Pub Date : 2019-09-18DOI: 10.1080/17528631.2019.1666498
Bryce Henson
ABSTRACT This article discusses Black invisibility to examine Afro-diasporic visual cultures that are grounded in Black people’s material conditions. As a conceptual and empirical tool, it turns to the Black subjects and their visual representations that remain invisible by diasporic yearnings for an essentialist African in conjunction with societies’ dependence upon race as a visual signifier to naturalize ideologies and structures of racial, classed, and gendered domination. This reroutes diasporic connectivities to particular conditions, spaces, and politics of Black people that must contend with both Black people’s conditions and the processes that emerge from the exigencies of Black sociopolitical life. To do so, this article analyzes performance artist Tiago Sant’ana’s ‘Apagamento #1’ and Baiana System’s ‘Invisível’ in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, a city acclaimed for its ‘authentic’ African culturalisms and supposedly romantic race relations. Both Sant’ana and Baiana System illustrate how Black invisibility uses visual cultures to deconstruct and critique the master codes of race in the diaspora.
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We often speak of heat as though it were a material that flows from one object to another; it is not. Rather, it is a form of energy. Unit of heat: calorie (cal) 1 cal is the amount of heat necessary to raise the temperature of 1 g of water by 1 Celsius degree. Don’t be fooled – the calories on our food labels are really kilocalories (kcal or Calories), the heat necessary to raise 1 kg of water by 1 Celsius degree.
{"title":"Heat","authors":"Alecia McKenzie","doi":"10.2307/j.ctvmd85m7.25","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvmd85m7.25","url":null,"abstract":"We often speak of heat as though it were a material that flows from one object to another; it is not. Rather, it is a form of energy. Unit of heat: calorie (cal) 1 cal is the amount of heat necessary to raise the temperature of 1 g of water by 1 Celsius degree. Don’t be fooled – the calories on our food labels are really kilocalories (kcal or Calories), the heat necessary to raise 1 kg of water by 1 Celsius degree.","PeriodicalId":39013,"journal":{"name":"African and Black Diaspora","volume":"13 1","pages":"199 - 200"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-08-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42919503","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-08-04DOI: 10.1080/17528631.2019.1611324
C. Nelson
On 10 June 1776, an enslaved woman named Florimell, described as a ‘Negro’, fled from her slave owner in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Amongst the various details designed to describe and recapture her, the advertisement noted that, ‘she commonly wears a Handkerchief round her Head’ (Nova Scotia Gazette and Weekly Chronicle June 18, 1776). On the 29 April 1794, an enslaved ‘NEGRO MAN’ who called himself Charles fled from his owner Azariah Pretchard Senior of New Richmond, Quebec who described him in part as ‘speaks good English and some broken French and Micmac’ (Quebec Gazette May 22, 1794). Finally, when a man described as a ‘Negro’ named William Spencer busted out of the local Montreal jail in 1792, the jailer Jacob Kuhn, described him as wearing, ‘a round hat and generally a wig’ (Montreal Gazette November 22, 1792). All three cases are evidence of the multi-directional processes of creolization in the Trans Atlantic world. Although little discussed, these examples culled from the fugitive slave archive of Canada, expand the traditional limits of the definition and study of creolization. Often defined as a uniquely American (continental) phenomenon, creolization describes the processes and outcomes of cultural and social contact and transformation that occurred within the overlapping contexts of European imperialism and Trans Atlantic Slavery. While scholars like Sidney Mintz offered a rather constrained definition, bound by time and location, others like Linda Rupert have provided a more expansive description which allows for the possibility of different stages of creolization unfolding over time. For Mintz, creolization was a discreet seventeenth-century phenomenon lasting about a half a century and being characterized by the ‘plantation thrust’ through which the ‘first large introductions of enslaved Africans were occurring’ (2008, 255). Creolization for Mintz then is not merely the meeting of two races or cultures, but a meeting within the context of slavery wherein the majority population was not only African, but also enslaved. Therefore, creolization could only develop from the initial interactions between two newly introduced, foreign populations – European and African, only take place in tropical plantation regimes, and only involve slave majority populations. Due to their climates, the practices of slavery, the makeup of their enslaved populations, and the ratio of the enslaved to slave owners, Canada, the American North and Argentina (amongst other places) would not fit such a definition. What is more, for Mintz, once one or more generations of these newcomers had already experienced this ‘cultural blending and biological blending’, the term creolization no longer applied. (2008, 254). But if the heart of his definition is drawn out – the cross-cultural and cross-racial interaction between enslavers and the enslaved which resulted both in new institutions and new cultural forms – creolization could indeed be said to have transpired in both
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Pub Date : 2019-07-03DOI: 10.1080/17528631.2019.1637144
Mar Gallego
ABSTRACT Concepts of healing and spirituality have remained crucial to generating agency and empowerment for both black women and black men, especially in their diasporic displacement from Africa to the US. Healing has been consistently deployed to fight against the systemic racism and sexism that has pervaded and continues to persist in the lives of African diasporic subjects. Placing the discussion of healing within the current debates about interdependence and spirituality, the paper traces the notion back to its African roots and enslavement times, and attempts to delineate a genealogy of healing up to the present that grounds interdependence and interconnectedness within an ‘ethics of resistance’.
