and the dynamics of domination and submission. Most commonly an interracial erotic play, race play employs racism, often involving the exchange of racist language, role-playing, and the construction of racist scenes. Eroticizing not just racism, but the miscegenation taboo, racial difference, and (hyper) 2. See Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West,” Signs 14, no. 4 (1989): 912–920. For more on Black female slave sexual assault and its aftermath, see Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); Ann duCille, “‘Othered’ Matters: Reconceptualizing Dominance and Difference in the History of Sexuality in America,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 1, no. 1 (1990): 102–27; Elsa Barkley Brown, “Imaging Lynching: African American Women, Communities of Struggle, and Collective Memory,” in African American Women Speak Out on Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas, ed. Geneva Smitherman (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1995), 100–24; and Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness As Property ,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (June 1993): 1707–91. 3. BDSM is an umbrella term that stands in for bondage/discipline (B/D), domination /submission (D/S), and sadism/masochism or sadomasochism (S/M). For the purposes of this paper I exchange S/M, S&M, and/or SM with the more contemporary label BDSM. For more about the terminology of BDSM, see Margot Weiss, Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). Ariane Cruz 411 racialization itself...

Diabetic Neuropathy in Black Sub-Saharian Africa Subject: Clinical and Electromyographic Fealures

Diabetic neuropathy occurs in more than 60% of diabetic’s populations. The aim of our study wasto describe clinical and electromyography characteristics of diabetic neuropathy in a Senegalese black diabetic population (Senegal). This was a cross-sectional study of 68 neuropathic type 2 diabetic patients with 56.8years mean age. Clinical examination, Visual Analog Scale, Neuropathy Symptom Score, Disability Neuropathy Score and electro neuromyography were used to characterize neuropathy. Mean duration of diabetes was 8.7 years and mean glycosylated hemoglobin9%. Motor neuron deficit was found in one patient. The main sensory disorders were paresthesia (97%), neuropathic pain (94%), and hyperesthesia (44%). Cramps were found in 45.5% and tendon reflex abnormalities in 63.2% of cases. Tachycardia (52.9%), intestinal transit disorders (42.6%) were the most common symptom of autonomic nervous system neuropathy. High blood pressure (p=0.05) and sex (p 0.05). Diabetic neuropathy in our series is a multi variate symptom with usually mixed type. Its risks’ factors were still poorly known. Studies on larger series would better characterize it.

Gospels according to Faith: Rewriting Black Girlhood through the Quilt

This essay investigates the ways that the menaced and sometimes triumphant bodies of Black girls have impacted upon narratives of African American subjectivity, as exemplified by the children’s works of Faith Ringgold. Ringgold has consistently engaged the project of reimagining the figures of the wounded black girls of African American literature, epitomized by figures like Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Pecola Breedlove, and Alice Walker’s Wile Child. This essay examines the trajectory of Ringgold’s work, from a primal moment of stasis and wounding in her Shades of Alice quilt, through the increasingly liberationist vision of Tar Beach , to a new myth about salvation and redemption in The Invisible Princess , arguing that, through the innovative form of the story quilt, she reimagines the construction of Black female subjectivity.

Traduzindo literatura da diáspora africana para a língua portuguesa do Brasil: o particular, o pós-colonial e o global

The present article presents a brief reflexive synthesis of a relevant aspect raised by recent trends in Translation Studies in their intimate relationship with Literary Studies. Departing from studies from the last decades, which have been showing that translation is not just an interlingual process, but basically, an intercultural activity, this article aims at raising elements for the understanding of how blackness – or the black subject – is translated into different contexts and geographical spaces. In lusophone areas, the issue is full of colonial and postcolonial traits. Focusing on Brazilian Portuguese, we look for answers to questions such as “Which are the implications of translating contemporary African-American Literature from English, with its specific forms of questioning identity, into Brazilian Portuguese?” (or vice-versa), or still, “Which are the assumptions about Afro-descendant Literature in Brazil and in the United States?” Having in mind that such questions are much broader and deep than they actually seem, new questions turn up about the construction of identities in different geographical spaces. Aspects related to the translation of African-American works into Brazilian Portuguese (and vice-versa), as well as political and cultural aspects that shape selection, translation, and reception of translated literature will be central in the discussion.

