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The Ethics of the Black Muslim Body

Edward E. Curtis

in Black Muslim Religion in the Nation of Islam, 1960–1975

The challenge of bodily safety is a key concern in African American culture. Members of the Nation of Islam (NOI) also have a high regard for protecting and civilizing the black body, and argue that ... More

The challenge of bodily safety is a key concern in African American culture. Members of the Nation of Islam (NOI) also have a high regard for protecting and civilizing the black body, and argue that the practice of Islam could heal the body physically and spiritually. This chapter explores NOI's ethical discourse on the body. It examines how members of NOI attempted to purify their body by changing their diet, clothes, hairstyle, and sexual behaviors.Less

Photons

Stephen J. Blundell and Katherine M. Blundell

in Concepts in Thermal Physics

This chapter considers the thermodynamics of electromagnetic radiation. It begins by discussing spectral energy density, Kirchoff's law, radiation pressure, and the statistical mechanics of the ... More

This chapter considers the thermodynamics of electromagnetic radiation. It begins by discussing spectral energy density, Kirchoff's law, radiation pressure, and the statistical mechanics of the photon gas, respectively. It then goes on to cover the statistical mechanics of the photon gas and black-body distribution. The final sections concern the thermal radiation that exists in the Universe as a remnant of the hot big bang and the effect of thermal radiation on the behaviour of atoms, and hence the operation of the laser.Less

The Lynched Earth: Trees, Trespass, and Political Intelligence in Welty’s “A Worn Path” and Morrison’s Home

Donnie McMahand and Kevin L. Murphy

Harriet Pollack (ed.)

in New Essays on Eudora Welty, Class, and Race

Focusing first on Welty’s “A Worn Path” then Morrison’s Home, this chapter discusses the authors’ treatment of landscape, which reverberates with lingering touches of racialized violence and trauma, ... More

Focusing first on Welty’s “A Worn Path” then Morrison’s Home, this chapter discusses the authors’ treatment of landscape, which reverberates with lingering touches of racialized violence and trauma, and identifies how black characters read and decode its various evocations. The characters’ ability to recognize trees as signposts of the lynched black male body demonstrates a political consciousness necessary for their survival. Trees in these works figure as totems of death and destruction and as potent life-forces, pointing expectantly toward survival and regeneration. Shifting from figurative burial to affirmative acts of intrusion and trespass, these texts’ protagonists defy the forces of immobilization and the stereotypical images of southern black women depicted in earlier pastoral formations. Ultimately, this chapter argues that Welty and Morrison reorient the apocalyptic visioning of the antipastoral by bending the arc toward resilience and resurrection, permitting their terrain to appear mutably as bleak and beautiful, frightening and futurist.Less

Gender and Spectatorship

Thomas F. DeFrantz

in Dancing Revelations: Alvin Ailey's Embodiment of African American Culture

This chapter examines the issues of gender and spectatorship in Alvin Ailey's concert dances. Though Ailey's dances generally suggest an egalitarian configuration of female and male physical ... More

This chapter examines the issues of gender and spectatorship in Alvin Ailey's concert dances. Though Ailey's dances generally suggest an egalitarian configuration of female and male physical presence, they seldom privilege male over female bodies in terms of either technical challenge or stage time. His works consistently encouraged gay male spectatorship in its varied depictions of glamorous masculinity and presentation of black bodies in heightened states of grace.Less

The universe: its structure and evolution

A. J. Leggett

in The Problems of Physics

This chapter starts by emphasizing that we can construct a picture of the universe as a whole only by extrapolating the laws of physics as we know them on earth to conditions almost unimaginably ... More

This chapter starts by emphasizing that we can construct a picture of the universe as a whole only by extrapolating the laws of physics as we know them on earth to conditions almost unimaginably different from those prevailing here. It then reviews the information we can get from optical and other observations, and the picture of the current universe and its contents which emerges from it, with a discussion inter alia of the cosmic distance scale and the cosmological red shift. The ideas of special and general relativity are sketched, and some consequences such as gravitational radiation and black holes are discussed; possible futures of the universe are considered. Finally, it is indicated how extrapolation of the equations of general relativity into the past leads inexorably to the idea of a “hot big bang”.Less

