Forms of Blackness

Race and Visibility in the French-Speaking World

Cécile Bishop

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2026
• Print ISBN:
  9781478038764
  9781478033837
• eBook ISBN:
  9781478062349
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: History of Art
• Index: Social Sciences

Forms of Blackness examines how race can be approached as a form shaped and perceived through visual and aesthetic practices. Cécile Bishop offers a new way of thinking about the politics of visibility and presses readers to question how to interpret what they see.

Considering race as form across literature, theory, painting, and photography, Cécile Bishop's Forms of Blackness explores the formal devices that make blackness both visible and recognizable. In keeping with black Francophone theorists like Édouard Glissant and Frantz Fanon, Bishop uses the ambiguities these aesthetic forms carry to explore a range of identity concepts like opacity, formlessness, and doubleness. Bishop puts blackness-as-race and blackness-as-form in dialogue, showing how race disrupts the concept of artistic autonomy and how the aesthetic challenges race as a self-evident visual phenomenon. When thought together, form does not isolate blackness from race but rather calls attention to the material substrate that turns race into a phenomenon that can be experienced through sense perception. Moving between careful analysis and experimental modes of critique, Forms of Blackness offers a new way of thinking about the politics of visibility and offers a pressing invitation to question the ways we interpret what we see.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter One. Blackness Unseen: The Liberation of Paris, in Black and White
• Chapter Two. Portrait of Madeleine Versus Portrait of a Negress? Portraiture, Race, and Subjectivity in Marie-Guillemine Benoist’s Painting
• Chapter Three. The Becoming-Insect of Frantz Fanon: Blackness, Form, and Lived Experience
• Chapter Four. Photographic Possessions: Summoning the Diaspora in Samuel Fosso’s African Spirits
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Sources
• Index