Bearing the Burden of Loss: Melancholic Agency in Charles W. Chesnutt’s Paul Marchand, FMC

Although a number of scholars have focused on titular protagonist in analyzing arbitrary constructions of race and performances of racial identities (1) in Charles W. Chesnutt's Paul Marchand, FMC, few have fully explored ways in which author deploys novel to personify history and create entities that represent those people who seem lost to official record but demand attention nevertheless (Tettenborn 114). Indeed, Chesnutt embeds in main plotline of Paul Marchand, FMC an account of subject formation of Zabet Philosophe, (2) an enslaved black Saint-Dominguan woman who, at behest of her owner, flees Haiti with her master's children during 1793 revolution and later influences destiny of wealthy Beaurepas family of New Orleans. As I argue, Zabet Philosophes biographical narrative is developed as a response to white Saint-Dominguan refugees' historical erasure of black Haitians' subjectivity in their descriptions of war and their transnational emigration to United States. Through Zabet's story, Chesnutt, consequently, endows cake woman with authority to reveal black refugee's experiences of complex realities of enslavement, dispersion, and diasporic survival. In so doing, he further unmasks Zabet as an embodiment of what I term a black melancholic subject, a raced individual who not only willfully manifests infinite sorrow that stems from enduring a long history of personal losses but also transforms this grief into an enabling force of resistance against racial and post-imperial objectification. (3) Ultimately, my concentration on Zabet's narrative is to make evident her identity as more than an old trusty family slave (Wilson xix) but as a Haitian revolutionary whose subjectivity emerges both as effect of a prior power--French imperialism--as well as the condition of possibility for a radically conditioned form of agency (Butler 15)--melancholic agency. One may speculate that Chesnutt's decision to reference Haitian Revolution and compose a narrative of melancholic subjectivity of a black Saint-Dominguan refugee was informed by his intense interest in political state of Haiti during time he was writing novel. (4) At time of novel's authorship, Chesnutt was following newspaper accounts, especially those that appeared in Nation, of American occupation of Saint-Domingue. (5) In 1915, United States intervened in debt-ridden and politically unstable Haiti's affairs ... for proclaimed end of stabilizing country ... and preventing rival nations from bringing it under their (Crisler, Leitz, and McElrath 244). On March 18, 1922, Chesnutt relates to Ernest Angeli that he had signed a brief in support of withdrawing U.S. marines from occupying Haiti in 1915 (Crisler, Leitz, and McElrath 150). He would later encourage others, such as Harry C. Smith, editor of Cleveland Gazette, to support a resolution to remove American troops. Chesnutt writes, The United States ought to be able to help Haitians out of rut without entirely depriving them of their hard-earned and long-maintained independence (Crisler, Leitz, and McElrath 159). Through this statement, Chesnutt connects modern with colonial domination of Haiti. In particular, twentieth-century occupation harkens back to history of Haitian subjugation by French. And like French, Americans would also experience Haitian rebel resistance against its presence on island nation in 1918. America's agenda to control Saint-Domingue thus provides rich fodder for Chesnutt in constructing novel through which he tacitly articulates his contemporaneous grievance concerning continued oppression involved in Western rivalries that are endemic to nation-building. Moreover, Paul Marchand, FMC provides readers with occasions for historical remembrance of black insurgents and especially refugee subjects who were engendered by Haitian Revolution. …

The Black Market: Property, Freedom, and Piracy in Martin Delany’s Blake; or, The Huts of America

