Migrating the Black Body: The African Diaspora and Visual Culture

by Leigh Raiford (Editor), Heike Raphael-Hernandez (Editor)

Overview

Migrating the Black Body explores how visual media—from painting to photography, from global independent cinema to Hollywood movies, from posters and broadsides to digital media, from public art to graphic novels—has shaped diasporic imaginings of the individual and collective self. How is the travel of black bodies reflected in reciprocal black images? How is blackness forged and remade through diasporic visual encounters and reimagined through revisitations with the past? And how do visual technologies structure the way we see African subjects and subjectivity? This volume brings together an international group of scholars and artists who explore these questions in visual culture for the historical and contemporary African diaspora. Examining subjects as wide-ranging as the appearance of blackamoors in Russian and Swedish imperialist paintings, the appropriation of African and African American liberation images for Chinese Communist Party propaganda, and the role of YouTube videos in establishing connections between Ghana and its international diaspora, these essays investigate routes of migration, both voluntary and forced, stretching across space, place, and time.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780295999579
Publisher:	University of Washington Press
Publication date:	03/20/2017
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	392
Product dimensions:	6.90(w) x 9.90(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Leigh Raiford is associate professor of African American studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle and coeditor of The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory. Heike Raphael-Hernandez is professor of English at the University of Maryland University College, Europe and professor of American Studies at the University of Wurzburg, Germany. She is the author of The Utopian Aesthetics of Three African American Women (Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Julie Dash): The Principle of Hope and editor of Blackening Europe: The African American Presence. The contributors are Rushay Booysen, Kiersten Chace, Cedric Essi, Cheryl Finley, Robeson Taj Frazier, Sonja Georgi, Robin J. Hayes, Carsten Junker, Charles I. Nero, Irina Novikova, Tavia Nyong’o, Joachim Ostlund, Alan Rice, Julia Roth, Reginold Royston, Karen N. Salt, Darieck Scott, Krista Thompson, Pia Wiegmink, and Lyneise Williams.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction Leigh Raiford Heike Raphael-Hernandez 3

Part 1 Making Blackness Serve

1 Containing Bodies-Enscandalizing Enslavement: Stasis and Movement at the Juncture of Slave-Ship Images and Texts Carsten Junker 13

2 Russian Blackamoors: From Grand-Manner Portraiture to Alphabet in Pictures Irina Novikova 30

3 Migrating Images of the Black Body Politic and the Sovereign State: Haiti in the 1850s Karen N. Salt 52

4 Playing the White Knight: Badin, Chess, and Black Self-Fashioning in Eighteenth-Century Sweden Joachim Östiund 71

5 Making Blackness Serve China: The Image of Afro-Asia in Chinese Political Posters Robeson Taj Frazier 92

Part 2 Dreaming Diasporas

6 The Glamorous One-Two Punch: Visualizing Celebrity, Masculinity, and Boxer Alfonso Teofilo Brown in Early Twentieth-Century Paris Lyneise Williams 116

7 The Here and Now of Eslanda Robeson's African Journey Leigh Raiford 134

8 Black and Cuba: An Interview with Filmmaker Robin J. Hayes Robin J. Hayes Julia Roth 153

9 Return to Which Roots? Interracial Documemoirs by Macky Alston, Eliaichi Kimaro, and Mo Asumang Cedric Essi 170

10 Dreaming Diasporas Cheryl Finley 185

Part 3 Differently Black

11 Differently Black: The Fourth Great Migration and Black Catholic Saints in Ramin Bahrani's Goodbye Solo and Jim Sheridan's In America Charles I. Nero 207

12 Coloured in South Africa: An Interview with Filmmaker Kiersten Dunbar Chace and Photojournalist Rushay Booysen Sonja Georgi Pia Wiegmink 221

13 When Home Meets Diaspora at the Door of No Return: Cinematic Encounters in Sankofa and Little Senegal Heike Raphael-Hernandez 236

14 Of Plastic Ducks and Cockle Pickers: African Atlantic Artists and Critiques of Bonded Labor across Chronologies Alan Rice 253

15 At Home, Online: Affective Exchange and the Diasporic Body in Ghanaian Internet Video Reginold A. Royston 266

Part 4 Afrofabulation

16 Habeas Ficta: Fictive Ethnicity, Affecting Representations, and Slaves on Screen Tavia Nyong'o 287

17 The Black Body as Photographic Image: Video Light in Postcolonial Jamaica Krista Thompson 306

18 The Not-Yet Justice League: Fantasy, Redress, and Transatlantic Black History on the Comic Book Page Darieck Scott 329

List of Contributors 349

Index 359

What People are Saying About This

Tina Campt

"Migrating the Black Body enunciates a new approach to black visuality by recentering the role of visual media in imagining blackness and diaspora individually and collectively. This exceptional collection deftly interrogates the intersection of diasporic blackness and visual culture from the eighteenth century to the present and across a vast transnational landscape, engaging an extraordinary variety of visual texts and methodologies along the way."

Kobena Mercer

"Exploring the migratory circuits through which identities are performed and positioned in visual encounters of many different kinds, this collection ranges far and wide on a global scale to deliver rich insights into the multiple meanings of blackness. The transdisciplinary inquiry activated in these pages renews the urgency of understanding how aesthetics and politics are articulated in affective experience, and in so doing Migrating the Black Body opens a fresh chapter in the critical dialogue between diaspora studies and visual culture studies."