Black Beauty: Aesthetics, Stylization, Politics

Black Beauty: Aesthetics, Stylization, Politics

Shirley Anne Tate

Black Beauty : A esthetics, S tyliza tion, Politics

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Black Beauty: A esthetics, S tylization, Politics

S hirley A nne T a te University of Leeds, UK

© S hirley A nne T ate 2009 A ll rights reserved. N o part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. S hirley A nne T ate has asserted her right under the C opyright, Designs and Patents A ct, 1988, to be identi.ed as the author of this work. Published by A shgate Publishing L imited A shgate Publishing C ompany Wey C ourt E ast S uite 420 U nion R oad 101 C herry S treet Farnham Burlington S urrey, GU 9 7PT VT 05401-4405 E ngland USA www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data T ate, S hirley A nne Black beauty : aesthetics, stylization, politics 1. A esthetics, Black 2. Feminine beauty (A esthetics) I. T itle 305.4'8896 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data T ate, S hirley A nne. Black beauty : aesthetics, stylization, politics / by S hirley A nne T ate. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. IS BN 978-0-7546-7145-9 1. Women, Black--C aribbean, E nglish-speaking--E thnic identity. 2. Women, Black-C aribbean, E nglish-speaking--Psychology. 3. Women, Black--R ace identity--C aribbean, E nglish-speaking. 4. Beauty, Personal--C aribbean, E nglish-speaking. 5. S elf-perception in women--C aribbean, E nglish-speaking. 6. C aribbean, E nglish-speaking--S ocial conditions. 7. C aribbean, E nglish-speaking--R ace relations. I. T itle. H Q1501.T 37 2008 305.48'8969729--dc22



IS BN 978 0 7546 7145 9 (hardback) eIS BN 978 0 7546 9140 2 (ebook)

2008039886

C ontents Acknowledgements   Introduction   1

‘Beauty C omes From Within’: O r Does It?  

vii 1 17

2 A nti-R acist A esthetics in the 21st C entury: T he Matter of H air  

35

3

53

‘R ace’, Beauty and Melancholia: S hade  

4 T he S hame of Beauty is its T ransformative Potential  

79

5

99

‘T he Browning’, S traighteners, and Fake T an  

6 H ybrid Black Beauty?   7

C onclusion: Is it all S tylization and Is T here a N eed for Black Beauty C itizenship?  

Appendix:Transcription Conventions   Bibliography   Index  

123 145 161 163 173

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A cknowledgements I would like to dedicate this book to my brother, R odger, who died in March 2008 aged 50. I will never forget him. I would like to thank all the women who made this book possible through allowing me to use their thoughts and words. T hanks Damian, S oraya, Jenna, and T evian for all of your support during the writing of this book. I would like to thank E ncarnación Gutiérrez R odríguez for always pushing me to doubt my certainties in our chats around the kitchen table. I could not have finished this book without structured weekly time off from the C entre for Interdisciplinary Gender S tudies, T he U niversity of L eeds where I work. T hanks for that. I would like to thank R uth H olliday for her comments on an early draft of C hapter 1. A version of C hapter 2 appeared as ‘Black beauty: shade, hair and antiracist aesthetics’ in Ethnic and Racial Studies 30(2), March 2007. A version of Chapter 5 appeared as ‘Black beauty meets feminisms’, in Marina Gržinić and R osa R eitsamer (eds) (2007), New Feminism: Worlds of Feminism, Queer and Networking Conditions (Vienna: L öcker Verlag).

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Introduction What is Black beauty? Does anti-racist aesthetics still have a place in its theorization and stylizations? H ow can Black beauty stylizations enable a critical reading of feminist and Black anti-racist aesthetics that challenges normative thought and bodily practices? What does this reading mean for the continuation of Black antiracist politics? T he ‘aesthetics’, ‘stylization’ and ‘politics’ of the book’s title enable the development of a discussion on Black beauty which queries essentialisms and puts differences at its very centre so as to destabilize certainties. Black Beauty uses postcolonial, feminist and Black anti-racist thought as a theoretical framework to allow for readings of Black beauty which deal with both the place of subjugated knowledge in identity politics and the making of subjectivities in the 21st century. Black beauty is seen throughout the book as performative and as such is an ongoing negotiation of aesthetics, stylization and politics produced through the mobility and mobilization of beauty knowledge, stylization technologies, feminist and antiracist/Black N ationalist ideology in the Black A tlantic diaspora. T hinking the Black A tlantic as a transnational structure of feeling which links diverse populations in a network of Black beauty ideology and practices has meant that this book has evolved from its earlier narrow focus on the UK /US to also looking at the C aribbean and L atin A merica. T his focus acknowledges that Black beauty has raised the possibility for political contestations and has subverted hegemonic knowledge as it has reaffirmed new strategies of identification. Black beauty’s Black A tlantic diasporic roots and routes has affected whole cultures as it has involved the shifting of socio-political not just aesthetic boundaries, transformed discourses and changed both individual and communal identities. In this book the shifts from the colonial to the contemporary, from the C aribbean, to Britain, to the US , to L atin A merica tries to capture Black beauty’s mobility and genealogies. T hese shifts also demand that we remember that ‘race’ is performative and as such it is not just Black beauty but also white beauty that is produced through racialized and racializing discourses on aesthetics and race-ing stylization practices. Feminist ideas on beauty are ‘raced’, classed and the site of othering others (C raig 2002, 2006; H olliday and S anchez T aylor 2006). T he feminist preoccupation has not been with defining beauty as such. Rather the concern has been to explicate definitions and standards of beauty and who stands to gain or lose in terms of these norms, which has resulted in an anti-beauty position (H olliday and S anchez T aylor 2006). H owever, beauty continues to matter and so maybe we should go back to basics, maybe we should attempt to define beauty and see where that takes us.

Black Beauty: Aesthetics, Stylization, Politics



What is beauty? Writing a book on Black beauty has made me face many challenges. O ne of these has been unease about knowing just where to start when looking at beauty itself. S hould I start with R astafarianism as a Jamaican or should I start with Ivan Van S ertima’s (1989) Black Women in Antiquity or should I start with the words of Black British women who participated in my research? A s you would expect, I suppose, knowing that I am an ethnographer, women’s words are my first port of call. When I asked R ay, a twenty-three-year-old Black ‘mixed race’ British student what Black beauty meant to her she replied Black beauty to me is – it’s a tricky question. But I think a really beautiful Black woman or a ‘mixed race’ woman out of them all is the one that has the potential to be stunning. My ideas of Black and beautiful I would say that they originate from my mother’s side of the family also the media probably influenced it. Being at home in Jamaica, what I call home in Jamaica and also even here which has a high Black population and even just within myself as well. A ccepting myself as being beautiful I believe was a big step in knowing more about and having ideas on what Black and beautiful are especially from childhood experiences as an example because I grew up in a predominantly white neighbourhood. When I was eleven or twelve I met my best friend and I started to chill with her etc. and go over to H ud and I discovered that my hair, my nose, my lips, my skin colour, everything was actually beautiful and normal if anything above normal standards, normal or better than the norms that I was used to. T hat is, white straight hair, thin lips you know all that kind of thing, even the colour of the eyes, blue eyes.

With these words Ray orients us to the difficulty of defining once and for all what Black beauty is or could be claimed to be. Instead she points out its complexities when she first says that beauty is about having the potential to be stunning as she makes it clear that beauty is about an appeal to the senses and a judgement is made based on that appeal. For her such judgements have a context in her home in Jamaica, her mother’s family, Black community acknowledgement and acceptance of your beauty, your own acceptance of yourself as beautiful and a continuing uneasy interconnectedness with ideals of white beauty. Black beauty then is lodged in diasporic sociality, sensibilities and processes of transculturation. It is also about racialized aesthetics, the link between the psyche and the social mediated by the surface of the skin and a process of self discovery throughout one’s life. R ay’s words both point to classical philosophical accounts of beauty at the same time as they make us wonder about them. Plato’s (1998) Symposium does not provide us with as detailed an account of beauty’s parameters as does K ant’s (1914) Critique of Judgement. What we are told in the Symposium is that love (ordinary eros) has beautiful things (people) as its object. Further, beauty exists

Introduction



independently of beautiful things and can be grasped by rational means. Beauty becomes here a category about which everyone would hold a common idea and that would be independent of bodies. Judging people as beautiful would therefore be removed from feelings and partiality. If we look again at R ay’s words above we can notice that there is no common idea of beauty that applies to all communities and political interests, beauty is not disembodied and judging beauty is also not about rationality but partiality and feelings. R ay again shows us this when in answer to the question ‘what is your beautiful Black woman ideal?’ she replied Wow this is an interesting question. I should say myself really shouldn’t I? L et’s say me then first but who would it be and why? Now you see this is hard. I could say Beyoncé and be very cliché. S he is a very beautiful woman but too much weave. S ee for me too much weave and not enough of the natural. I don’t think that’s beautiful anymore it’s kind of like artificial. Who would I say? Got it! H alle Berry. S he has wonderful features, nice big brown eyes, nice bone structure, great eyebrows and really nice hair especially I found when it was short and natural and it was natural she just straightened it with her tongs. E ven the body shape, slender not maaga, slender with curves, you know she still had batty, she still had breasts. E veryone says she looks like my mummy so maybe that’s what I have to look forward to as well when I am older.

U ndoubtedly other Black women would disagree with R ay’s assessment or choose other Black beauty ideals such as E rykah Badu, for example. H owever, R ay’s judgement of Beyoncé’s beauty as artificial as opposed to Halle’s more natural looks also links beauty to taste, how taste is inscribed onto the body’s surface and judged for fit in terms of both individual and communal expectations, which are themselves subject to the intersections of class, sexuality, ‘race’ and age, for example. Immanuel K ant’s Critique of Judgement, first published in 1788, deals centrally with taste, beauty and judgement. K ant (1914) saw beauty as a judgement of taste. Judgements of beauty are therefore based on observation/reflection. Unlike Plato’s view, K ant states that these judgements are not logical but aesthetical and therefore subjective. K ant removes beauty from cognition and places beauty within the senses as he says that judging beauty is related to the subject’s feeling of pleasure or pain. Judgements of beauty are always therefore partial. More controversially in my view K ant (1914, 55) claims that ‘the beautiful’ is an ‘object of universal satisfaction’ and, further, that we do not need a concept of ‘beauty’ to find something beautiful. Although Kant writes largely about nature the question for our concerns is what would be ‘universal’ here and how can we judge beauty without having a concept?

  Jamaican for very slim.   Jamaican for bottom.



Black Beauty: Aesthetics, Stylization, Politics

K ant (1914, 55) bases his idea of ‘universal satisfaction’ on the premise that the beautiful as the ‘object of disinterested satisfaction’ is the ground of satisfaction for everyone. We would now, of course, say that both the local and global (universal) are conditioned by discourses so the position of ‘disinterested’ is problematic. H e also states that beauty ‘must claim universality for everyone, without this universality depending on objects. T here is, there must be bound up with it a title to a subjective universality’ (K ant 1914, 55). By a subjective universality I take K ant to mean something akin to a structure of feeling which everyone would share though one without any concepts to give it meaning. T his would mean that as humans we would all feel beauty in exactly the same way as either pleasure or pain and through this feeling apprehend it. A subjective universality is problematic though as K ant’s (1914, 88) own words point out when in speaking of beauty and perfection he says: If now in a similar way for this average man we seek the average head, for this head the average nose etc., such figure is at the basis of the normal Idea in the country where the comparison is instituted. T hus necessarily under these empirical conditions a negro must have a different normal Idea of the beauty of the [human figure] from a white man, a China man a different normal Idea from a E uropean, etc.

T herefore the racialized local would be in constant negotiation with the universal (global) in any definition or judgement of the beautiful. Kant here names ‘racial groups’ so for him ‘race’ is significant and will impact on beauty norms around the world. H is claim then that there is universal satisfaction in the beautiful needs to be prefaced with an acknowledgement that beauty is contingent, dynamic, racialized and is involved in an ongoing aesthetic and political contestation between local and global norms. H owever, K ant (1914, 55–7) continually insists throughout that we cannot say something is beautiful if it only pleases us individually. R ather when we say something is beautiful there is a demand that others share in our assessment so we cannot say that each person has their own particular taste. With this idea that each person does not have their own particular taste and a demand for commonality in assessment, K ant allows us to think his ideas discursively. A judgement of beauty cannot rightfully just belong to an individual but is based in sociality. It is based in the discourses on beauty and ugliness and the embodied practices of beauty which sediment in our structures of feeling over centuries of transnational political debate and stylization. It is these dominant discourses and practices which demand assent from us as they declare this ‘beautiful’ and that ‘ugly’ through norms which delineate who will qualify as a subject of recognition within regimes of beauty truth: In Foucault’s view there is always a relation to this regime, a mode of selfcrafting that takes place in the context of the norms and, specifically, negotiates an answer to the question of who the “I” will be in relation to these norms …

Introduction



T his does not mean that a given regime of truth sets an invariable framework for recognition; it means only that it is in relation to this framework that recognition takes place or the norms that govern recognition are challenged and transformed (Butler 2005, 22).

A judgement of beauty based on reflection can assume the assent of others because we are all imbricated in regimes of beauty truth in which the ‘I’ and the ‘other’ are recognizable. There is then no ‘aesthetical universal … [which] does not unite the predicate of beauty with the concept of the object … and … extends it to the whole sphere of judging persons’ (K ant 1914, 61). T here are racialized aesthetics which attempt to be universal by uniting beauty with some bodies while othering others and extending this to everyone globally. Further, there is a reflexive dimension involved here because a relation to such regimes will also be a relation to oneself as these regimes govern subjectivation (Butler 2005). A s we question regimes of beauty truth through debate and everyday stylization we also question the regime through which our being is recognized (Butler 2005). Beauty therefore matters. It is not superfluous but is an integral part of individual and communal life and politics. H owever, K ant’s aesthetical universal attempts to hide its normalizations and its regimes of truth within the idea that there is no object of beauty only judgements of ‘the beautiful’ which he claims does ‘not unite the predicate of beauty with the concept of the object’. Trying to camouflage normalizations simultaneously denies the specificities of beauty itself in terms of class, ‘race’, gender, sexuality, age, ability, for example. What is interesting about K ant’s objectless beauty is that as a norm it works its way outwards from a racialized E uropean centre and even whilst remaining hidden it is never forgotten. It continues to lie dormant and bubble to the surface in both global and local expressions and translations of the beautiful even though as K ant also makes clear there are other ideas of beauty which coexist with the E uropean ideal. It must be said that E uropean beauty ideals, as others, have also undergone change over the centuries. T wo everyday examples of this are the canerow and hair extensions. T hese stylization technologies and aesthetics have gone from Black women’s hair to that of white women without any derisory comment being made about the latter women’s politics or identities. H owever, it is the continuing ability of the white body to mark itself as racially unmarked while racializing othered beauty as ‘exotic’, ‘different’ , ‘not quite right’ and ‘consuming the other’ while remaining at a distance, for example, which are part of the continuities of a structure of feeling based on whiteness as the beauty norm. Another aspect of this is not seeing white stylization and beautification practices as ‘race work’, as performatively reproducing whiteness. K ant’s Critique of Judgement is also part of this structure of feeling even though it does not deal with bodily practices but with philosophy. T hinking about whiteness as a structure of feeling makes us again look to K ant who tries to decipher in what way we are conscious of a mutual societal cognition in the judgement of taste. H e regards this question as one which is easy to answer



Black Beauty: Aesthetics, Stylization, Politics

because what we have to be clear about is only whether this is done aesthetically by mere internal sensation or if it is done intellectually by consciously designed activity (K ant 1914, 65). H is answer to what I see as a complex question is that ‘the beautiful pleases universally without a concept’ (K ant 1914, 67) and so judgements of beauty would only be done aesthetically, be based on individual reflection and, I suppose, be devoid of politics. He does not wonder at any point, of course, if internal sensation is also shaped by sociality. If we go back to the earlier discussion of recognition and regimes of truth, it is clear that there is an ‘outside in-inside out’ movement in beauty judgements. T his outside in-inside out movement of judgements of beauty is something that I would insist on as a basis for understanding the everyday workings of the intersections and interconnectedness of beauty knowledge, practices and politics. S ince my view is that beauty is performative, what K ant’s answer occludes is the operation of designed activity such as stylization in bringing beauty into being on the surface of the body. Beauty concepts must be going from the outside in if R ay can say above that her preference is for H alle over Beyoncé based on the idea of natural versus artificial beauty. As I said earlier, beauty concepts must also be at play because without them how can we judge the beautiful and have the attendant feelings of pleasure/pain. If ‘beauty … ought merely to be concerned with form’ (Kant 1914, 74) and if in reflecting on this form we feel pleasure we will seek to retain this in our consciousness whilst we seek to keep pain out. Feelings say ‘“I like this it feels good to me” or “I don’t like it” and lead to an action on this basis’(Brennan 2004, 116). T here is always interplay between the psyche and the social. T herefore, to obtain pleasure and avoid pain we must approximate some concept of that which is judged beautiful by others in our embodiment. Designed activity is therefore an integral part of the quest for perfection in beauty. When we judge something as beautiful we get immediate satisfaction because of its ‘internal purposiveness’ (K ant 1914, 77). By this K ant means the perfection which comes nearer to the predicate of beauty. H is question is whether or not beauty can ‘be resolved into the concept of perfection’ (K ant 1914, 77). T hose two words ‘perfection’ and ‘predicate’ already imply that there must be a concept of beauty which we all access in making judgements. T his undermines his other idea that beauty has no concept. To be fair though in his three definitions of beauty only free beauty assumes ‘no concept of what the object ought to be’ (K ant 1914, 81) whilst dependent beauty presupposes a concept and the perfection of the object. H uman beauty is ‘adherent beauty’ as it has a concept of perfection. N oël C arroll (2000) has described at length how this concept of perfection is itself racialized and ethnicized as the binary beauty/non-beauty is frequently used in the representation of racialized and ethnicized minorities. For him beauty and perfection are political and an important part of racialized/ethnicized sociality. K ant’s perfection carries with it ‘sensation in the subject’ as we compare an object with the O bject (that is, Beauty) that it ought to be (K ant 1914). E very judgement of beauty though is still aesthetical as it is based on the feeling of the subject even given the presence of perfection. T he O bject is an Idea which everyone must produce in themselves and

Introduction



use to judge others through the Ideal (K ant 1914, 85). Beauty norms have ideals of perfection within them which emerge in individual presentations (K ant 1914, 85). E ven though K ant was writing pre-Foucault his thoughts have clear connections to regimes of truth (the O bject), norms (the Ideal) and recognition (a production in oneself and its judgement based on the Ideal). Within K ant’s writing there seems to be a continuous and anxious interplay between whether we should give priority to feelings or sociality within judgements of beauty rather than to admit to their interconnectedness once and for all. I want to turn now to look at K ant’s view that we produce the O bject, Beauty, in ourselves. In my previous work I claim that beauty is performative (T ate 2007a) and I would like to again say that here through reading K ant. K ant speaks of the constant attempt to embody hegemonic beauty norms and their attendant ideals of perfection. T his is what Judith Butler (1990) in Gender Trouble calls a performative reiteration. Black beauty as all other beauties is a matter of doing and its effects are not therefore an inherent attribute which awaits apprehension and judgement through a neutral process of reflection. Just as all beauty judgements are about a comparison between one’s presentation and racialized ideals so beauty is about practices of enracing. Beauty stylizations in general terms are about ‘race-ing’ bodies and being raced by embodied subjects from hair dressers to people in the street. A s Black beauty is performative it can be performed differently and disrupt the beauty normalizations, the taken for granted ideas of our beauty Ideals. T wo of these normalizations which I deal with centrally in this book focus on Black beauty as ugly if white beauty is the Ideal and Black ‘mixed race’ beauty as despicable if the Ideal emerges from Black anti-racist aesthetics. Beauty stylizations thus link the psyche and ‘the social’ when they freeze the ideal of perfection on bodies or question this as judgements of beauty are made. T hese judgements are not just aesthetically, politically or interpersonally neutral as K ant would lead us to believe. In T eresa Brennan’s (2004, 119) view as we judge we are possessed by affects. S he does not mean feelings in the K antian sense of sensation in the subject as feelings are ‘sensory states produced by thought while interruptive thoughts are produced by affects. Feelings are thoughtful, affects are thoughtless’ (Brennan 2004, 116). Feelings are information about whether or not a state is pleasurable or painful, whether we are attracted to something or repelled by it (Brennan 2004) whilst affect relates to intensification and the very creation of bodies through emotion (A hmed 2004). I am dealing with K antian ‘feelings’ and ‘judgement’ at length here because affect and its implications for politics is also an important aspect of the project of Black Beauty. A s we judge others we simultaneously direct toward them a stream of negative affect which cuts off our feeling of kinship towards them as fellow human beings (Brennan 2004). Judgements of Black beauty in terms of some ideal are not therefore without individual and political consequences. A s we direct negative affects such as disgust and shame to the other we cut any tie with her as we objectify her. In such judgemental projection we make her into an object as we mark her with affects that we refuse in ourselves but which still possess us (Brennan 2004) because we too cannot be the



Black Beauty: Aesthetics, Stylization, Politics

Ideal in terms of beauty. S ince they are based on perfection, judgements of beauty imbricate us in affects. T his makes us see K antian feelings as not being about free floating feelings of pleasure and pain produced by reflection on beauty but rather the affects going from the outside in and the inside out as we compare ourselves and others to the impossible to obtain Ideal. Judgement is not just aesthetical and based on an individual’s feelings but is also an active process of the transmission of affects which feature in othering by ‘race’, gender and sexuality, for example. S uch othering troubles K ant’s idea of ‘universal beauty’. In trying to account for universal beauty K ant locates it as something we have an image for which extends across the whole human ‘race’. If we remember his claim that the local also determines what we have as the Ideal and that human beauty has the ideal of perfection, we can see that he is also operating with a ‘racial’ typology based on ‘biology’. What we would have then are ‘racial’ archetypes rather than ‘the image of the whole race, which floats among all the variously different intuitions of individuals which nature takes as archetype in her production of the same species, but which seems not to be fully reached in any individual case’ (K ant 1914, 88). For K ant beauty of form has to do with correctness and non-contradiction of the ‘mental presentation of the race’ (K ant 1914, 88). H ere I assume that he is using ‘race’ biologically in order to judge beauty as correctness and non-contradiction and that he also implies the operation of a norm when he speaks about ‘mental presentation’. When we judge beauty then we are making racialized judgements of form based on communal/societal/ global norms of beauty. We can see the detrimental effects of this in the uses and abuses of Black women’s bodies in the Black A tlantic over the centuries ranging from their sale on the slave blocks, to the exhibition of S arah Baartman and other Black Venuses in E uropean living rooms and freak shows (H obson 2005), to A lek Wek’s body being used as the espresso in a L avazza cup (Wek 2007), to Iman with her ‘signifying monkey’ in T hierry Mugler’s S pring/S ummer show 1985 (K uipers 2001). In my earlier work on hybridity and Black ‘mixed race’ women’s identities (T ate 2005) I have looked at ‘race’ as performative. By this I mean to denote the interaction of both agency and subjectivation. T hat is, racialized subjects bring into being what they name within the reiterative power of discourse on ‘race’ which also produces the ‘phenomena that it regulates and constrains’ (Butler 1993, 2). R acialized discourses of beauty and ugliness are always already carried within K ant’s idea of ‘race’ as we see from his view of the normal Idea of beauty and the average man. E ven though hidden these racialized discourses are made known in the embodiment of different beauty models. O ne space in which these beauty models and their attendant politics are present is within the debate on naturalness and hair in Black communities which R ay uses above when she highlights the difference between H alle Berry and Beyoncé around the latter wearing too much weave and the former having natural short hair. In Doing Business with Beauty Adia Harvey Wingfield (2008) shows us some of the complexity of Black beauty stylization and politics when she looks at the work of Black beauty salons. H ere

Introduction



hair can still be straightened to either fit what she sees as a white hair image or only to make curly hair more controllable; but natural hair styles with A frican, A frican-A merican or Jamaican origins – such as canerows, dreadlocks, afros, braids – have become popular as a way of showing rejection of white-orientated images of beauty and being proud of natural Black beauty. T he natural/unnatural hair debate and its attendant politics of pride/shame, Black authenticity/white wannabe has been a long-running one in Black communities as is also reflected in the work of Banks (2000), C raig (2006), R ooks (2000), Figuerido (2003) and Farris L ewis (2001). Natural beauty is superior to artificial beauty in Kant’s (1914, 178) view, as it is natural beauty alone which ‘arouses an immediate interest’. H owever, for him, artificial beauty may surpass natural beauty in terms of form. Further, ‘natural beauty is a beautiful thing; artificial beauty is a beautiful representation of a thing’ (Kant 1914, 193). Whether artificial or natural we can say ‘That is beautiful which pleases in the mere act of judging it’ (K ant 1914, 187). A s I have said above, the act of judging is not the impartial reflection of a subject that Kant would have us believe. R ather judgement is always partial and contingent. Furthermore, the natural/artificial binary has its normalized parameters. If it did not, how could we judge where the natural ceases and the artificial begins? Perhaps Kant should have thought about beauty/the beautiful not as being about some un-worked on nature but about practices productive of the Ideal. T his would mean that natural/ artificial would not then be the compelling binary. It would also mean perhaps that we would be more interested in looking at the production of the natural through the artificial as in beauty stylizations, for example. So as we produce the natural through the artificial beauty itself would be re-producible. What we would end up with then are simulacra which we term ‘the beautiful’. T he agreement on the beautiful which for K ant we assume from everyone would be also based on simulacra rather than some original, ideal beauty which somehow floats between us as members of the human race. Clearly, there is no natural or artificial beauty, indeed no beauty as such, which pre-exist their representation and reading in culture. Beauty is not something that simply is but it is rather done and translated for its cultural intelligibility. A s culturally intelligible beauty is an effect of discourses. When we say ‘she is beautiful’ we interpellate her and initiate her beauty-ing in opposition to that which is deemed ‘ugly’ (N uttall 2006). Beauty and ugliness are performatively produced in and through discourse so it is possible to change the interpellation of beautiful/ ugly on the basis of an alternative set of discursively constructed attributes as was the case at the birth of R astafarianism in 1930s Jamaica or in the ‘Black is beautiful’ era, for example. T o produce such alternative beauty attributes was a political challenge to white beauty iconicity which at the same time put Black beauty’s recognition at risk. T his is so because such a challenge to the white beauty regime meant to risk unrecognizability as one was outside the norms. What had also to be worked for was a self recognition which brought existing norms into crisis through its very unrecognizability (Butler 2005). T he dreadlocks and the afro are

10

Black Beauty: Aesthetics, Stylization, Politics

good examples of this at the level of hair as they enabled a change in interpellation to ‘Black’ and ‘A frican diasporic’ beauty rather than ugliness by widening beauty norms. N ow positioned as the other because of Black politics and stylization, white beauty could not be the only normative frame to confer recognizability. T he normative framework within which whiteness as the other was apprehended and within which whiteness as the other saw and recognized Black beauty was irrevocably changed. T o enable a change in interpellation depends as much on politics and affirmative identifications as it does on stylizations even though there is always a continuous interplay between them. What is interesting throughout the history of beauty in the Black A tlantic diaspora is the paradox of the simultaneity of Black beauty valorization or negation/shame in our lives and this still extends into the twenty first century. It is unpicking the complexities of this simultaneity which has been the focus of Black anti-racist and feminist writing on the subject of Black beauty. Black beauty and feminism T he quest for Black beauty has spawned a multi-million pound industry. T his has happened even whilst beauty is still a form of social capital which continues to be racialized and contested. In the contestations produced by debate and stylizations it is clear that Black beauty is not a decided once and for all but is still subject to the vicissitudes of identity politics, representations and the ongoing racializations of bodies and practices. Within this debate and its translations onto the body through stylization lies the potential for revisiting Black anti-racist and feminist beauty theorization and politics. T his revisiting is what Black Beauty aims to do. Hunter (2005, 29) highlights the significance of beauty for ‘race’ politics when she says ‘color consciousness and the pursuit of whiteness is the backdrop for contemporary definitions of beauty and femininity in communities of color’. If we look at the inclusions of Black beauty within popular culture we cannot argue with this point. O ne such notable inclusion as I am writing in 2008 is the beautiful singer/actress Beyoncé K nowles, a Black blonde who has been the spokesperson for L’Oréal, the face of the perfume ‘Star’ by Tommy Hilfiger and was in 2007 the ‘spokesbody/spokesvoice’ for A rmani’s perfume ‘Diamonds’. A nother is the O scar award winning actress H alle Berry whose mother, we are reminded in the E nglish press, is white E nglish and so we can assume she is the source of her good looks. N otwithstanding H alle’s declaration of herself as A frican-A merican in her O scar’s speech, if you had a mind to, you could say that these two women highlight the Black pursuit of whiteness and colour consciousness of which H unter speaks. H owever, my preferred take on this would be to say that these women show some of the variety which exists in Black beauty in the A tlantic diaspora and that this diversity is in need of explication in terms of aesthetics, stylization and politics. T o not undertake this explication means that we obscure Black beauty’s nuances, paradoxes and depths and continue to judge ourselves in relation to white beauty’s

