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Photographic Insights: Ceremonial Ritual in Ghana and Togo

Brian Jeffery

in Situated Narratives and Sacred Dance: Performing the Entangled Histories of Cuba and West Africa

Photographer Brian Jeffery looks at the role of witness when documenting practitioners as part of sacred ceremonies and rituals. Perspectives are also shared on the subjectivity of visual ... More

Photographer Brian Jeffery looks at the role of witness when documenting practitioners as part of sacred ceremonies and rituals. Perspectives are also shared on the subjectivity of visual documentation through the photographic lens in addition to Jeffery's experiences with environmental portraiture to appropriately represent individuals in their communities. The chapter concludes with a brief summary of his conceptual development with utilizing his photographic source materials into the original artwork of photographic assemblages included in the numerous Secrets Under the Skin gallery installations.Less

In listening/in response

Marianne M. Kim

in Situated Narratives and Sacred Dance: Performing the Entangled Histories of Cuba and West Africa

Chapter 16 is a short essay by artist and performer Marianne M. Kim reflecting on her introduction to Flanders Crosby’s expansive research in West Africa and Cuba and her contribution to the Secrets ... More

Chapter 16 is a short essay by artist and performer Marianne M. Kim reflecting on her introduction to Flanders Crosby’s expansive research in West Africa and Cuba and her contribution to the Secrets Under the Skin installation through live improvisational performance. Kim’s personal writing addresses the exploration, preparation, and execution of her solo durational performance titled in listening | in response. The essay considers the role of witness and the power of liveness.Less

Analytics of Credit Frictions and Market Freezes

Assaf Razin

in Understanding Global Crises: An Emerging Paradigm

The chapter reviews models that analyze frictions in loans extended by financial institutions and other lenders.1 Broadly speaking, these are models of credit frictions and market freezes. This ... More

The chapter reviews models that analyze frictions in loans extended by financial institutions and other lenders.1 Broadly speaking, these are models of credit frictions and market freezes. This literature highlights two key problems that create frictions in the flow of credit from lenders to borrowers. When these frictions strengthen, a financial crisis ensues that can even lead to a complete freeze. One problem is that of moral hazard. If a borrower has the ability to divert resources at the expense of the creditor, then creditors will be reluctant to lend to borrowers. Hence, for credit to flow efficiently from the creditor to the borrower, it is crucial that the borrower maintains “skin in the game”; that is, that he has enough at stake in the success of the project and so does not have a strong incentive to divert resources. This creates a limit on credit, and it can be amplified when economic conditions worsen, leading to a crisis.Less

The Studio Resumes Production, 1922–1923

Brian Taves

in Thomas Ince: Hollywood's Independent Pioneer

After four months of idleness, the Ince studio was ready to begin operating again. Under the new contract, Ince's first release was in September 1922: Skin Deep. The story was inspired by the ... More

After four months of idleness, the Ince studio was ready to begin operating again. Under the new contract, Ince's first release was in September 1922: Skin Deep. The story was inspired by the notorious East Side gangster “Monk” Eastman, whose real name was William Delaney. With the resumption of activity at the studio, Ince relied more heavily on other companies' paying for access to his facilities as a vital source of income to split the cost of overheads. This was recorded on a list kept of the movies; number 1 had begun with the signing of the Famous Players–Lasky contract, with 102 movies produced in the three years from 1917 to 1920.Less

Frantz Fanon, the Pathologies of Freedom, and the Decolonization of Institutional Psychotherapy

Camille Robcis

in Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France

This chapter examines the role of psychiatry in the life and work of Frantz Fanon. It focuses on Fanon’s relationship to institutional psychotherapy which he discovered at the hospital of Saint-Alban ... More

This chapter examines the role of psychiatry in the life and work of Frantz Fanon. It focuses on Fanon’s relationship to institutional psychotherapy which he discovered at the hospital of Saint-Alban where he was a resident from 1952 to 1953, after completing medical school in Lyon. Institutional psychotherapy confirmed, on a clinical level, what Fanon had already intuited in his early work, especially in his early articles and in his 1952 book, Black Skin, White Masks, all of which revolved around the problem of psychic causation. If alienation was always political and psychic at the same time, then decolonization needed to involve the disalienation of the mind. This is precisely what Fanon tried to do in his psychiatric work in North Africa, first in the hospital of Blida-Joinville, and later in Tunisia, and in his last political texts, especially in The Wretched of the Earth (1961).Less

