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This chapter examines how White viewers retreated to their parlors and used caricature to retool White dominion over the visual in response to street encounters with free Blacks, including Black women. Drawing on existential theories of the “look,” it considers Frantz Fanon's personal experience of the White gaze, captured in the phrase “Look! A Negro,” as a practical observation to linger in the moment of White sight and to assess the effect of Blackness on Whiteness. It also discusses Edward Williams Clay's “Life in Philadelphia” cartoon serial, which mocked free Black Philadelphians for their public displays of freedom and showed unflattering caricatures of Black women. Finally, it analyzes White perceptions of the social changes compelled by gradual emancipation laws and how Whites imagined Black freedom in hostile ways in order to manage anxieties about sharing northern spaces with free Blacks. The chapter shows that free Black women tailored their public appearances to directly counter slavery's visual culture, to reclaim rights to covering and to sacredness.

This chapter theorizes Black body aesthetics through the lens of the white gaze, which is parasitic upon the construction of the Black body as ersatz, disgusting, and ontologically problematic. The white gaze is an historical achievement, a site of lived sedimentation of white power and privilege that perpetuates violence upon Black bodies. As such, the white gaze is contingent, and the relational ontology it assumes is not historically inexorable, but undoable. Through contemporary incidents of violence by white police (and their proxies), this chapter shows that white gazing presupposes a fundamental site of what is called “suturing,” an embodied white practice that involves fleeing the ways in which we are, in these terms, un-sutured: an important ontological claim about human persons. It argues that white people must develop specific socio-ontological un-suturing practices, ones that refuse to cover over the festering reality of white lies and white attempts at self-mastery.

This chapter documents the racial parameters of the fashion aesthetic. While models of color are more prevalent in high-fashion images today, historically the modeling industry has been closed off from taking the kinds of risks that involve troubling the idea of “fashion” as dictated the given signs and symbols that have evolved within the corporate world. For black models the repertoire for creating a marketable look has traditionally been limited by stereotypes and cultural assumptions, which shape black models’ glamour labor in specific ways. Their self-branding has demanded more intense forms of bodywork and self-commodifying, at times using their race as part of their brand, while at times essentially erasing their racial characteristics by straightening their hair or pushing their bodies to fit a Euro-American standard. While my respondents experienced their race as something they created or dissimulated according to client’s whims, at the same time they were keenly aware of how their work was shaped by prevailing expectations of what “race” should look like, indicating the power of pre-existing racial tensions into which they must fit the aesthetics of the look they build when doing glamour labor.

This chapter provides an intellectual history of syncretism in Christian theology during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It engages three prominent instances of writing on syncretism that represent wider theological trends during this time. The first two perspectives are those of theologians Adolf von Harnack and Hendrik Kraemer, writing in the early to mid-twentieth century. The third perspective on syncretism is more contemporary. Rather than a single writer, it is a grouping of synonymous terms that have become stand-ins for positive syncretism—“inculturation,” “indigenization,” and “contextualization.” Each of these perspectives, in differing ways, exhibits a theological method that sidesteps difficult questions of syncretism and material history, which inadvertently defers to existing Western white forms of Christianity.

In their book The Black Female Body: A Photographic History, Deborah Willis and Carla Williams take readers through four ways of perceiving black women’s bodies in photography: as colonized bodies, as cultural bodies, as beautiful bodies, and finally as reclaimed bodies. Some of the photos present black women as agents exercising autonomy, while others present their bodies as objects of sexual desire. This chapter shifts attention away from the content of these photographic images of the black female body and back to the white gaze that is behind the photographic lens. From this starting point, the chapter examines the work of artist Kara Walker. Walker’s use of black silhouettes on white walls offers a counter-aesthetic to the white male gaze. Underneath the eroticization of the black female body, she exposes the history of sexual and racial violence that accompanies it.