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How does the performance of blackness reframe issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality? Here, the contributors look into representational practices in film, literature, fashion, and theatre and explore how they have fleshed out political struggles, while recognizing that they have sometimes maintained the mechanisms of violence against blacks.
A critique of theory through literature that celebrates the diversity of black being, The Desiring Modes of Being Black explores how literature unearths theoretical blind spots while reasserting the legitimacy of emotional turbulence in the controlled realm of reason that rationality claims to establish. This approach operates a critical shift by examining psychoanalytical texts from the literary perspective of black desiring subjectivities and experiences. This combination of psychoanalysis and the politics of literary interpretation of black texts helps determine how contemporary African American and black literature and queer texts come to defy and challenge the racial and sexual postulates of psychoanalysis or indeed any theoretical system that intends to define race, gender and sexualities. The Desiring Modes of Being Black includes essays on James Baldwin, Sigmund Freud, Melvin Dixon, Essex Hemphill, Assotto Saint, and Rozena Maart. The metacritical reading they unfold interweaves African American culture, Fanonian and Caribbean thought, South African black consciousness, French theory, psychoanalysis, and gender and queer studies.
An interrogation of the often-unexamined assumption that silence is oppressive, to consider the multiple possibilities silence enables. The volume features diverse feminist reflections on the nuanced relationship between silence and voice to foreground the creative, meditative, generative and resistive power our silences engender.
DIVA consideration of the performance of Blackness and race in general, in relation to sexuality and critiques of authenticity./div
An introduction to the burgeoning field of food studies Popular and intellectual interest in food is on the rise. The breadth of concerns surrounding food ranges from animal welfare and climate change’s impact on food production to debates on the healthfulness of carbohydrates and fats, and fair compensation for restaurant and farm workers. Not only is there an expanding conversation about the ways in which we produce and consume our food, but there is growing attention being placed on the myriad ways in which food expresses and shapes shifting identities. Practicing Food Studies details the turn of the twenty-first century development and flourishing of food studies as a multidisciplinary...
"From using clamshell razors and homemade lye depilatories in the colonial era to using diode lasers and prescription pharmaceuricals in the twenty-first century, Americans have gone to great lengths to remove body hair demmed unsightly, unattractive, or unhealthy. In Plucked, Rebecca M. Herzig examines both the causes and consequences of routine hair removal in the U.S. Plucked illuminates some of the broad social and environmental effects of seemingly 'personal' choices: widespread experimentation on animals, exploitation of workers, exacerbation of racial divisions, and more. An engrossing, multidimensional history of fulctural attitudes toward body hair and the increasingly sophisticated tools used to remove it, Plucked reveals the complex political significance of even the most mundane activities of modern life."--Back cover.
On the southern end of the Grand Rue, a major thoroughfare that runs through the center of Port-au-Prince, waits the Haitian capital's automobile repair district. This veritable junkyard of steel and rubber, recycled parts, old tires, and scrap metal might seem an unlikely foundry for art. Yet, on the street's opposite end thrives the Grand Rue Galerie, a working studio of assembled art and sculptures wrought from the refuse. Established by artists André Eugène and Jean Hérard Celeur in the late 1990s, the Grand Rue's urban environmental aesthetics--defined by motifs of machinic urbanism, Vodou bricolage, the postprimitivist altermodern, and performative politics--radically challenge idea...
This book offers a theory of disaster in modern and contemporary society and its impact on the construction of social and political life. The theory is premised upon what the authors call "the sign continuum," where disaster spreads across society through efforts to evade social responsibility for its causes and consequences. Phenomena generated by such efforts include the social manifestation of monstrosity (disastrous people and other forms of living things) and an emerging antipolitics in an effort to assert rule and order. A crucial development is the attack on speech, a fundamental feature of political life, as manifested by the increased expectations of categories of people whose containment calls for shunning and silence.
Entangled Otherness explores the dynamics of cross-dressing and gender performance in contemporary francophone Caribbean cultures through a range of visual and textual media. Original in its comparative focus on the islands of Haiti, Martinique, Guadeloupe and their diasporic communities in France, this study reveals how opaque strategies of crossing, mimicry and masquerade have enabled resistance to the racialised, gendered and patriarchal classifications of bodies that characterized Enlightenment thought during the French transatlantic slave trade. It engages with archival texts of pre-revolutionary Haiti to offer a historical understanding of current constructions of Caribbean gender most...
Excerpts from foundational work, recent journal articles and pieces written for this text about the role of communication in the construction and performance of sexualities in interpersonal contexts and public discourses.