Ghostly Forms: Race, Nation, and Genre in Frantz Fanon

in Worlds Within: National Narratives and Global Connections in Postcolonial Writing

This chapter explores the ghostly continuities between Fanon the Martinican-born psychiatrist and Fanon the anticolonial Algerian nationalist. It finds in both a common engagement with the ... More

This chapter explores the ghostly continuities between Fanon the Martinican-born psychiatrist and Fanon the anticolonial Algerian nationalist. It finds in both a common engagement with the topological limitations of territory, both colony and nation, by means of the oscillatory temporality of consciousness, including the racial consciousness Fanon attempts to get beyond in Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and the national consciousness espoused in The Wretched of the Earth (1961). Through a reading in dialogue with Derrida's Specters of Marx (1993), the chapter argues for Fanon's body of work as a model of fantasmatic nationalism, nationalism which incorporates outside into inside, globe into nation in such a way as to suggest that those externalities were always there from the beginning.Less

Minority agency, experiences and reconstructed identities: how migrants negotiate racially stratifying systems

Ebun Joseph

in Critical Race Theory and Inequality in the Labour Market: Racial Stratification in Ireland

Although racial stratification influences the outcomes of groups and their members, this chapter shows that it is not deterministic because individual migrants can and do express minority agency ... More

Although racial stratification influences the outcomes of groups and their members, this chapter shows that it is not deterministic because individual migrants can and do express minority agency which influences labour mobility and intra-group hierarchy. This dialectical interaction between minorities and racially stratifying systems in their new country of settlement is the focus of this chapter. It presents a framework for interrogating the migration to labour market participation process within four strands that every migrating person goes through: expectation, experience, negotiation and identity reconstruction. It also presents the typologies identified from migrants’ trajectories that reveal five characteristic labour market experiences which in turn become solidified into reconstructed identities. Just as racial stratification has been argued to do in this book, its presence in the labour market participation process selectively metes out an endemic colour-coded migrant penalty which proliferates racial inequality.Less

Colonial Love in Fanon and Moffatt

Linnell Secomb

in Philosophy and Love: From Plato to Popular Culture

This chapter explains Frantz Fanon's reflections on the risks of interracial love in colonial contexts of racial inequality. Fanon's Black Skin, White Mask reports the situation of the black and ... More

This chapter explains Frantz Fanon's reflections on the risks of interracial love in colonial contexts of racial inequality. Fanon's Black Skin, White Mask reports the situation of the black and elaborates the subjectivities and the neuroses that arise in colonial contexts. While Fanon remains oriented mainly toward the experience of black love of whiteness, Tracey Moffatt refines this story tracing the consequences of black-white colonial love. The different tone adopted in Fanon's reading of black women's and men's desires indicates a greater uneasiness about relations between black women and white men. Gayatri Spivak's A Critique of Postcolonial Reason reflect on the impacts of the operation of white humanist benevolent love in the colonial context. The ambiguities and the paradoxes, the dangers and the destructive potential, of love become apparent in the fraught engagements of colonial and postcolonial relations.Less

Narrating the Secrets Under the Skin Installation

Jill Flanders Crosby

in Situated Narratives and Sacred Dance: Performing the Entangled Histories of Cuba and West Africa

Chapter 13 unpacks the process of creating the Secrets Under the Skin transdisciplinary art installation that preceded this book. It opens with a Ghanaian fieldwork story in the community of Nogokpo, ... More

Chapter 13 unpacks the process of creating the Secrets Under the Skin transdisciplinary art installation that preceded this book. It opens with a Ghanaian fieldwork story in the community of Nogokpo, Ghana, that planted the seed for the installation. It further unpacks the concept of art-as-ethnography, revealing the intersecting voices that formed the approach to the installation using methods from various art media. Included are detailed descriptions about the collaborative process that also included our interlocutors.Less

