This book aims to develop a Black decolonial feminist approach to Black beauty shame. As such it begins from a perspective which does not deny that intersectional racism and racialization matter for Black womenâs experiences of being looked upon as beautiful or ugly . That is, beautiful and ugly are not seen as judgements which are neutral and inconsequential for Black womenâs lives. Rather, beauty and ugliness impact all of our psyches, our affective lives, our possibilities of being and extend to and through society, culture and political economy . Beauty and ugliness are socioculturally constructed and as such are raced, gendered, sexualized, classed, abled and aged in a multitude of ways. This is why it is important and necessary to think these categories intersectionally. As intersectional categories âBlack beauty/uglinessâ and âBlack beauty shameâ drag coloniality with them into the twenty-first century. As such, Black beauty/ugliness and Black beauty shame always already demand a Black decolonial feminist analysis. Such an analysis would be one that takes on board the coloniality of power, being, knowledge and affect as integral to the very construction of these categories, as well as theorizing how it is that we can build Black beauties anew through Black decolonial feminist thought and practice.
Are We All Black Decolonial Feminists yet?
For Jamaican feminist philosopher and cultural theorist, Sylvia Wynter OJ
You cannot solve the issue of âconsciousnessâ in terms of their body of knowledge. You just canât. Just as within the medieval order of knowledge there was no way in which you could explain why it is that certain planets seemed to be moving backwards. Because you were coming from a geocentric model, right? So you had to âknowâ the world in that way. Whereas from our âMan-centricâ model, we cannot solve âconsciousnessâ because Man is a purely ontogenetic/purely biological conception of being, who then creates âcultureâ. So if we say consciousness is constructed who does the constructing? You see? (Thomas 2006: 2)
Wynter highlights first, who constructs consciousness and culture and second, Man as synonymous with Western Man racialized as white who creates culture. If we begin from the position of white Western Man, then we can see how it is that we still struggle within feminism over the construction of Black womenâs consciousness as well as what counts as Black decolonial feminist knowledge in the academy and beyond. We can see the very coloniality of Man in its raced, gendered, heteropatriarchal, ableist and classed modalities in academic life in other words. Black feminist thought in the UK academy still struggles to be perceived as theory as is also the case in the USA where for Ann Ducille (1994) Black feminist theory is not seen as a âseriousâ academic endeavour. This erasure ensures that Black feminism is not seen as a discipline with a history, distinguished scholars and rigorous scholarship, but rather a buffet where Black feminist theory can be picked at by white feminists and discarded as easily as a half-eaten sandwich or relegated to the dustbin of the easy to forget, the inconsequential, even whilst it is an essential part of the epistemological toolkit of Black feminists.
One example of this is KimberlĂ© Crenshaw âs (1993) theorization of âintersectionality â so key to feminist theory in general. Through lack of proper citation, Crenshaw âs work at one time within European academic feminism was transformed into appearing to be a white womanâs invention so much so that various feminist scholars had to reassert its origins (Brah and Phoenix 2013; Erel et al. 2010) . Crenshaw had mysteriously disappeared from the genealogy of this approach to feminist theory and with it all of the precursors of this within the long tradition of Black US-based feminists attempting to account for Black womenâs multiple positionalities because of the simultaneity of oppression or the interlocking of oppressions (cf Combahee River Collective 1983; Davis 1981; hooks 2000). These accounts were essential in thinking Black womenâs lives because they enabled us to see racialization as intersectional when we viewed it as an object of knowledge. These accounts enabled an analysis of how racialization interfaced and continued to interface with gendered racialized violence, feminist politics, dehumanization and de-womanization . That is, intersectionality enabled us to look at wide-ranging anti-Black African descent womenâs oppression rather than just being focused on difference.
If we go back to Wynter âs quote and its focus on the human as white liberal subject, we can see that Black feminist theory must essentially continue its thinking through oppressive hierarchies as well as the contestation produced by intersectionality . Further, Black feminist theory as a decolonial project must construct new forms of becoming which are not focused on Man as a position from which Black women would know the world or be known by that world. Wynter also reminds us that there are modes of knowledge which are liminal, erased or subjugated in the academy because they stand outside of the hegemonic text of white Western epistemologies. Responding to white feminism from a Black decolonial feminist perspective, Wynter (2001) has said repeatedly that her focus is not on gender but on âgenres of Manâ. She asserts this as her position because in her view focusing only on gender leaves Man intact and this cannot then lead to womenâs emancipation. Therefore, for her, placing gender at the centre of Black decolonial feminist theory will not be the root of Black womenâs liberation. However, critiques built on gender, race, other intersections and coloniality enable feminism to liberate Black women.
Rather than solely Wynter âs Man, here we should probably also put (Wo)Man under our critical gaze because in academia in the Global North West the only feminist theory which prevails is white feminist theory. Within the academy, white feminist theory still seems to be applicable to everyone, to be universal, whilst that from Black feminists is seen to be particularistic. Of course, this continues to elevate white feminist theory to the detriment of Black feminist theory which still is not seen as capable of occupying the âproper placeâ of theory because it is seen to be very narrowly only based on âBlack womenâs experienceâ. The error here, of course, is in seeing white womenâs universal feminist theory as not speaking from a particularistic position which is itself racialized as white (Alexander and Mohanty 1997). Thus, white feminist theory remains transposable to limitless contexts in its very invisible racialization as white. The Black decolonial feminist answer to this deracinating attempt to universalize white feminist theory has been to change âwomanâ into a heuristic rather than an essentialist [white] fait accompli (Spivak 1993; Lorde 1984; Davis 1981; Collins 1990). This went some way to countering the past and future life of woman as white fait accompli through the violence of dehumanization , de-womanization and erasure of Black women and women of colour by decolonizing the category âwomanâ.
This decolonization continues to be theoretically important, perhaps more so than ever. This is the case because in times of Trump, BREXIT, #Black Lives Matter and Fallism, for example, we need to take account of gender, race, sexuality, disability, class and other intersections as constitutive in establishing the borders of who can be âwomanâ. A question which the analysis of Black beauty shame addresses in this book has long been a Black feminist theme and continues to be an essential Black decolonial feminist one. That question is what we do in terms of a politics of liberation in a profoundly anti-Black African descent woman world where she continues to be seen as only flesh ?
The Body and the Flesh : What Are We to Do in a Profoundly AntiâBlack Woman World?
Sylvia Wynter draws on Frantz Fanonâs (1986) work to assert that we live in a sociogenetic world in which we have converted the social construct âraceâ into flesh . Thus, it is that white (Wo)Men see themselves as being outside of race and racialization, whilst Black (wo)men are its very embodiment, the absolute limit of race itself. As a result of the fact that they have been constructed as inherently pathological Black womenâs bodies have to be abjected (Kristeva 1982) from the white body politic including feminism and feminist theory.
At the level of theory, within academic life Black women can be seen to be too critical of and in contradiction to, the taken for granted of the disciplines when they are conceptualized as only speaking from other, quantitatively and qualitatively unverifiable knowledge bases. This can open up subjugated knowledge such as Black feminist knowledge to censure and the very live possibility of erasure (Collins 2015). Within white epistemic domination which does not acknowledge its hegemony , Black feminist thought can be accused of being too political, be r...