“The Black Market: Property, Freedom, and Piracy in Martin Delany’s Blake; or, The Huts of America” examines varied forms of social and political life made possible through an economic framework of piracy. Recognizing that the hemispheric slave trade is a piratical act in the context of the novel, I propose that Delany suggests that slaves too should engage in piracy as a response to the illegal commercial activities undergirding the peculiar institution. In the novel, Blake’s act of piracy exists both at the register of the material theft of property and at the level of the symbolic restructuring of social and political order. By exploring the economic impact of Blake as pirate, Delany presents a form of Black participation in the market that disrupts the proper operations of exchange and doubly creates a Black market. Read alongside the significant historical events of the mid-nineteenth century, Blake helps frame my interest in the intersections of economic freedom and liberal principles as they come to bear on the enslaved Black subject. This mode of analysis reinvigorates of the interplay between economics and literature, forcing us to engage with analyses of power that account for commercial subjectivities emerging in the context of slavery in the Americas, and surfaces the overlooked processes of illegal exchange in the novel.

The Punk Show: Queering heritage in the Black diaspora

This article presents ethnography of Black cultural politics in post-flood New Orleans during the summer and fall of 2009. I engage in three interrelated subjects: (1) life histories and oral narratives in which I trace a history of Black queer performances locally referred to as “Punk Shows”; (2) my observations of a community play in which heritage, Black queer subjectivity, and the struggle over communal memory intersect; and (3) a broader discussion of the ways power is constituted by the shaping of history and communal memory to narrate race and sexuality. I argue that some ways of life are constructed as timeless, recuperable, and productive to the nation rather than ephemeral and contradictory. In arguing for a theory of Black queer generation, I deploy performance studies to valorize the “ephemeral” history of their cultural labor.

Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination by Salamishah Tillet (review)

Reviewed by: Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination by Salamishah Tillet Patricia Stuelke Tillet, Salamishah . 2012 . Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination. Durham, NC : Duke University Press . $84.95 hc. $23.95 sc. 248 pp. In a second-season flashback, viewers of Shonda Rhimes’s delicious soap opera Scandal finally become privy to African-American political fixer Olivia Pope’s reasons for (temporarily) abandoning her job and her affair with married white president Fitzgerald Grant, despite having helped steal the election for him. “I’m feeling a little Sally Hemings–Thomas Jefferson about all this,” she tells Fitz in a stolen hallway conversation. How does this rare historical invocation fit into Scandal’s optimistically postracial yet manifestly corrupt world? Salamishah Tillet’s penetrating study of the uses of slavery in African-American post–civil rights culture offers a means of approaching this question, suggesting that we might understand Rhimes’s show and other texts like it as complicated articulations of African Americans’ ambivalent dreams for American democracy in the post–civil rights era. Tillet’s elegantly constructed book analyzes representations of slavery in the post–civil rights period by African-American authors, artists, and intellectuals as responses to the experience of “civil estrangement”: the paradox in which African Americans possess equality under the law but remain barred from American economic prosperity and the nation’s official myths, monuments, and histories. African-American post–civil rights representations of slavery respond to this paradox by advancing what Tillet terms “a democratic aesthetic,” a “mode of poetics and politics” (12) that critiques myths of American equality while simultaneously writing African Americans back into those narratives and revising them for a radically democratic future. In defining this aesthetic, Tillet explains that these representations neither idolize the past nor revere the state but rather advance a “critical patriotism,” one that incorporates elements of postmodern skepticism and Post-Soul aesthetics in order to advance a utopian dream of democracy while “remaining skeptical of its materialization” (12). In her book’s first two chapters, Tillet investigates the deployment of this “democratic aesthetic” by interrogating post–civil rights revisions of antebellum icons. The first chapter traces how novelist Barbara Chase-Riboud, playwright Robert McCauley, and historian Annette Gordon-Reed reimagine Sally Hemings not as a victim or an empty symbol, but rather as a “radical black female subject” (23). These authors’ restagings of the interracial intimacy between Hemings and Jefferson, Tillet argues, revise sanitized myths of slavery and register post–civil rights civic disenfranchisement while casting Hemings as an agent of history and an ideal model for post–civil rights citizenship. In the second chapter, Tillet [End Page 146] considers post–civil rights renditions of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom and Topsy, tracing how works by Ishmael Reed, Robert Alexander, Bill T. Jones, and Kara Walker use satire to puncture the hegemony of Stowe’s sentimentality while reimagining more complex Uncle Toms and Topsys. Both of these chapters would make for excellent reading in undergraduate literature or composition classrooms, as Tillet organizes them in clearly framed sections that would offer undergraduates useful models for comparative analytical essays. The second chapter, however, is ultimately more compelling than the first, due to Tillet’s careful exploration of how the texts she discusses “are remembering slavery at different points in time” (85). She is beautifully attentive, for example, to how Reed’s 1976 Tom registers a cynical critique of the Black Power movement, while Alexander’s later reappropriation of Tom registers the frustration of the civic estrangement that arose after Rodney King’s beating. In contrast, such attention to shifting historical context is noticeably absent from Tillet’s first chapter. Further consideration of her authors’ revisions of Sally Hemings in relation to the different historical moments of their production (ranging from 1979 to 2008), particularly the evolving context of US feminisms, might have helped Tillet more fully account for the texts’ variegated presentations of the Hemings-Jefferson relationship. The second half of Tillet’s book takes up more collective forms of remembering and representing slavery, considering post–civil rights African-American heritage tourism and African-American...