Introduction

11

iconicity. T his is an iconicity which is implicitly heterosexual, age conscious, purportedly classless and seeks to obscure its racial markedness. Further, what H unter’s claim precludes is the continuing impact on consciousness and stylization of a specifically Black Atlantic derived diasporic anti-racist aesthetics into the 21st century. In doing this she thereby denies the contestation over aesthetics which is evident at the level of everyday stylization and politics. For example, the debate on ‘natural’ versus ‘un-natural’ Black beauty which began in at least the 1830s (R ooks 2000) is one which continues unabated within Black politics today. Black beauty’s complexity is also added to by the impact of stylization and its technologies. T his is so as stylization makes Black beauty performative, negotiable and impossible to fix in a once and for all way because of the possibility for multiple inscriptions on the body. What is interesting about these multiple inscriptions though is that they can still be and, indeed are, read as Black. T hroughout the book I use the words of Black British women from ‘a beauty ethnography’ which spanned ten years. T heir words have helped me enormously in looking at the significance of Black beauty and readings of its stylizations for thinking shame, melancholia, hybridity, mimicry, performativity and a transformational Black anti-racist and feminist beauty politics. In doing this I hope to begin to understand the dynamics of Black beauty in the early 21st century in which skin, shade and hair continue to matter at the level of politics but stylization means that what was once taken as a given in terms of ‘race’ and aesthetics now has to be re-read and enraced as Black. Feminist views on the female body highlight crucial links between issues of identity, sexuality and empowerment (Brand 2000). From the 1980s feminists have focused on how dominant beauty norms positioned white, Black and A sian women and in so doing maintained racial and gender inequality (C raig 2006). T hose who look at non-white women in contemporary beauty regimes have found exclusion, inclusion only if there is approximation to whiteness, or inclusion of ‘a changing spectrum of women in the marginalized and marked position of the exotic beauty’ (C raig 2006, 163). In common with the cultural turn in feminist approaches to beauty (Black 2004; Davis 1995; Frost 1999; Gimlin 2002; H olliday and S anchez T aylor 2006; McR obbie 1997), I see women as having agency in terms of beauty practices, getting pleasure from them and being empowered by stylizations. For S heila Jeffreys (2005, 20), however, beauty is a primary source of women’s oppression. Its practices are harmful cultural practices because women engage in them ‘as a way of ameliorating the shame and despair that a male dominant culture creates in women’. H armful cultural practices, dangerous to women’s physical and emotional well-being spring from beauty and should be either legally sanctioned or censured (Felski 2006). What is interesting in this body of feminist work – both pro- and anti- beauty – is the omission of a sustained discussion on speci.cally Black beauty. T hrough this omission whiteness is taken as the norm and the place from which all discussion must stem as it is the one standard, which speaks loudly in its silence, against which all are judged. In Jeffreys’ (2005) work, for example, Black women and

12

Black Beauty: Aesthetics, Stylization, Politics

women of colour are represented as pathological in that the only mention made of them is as victims of genital circumcision and footbinding, clients for hymen reconstruction or as women in search of white beauty because of the impact of racialization. In terms of ‘a search for white beauty’, she places A frican-A merican scholars as being the origin of this information which locates it very much as ‘insider’ knowledge and therefore difficult, if not impossible, for her to refute especially as a white woman. Black women are presented then as being dupes of patriarchy and racism and completely without beauty agency as they can only yearn for whiteness. It goes without saying that I do not see Black women – us – as ‘dupes’, ‘dopes’ or agency-less. Further, what has become clear throughout the research is that Black beauty is multiple and Black communities and politics also produce silently speaking norms against which Black women are judged. Whiteness is not the only or central focus of Black beauty norms. Outline of the book What I hope is beginning to be clear through this short introduction is that this book aims to enter feminist debates on beauty from the position of Black feminist dialogues on racialized beauty and the nature of Black beauty ideals which have been started by, for example, hooks (1992), Mama (1995), Weekes (1997), R ooks (2000), Banks (2000), C ollins (2000; 2004), C raig (2002; 2006), H obson (2003; 2005) and H unter (2002; 2005). I also want to make us think ‘well, what else do we need to think about?’ What these writers have in common is their insistence that in a context that has decreed Black women to be inherently ugly, shade and hair continue to matter for Black women both in the U nited S tates and in Britain. T his is also the case in the wider Black A tlantic world of the C aribbean (Jan Mohammed 2000; C andelario 2007; A rrizón 2006; C ooper 2004) and L atin A merica (Figueiredo 2003; Pinho 2006; C aldwell 2007). O ne aspect of this is that approximation to white standards is still a prerequisite for beauty, which in turn is a necessary aspect of social capital. Indeed, for H unter (2005) light skin and straight(er) hair ensure one’s upward mobility in the job market and marriage to someone who is upwardly mobile. I do not deny the continuation of such aesthetics into the 21st century or indeed its power to determine one’s life chances. What I want to do instead with my ‘well, what else do we need to think about?’ is to show that there are cracks in this white originated/orientated hegemonic Black beauty and there always have been. T hese cracks appear often in surprising ways. T his is made clear if viewed through the lens of the performativity of everyday practices of stylization and the politics of aesthetics in which they reside, in which claiming Black beauties can be a subversive act. T his stylization makes us of necessity have to rethink just what is Black beauty anyway and to see it as being both about the visibility of a surface and recognition within an economy of racialized and racializing valuation. C hapter 1 takes up these themes through its engagement with the saying ‘beauty comes from

Introduction

13

within’ and what it tells us about the anatomical economy of Black beauty. Within this economy beauty is inscribed on the surface of the ‘race’d and gendered body through stylizations that are also classed, aged, sexualized and situated within local and global circuits of representation. T he labour of stylization adds beauty value which is contingent on the context in which it is displayed. Beauty does not come from within and ‘the beautiful’ is constantly re-fashioned using the surface of the body, its very skin and hair, as its raw materials, its canvas. T hroughout the book I come back again and again to the question of the cultural politics of Black beauty in the latter part of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century. There is this specific periodization because of the timescale of the ethnography which began in 1997 and extended to 2007. A part of this periodization is a look at ideals of feminine Black beauty in terms of skin and hair from the 1990s to today and how these ideals are inscribed onto bodies, under what conditions and with what effect/affect. C hapter 2 deals with the issue of anti-racist aesthetics in the 21st century, the question of the racialized hierarchy embedded in ‘hair’ and how women negotiate specifically Black political contestations along the natural/unnatural hair binary. H air as we know is not just organic matter growing out of your scalp that makes us beautiful or not. A s I have said before it has also formed the basis for a long running debate on Black consciousness and politics in the Black Atlantic diaspora in which what you do with your hair is taken to reflect who and what you are or can lay claim to be. T he meanings of hair are not just formed by white aesthetic concerns but are also constructed out of Black political projects which continue to resonate in Black women’s lives. T he interrelatedness of stylization, the politics of Black aesthetics and affect also turn our attention to how questions of ‘race’ and beauty are related to cultural melancholia as it does to the part shame plays in beauty recognition. C hapter 3 continues to look at the racialized hierarchy of Black beauty but now turns our attention to ‘skin’. I focus here on the culturally instituted melancholia of Black beauty. T his culturally instituted melancholia means that as we live in postcolonial societies in which ‘Black ugliness’ is the norm from which we must of necessity dissent, ‘Black mixed race’ beauty is formed from the refusal to grieve all Black beauties as a possibility of love within Black community and politics. I argue though that such postcolonial affective melancholia in terms of shade is not debilitating as it leads to the relocation of Black ‘mixed race’ beauty within Black diasporic beauty politics through disidentification from dominant E urocentric beauty ideals. R acialized beauty as a site of affect and agency is also impacted on by shame and disidentification. Chapter 4 looks at the interaction of beauty, ugliness and the transformative potential of Black beauty shame as a bad feeling which attaches to what ‘one is’. A s such Black beauty shame is both relational and productive of what one is through its ability to transform or intensify the meanings of parts of the body’s surface. T hese meanings are contested through the workings of racialization and Black anti-racist aesthetics and therefore produce their own paradoxes. A s is the case with melancholia, shame is not paralyzing. R ather,

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Black Beauty: Aesthetics, Stylization, Politics

through disidentification shame participates in the transfiguration of Black beauty identities as it allows newness to emerge in terms of beauty stylizations and their recognition. S hame makes Black beauty mobile, a process of change rather than being inevitably fixed in a once and for all way. Black beauty as process and change in turn points to the question of how the very bodies of Black beauty and the performativity of stylization ensure that aesthetics have to be re-read and enraced differently. C hapter 5 takes up this discussion through looking at the Jamaican diasporic category ‘the browning’, ‘enracing’ and being ‘raced’ and the challenges these offer to the ideas on beauty emanating from both Black anti-racist aesthetics and hegemonic whiteness. T hrough looking at the newness that is being brought into being by Black A tlantic ‘mixed race’ aesthetics translated into Black ‘mixed race’ British beauty practices we begin to see the everyday disruptions of beauty hegemonies. H ere the use of ceramic straighteners and fake tan is normalized as a part of a specifically Black stylization through readings of diasporic beauty knowledge on ‘the browning’. T hinking about Black beauty as diverse brings us to the question of the continuing impact of Black anti-racist aesthetics on who counts as Black and beautiful. C hapter 6 takes up this theme in its focus on ‘hybrid Black beauty?’. T he question mark is instructive as it highlights the uncertainties around the Black beauty category alongside the transformative potential of enracing which exists through stylization. In this enracing, these uncertainties are never replaced once and for all with something certain and altogether new. R ather, Black beauty becomes mobile and the locus of stylizations which make it hybrid and undecidable. H owever, this hybrid undecidability coexists with the necessity for the categories ‘race’ and ‘Black’ themselves. This complicates any easy definition of Black beauty or any simplistic account which would say that ‘a Black anti-racist feminist aesthetic is ... ’ or ‘to belong within the Black beauty category is ...’ A s I look at these issues throughout the book I focus on the idea that there is now, as there always has been, a necessity for a wider and more inclusive Black beauty citizenship in order to enable Black anti-racist feminist politics to continue. I go then from aesthetics to politics and back again. T his movement back and forth is developed more fully in the conclusion in C hapter 7. In this chapter I make the claims that beauty cannot be thought outside of politics as beauty continues to matter politically to Black women and communities in the Black A tlantic diaspora. Through an engagement with, beauty as racialized, the significance of diasporic Black beauty norms and how Black women themselves, speak about, negotiate, inhabit, work up/on and performatively produce beautiful Black bodies, sometimes against all the odds, I show that politics are at stake within any consideration of beauty. I also move to a discussion of whether or not there is a continuing need for a Black anti-racist feminist aesthetics. T he question of what this could mean in the 21st century is an urgent one given the persistence of a global colour blind dialogue obscuring the nature of beauty as a site of othering in terms of ‘race’, class, sexuality and age, for example. T he book closes with a consideration of whether or not a racial rearticulation approach to beauty in the 21st century calls

Introduction

15

into question the need for Black beauty citizenship. T hat is for the reading of stylization’s differences as Black and therefore worthy of inclusion within Black beauty. I maintain throughout the book that stylization does not mean that women are inscribing a white aesthetic onto their bodies. R ather, what they are doing is expanding the boundaries of what counts as Black beauty, delimiting Black beauty as performative and at the same time investing beauty with a recognizably Black social capital. A note on data and method T he data with which I engage in the book are based on what I have come to call a mobile beauty ethnography. T his is comprised of two pieces of face-toface ethnographic research with Black British C aribbean heritage women and an ongoing virtual ethnography. The first interviews were conducted in London and the N orth of E ngland in the late 1990s on matters of identity with women who were then in their 30s and 40s and who had been anti-racist political activists in the 1980s. T he second are with women in their 20s in L ondon and the N orth of E ngland conducted in 2004/2006 which focuses on questions of beauty, their beauty stylizations and their bodywork. T he virtual ethnography on Black women’s health and beauty websites and Y ouT ube was begun in 2005 and is ongoing. I also draw on material from writers and film makers in/on Brazil, Mexico, C uba, the Dominican R epublic, Jamaica and the U nited S tates who share an interest with me in explicating Black beauty’s particularities as I try to unpick Black A tlantic diasporic beauty connections. O ver the decade long life span of the beauty ethnography I made extensive notes in a fieldwork diary as it became clearer that talk on beauty is very much a part of the daily interactions of Black women. S o I also use these everyday experiences as data in keeping with the Black feminist approach to data outlined by Pat H ill C ollins (2000). T he ethnography then has both 20th and 21st century data and draws from different generations of Black British women and the wider diaspora in order to show the continuities and ruptures in Black beauty as aesthetics, politics and stylization. I hope that as I present the words of the research participants I do not reproduce them as pathological or as dopes/ dupes but rather as women who stand opposed to Black beauty’s marginalizations and exclusions. Doing virtual ethnography and using psychoanalytic categories like shame and melancholia to read data were points of unease in the fieldwork and analysis processes. I think that the decision to include a virtual aspect to the beauty ethnography was a sound one as it allowed me to have access potentially to a much wider Black beauty structure of feeling than would have been the case if I only used interviews in the UK . T his is so because whilst online discussions call into being pre-existing identities they also question narrow definitions and replace them with new imaginings of global and transnational identities (C onstable, 2003). I have not used information from private discussion groups and

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Black Beauty: Aesthetics, Stylization, Politics

also use pseudonyms for the internet subjects as I do for the interview participants. I read all of the data irrespective of the source as texts. T his does not mean that I see them as ‘transparent carriers of the meanings intended by their authors’ (H ine 2001, 50). R ather they allowed me to develop an understanding of Black A tlantic diasporic beauty meanings which underlie textual practices and are enacted through them (H ine 2001, 50). It occurred to me as I read the sites and also listened to my audiotaped interviews and conversations that theorizing Black beauty would mean that I would have to find some way to talk about the intertwining of the psyche and the social. Attending to this interplay does not mean that I privilege the unconscious but rather that in common with A vtar Brah (1992), Judith Butler (1997), S tuart H all (1996), A mina Mama (1995) and Sasha Roseneil (2006) I recognize the significance for the psyche of discourses, identifications and everyday practices. My orientation to both Black beauty shame and melancholia is that as affect (K hanna 2003; A hmed 2004; Probyn 2005; S edgwick 2003) these are culturally instituted, go from the outside in and are not inherently part of who we are as Black people. A question I was asked at a conference still resonates almost a year on and it is this that I now want to attend to. T he question was ‘how are you imbricated in your research?’ A simple question on the surface but one that made me dig deep to be truthful about my motivations and my location as a researcher/academic. I had to that point thought that I was doing this topic because I was dissatisfied with the treatment of Black beauty in the academic literature. What is so interesting about digging deep is that it suddenly becomes really about you so I told my own story. It goes something like this. When I was growing up in my village, S ligoville, in Jamaica, I had daily fights after school from about the age of five and my mother was in despair at my constantly ripped clothing and bleeding skin. T he reason for all this was that I was being called ‘red’ by one particular girl for whom my lighter skin and ginger hair was not quite right. T his stopped when I changed to my high school in S panish T own and did not resurface again until I moved to E ngland and became involved in Black anti-racist politics, community activism and trade unionism. I am still here and in June 2007 I was again reminded that Black politics is still rife with tension over the issue of skin colour and hair texture when I was challenged by brothers and sisters over my ability to speak on a panel on ‘why skin colour still matters’ because of my ‘mixed race’ appearance. Many years have passed but oh so little has changed! My own encounters in terms of shade and hair led me here to this book. My own shaming events, my own pain, my own melancholic state that I also recognize and share as I listen to women speak or I read their words. I write this book for all those women for whom shade and hair still continues to matter in their daily lives.

C hapter 1

‘Beauty C omes From Within’: O r Does It? Introduction ‘Beauty comes from within’. ‘Beauty is only skin deep’. ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder’. A ll three are well known sayings that are part of our everyday culture. Interestingly they link with K ant’s ideas of beauty as a judgement of taste which is based on reflection and Plato’s view that beauty does not only relate to form. T here is some innerness of beauty which is as seductive as its physicality. T hese sayings that almost go without saying have always made me wonder, ‘what do they tell us about beauty? What do they conceal? What do they exclude? What are they supposed to make “us” feel and do?’ I want to engage with the idea that ‘beauty comes from within’ in order to continue to look at the question of beauty itself. First, though, we should remember as I said earlier that beauty is not neutral. R ather, there is a continuing racialization of beauty in a society in which skin and hair continue to matter (C raig 2002; C arroll 2002; Banks 2000; H obson 2005; Gilman 1985; T ate 2005; T ate 2007a). T hrough the words of Black British women I explore the anatomical economy of Black beauty in order to show that, beauty is about outsideness, in a context in which beauty as visible, as inscribed on the body’s surface, matters. What this means is that considerable labour is involved in producing this surface, in performing a visible beauty which is recognized by the beauty gaze. T he labour of inscribing beauty on the body produces difference from ‘beauty comes from within’ as beauty value. T he performance of beauty as difference from ‘beauty comes from within’ leads us to begin to think about the play of seduction, societal melancholia and agency in women’s lives. What Black women’s words make us recall is that what counts as beauty is never settled once and for all but is constantly re-negotiated, re-fashioned and re-inscribed on the surface of the body. In other words, beauty has no within but is the fetishized outcome of the work of fantasy. T he work of fantasy itself is impacted on by both beauty wisdom and racialization.

 T he material drawn on for this chapter is from face-to-face interviews in the late 1990s and the pilot questionnaire of a virtual ethnography which I did in June 2005 on three Black women’s health and beauty sites.

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Black Beauty: Aesthetics, Stylization, Politics

Beauty ‘wisdom’ and racialization ‘Beauty comes from within’, ‘beauty is only skin deep’ and ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ are only sayings but do they betray other meanings? T o call them sayings is very suggestive as a ‘saying’ is both ‘a piece of wisdom or rule of conduct’ and ‘only a saying’ – truth and fiction. Let’s take this a bit further in terms of ‘wisdom’/ ‘rule of conduct’. For Foucault (1995) the body is the object of power/knowledge and its resultant discourses are regimes of truth that lay down the possibility for thinking and speaking, such that at any particular time only some statements will come to be recognized as ‘true’. T hese discourses impact on us because they are not just textual. T hey are also put into bodily practice as individuals monitor their own behaviour and put other bodies under surveillance so as to ensure that the accepted wisdom has no dissenters. Questions of bodily practices such as those of beauty are always already discursive and subject to the gaze of the other. Sayings such as ‘beauty comes from within’ thus reveal themselves as very potent pieces of ‘wisdom’ and ‘rules of conduct’ whose power has emerged through long histories of repetition which define societal taboos on beauty, ugliness and vanity. The rule of conduct which emanated from ‘beauty comes from within’ could, for example, be that we should not be vain but at the same time we should not aspire to ugliness either. What is interesting about these sayings is their global purchase as they are used wherever E nglish is spoken. T he sayings themselves also make invisible the racialization of beauty and the impact of this on the lives, psyches and bodies of Black women (C raig 2002; Gilman 1985, 1992; H obson 2005; R ooks 2000; R ussell et al. 1992; T aylor 2000; T ate, 2007a). What can we make of these sayings when we have Black women like L orna, for instance, who say: Y ou know it would be quite easy to deny your past and say, ‘no, I’ve never wished I was white’. But you are lying to yourself, you know. I have to be honest, S hirley, and say that I did used to wish I was white when I was young because I always saw white girls as beautiful and I never saw anything beautiful about myself.

‘I always saw white girls as beautiful and I never saw anything beautiful about myself’. With these words L orna highlights for us the racialized paradox of beauty. Iconic beauty was white in her childhood (T aylor 2000; C raig 2002; Gilman 1992). In their childhoods growing up in 1960s Britain, Black girls like L orna and their Black women significant others, had to ‘live up’ to this norm of ‘white girls as beautiful’. A s a norm ‘white girls as beautiful’ is not necessarily explicit but remains implicit within the psyches and practices of sociality. T his norm is therefore difficult to read. It is only discernible in the effects it produces (Butler 2004a). T he effect of the norm for L orna is a feeling of ugliness and a desire for whiteness when she was a child. R acialization means that there is an inscription of beauty on some bodies and not others so that beauty is always embodied as white.

‘Beauty Comes From Within’: Or Does It?

19

A s a norm ‘white girls as beautiful’ ‘is acted out in social practice and reidealized and reinstituted in and through the daily social rituals of bodily life ... it is itself (re)produced through its embodiment, through the acts that strive to approximate it, through the idealizations reproduced in and by those acts’ (Butler 2004a, 48). T he norm confers recognizability through bodily practices which can also alter norms at the everyday level. N orms, practices and recognizability imply visibility and surface. In this case, then, beauty cannot come from within and although beauty might be skin deep, the Black skin which is inhabited lies outside of the realm of ‘the beautiful’ because of the work of racialization so you have no beauty ‘in the eye of the beholder’. L orna alerts us to the idea that beauty relates to skin, hair, facial features and all that is outside, all that is on the surface, all that can be seen. Beauty is about ‘the visible’. If we recognize the beauty paradox produced by racialization and the ‘to be seen-ness’ of beauty then it makes us look at ‘beauty comes from within’ differently. We can only use this phrase with comfort and without question from a position of privilege, from a position in which we possess the idealized characteristics of white beauty – the skin deep beauty – which is validated by the look ‘of the beholder’. For those supposedly outside of this location because they are not white it is much harder for this phrase to ring true as this beauty is not imprinted on the surface of their bodies, on their hair, skin and faces. A t the level of hair, for example, S elma speaks about her experiences as a girl: I remember we used to play a game and I remember we would put cardigans on our heads. I don’t know if you’ve ever done that as a child. Button it and flick the sleeves and stuff like that. Y ou know us Black girls in school used to do that a lot.

S elma and other Black girls in her school in the 1960s didn’t have the requisite straight, blonde flowing locks of normative beauty and so were compelled to get them through playful artifice. Such behaviour makes us view hair as more than just hair within a context of racialized beauty in which the only beauty ‘truth’ is ‘the straight hair rule’ (T aylor 2000). H air may only be organic matter but it carries deep racialized meaning in terms of beauty (Mercer 1994; Banks 2000; C raig 2002; T aylor 2000; T ate 2005). T his is linked to the fact that ‘within racism’s bipolar codification of human worth, black people’s hair has been historically devalued as the most visible stigmata of blackness, second only to skin’ (Mercer 1994a, 101). If one doesn’t already have the straight, flowing locks of whiteness which can be flicked like the sleeves of a cardigan, one must strive to produce it in order to be recognized as beautiful. T his speaks to various beauty desires and longings, which again haunt the wisdom/rule of conduct of ‘beauty comes from within’ and makes us wonder, ‘well, does it really?’ T he effect of the norm of ‘the straight hair rule’ also makes ‘beauty is only skin deep’ into a very powerful saying as its meaning becomes visible. Beauty is attainable, often at significant cost, but at the same time we must also be wary of the entrapments of artifice in order to avoid accusations

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Black Beauty: Aesthetics, Stylization, Politics

of vanity. Vanity is part of the sub-text of ‘beauty comes from within’ that keeps us within its thrall, and makes us subject to its repetitions. ‘Beauty is only skin deep’ which could be seen to be the opposite of ‘beauty comes from within’, makes the whole question of beauty open to interpretation as a practice of/on the body. It relates beauty to outsideness, to the surface, to the skin, to a being made visible for ‘the eye of the beholder’. ‘T he beholder’ then judges this beauty in terms of Ideals of perfection according to K ant and this in turn produces feelings in the subject. If we continue with the subject of hair and what L orna tells us, we can see that beauty clearly doesn’t come from within but has to be inscribed onto the surface of the body. We also see that we can place ourselves in the position of ‘the beholder’ of our own beauty. The first time I was a bridesmaid I was about 7 or 8 years old and I remember the first time I ever had my hair straightened. In those days I had it done with the hot comb, they didn’t have tongs. T hey straightened it with the hot comb that they heated on a paraffin stove and then I had it ringletted. I couldn’t stop looking at myself in the mirror because my head felt so light and I just thought, oh doesn’t it look beautiful? I couldn’t stop touching it. It felt so nice.

H er memory of beauty at age seven or eight that she looked back on as a 38-yearold woman makes us notice several things. First, beauty is about racialization and performativity. S econd, beauty is about labour. T hird, beauty is also about creating difference through artifice and the work of fantasy. Last, this difference creates beauty value and affect. I want to deal first with fantasy and then affect. A ccording to Butler (2004a, 28) the embodied relation to the norm exercises a transformative potential. T o posit possibilities beyond the norm itself, is part of the work of fantasy when we understand fantasy as taking the body as a point of departure for an articulation that is not always constrained by the body as it is.

T he hotcomb provides such an articulation which gives a different reality to the possibility for beauty and challenges the limits of ‘white girls as beautiful’. T he effect of the fantasy produced by the hotcomb is that it brings ‘the elsewhere’ of beauty home to the surface of the Black body. T his ‘homing’ releases affective beauty value even though here it is within the parameters of ‘the straight hair rule’. By affect I mean the obvious pleasure she speaks about in touching, feeling and   Beauty as skin deep belittles beauty and it is a warning to beware the artifice of beauty because it hides an ugliness of character and good character is highly valued. ‘Beauty comes from within’ valorizes that beauty which reflects a ‘beautiful person’ especially if that person has a beauty flaw but it can also be a way of demeaning undue vanity.   My emphasis.   Butler (2004a, 29).

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seeing her newly-straightened and ringletted hair, which now had value because beauty had been inscribed onto it. H er pleasure emerges from the touch and feel of her now beautiful hair, which for the young L orna was related to how closely it approximated the white ideal. What is also interesting here is that her ‘head felt so light’ that she kept looking in the mirror. T he heaviness of her natural hair was removed by the labour of artifice (straightening) thus introducing a lightness of body. T he feeling of beauty – both through touch and vision – induces pleasure. Being beautiful is clearly about pleasure in seeing, touching and feeling differences on the body’s surface which make us recognizable within beauty norms. T his recognition is important because without it we are excluded from the possibility of beauty. T his extract from L orna shows us that beauty is about labour, racialization, artifice, value, affect but it also demonstrates that beauty has performative potentiality at the level of identification. Lorna identified her hair as beautiful in that moment of seeing its transformation and therefore as beauty was inscribed onto her seven- or eight-year-old body, she herself became beautiful. S he was interpellated into the position of beautiful through her straightened, ringletted hair. I would also like to suggest at this point that L orna’s talk also makes us pause to notice the performative potentiality of the sayings ‘beauty comes from within’, ‘beauty is only skin deep’ and ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ in terms of subjectivation and agency and this is what I will look at in the rest of the chapter. H owever, before doing this, I would like to make one further point based on L orna’s account. T hat is, the prevalence of beauty expectations, norms and subject positions that sayings like ‘beauty comes from within’, ‘beauty is only skin deep’ and ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ serve to make opaque. T hese beauty expectations, norms and subject positions are opaque only until we fall outside of hegemonic norms and expectations at which point we become ‘the other’ to beauty. A n other who is the object of derision. S haron’s childhood was lived within the context of ‘the straight hair rule’. When she decided to stop straightening her hair and to instead plait it because of the emphasis within Black politics in the 1970s on ‘natural hair’, this put her in the position of the ‘other’ to beauty. For her, the only possible outcome in her majority white high school was derision, even though ‘natural’ hair (like the afro and combing your hair back) was the current fashion in Black community. S haron says, I stopped hot combing my hair and I thought I am going to plait it because it was all afro or combing it back, you know? I plaited it and I was so embarrassed at school I had to put a scarf on my head. I was told to take off my scarf in A ssembly. E veryone looked at me like I was some sort of, like I had something sort of wrong, like I had gone out of my head.

