Preface Introduction The Myths of Black Womanhood A Century Ago: The Foundations of Sexism-Racism The Age of Jim Crow: White and Black Stories of Slave Women The All-Mother Vision of W. E. B. Du Bois Slave Women of the Sociological Imagination Prefabricated Women of the Mid-Twentieth Century The Invisible, Shrinking Woman Black Studies/Women's Studies: Discovering Black Women's History? Rediscovering the Black Family: New and Old Images of Motherhood Toward Discovering Slave Women Conclusion Selected Bibliography Index

Disfigured Images: The Historical Assault on Afro-American Women. Contributions in Afro-American and African Studies, No. 144.

L’elaboration de portraits feminins reflete la fascination de Hawthorne pour cette creature complexe, un attrait nourri par l’omnipresence des femmes dans son entourage. L’influence de ces dernieres est indeniable, et semble etre a l’origine du feminisme ambigu de l’ecrivain, partage entre, d’un cote, l’heritage puritain des Manning et Hawthorne, et, de l’autre, les convictions feministes emergentes de sa belle-famille, les Peabody. Les portraits de femmes de la fiction hawthornienne se caracterisent donc par un binarisme essentialisme-differentialisme qui emane de la vision etroite des protagonistes masculins, et que l’auteur tente de depasser. Les concepts deleuziens du « mineur » et du « devenir-femme » nous seront d’une grande utilite pour comprendre comment la femme essentialisee des Puritains, ce que nous pouvons aussi appeler la femme-image, au sens lacanien du terme, est en realite une femme minoree car amputee de son esprit et de son role social. Hawthorne temoigne ainsi d’un feminisme equivoque, une voix qu’il a du mal, par moments, a assumer et affirmer completement.

https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-01388777/document

L’émergence d’un discours féministe dans la fiction courte de Nathaniel Hawthorne (1832-1844) : l’écriture du devenir-femme

This article explores the ways in which transnational feminist analysis can be deployed to reconfigure new gendered and racialized cartographies of the African Diaspora in Europe. First, I position contemporary film representations of trafficked Nigerian sex workers in Italy in dialogical relation to 19th century discourses of black sexuality—in particular, Sharpley-Whiting's (1999) reinscribed ‘Black Venus Master Narrative’—and assess historical and geographical (dis)continuities in their modes of signification. Second, by linking endemic factors feeding the supply of Nigerian women for the purposes of (in)voluntary participation in the Italian sex industry, such as the localized feminization of poverty and regionally specific perceptions of sex work as a temporary economic strategy, I engage with broader feminist debates on victimization and agency in global sex work and migration literatures. In doing so, this dialectical think piece highlights the gendered complexities of new African diasporic formations and the ways in which their growth is facilitated by broader illegal networks that shape and are shaped by vicissitudes in glocalized economies.

/pdf/recasting-black-venus-in-the-new-african-diaspora-fgk8kwtu6b.pdf

Recasting 'Black Venus' in the new African Diaspora

Introduction: Globalization and the Transformations of Race

This paper explores the micro-politics of globalization, that is, how abstract and generalizing descriptions of processes of globalization are also a part of the negotiation of cultural identities in everyday encoutners. By “everyday” I mean the encounters and negotiations that occur as people follow their daily life pathways; that is in the “non-spectacular” aspects of life (Essed: 1991). I discuss how the travel of peoples, goods, and capital, has also come new encounters and negotiations of meaning and power. Modern meanings, and in particular, those based on bound meanings of “race,” geography, and culture, have also necessarily come under reformulation and rearticulation. Questions of who “legitimately” belongs, and what criteria this belonging is based upon, have become hot questions for not only nation-states but also individuals and their local understandings of community and self. Meanings of “Africa” and “Africans” are not static, but under constant reformulation and change. For example, the criteria used to define concepts such as “Africa”, “Africans”, and “African cultural productions” has been given varied significance by different actors positioned in different locations and time-periods. These are meanings that are not only racialized, but also gendered and sexed. Perhaps most well known are the ways that black African men and women’s bodies have long been a foil onto which Western capitalist longings for a different self, culture, and nation have been projected (Gilman 1985; Morrison 1992; Roedriger 1991; Sawyer 2000). At different historical periods, geographical locations, and cultural contexts normative understandings of “Europe” and “European men and women” have been reflected upon a mirror of an imaged “Africa” and “Africans.” These historical imaginings of an African “Other” have been used to legitimate power imbalances, privilege, and exclusion. This paper looks at one such reformulation of meanings of Africa and Africans. I discuss how the marketing and consumption of “African dance” in Stockholm is a site where meanings of “African culture” are under negotiation. A goal of the paper is to show how ”local” gendered and racialized power relations (and by that I mean the cultural politics of belonging in Sweden and Stockholm), are an integral part of the meanings of Africa and African culture that are produced in these settings. In particular, I will discuss how issues of “authenticity,” and in particular, how criteria such as gender, nationality, and the geographical space of Africa, are used by both instructors and students to negotiate perceived power imbalances between dancers and students. Through listening closely to their narratives it becomes evident that processes of globalization are also an integral part of the Stockholm everyday. Categories of ancestry, gender, biology, “race,” language, religion, territory, and “history”, were used as powerful agents in both the dance students and instructors claims of their own and other belonging to African community of dance. Methods used for this research are anthropological participant observation and open and closed tape-recorded interviewing techniques. The interviews cited in this paper were conducted as a portion of a larger Ph.D. research project on Swedishness, racism, and Black diasporic identities in Stockholm (Sawyer 2000). As one part of my dissertation fieldwork during 1995-6 I participated in

Racialization, Gender and the Negotiation of Power in Stockholm's African Dance Courses

Despite criticisms of the film The Scarlet Letter as engaging in historical revisionism of representations of blighted groups in society, a critical examination of its symbolic language reveals that the film draws on, and circulates, centuries-old Western symbolism and mythology of black sexuality. The article undertakes a review of Western iconography surrounding black sexuality in nineteenth-century Europe and shows how it manifests itself in the interaction of race and sex in contemporary American mythology. The article attempts to show how the iconography of black sexuality undergirds signification of the narrative relationship between the main character and her black servant in the film. The article argues, from the perspective of potential multiaccentual interpolation of the audience, that even a polysemic interpretation (from the hegemonic male gaze or a subversive female gaze) of the text still reveals blackness as a marker of difference and hypersexuality.

The Black Woman As Marker of Hypersexuality in Western Mythology: A Contemporary Manifestation in the Film The Scarlet Letter

New media technology provides the visual communication academy the opportunity to distance itself from the fractured, ancillary, and skills connotation associated with the field in the past. The concept of “visual journalism” in its integrative sense aimed at training the “complete visual journalist,” provides an opportunity for visual communication to develop an integrated and unified identity, reinvigorate itself, and locate its study at the center of journalism education. It allows the visual academy to create a more integrated conception of the field that is also made more germane to contemporary enterprise of journalism. If cashed-in, the concept should help visual communication overcome its supporting role to take a more central position in journalism education.

Linus K. Abraham

Papers

The Black Woman As Marker of Hypersexuality in Western Mythology: A Contemporary Manifestation in the Film The Scarlet Letter

Visual Journalism: An Integrated Conception of Visual Communication in Journalism Education