Blackness and the Identifying of Bodies

Anthony B. Pinn

in Embodiment and the New Shape of Black Theological Thought

This chapter discusses the troubled nature of identity as “blackness.” It raises questions concerning how notions of identity, framed and embedded in black theological discourse as “blackness,” have ... More

This chapter discusses the troubled nature of identity as “blackness.” It raises questions concerning how notions of identity, framed and embedded in black theological discourse as “blackness,” have served to privilege the black male body by assuming the re-presentation and re-construction of that male body meet the liberation needs of all black bodies. Of concern is the manner in which this formulation of the (assumed male) black body hampers a full understanding of complex subjectivity as the shape of religious encounter because it fails to consider a sufficient range of the ways in which African Americans are dehumanized.Less

Ancient Ideals and the Healthy Self: Mary Ann Shadd’s Plea for Emigration and Martin Robison Delany’s Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny

Andrea Stone

in Black Well-Being: Health and Selfhood in Antebellum Black Literature

Emulating more the conventions of the almanac than those of wildly popular early- to mid-nineteenth-century emigration narratives authored by British émigrés to Canada, Mary Ann Shadd and Martin ... More

Emulating more the conventions of the almanac than those of wildly popular early- to mid-nineteenth-century emigration narratives authored by British émigrés to Canada, Mary Ann Shadd and Martin Delany urge black evacuation through a claim for black health and well-being, vivifying the crucial relation they see between corporeal and political ideals. Each advocates the connection between a healthy black body and black political independence, irreconcilable with U.S. residency. Their quest for and designation of healthful places of settlement draw from classical Greek characterizations, which idealize hygia. Such an ideal forms the primary vehicle for their propaganda.Less

Freedom Claims: Reconstructing the Golden State

Lynn M. Hudson

in West of Jim Crow: The Fight against California's Color Line

This chapter examines the history of California’s commitment to Jim Crow, a history that begins during the state’s earliest years. African Americans loomed large in the minds of California’s earliest ... More

This chapter examines the history of California’s commitment to Jim Crow, a history that begins during the state’s earliest years. African Americans loomed large in the minds of California’s earliest legislators and politicians. Black codes became a prominent feature of the state’s legal system and developed in tandem with scientific racism. Black bodies as a site of difference became a staple of the public discourse of citizenship. Resistance to the state’s color line took place at parades, in court, in schools, on streetcars, and on stage, all places African Americans were discouraged or prohibited from occupying. Gendered politics infused this first western campaign for civil rights and women’s participation would be pivotal in the ongoing struggle for racial justice.Less

Introduction: Parlor Fantasies, Parlor Nightmares

Jasmine Nichole Cobb

in Picture Freedom: Remaking Black Visuality in the Early Nineteenth Century

This book explores how Black people appearing in early daguerreotypes reimagined and reconstructed Black visuality removed from the cultural logics of slavery. It explains how the daguerreotype ... More

This book explores how Black people appearing in early daguerreotypes reimagined and reconstructed Black visuality removed from the cultural logics of slavery. It explains how the daguerreotype became a means to create distance between freedom and slavery's mediation of Blackness, and as tools of “critical black memory.” It analyzes modes of picturing Black freedom before the Civil War and before the daguerreotype to trace its emergence in the transatlantic imaginary. It shows how picturing freedom before the advent of photographic technologies reorganized Black visuality, repositioning Black people within the conceptual space of the Atlantic world. It also discusses efforts to imagine both Black men and Black women as free in the context of slavery, with particular emphasis on “the black female body and the gaze.” Finally, it locates diverse conceptions of Black freedom in the transatlantic parlor as a place for dissimilar groups of people and cultural producers to convene around visions of Blackness separated from slavery.Less

Afro-Paradise: Where the Whip Tears the Flesh

Christen A. Smith

in Afro-Paradise: Blackness, Violence, and Performance in Brazil

This chapter analyzes the relationship between carnival and Afro-paradise through two genealogies: racial violence in the national legacy of the use of the black body as an ironic transfer point, a ... More

This chapter analyzes the relationship between carnival and Afro-paradise through two genealogies: racial violence in the national legacy of the use of the black body as an ironic transfer point, a fulcrum for constructing the Brazilian nation, specifically at the site of the pelourinho—the place where enslaved Africans were publically whipped in Brazilian colonial society; and black Brazilians' use of performance (theater and dramatic play) to disrupt and refract this process of violence. For generations, the theater has been a key political space for radical black Brazilians to denounce the myth of racial democracy and declare this myth genocidal. The chapter considers these two interlocking genealogies through a look at race, space, and violence in Bahian carnival, the historical relationship between Afro-paradise and the black body in pain, and the relationship between these two contexts and contemporary black political performance in Salvador.Less