H er refusal to straighten her hair but leave it natural and plait it, put her beyond ‘the normal’ expectations of Black beauty comportment. T he white gaze positioned her as someone who had gone out of her head, as someone who was

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further marginalized by her refusal of the norm. T his judgement was based on the unacceptability, unexpectedness and unrecognizability of literally what was on her head. What S haron reminds us of here is the governmentality of the beauty gaze where there can be severe consequences for stepping outside of the boundaries of acceptability. T he saying ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ makes sense here as we apply the beauty gaze to ourselves. We constantly monitor ourselves because racialized beauty norms work in such a way that the beauty gaze is an ‘inspecting gaze, a gaze which each individual under its weight will end up by interiorising to the point that he is his own overseer, each individual thus exercising this surveillance over and against himself’ (Foucault 1980, 154–55). For S haron, her initial embarrassment at stepping outside the norm led to her wearing a scarf and in the late 1990s when she was in her thirties talking about this episode in her life with deep hurt. ‘Beauty comes from within’, ‘beauty is only skin deep’ and ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ thus hide the ‘will to conformity’ that they contain because of the surveillance that is inherent within them. O n the one hand, we should not breach ‘beauty is only skin deep’ beauty norms by being either obsessively vain or letting ourselves go, whilst on the other, we should not fall prey to the conceit of artifice because that goes against the grain of ‘beauty comes from within’. N or should we be anything but modest because ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’. Beauty is then a trap from which it is difficult to extricate ourselves. We would, of course, like to think that the derision of which S haron speaks is no longer with us. We are, after all, now in the 21st century so we should have left it far behind. We now have Beyoncé K nowles as a spokesperson for L ’O réal so times must have changed! Who is she an icon for though? C learly, not for those women who prefer to wear their hair in its natural colour/texture/ length. T he straight hair rule still bites and takes S haron’s and L orna’s childhood experiences with it into the 21st century. We can all have whatever hair we like just so long as we remember the long, the straight, the flickable is still the ideal. Beauty inscriptions on the body’s surface are about performativity and governmentality within a racialized anatomical economy where there are differences that matter. I want to turn now to look at subjectivation and agency within such an economy. ‘Beauty comes from within’ and the anatomical economy of Black beauty A response I got to the question, ‘what is Black beauty?’ in the virtual ethnography is pertinent here as it shows us the beauty paradox within which we exist as Black women. It also shows us that beauty is something of an un-decidable and subject to translation (‘beauty means so many things to different people’) as well as being  T his is taken from the title of S ara A hmed’s (1998) book.

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something that Black women inherently possess or can inscribe onto their bodies. E J wrote in reply: It’s a huge question! Beauty means so many things to different people. I think Black women are beautiful. I’m not just talking about looks. I mean from what comes from within. I think we should have the right to experiment with different looks, eg: contact lenses and wigs. I hate it when women criticize other women for daring to look a little different.

She uses ‘look(s)’ here in three very interesting ways. The first is to do with beauty/ attractiveness which is physical. T he second is to do with appearance/style which arises from artifice. For her beauty is not just physical. Beauty comes from within, but we can also experiment to get a different look. T his daring different look elicits the disapproving look of other women. H ere is the third way she uses look, that is, to mean ‘the gaze’. A s E J is hailed into the subject position of the ‘beautiful Black woman whose beauty comes from within rather than from artifice’, we see that this is not an instantaneous act of subjection. R ather, her hailing ‘involves a process of cultural reiteration which engenders a somatic circuit of recognition’ (McN ay 1999, 179). S uch a somatic circuit of recognition always already holds within it the possibility of unintended effects of subversion and counter-discourse. T his is so because of the ‘process of temporal deferral where the original conditions of utterance cannot be indefinitely sustained’ (McNay 1999, 179). Black women are dialogically located with respect to dominant beauty norms. T hat is, they speak on/through/against discourses on/of Black beauty. T his somatic circuit of recognition is one aspect of the anatomical economy of Black beauty. A further aspect is cultural translation and naturalising different looks as they are mapped onto the Black body. By cultural translation I mean here ‘the negotiation of personal and group meanings within identity discourses’ (T ate 2005, 8). S o contact lenses and wigs in their very fakeness make clear the cultural translation, appropriation and normalisation which occur on an everyday level. T his acknowledged fakeness makes us question not only the boundaries of Black beauty but also again alludes to the necessity for visibility and recognition of our disidentification from ‘beauty comes from within’. What E J shows us, as in previous examples, is that the labour involved in beauty invokes affect. T his affect is another aspect of the anatomical economy. First, as our disidentification from ‘beauty comes from within’ and desire for experimentation and difference become clear through contact lenses and wigs. S econd, in the form of the dislike felt towards those who criticize women who would seek to look different. T his makes us wonder which/whose difference or difference from what is being sought here. H ow can we begin to unpick  S ee Bakhtin, M. (1981).  O ne way of interpreting this is that something other than Black beauty is being desired. I do not, however, want to go down this very well-trodden route of antiracist

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the paradox that exists between saying that ‘beauty comes from within’ but we shouldn’t criticize women who dare ‘to look a little different’ from a racializing Black norm? H ow can we be beautiful because of what is inside us but choose to use artifice to create a difference from this beauty? What does the creation of a different somatic circuit of recognition engender? What I want to look at is the yearning for difference from ‘beauty comes from within’ and what this means for the anatomical economy which is set in train. By anatomical economy I mean to invoke Fanon’s (1967) racial epidermal schema and a gendered reading of ways of representing and viewing the body which involve commodification and consumption. It is an anatomical economy which is at work in both ‘beauty comes from within’, the yearning for skin deep difference and the approval of the eye of the beholder, of which E J speaks. In this respect we can see ‘beauty comes from within’ as a socially constructed and sanctioned way of handling the stigma of flawed beauty, while also being a critique of a beauty of the surface itself. Beauty flaws endanger our possibilities of being and becoming the object of the admiring gaze, so they have to be carefully managed at the level of the individual. T he admiring gaze is diverted from the skin, the surface of the individual, towards inner beauty, their caring nature, for example, as the impossibility of their skin deep beauty is made known through the phrase ‘beauty comes from within’ or the disapproval of those who are doing the looking. A s another respondent from the virtual ethnography, make-up queen, says: Absolutely right it [Black beauty] is a big question and definitely down to the individual. T here’s the old saying beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I believe in that! I see almost everything as beautiful. I do really believe that beauty is confidence. Beauty comes from within. If you are happy with who you are and confidently carry yourself, you will be beautiful.

The individual’s responsibility is to be beautiful within, to be confident and carry themselves confidently as it is possible to see almost everything as beautiful. H owever, they also know that they are the constant object of the gaze as ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’. Within the anatomical economy of Black beauty this gaze attaches these women’s bodies to the world of other bodies in which visible beauty counts. T hey are being set a standard of perfection to which few can really measure up. In an anatomical economy where ‘to be looked-at-ness’ is based on aesthetics and quote Bob Marley’s (1981) very famous dictum ‘emancipate yourself from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds’.   By racializing here I mean to show the distinction between the racialized bodily schema emanating from white beauty within which we are located and over-determined from without and a subject position in which ‘Black community’ norms on beauty are generated in an ongoing way to account for stylization and difference as a part of Black beauty. S ee also T ate (2005).

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approximation to a physical perfection which few can attain, ‘beauty comes from within’ should have lost its appeal as a palliative for women who stand outside of the beauty norms. A s Black women what are we different from in terms of beauty? What is this difference that we wish to make part of our own bodies? H ow does this relate to the beauty work we do on ourselves? What does the affect attached to beauty mean for us? To deal first of all with the question of what we are different from. A s mentioned previously much has been written about the beauty ideal being a white one (Banks 2000; C raig 2002; T ate 2007). L ess, however, has been made of Black beauty ideals and what they might mean for Black women. In some of my own work on Black women, for example, I look at the impact of shade on who can occupy the space of Black beauty (T ate 2005; T ate 2007a; T ate 2008) and the struggles of lighter-skinned Black women to position themselves within Black beauty as a matter of political identification. Their positioning of themselves within Black beauty expands its boundaries. K obena Mercer’s (1994) ‘Black Hair Style/Politics’, looks at how some Black hairstyling practices reflect the anti-racist aesthetics position in which ‘the natural’ look is the only possibility politically. H owever, in his view, ‘when hairstyling is critically evaluated as an aesthetic practice inscribed in everyday life, all black hairstyles are political in that they each articulate responses to the panoply of historical forces which have invested this element of the ethnic signifier with both symbolic meaning and significance’ (Mercer 1994a, 104). Black beauty is about aesthetics as much as it is about politics10 and it is not whiteness which is privileged as hair styling is about a cut-and-mix approach to beauty. T herefore, Black women are different from themselves because of practices on/of the body (see E J above) as well as different from white beauty. T his difference is normalized so that it becomes a part of a racializing Black beauty repertoire in which beauty ideals can be questioned and brought into crisis. T his troubles the very notion of difference because there is no clear other which we want to become as a totality. S o when the plaint of hair as a mess is heard the response can be multiple: ‘plait it – row it – straighten it – cut it – texturize it’. A fter all, anything goes. H owever, this ‘anything goes’ position is like make-up-queen’s ‘almost’. It denies the affect which arises from the circulation of the sayings and the devalorization of Black beauty because of racialization. For S ara A hmed (2004, 45) affect ‘does not reside in an object or sign, but is an effect of the circulation between objects and signs (=the accumulation of affective value). S igns increase in affective value as an effect of the movement between signs: the more signs circulate, the more affective they become’. T he more beauty expectations, knowledges, practices, languages and technologies circulate, the more affective beauty becomes. Beauty after all is not just there. Beauty must be worked on and worked up. Beauty must be touched, felt, seen and recognized. We must inscribe it onto our bodies as we make who we  S ee T aylor (2000) for more on Black anti-racist aesthetics. 10 S ee also Banks (2000).

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are known to the world. It seems to me that there is something specific also going on here. T here is a paradox in E J’s ‘beauty comes from within but we can wear contact lenses and wigs’. T hat is, there is mourning for what could be and a feeling of loss that haunts what is. T his is usually theorized in terms of internalized racism in Black antiracist aesthetics (see T aylor (2000) for example). I want to theorize this otherwise because ‘the different’ in the form of contact lenses, wigs and hair extensions for that matter, is also marketed to white women and used by them in their beauty ‘race’ work. Just look at Posh11 who up until quite recently was well known for her hair extensions, for example. If the analysis remained in the Black anti-racist aesthetics framework it would ignore the complex ways that ‘race’ intersects with gender as well as wider social relations of power, agency, identity and changing cultural and economic practices. L eaving room for complexity helps us to see that bodies are socially constructed into fixed and essentialized categories in current debates on beauty without any possibility for hybrid12 articulations. Further, complexity allows us to see that ‘race’ is mediated also by consumers of beauty who are reflexively engaged in projects of the self. Black beauty is ‘under construction’, it can no longer be taken as a given. If we engage with beauty value at this point we will also add to this complexity. When we think about the labour involved in beauty it is clear that beauty has a utility value. T he more labour is invested in the body’s surface the more it is worth. H owever, it is also the case that it is not only labour that dictates worth because the more we want something, the more it is worth. For Jean Baudrillard (1981) commodities (like beauty) cannot merely be characterized by use-value and exchange-value but also by sign-value in which the expression and mark of style, prestige and status becomes an important part of the commodity and its consumption. T o be beautiful involves labour which is about an active manipulation of signs as a way of inserting oneself into consumer society and of differentiating oneself from others. T o be different from ‘beauty comes from within’ by this ‘making manifest’ of beauty on the skin through the labour of difference is what denies what Baudrillard (1990) calls the seduction of the saying ‘beauty comes from within’. Difference and seduction What we get as women take on difference from ‘beauty comes from within’ by inscribing skin deep beauty is what Jean Baudrillard (1993) would call a simulation. In a simulation appearances become reality. T his becoming is no longer, therefore, concerned with ‘the real’ as images are produced from a model 11  Posh is Victoria Beckham who was formerly in the ‘S pice Girls’ as Posh S pice. 12 H ybridity is the same and the different in a constant dialogue (Y oung 1995; T ate 2005).

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which can be from anywhere. T here is no longer any distinction between the true, the authentic, the original and the false of Black beauty because it is never clear what ‘the real’ of beauty is to which the sayings relate. There is then no definitive elsewhere to bring home to the surface of the Black body. ‘Beauty comes from within’, ‘beauty is only skin deep’ and ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ are themselves simulacra and as simulations proliferate they come to refer only to themselves. We are caught up in simulations so we are submerged in messages without meaning. A s appearances, the surface, become reality, we have a context within which knowledge and reality become disrupted so that one can use one’s unreality [one’s difference from ‘beauty comes from within] to make an otherwise impossible or illegible claim ... when the unreal lays claim to reality, or enters into its domain, something other than a simple assimilation into prevailing norms can and does take place [these norms] themselves can become rattled, display their instability, and become open to resignification (Butler 2004a, 27–8)

T he within-ness of beauty is laid bare and named as false through Black women’s beauty labour in which racialized norms are subverted and racializing difference is normalized. A ll this augurs well for the dissident multicultural world which Paul Gilroy (2004, 167) advocates that takes us beyond ‘racialized and racializable categories of all kinds’. H owever, I prefer to qualify this by saying, up to a point. I say up to a point because racialization always stops the ‘raceless chaos’ of Gilroy’s ‘beyond’, as there is still reference to a racialized simulacrum, constructed though it may be. R acialized embodiment is not thinkable without reference to a norm. H owever, it is possible to go beyond this norm or to envision it in terms of difference as E J has shown us. T his is then a racializing which I would like to relate to Butler’s (2004a, 28) idea about the work of fantasy, which takes ‘the body as a point of departure for an articulation that is not always constrained by the body as it is’. What the simulation involved in the ceaseless repetition of ‘beauty comes from within’, ‘beauty is only skin deep’ and ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ does is invite a perpetual (re)reading and (re)making of the code of racialized beauty. This (re)making is important but what is also significant is Baudrillard’s (1981) argument that power relations are always inscribed into the very production of objects and therefore into the simulacrum they become – in this case, lenses, wigs and blonde hair dye. The significance of his argument here lies in the continuation of the power of the discourse of racialized beauty in which whiteness is iconic and in which its markers are only possible and recognized as such on white bodies. Further, for Baudrillard (1981) it is also significant to remember that objects never exhaust themselves in their functions and their excess of presence has meaning in terms of prestige (T seëlon 1995). T he prestige here also arises in our example of lenses, wigs and blonde hair dye from the approximation to white beauty which they provide. I want to argue though that the difference which women seek is

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difference from ‘beauty comes from within’. T hey seek this difference because the phrase itself is a sign for lack of physical beauty and ugliness is a stigma of which everyone is afraid (Goffman 1963). Distancing oneself from the stigma of ugliness is perhaps doubly important for those who, because of racialization, are seen as the antithesis of beauty as they do not ‘approach the perfect example of the category or concept of human being’ (C arroll 2000, 37). T hey seek difference from ‘beauty comes from within’ by inscribing skin deep beauty on their body’s surface through artifice. This very artifice itself marks lenses, wigs, blonde hair dye not as approximations of whiteness but as ‘versionings’ of Black beauty. Why do we keep reiterating ‘beauty comes from within’ and reinforce its power when we are also preoccupied with inscribing difference from it? S eduction (Baudrillard 1990) and ‘colonial melancholia’ (K hanna 2003) are useful tools for looking at the desire for, and practice of, difference. I will look at melancholia in more detail later but for now I want to deal with seduction first. Seduction makes it possible to understand the pull of ‘beauty comes from within’ and its relationship to beauty itself if one reads beauty in to Baudrillard. T hus, I will replace seduction with ‘beauty comes from within’ and ‘sexual’, within Baudrillard’s formulation, with beauty. For Baudrillard (1990, 44) it is true that in our culture the sexual [beauty] has triumphed over seduction [‘beauty comes from within’] and annexed it as a subaltern form … More generally seduction [‘beauty comes from within’] is a challenge to the very existence of the sexual [beauty] order. Seduction [‘Beauty comes from within’] is never neutral but instead ‘becomes an object of fascination’.

A s a latent discourse ‘beauty comes from within’ turns the manifest discourse of Beauty ‘from its truth, but towards its truth. It makes the manifest discourse say what it does not want to say; it causes determinations and profound indeterminations to show through in the manifest discourse [Beauty]. The manifest discourse has the status of an appearance, a laboured appearance,13 traversed by the emergence of meaning’ (Baudrillard 1990, 53). H ere presence hides absence and thereby masks a meaning void. T he work of seduction through ‘beauty comes from within’ enables the manifest discourse (Beauty) to turn back on the deeper order of the saying itself ‘in order to invalidate it, substituting the charm and illusion of appearances’ (Baudrillard 1990, 53). In this way, parts of the unknown, ‘the secret’ of ‘beauty comes from within’ emerge. A s they emerge what we see is that ‘there is nothing to say. E verything that can be revealed lies outside the secret’ (Baudrillard 1990, 79). T his can be seen in make-up-queen’s unveiling of ‘beauty comes from within’ as confidently carrying oneself. This carrying has to be judged as confidence and – therefore beauty – by the gaze, which means that it must be visible to the gaze. ‘Beauty comes from within’ maintains its power only because its secret is not spoken nor is it ever hidden. If the secret of ‘beauty comes 13  My italics.

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from within’ was disclosed then the truth of beauty, which is that it is inscribed on the skin/hair, visible and a possibility for everyone, would be revealed. T he meaning of ‘beauty comes from within’ ‘if it had one would be about [beauty and “the within”] but in fact it doesn’t have one’ (Baudrillard 1990, 80). As one is seduced by the saying ‘beauty comes from within’ one is led from one’s truth by something whose ‘strategy is to be-there/not-there, and thereby produce a sort of flickering, a hypnotic mechanism that crystallizes attention outside all concern with meaning’ (Baudrillard 1990, 85). A s seduction, ‘beauty comes from within’ initiates an ‘aesthetics of disappearance’ (Baudrillard 1990, 85), a going inwards to an unknown where true beauty lies, which co-exists uncomfortably with the requirement for hyper-visible surface inscriptions of beauty. U nease and lack of concern with meaning indicates that seduction is imbricated in affects. A gain we have to have the rider, ‘to a point’, in terms of Baudrillard’s ‘aesthetics of disappearance’ because racialization brings us back constantly to a very meaningful space of beauty. T his space is one which is based on the ‘aesthetics of appearance’ and is always open to deconstruction, questioning and being read differently. ‘Beauty comes from within’ then would not be abolished completely. S eduction does not undermine or transform existing social relations or institutions. What we have instead as E J, S haron and L orna show us, is a play with appearances which involves artifice as a challenge to the meaninglessness of ‘beauty comes from within’. A s women succumb to the deception of ‘beauty comes from within’ they also void it and strip it of its control (Baudrillard 1990, 176). Further, they show that ‘beauty comes from within’ is an ‘informal form of politics [in which ‘race’ and gender intertwine in] the endless reproduction of a form with [racialized] content’ (Baudrillard 1990, 180). Racialization removes the possibility of ‘beauty comes from within’ becoming a pure simulacrum. The act of subverting ‘beauty comes from within’ in itself signifies. It signifies those creative/confident enough to re-invent conventions or those who are not invested in what these conventions deem to be appropriate. It speaks of those who are creating new beauty subject positions, those who keep beauty under construction and in question. Mercer (1994a) already spoke about these beauty dissidents. For him diasporic practices of Black stylization are paradoxically both responses to racism and appropriations from the ‘master’ culture. S yncretism has always been a part of Black stylization and it is the case that Western cultural traditions are radically transformed by this neo-A frican, improvisational approach to aesthetics (Mercer 1994a). Black hairstyling is a ‘cut and mix’ approach to aesthetics and hairstyles and when adopted by white youth maintains an ambiguous relationship to the practices of their Black counterparts. S o, in the postmodern context where the question is, ‘who is imitating whom?’ hair straightening and the wearing of wigs or extensions, for example, become just another part of the repertoire of Black hairstyles. O ne could also extend this to the wearing of contact lenses. What we could be looking at is a stylization with an ‘enthusiasm for quoting and combining elements from any source – black or white, past or present – into new configurations of cultural expression’ (Mercer 1994a, 124–5).

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Beauty dissidents also unmask something else though. T hat is that ‘beauty comes from within’ asserts that no beauty labour is needed. Beauty is either there or it is not. T his denies that women are engaged in an act of objectifying themselves to the extent of seeing themselves through the eyes of others, but also crucially, their own eyes as they construct beauty. A fter all, as Goffman (1959) thought, it is just as significant to represent oneself as possessing a certain quality as it is to possess the quality that one is claiming. Beauty has to be constantly performed with and on the body. What E J and make-up-queen are doing is being invisible as the source of the gaze on/of ‘beauty comes from within’. T hey become women who are looking without being looked at and that is a very powerful position to be in. ‘Beauty comes from within’ and its negative connotation of lack of physical beauty then become hyper-visible as women reproduce it in talk. ‘Beauty comes from within’, ‘beauty is only skin deep’ and ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ also seem to be about a societal melancholia which seeks to hide the (im)possibility of beauty within the possibilities made available through artifice. What can be said about ‘beauty comes from within’ and melancholia at this point? ‘Beauty comes from within’ and the work of melancholia What does it mean when I say that ‘beauty comes from within’ is a plaint, a melancholic remainder from which difference must be sought? What role does such a plaint have in terms of making Black women’s beauty visible within a racialized anatomical economy? T he melancholia which I am drawing on here is from the work of R anjana K hanna (2003) who engages in a post-colonial reading of Freud in order to focus on ‘colonial melancholy’. In K hanna’s work what is at stake is formulating an idea of the affective melancholia of post-colonials which, for my purposes, I would like to turn to understanding both ‘beauty comes from within’ and how this saying locates Black beauty. For K hanna (2003, 17) ‘melancholia is an affective state caused by the inability to assimilate a loss, and the consequent nagging return of the thing lost into psychic life. T heorizing melancholia involves theorizing a relationship to the other, and the manner in which the other is manifested’. In melancholia assimilation of a loss is not possible through mourning so the lost object is swallowed whole (K hanna 2003). T he subject is stuck with the lost object and begins to criticize it so that an inassimilable loss is shown through language. T his means that the subject criticizes herself for attributes one would associate with the lost object. S o even ‘while melancholia is paralyzing [...] the inassimilable paradoxically becomes the site of what Freud calls a critical agency’ (K hanna 2003, 22). S uch a critical agency operates through ‘the plaint or a kind of lament [in which] the complaints are directed toward the object that has been incorporated’ (K hanna 2003, 65). It is through critical agency that selves are authored. ‘Beauty comes from within’ is a plaint, it is the melancholic remainder which has been swallowed whole which becomes known with each reiteration. T his

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is the melancholic remainder from which difference must be sought so that one does not become ‘visible as objectified’, powerless, muted, socially invisible and ‘ugly’. We must remember as EJ says that looks [beauty/attractiveness] are about looks [appearance/style] and our own dissident looks [gaze] can judge beauty. E J’s looks [gaze] counter Baudrillard’s (1990, 175) claim that the ‘masses will be psychologized in order to be seduced ... where once they had to endure domination under the threat of violence, now they must accept it by dint of seduction’. ‘Beauty comes from within’ spreads itself throughout all our personal and social relations like an unseen shadow which only becomes known at the moment it is spoken. When it is spoken it is undone as it is through language that a plaint becomes known. A s a plaint ‘beauty comes from within’ makes known the desire for the impossible and the (im)possibility of the impossible – that is beauty without artifice and a beauty which is not racialized. Maybe we should pause for some reflection and ask a few questions. First, if our position is that of endless simulation then what/who is the other in beauty’s societal melancholia? Further, how does it make sense to speak of the beauty labour in which women engage as critical agency? I have said above that difference is sought from ‘beauty comes from within’. T he saying is the other, and, as a simulation it is never clear what it is. Its opacity is its undoing as beauty dissidents can then make of skin deep beauty what they will through their own beauty gaze. T he beauty labour that women enter into through showing their critique of ‘beauty comes from within’ reveals it as a plaint. If, as I claim, ‘beauty comes from within’ is about managing the stigma of ugliness and obsessive vanity, then to show difference from its rule shows critical agency. In that way women like E J show dissent in terms of the societal melancholia of the swallowing whole of the lost object of the meaning of beauty itself which remains hidden because of its insideness. A s their dissent becomes known they lay bare what constitutes ‘beauty comes from within’ and assert its positioning outside in a sociality which is beyond themselves. With this they convey that ‘the social norms that constitute our existence carry desires that do not originate with our individual personhood [even whilst being] fundamentally dependent on these social norms’ (Butler 2004a, 2). A s those on the margins of beauty because of racialization they speak to and from ‘beauty comes from within’. T he power of this norm emerges in language as it tries to halt the articulation of beauty otherwise. A s women disidentify from ‘beauty comes from within’ they enter into a ‘process of splitting and multiple/contradictory belief at the point of enunciation and subjectification’ (Bhabha 1994a, 80). For Bhabha (1994a, 80), T his process is best understood in terms of the articulation of multiple belief that Freud proposes in his essay on fetishism. It is a non-repressive form of knowledge that allows for the possibility of simultaneously embracing two contradictory beliefs, one official and one secret, one archaic and one progressive, one that allows the myth of origins, the other that articulates difference and division. Its knowledge ‘value’ lies in its orientation as a defence towards external reality.

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‘Beauty comes from within’ is part of our commonsense about beauty which serves to hide its power as a discourse. It is a ‘folk knowledge’ which we draw on in our everyday stock of commonsense. A s E J shows us though, we operate simultaneously within two contradictory beliefs as ‘the attitude which fitted in with the wish and the attitude which fitted in with reality existed side by side’ (Freud 1991, 356). The official, archaic version that allows the myth of origins through its focus on insideness, eschewing of vanity and its use as a palliative for the hurt of stigma, is ‘beauty comes from within’. T his is ‘the wish’ (Freud 1991) with its belief in the hidden-ness of beauty. What is the secret and the progressive that articulates difference and division14 are the practices on the body that E J speaks about which are entered into in order to avoid the stigma of ugliness. T his is ‘the reality’. S o, at the point of their subjectivation to ‘beauty comes from within’, women show that beauty is a fetish precisely by revealing it15 as a defence from an external reality in which beauty must be performed and appear on the surface of the body. T he active, imagining subject therefore, displaces and recodes the normalizing function of ‘beauty comes from within’. Beauty dissidents show us that, rather than eschewing vanity and artifice, we must use them for the secret of beauty to become known. T hey undermine the work of ‘beauty comes from within’ which makes beauty there but not there because there is an impossibility of translation, once and for all, of the secret of its materiality, by making its secret known. T hey seduce the seducer – ‘beauty comes from within’ – by situating beauty firmly ‘in the eye of the beholder’. E J’s ‘looks, looks and looks’ clearly underlie beauty. Conclusion – Looks, looks and looks and the challenge of racialization to beauty Beauty dissidents usurp ‘beauty comes from within’ by inscribing skin deep beauty as they become ‘the eye of the beholder’. T his sets in train new subject positions in relation to ‘beauty comes from within’. What this brief foray into the workings of beauty has made clear is that racialization makes us stop and think about the whole issue of the supposed neutrality of the saying ‘beauty comes from within’ and beauty itself. We say ‘beauty comes from within’ to the extent that it is almost a (non)sense. H owever, much underlies it within a society structured through racialization. For one thing the saying serves to hide the fact that beauty is not neutral in a context in which iconic beauty is white. It also hides by definition that Black women can never be beautiful because they are outside of iconic beauty. T he constant struggle, as always for Black women, is to create a stylization which goes counter to this flow and which acknowledges the use of artifice and its normalization as a Black beauty cut-and-mix, rather than seeking to hide it. 14 S ee Bhabha’s quote previously. 15 T hat is, ‘beauty comes from within’.

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R acialization makes us see beauty as related to surface, as being about stylization and performativity. It emphasizes the outside-ness of beauty. It also opens up the possibility of Black beauty as the development of a repertoire of looks in which there is no original or authentic looks. Looks which cannot be fixed once and for all lead to the looks of beauty value being subverted as beauty ‘realities’ based on difference from ‘beauty comes from within’ are created through artifice. Beauty is revealed to be a fetish which depends on the work of fantasy in order to be resignified on the surface of the body. T he next chapter takes forward the discussion of hair and the politics of Black looks being achieved through artifice begun here.

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A nti-R acist A esthetics in the 21st C entury: T he Matter of H air Introduction – Why hair matters Many Black feminist writers (C ollins 1990; hooks 1993; Mama 1995; Weekes 1997; Banks 2000) speak of the importance placed upon having ‘good hair’, ‘a good nose’ and ‘a good complexion’ by parents in the C aribbean, Britain and the United States. This is a reflection of one of the dominant beauty paradigms which privileges white/light skin, straight hair and what are seen to be E uropean facial features (C ollins 2004; H obson 2005; H unter 2005). T his beauty paradigm has been the focus of anti-racist critique, counter-discourses and bodily practices since at least the 1800s in the Black A tlantic diaspora. What I will look at in this chapter is women’s talk on hair styling practices and what they might have to tell us about the continuation of the politics and practice of Black anti-racist aesthetics into the 21st century. K obena Mercer’s (1994a, 104) point of view is that ‘when hairstyling is critically evaluated as an aesthetic practice inscribed in everyday life, all black hairstyles are political in that they each articulate responses to the panoply of historical forces which have invested this element of the ethnic signifier with both symbolic meaning and significance’. I will continue this focus on the politics of hair and stylization whilst beginning to unpick women’s discourses on what counts as a ‘Black hairstyle’. This latter is a significant engagement given that we are in a context in which Black blondes, hair straightening, different lifecourse style trajectories, as well as the crossover of what are seen as Black styles onto white bodies must surely have troubled the meanings of what constitutes ‘Black hairstyle’. H air texture, shade and style are important components of any approach to Black women’s hair. T his will be looked at along the centuries’ old but still compelling dividing line of ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ Black beauty to see how this binary is constituted/contested. L ooking at this divide will be done in order to understand how it is possible to maintain the idea and practice of a specifically ‘Black hairstyle’ in the 21st century and what this means in turn about the boundaries of body, community and Black anti-racist politics. L et us begin by looking at anti-racist aesthetics in the Black A tlantic diaspora.

