User:Daask/sandbox/black body

The phrase "black bodies" appears to have steadily increased in use starting around 1990. Note: The term "black body" is also used in physics and biology https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=black+body%2Cblack+bodies&year_start=1880&corpus=en-2019

examples of current use "a myth that renders invisible the specific contours of living in female, working class, gay and lesbian black bodies." "These urban areas... are then marked as bantustans for black bodies. ... Black bodies are then banished, like lepers" "the act of marching itself--the actual movement of black bodies in public space" *  "This... was certainly an invasion: black bodies acting out in a public domain circumscribed by a racist culture. The Garvey movement presents an example of black bodies transgressing racialized spatial boundaries." *  "There is an assumption that theories (and hence facts) come from our heads and feelings (and hence fictions) come from our bodies. In 'My body, myself: How does a Black woman do sociology?', Felly Nkweto Simmonds makes the point that sociology labours under the fiction that social reality has nothing to do with the body. However, for black women, social theory has fed on their embodied experiences. Black bodies are killed, displayed, watched, analysed, stroked, desired because of their embodied 'otherness'. Anthropology's fascination for the anatomical landmarks of different races has fed the fantasies of the Western imagination which fuelled the desiring machine of capital. Black women cannot be dispassionate, disembodied theorists. Their social reality, their habitus, is to be black, gendered subjects in a white world." "Gilroy’s mention of black cultural workers seems to imply that through black popular culture, blacks resist and construct new meanings of blackness in relation to their bodies. It is black popular culture’s deliberate use of the body as a canvas, particularly through its production of style and music, that has allowed blacks to attach new meanings of blackness to their bodies (Hall, 1993:27). According to Jefferies, style, music, and the body as a canvas, are three repertoires of black popular culture, and the city is a fourth. This is the place where black popular culture is born (Jefferies, 1993:27). The city is the place where the “language of black popular culture describes the emotions and circumstances black urban resistance encounters” (Jefferies, 1993:27). These circumstances include the control of black bodies through the manipulation of urban space (the redevelopment of space or gentrification), the surveillance and repression of black bodies through state sanctioned and organized policing, and the coercive control of black bodies in the work process (Gilroy, 1989)." *  "By tracing the representation of black women in mainstream U.S. cinema by foregrounding the various configurations that structure her image in cultural ideology, I have tried to demonstrate how the traditional dichotomy between black women and white has shifted in the contemporary era toward conflations and reversals, and how both of these strategies depend, for their fullest articulation, on the diffusion of race and gender through class. In such a diffusion, the black woman's access to commodity culture—and her ability to serve as its specular embodiment—are the mechanisms for envisioning a reconstruction of U.S. cultural relations in the era that followed the 1960s. The black body, in this sense, becomes a commodity, a representational sign for the democratizing process of U S culture itself. What may have begun as cultural responses to the demands posed by civil rights, black power and (to a lesser extent) feminism—for greater representational terrain—have thus become strategies for recuperation, mystifying narrative scenarios that negotiate race and gender disempowerment through the symbol systems of bourgeois culture." *

Modern usage seems to be emphasizing the material while de-ephasizing any actual agents making choices. dbk date="10 mar 2024"

theory: modern usage stems from discussion of social construction of black bodies, eg. Wiegman, 1991

highly cited work using the phrase in the title, but doesn't in the article body Gilman, S. L. (1985). Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature. Critical Inquiry, 12(1), 204–242. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343468

predecessors of little influence *  "Southern white cops tried to use cattle prods, night sticks and water hoses to beat back those black bodies." *  "a master... used to whip my great, great granddaddy everytime he'd talk of freedom for the Black bodies that populated the land" *  "A legal and physical revolution, putting black bodies among white bodies in either token or massive numbers, had not produced a revolution in white attitudes." *  <>  *   "I will suggest that representations of black sexuality are ideological constructs that can be mobilised to justify the oppression or else emancipation of black bodies."  *   "A solid wall of black bodies, two, maybe three, hundred, slowly gyrates to the moan and the heavy drum rhythm of reggae"  black london  *   " And these black bodies and this sun-burnt face / Is but a cloud" [a temporary obstacle to seeing more true reality]   William Blake. (1789). The Little Black Boy. Songs of Innocence. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43671/the-little-black-boy

substantial use of the term in the modern sense Deborah E. McDowell. Viewing the remains: A polemic on death, spectacle, and the [black] family. 153-177. Laura Wexler. Seeing sentiment: photography, race, and the innocent eye. 248-275 Andrea Liss. Black bodies as evidence: Maternal visibility in Renee Cox's family portraits. 267-292 "As masculinity and sexual politics have become the objects of national scrutiny, such issues and dynamics have been made visible through the criminalization of black bodies" "Genoocide and mass death are held up to Aborigines as the horrifying consequence of what might happen to them if they positively embrace their bodies as the site of their social being. This is a new culture of terror which Europeans have developed around black bodies. Instead of denying the existence of black bodies through physically destroying them (cf. Lattas 1987, Morris 1992), one now denies those bodies the right to any positive imaginary existence. Here white academics displace their own fears of themselves and of how Europeans have racialised bodies onto the Other. The body of the black man becomes yet again the imaginary basis for all that which the white man fears about himself (cf. Taussig 1987)." (p. 161) "Hollinsworth only superficially explores the world of Aboriginality as it is constructed by Aborigines. When he does so he is horrified to see his own naive intellectual opposition between biology and culture being continuously blurred in everyday life by people making their bodies a site of resistance and the site of collective unity." (p. 161) "The above quote does not fit Hollinsworth's and Keeffe's notion of the body as being some fixed conceptual prison that produces a lack of political and intellectual creativity. Instead it reveals the plasticity and mobile nature of bodily boundaries, where the body as the space of an imaginary community is continuously being reworked to produce new images of a shared essence and so as to take account of the power relations which problematise people's bodies." (p. 162) " academics' policing of people's identity politics emerges out of their inability to come to grips with the changing cultural morphology(ies) of black bodies." (p 163f.)
 * Kelley, R. D. (1993). " We are not what we seem": Rethinking black working-class opposition in the jim crow south. The Journal of American History, 75-112.
 * Kelley, R. D. (1993). " We are not what we seem": Rethinking black working-class opposition in the jim crow south. The Journal of American History, 75-112.
 * Kelley, R. D. (1993). " We are not what we seem": Rethinking black working-class opposition in the jim crow south. The Journal of American History, 75-112.
 * Nyoongah, M., Atwood, B., Lattas, A., Beckett, J., & Hollinsworth, D. (1992). Comments on Hollinsworth. Oceania, 63(2), 156-171.

further reading
 * Gilroy 1989
 * Gilroy 1989
 * Gilroy 1989

Searched using this query to try to filter out some unrelated uses https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_yhi=1992&q=+%22black+bodies%22++-%22photometry%22+-spectrometer+-physics+-aperture+-nuclear+-cytoplasm+-Hymenoptera+-thermonuclear+-isothermal+-Teleilat+-nebulae+-radiometers+-neutron+-Chlidonias+-infrared