Representational Static: Visual Slave Narratives of Contemporary Art

In 1993, visual artist Glenn Ligon debuted Narratives, a series of prints that uses the antebellum slave narrative title page as a template for ironic commentaries on contemporary American race relations. Substituting his own autobiographical details in place of those of the ex-slave narrator, Ligon creates large mock-ups of slave narrative frontispieces that link the racialized conditions of production of antebellum narratives to the racialized conditions of contemporary African American art. Narratives challenges viewers’ expectations of black art and life by utilizing the autobiographical conventions of an earlier time, mimicking the baroque form and syntax of slave narrative titles and ancillary advertisements while keeping the contemporary subject always in view. One of the prints in the series, for example, The Life and Adventures of Glenn Ligon A Negro (1993) (see Figure 1), confronts the viewer with an unexpected collision of nineteenth-century literary conventions and late twentieth-century autobiographical disclosure. The historical displacement creates a frisson of competing expectations that operates as both punch line and trenchant critique, reducing the black post-civil rights era subject and the ex-slave narrator to type. In the competing discourses of authenticity on display, it becomes impossible to locate the “real” Ligon. Rather than “the unvarnished truth” (as it might have been called in the antebellum period) or a “confession” (as it might have been called in the postcivil rights era), Narratives presents a sly critique of the very notion of authenticity as it has been unequally applied to black artists and writers. Like the stencil paintings for which Ligon is perhaps best known—such as Untitled (I Feel Most Colored When I Am Thrown against a Sharp White Background) (1990), inspired by Zora Neale Hurston’s essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” (1928)—Narratives works by way of reference to canonical African American literature and is composed entirely of text. Although the prints are richly intertextual and often reference visual media—quoting prominent film and theater critics, or boasting “with a portrait” (Ligon, Black Rage)—there are no actual images in the series. Ligon avoids figuration and instead uses competing registers of text to frustrate the viewer’s assumption of an essential black

Comparison of Cardiovascular Risk Assessment Algorithms to Determine Eligibility for Statin Therapy: Implications for Practice in Canada

BackgroundNew lipid management guidelines in the United States have created controversy regarding risk assessment using the new Pooled Cohort Equations (PCE) which might overestimate cardiovascular risk and identify an excessive number of patients as new candidates for statin therapy. MethodsWe compared the Framingham Risk Score (FRS) used in Canada with PCE, the FRS version used in Adult Treatment Panel III (ATP III), Reynolds Risk Score (RRS), and Systematic Coronary Risk Evaluation (SCORE) using patient profile simulation of 10 cohorts of 100,000 each (total n = 1,000,000 for each comparison). Patients with diabetes, established cardiovascular disease, or family history of premature cardiovascular disease were not considered, mimicking uncomplicated primary prevention. Analyses were performed separately for men and women and for black individuals when feasible. ResultsSCORE (high-risk version) was most concordant with FRS in men, whereas PCE was most concordant in black women. Compared with FRS, all other algorithms except SCORE (high-risk version) identified more simulations as low risk. Reclassification from low FRS to a higher risk was not seen using RRS or ATP III and seen in < 5% of simulations using PCE, affecting predominantly black subject simulations. ConclusionsChoice of risk calculator leads to systematic differences in risk categorization that can influence eligibility for lipid-lowering therapy. Compared with FRS, an isolated switch to PCE, RRS, or ATP III is unlikely to lead to substantial reclassification from low to higher risk categories in Canada.