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Black anti-racist aesthetics in the diaspora – A brief history What is the allure of natural hair? T his is a question that I ask myself as I sit to write this chapter with an ‘I like your hair’ incident fresh in my mind. My own hair has been sheared very short. T his time ‘I like your hair’ was the prelude to another Black woman speaking at length to me about the fact that relaxing her hair had led to its breakage and she had been forced to cut her hair as she had had no other option. N ow she said it was growing quickly and was healthy and ‘would never see relaxer again’. T his story of health, relaxer/natural, short/long hair is, of course, not an unusual one in the hair-stories of Black women (T ate 2005, 2007a; White 2005; Farris L ewis 2001). Whether to relax or not is quite a familiar issue, across the Black A tlantic diaspora, as are stories about wearing hair extensions so that the relaxed hair can grow out to a specific length and the ends can be trimmed. There are also hair horror stories like S asha’s which also lead to learning how to work successfully with the combination of one’s own natural hair and synthetic hair Y eah I had some thick twist extensions and I tell you the trouble I had. I decided to take them out so I did but then the hair on my head just nat up. I decided to put some conditioner on it, put a cap on and sit in the sauna and try to comb it out then. I went home and I still couldn’t then it was worse. I was going to just cut it all off with the scissors because I don’t mind short hair but C arl said I’ll do the back and you do the front. When we finished there was a big ball of hair on the bed and I had to cut some off anyway. S o some is long and some is short at the moment. I’ve bought the hair to do some more twists though because I know what to do now. Y ou should take out a bit at a time, comb it out and plait it separately.

In the U nited S tates according to R ooks (2000) the discussion of straight versus natural hair has a long history in the lives of A frican-A merican women of both the Progressive era and today. A s early as the 1830s the selling of hair-care products was commonplace in A frican-A merican periodicals in the N orth of the U nited S tates, as were beauty parlours run by A frican-A merican women. T hese early ads were focused on marketing products to lighten the skin and straighten the hair. H owever alongside this there were those who argued in the 19th century that there should be a beauty standard related to ‘the A frican physiology’. T his became an integral part of nineteenth century ‘“Black pride” discourses that linked “beauty” to a call for the production of imagery that would combat the damaging representations in popular culture’ (R ooks 2000, 35). During the late 1800s the issue of beauty was discussed predominantly by middle-class men and A fricanA merican intellectuals championed hair in its natural state as the preferred style. T hat began to change at the beginning of the twentieth century as Black women beauty entrepreneurs began to create alternative representations firmly located  T he Jamaican ‘nat up’ means matted/knotted.

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within the context of A frican-A merican culture and straight hair became the preferred texture to signal middle class status by the mid-1920s (R ooks 2000). T hese women entrepreneurs like Madame C .J. Walker, ‘used a counter hegemonic discourse to critique ideologies of gender, race, and class in the dominant as well as A frican-A merican middle-class culture’ (R ooks 2000, 49). During and following World War I, A frican-A merican communities were presented with competing ideologies on identity by writers and activists like J.A . R ogers, W.E .B. Du Bois and the Jamaican, Marcus Garvey, who spoke about the beauty inherent in A frican heritage. Indeed Garvey’s U niversal N egro Improvement A ssociation (UNIA ) grew between World War I and the 1920s and has been acknowledged as the largest mass movement in A frican-A merican history (R ooks 2000; Dossett 2008). T he R astafarian movement which was inspired by Marcus Garvey’s teachings had its roots in Jamaica in the 1930s with its base in Pinnacle, S ligoville R oad, S t. C atherine. T his is an early example of an A frican-centred movement in what was then the British West Indies, which de-centred the iconicity of a beauty which approximates whiteness or is white. Its anti-colonialist, anti-racist aesthetics focused on natural hair, praised darker Black skin, A frican features, Black self love and promoted a return to A frica (Barrett 1977). It shifted the value of natural afro hair which was then continued by the U nited S tates based Black Power Movement. This latter brought a redefinition of Blackness in the 1960s/1970s with the acceptance of the ‘Black is beautiful’ idea. A s for R astafarianism, the straightening comb and chemical straighteners came to be seen as oppressive tools symbolizing the white induced shame of natural Black hair internalized by Black women. H air straightening came to be equated with self-hatred by those in the Black Power movement and by Black psychiatrists like Grier and C obbs who published work based on the self-hatred theory (Banks 2000). A fro hairstyles (‘the natural’) became associated with political change and Black self love/knowledge (Weekes 1997). A ccording to Patricia Pinho (2006) there is a growing trend among Black Brazilians to search for beauty references in idealized images of A frican beauty so as to counter associations which link Blackness to ugliness, stench and criminality. T hese associations have their roots in Brazil’s three hundred years of slavery. H air straightening was practised by large numbers of Black women as part of having the neat and tidy appearance (boa aparêcia) considered necessary in Brazilian society. C raig (2002), R ooks (2000) and White (2005) also speak about the connection between neat and tidy appearance and hair in the U nited S tates. H owever, from the 1970s onwards changes started to occur in Black Brazilian aesthetics which produced, for example, the wearing of the A fro (called in Brazil ‘Black Power hair’) (Pinho 2006).   Aesthetics in this period was based on a definition of Blackness which stressed naturalness and the rejection of hair straightening and skin bleaching (Weekes 1997; Banks 2000). Women who continued with these practices were perceived as victims of self-hatred (Weekes 1997).

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T he standard of white or mulata beauty is hegemonic in Brazil’s C arnival and as a response to this Ilê Aiyê was the first bloco afro to be established in 1974 (Pinho 2006; Figueiredo 2003). U nderlying its creation was clearly the aesthetic references which were set by the Black Is Beautiful movement (Pinho 2006). O ther afro blocos were set up in the 1970s which led to a re-A fricanization of Bahia’s C arnival through the creation of a wide range of created and imagined diasporic A frican aesthetics. For example, hairstyling such as braids and dreadlocks, colourful clothes and jewellery made from shells and straw. A s well as stylization there was also a counter discourse on beauty and affirmative identity politics at play. T his is captured in A ngela Figueiredo’s (2003) documentary Ebony Goddess – 24a Black Beauty Night Ilê Ayê. T he documentary charts the search for the E bony Goddess in a competition which runs counter to the dominant discourses on beauty in the Brazilian media, beauty contests and the samba schools in R io de Janeiro. T he E bony Goddess Black beauty contest is not about the display of Black women’s bodies. R ather, Black beauty here is performed through hairstyles, clothes and dances which are seen to be Black beauty’s important elements. H air is central to beauty here as T aís C arvalho, E bony Goddess 2002, states: H air is everything, everything in a woman … if your hair is well done even with your clothes in shreds you are beautiful (Figueiredo 2003).

S imone S antos a contestant in the 2003 E bony Goddess competition interestingly links beauty to the autonomy produced by A frican ancestry and natural braided hair which allows your hair to grow in opposition to artificially straightening hair which can make it fall out. For her there is no separation between using synthetic hair or just your own hair in braids. The artificial and the natural both seem to just become one, your braids: I believe each one has her own beauty each one chooses her style if one wants to follow our A frican ancestors. I braid my hair because it feels good. T hat’s mine. I don’t want to straighten my hair. My hair is curly and you can see that our hair is sensitive. S ome say it’s hard but it’s sensitive. It’s great using braids even with fibre hair. When a Black woman uses products to straighten her hair it only lasts for a while then it begins to fall. If you braid your hair it grows more quickly (Figueiredo 2003).

S imone’s viewpoint springs from the new A fro-aesthetics begun in the 1970s which was adopted more widely by Black Brazilians as part of their everyday beautification/stylization/popular cultural practices (Caldwell 2007; Pinho O. 2006). Many began to wear bright colours, women stopped straightening their hair and adopted ‘A fro looking hairstyles’ while men adopted dreadlocks (Pinho 2006). In Brazil, dreadlocks became an important part of A fro-aesthetics along with other Jamaican symbols such as Bob Marley and Jamaica’s national colours (black, green and gold) or R astafarian colours (red, green and gold) (Pinho 2006).

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A ll of this was related to how A fricans dress or style their hair and so is about the making of A fricanness in a diasporic context, weaving together dress and hair styles to create Black anti-racist aesthetics in a particular location out of the elements at hand, including the imagined. T he history of the politics of Black A tlantic diasporic anti-racist aesthetics is intentionally then inscribed on the body and hair in Brazil as elsewhere in the crisscross of elements drawn from Jamaica, the UK , the US , Brazil and an imagined A frica. Within this Black A tlantic diasporic generated anti-racist aesthetics the beauty that was valorized and recognized was that of ‘dark skin’ and ‘natural afro-hair’. What accounts for this, according to Paul C . T aylor (2000, 59), is that within the Black anti-racist tradition, which as we have seen spans centuries in the Black A tlantic diaspora, people are motivated first by the realization that a white dominated culture has racialized beauty, that it has defined beauty per se as white beauty, in terms of the physical features that people we consider white are more likely to have. T hey are motivated also by the worry that racialized standards of beauty reproduce the workings of racism by weaving racist assumptions into the daily practices and inner lives of the victims of racism – most saliently here by encouraging them to accept and act on the supposition of their own ugliness.

A nti-racist aesthetics is ‘an indigenous mode of cultural criticism, produced by efforts to come to grips with the uses and abuses of the concept of beauty in the experiences of black folks’ (T aylor 2000, 62). It is a cultural criticism of a negative black aesthetic. O n the level of hair this negative Black aesthetic is characterized by the straight hair rule, the presumption that long straight hair is necessary for black women’s beauty (T aylor 2000). T he anti-racist aesthetics position would be that we erase the hold that hair straightening has on Black consciousness and that we instead promote the idea that we can be beautiful just as we are naturally (T aylor 2000). What this ‘just as we are naturally’ erases is the work involved in natural hair, from the beeswax on the dreadlocks to the shaping of the afro, to the parting of the hair for plaits and canerows. It also conceals the struggle over the political meaning of hair which continues today across the Black A tlantic diaspora. In contemporary times the struggle over meanings of A frican-A merican women’s hair still continues to be structured by the cultural significance of hair (R ooks 2000; C ollins 2004; Banks 2000; White 2005; Farris L ewis 2001) and for R ooks (2000, 118) ‘texture has become an important expression of identity’. By the 1980s there were no calls in advertising ‘for leaving one’s hair in its natural condition. A frican-A merican women’s hair must be straightened’ (R ooks 2000, 130). H owever, with the hip hop generation hair that has not been straightened is   By ‘indigenous’ here I take T aylor to mean that this critique has developed organically through Black anti-racist politics.

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more likely to be applauded (R ooks 2000). For R ooks (2000), however, this can be read as gendered and contradictory as different rules could be seen to apply for women where straightness also still is an option as we can see in the styling preferences of women performers like Missy E lliott and C iara. When we can also see so many different styling options in everyday life, why think about being natural at all? Hair – The natural and unnatural of it I want to pursue this emphasis on ‘the natural’ again here as I see this repeated in the narratives of women in their twenties who were not involved in Black antiracist politics in 1970s and 1980s Britain. I want to do this because focusing on how ‘natural’ is interpreted gives us an insight into new configurations of the social, political, aesthetic and personal in terms of Black hair in the twenty-first century. L et us listen to L orraine’s response to my question about what she thought was ‘Black beauty’. I start with this not only to show how imbricated hair is with beauty but also to get to grips with the gendered meanings of racialized hair and the politics of stylization I think Black beauty – I don’t know if I have been reading too many Black books [laughter] but I think Black beauty is somebody who just embraces it, embraces their Blackness you know? Doesn’t – doesn’t try to conform to white – even though sometimes they think they are not conforming but they are in some ways I think. I think hair plays a big part in it to be honest. I think girls – when I see girls that are trying to make their hair straight and you can tell it’s looking frizzy and it would probably look better if it was just an A fro. But they are still trying to process it and do all these things to it. I think they probably don’t think they are but I think they’re not embracing Black beauty. I think Black beauty is about being natural. It’s about just letting yourself just be as you are. Y ou know if you are that way, you were made that way for a reason. L ike you know I don’t think you should change it to look more attractive even though society makes you feel more attractive if you do all those things.

L orraine here talks about a naturalness which is not conforming to a society which insists on changing the natural Black body in order to be seen and valued as more attractive. She acknowledges the difficulties of this in terms of having a stake in societal discourses on attractiveness through the use of artifice or not and that even when one thinks one is not conforming one also does ‘conform to white’. I think that what she highlights for us are four things. First, as also shown in Figueiredo’s (2003) work, she focuses on the centrality of hair stylization to issues of Black beauty. S econd, the existence of several beauty models within Black communities which Maxine L eeds C raig (2006), Patricia Pinho (2006), N oliwe R ooks (2000), K obena Mercer (1994) and I (T ate 2007a) also emphasize. T hird, the continuation

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of the white ideal as iconic in societies structured through racial dominance. Finally, the continuation into the 21st century of the critique of a negative Black aesthetic which can be related to Black anti-racist aesthetics from the 19th and 20th centuries. A s L orraine says ‘Y ou know if you are that way, you were made that way for a reason. L ike you know I don’t think you should change it to look more attractive even though society makes you feel more attractive if you do all those things’. Banks (2000) states that, the distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ hair is one that occupies the psyche of A frican-A mericans and it is clear that in the U nited S tates as in the C aribbean, Brazil and Britain, within Black communities ideas of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ hair articulate with ideas of skin colour. ‘Individuals who feel special because they have “good hair” can only feel special through the existence of what has come to be known as “bad hair”’ (Banks 2000, 29). ‘Bad hair’ is an idea which is spread throughout the diaspora and, for example, S imone S antos in Brazil reproduces this when she says some people think our hair is ‘hard’. ‘Bad hair’ for Black women in Britain is also about growing up thinking that our hair is not quite right as L orraine, who was a 23-year-old student at the time, says Y ou know when I was growing up as a child I thought everything was wrong with me but at least I didn’t have picky-picky head. Well to everybody else all the white kids in the school it probably was. L ike you know all the bits at the back that you have to comb and keep on combing them. Maybe you might have a little comb in your bag just so they don’t go curly. I remember doing that for a school photo or something. But no I wouldn’t do that now [laughter].

What is interesting about L orraine’s account is that who had ‘good’/‘bad’ hair depended on who was doing the looking and giving value to one’s hair. S he says when she was growing up she thought everything was wrong with her but at least she didn’t have ‘picky-picky head’. T his description speaks to her Jamaican heritage, the travel of these hair categories and their interpellating capacities in the diaspora, whilst the ‘at least’ means that her hair saved her from the shame of ugliness within her own community and self abjection. H owever, for the white kids at school her hair was undesirable and therefore, she had to have a comb in her bag to keep combing the ‘bits at the back’ so ‘they don’t go curly’. T his  In the context of the U nited S tates, historically, young women with ‘milky white skin, long blonde hair and slim figures were deemed to be the most beautiful and therefore the most feminine women. Within this interpretive context, skin color, body type, hair texture and facial features become important dimensions of femininity’ (C ollins 2004, 194). T hese beauty standards mean that A frican-A merican women are largely rendered less beautiful or at worse, ugly (C ollins 2004; Banks 2000; H obson 2005; H unter 2005). A good deal of women’s beauty is associated with their hair so this is important in the process of constructing hierarchies of femininity (C ollins 2004).   ‘Picky-picky’ is Jamaican for hair that is short and difficult to style.

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was what the intense scrutiny of the white gaze and its devaluation of Black hair coerced her to do in her youth, but now she asserts ‘I wouldn’t do that’. From my own childhood in Jamaica I could add in ‘kinky’, ‘peppercorn’, ‘tough’ and ‘natty’ (knotty) to L orraine’s ‘picky-picky’ as a description of Black hair. A racialized hierarchy is clearly embedded in this language of hair and it must be negotiated by Black women like L orraine who claim the space of Black beauty. T his racialized hierarchy of course has always been subjected to the assault of Black politics and liberation struggles from at least the nineteenth century. Within this politics the only authentic Black hairstyles would be dreadlocks, afro, canerow, plaits, twists and chiney bumps without the addition of any commercially available hair. These are the valorized signifiers of the ideal of this ‘natural Black beauty’. A cursory look around any neighbourhood would make clear that these ‘Black hairstyles’ have now gone into the mainstream and that Black hairstyles are much more diverse than this. A lso if we go into the hair and beauty care shop women are there buying hair for weaves and extensions. In terms of infiltrating the white mainstream, as Lorraine says ‘I think Black’s become more popular. It’s become like the new accessory. S o – it’s because of the music as well hip hop and yeah you see a lot of white people trying to style the Black stuff’. S he goes on to say, But there is a lady that comes into the pool where I work. I always try and talk to the people when they come in when I am in reception. A nd this white girl came in with dreadlocks and I was like oh, how come you’ve got dreadlocks. O h, because I used to go to whatever festivals like Glastonbury and we used to go out a lot and it’s part of our culture and all my friends have dreadlocks so I decided to get them. S o for her it was something different but for me it would mean just being natural and not straightening out your roots.

S tyling ‘the Black stuff’ for her here is related to the use of a hairstyle associated with the R astafarian religion in Jamaica and Black A tlantic diasporic politics and stylization more widely by a white woman in Britain to show the sub-cultural group membership of some music festival participants. What L orraine manages to show here is that this is about ‘consuming the other’ (hooks 1992; N arayan 1997), in order to make a bland culture interesting/different and give her cultural capital. T his contrasts with L orraine’s own position as a Black British woman of Jamaican heritage where dreadlocks to her would ‘mean just being natural and not straightening out your roots’. T his has a clear link to the Black anti-racist tradition. H er ‘not straightening out your roots’ is quite intriguing as it both points to the practice of straightening your hair roots at the same time as it speaks to a politics of acceptance of self and one’s ‘roots’ in terms of cultural heritage. For L orraine we should just accept our kinky, tough, nappy, peppercorn hair because that is who we are naturally.

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T his is quite straightforward but as L orraine goes on speaking we can see the continuing paradox which faces Black women in Britain in terms of hair. S imply put this is ‘to be or not to be – natural’ I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen a Black girl natural – natural hair I mean. E veryone gets it braided which I don’t think is their hair. E veryone gets weaves or straightened, burned to straighten the frizz. Well I’ve decided I’m not going to have it relaxed again because it’s just doing my head in to be honest with you having to touch up the roots every four to eight weeks. I’m like why? Why am I hiding these roots that’re going – that’re supposed to be like that, you know what I mean?

A gain here she speaks about Black hair stylization technologies – weaves, braids with bought hair, straightened with relaxer or burned with a straightening comb or curling irons – which either removes the frizz or hides it. For her, relaxing her hair is ‘doing her head in’ because of its monthly repetitious ritual of straightening the roots. A gain her question of ‘why am I hiding these roots?’ both speaks to her antiracist aesthetics and her relation of her hair to diasporic A frican essence – ‘why am I hiding these roots that’re supposed to be like that?’ I understand what she means though. Why touch up the natural with the unnatural? Well, in the way of things it is necessary so that the unnatural is normalized/ naturalized, so that the unnatural seems to spring from the head in an unproblematically natural way. A s the styles, weaves and straightened hair, spoken about by L orraine and the braids with synthetic hair spoken about by S imone S antos are widespread and are seen as Black hairstyles quite unproblematically, we have to move towards a view that stylization does not mean that we hate ourselves as would be the case in Black anti-racist aesthetics. R ather we have to think instead about how it is that these styles can be and indeed are naturalized as specifically Black hairstyles. If white people can be unproblematically styling ‘the Black stuff’, why is it so difficult for us to see straightened Black hair as just another in a series of possibilities (Mercer 1994a; Banks 2000; C raig 2002)? Practices on and of Black hair remind us that to make sense of the question ‘what is a Black hairstyle?’ we must therefore think beyond Black anti-racist aesthetics even whilst keeping it as a focus for a positive and more inclusive Black politics. I say ‘inclusive’ here as in some of my previous work (T ate 2005; 2007a) I have shown that it can be very exclusionary for Black ‘mixed race’ women, for example. T he emphasis on naturalness into the 21st century still continues to haunt Black beauty practices which are clearly about artifice and makes us wonder just ‘what is Black hair anyway’? In asking this question I am also aware of the challenges that can be made to the use of the word ‘Black’ as a preface here. I have been challenged myself on this after having given a talk on Black beauty, with the comment ‘I do not have Black hair, I have A frican hair’. I need to acknowledge then that hair continues to be highly political as writers before me have shown

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(Banks 2000; R ooks 2000) and as I am sure others will continue to show. A s K obena Mercer (1994a, 100–101) reminds us hair is not just hair, but a constant signifier of self because as organic matter produced by physiological processes, human hair seems to be a natural aspect of the body. Y et hair is never a straightforward biological fact, because it is almost always groomed, prepared, cut, concealed and generally worked upon by human hands. S uch practices socialize hair, making it the medium of significant statements about self and society and the codes of value that bind them, or do not [...] hair is constantly processed by cultural practices which [...] invest it with meanings and value.

A s such hair is both discursive and material because it is ‘a physical manifestation of our being that becomes loaded with social and cultural meanings’ (Banks 2000, 26). T he question that I started with perhaps needs to be re-phrased then to ‘what are the cultural practices that socialize hair, that make it Black and communally valued’? Stylization and what counts as Black hair in the 21st century L orraine spoke above about the importance of who was looking at your hair in terms of its value (‘is it picky-picky or good hair?’) and the fact that this varies between Black and white communities. I guess that for her all white people’s gaze would interpellate her as a subject with ‘bad Black hair’ as they do not possess the cultural capital of the Black community to judge the textures of ‘good Black hair’. O ur hair then speaks simultaneously for us and of us to others. It creates the addressivity of good/bad, political/coconut-wanna be, beautiful/ugly as we go about our daily lives. T hese addressivities are produced not only by stylization but also by the discourses which abound on/of Black hair which have become embedded in Black A tlantic diasporic culture over the centuries. What is interesting is that through these addressivities and their attendant interpellations we are brought into being as subjects for whom the ‘same’ and ‘other’ of Black beauty, Black hair and natural/ un-natural, are constantly being produced and contested through stylization. It is in this reproduction and contestation that is a by-product of stylization that what counts as Black hair, what is given cultural value, is made known. Part of this valuation as L orraine makes us aware next has to do with the appeal of our hair to the opposite sex (‘Y eah most guys like long hair’). H ere she shows herself as in opposition to this as what she desired was to look like she had dreadlocks. T his was a sign of her Black anti-racist political orientation, whereas ‘most guys want girls to have hair that’s loosely curled’. In fact here she also shows that within Black communities there is resistance to dreadlocks as a style as she had to ‘take them down so they didn’t look so much like dreadlocks’ to appease her boyfriend.

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Y eah, because most guys like long hair. Most guys want girls to have hair that’s loosely curled but I was even contemplating having dreadlocks because it’s the natural way the hair grows as well. But I remember I was going out with this guy – he’s the worse guy I have ever been out with and it was C arnival night and Black people from all over came to S toke and I had my thick plaits up and I absolutely loved them because they looked like dreadlocks. I thought yeah and I walked into the shop because he has a computer shop and he was like why have you done your hair like that? A nd I was like because I like it and he was like they look like dreadlocks and I was like yeah I want them to look like that. A nd he was like yeah I want you to take them down so I had to take them down so they didn’t look as much like dreadlocks.

What her example reminds us of is what I said earlier. T hat is, there is a diversity of styles within Black community and a complex relationship between aesthetics and politics. T his diversity can also extend to hair colour. L isten to L orraine who has earlier been talking about plaiting her hair for her upcoming 21st birthday party: Y ou know what? I bought blonde hair yeah? Because I thought I’m sick of having black. I just want something again just a colour change. A nd I keep looking at it, get it out of the bag thinking but I think I’m gonna take it back and just get the black I reckon.

In this short excerpt she points to blonde hair as just another styling option, as is using hair which you buy in a bag. It’s just for a colour change when you think ‘I am sick of having black’ and you just want ‘something again just a colour change’. S he is torn about the colour and might just go get the black hair for her extensions. N otice that it is only colour here that is at issue, not the use of commercially available hair to give her the style she wants. T his is an important point because it makes us notice that even something which is clearly artificial causes no great feelings of discomfort in the admission that ‘I get my hair from the shop’. H air out of a bag can be yours when combined with your own hair that grows out of your scalp. It just becomes an extension of your hair – that is after all what some are called, ‘extensions’. O f course, we know that there are natural Black blondes/brown-haired Black women. My niece is a case in point. My sister has always been asked by other Black women what dye she uses in her hair with ‘it’s such a beautiful colour’ being the compliment. We can be so easily caught out though with our own ideas that blonde/brown hair is not naturally Black. I also said ‘your hair is a beautiful colour’ and asked about the dye as I was doing the research for this book. I was really ashamed when S asha replied ‘oh no, this is my natural hair colour’. S he then went on to say that the only black hair on her body was her eyebrows! T he question of Black blondes though continues to be a contentious one within Black communities even in the face of these everyday encounters.

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R ay is a 23-year-old student who is Black ‘mixed race’ British and takes up the issue of Black blondes next. Within the research she expounded at length on the ‘browning’ category, both as a point of identification and of Black beauty recognition. Her answer to my question about Black blondes is to at first ask ‘Black what?’ before going on to say, after my clarification, ‘it’s very tricky isn’t it? I don’t know. I think it suits Beyoncé. Do you know what? I think it suits C hristina Milian who isn’t really Black though she is browning’. S he here is clearly saying that blonde as a colour is totally appropriate on Black hair and bodies but it does suit some more than others. T hat is the focus of her ‘it’s tricky’. It’s about whether it suits the individual, not about the politics of being blonde and Black. T he rest of her talk on browning and hair is also apposite here as she talks about how it is that a canerow can change a L atina body into the Black category ‘browning’. T he style enables the singer C hristina Milian to morph in R ay’s eyes and possibly those of others and become something else ‘racially’. R ay reminds us then of the performativity of stylization S

What do you think about think about Black blondes then?

R

Black what?

S

Blondes like Beyoncé who have blonde hair.

R [Laughter] it’s very tricky isn’t it? I don’t know. I think it suits Beyoncé. Do you know what? I think it suits C hristina Milian who isn’t really Black though she’s browning. S C hristina Milian? R Y eah but she’s not Black S

Well what is she?

R She’s Hispanic. She’s browning in that new video definitely. Yeah she’s browning especially when she’s got canerow in very much so S S o do you think it needs the hair to also be browning then? Y ou need to have some hair or the other? What kind of hair do you think browning needs? R Y ou need something on your head dread. [Joint laughter] R I won’t lie a millimetre long afro ain’t gonna make it browning or not blood. H er canerow really makes her browning. I don’t know why maybe it’s because I am aware of the fact that she isn’t Black or ‘mixed race’ why the canerow just brings her nicely into that category because I wouldn’t care if she was half L atina or half something else you know what I mean?

 I look at the browning in more detail in C hapter 5 so I will not develop it here.  S miley-voiced delivery.  S aid with laughter bubbling through.

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A s she continues to speak she expands on the relationship between hair and browning thus S S o what hair do you think goes with browning then? R A n array. Well you can have straight so long as it’s not weave. It can be naturally straight or you straighten it with a straightener. I don’t want to see any relaxation up in there either, no need for relaxer. A nyway and then natural curls any kind of curls from loose blowing in the wind curls to afro texture. Well I don’t want to see any weave. I don’t want to see any plaited up hair extensions and only straightened with ceramics curled with tongs but when you wash it, it goes back to being naturally nice and curly. T hat’s it full stop. A ny colour like blonde, red, highlighted different shades of blonde and brown. It’s got to look natural though. It’s all got to be natural.

For the browning category any hair colour goes as long as it looks ‘natural’. H air can be straight or straightened with a straightener but not a chemical relaxer, whereas it can be afro-textured, straight or loosely curled. T he only proviso is that ‘it’s all got to be natural’. T here can’t be any hair in a bag here! S o even within this vast array in terms of colour and texture within what R ay sets up as the browning category, ‘natural’ is still paramount. S he begins here the work of introducing the next section of this chapter where I take issue with the idea of hair alteration as self hatred and try to see what ‘natural’ can mean in the 21st century anyway.

