1st Edition

Imagining, Writing, (Re)Reading the Black Body

Edited By Sandra Jackson, Fassil Demissie, Michele Goodwin Copyright 2025
210 Pages
by Routledge

210 Pages
by Routledge

210 Pages
by Routledge

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,... Read more

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Notes on Contributors

Introduction

1. Displaying Africans at l’Exposition Coloniale

Internationale de Paris, 1931

Fassil Demissie

2. Aestheticisation of the Sentient Black Body: Jean Rouch and Jean Genet

Mbala D. Nkanga

3. Seeking the Dry Bones of My Father: Race, Rites, Ritual and the Blackmale Body in Baldwin, Wright and Ellison

Carol E. Henderson

4. The Black Body as Medical Commerce

Michele Goodwin

5. Unshackling Black Women’s Bodies

Dorothy E. Roberts

6. ‘All the Women Must Be Clothed’: The Anti-nudity Campaign in Northern Ghana, 1957–1969

Benjamin Talton

7. Blackwomen’s Bodies as Battlegrounds in Black Consciousness Literature: Wayward Sex and (Interracial) Rape as Tropes in Staffrider, 1978–1982

Pumla Dineo Gqola

8. Reading the Text of Josephine Baker

Kaiama L. Glover

9. Buried in a Watery Grave: Art, Commemoration and Racial Trauma

Charmaine Nelson

10. Black Bodies and the Representation of Blackness in Imagined Futures

Sandra Jackson

Index

Biography

Sandra Jackson is Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Director of the Center for Black Diaspora at DePaul University, Chicago. Her published works include the following co-edited books: Talking Back and Acting Out: Women Negotiating the Media across Cultures (2002); I’ve Got a Story to Tell: Identity and Place in the Academy (1999) and Beyond Comfort Zones: Confronting the Politics of Privilege as Educators (1995). She is a founding co-editor of African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal (Routledge, Taylor & Francis). She is currently working on a book of essays on race, gender and power in the academy as well as a book on the ways in which black women negotiate a habitable space in the academy.

Fassil Demissie is Associate Professor in Public Policy Studies, DePaul University, Chicago. He is a co-editor and contributor of the book, The New Chicago (2006) and editor of Postcolonial Cities (Routledge, Taylor & Francis). He is a founding co-editor of African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal (Routledge, Taylor & Francis) and Series Editor of Routledge Studies on African and Black Diaspora. His work has also appeared in Housing Studies, International Journal of African Historical Studies, African Identities, Social Identities and Urban Studies.

Michele Goodwin is the Everett Fraser Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota Law School. She is also Professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota Medical Law School. She is the author of Black Markets: The Supply and Demand of Body Parts (2005) and a host of law review articles and book chapters.