She may become politically denegated but this has never yet erased the genealogy of inhumanity her body represents for its privileged others in so many symbolic, institutional, and economic contexts of production
-Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (2008), p.166
Estelle ft. Janelle Monae | Do My Thing
Although there is plenty of (really bitingly funny) ranting against essentialism in Against Race - what Paul Gilroy considers spurious and dangerous claims to racial memory inhering in the bodies of black subjects, rather than created by an actively sought knowledge of the past - I think Gilroy gets misread as an anti-essentialist when he also situates himself against the most commonly articulated anti-essentialist modes of thinking race.
As an anti-essentialist his work rejects exceptionalist/mystical claims to an ethnic essence of blackness pointing out that this tends to elide the diversity/difference between various black cultures.
I see this for instance in the argument over black women’s hair, some hairstyles as being more ‘white’ than others which is sometimes too simplistic and often precludes more vital conversations about black creativity, ingenuity and modes of cultural negotiation. & beyond black cultures this essentialism can muddle transnational/continental readings of race/blackness, especially as regards African identities, or lead to anachronistic readings of ancient cultures (i.e. black people in Ancient Rome) rather than understanding our particular notion of race (quasi-biological, hierarchical etc.) as having a specific set of origins, and a shifting history of signification.
It’s only through understanding race as a temporally and geographically dynamic technology that we get at the specific kinds of injustice it has helped/helps perpetuate and justify.
Against anti-essentialism, then: Gilroy contests radical constructionists (black is just a construction of whiteness & we want to get rid of these categories etc.) because they fail to see the very real racialised social structures that continue to produce race/blackness in society. He also thinks they fail to acknowledge that black identity ‘is lived as a coherent (if not always stable) experiential sense of self. Though it is often felt to be natural and spontaneous, it remains the outcome of practical activity: language, gesture, bodily significations, desires’ (The Black Atlantic, 102).
In this sense blackness is diverse, dynamic, various, multifarious, always being newly invented, and lived. Although in making his point against essentialism Gilroy forgets affect (he’s definitely writing polemically in Against Race and so draws his lines a little heavily along the lines of the Cartesian mind/body split), I think he returns to the affective experience of blackness when he begins to reconcile black as construction to blackness as lived experience.
Women in the United States are more likely to die during or shortly after childbirth than women in nearly all countries in Europe and many in Asia and the Middle East, according to the United Nations.
While maternal mortality declined in most countries over the past 20 years, it has not just increased, but nearly doubled, in the United States.
Experts blame the high death rate partly on the heavy reliance the United States places on technological intervention, particularly when it results, as it so often does, in surgical delivery via cesarean section.
” —Nicole Montesano (via jonathan-cunningham)
C-sections are the most common and frequent surgery done to women. They are also hugely profitable and expensive. In a system premised on profits, this actually makes sense.
“In France, we want a French Islam and we refuse an Islam in France. No Burqas, no Hijabs on identity cards, no halal food in school canteens.”
Eloquent as ever.
Michael Jackson | Dance of Life
(via dundunberberlee)
Hugh Muir looks at the Reading the Riots study