Taking issue with hair alteration as self hatred or ‘queering the natural’ T here is a long-standing tradition in Black anti-racist aesthetics of thinking that straight/processed hair means Black self hatred. What I will argue in the rest of this chapter is something quite different from this. My argument will be that as there is a multiplicity of Black stylizations, sedimentation of these practices on/of hair makes them Black so we no longer need to continue to be centred on this equation. T he Black body also makes the hairstyle Black so ‘natural’ assumes a different meaning. S traight hair is not about being ‘fake’ or ‘wanting to be white’. R ather it is about a stylization which points to the hair as Black apart from any signification from the racialized body which it occupies. I will draw below on S ara A hmed’s (2006) work on queer phenomenology by placing hair as an object which we orient to in the work of stylization and which orients us as Black. We can see this for example in R ay’s talk above on C hristina Milian as browning through her canerow hairstyle. S tylization allows us to do Blackness through hair irrespective of whether it comes in a bag or it’s straight, natty or loosely curled, black, brown or blonde. A s said before, the idea of hair alteration as self-hatred is one which has been in existence in Black communities in the diaspora since at least the 1830s (R ooks 2000). I think that the 21st century though has seen a difference emerging.

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T hat is, that Black hair can be straight, curly, blonde/black/a variety of shades as long as it is styled as Black. T his styling has also meant that the hair must follow the injunction of looking natural, although what natural now means has changed enormously. It can encompass anything from short afro hair to Beyoncé’s weaved on blonde tresses. L iterary critic, C arolyn C ooper’s (2004) work on Jamaican dancehall aesthetics in terms of hair is illuminating here as ‘natural’ is severely tested in this context. Working class Jamaican women don wigs, weaves and extensions in various colours and as ‘“picky-picky head” women go to all lengths to claim the sex appeal that is perceived to reside naturally in “tall-hair” women, as evidenced in the dominant images of pinup female sexiness in the mainstream media in Jamaica and elsewhere’ (C ooper 2004, 131). H air can be straight, dreadlocks or sisterlocks. L ength, volume and height of store-bought hair is crucial in this ‘constructed beauty that bears absolutely no resemblance to contemporary E urocentric modes of hairstyling. Dancehall hairstyles are engineered and require sophisticated technical skills for their construction. Indeed, this dancehall hair-extension aesthetic must be acknowledged as a contemporary expression of traditional patterns of hair and body adornment in continental A frica, which have gloriously reemerged in the diaspora’ (C ooper 2004, 131). E ven though C ooper herself acknowledges that these stylizations both subvert and reinscribe the devaluation of the ‘natural’ beauty of A frican Jamaican women it is interesting that they have no resemblance to E urocentric hairstyles and that they have become naturalized as Black hairstyles in the Jamaican diaspora and beyond. ‘N atural’ then has shifted to ‘naturalized’. Bearing this ‘naturalized’ in mind, perhaps what we need to look at instead if we are interested in the politics of hair is the difference that difference makes especially when it is conjoined with the racialized body. In the example above R ay talks about C hristina Milian’s canerows bringing her into the browning category even though she isn’t Black and we have also seen the ambivalence about chemically straightened hair even whilst straightening is practiced. N atural hair is somewhat of a fetish (Bhabha 1994a). T his is so as it can be both a marker of cultural pride based on some imagined Black essence as well as simply an indicator of styles which are constantly shifting and become the focus of communal identity anxieties. Ingrid Banks’s (2000) work also highlighted the complexity of the meanings attributed to hair practices in a climate in the 1990s which nurtured diversity and the idea of individual choice alongside rhetoric of the necessity to have ‘manageable’ hair. S o why does ‘natural’ continue to matter? What is this ‘Black’ in ‘Black hairstyle’ anyway? H ow does ‘Black’ work here? In S ara A hmed’s (2006) Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, she raises two aspects which are important for this discussion. O ne of these is that objects are formed by labour over   For Bhabha in ‘T he O ther Question’ (1994a, 74), ‘fetishism is always a “play” or vacillation between the archaic affirmation of wholeness/similarity … and the anxiety associated with lack and difference’.

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generations and the other is that the sedimentation of bodily practices occurs over time. Drawing on Marx she sees objects as taking shape through their particular histories of being worked on/with and as thereby acquiring/having value. If we turn this to understanding hair and specifically Black hair, we could say that hair as an object is shaped into a commodity through the labour of stylization. T he commodity both shows and makes cultural value through this ‘transformation of matter into form’ (Ahmed 2006, 43). This is significant because a hairstyle does not have an ‘itself’ that emerges devoid of contact with us. T herefore, how a hairstyle appears and its shaping by histories of work in terms of stylization, technology, taste and cultural politics is important to consider as Mariane Ferme (2001) shows us in her discussion of hairstyling in S ierra L eone, for example.10 We must consider history, technology, taste and cultural politics as the ‘actions performed on the object (as well as with the object) shape the object. T he object in turn affects what we do’ (A hmed 2006, 43) and is itself affective. Black hair as an object has its own cultural biography, as I have shown above, in which the history and ideologies of Black politics have shaped what surfaces as Black hairstyles, how they are valued and the feelings attached to them across the centuries and across the diaspora. S o our hair sits on our heads comfortably or uncomfortably. It is not only shaped by the work of stylization, which throughout I have been using to mean the labour of styling, discourses and technology working together to produce beauty. O ur hair also takes the shape of what it is supposed to do on the body on which it sits. It is supposed to be Black and appear as a natural extension of that racialized body, whether it is straight, curly, twisted, locksed, rowed, chiney bumped, shaved, dyed, afroed, or the height of a dancehall diva’s. A Black hair style is performative11 in that even whilst the racialized body proclaims it to be Black it also points to the body as Black. T his duality occurs because ‘hair even in what is presumed to be its “natural state” is shaped by culturally determined creative and re-creative acts to form and further particular ends’ (R ooks 2000, 8). H air does things and it is a tool which can be used to extend (remember what I said about extension above?) ourselves beyond our bodies whilst at the same time being drawn back into them. H air does this extension/retraction movement because of its dual ‘racial’ signification. This dual movement is what stylization allows hair to do through fetishization. It allows hair to point beyond us as well as to our embodied selves. T here is both a pointing to the body as Black done by hair and a pointing to hair as Black done by the body even when for example, ‘we know it’s a weave’. E ven Beyoncé’s weave like other Black hair-styles can be normalized 10  ‘H air weaving was more responsive to changes in style and technology (synthetic extensions, chemical products and other hair-straightening gadgets, and decorative additions such as beads) than the other forms of weaving. It inscribed the history of the moment on women’s bodies, as styles took on the name of events, or popular icons on the national or even global scene’ (Ferme 2001, 58). 11  Judith Butler (1993) Bodies That Matter: On The Discursive Limits of Sex.

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as a natural accompaniment to a Black body. S tylization as a technology brings forth Black hair, which as an object ‘has been shaped for something which means it takes the shape of what it is for’ (A hmed 2006, 46). T he shape of what it is for here is Black, beautiful and natural. S o, stylization’s practices on and of hair both point to Blackness even whilst they disturb its essentialisms. T hink of the Black blonde, E ve, for example, whose very straight ash blonde tresses, for some, speak of whiteness incorporated into Black style. H owever, her straight, ash blonde hair also serves to highlight the singer’s Blackness through its very fakeness. T his fakeness connects to and contains her hair as Black. What we have also seen in the examples and C ooper’s (2004) take on dancehall diva hair in Jamaica is that in the styling of the hair, ‘Black’ is produced. H air is an object which is worked on and shapes bodies ‘racially’. ‘Bodies hence acquire orientation [as Black]12 through the repetitions of some actions over others, as actions that have certain “objects” in view, whether they are physical objects required to do the work or the ideal objects that one identifies with’ (Ahmed 2006, 58). My contention here is that the identification which is being done is not with whiteness but with Blackness itself. T his is what the repetitions of stylization are intended to produce even if the object is straightened ash blonde hair on a Black body. T here is a habitus of Black hairstyle in which practice makes the hair Black and the body Black too. T his means that ‘natural’ assumes different meanings and straightened hair is not about being fake or wanting to be white, but is rather about having straightened hair as one of the multitude of specifically Black styling options. S tylization is normalized as natural. T his ‘becoming naturalness’ as a process of beauty seems to make it possible for us to continue to negotiate the politics of what counts as a Black hairstyle into the 21st century. H ow can we speak of something as being ‘natural’ when it is clear it is not? T hat is, how can we say that normalization/naturalization might work in terms of a ‘natural’, a ‘norm’, which is a fake? R ay’s point of view is that ‘if you buy the hair then it’s yours’. E ven though this hair is clearly other from my Black body it is still ‘mine’. T his view is also echoed in the words of S imone S antos when she speaks about braiding her hair with synthetic hair. T he interesting thing here is how the ‘other’ of fake hair can become a part of the self so that it is natural. H ow can this other-naturalness work? A ccording to S ara A hmed (2006, 15): T he otherness of things is what allows me to do things ‘with’ them. What is other than me is also what allows me to extend the reach of my body ... T he body extends its reach by taking in that which is ‘not’ it , where the ‘not’ involves the acquisition of new capacities and directions – becoming in other words, ‘not’ simply what I am ‘not’ but what I can ‘have’ and ‘do’. T he “not me” is incorporated into the body extending its reach.

12  My addition.

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I am not here using A hmed’s words to again reiterate the old idea that hair straightening, for example, means that we want to constitute ourselves as white (see for example, Jeffreys 2005). R ather, what I want to point to is that white bodies as in the example from L orraine above of the dreadlocked white woman as well as Black bodies can also extend their reach through the process of incorporation. Black extension though is not ‘consuming the other’ (hooks 1992; N arayan 1997) but is a disidentificatory (Muñoz 1999) moment with whiteness. At each moment this process of incorporation is normalized/naturalized as natural, as a possibility for the Black body through the repetition of stylization. O ver time this repetition means that hair-styles become Black because they are shared within the local collective and the Black A tlantic diaspora as a whole. A question which remains to be asked is why some hair and not others is the subject of scrutiny and critique in terms of one’s politics? For example, was Posh criticized for her hair extensions as imitative of Black hair styling technology/ Black hair style? N o. Was Bo Derek criticized in ‘10’ for having canerows and beads as someone who wanted to be Black? N o. Why are white women not seen to be doing beauty as ‘race work’ through stylization in the same way that Black women are? T his question makes me think that it is probably time that we called a beauty truce and relaxed enough to think as R ay does: Y eah you can have Black blondes but there are certain shades that are Black. I don’t know if that is because of how our hair is or if that is all that Dark and Lovely has, for example [laughter]. But yeah you can have honey blonde, ash blonde and platinum and these are Black blondes. Beyoncé is more honey. E ve is platinum and Mary J. Blige is a lovely mixture of honey and ash. Y ou can have all other colours too like red, brown, blue, you name it.

With these words R ay engages with a very old debate about fake versus natural in the form of the Black blonde. H ere she displaces the privileged position of ‘the natural’ born out of Black anti-racist aesthetics and its predecessors as the locus of a pure cultural and political identity. Instead she makes this just merely one of the many locations of Black hair stylization in the Black A tlantic diaspora. R ay also makes us consider how Black hair stylization travels across national borders – note that her examples are A merican as is the brand mentioned. T his helps us to note that her point of reference here is the wider Black A tlantic diaspora as she outlines what a Black blonde could be. Black hair stylization in this diaspora continues to be a part of its web of ‘affiliation and affect’ (Gilroy 1993, 16) as it has always been.

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Conclusion A s I draw this chapter to a close I think that there will be many readers who will not agree with me at all and see what I have said as being somewhat ‘blasphemous’ as I have not continued the tradition of talking about self-hatred and hair straightening as harmful. T hese readers will clearly think that I have no politics or that in my hurry to be too postmodern I have forgotten ‘the truth of being Black’. What I wanted to show here, as in the rest of the book, is that there are other ‘truths’ which also exist uncomfortably with ‘the truth of being Black’. Just because they don’t fit the doxa does not mean that they are not worthy of being heard, just because they are uncomfortable does not mean that we cannot discuss them. I hope that I have begun to show that class, location and historical moment are determinants of what we do with our hair. Further, the discussion so far has shown the variety of stylizations that are possible and the possibility that as sedimented practices they provide the context for Black women’s identifications with specifically Black women’s hair styles across the diaspora. What this means is that we can move to seeing that as we extend our bodies through hair stylizations our extension is toward Blackness and nothing other than that. It is Blackness and Black anti-racist aesthetics that are being reframed, renegotiated and re-embodied through hair stylization. Black women’s aim is not to mimic whiteness at all, quite the contrary. N either is it the case that we are ashamed of our hair. R ather, we are made to feel shame by others. T hese ideas will be taken up in the next chapter as I turn to look at Black beauty affect in terms of shade and melancholia.

C hapter 3

‘R ace’, Beauty and Melancholia: S hade Introduction H ow do I come to write about Black beauty and melancholia in the same sentence? H ow is politics at stake here in making this connection? H ow can I depathologize melancholia? H ow can Black beauty melancholia become a part of change in a politics of Black belongings? These are some of the thoughts which flood my mind as I sit rather nervously to write what could turn out to be an uncomfortable chapter for us. I have been told by other Black women in the past ‘don’t wash our dirty linen in public’ and ‘do not reproduce us as victims and as pathological’. I do not undertake the task of writing this chapter lightly because, as is anything to do with Black beauty, it is about politics, belongings and emotions. I feel I must do this writing though for three reasons. The first one is that for years I have been trying to understand the expressions of loss and being lost that I have heard in women’s narratives when they speak about exclusions from Black community based on shade. S econd, I think that it is important to look at how loss/being lost can be productive of both individual and communal politics. Feelings of unease with exclusion from Black community need therefore to be voiced openly to take an inclusive Black politics into the future. I aim in the discussion to make the social workings of Black beauty melancholia visible in terms of it being culturally instituted. I also want to further depathologize it by looking at Black women as agents of change rather than as victims of Black beauty melancholia. It is clear that the ideals of Black beauty within the Black A tlantic diasporic anti-racist tradition remain unattainable for some. A s such processes of becoming Black are suspended and are the scene of contestation and conflict. This irresolution places becoming Black within a melancholic framework. A s David E ng and S hinhee H an (2003) show in their discussion of A sian A merican racial melancholia, being A sian means that one cannot attain the ideals of whiteness through assimilation. ‘A ttaining whiteness’ is always impossible as is shown by the ‘racial’ categories constructed during slavery, so Black and white remain permanently estranged. T his is the context of Black beauty melancholia, in which both becoming Black and being Black are framed by hegemonic Blackness and whiteness. Becoming/Being Black occurs when one accepts and identifies with racializing Black anti-racist movements’ beauty philosophies – for example, R astafarianism, Brazilian A fro-aesthetics and Black Power – and their race-ing stylizations and accompanying technologies as the norm. Being Black also has another side. That is, fitting in to the racialized beauty order where white is right.

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Becoming/Being Black speaks at once both of the individual and communal because it is based on thinking intersubjectively and relationally. If we do this intersubjective relational thinking we notice that as Black women – whether queer or not, irrespective of class, age and other differences – we also have moments in which we have difficulties in being admitted to Black community. One aspect of this is the difficulties we have as Black women/community in sharing a truly common structure of feeling because of the politics and aesthetics of skin colour. What I argue in this chapter is that Black and white beauty ideals have produced and continue to produce their own Black beauty melancholia within the Black Atlantic diaspora. The melancholic focus on being Black must be disidentified from if one is to become Black through transforming the whole notion of Black beauty. If we say that the production of this melancholia has happened and continues to happen throughout the Black A tlantic diaspora then we could say that there is transnational Black beauty melancholia because of the cultural institution of ‘race’ and racism in former slave societies. In this transnational melancholia Black as well as white ‘blood’ and ‘culture’ is equally contaminating depending on whether your vantage point is Black anti-racist or E urocentric. T he politics of these vantage points demand that you take sides even in the face of exclusion from the larger group to which you want to gain access. T aking sides also entails that you ‘ignore’ the exclusion and the pain it causes so that Black anti-racist politics and Black community can continue. H owever, what we try to ignore reemerges again and again in the face of exclusionary events to produce psychic and social discomfort which begins from our individual and communal skin. We become Black within an anatomical economy based on Blackness and whiteness. S uch skin colour politics ensure that becoming Black demands a psychic splitting on the part of women who both are and are not part of Black community because of their shade. In this racialized anatomical economy one is never quite right. O ne is never quite Black/white enough according to what Fanon (1967) would call its ‘racial epidermal schemas’. A s we stand in our skin we must recognize both its beauty and its simultaneous ugliness brought about by ‘racial’ norms. Perhaps it is in this uneasy third space between beauty and ugliness   Raymond Williams (1978) first used ‘structure of feeling’ in his book Marxism and Literature. What he meant by this was that a structure of feeling was a process of relating the continuity of social formations in works of art ‘where true social content is in a significant number of cases of this present and affective kind, which cannot be reduced to belief systems, institutions, or explicit general relationships, though it may include all these as lived and experienced, with or without tension, as it also evidently includes elements of social and material (physical or natural) experience which may lie beyond or be uncovered or imperfectly covered by, the elsewhere recognizable systematic elements, (p. 133). T his was developed further by both S tuart H all and Paul Gilroy in their writings on Black British and Black A tlantic cultural productions. I am using it here as a way into making sense of the Black A tlantic diasporic beauty cross pollinations and hybridities at the level of philosophy, politics, aesthetics and stylization.

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that Black beauty melancholia awaits us as we cannot fully invest in ourselves as subjects of beauty but must constantly wrestle with old ghosts. T his chapter develops a reading of beauty melancholia within the Black A tlantic diaspora based on the work of Judith Butler (1997), A nne A nlin C heng (2001) and R anjana K hanna (2003) in order to look at a connection between subjectivity and beauty. T his reading does not just resign Black women to self-hatred or deny the profound effects of racism. Drawing on Butler (1997) we could say that racialized beauty is formed from the inability to grieve Black beauty as a possibility of love. T he Black woman becomes the beauty she never loved and never grieved. In order to understand what we do with grief so as not to be paralyzed by it I have found C heng’s and K hanna’s work invaluable. C heng’s work places racial melancholia within the interaction between assimilation, grief and grievance. S he also speaks of the moment of grievance as being the point of the emergence of transgressive politics and future potentialities. K hanna (2003) engages in a post-colonial reading of Freud in order to focus on ‘colonial melancholy’. H er work helps us to see how the melancholia of un-beauty can become known through talk and the place of critical agency in the emergence of new beauty ideals. In K hanna’s work what is at stake is formulating an idea of the affective melancholia of post-colonials which, for my purposes, I would like to turn to understanding shade and how this re-situates Black beauty through disidentification from dominant Eurocentric and hegemonic Black beauty ideals. It is this moment of disidentification through critical agency which is important as this denies Black women’s positioning as pathological victims. Cheng (2001) adds flesh to the connection between the psyche and the social which A nzieu (1990) discusses through ‘the skin ego’ and Butler (1999) alludes to when she says that ‘race’ is a culturally instituted melancholia. T he chapter begins by thinking the link between the psyche and the social through using Didier A nzieu’s skin ego. It then moves to drawing from K hanna, Butler and C heng in terms of Black beauty melancholia before moving to look at the cultural/political/ social terms under which Black beauty was positioned as melancholic. T his latter involves a periodization of Black beauty within the Black A tlantic diaspora. What I do here is to think melancholia by using the notion of Black beauty as a transnational structure of feeling which has different manifestations in different periods and spaces. T he last section of the chapter continues to depathologize Black beauty melancholia by engaging with the possibility for disidentificatory agency and the emergence of new beauty ideals within Black politics. First though, how can the skin ego help us to think the link between the psyche and the social? The skin ego and linking the psyche to the social R ussell et al. (1992, 54) highlight the fact that white beauty is also about ‘race’ work and the use of race-ing stylization technologies but it is not seen as such and is not interpreted politically when they state

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Black Beauty: Aesthetics, Stylization, Politics When a white woman with brown eyes wears blue contact lenses, she might be thought vain for doing so, but most people would not assume that she was denying her heritage. When a white woman bakes under the sun all day to tan her pale skin, she might be admonished for risking skin cancer, but few would conclude that she hates being white. A nd when a white woman perms her straight hair, she is rarely accused of wanting to be something she is not. But nearly everything the Black woman (or man) does to her (or his) appearance is interpreted politically.

Indeed, as Ginetta C andelario (2000, 129) reminds us white ‘female bodies are racialized as well but this racialization is enacted in the assumption of deracination, racial neutrality and naturalized invisibility’. N owhere is this more clearly illustrated than in cosmetic surgery in which, for example, Jordan’s 2008 nose is not seen as being to do with racialization but rather with her wish to have a nose which didn’t look like a cat’s but was instead a ski-jump nose (interview in OK! magazine issue 609, 12 February, 2008). O n the other hand, Black women who choose aesthetic surgery are still haunted by the ‘wanna be white’ issue of Black hatred and psychic damage. L ooking at cosmetic surgery among A frican A merican women in the U nited S tates, H unter (2005, 63) asserts ‘I do not believe that patients of color do want to be white per se’. What is more the case is that the cultural ethos of the U nited S tates is about white beauty as normal, ideal and the only real beauty. So although women do not want to be white they are influenced by these cultural norms on/of beauty (H unter 2005). I also think that it is clearly the case that aesthetic surgery as a race-ing technology could also potentially reproduce what are seen to be white looks on Black bodies in the same way that through collagen and implants it reproduces what are seen to be ‘Blacker’ lips and bottoms on white bodies. A gain though this latter is seen as making the white body and face look better, younger, more voluptuous and is naturalized as being about free choice and socio-economic status. H owever, everything that Black women do to their bodies can be read as a sign of psychic dysfunction usually interpreted as self hatred produced from internalizing racism. Psychoanalysis and phenomenology therefore meet when we look at Black beauty as it destabilizes the neat binary between mind and body which obscures the race-ing stylizations of white beauty. Psychoanalysis has its critics (Venn 1992; Mama 1995; K hanna 2003) and rightly so but it can help us in trying to link the social skin to the psychic skin in order to understand the question of shade and beauty melancholia. O ne’s felt sense of the body’s surface, its skin, has also to be read as such in order for us to have a contiguous connection between ourselves and the physical body as it is perceived from the outside. S kin is, therefore, a key interface between the self and the other, between the psychic, biological, political and social (Prosser 1998). For Freud (1962, 26) the ego has a bodily nature as the ‘ego is first and   Jordan is K atie Price who was once a glamour model and now has her own talk show on UK television. S he has spent £75,000 so far on aesthetic surgery.

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foremost a bodily ego, it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface’. Didier A nzieu (1990, 63) uses this insight to coin the term the skin ego as ‘the ego is the projection in the psyche of the surface of the body, namely the skin’. T he skin ego encompasses the skin’s impact on the mind and ‘is at once a sac containing together the pieces of the self, an excitation screen, a surface on which signs are inscribed, and guardian of the intensity of instincts that it localizes in a bodily source, in this or that sensitive zone of the skin’ (A nzieu 1990, 63). T he skin as a surface on which signs are written speaks of the impact of culture on the psyche. T his connection is shown in the following excerpt from the Black Beauty and H air.com website’s live discussion on whether or not skin lighteners should be banned: I agree skin lighteners should be banned, you should be proud of the colour of your skin, white people go on sun beds and try to be darker and black people want to use skin lighteners to be lighter. I think people use them because there is a lot of pressure for women these days about how they look and a lot of black girls think they will look a lot better and prettier if they were lighter, but they are the ones who will suffer the consequences when the cream damages their skin (S ienna).

Sienna relates first of all to the anti-racist position that we should be proud of the colour of our skin. S he goes on to place acting on the skin to change its surface shade as both a Black and white pre-occupation – white people want to be darker and Black people want to be lighter. T here is a yearning for difference which seems to cut across the colour line here. Within this cultural context she relates looking better and prettier to looking lighter for some ‘Black girls’ because of the pressure related to how they look. T his pressure leads to the possibility of skin damage from harmful skin lighteners. In ‘O f mimicry and man: the ambivalence of colonial discourse’, Bhabha (1994b) provides us with one way into reading this practice when he writes that colonialism ensures that the colonized mimic Western white ideals. Fanon (1967) also speaks about mimic men in his incisive account of French A ntillean colonial subjectivities. T his mimic though fails because it continually produces its difference which is almost the same but emphatically not white. We could also say, of course, that what is being aimed for is not whiteness but a Black ideal because as Pinho (2006) and H unter (2005) among others remind us, light(er) skin is still prized also in the Black A tlantic diaspora. T his is also taken up by Beulah, a 40year-old Black British administrator, when she says I didn’t have it so bad growing up in my family here in the ’60s because I was light skinned. S o everyone thought I was pretty, clever and the best of everything. My cousin, C levia, did really meet it though because she was dark with tough  T o ‘meet it’ in Jamaican is to have bad experiences.

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Black Beauty: Aesthetics, Stylization, Politics head. N o-one thought that she would amount to anything but now look at her she is a very successful teacher.

T here is a link between colour, hair texture and success that is carried over from slavery and colonialism to 1960s Black British communities which was further reinforced through this society’s ‘racial’ hierarchies. We could also hear stories like this in the U nited S tates as H unter’s (2005) work has shown. I am making these points here because I want it to be clear that whiteness is not the necessary model. We have our own ideals within Black community that carry their own histories and particular consequences for our psyches. S hade goes from culture into the psyche and back again in practices on the skin in Sienna’s view. How does this traffic in thinking and acting shade because of the workings of the skin ego relate to Black beauty melancholia? In what follows I want to suggest that as the ego projects skin and skin projects ego so it is with melancholia, which as affect, comes from outside in and is then projected back out on to the skin itself. What is then set up is somewhat similar to a reflexive feedback loop of appraisal, practice and introspection. Just what though is the melancholia that I am speaking about? Getting to grips with melancholia T rying to draw together the threads of what I call Black beauty melancholia led me to the work of K hanna, C heng and Butler. Drawing on Freud, R anjana K hanna (2003, 16) sees melancholia as ‘an affective state caused by the inability to assimilate a loss, and the consequent nagging return of the thing lost into psychic life’. A s assimilation of a loss is not possible through mourning the lost object is swallowed whole (K hanna 2003). T hus ‘Freudian melancholia designates a chain of loss, denial and incorporation through which the ego is born’ (C heng 2001, 8). T he subject continually generates a profound ambivalence around the object that has been swallowed whole as the relationship to the object shifts from love to nostalgia to resentment. T he melancholic is stuck almost choking on the hateful and loved thing that she has devoured. S he then begins to criticize it so that an inassimilable loss is shown through a language of complaint. Freud notes that melancholic complaints are really ‘plaint’ (C heng 2001). T his means that the subject criticizes herself for attributes one would associate with the lost object. Melancholics therefore are not ashamed and do not hide themselves because everything derogatory that they say about themselves is about someone else (C heng 2001). A nne A nlin C heng (2001) makes a useful distinction for us in trying to get to grips with melancholia when she speaks about going from a subject of grief to the agency of being a subject of grievance. In doing this she makes it obvious that there will always be ‘psychical complications for people living within a ruling  In Jamaican ‘tough head’ is kinky, hard to comb hair.

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episteme that privileges that which they can never be’ (C heng 2001, 7). S o even ‘while melancholia is paralyzing ... the inassimilable paradoxically becomes the site of what Freud calls a critical agency’ (K hanna 2003, 22). S uch a critical agency operates through ‘the plaint or a kind of lament [in which] the complaints are directed toward the object that has been incorporated’ (K hanna 2003, 65). C ritical agency is also the basis of C heng’s (2001) formulation of the subject of grievance as political change agent. Whilst the women spoken about by S ienna can and do develop relations to the norm’s injunction ‘to be lighter is to be prettier’ which are self-affirming, there is always a painful negotiation involved. T herefore, individuals are always in a continuing process of grief/grievance. T his process arises for Black women because they have to negotiate beauty exclusions which result from the racialization of beauty. Dominant Black and white beauty discourses operate melancholically as identificatory systems based on individual and communal psychic swallowing whole, exclusion and denial. What does this exclusion and denial mean for grief and grievance in terms of beauty? Judith Butler (1997) in The Psychic Life of Power revised her earlier conception of gender performativity. S he used melancholia to argue that gender identity in heteronormative societies is produced through a prohibition on homosexual love. Gender itself becomes an acting out of unavowed and unresolved grief. A masculine gender is formed from the refusal to grieve the masculine as a possibility of love. T he straight man becomes the man he ‘never’ loved and ‘never’ grieved. If we re-read this for the issues we are looking at we can say that Black beauty in racialized societies is produced through a prohibition on loving oneself as one is. Black beauty in all its shades and hair textures becomes the acting out of an unavowed and unresolved grief. A Black beauty is formed from the refusal to grieve Black beauty as a possibility of love. T he Black woman becomes the beauty she ‘never’ loved and ‘never’ grieved. Melancholia is never a clear rejection of the other as Black beauty melancholia is imbricated by the desired relationship between Black, ‘mixed race’ and white beauty ideals. I therefore define Black beauty melancholia as the grieving for the loss of the right to be a Black beauty, irrespective of embodiment, irrespective of skin. T his grief arises out of an attempt to come to terms with being represented as the other of racialized and ‘racializing’ beauty. L et’s look at L ola’s talk for an example of what I am trying to get at here: But I never saw anything beautiful about myself. N o never. N ever, never saw anything beautiful about myself. I hated my hair. I always said my mum couldn’t do it properly. Because my hair is a lot finer now it used to be a lot thicker when I was younger and more bushy and thicker and I hated it. I hated everything about myself. E verything. I was really on a self-hate journey. I hated everything about myself. I think I have got lighter as well. I always remembered myself as darker. I feel that I am lighter than I used to be and so I never saw no beauty in myself or anything like that. Y ou know you can pretend that that’s not how you used to feel you know because I’m so Black conscious and stuff now. It could be quite

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Black Beauty: Aesthetics, Stylization, Politics easy to deny your past and say no I’ve never wished I was white. But you are lying to yourself you know. I have to be honest and say that I did used to wish that I was white when I was young because I always saw white girls as beautiful and I never saw anything beautiful about myself.