The Artist’s Accidental Proof: The Palm Frond and the Wood Block

Susan Matthews

in Situated Narratives and Sacred Dance: Performing the Entangled Histories of Cuba and West Africa

This chapter describes the format and media of Matthews’ paintings, their intended content, and instances in which images had to be in interpreted in order to transcend the literal while preserving ... More

This chapter describes the format and media of Matthews’ paintings, their intended content, and instances in which images had to be in interpreted in order to transcend the literal while preserving ethnographic integrity. She describes how the presentation of the Secrets Under the Skin installation as a whole depended on available exhibition space as well as perceived relationship of the viewers to the work. Viewers’ reading and reaction to the works depended on their personal and collective histories.Less

George Lamming

Mary Chamberlain

in West Indian Intellectuals in Britain

By the time George Lamming wrote In the Castle of My Skin, he was able to translate the fear, misery and violence he had witnessed into a sophisticated literary analysis of the complexities of ... More

By the time George Lamming wrote In the Castle of My Skin, he was able to translate the fear, misery and violence he had witnessed into a sophisticated literary analysis of the complexities of poverty and powerlessness. His arrival in Britain coincided with an explosion of Caribbean literature and poetry. Freedom was essential if the individual was to become fully human and the ego whole rather than incomplete. For Lamming, the search for authenticity necessitated a profound reworking of the colonial relationship. All of Lamming's fiction is concerned with migrants, leaving or returning to the Caribbean. He has been as involved in politics as in literature and for over a decade published no novels, focusing instead on critical, editorial and political work. His aesthetics led him to reflect on authenticity and oppression, to translate those philosophical musings into political action and critical reflection on the lingering impact of colonialism.Less

Lean Times to Revival: 1953–1970

Richard Carlin and Ken Bloom

in Eubie Blake: Rags, Rhythm, and Race

This chapter explores the beginnings of the rediscovery of early jazz and blues musicians by a dedicated band of collector/scholars; Rudi Blesh and Harriet Jans’s research on early ragtime that led ... More

This chapter explores the beginnings of the rediscovery of early jazz and blues musicians by a dedicated band of collector/scholars; Rudi Blesh and Harriet Jans’s research on early ragtime that led them to Eubie; Blake’s partnership with Flournoy Miller to write Hit the Stride (not produced) and Brown Skin Models of 1955, staged as a touring show by Miller’s brother Irvin; and Flournoy Miller and Noble Sissle’s continuing attempts to revive the original Shuffle Along. The chapter also examines the ragtime revival that led to Blake recording two albums for 20th Century Fox with a small Dixieland jazz-flavored ensemble; his appearance at the 1960 Newport Jazz Festival; and how he met ragtime revivalist Bob Darch, leading to a few appearances and a mid-1960s recording. Finally, the chapter discusses John Hammond’s interest in recording Blake and how the recording and success of The Eighty-Six Years of Eubie Blake kick-started Eubie’s late career.Less

Pornography’s Play(ing) of Race

Ariane Cruz

in The Color of Kink: Black Women, BDSM, and Pornography

Chapter 2 reads black women’s diverse performance of race play in contemporary American pornography, focusing on three sites of analysis. First, I discuss the performance of black female/white male ... More

Chapter 2 reads black women’s diverse performance of race play in contemporary American pornography, focusing on three sites of analysis. First, I discuss the performance of black female/white male humiliation in the BDSM femdom website of a veteran black female performer/pornographer, Vanessa Blue, arguing that race is a critical technology of interracial BDSM pornography. Next, I read a performance of black female submission staged as a historical reenactment of chattel slavery in hard-core mainstream race-play pornography to illustrate the hold this history maintains over our erotic imaginary. Then, I turn to amateur Internet race-play pornography to analyze queer race-play performance in porn. From amateur to high budget, mainstream to margins, and across the shifting racial and gender dynamics of production and positions of domination and submission, pornographic performances of race play exhibit an unfaltering racial hyperbole and eroticization of black female racial-sexual alterity and its anxiety. Though I demonstrate the salience of race play in the pornographic imaginary, I analyze race play as a comprehensive performance with a more universal sociocultural currency and relevance. Far from being a liminal sexual practice, race play delineates the performance of racialized sexuality more generally.Less