The African Scholar in the Western Academy

In this essay, I push the discursive envelope on what it means to speak of a particular space, location, and position of the “Black Scholar” in the (Western) academy and its colonial satellites globally. The Black Scholar is not about racializing the identity of Blackness (or Black subject as simply an intellectual of Black identity) nor a pursuit for “an essential Black subject.” Rather, it is about an appreciation of the interface of critical (Black) scholarship and creative intellectual thought and practice that goes back through time as a counterpoint and challenge to dominant ideologies, including “ideologies of the authentic.” It is argued that the Black Scholar is fundamentally about an intellectual praxis informed by an African sense of history, culture, identity, community knowledge, and political work to bring about change in the lives of African peoples.

Putting on a Bold-Face

This article will examine how artists Renee Cox and Sonia Boyce are visually problematizing notions of civilized society by re-presenting eighteenth- and nineteenth-century black women as the unorthodox, unusual, and, thus, transgressive embodiment of modernity. In Queen Nanny of the Maroons (2004) series and From Tarzan to Rambo: English Born ‘Native’ Considers her Relationship to the Constructed/Self Image and her Roots in Reconstruction (1989) respectively, Cox and Boyce re-present these black women, creating images of them that reflect a multi-valenced black female subjectivity. These artworks challenge the incessant need to study and contain the black masses, and particularly black women, which was so characteristic of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Both artists offer with postcolonial rigour a counter-history of those who came before them, confronting how colonial authorities of the Americas viewed black women of the nineteenth century: as the antithesis of civilized society.

Mickalene Thomas

This essay considers how discussions of gender, race, and sexual difference converge in the work of celebrated multimedia artist Mickalene Thomas. Thomas is part of a contingent of African-American contemporary artists associated with the controversial term post-black: a highly contested terminology meant to characterize the aesthetic and conceptual specificities of post-Civil Rights-generation visual artists. Often mischaracterized as a post-racial stance, post-black captures the shifting gender and sexual politics that inform black artistic production in the twenty-first century. However, it also speaks to the need to redefine the ideological parameters of blackness in the face of persistent racial, sexual, and gender inequality. In her striking images of women, Thomas reimagines black female subjectivity beyond its ideologically overdetermined meanings, and envisions her subjects through a queer-feminist desiring lens, a gesture that dares to assert a more inclusive understanding of what—and whom—blackness may represent.

Where Author and Auteur Meet

Abstract This essay examines black women's transition from cultural consumers to artistic producers in Martha Southgate's under-studied novel Third Girl from the Left. Analyzing the text's exploration of black women's misrepresentation in popular film and mainstream narratives of history, this essay argues that Southgate rewrites the script of black female desire beyond sexual subjugation and racial stereotype over the course of the novel's three generations of mothers and daughters. Southgate reveals the importance of black women controlling the narrative of black female subjectivity portrayed on the movie screen. Moreover, she illustrates the significance of black women's performance of subjectivity in their own lives. By charting a “reel” and “real” history of the erotic, Southgate not only explores the repercussions of movie-watching and movie-making for black female spectators, but she also demands that her readers participate in the critical interpretive work necessary for recognizing the difference between “fact” and “fiction.” Her novel reveals that such cultural work is important for interrogating and reconfiguring past and present representations of black female eroticism. This essay looks at the nuances in Third Girl from the Left by placing the novel in the context of its explicit movie allusions as well as films with which the text is in tacit dialogue.