L ola’s story shows us melancholia through the words ‘I never saw anything beautiful about myself’, ‘I hated everything about myself’, ‘you can pretend that that’s not how you used to feel you know because I am so Black conscious and stuff now’ and her description of being on ‘a self-hate journey’. By melancholia here I mean that there is inscribed in Black shades almost a necessity for hate and revulsion within racialized societies which for L ola as a Black ‘mixed race’ British girl, was translated into her wishing to be white and only seeing white girls as beautiful (see also C arroll 2000; H obson 2005; H unter 2005). T his means that we of necessity ‘may need to consider our own early 21st century attitudes toward black female bodies – their shapes, their sizes, their skin tones – and their potential as beauty subjects’ (H obson 2005, 2). L ola’s story is not unusual and is replayed again and again throughout the data as it is in Black women’s everyday lives. T his removes Black beauty melancholia from just the level of an individual’s psyche to that of culture. What I want to talk about is at base a ‘culturally instituted melancholia because what that would mean is that there is a class of persons … [who] are constituted essentially as the unthinkable, the unloveable, the ungrievable, and that then institutes a form of melancholia which is culturally pervasive, a strange ungrievability’ (Bell 1999, 170). T his strange ungrievability did just not appear out of nowhere. T he culturally instituted melancholia of Black beauty has a history which I will now move to briefly periodize within the UK, the US, the Caribbean, Brazil and Mexico. Periodizing Black beauty as culturally instituted melancholia What do we mean when we talk about Black beauty as culturally instituted melancholia? What is the connection between beauty and Black women’s bodies? H ow have anti-racist discourses produced different beauty paradigms? H ow does Black beauty reflect racialized hierarchies of Blackness? These questions lead us to the point of view that discussions of beauty have to be aware that formations of melancholia are not just in the psyche. We have to take account of the remains of colonial domination which still continue to haunt Black beauty’s desires and practices. We also have to be aware of the impact of Black politics and A fro-centric/ Black N ationalist philosophies/movements in the E nglish speaking C aribbean, T he US and UK , Negrismo the Black aesthetic and cultural movement in the S panish speaking C aribbean (A rrizón 2006), Négritude in the French speaking C aribbean (C esaire 2000) and Brazilian A fro-aesthetics (Pinho 2006; C aldwell 2007), which have impacted on Black beauty in our transatlantic world. What is important to note here in terms of Black politics and A fro-centrism is that Black beauty cannot

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be assimilated into white beauty and vice versa at the level of politics. H owever, in everyday life either side of the ‘racial’ divide uneasy beauty assimilations exist alongside the ‘acting otherwise’ of A fro-centrism. Whether Black or white, iconic beauty is always melancholic because its exclusions are never forgotten. T o understand Black beauty and to see how the psyche is linked to the social we have to engage in constructing a genealogy extending from slavery which shows a periodization of its contradictions and complexities within the operation of the micro and macro levels of ‘racial’ ideology. Many Black feminist writers (for example, C ollins 1990; hooks 1992, 1993; H unter 2005; Mama 1995; Pinho 2006; Weekes 1997) assert that importance is placed on having ‘good hair’, ‘a good nose’ and ‘a good complexion’ in Brazil, the Caribbean, Britain and the United States. This is a reflection of the dominant beauty paradigm where white/light skin, straight hair and what are seen to be E uropean facial features are privileged (H obson 2005; H unter 2005; R ussell et al. 1992). O ne facet of the culturally instituted melancholia of Black beauty is the influence of whiteness as a yardstick for beauty that has a history which extends back to slavery. For Barbara Bush (1990) during slavery in the C aribbean, E uropean concepts of beauty were based on notions of purity, delicacy, modesty, asexuality and physical frailty. T his was also the case in the U nited S tates (R ussell et al. 1992). Whiteness was about the embodiment of beauty while Black women were viewed as physically strong, immodest and as exuding an animal sensuality which latter coalesced into the figure of the Black Venus (Hobson 2005; Gilman 1985). We can see this continuing fascination from then onwards with the supposed animal sexuality of Black women in the exhibition of S arah Baartman (the socalled ‘H ottentot Venus’), Josephine Baker’s banana tutu, the photograph of Grace Jones in a cage (H obson 2005) and the supermodel N aomi C ampbell’s appellation, ‘Black Panther’. Within the pigmentocracy of C aribbean slave societies and those of the U nited S tates, miscegenation produced another beauty aesthetic ‘in that the mixed or mulatto woman disrupted the notions of a Victorian purity of the white woman, and the idea of the “hot constitution’d black female sexuality”’ (Jan Mohammed 2000, 24). Whether in the E nglish or S panish speaking C aribbean ‘mulatto’ women whether slave or free, were generally viewed by contemporary observers as being more sexually desirable because of the value placed on approximation to ‘E uropean’ facial features, hair texture and lightness of skin colour (Bush 1990; A rrizón 2006; C andelario 2007). L ight skinned women aimed to continue to ‘lighten’ their own children by having relationships with white men so as to increase their status and gain the possibility of freedom for themselves and their children. A ccording to

  By pigmentocracy I mean to say that status, life chances and very often freedom were based on skin colour and that skin colour itself was also a matter of official record and surveillance within a caste system based on colour.

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Fanon (1967) the desire for lighter skin also continued into the colonial period and this is also referred to in much contemporary work (Jan Mohammed 2000; C andelario 2007). ‘Mixed race’ women were very differently located in slavery’s hierarchy of feminine and ‘raced’ beauty aesthetics in a context in which white women were the body politic, Black women were the womb of slavery and ‘mixed race’ women were placed as the sexually desired (Jan Mohammed 2000). In colonial C uba the mulata was seen as being inferior to the mestiza because of her legal status as a slave woman (Arrizón 2006). Cuba’s social stratification was based on caste relations in which white men’s preference was for ‘Indian’ women over Black and for mestizas over mulatas. S o while white men used the mulata body sexually she was socially ostracized by many. Further, ‘the racialized dimensions of the mulata’s sexuality under slavery made her a symbol of prostitution’ (A rrizón 2006, 105). A s such she alone was responsible for the sexual exploitation which she endured whether as property or free. While being the object of desire the mulata also represented the threat posed to whiteness by ‘racial impurity’. T he mulata became ‘a “docile body” manipulated and shaped by the social order of slavery’ (A rrizón 2006, 106). T oday the mulata body continues to be sexualized in the form of the mulata-cabareteras (night club dancers) who perform at the T ropicana nightclub for tourists (A rrizón 2006). Mexico’s Black population arose from the same imperialist profit making impetus that drove slavery from the 16th century. In 18th century Mexico, then the Spanish colony of Nueva España, there were about 150,000 Africans (Robinson and C abral 2003). By 1810 there were 635,461 people of A frican descent. Indeed, three of the most prominent leaders of the first Mexican revolution were ‘mixed race’ – Miguel H ildago y C ostilla, José Maria Morelos y Pavón and Vicente Guerrero. T here are still substantial A fro-Mexican populations along the C aribbean coast of Vera Cruz and the Pacific coastal states of Guerrero, Michoacan, Colima, Jalisco, N ayarít and S inaloa (R obinson and C abral 2003). T oday Mexico sees itself as mestizo with no ‘races’ as such but there still remains intact a colour caste system left over from colonial times (H unter 2005). Mestizo emphasizes Indio and E uropean descent so mulatez as the marker of the Black ‘hybrid’ body has been successfully obliterated as has the presence of A frican Mexicans both past and present (R obinson and C abral 2003). T he mulata did not disappear from society or from representation as films from the 1940s to the 1950s – La Negra Angustias, La Mulata de Córdoba, Los Angelitos Negros and Negro Es Mi Color – show. H owever, her presence has been the subject of national amnesia because it Blackens and A fricanizes the borders of mestizaje. In her study of Mexican A mericans, H unter (2005) found that dark skinned Mexican A merican women tried to avoid being seen as la india/la prieta/la negrita/la morena and that la güera (fair or light) continued to be first in the ‘beauty queue’. The overall impact of  H is view is that the women he met in France and the A ntilles were obsessed with becoming white or with at least having white partners so that they would have children lighter than themselves.

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having only the light skinned as beautiful is that darker skin is constructed in Mexican A merican communities as undesirable and Blackness is to be avoided at all costs (H unter 2005). A s mentioned in C hapter 2, in 1930s Jamaica a counter discourse on aesthetics emerged from the R astafarian Movement. L ike those other A fro-centric anticolonial and anti-racist movements in the US , UK and Brazil which followed, it pointed to the culturally instituted melancholia of Black beauty in terms of the object of its critique and that which it valorized. T his anti-racist/anti-colonial/ religious/A frican-centred movement drew its inspiration from the writings of the Jamaican Marcus Garvey. Wearing dreadlocks as Black hair in its most natural state and praising dark skin and ‘natural beauty’, that is one untouched by artifice of any kind, were for Rastas powerful symbols of freedom, defiance and being outside of a white oriented aesthetics (Barrett 1977). N otwithstanding this counter discourse on aesthetics, throughout C aribbean history skin colour, facial features and hair texture have had the power to shape the quality of Black women lives. T he interaction of the counter-discourse and that of the hegemonic discourse of lightness/whiteness underlies the culturally instituted melancholia of Black beauty. T his means that the ‘norm’ and its ‘other’ coexist agonistically in struggles over ‘the Black beautiful’. It is no surprise that they continue to impact on judgments of beauty, femininity and desirability into the 21st century. Indeed, whilst in the E nglish speaking C aribbean it is no longer simple to ascertain class and status by skin colour alone, the legacies of the colonial past mean that light(er) skinned and straight(er) haired women are still desirable in mainstream society (Jan Mohammed 2000). Ginetta C andelario (2007) looks at identity formation in the Dominican R epublic and amongst Dominicans in the U nited S tates. S he shows that for much of the Dominican Republic’s history the national body has been defined as ‘not Black’ even though Black ancestry is recognized as a part of the national soma. ‘N ormative white H ispanic looks, therefore, are those that show some mixture of E uropean, indigenous, or A frican ancestors but are somatically distant from the indigenous or A frican somatic norms’ (C andelario 2007, 225). S he shows how this works in ‘hair race-ing’ in beauty salons in N ew Y ork C ity as Dominicans continue to prefer a whiteness that indicates mixture. Dominicans deploy ‘H ispanic’ as a marker of linguistic, somatic and cultural difference from A nglo whiteness and A frican A merican Blackness (C andelario 2000, 130). T hey do not use the language of negrismo – negra, mulata – as descriptions of themselves but use language which limits their ‘racial’ heritage to E uropeans and the long since exterminated indigenous T aino population – indio, indio oscuro, indio claro, trigueño, morena. T his language results in an Indio-H ispanic identity which erases Blackness and shows at the same time that whiteness is achieved (C andelario 2000). The role of hair as racial signifier was begun in at least the late 18th century  T his refers to people from the Dominican R epublic rather than people from Dominica.

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and for Dominicans hair still continues to be the main signifier of ‘race’ followed by facial features, skin colour and ancestry (C andelario 2000). While lighter skin was generally valorized in N ew Y ork this did not by itself signify beauty as skin that is too white is seen as unsightly (C andelario 2000, 2007). Dominicans in N ew Y ork saw as beautiful someone of colour but not black. T he aesthetic model is the body that is a ‘middle term’ … neither too white nor too black. In other words, the mestiza/mulatta, the embodiment of the T aino/a icon displayed at the Dominican museum, in the Dominican beauty pageant, in the Dominican media, and in Dominican history books (C andelario 2000, 149).

A s C andelario’s work shows light skinned aesthetics travels within diasporas. N o doubt this point of view was transported to Britain and the U nited S tates in the C aribbean diaspora in the 1950s and 1960s and added to the existing stock of ideas on racialized beauty aesthetics. What was also transported was R astafarianism’s and Black Americans’ ideas of natural Black beauty unchanged by artifice and in praise of more A frican features. T hese, of course, were sidelined by many because they were not part of mainstream racialized beauty aesthetics. For example, during the 1970s, Black girls growing up in Britain were influenced by dominant notions of female beauty which became apparent in their desire for ‘long flowing hair, lighter skin and aquiline features’ (Mama 1995, 149). The embodied signifiers of ‘race’, hair texture, skin shade and shape of lips and noses ensure the continuation into the present of racialized criteria of attractiveness. T hese racialized criteria are linked to a E uropean standard and a continuation of ‘shade prejudice’ (Weekes 1997). A s L ola, a 38-year-old social worker, shows us for a Black ‘mixed race’ girl child these racialized criteria of beauty can be very effective in shaping a wish to be white especially for her as someone who grew up in 1970s Britain when there were no Black beauty role models. I’m not confused you know. I have never had a problem with my identity. I have always known I was Black. But it didn’t stop me wishing I was white when I was younger because I saw no positive Black role models. I never saw beauty in Blackness do you know what I mean? But that doesn’t mean to say I was never confused. I was. I wondered if I was white. O r what I was. I always knew I was Black but it didn’t stop me wishing I was other than that when I was younger.

T he question of skin shade also articulates with that of hair texture in judgements of beauty in the Black A tlantic diaspora. S o, as stated in C hapter 2, as Black women we grow up surrounded by comments such as, ‘she is dark but she has good/long/loose curls/Indian hair’ and, as this is the case, her hair saves her from the ‘ugliness’ of  H unter (2005) also speaks about this in the context of the U nited S tates as ‘colorism’.

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dark skin. We can also hear ‘she is light-skinned but her hair is tough/afro/natty/ kinky/peppercorn’, so her skin saves her from the ugliness of non-straight(er) hair. S uch a racialized hierarchy of skin and hair has continuity from slavery and colonialism and forms the basis of the culturally instituted melancholia of Black beauty. For R ussell et al (1992) speaking from the U nited S tates it is not surprising that a heightened sensitivity has developed around issues of appearance for Black women. Further, whilst whites and Blacks might seem to imitate each others’ looks, the political dimensions of these actions are very different because of the power differential between Black and white women (R ussell et al 1992). S o whites can dabble in race-ing stylization practices which make them look ‘more Black’ and this is made invisible but for many A frican A mericans embracing whiteness is a matter of economic, social or political survival (R ussell et al. 1992; H unter 2005). T he C ivil R ights Movement took a path from the integrated ‘Black-and-whiteunite-and-fight’ desegregation struggles of the mid-1960s to the Black Power, Black consciousness, ‘Black is beautiful’ era with its greater emphasis on ‘race’ as a positive and exclusive identity category alongside an A fro-centric, essentialist emphasis (H all 2006). T he question of Black identity in the 1970s was integral to the Black anti-racist politics of resistance on all sides of the Black A tlantic diaspora. It emerged as a restoration of the A frican connection which began to be spoken by young Black British people, through for example, the language and iconography of R astafarianism and dreadlocks, A frican robes, in music and Black popular culture (H all 2006). A s another part of the Black anti-racist tradition, the Black Power Movement brought a redefinition of Blackness in the America of the 1960s and 1970s. A fro hairstyles (‘the natural’) became associated with political change and Black self love/knowledge (Weekes 1997; Banks 2000) and this was transferred to the C aribbean, the UK and L atin A merica. H ere the beauty that was valorized and recognized was that of ‘dark skin’ and ‘natural afro-hair’ as for R astafarianism. In Brazil these changes began to be felt in the 1970s with the formation of Ilê A iyê (Pinho 2006; C aldwell 2007) as discussed in C hapter 2. What accounts for this A fro-centric focus, according to Paul C . T aylor (2000) is the development of Black anti-racist aesthetics within Black political liberation movements. In this now Black anti-racist aesthetics tradition it is clear that beauty is not neutral it is always racialized. Beauty as such can therefore only be defined in relation to the norm of the features that we consider people we see as white are more likely to have. T his means that racism works by encouraging Black people to only ever be able to see ugliness when they look into a mirror or another’s face as L ola shows us. T here is a quick move here in Black anti-racist aesthetics from the psychic injury of racialized ugliness to the inherent disability of having no agency or to assuming that having strong self esteem protects one from psychic harm (C heng 2001). H owever, as L ola shows us these are also things of youth and uncertainty which we can also grow away from as we develop politically. T hat political development is based on Black Atlantic diasporic definitions of what is recognized as Black beauty. It is clear that in Black anti-racist aesthetics the only authentic and

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beautiful Blackness would be a dark-skinned one. This is the valorized signifier of the ideal of ‘natural Black beauty’ in R astafarianism, Black Power and Brazilian A fro-aesthetics. T o make a diversion to hairstyles though, a cursory look around any neighbourhood would make clear that ‘Black hairstyles’ have now gone into the mainstream. Didn’t we all see S amantha with an afro wig and a mini afro pick in Sex and the City, for example? A s straightened hair is just another in a series of possibilities (Mercer 1994a; Banks 2000; C raig 2002) why can’t this extend to shade? Questions of shade must therefore go beyond this Black anti-racist aesthetics to actually interrogate the making of Black skin. T o paraphrase S tuart H all (1996b), we should ask ‘what is this “Black” in “Black beauty”’? Going beyond a Black anti-racist aesthetics without leaving its politics behind reminds us that shade too is invested with symbolic meaning and significance. This means that all Black skin shades are political in that throughout the history of the Black A tlantic diaspora this aspect of ‘race’ has been invested with symbolic meaning and significance. Nowhere is this clearer than in the designations ascribed to people on the basis of lightness of skin and ancestry which emerged in slave societies. N ames such as mulatto, quadroon and octoroon are part of our collective C aribbean, US and UK historical memory, while mulata/o still lives on in present day C uba and Brazil as a seemingly unproblematic appellation for those with light(er) skin and we still hear ‘half caste’ on Britain’s streets. T his puts the ‘Black’ in Black beauty into question and engenders a proliferation of meanings which throws light on the connections between racialized, gendered and sexualized bodies that for so long had been hidden by racial discourse (H all 2006). S uch racial discourse could not be unraveled through the positive affirmation of ‘Black is beautiful’ because reversal leaves it intact. ‘Indeed, as we know nothing can protect the black body – a signifier caught in the endless play of power – against reappropriation. Witness the way it has transmogrified, apparently seamlessly, from a reduced, abject stereotype into the well honed, ‘designer’ bodies found everywhere in the contemporary iconographies of sport, fashion, the music business, street ‘chic’ and advertising (H all 2006, 20). We are in a post-Black is beautiful discursive space where ‘post’ points to the waning of old paradigms without their supercession by anything new. A s we are still living and developing this space we cannot say what its outcome will be. What we can say though is that the ‘Black’ in Black beauty has become part of the axes of difference which provide overlapping lines of identification, exclusion and contestation over beauty paradigms. What we have in terms of Black beauty is a paradox within which we have the coexistence of the imperative to valorize and perform a static ‘natural’ Black body beautiful, the naturalization and normalization of the ‘unnatural’ onto the surface of the Black body through stylization’s race-ing technologies and practices, the rise of Black and R asta ‘chic’ and the global multicultural beauty, alongside the continuing iconicity of white beauty within the everyday. T his agonistic  T his is, of course, not new as there was a mainstreaming of the afro in the 1970s.

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co-existence and the continuing necessity for performing the beautiful Black body in all its multiplicity in ways that are still recognized as Black are what constitute the culturally instituted melancholia of Black beauty. In saying this, what I am doing is making Black beauty melancholia a part of our collective cultural life. I now want to turn to look at how to further depathologize Black beauty melancholia through thinking about agency. Depathologizing Black beauty melancholia I want to continue to depathologize melancholia by drawing first on David Eng and S hinhee H an’s (2003) thoughts on the issue of depathologization. E arlier I spoke about the Black beauty paradox as being an agonistic coexistence of Black and white beauty iconicity along with the necessity to constantly perform Blackness through stylization. T his means that my focus in common with David E ng and Shinhee Han (2003) is on the negotiation of Black beauty melancholia as conflict. I do not at all think about damaged psyches which have been irreparably damaged by racism’s ideas of Black ugliness or Black anti-racist aesthetics’ valorization of dark skin. I do not see Black women whatever their shade as ‘victims’. T hey are agents and exist within contexts of intersubjective, intergenerational and transnational conflict which have been shared within communities in the long history of the Black A tlantic diaspora. T hinking in these terms is necessary because ‘social relations live at the heart of psychical dynamics and the complexity of those dynamics bespeaks a wide range of complicated, conflictual, interlocking emotions: desire and doubt, affirmation and rejection, projection and identification, management and dysfunction’ (Cheng 2001, 17). Beauty melancholia for the raced and racializing subject is at once ‘the internalization of discipline and rejection and the installation of a scripted context of perception’ (C heng 2001, 17) as an everyday experience. A t the level of the everyday there is always a negotiation of identity as agency and abjection which is about grievance and grief because the internalization of dominant oppression may not signal pure conformity or defeat but rather point to new ways of thinking agency for those who would be made to feel as though they were stripped of it (C heng 2001). Black beauty melancholia is neither pathological nor permanent. R ather, it is a structure of feeling, a structure of everyday life (E ng and H an 2003) within which we live out our daily lives and (re)construct our identities (Muñoz 2006). U nderstanding Black beauty melancholia is about looking at how this constitutes women’s identities, shapes their subjectivities and impacts on communal politics. Bev, a forty year old administrator and mother, next contextualizes some of the structure of feeling of Black beauty melancholia as she talks about the struggle for Black beauty that she has engaged in and that she is still engaged in with her daughter within the racialized society of 1990s UK where ‘the quite rightness’ of dark(er) as opposed to light(er) shade has to be fought for. In her youth Bev had to keep the secret of her wishing to be white from her parents whereas now that

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she is older and knows ‘where she’s at’ politically she can provide the support for her daughter who wants to be ‘not even so much white’ but only light like her. H er daughter seems to her to have the same uncertainties about shade that Bev had as a child but the ‘not even so much white’ removes whiteness as iconic within one generation. S upport for her daughter is in the form of the tried and tested phrase of Black anti-racist aesthetics ‘you should be proud of the colour of your skin you are beautiful as you are’. Y es in terms of knowing your identity and feeling that you are beautiful. Y ou know and nipping them in the bud especially if you are aware of certain things from wanting to be white. Y ou know from an early age which I am sure a lot of Black people have gone through like of my age. E very Black person goes through that in this country and another thing as well is having this little secret and not telling mummy and daddy about it but wishing deep down inside. But I think it’s important that when you realize certain things when you get older and you sort of know where you are at. For me having my daughter is like having me all over again. Y es it’s like having a little me speaking out and knowing that I can you know sit down and say to her well why do you want to be light? N ot even so much white. S he says mummy I want to be light like you and I say baby you should be proud of the colour of your skin you are beautiful as you are.

T he preceding discussion and Bev’s talk has constructed an outline of distinct moments in the emergence of Black beauty discourses – the wanting to be white, becoming Black and negotiating shade. In highlighting this I am being attentive to culture as ‘a description of a particular way of life which expresses certain meanings and values, not only in art and learning, but in institutions and behaviour’ (H all 1993, 351). T here are structures of feeling of a period which entail the giving and taking of meanings within lived relations (H all 1993). In noting convergences, breaks and ruptures in its genealogy we can see that Black beauty has emerged in multiple directions, through different structures of feeling which impact on how we think and feel Black beauty’s presence only as an absence, a lack that resists any definitive formulation. The ‘Black’ as preface ‘is used here not as the sign of an ineradicable genetic imprint but as a signifier of difference: a difference which, being historical, is therefore always changing, always located, always articulated with other signifying elements: but which, nevertheless, continues – persistently – to register its disturbing effects’ (H all 2006, 2). Black beauty discourses, knowledge, politics and race-ing stylization technologies and practices have been taken back and forth across the lines of communication of a Black A tlantic discursive space. Within the Black A tlantic diasporic space of beauty each moment in its genealogy produces change in pre-existing structures of feeling without eradicating them. T his is shown for example, in Bev’s daughter wanting to be light but not white and Dominicans’ preference for mixture but not Blackness. ‘R ace’ is still very much a part of what Judith Butler (2004a) calls a ‘legible humanity’. E ach genealogical moment poses a set of beauty questions which create possible futures and ways of

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living the present to which our practices constitute a reply. ‘When the historical conjuncture changes – as it did significantly between the 1960s and the 1980s and again, between the 1990s and the present – the […] space and thus the practices also change’ (H all 2006, 4). In looking at a depathologized structure of feeling in terms of everyday group experience we take the culturally instituted melancholia of Black beauty outside of the purely psychoanalytic. H owever, it is to the psychoanalytic that we must return again and again. What though can we make of Butler’s (1997) thoughts in The Psychic Life of Power and in the interview with Vicki Bell where ‘race’ is spoken about as a culturally instituted melancholia? Butler (2004b, 24) speaks about gender as a dispossession a ‘way of being for another or by virtue of another’. S ince Black beauty is relational one is always for others and there is never any room for love of Black beauties. Black beauty’s shades are constantly obscured so that we can be recognized as Black and beautiful. We are therefore as Black women in the position of grieving a love which never was. T o grieve a love which never was speaks a deep unease with self, a discomfort which goes from the outside to the inside. T his speaks to abjection of self as other. When one makes oneself the abject other it sets in train a process of self disgust, negation and necessity for change. T his relates to K hanna’s (2003) melancholic critical agency. Within this critical agency though there is always a pulling back to oneself as the other which occurs within the culturally instituted melancholia of the norm. L et us listen to Dana and S heila in conversation: D A nd it was like you know these cards the Black cards sometimes have a light-skin person because that’s the beautiful representation to them. S Y eah yeah. D Well he actually sent me a card like that. And when I first got the card and I looked at it, it was like this girl with long hair and brown skin with a red rose in her hair. S Mhm. D A nd I was sort of looking at it in a negative way. A nd then I rang him up and he said, “do you like it?” and I said, “oh yeah it was nice, you know”. A nd he just said I wanted to show you what you’re like. S O h nice. D Because you are really beautiful and you should accept yourself for what you are and love yourself for who you are. S Mhm mhm. D A nd don’t make any of these people make you feel bad about yourself you know because whatever anybody says you’re beautiful anyway. Whether that means that you may not be the politically correct beautifulness you’re still beautiful. T hen afterwards when I looked at the card I could see what he was trying to say because the girl in the picture did look like me.

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Black Beauty: Aesthetics, Stylization, Politics S S o he took time choosing it. D But I was so tied up in it that I didn’t even see the fact that the girl looked like me I just looked at the fact that she had light skin and long curly hair and rejected it because that was the image on it. A nd I thought is this how we get screwed up?