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Pub Date : 2019-06-19DOI: 10.1080/17528631.2019.1611325
C. Thompson
ABSTRACT The Uncle Tom’s Cabin Historic Site in Dresden, Ontario is dedicated to the life of Josiah Henson (1796–1883), a Reverend, abolitionist, and ‘conductor’ on the Underground Railroad. The Historic Site is also located on what remains of the Dawn Settlement. Creolization in the context of Trans Atlantic Slavery is thought to have occurred when select elements from the enslaved were mixed, intertwined and reframed with different sets of meanings within sites of enslavement, such that new identities, realities, and sensibilities emerged. Creolization also reflects a relationship between time and space, and the erasure of a past that is replaced by a hybridized present. How is Henson’s creolized (‘real’) life and his fictionalized (‘fake’) life as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s ‘Uncle Tom’ imagined at the Historic Site? In what ways does erasure frame how we read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as both an archive and a novel?
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Pub Date : 2019-06-06DOI: 10.1080/17528631.2019.1611320
Sophie Saint-Just
ABSTRACT Le passage du milieu (France, 1999) or The Middle-Passage (US version, 2001) proposes in theoretical and conceptual cinematic language a visual and aural translation of the Creolization process on screen. Drawing on literary and theoretical imageries of the middle passage, Filmmaker Guy Deslauriers and his screenwriters replace plot-driven Western literary and visual constructions of la traite with an abstract and disorienting rumination on the slave trade to situate the film in a tradition of African diasporic discourses and to posit the ship as the first island and the original site of proto-creolization.
Le passage du milieu(法国,1999年)或The middle passage(美国,2001年)从理论和概念上对银幕上的克里奥尔化过程进行了视觉和听觉上的翻译。电影制作人Guy Deslauriers和他的编剧借鉴了中间通道的文学和理论图像,用对奴隶贸易的抽象和迷失方向的反思取代了情节驱动的西方文学和视觉结构,将电影置于非洲流散话语的传统中,并将这艘船假设为第一个岛屿和原始克里奥尔化的原始地点。
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Pub Date : 2019-05-16DOI: 10.1080/17528631.2019.1611323
Matti Turner
ABSTRACT Beginning in the 1670s, enslaved Africans’ knowledge, technologies, and labour made the rice plantations of the South Carolina ‘Lowcountry’ incredibly rich. As a result, the transplanted West African ‘rice culture,’ underwent a fascinating creolization process. By examining the creolization of material technologies, especially Lowcountry baskets, this paper challenges Sidney Mintz’ assertion that creolization is completed by the first generation in slave colonies. Instead, creolization extends through time, driven by both disruption and continuity. Both the immediate disruption of enslavement and the ongoing disruptions of shifting economic imperatives—of African subsistence agriculture, the plantation economy, and post emancipation subsistence—drive creolization. Geographic similarities between West Africa and the Lowcountry and the autonomy achieved in provision grounds and the slave-domestic provided continuity. Exemplary of this process, contemporary Lowcountry basket sewing, creolized through the disruptions of slavery and preserved in the slave-domestic, grants practitioners a means of communication with their history and ancestors.
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Pub Date : 2019-05-14DOI: 10.1080/17528631.2019.1611321
Eloisa Valenzuela-Mendoza
ABSTRACT Within her collection, Thrall (2012), Natasha Trethewey turns to Mexico’s eighteenth-century casta paintings to contemplate the enthralling nature of race and mixed-race identity in the United States. For much of the eighteenth century, casta paintings were employed by the elite to establish a lexicon of difference wherein the Other would be constructed and categorized. This aspect of material culture gave privileged Spaniards the illusion of control over an increasingly complicated and diverse population that included Africans – enslaved and free – as well as local Indigenous nations. This is significant when considering the history of the Americas as a violent colonial space within which peoples of difference were often dehumanized within the rhetoric and slave economies of imperial rule. Ultimately, Trethewey creates a poetic vision that establishes a substantial connection between the visual cultures of eighteenth-century Mexico and the contested nature of contemporary race relations in U.S. America.
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Pub Date : 2019-05-09DOI: 10.1080/17528631.2019.1611322
Lesley A. Wolff
ABSTRACT This article argues that Sugar Conventions (2013), an unstudied, mixed media work by the Haitian-born artist Edouard Duval-Carrié, challenges established notions of Eurocentric visuality to locate creolization as a process entangled with, though historically veiled through, canonical Western image production. By destabilizing and denaturalizing Eurocentric conceptions of originality, ‘whiteness,’ and colonialism, Sugar Conventions negotiates the consequences of sugar cultivation and its product, ultimately raising new questions about the complicity of images in producing and obscuring colonial dynamics. To consider the myriad ways in which Sugar Conventions medially and figuratively elevates the physical, moral, and material costs of sugar, this article looks to the three layers, rendered on Plexiglas, that together comprise the work. This article suggests that each layer – background, middle ground, and foreground – negotiates visual, medial, and cultural tensions, which illuminate processes of creolization through the very forms and subjects that construct and perpetuate it.
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Pub Date : 2019-05-02DOI: 10.1080/17528631.2019.1611319
Kristina Huang
ABSTRACT This essay recalibrates the visual signifier of blackness in eighteenth-century art to the period’s adjoining theories and visual aesthetics of lines. The uneven archive of eighteenth-century Anglophone materials – comprised of visual representations of black subjects and written works by black subjects – invites readers of the present to move between, at least, visual and textual modes of interpretation. Building from the scholarship of David Dabydeen and the work of eighteenth-century Londoner, grocer, critic and free black artist Ignatius Sancho, this essay argues that the interplay of visual and textual lines renews readings of eighteenth-century representations of blackness. On the one hand, readings around this interplay open up a recognition of the interrelatedness of literary production, like the rise of the English novel, and the Caribbean plantation system; on the other, these readings gesture at the submerged relationships between eighteenth-century black subjects in the Anglophone Atlantic world.
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