This book is an outgrowth of an international conference – The Black Body: Imagining, Writing, and Re(Reading) – held at DePaul University, Chicago in 2004. The various contributing authors critically examine the changing discourses on the black body to address how it has been constituted as a site for construction and maintenance of social and political power. Drawing examples from Europe, Africa, the United States as well as other places in the Black Diaspora, the subject matter in this book discusses the raced, gendered, classed and culturally produced discourses about the black body. Through its examination of these and related issues, this book contributes to a dialogue across various disciplines about the black body, its meanings and negotiations as read, interpreted, and imagined in different frames of perception and imagination. Print editions not for sale in Sub-Saharan Africa. This book is part of Routledge’s co-published series 30 Years of Democracy in South Africa, in collaboration with UNISA Press, which reflects on the past years of a democratic South Africa and assesses the future opportunities and challenges.

A groundbreaking book, accessible but scholarly, by African activists. It uses research, life stories, and artistic expression--including essays, case studies, poetry, news clips, songs, fiction, memoirs, letters, interviews, short film scripts, and photographs--to examine dominant and deviant sexualities and investigate the intersections between sex, power, masculinities, and femininities. It also opens a space, particularly for young people, to think about African sexualities in different ways.

"America and the Black Body is a timely exploration into the creative, literary, and visual uses of the black body in American print and visual culture. More specifically, this volume contemplates the social development of American identity and the multifarious ways this identity coalesces in the small gestures of preclusion that establish discemable markers of national belonging. Such investigations underscore issues of power and disenfranchisement, of race, class, and gender that mediate the representations of the black male and the black female body in real and imagined ways, as it also reveals the invisible social and political ties that connect white men and women's identities to these racial imaginings." --Book Jacket.

Sarah Baartman's iconic status as the "Hottentot Venus" - as "victimized" African woman, "Mother" of the new South Africa, and ancestral spirit to countless women of the African Diaspora - has led to an outpouring of essays, biographies, films, interviews, art installations, and centers, comprising a virtual archive that seeks to find some meaning in her persona. Yet even those with the best intentions, fighting to give Baartman agency, a voice, a personhood, continue to service the general narratives of European documentation of her life without asking "What if we looked at Baartman through another lens?" This collection is the first of its kind to offer a space for international scholars, cultural activists, and visual artists to examine the legacy of Baartman's life anew, specifically finding an alternative Africanist rendering of a person whose life has left a profound impact on the ways in which Black women are displayed and represented the world over.

Postcolonial Justice addresses a major issue in current postcolonial theory and beyond, namely, the question of how to reconcile an ethics grounded in the reciprocal acknowledgment of diversity and difference with the normative, if not universal thrust that appears to energize any notion of justice. The concept of postcolonial justice shared by the essays in this volume carries an unwavering commitment to difference within and beyond Europe, while equally rejecting radical cultural essentialisms, which refuse to engage in “utopian ideals” of convivial exchange across a plurality of subject positions. Such utopian ideals can no longer claim universal validity, as in the tradition of the European enlightenment; instead they are bound to local frames of speaking from which they project world.

This book examines how same-sex sexualities are represented in several post-apartheid South African cultural texts, drawing on a rich local archive of same-sex sexualities that includes recent fiction, drama, film, photography, and popular print culture. While the book situates these texts within the specific context of post-apartheid South Africa, it also looks outwards towards transnational connectivity and cultural flows. The author uses the idea of restlessness to refer to the uneven flow of cultural tropes, political sentiment, ideas, ideologies, and representational modes across geographical boundaries, across time and space, and between genres, presenting sexual cultures as simultaneously rooted and transnational. He focuses on how notions of race and gender, in the shadow of colonialism and apartheid, play out in the present and shape how sexualities are represented. This interdisciplinary book offers a conceptual entry point to several areas of study, including transnationalism, literary and cultural studies, critical race theory, gender and sexuality studies, and African studies, and will be of interest to students and researchers across these fields. Its inclusion of a range of textual genres extends its reach into visual culture, film and media studies, history, and politics.

There is a current revival of Black Consciousness, as political and student movements around the world – as well as academics and campaigners working in decolonization – reconfigure the continued struggle for socio-economic revolution. Yet the roots of Black Consciousness and its relation to other movements such as Black Lives Matter have only begun to be explored. Black Consciousness has deep connections to the struggle against apartheid. The Black Consciousness Reader is an essential collection of history, culture, philosophy and meaning of Black Consciousness by some of the thinkers, artists and activists who developed it in order to finally bring revolution to South Africa. A contribution to the world’s Black cultural archive, it examines how the proper acknowledgement of Blackness brings a greater love, a broader sweep of heroes and a wider understanding of intellectual and political influences. Although the legendary murdered activist Steve Biko is a strong figure within this history, the book documents many other significant international Black Consciousness personalities and focuses a predominantly African eye on Black Consciousness in politics, land, women, power, art, music and religion. Onkgopotse Tiro, Vuyelwa Mashalaba, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, Assata Shakur, Marcus Garvey, Neville Alexander, Thomas Sankara, Malcolm X, Don Mattera, Keorapetse Kgositsile, W.E.B. DuBois, Walter Rodney, Mongane Wally Serote, Ready D and Zola are among the many bold minds included in this amalgam of facts, ideas and images.

This book offers the first concentrated examination of the representation of the black female subject in Western art through the lenses of race/color and sex/gender. Charmaine A. Nelson poses critical questions about the contexts of production, the problems of representation, the pathways of circulation and the consequences of consumption. She analyzes not only how, where, why and by whom black female subjects have been represented, but also what the social and cultural impacts of the colonial legacy of racialized western representation have been. Nelson also explores and problematizes the issue of the historically privileged white artistic access to black female bodies and the limits of representation for these subjects. This book not only reshapes our understanding of the black female representation in Western Art, but also furthers our knowledge about race and how and why it is (re)defined and (re)mobilized at specific times and places throughout history.

A pathbreaking history of the development of scientific racism, white nationalism, and segregationist philanthropy in the U.S. and South Africa in the early twentieth century, Waste of a White Skin focuses on the American Carnegie CorporationÕs study of race in South Africa, the Poor White Study, and its influence on the creation of apartheid. This book demonstrates the ways in which U.S. elites supported apartheid and Afrikaner Nationalism in the critical period prior to 1948 through philanthropic interventions and shaping scholarly knowledge production. Rather than comparing racial democracies and their engagement with scientific racism, Willoughby-Herard outlines the ways in which a racial regime of global whiteness constitutes domestic racial policies and in part animates black consciousness in seemingly disparate and discontinuous racial democracies. This book uses key paradigms in black political thoughtÑblack feminism, black internationalism, and the black radical traditionÑto provide a rich account of poverty and work. Much of the scholarship on whiteness in South Africa overlooks the complex politics of white poverty and what they mean for the making of black political action and black peopleÕs presence in the economic system. Ideal for students, scholars, and interested readers in areas related to U.S. History, African History, World History, Diaspora Studies, Race and Ethnicity, Sociology, Anthropology, and Political Science.

Richard Greggory Johnson III, Phi Beta Kappa, is Associate Professor in the Educational Leadership and Policy Studies Program and faculty in the Masters of Public Administration Program at the University of Vermont. He is widely published and serves as an executive editor for Peter Lang's Black Studies and Critical Thinking series. Dr. Johnson is a life member of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity. --Book Jacket.