Judith Butler (1997) used melancholia to argue that gender identity in heteronormative societies is produced through a prohibition on homosexual love. I want to use her understandings to develop an argument in terms of Black ‘mixed race’, beauty and melancholia. T he argument goes that Black beauty identity in racialized societies and in Black anti-racist aesthetics is produced through a prohibition on love for ‘Black mixed race’ bodies. (Gender) [‘Black mixed race’] itself becomes the acting out of unavowed and unresolved grief. A (masculine gender) [Black ‘mixed race’ beauty identity] is formed from the refusal to grieve [‘Black mixed race’ beauty] (the masculine) as a possibility of love. The [Black mixed race woman] (straight man) becomes the [woman] (man) [she] (he) ‘never’ loved and ‘never’ grieved. T o go back to the example with which we started, in the course of her story about the card Dana first shows her awareness of being positioned culturally as the epitome of beauty in a society in which white beauty is iconic, because of her light skin and long curly hair when she says ‘the Black cards sometimes have a light-skin person because that’s the beautiful representation to them’. By saying ‘that’s the beautiful representation to them’ she puts herself outside of this white-centred aesthetic and politics. T hroughout her story she continues to look at this aesthetic negatively until she is allowed to do otherwise by her dark-skinned friend who bought the card to show her what she looked like and to encourage her to celebrate that beauty and not ‘make any of those people make you feel bad about yourself’. In negating a white iconicity approach to Black beauty, she shows herself through her story as a conscious Black woman, one who is not prepared to reap the benefits of her embodiment in a racialized society in which she would be privileged because of skin and hair. T he demands of Black politics, of centring oneself within Black anti-racist aesthetics have negated the possibility for the emergence of Dana’s feelings of exclusion from the boundaries of Black beauty. T hese feelings though are present throughout her story of her negation of herself. T his negation must happen if she is to successfully present within Black community and politics as a conscious Black woman. H er exclusion from the category of Black beauty though can never be grieved because of her light(er) skin and straight(er) hair and the assumed societal privileges that this brings because of the iconicity of white beauty in racialized societies. H er exclusion as a result of embodiment emerges in the words of her friend. What Dana presents us with is a story of affect. A story about how her readings of the dictates of Black anti-racist aesthetics meant that she had to reject a representation of her own beauty which in turn made her wonder if that ‘is how we get screwed up?’ S he herself never uses the word melancholia but points to the impact of the social on one’s psyche and the paradoxes that exist

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within essentialist identity politics. Being ‘screwed up’ points to the extension of the past into the present, a continuous process of the re-stimulation of past abjection which impacts on the present, a grief for the self that is never allowed to emerge which haunts us. T here is a hidden grief which is carried around daily. T his is re-stimulated in the face of different experiences, but it is always there, it never goes away. T he point is though that this does not come from Dana. Grief was always already there for her to inhabit. I say this because I am taking into account the history around the struggles for Black beauty’s recognition, amidst the continuing iconicity of white beauty, alongside a long-standing valorization of light(er) skin and straight(er) hair which comes out of the institution of slavery. T his is the inherited grief of light skinned Black women and it is one aspect of what underlies Black beauty as a culturally instituted melancholia. T he other side of this culturally instituted melancholia is that produced by discourses emanating from Black anti-racist aesthetics which valorize darker skin, ‘kinkier hair’ and ‘more A frican features’. Within Black beauty melancholia discourses on beauty ensure that beauty will be racialized and that there will be beauty and ugliness based on such racialization. Further, such discourses ensure that there will continue to be binaries – Blackwhite, really Black, Black ‘mixed race’ – and differences will struggle to be known. T wo Black beauty norms are at work here. O ne is that of Black anti-racist aesthetics. T he other is that of the beauty which needs never speak its name because of its iconicity in our society – whiteness. T hese norms are of course culturally instituted very differently from each other. T he latter is at the level of society in general. T he other occupies another structure of feeling related to Black anti-racist politics and the struggle for Black pride and liberation from racist norms. T his aesthetic is culturally instituted at the level of communal cultural practices. T he capacity of popular culture to unseat the iconic can perhaps be seen in terms of the impact of Black culture on white youth culture (Gilroy 1993; N ayak 2003). H owever white beauty’s iconicity as H unter (2005) shows means that Black aesthetics remain on the outside of the mainstream even whilst there are notable Black beauty inclusions such as A lek Wek and H alle Berry. I continue next to build a cultural approach to melancholia rather than a psychoanalytic one starting by thinking through the plaint, before then going on to look at how discomfort as expressed in talk links to the structures of feeling of the norm. T his will help us to see how norms from ‘the really Black/ Black ‘mixed race’ binary work in a complex interaction between sociality and psychodynamics because ‘intrasubjectivity exists as a form of intersubjectivity and that intersubjectivity often speaks in the voice of intrasubjectivity: a mutually supportive system’ (C heng 2001, 28). H ow does the ‘haunting negativity’ (C heng 2001, 25) of Black beauty melancholia come into view in this intrasubjectiveintersubjective system through the plaint?

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The plaint, agency and culturally instituted Black beauty melancholia A s we know, Freud’s melancholia is about loss, denial and incorporation and it is through this that the ego is born (C heng 2001). In Dana’s story we can see that her ego as someone who has Black political consciousness has been forged through the loss and denial of the difference of Black ‘mixed race’ skin and hair within Black politics, the incorporation of the negative valuation of ‘Black mixed race’ embodiment and its attendant necessity for the rejection of light skinned and curly haired beauty. T his all speaks of the impact of the social on the psyche so melancholia as affect goes from the outside in (A hmed 2004). Melancholia as affect is caused by the inability to assimilate a loss, which constantly returns in psychic life (K hanna 2003). A lthough this is usually related to individuals I also relate it to communal life as my argument is that Black beauty melancholia is a part of the psychic life of a Black A tlantic diasporic structure of feeling. Dana talks about the loss of the ‘Black mixed race’ self as beautiful both in her own words and those of her friend who she reports as saying, ‘you should accept yourself for what you are and love yourself for who you are’. H is insistence on self love and acceptance, as well as Dana’s ‘is this how we get screwed up?’, seem to point to the continuation of denial and loss, as does his statement ‘don’t make any of these people make you feel bad about yourself’. By these people he means those who feel that her beauty is not the politically correct beauty and therefore must be made invisible, must become lost, must be experienced as loss. It is a loss though which is not mourned either individually or communally so is swallowed whole. T he lost object here is Black ‘mixed racedness’ and its Black beauty differences. Dana in her story shows the continual generation of a profound ambivalence around the object that has been swallowed whole. In her story she shows a shift in her relationship to the object from rejection to resentment to grudging acceptance of similarity – ‘then afterwards when I looked at the card I could see what he was trying to say because the girl in the picture did look like me’. S he does not though embark on self-love and acceptance although encouraged to do so by her friend perhaps because she is still stuck in the location of being not the ‘politically correct beautifulness’. Dana is stuck with the feelings of exclusion and lack engendered by discourses on beauty and politics within the Black community which she recognizes have the ability to ‘screw you up’, to make you twisted, to disorientate you in terms of finding solutions that make sense when politics and embodiment cannot meet, that deny you the possibility of grief. If we go to the communal we can see the impossible life that we have in which we live between the pull of the iconicity of lightness and dark skinned Black authentic beauty, especially when these are linked to politics and identification. Black beauty melancholia is then to an extent paralyzing. H owever, what we are choking on can also become the site of Freud’s ‘critical agency’ (K hanna 2003, 22). C ritical agency you will recall operates through ‘the plaint or a kind of lament [in which] the complaints are directed toward the object that has been incorporated’

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(K hanna 2003, 65). T he complaint contained in Dana’s story is directed towards those discourses of politically correct Black beauty which would make her beauty politically incorrect and therefore of necessity, to be denied. A nne A nlin C heng (2001) uses plaint/(com)plaint to make clear for us how critical agency can arise in melancholic states. She sees (com)plaint as a moment of dis-identification as she speaks about going from a subject of grief to the agency of being a subject of grievance. In doing this she makes it obvious that there will always be ‘psychical complications for people living within a ruling episteme that privileges that which they can never be’ (C heng 2001, 7). T herefore, individuals will always be in a continuing conflictual process of grief/grievance even when we can clearly see, as in Dana’s talk above, that they have also arrived at a new moment in terms of how they view themselves. H ere Dana’s new moment is in accepting that the picture on the card did look like her, so by extension she must also be beautiful. Dana’s moment of dis-identification from the lost object of grief emerges when she says ‘But I was so tied up in it that I didn’t even see the fact that the girl looked like me I just looked at the fact that she had light skin and long curly hair and rejected it because that was the image on it. A nd I thought is this how we get screwed up?’ Her dis-identification makes us notice that when identifications are at their most insistent they are also at their most troubled as ‘our most impassioned identifications may incorporate non identity within them and [...] our most fervent disidentifications may already harbour the very identity they seek to deny’ (Fuss 1995, 10). T his is the paradox which has the potential to make us ‘screwed up’, to make us continue to live in the conflict ridden cycle of grief and grievance which C heng speaks about. Dana continues to live in a cycle of grief and grievance because she simultaneously both belongs and does not belong to the sign Black and to its attendant Black anti-racist aesthetics focused beauty model. Dana’s disidentification is both produced by and through a Blackness that underlies the political solidarity which she holds dear. Within this dis-identification we see her working with/resisting the conditions of (im)possibility for identification that dominant Black culture generates in terms of shade and hair. ‘In doing so a representational contract is broken; [Black “mixed race” beauty] come[s] into perception and the [Black] social order receives a jolt that may reverberate loudly and widely’ (Muñoz 1999, 6). However, for Muñoz (1999, 12) dis-identification does ‘not dispel those ideological contradictory elements rather, like a melancholic subject holding on to a lost object, a disidentifying subject works to hold on to this object and invests it with new life ... T o disidentify is to read oneself and one’s own life narrative in a moment, object, or subject that is not culturally coded to “connect” with the disidentifying subject’. Dana resists this cultural coding at the very outset by saying ‘the Black cards sometimes have a light skin person because that’s the beautiful representation to them’. N ote she didn’t say to her. H owever, the work that she does to invest light skin and long curly hair with new life is to say that the picture did look like her after getting the approval of her darker skinned male

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friend. In acknowledging some similarity she at the same time widens the borders of Black beauty by placing herself within its parameters. S imultaneously she also unsettles Black anti-racist aesthetics as she is a politically conscious Black woman who is embodied as the exact opposite of the acceptable, the respectable and the recognized politically correct Black beauty. Dis-identification is key in going from the incapacity of grief to the agency of grievance. A s said earlier, Dana does this in the moment when she recognized that the woman on the card looked like her and when she asks ‘is this how we get screwed up?’ T hese moments in turn severely unsettle the culturally instituted melancholia of Black ‘mixed race’ beauty. S he makes known her lost object which is the (im)possibility of being in the Black and beautiful category because of Black politics’ negation of light(er) skin and straight(er) hair. A t the same time she undermines the hold of such aesthetics on her own psyche. In this process of critical agency when grief turns to grievance through dis-identification new Black beauty ideals emerge. T he culturally instituted nature of Black beauty melancholia necessitates a capacity for reflexivity that makes us turn back and objectify ourselves producing the body as both subject and object as we move agentically between grief and grievance. T he plaint then emerges from the talk itself and within it lies the traces of the workings of the norms of Black beauty melancholia which constantly require subjectivation to them in order to become a recognizable subject. For example at the level of Black anti-racist aesthetics to bleach one’s skin is to make oneself white and this speaks to deep psychological damage. T herefore to appear Black, to be seen as Black one has to submit oneself to the discourse’s rules of naturalness. T he traces of this norm still abound in Black women’s talk. A longside this, however, there is another that struggles to be heard. Melancholia also results from bearing the mark of whiteness on one’s skin through heritage as Dana has shown us earlier and will again show us next. H ere the plaint is that of non-acceptance into Black beauty community unless one conforms with and confirms the trappings of Blackness – here it is A frican dress – if one’s skin marks you as potentially ‘otherwise’. We don’t normally get so dressed up for work but we had these C hinese dresses on and like make-up and had our hair blow dried and I did look very O riental that night and the looks we got from those people as we walked in. A nd ever since then they have done nothing but gossip about us to the white people in the office. They’re saying oh they think they can dance like Black people and all this. A nd like we were really hurt you know and my friend C aroline was really upset because these people are now trying to say we are not allowed and the fact that we had C hinese dresses on meant we thought we weren’t Black. Y ou see I mean when I go to work in the summer I wear a different African outfit every day but one night I wear a Chinese outfit and all of a sudden I think I am not Black.

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In the 21st century we now have an approach to shade which seems to speak to the faltering of Black beauty’s culturally instituted melancholia. We are in no way ‘post’ this melancholia though as it is always lurking, ready to reemerge in the face of Black beauty exclusions as for Dana and her friend C aroline. H ere we also have Black ‘mixed race’ women who speak of shade in terms of limitless Black beauty possibilities. T hese possibilities do not make one less Black but rather open up the space for difference in the term ‘Black’ itself and for hybrid incorporations in terms of dress. This refuses the simple equation between the signifier dark(er) shade, to the signified Black such that Black differs from itself as, indeed, it always has. If we think of subjectivity as a text we can think of the melancholia of racialized gender and beauty norms as always already inscribed within it. Within these norms as we know we have an absencing and a presencing or appearance and disappearance of Black women’s beauty as the ‘look-at-me-ness’ of beauty ‘produces a structural politics of the gaze: who is watching whom: who is performing for whom’ (C heng 2001, 45). T his is what forms our subjectivity in terms of beauty and is the basis of Black women’s beauty melancholia, because absence/presence produce the conditions of impossibility of each other in the same instant. T he work of melancholia in terms of Black beauty is not that which excludes its other but rather overshadows it. T his is similar to Derrida’s supplement in which according to Irene H arvey (1986, 218) ‘one aspect comes into view as the other discretely slides into the background. “T he other” in this play remains therefore essential, active, and still within the scene’ of the simultaneity of absence and presence. For Derrida the supplement adds itself to a full presence so that the presence can present itself as full presence but also becomes a substitute for a presence which was never there (H arvey 1986, 219). T he minute we speak the plaint we therefore make absent what we also want to speak about and it is this absence which must be listened to in order to find out about the culturally instituted melancholia of Black beauty, the yearning for Black sameness within embodied difference. T he internalization of hegemonic mirroring or interpellation may be inevitable – one may always have to answer the call – but a consideration of the (racialized, gendered, aged, sexualized, classed, for example) contingencies attached to the ‘answerer’ profoundly changes the question of agency or compliance. When we think of Black beauty I hope that it is a multiplicity that springs to mind. T he question of beauty is one with which Black women do battle like all women. T he battle is as much over the terms of engagement as it is about aesthetics and where our preferences/practices place us in terms of identity and political allegiance. Beauty and specifically Black beauty is not as straightforward as one might have thought. H ow do we come to the point of being able to authoritatively pronounce this as Black beauty and that as not? H ow have discourses on beauty played a role in the making of Black beauty melancholia and its ‘governable subjects’ (R ose 1999)? What regimes of the self organized around identity, autonomy and stylization do such discourses set in train? T hese questions make us relate the cultural institution of Black beauty melancholia to government. In N ikolas R ose’s (1999, 6) terms government

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‘depends upon the production, circulation, organization and authorization of truths that incarnate what is to be governed, which make it thinkable, calculable, practicable’. If though the concept ‘beauty’ as such excludes ‘Black’ (C arroll 2000) what position does this place Black women in? T hey become the unloveable and the un-grievable whose only recourse to claiming beauty is through their narrativization as beauty survivors. T ypically this takes the form of the plaint of non-beauty, followed by a recuperation of the self as beautiful or not being to blame for failed beauty. Within this narrativization of the self we see self-inspection, self-monitoring, confession and evaluation of ourselves according to the criteria of others. T his is how we can begin to understand the culturally instituted melancholia of Black beauty in the words of women. Women struggle with a long history of Black ugliness which comes to ‘govern the soul’ (R ose 1999, 11) as the government of the soul depends upon our recognition of ourselves as ideally and potentially certain sorts of person, the unease generated by a normative judgement of what we are and could become, and the incitement offered to overcome this discrepancy by following the advice of experts in the management of the self (R ose 1999, 11).

Black beauty does not pre-exist its social recognition. It is a multiple and shifting ensemble of the norms according to which it is judged, the self-surveillance within it, and the language by which it is accounted for in thought and talk. Black beauty is not ‘free-floating’, ‘out there’, ‘in culture’ but is embedded in institutional and race-ing stylization’s technology and practices through which the beautiful is made known, made visible, judged and valued. T hese practices have attendant techniques of the self – reflection, examination, beauty management – for the deciphering of beauty and the transformation of oneself as object that ensues from readings of the body for beauty. A s Black women enter into beauty stylizations they denaturalize and alienate them in their very performance of beauty. T he ideology of aesthetics and its mediation of ‘race’ and gender falter as pleasure emerges from beauty’s alienation. T he assumption of beauty must always state one’s remoteness from the Black/white norm of beauty as beauty continuously incites the negotiation of the gap between the ideal and the self in its demand for approximation. What the plaint shows is that women position themselves both as the beauty that is seen and the beauty that sees. Women renounce and disrupt the meaning of the abjection of non-idealized beauty (the cause of their grief) within culturally instituted melancholia. T his agency though is not that of ‘you can be whatever you want to be’. R ather, it is breaking through that norm which is only heard as pathology. It is breaking through a beauty melancholia within which Black women both have to incorporate and inscribe an impossible ideal and a demeaned self in/on/to their psyches and their bodies. It is at the crossroads of the social and the psychic that Black women’s bodies acquire their most prominent outlines and need their greatest justification through the assumption of a range of identifications

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– dominant and otherwise – within an obsession with the ‘perfection’ of the norm and acute awareness of any deviation from that norm. T he point perhaps is not to become the ideal at all but being able to act in order to become comparable to the norm in one’s very difference. Conclusion T hinking about Black beauty melancholia makes us note that dominant norms by which we are hailed as subjects are not just those of whiteness, dominant Blackness is also at work here as well. Further, thinking melancholically helps us to destabilize the simplistic division between agency/powerlessness and to look with new eyes at the internalization of pathology argument of Black anti-racist aesthetics. T o see the culturally instituted melancholia of Black beauty as grief and grievance at once makes us recognize the role that grief plays in subjectivities and how grievance can enable agency and a politics of Black beauty. What the history of Black beauty shows is that the relation to the complex terrain of beauty norms is one of bricolage, translation and hybridization. It also shows that there are beauty habituses at play which have emerged and spread within collectives so that they have come to be related to some social groups and not others. Further, looking at Black beauty melancholia also makes it plain that all beauty is melancholic as approximation to the norm can be only that, an approximation. I have been at pains to stress throughout that Black beauty melancholia is not pathological but is the basis for both individual and communal change and politics. Drawing again from David E ng and S hinhee H an (2003) we can say that there is a refusal on the part of women in the Black A tlantic diaspora to let go of their otherness. T o either become the same Black or mimic white women. Difference is clung to even if this means living in a melancholic state. R efusing to let go constitutes Black beauty melancholia’s potential for politics when grief turns to grievance (C heng, 2001). Black beauty melancholia’s past, present and future is not one of pathology and paralysis but of survival, mobility and a full communal life. T he next chapter continues to look at affect and agency as it turns to the question of Black beauty shame.

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C hapter 4

T he S hame of Beauty is its T ransformative Potential Introduction Why choose to talk about shame in a book about Black beauty? A m I not just simply once again repeating the old idea of Black women’s pathology? T hese are important questions and ones whose implicit critique I hope will be put to rest by the end of the chapter. What I want for everyone to draw from reading this chapter is that beauty shame is always already there for us all to be affected by but that we in turn can affect it by turning off its power to wound. In our everyday lives we can do this at an individual level by uncovering the structures of feeling through which shame continues to haunt us. Within the academy we should produce bodies of work which show that Black beauty shame is being continuously resisted and refused in ways that transform Black beauty itself. Black beauty shame is seen here as performative and it is this which leads to its transformative potentiality. T he history of slavery, colonialism and Black liberation struggles with their attendant aesthetics often lay within the workings of Black beauty shame as I have argued they do for melancholia. T hese ideas have been circulating within the Black A tlantic diaspora for centuries, gaining intensity with each repetition, with each individual and communal feeling of shame. S hame has become embodied to such an extent that the Black body, its very skin, hair and shape, now speaks ‘body shame’ (Gilbert and Miles 2002). T his body shame is the result of the sedimentation of un-beauty on the surface of the Black body because of the culturally instituted melancholia of Black beauty. T herein lay Black beauty ‘shame scripts’ (Munt 2007) which are shared within the Black A tlantic diaspora and understood by all of us in the moment they are felt or communicated. T o be clear, this is not about feelings of guilt because we have not committed any wrongs which make us feel shame. H owever, Black beauty shame is always already there and capable of flooding us with feelings of disgrace at every turn. S hame, as we know from the history of liberation struggles like R astafarianism, Black Power and A fro-aesthetics also has positive effects. It has the power to transform politics, to generate pride and build communities transnationally. Its  S ally Munt (2007, 3) says ‘T here are a variety of opinions on the distinction between guilt and shame, and often the two are confused. In its simplest form the distinction is an epistemological/ontological one, that in the former one knows one has committed a wrong (guilt) and, because of it, one has entered a state of disgrace (shame)’.

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power comes from the fact that it can ‘provoke a separation between the social convention demarcated within hegemonic ideals, enabling a re-inscription of social intelligibility’ (Munt 2007, 14). Black beauty norms can be changed through the agency of those formerly (a)shamed because as we have seen in ‘Black is beautiful’ and Brazilian A fro-aesthetics, for example, transnational change in Black beauty ideas and stylization practices can be instigated through the refusal of collective Black diasporic shame. T his movement away from collective shame has meant an orientation towards a new structure of feeling in the Black A tlantic diaspora in which the words ‘Black’ and ‘beauty’ cease to be mutually exclusive and do ‘go together’. S hame can still reside even within this Black generated structure of feeling though because what are seen as the constituent elements of ‘race’ cannot be made to signify a carbon copy of the Black beauty norm. Black community generated versions of ‘race’ also have their own pitfalls (Gilroy 2000). A lthough it is not a pleasant task, Black beauty shame needs to be spoken about so as to ensure the possibility that we can continue a meaningful, collective Black politics. S peaking about beauty shame is essential in order to prevent shame’s incitement of ‘[…] a wilful disintegration of collectivity, it can cause fragmentation, splitting and, dissolution in all levels of the social body, the community and within the psyche itself. U nexamined shame can also fall like a mist, obscuring vital political connections, sourced from injury it unwittingly seeks to reproduce injury to others, as a positive energy through direct attack or a more negativising denial and obliviousness’ (Munt 2007, 26). S tories of Black beauty shame are an important resource in transforming Black beauty politics because as we make shame known it loses its power to wound and separate us from one another. Stories and Black beauty shame S hame makes us uneasy so we rarely admit to it. T he point is that positions of shame are always there for us to occupy and shame is present when we speak even when we do not use the words ‘shame’ or ‘ashamed’. L et me tell you a hair story: I sat in the sauna with T ami, a Black woman who was not a friend but a casual acquaintance I had met on other sauna visits after my gym workout. S he said that she liked my short hair and admired me for wearing it so short and natural. T his pleased me a great deal. T hen T ami said that she wished that she could just wear her hair like that without feeling self-conscious. S he had had it relaxed but had now decided to have it natural and part of that process was to cut the relaxed hair away and leave her natural hair behind. S he said that she had to get used to her short hair though and wished that she had the self confidence to stop wearing a scarf wrapped around her hair. Maybe when it was a bit longer she would feel better about it because then it would look more feminine.

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Why start with this story? I started here because I wanted to show some very important issues for this chapter. T hese are, how the story constructs the shameful subject; how the account constructs the experience of the feeling of shame; how shame can be spoken without mentioning the word shame; how it is that who we think we are is circumscribed by what we think we look like; and, how central the gaze of others is in a shaming event. T he shameful subject who feels (a)shamed is present in the words ‘feeling self conscious’, ‘self confidence’ and ‘feel better’. What we think we look like is present in ‘it would look more feminine’ which engages us in the thought that she thinks she looks like a boy. T his latter can be a failure for someone who has invested in femininity. T he gaze of others is represented by ‘feeling self conscious’ because it is only possible to feel conscious of yourself when faced by others who make you look at yourself through their critical eyes. S hame makes us think about the skin we stand in, the hair growing out of our scalp, our ease or self-consciousness with those with whom we interact. Feeling Black beauty shame is related to our experience of the self in social bonds which brings into awareness the imagery that the other rejects the self (Mokros 1995, 1095). ‘Shame brings the fear of abandonment by society […] of being left to starve outside the boundaries of human kind’ (Probyn 2005, 3). We feel shame because we are affected by what we come into contact with (A hmed 2004). ‘C oming into contact’ has both a regulatory function and the relationality of self-awareness that are aspects of ‘the phenomenological experience of shame [in which] the self is both participant and watcher in its own fantasy of shame’ (Mokros 1995, 1095). A s a participant one is affected by shame but as a watcher the impact of shame is affecting. T his affected/affecting doubleness leads to an intensification of Black beauty shame itself to the extent that ‘I feel myself to be bad, and hence to expel the badness, I have to expel myself from myself’ (A hmed 2004, 104). T hat is I have to expel the abject other from the self (K risteva 1982) in order to maintain a flawless identity, one devoid of the stigma (Goffman 1963) of Black beauty shame. T his impulse for expulsion for the sake of self preservation remains with us across our life transitions and its memory is re-stimulated by new shaming events. T hese shaming events are then spoken as (com)plaints (C heng 2001) and show Black beauty shame’s link to melancholia. T o expel myself from myself represents a process of recognition of the abject followed by its excision from the self or at least its concealment, as in T ami’s headscarf, in order to avoid Black beauty shame. The excision of the abject occurs in the moment of dis-identification. This moment occurs at the level of talk itself. It is dis-identification which enables the critical agency that is an integral part of the transformation of Black beauty. Black beauty shame ‘involves the intensification not only of the bodily surface, but also of the subject’s relation to itself, or its sense of itself as self’ (A hmed 2004, 104) and the possibility for change, all of which is revealed in talk. Talk is a significant site of doing the self in terms of beauty as

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Black Beauty: Aesthetics, Stylization, Politics If saying is a form of doing and part of what is getting done is the self, then conversation is a mode of doing something together and becoming otherwise; something will be accomplished in the course of this exchange, but no one will know what or who is being made until it is done (Butler 2004a, 173).

H ow though can beauty be a source of shame? I spoke earlier about structures of feeling and for me beauty shame is attached to the culturally instituted melancholia of ‘race’, gender and femininity that pervades society and that is transgenerational in its reach. Put simply, as Black women are made to feel ashamed they experience shame through others’ reactions to their embodied selves. S hame is therefore productive on this level. Beauty shame arises in the moment of our ‘wounding exposure to others’ (A hmed 2004, 105). T his is especially so if we are interested in them or we share an interest such as community, politics or identifications. As such, shame is not intrapsychic but a ‘bad feeling’ that attaches to what one is (S edgwick 2003). What one is makes beauty shame relevant for the surface of the skin, to beauty’s recognizability and visibility as discussed in C hapter 1. T he power of shame lies in its ability to transform or intensify the meaning of, for example, parts of the body, a prohibited identity or other people’s behaviour towards oneself (S edgwick 2003). S hame is not paralyzing. It is also a part of the process in which identity is formed and is available for the work of reframing, transfiguration and deformation (Sedgwick 2003) of Black beauty ideals. A s such beauty shame compels a re-evaluation of our selves which is self transforming. T his self transformation means that shame is a component in the dis-identification which is necessary for newness to emerge in terms of beauty stylization, recognition and politics. Performativity is at work in Black beauty shame. The chapter continues by ‘finding’ shame in talk when the word ‘shame’ is not used through looking at both paralinguistic cues and talk on (com)plaints. It then moves to looking at the recognition of Black beauty exclusions as shaming events before focussing on how it is that shame leads to disidentification and critical agency which allows new beauty recognitions and political positionings to emerge. T hroughout performativity underlies the discussion and the threads of this will be drawn together at the end of the chapter. Black beauty shame, racialization and (com)plaint-recognition As Tami’s talk shows, the work of finding shame in talk when the word shame is not used because to do so is also shaming points to the need to develop a phenomenology of beauty shame. When we read talk we are looking for cues to shame and trying to develop a vocabulary of shame. S uzanne R etzinger (1995) very usefully helps us to identify verbal and paralinguistic cues for shame in talk and this will be applied to analysing the data which focuses on the excision of  S ee A ppendix for transcription conventions.

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the abject. A s such the transcription will change in the extracts from one which is ‘plain’ to one which is more conversation analytic so that you can see the cues I used to read shame when the word ‘shame’ was not said. What I will try to make clear in stages is the general patterning of shame in the talk of (com)plaint-recognition, dis-identification and critical agency-transformation which is apparent across the data. First though, how are beauty, shame and racialization connected? A s said previously what makes beauty shame possible within the Black/white binary is the stock of beauty value which has been sedimented in our structure of feeling over centuries. T his leads to forms of measurement of worth but as the measures that are being used are racialized this means that one can never measure up. ‘N ot measuring up’ is a component of the culturally instituted melancholia of Black beauty spoken about in the previous chapter. T he culturally instituted melancholia of racist name calling and touching in one’s youth produces a bad feeling which attaches to Black skin and hair as an affect produced from proximity to whiteness. T his leads as C oral, a 38-year-old C ommunity Worker, says below to ‘a lot of Black people start[ing] to get a complex from there’, an acute shaming sensing of one’s racialized difference. C oral’s talk also shows us that shame ‘becomes felt as a matter of being – of the relation of self to itself – insofar as shame is about appearance, about how the subject appears before and to others [where the] “apartness” of the subject is intensified in the return of the gaze; apartness is felt in the moment of exposure to others, an exposure that is wounding’ (A hmed 2004, 104–105). T he wounding of apartness is felt as it organizes racialized social relations in school, represented here by the racist words ‘rubber lips’, ‘cotton wool for hair’ and touching of the hair as if ‘your hair wasn’t normal’ C Y ou know the- o- the other kids, the white kids > even tr-< treated us differently because the name calling started from there?= S

=R ight=

C = R ight? ((K iss teet)) from THAT age you know like a:hm pt > at First S chool like I can remember< being called RU BBER LI PS and (.3) S RU BBER LI PS ?= C = Y eah rubber lips ((.hhh)) they used to call us rubber lips and st- I THINK THAT ’S WHERE A LOT O F BLACK PEO PLE START GETTIN G A CO MPLE X FRO M FRO M A :H M= S

=Mhm (1.0)

C Y eah well I’ll say that’s where I- I started getting my thing from about being (1.0) called RU BBER LI PS and a:hm >kiss teet< a:hm (.) a:hm (.) a:hm (.) >cotton< and cotton wool for your hair and stuff like that (1.0)> it’s like you were DIF< and they’d say oh LET ME FEEL YOUR HAIR you know like- like your hair WASN ’T NOR MAL .