Bought and Sold

Matthew Pratt Guterl

in Seeing Race in Modern America

This chapter shows that, long after slavery, it is common to see the black body not merely as evidence of humanity but also as an object, and as a metaphor for other objects, so that the desirable ... More

This chapter shows that, long after slavery, it is common to see the black body not merely as evidence of humanity but also as an object, and as a metaphor for other objects, so that the desirable and raced body is densely related to the symbolic surround of American consumer culture. To visualize blackness, then, is to strangely conflate blackness and a product, a bauble, or an object that we desperately desire. Indeed, inasmuch as the postemancipation desire for the black body connoted—and continues to connote—a desire for the presumably stable relations of slavery, the love of blackness as a medium for advertisement also breathes life, as we understand it, into the otherwise static and disembodied world of things. To see the black body as a commodity, then, is to see race in a very particular way, to make use of a very unusual, very long lived sightline.Less

Hohlraum targets

Stefano Atzeni and JÜrgen Meyer-Ter-Vehn

in The Physics of Inertial Fusion: BeamPlasma Interaction, Hydrodynamics, Hot Dense Matter

Hohlraum targets are a special class of ICF targets, in which capsule ablation is driven by the thermal radiation inside a cavity, the so-called hohlraum. In this scheme, the laser or ion beams do ... More

Hohlraum targets are a special class of ICF targets, in which capsule ablation is driven by the thermal radiation inside a cavity, the so-called hohlraum. In this scheme, the laser or ion beams do not drive the capsule directly, and one therefore calls it indirect drive. Expressions for X-ray conversion efficiency are derived for incident laser and ion beams. Radiation confinement inside the cavity is discussed in terms of the wall albedo, which measures the re-emission of absorbed radiation by the heated wall. The radiative transfer between the walls is treated approximately by means of the viewfactor method. Simple estimates are derived for the hohlraum temperature of the black-body radiation. Simulations of radiatively driven implosions are presented in the context of targets for ion beam fusion.Less

It’s Lonely at the Bottom: Elizabeth Alexander, Deborah Richards, and the Cosmopolitan Poetics of the Black Body

Samantha Pinto

in Difficult Diasporas: The Transnational Feminist Aesthetic of the Black Atlantic

This chapter examines Elizabeth Alexander’s The Venus Hottentot and Deborah Richards Last One Out—both of which reference black popular cultural figures such as Saartjie Baartman to remap the ... More

This chapter examines Elizabeth Alexander’s The Venus Hottentot and Deborah Richards Last One Out—both of which reference black popular cultural figures such as Saartjie Baartman to remap the difficult genealogy of black corporeality. These collections consider and critique models of diasporic subject formation that lean on example, exception, and recovery, creating instead a network of compromised affiliations and cosmopolitan desires that acknowledge both the pleasures and dangers of representation. Tracing a range of alternative ways to engage the vexed black body through its very visible global circulation, Alexander and Richards reorder the legacies of iconic raced and gendered representations; hence, establishing new genealogy of black women's bodies in innovative form.Less

. Mississippi Goddam: Emmett Till’s Photographs and Geographic Identity

Sandy Alexandre

in The Properties of Violence: Claims to Ownership in Representations of Lynching

In August 1955, fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, an African American, was lynched to death by two white men in Mississippi after he wolf whistled at a white woman. The story of Till’s lynching, along ... More

In August 1955, fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, an African American, was lynched to death by two white men in Mississippi after he wolf whistled at a white woman. The story of Till’s lynching, along with the gruesome photographs of his terribly bloated corpse and mangled face, attracted national attention. This chapter examines the story of Emmett Till and how his murder subverts the whole dynamic of lynching and lynching photography. It analyzes the dynamics of lynching by focusing on Till’s lynched black body that was displayed publicly by blacks against the wishes of the white lynchers. It argues that the images of a propertied and domesticated Till show him to be part of a community, in stark contrast to the usual lynching photo. It also considers how traumatic events are projected onto the landscape, whereby human deeds are metaphorically blended into the very geography of the land. Finally, it comments on how scholars ignore the life Till lived in Chicago before he perished in Mississippi.Less