Sleights of Hand, Black Skin, and the Redemption of Curzio Malaparte’s La pelle

Marisa Escolar

in Allied Encounters: The Gendered Redemption of World War II Italy

This chapter analyzes Curzio Malaparte’s La pelle (1949; The Skin), a graphic depiction of the interracial, sexual encounter between the hypersexual Buffalo soldiers and the local prostitutes on the ... More

This chapter analyzes Curzio Malaparte’s La pelle (1949; The Skin), a graphic depiction of the interracial, sexual encounter between the hypersexual Buffalo soldiers and the local prostitutes on the streets of Naples. Interspersed within these spectacles, La pelle evokes the Franco-Moroccan goumiers—the accused perpetrators of mass rape after their victory at the battle of Monte Cassino. Using the historical referent to inform the allegorical reading of the “colored” soldier as “other” and “penetration” as a metaphor for the failure of redemption, this chapter argues that the racialized soldier opens redemption beyond the U.S.–Italian encounter. As the title shouts, “skin” is a major concern, yet the question of “saving one’s skin” shifts attention away from the way in which black-skinned figures insert Italians and Allies into a global network that undermines neat moral distinctions. These interracial, sexual encounters evoke the war’s interrelated colonial conflicts and the misogynist, racist logic that sustains both.Less

Bourdieu and Fanon on Algeria

Roxanna Curto

in Bourdieu and Postcolonial Studies

This essay examines how Bourdieu and Fanon’s views on colonialism and post-colonialism diverge and converge, focusing on their ideas about the revolutionary potential of the Algerian peasants, ... More

This essay examines how Bourdieu and Fanon’s views on colonialism and post-colonialism diverge and converge, focusing on their ideas about the revolutionary potential of the Algerian peasants, especially with regard to their preservation of traditions and adaptability to modernity. In particular, there are distinct parallels between Fanon’s psychoanalysis of race in Black Skin, White Masks, and Bourdieu’s analysis of symbolic domination in Distinction. In addition, Bourdieu’s emphasis on the role of racism and violence in colonization in “The Shock of Civilizations” and Algeria 1960 echoes Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. Nonetheless, these two thinkers strongly disagreed about how to decolonize nations. Fanon, a member of the FLN, equated this party with progress, and believed that the fellah (the indigent peasant class) would lead the revolution. For Bourdieu, this fellah can only break out into senseless revolt, and it is the urban proletariat that holds the greatest revolutionary potential.Less

Identifying the differently humoured

Mark S. Dawson

in Bodies Complexioned: Human Variation and Racism in Early Modern English Culture, C. 1600-1750

To trace the persistence of bodily discrimination based in humoralism, this chapter turns to advertisements for wanted persons. By the mid-eighteenth century not only English cities like Bristol and ... More

To trace the persistence of bodily discrimination based in humoralism, this chapter turns to advertisements for wanted persons. By the mid-eighteenth century not only English cities like Bristol and Norwich, but also Edinburgh and Dublin, Boston and Philadelphia, had newspapers whose readers drew upon and continued to feed London’s press. Serial publication of advertisements made possible an information dragnet which people used to locate offenders, fugitives, and the missing. Examining these notices in series allows us to witness physical discrimination at work on a daily basis. We can reconstruct lines of sight, establish the most commonly drawn bodily contrasts, and evaluate their contemporary meaning for ordinary folk. Using a custom-built database indexing some 23,600 physical descriptions, the chapter shows how distinctions on the basis of somatic variation were clearly being drawn much earlier but the resulting patterns are unfamiliar. We can explain their peculiarity once we understand their reliance on humoral typing. This typing was traditionally concerned with questions of health and social status, and it was a process of categorising appearances which usually relied on a number of somatic signs even as skin coloration was gradually becoming the single most important marker for establishing difference.Less