Introduction

Christen A. Smith

in Afro-Paradise: Blackness, Violence, and Performance in Brazil

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main arguments. Focusing on the city of Salvador, this book uses performance as a methodological frame for deconstructing gendered ... More

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main arguments. Focusing on the city of Salvador, this book uses performance as a methodological frame for deconstructing gendered antiblack violence. Following the work of performance theorist D. Soyini Madison (2010), it employs performance analytics as a method of social analysis in order to travel back and forth between onstage and offstage. It makes five claims: (1) that the maintenance of racial democracy as a national ideology in Brazil (exemplified by the myth of Bahia's Afro-paradise) depends on the spectacular and mundane repetition of state violence against the black body; (2) that these repetitions of violence are entangled in time and space, implicating the past, the present, and the future; (3) that state violence against the black body is not only a performance but also palimpsestic—embodied, disciplining, and marked by erasure, reinscription, and repetition; (4) that the trauma of the black experience with state violence is a kind of gendered terror that not only harms the bodies of the immediate victims but also inflicts pain on the families and communities of the victims, defining the political stakes of these moments and, in part, blackness itself; and, finally, (5) that the close relationship between Afro-paradise and performance has also led the black community to turn to performance in order to demystify and undo its violence.Less

“I am King”: Hip-Hop Culture, Fashion Advertising, and the Black Male Body

in Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness

This chapter investigates how the black male body becomes the iconic figure for a consumer culture rooted in urban music, black masculine aesthetics, and nationalism. The successes of hip-hop moguls ... More

This chapter investigates how the black male body becomes the iconic figure for a consumer culture rooted in urban music, black masculine aesthetics, and nationalism. The successes of hip-hop moguls in the fashion industry has depended on their ability to signify racialized and gendered specificity through the marketing of the urban black male icon while appealing to a wide range of young consumers of various races. The success of hip-hop fashion has depended on the tension it creates as performance and promotion in authenticating “the urban real” while mass marketing commodifies a new reading of “Americana” and “American”-ness. The refashioning and promotion of the new and cool America performed through the black male b-boy and produced by the hip-hop mogul were manifestations of globalization and the marketing of youthful and racialized alterity as a stylized and reproducible commodity.Less

The Drama of Dislocation: Staging Diaspora History in the Work of Adrienne Kennedy and Ama Ata Aidoo

Samantha Pinto

in Difficult Diasporas: The Transnational Feminist Aesthetic of the Black Atlantic

This chapter examines Ama Ata Aidoo's The Dilemma of a Ghost and African American dramatist Adrienne Kennedy's Funnyhouse of a Negro. The two dramatize the sociopolitical movements in the 1960s by ... More

This chapter examines Ama Ata Aidoo's The Dilemma of a Ghost and African American dramatist Adrienne Kennedy's Funnyhouse of a Negro. The two dramatize the sociopolitical movements in the 1960s by the staging of black women's bodies. Aidoo's play centers on an African American woman experiencing cultural and sexual dislocation in postcolonial Ghana with her African husband, while Kennedy's play works around the psychological disintegration of a young black student in New York City. Working at the crossroads of major countercultural investments, these plays grapple with the lingering presence of colonial histories by creating scenes that question the mimetically realist boundaries of the body.Less

Palimpsestic Embodiment

Christen A. Smith

in Afro-Paradise: Blackness, Violence, and Performance in Brazil

This chapter looks at the repetition and performance of antiblack violence over time and the relationship between space, time, the body, and the visual. It analyzes photographs of state violence as ... More

This chapter looks at the repetition and performance of antiblack violence over time and the relationship between space, time, the body, and the visual. It analyzes photographs of state violence as archives of black pain and suffering on the one hand, and historical documents that reveal hidden truths on the other. The twentieth-century images examined were published in local newspapers and can be read as part of an image world of black suffering that circulates, producing narratives of the black body in pain across time and space. It is not accidental that these photographs conjure memories of lynching photography in the United States. Spectacular images of the black body in pain reveal the performative, transnational nature of Afro-paradise at the same time that they speak to us about the nature of race and antiblackness in Brazil.Less