T here is a constant necessity to account for ourselves in a context in which we are seen as abnormal, in a context in which this abnormality is taken as a given,

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as natural, as just how things are (C arroll 2000; T aylor 2000). S hame here relates to what Sedgwick (2003, 116) calls a ‘precarious hyperreflexivity of the surface of the body [which] can turn one inside out or outside in’. We do say ‘sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me’. H owever, C oral’s narrative and her recognition of the impact of her experience as being where she along with a lot of other Black people got their ‘thing from about being called rubber lips and cotton wool hair and stuff like that’, make us think again about the power of words to wound and erase our individuality. It makes us think how it is that words can reduce C oral to ‘rubber lips and cotton wool hair’ through name calling and saturate her with shame to such an extent that she still feels pain in her adult life. A s shame is performative, the reality of shame is produced as an effect of its performance. T his pain she calls her ‘thing’ at once both resists naming shame as well as making it clear because of its un-nameability. E ven whilst un-named the performative power of shame lies in its ability to reduce one to a stereotype, to an object of derision and distance. Whilst being located as the stereotype though, C oral also performs a task on the other side of performativity. T hat is, she also brings into being what she names (Butler 1993), the racist white kids whose actions were normalized in the 1970s. A longside this she also unmasks the possible origin of her ‘thing’ about being called ‘racist beauty names’ as being to do with her early experiences of racism and not her own ‘hypersensitivity’. S he also places the racist actions of the white children as abnormal when she says ‘you know like your hair wasn’t normal’. What made ‘rubber lips’ and ‘cotton wool hair’ both empowering and devastatingly hurtful was that they were related to racist stereotypes which are trans-generational and transnational in their scope as they arise from the racist habitus in which we live in T he Black A tlantic. A s such racialized positions of beauty shame are always already there with the possibility for multiple shaming events as Black women carry the past, a past which they did not make, on their bodies in the present. The (1.0) pauses, micro-pauses (.) and, fillers like ‘ahm’ and the kiss teet are speech disturbances which point us to the shaming event. T hat is, her shame  I draw this from Judith Butler (2004a, 218), ‘If gender is performative, then it follows that the reality of gender is itself produced as an effect of the performance’.  K iss teet is the primarily Jamaican name for an embodied oral gesture, which is more broadly known throughout the C aribbean and A frican Diaspora as suck-teeth, and also known as hiss-teeth, chups (with many variant spellings) and related to cho, chaw, and chut. K iss T eeth is performed by an ingressive airstream captured in an air and saliva pocket created in the mouth through varying configurations of velar, dental and lip closures, and dental configurations such as pouting or protruding lips, lip slightly opened to one side, lips flat or compressed against upper teeth. Duration, pitch, continuity (steady versus staccato, for example), and intensity vary based on tongue position, lip tension, ability to hold one’s breath, and so forth. K iss T eeth has been typically understood as expressing negative affect, but can also express positive affect, and is performed to indicate moral positioning (Figueroa 2005).

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occurred in her wounding encounter with others in a context in which her body was out of place. For S edgwick (2003, 36–7), [...] shame is peculiarly contagious and peculiarly individuating. One of the strangest features of shame ... is the way bad treatment of someone else, someone else’s embarrassment, stigma, debility, bad smell or strange behaviour, seemingly having nothing to do with me, can so readily flood me – assuming that I am a shame-prone person – with this sensation whose very suffusiveness seems to delineate very precise, individual outlines in the most isolating way imaginable […] That’s the double movement shame makes: toward painful individuation, toward uncontrollable relationality.

C oral’s talk shows us this individuation-relationality movement as she talks about this experience as being one of Black kids at school – ‘we’ – while at the same time being about her pain. T he communal and individual shame is the result of the racialized relationality that is a part of the lives of school kids who live in a society structured by racial dominance. A s such, the data show that shame works, for example, through ‘making us want to be like’, ‘feeling a way’, ‘reducing us to something’, ‘making us wish to be’, or noticing that we are ‘seen as not quite right’. T here are beauty norms which structure spaces, interactions, bodies and produce those who are ‘not quite right’, who make the Black/white social skin uneasy and who must be shamed back into their place of un-belonging. In racialized societies there is also a metaphysics of presence (Derrida 1976) at work in which one is being made strange. C oral talks about it above in terms of white kids wanting to feel her hair as if it wasn’t normal. Brenda, a forty-two-yearold S ocial Worker, speaks below about being seen to be rubbish if you were darkskinned when she was growing up within her Black family and Black community in 1960s Britain. S he speaks of herself as having emerged from a journey in her young life of wanting to be white to then face the Black preoccupation with and desire for, lightness of skin colour. A gain around the shaming event, the (com)plaint-recognition – ‘or what I also faced’ – there are speech disruptions like quite long pauses, fillers – ‘ahm’ – interruptions – ‘sort of’, ‘like seen as’, ‘how should I put it?’ – and loudness over the words which produce the shame. T hese words in themselves are interesting. ‘R ubbish’ speaks to detritus, human excrement which must be abjected if one is to get anywhere as Brenda says. T he second word ‘too’ speaks to excess, of being outside of the boundaries of the accepted/recognized/treasured/loved social skin of Blackness, which in this case in the 1960s is light-skinned. B T hat’s it so from crossing over from wanting to be white we also face- >or what I also faced< (1.1) growing up as well was that ah:m the darker you are (.9) were (.6) you were >sort of< like seen as (.3) how should I put it? A h:m (1.3) >like RU BBISH <= D =>Y eah< (.5)

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B =>L ike rubbish< you were sort of like >you know< you- you- you- you’re TOO dark= D =Mhm?= B => Y ou know< you’re not going anywhere so the fairer you are was the better for you

T he shame of Black hair has been spoken about at length by many writers (Banks 2000; C raig 2002; C ollins 2004; H unter 2005; H obson 2005; White 2005) while Mercer (1994a) has spoken about it as an ethnic signifier which whilst being political is also marked by the panoply of forces which shape racialized identities. O ne part of this is straightened hair which Mercer sees usefully as being just one aspect of Black stylization. S adie, a 36 year old AI DS activist and Jenna a 25 year old student, talk about either hair straightening or wearing jumpers on their heads to emulate straight hair in their youth. S adie does not talk about this as a shaming event in her youth but presents it now with shame as she speaks about it in the present as a self confessed ‘conscious Black woman’. A gain we see the speech disturbances around the shame involved in her confession to two other Black women of always trying to be the same as them (read white here), she even speaks about going home and wishing her ‘h-’ which one can assume to be ‘hair was straight’, given the discussion which follows. Perhaps because that is too much of a confession of wanting to be white she then changes tack to trying to be the same as them leading to her trying to hotcomb her hair. S he changes direction because questions of her Black authenticity and political identity arise in the moment of this confession even though this happened when she was of primary school age. It is interesting that she also mentioned her age at that time because this has the effect of distancing her from this way of thinking. C learly now as an adult she would not want to be white. T his potentially shaming confession though is met by Jenna’s ‘Didn’t you used to put jumpers on your head?’ which to her was about emulating white hair which everyone – ‘we’ – used to do. S a I know- I think (.6) >I don’t know REALLY < I >just< always try to be the SA:ME as them I used to go home and wish my h- and wish I was [(.4) ] Sh [Mhm] S a I AL WAYS TRY TO BE THE SA :ME AS THE M AN D TRY TO NE - PO HO -CO - you know HOT comb my hair (1.1) you know h-= Sh =Oh you did [ you HOT ] comb mhm= Sa

[Yeah

]=HOT comb my hair (.8)

Je >Didn’t you used to put JU MPERS on your head?<= S a =ºJumpers?º= Je =>A nd use- and use< it as a- = S a =O h I was much younger then wasn’t it- >I was- I was like< (.4) [PRIMARY]

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Sh [ºHow old?º] S a SCHOOL

days yeah=

Je I’m just saying that that ((* we all E MULATE D that didn’t we?))= Sh = [ Mhm] Sa

[Yeah]

T he use of childhood recollections in the examples so far make us notice that though shame can be felt momentarily it institutes ‘far more durable, structural changes in one’s relational and interpretive strategies toward both self and others’ (S edgwick 2003, 62). We take shame with us long after the shaming moment has passed. T his lies dormant but is re-stimulated in each new shaming event. S hame’s temporality is constantly about a back and forth, a criss-crossing, a reversion to a past painful moment which textures the pain of the present. S o, for example, Jenna can relate to S adie’s potential beauty and political shame which she ameliorates by claiming that experience as a peculiarly Black and female aspect of life for those growing up in 1960s/1970s Britain. Jenna’s interjection shows us that beauty shame is not a poisonous part of Black identity that needs to be silenced but rather that it is integral to identity and needs to be seen as being common to Black experience, survival and the necessary re-affirmational work of Black politics. ‘T he cardigan on the head’ was a way in which Black girls growing up in the 1970s in Britain attenuated shame by performing long flowing locks. This is interesting in itself because this performance was about a mimicry which was very clearly just mimicry as cloth does not even slightly approximate to hair. I wonder if there are other meanings to the cardigan to do with the carnivalesque and resistance which is possible within this childhood game? Would all Black girls have understood these meanings? Would they have created a community, a social skin through parodic play in which dis-identification from Black beauty shame was made evident? C ould the mimicry of the jumper on the head have been about critical agency (K hanna 2003) in the form of a ‘play’ beauty transformation after all? T he social skin spoken about earlier would have been one in which white girls would potentially be unable to participate even if they wanted to. T hey did not have the cultural and social capital needed to understand the importance of the game for group identity around racialized beauty norms. E ven in play there is the possibility for resistance through dis-identification in performatively producing straight hair through cloth, a cloth which is also outside the self as it is a part of the school uniform. In refusing to do shame through performing long straight hair we can see that performance ‘interlines shame as more than just its result or a way of warding it off, though importantly it is those things’ (S edgwick 2003, 38). In the moment of performance beauty shame alters the meaning of the cloth to make it the longed for ‘long straight hair’ which is reconfigured, creating spaces for the appreciation of difference. T his experience is looked back on with shame by S adie in the present and she shows us through her talk that shame because of not

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measuring up, not being quite white, is an integral part of Black women’s beauty identities, even if one now identifies as politically conscious. S hame is productive of identity, as shame is undone in the moment of a shared shame. T his makes shame no longer shaming as it is politicized and understood as being related to something larger than the self. T hat is, to discourses of racialized beauty and the culturally instituted melancholia produced by beauty iconicities. S hame enables Black beauty to assume the position of something-which-is-tobecome rather than something which simply is ugly without deligitimizing the notion of Black identity itself. S hame allows us to see that beauty and ugliness as shame scripts are products of discourses which address us and which we also answer back to. Beauty addressivities themselves have contradictions built in as the answer can be something quite different from that which was expected by shame scripts. H erein lays the transformational potential of shame. T he examples above have looked at Black beauty shame as being produced by an alignment of beauty of skin and hair with whiteness. H owever, Black beauty shame is much more complex than this. Black beauty shame is also paradoxical as will become clear in the next examples which deal with the Black beauty exclusions experienced by light(er) skinned, straight(er) haired women. T his shame is paradoxical because one would expect that it should not exist if white beauty is iconic. What the data show again and again is that Black politics and Black antiracist aesthetics intervene to create cracks in this hegemony. T here is no single beauty standard but what we have instead is a complex field of beauty, politics and identity which must be negotiated at the level of the everyday. Within this field ‘differently located individuals and groups invest in and promote particular ways of seeing beauty’ (C raig 2006, 174). T hese different investments also produce their own exclusions, their own shaming events. Black beauty exclusions as shaming events Black beauty shame is also related to Black community exclusions as Brenda has shown us above in terms of preference for lighter skin in her childhood. In the following example we continue to see the paradoxes which exist within Black community around hair and skin shade from the point of view of Black ‘mixed race’ women. O n the one side for Dana there are Black women who bleach their skin and straighten or weave their hair in order to look like her ‘artificially’ but then she cannot be accepted for what she looks like naturally. A s I have shown in other work (T ate 2007a), beauty for Dana must look natural rather than purchased if it is to be acknowledged as Black beauty. This shows the continuing significance of Black anti-racist aesthetics into the twenty first century. For her shame is within her recognition that she would be more acceptable if she also used artifice – ‘a wig’ or ‘weave’ – so it would be clear that her straight hair was not real when other  L . Pearce (1994).

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Black people pulled it. T essa then joins the conversation with her own experience of a shaming hair pulling event combined with ‘dirty looks and little remarks’, which are part of the daily lives of Black women with straight(er) hair and light(er) skin – ‘but it’s something you know I’ve learned to live with I know that this will happen’. H er sister cuts her hair to avoid further shame. H owever, even knowing that this will happen does not stop T essa from displaying that which could be the source of her exposure to another shaming event, her long straight(er) hair. S he does not take the route of her sister and cut her hair short. She dis-identifies from the shame of having naturally straight(er) hair and light(er) skin and performs an-other Black beauty. T his extract shows us that in their view within Black community fake hair is valued as opposed to their ‘naturalness’ which struggles to be recognized and accepted as Black especially when aligned with light(er) skin. L et us listen to Dana and T essa D >A nd yet< and look at some people using the face lightening creams and the hair straighteners (1.2) and weaving on hair kind of like mine sort of thing and- and I think to myself but (.5) you’re actually making yourself artificially to look like [ me ] T

[Yep ]

D >S o why can’t you just accept that this is how I Iook?< = T =N aturally= D = >A nd it would all make me< more acceptable (1.3) if I had a wig on or [I T [Oh] D had a ] weave [ they’d ] accept me >much< more then (.) I’ve had T yeah ]

[Definitely]

D people pull my hair to see if it’s real [>ºyou know?<º] T [ >Oh yeah< ] I was- ou- I was out on ah:m S aturday night (.4) and I went to the A lbert H all (.) s- somebody said to me it was a Black club and it was at the top of Wills R oad and I thought I’ll try it (.5) >and I went with my two sisters< and my- > one sister gets accepted more than (.7) me and E lsa will do >because she cut off her hair< she’s got very short hair now >ever since she cut it off she seems to be< spoken to more by (.) Black people whereas me and my eldest sister have kept our hair long >and every two minutes I could feel somebody< pulling my hair? (.7) and I was getting the >oh< sorry >you know< I was just passing by and I am >right?< so why is your hand in my head? (1.1) >right?< and we got the dirty looks and the little you know remarks and whatever but it’s something you know I’ve just learned to live with >I know< that this will happen (.5) D A nd that certain Black people are going to behave like that (.) T Y eah they won’t stop me leaving my hair out and wearing it long.

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Is their experience different from C oral’s memory of having her hair touched by white kids because it wasn’t seen as normal, I wonder? T hose who are doing the touching are Black and those being touched are also Black but there is a fundamental difference to the effect of the touch itself. T o be abjected by whiteness is a regular Black experience, painful though it can be, but to not be permitted entry to Blackness, to be placed as politically suspect and socially abject because of skin and hair is quite a different matter altogether. It is different because as A hmed (2004) persuasively argues one feels shame because of a quest for relationality. If we feel part of Black community and are committed to that, then rejection from that home must be felt to our very core. We feel so deeply because our identification possibilities are brought into question and our certainties are destabilized. T his points to the deep and continuing impact of the racialized norms of Black beauty on identifications, politics and (im)possibility of non-shaming interactions within Black communities. T he struggle for Black women who are doubly abjected from Black community because of light(er) skin and straight(er) hair which marks them as ‘mixed race’, is to know that this will happen as ‘certain Black people are going to behave like that’ but not to let this ‘stop [them] leaving [their] hair out and wearing it long’. It is almost as if these women are being asked to atone or at least feel guilt for their embodiment, for having bodies that are out of place within Black community because of the mark of mixing. The pull on the hair and the remarks confirm their lack of fit and keep them outside of the Black social skin unless some of their beauty iconicity is removed. In this case the removal of beauty iconicity is represented by T essa’s sister cutting off her hair to become an insider. H er shame at her exclusion from the field of Black community because of its beauty rules led her to take this action which shows her subjection to its normalizations. S he could not move past these limitations as T essa and Dana have done because the wanting to belong impeded her. T essa and Dana show us the possibility for beauty transformations through shaming events. S imply, if you are always made the abject there must come a point at which you merely say, ‘enough is enough’. Through their disidentification they show us this ‘enough is enough’ moment. Their disidentification disturbs the Black beauty habitus, even if just momentarily. T he momentary disturbance enables us to see that the social rules of the Black beauty habitus are inscribed in their dispositions, in how they see themselves and reinscribed with a difference in terms of the extent to which they can see alternative beauty possibilities. The process of shame, disidentification and reinscription, I think, underlies the performativity of Black beauty shame as a moment of beauty transformations. N ext, Brenda speaks about a process in which one is made to feel shame in the moment of facing people where your face is open to questions of belonging and difference because one appears to be a mixture, to be ‘a mixed race’. H er use of ‘a’ as a prefix to ‘mixed race’ makes her position one of outsideness and of abject singularity. S he is not a teenage girl, a family member, or a friend but an ‘a’. S he responded to her positioning with anger – ‘and as well I would get heated up’

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– even though she also ‘felt a way’. ‘Felt a way’ here is how she verbalizes feeling shame. T o ‘face people’ to make oneself vulnerable to the possibility of being wounded, to not being able to ‘save face’ is also a moment in which one seeks acceptance and a place to belong as a focus of identification, of easing the bad feeling of being an ‘a’. T he person being faced has the responsibility to provide recognition and acceptance into community rather than the abjecting question ‘are you a mixed race?’ T his abjection and refusal to recognize Brenda as Black points to one of the enduring paradoxes of a Black beauty which is tightly drawn around the parameters of authenticity and political identity based on dark(er) skin. T hese parameters meant that Brenda had to choose a group of friends (‘posse’) made up of ‘mixed race girls and other Black girls who were different’ where these questions of ‘looks’ did not come up. I have already spoken about looks in C hapter 1 and here Brenda means both being good looking and how one appears to others B Y eah (.7) and a:hm (.) for me (1.3) for me going to secondary school and having to face like a:hm (.5) º>face people<º saying you’re a mixture, are you a mixed race?= D =Mhm= B >A nd as well I’d get heated up< but at the same time wouldn- didn’t want-I kind of felt a way (1.0) my possee then was mixed race girls and other Black girls who were different where these questions of looks didn’t come up.

S he had to dis-identify with the same of the racialized ‘mixed race’ category, the ‘a’, in order to have a liveable life by identifying as different. T his liveable difference is one of being marginal to a Blackness which would only recognize her as an ‘a’ and instead placing herself in a Black communal space where how one looked was irrelevant. A s in the case of T essa and Dana her ‘feeling a way’, her shame, led to a re-evaluation of her self and her position within hegemonic Blackness. As a teenager she had to find spaces in the interstices of Blackness where she could fit even with the mark of whiteness on her skin. Through feeling shame she engaged in an-other way of being in the world. A way of being based on marginality, developing a critique from within forms of sociality on the border of the Black other/same. As for Tessa and Dana, shame made Brenda reflect on her body and the politics it entailed which in turn led her to different friendship choices, choices which underlay her emergent politics of difference within Blackness. Disidentification from hegemonic Black beauty norms produces transformations in beauty hegemonies as it goes about its work of creating spaces for different Black beauties through critical agency. Dis-identi.cation, critical agency and transforming Black beauty What is dis-identification? How does it link to shame? In what ways can beauty shame and dis-identification lead to beauty identity transformations? For Jose Esteban

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Muñoz (1999, 15) the ‘negotiation between desire, identification and ideology are part of the important work of disidentification’. However, disidentification does not dispel the contradictions between ideology, desire and identification in terms of beauty. R ather, as already mentioned in C hapter 3, ‘a disidentifying subject works to hold on to [Black beauty] and invests it with new life’ (Muñoz 1999, 6). Disidentification is the transformational motor of the performativity of Black beauty shame. Disidentification from Black beauty shame arises in the moment of the naming of the shaming event, its recognition and its construction as (com)plaint. T he second step in this is critical agency – transformation as women disturb the beauty contradictions at play at the level of the everyday. T his means that beauty standards negotiated by women become more open as they are revealed to be ‘changeable configurations of discourse and practice’ (Craig 2006, 160). In the following example Dana shows us that the continuum of Black shame and pride is regulatory. It is regulatory because we are constantly reminded about our political responsibility to the Black social skin. T his responsibility is contained in the injunction to perform our place within the social skin in order to show our commitment to Black politics. S he begins by saying that at this point she is hardly trying to look Black compared to other times in her life. H er confession is surrounded by speech disturbances again such as in-breaths and long pauses. T his for her is the shaming event, the ‘least trying to look Black’. S he goes on to say what this means in terms of straightening her hair, highlighting it and wearing it long which she prefaces with ‘and God sin of sins’. T he preface helps us to see that this is potentially shaming depending on who is doing the looking from within the Black community. S he ends though with pride by saying that she doesn’t ‘feel that it diminishes [her] in any way’, after which she speaks about other Black people who have tried to diminish her as a Black person while bolstering up their identity at her expense. T his diminishing and bolstering up speaks to past shaming events. H owever, now as middle-aged she no longer feels that she has to prove herself to anyone because she is now thinking more about herself rather than the need to do things politically, ((.hhh)) >but it’s funny< in my appearance >now< I suppose (1.3) ((.hhh)) I am the least trying (1.1) to look Black ºthan I have ever doneº ((.hhh)) and I wear my hair straight and God (.3) ((.hhh)) sin of sins I’ve even had a p- perm put on my hair and had it straightened and that >((.hhh))< when I was out in Jamaica (.9) ((.hhh)) (.8) and (.8) I can wear my hair (.8) long now and I can wear my hair straight and can go off and have highlights put in and (.6) ((.hhh)) (.4) I don’t feel like it diminishes me in any way? (.6) ((.hhh)) I feel like a >lot< of people’ve tried to diminish me as a Black person here (1.4) ((.hhh)) and I’ve(.4) I think a lot of people’ve ((.hhh)) bolstered up their identity at my expense in a way (.9) ((.hhh)) but now I just feel like WELL (1.4) pt HELL that’s their life you know and (1.6) pt >that’s what they want to do?< and I don’t feel like you know (1.3) I have to prove myself to anybody now >I’m jus- I guess- I don’t know< I am not depressed about it I don’t think ((.hhh)) I am just like (.8) well

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I’m here and I’m me and (1.3)you know? I guess I’m having middle age now and >thinking about myself more rather than (.7) thinking about doing things politically and all the rest (.3) ((.hhh)) (1.1) pt BUT (1.2) I feel I am happy with where I am with me and (.4) I am happy with the way I look.

Why is there always a need for the shamer to have ‘a shamed’, someone who they have made ashamed, to bolster up their identity? It is clear that there must always be an other to enable us to keep our identities whole. H owever, what is uncomfortable about such Black skin politics, what should also cause unease within the Black social skin, are the exclusions which operate based simply on who has light(er) skin and straight(er) hair and who does not. T he constant struggle for women thus embodied is to overcome the shame of exclusion and it seems the constant struggle of their other Black brothers and sisters is to assert their authenticity, their rightness of fit in the face of what they still read as light skin – straight hair privilege. As Black ‘mixed race’ women like Dana would say though it is a privilege which is illusory as racism also operates its exclusionary force through its ‘one-drop rule’, its ‘does not belong to any community’ and its ‘mixed race people are victims of cultural stripping’ ideas. Dana feels that she is now past the point of having to do things only politically. L ike her, we as a Black communal body must now be happy with where we are and how we look in all of our variety. S hame and pride are intimate bedfellows. T hrough shame Dana shows us that she has experienced distance within Black community and politics – ‘I am not depressed about it’, ‘I just don’t feel like I have to prove myself anymore’. S he has also experienced the pull towards normalization – ‘doing things politically and all the rest’ – that is part of the regulatory apparatus which is so deeply connected to one’s sense of belongings. Her disidentification here is done not just at the level of words and social interaction but at the level of stylization in terms of hair. S he has now straightened and highlighted her hair and wears it long. What is interesting about this straightening is that she imbues this practice with Black authenticity by saying where she had it done. Jamaica as home, as roots, enables stylization to be read as a Black race-ing stylization and not sinful as she implies is the case in the Black British political context which she occupied at that point in her life. T his is a case then of the aesthetics and politics of ‘home’ speaking to the aesthetics and politics of its diaspora. In this speaking hair straightening does not diminish one’s Blackness politically or aesthetically. H air straightening and highlighting with its origin in Jamaica is presented as a visible sign of pride. A pride which goes against the grain of ‘doing things politically’, whilst resisting normalization and at the same time expressing the urge for new forms of relationality. S uch relationality involves a ‘live and let live’ approach to Black beauty and political identifications in which one, like Dana, should be able to ‘feel happy with where I am with me and [be] happy with the way I look’. It is stylization which makes this resistance to normalization, this dis-identification/critical agency-transformation visible on the body. What Dana’s dis-identification shows us, as have the other extracts above, is that shame can be

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transformative. T his is so as the anguished feeling of Black beauty shame which we at first deny can be transvalued and then even flaunted as something which is no longer our preoccupation. Transvaluing beauty shame means that we have moved beyond it and its potential doubting of one’s beauty value into beauty transformations. T he transvaluing of beauty shame based on practices from ‘home’ also relates to aesthetic values from the wider Black A tlantic diaspora as L ola makes clear next. Below, she speaks about the mental battle that she has with being ‘me’ when for 33 years she saw nothing beautiful about herself. This struggle has been amplified for her as an adult who came to the N ation of Islam given the strictures of having to wear the hijab and not wear makeup. T here are two potentially shaming complaints here then. The first of these is that when she joined the Nation of Islam she had to cover her hair but she felt that that would make her look like A unt Jemima. T he shame of the stereotype of A unt Jemima carries from its US home across the Black A tlantic to the UK Black diaspora very straightforwardly without the need for any translation. S uch is the power of the discourse of A unt Jemima’s ugliness and servility (hooks 1982; C ollins 2000; H obson 2005; Weekes 1997; R oberts 1994). H owever, the N ation of Islam advocates that women should feel beautiful, feminine and groomed even in the absence of makeup so this has made it easier for her to disidentify from the A unt Jemima image. T he other shaming (com)plaint is that she should be natural and devoid of makeup which for her was a ‘big hurdle after wearing it for 18 years’. H owever, she is still in a continuing mental battle to be positive, not ‘putting on the falseness’ and being her, whilst wearing ‘a little bit of lipstick and mascara’. H er face is not totally bare but this is a minimalist approach to makeup. T he upshot of this is that she is now ‘trying to go natural’ and looking for her ‘inner beauty’ because she refuses to be influenced by negative raunch culture images in the media like ‘Dancehall Queen’. Her disidentification from this latter representation of Black women becomes her justification for the religious injunction that she looks for her inner spiritual beauty. ((.hhh)) Initially when I joined the N ation of Islam there was a problem because I had to cover my hair (1.5) and- and I felt that I would look like A unt Jemima ((.hhh)) (1.0) now I wear the hijab proudly because the N ation of Islam says women should feel beautiful (.4) feminine and groomed (1.2) it has been a big change not being able to wear makeup because ((.hhh)) I wore it for 18 years ((.hhh)) >this was a big hurdle< I am now comfortable because it’s about seeing your own beauty (1.0) for- for 33 years >I didn’t see myself as beautiful< so this was a struggle (.5) but I want to be me ((.hhh)) not putting on the falseness >it is a mental battle though when it comes to being positive< about not wearing makeup and- and- and now mostly I put on a little bit of lipstick and mascara (1.0) I am trying now to go natural and just look for my inner spiritual beauty (1.0) I refuse to be influenced by things in the media like Dancehall Queen.

T essa shows us below how the need to belong to Black community is a powerful motive for changes in stylization in terms of hair and dress. S he speaks of being

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amazed at the reaction of Black people to her as blonde when she was called ‘every name under the sun’. T he quietness of its delivery, the pauses and the speech disturbances pinpoints this as the shaming moment, the moment of exclusion from the Black social skin because she was stylized with the dream of being ‘the archetypal white blonde’, as she felt she ‘had more of a right to it than anyone else because [her] mum was white’. Her view of herself as an ‘archetypal white blonde’ was not acceptable within or compatible with Black community beauty norms. She was a failure and felt shamefully that her exclusion was justifiable because she later dyed her hair Black and began to wear trousers. S hame became a motive for disidentification from ‘the archetypal white blonde in a short skirt’ who was also ‘the biggest sell out going’ because she could not be compatible with Black norms. S hame is a powerful normalizer and regulator which informed T essa’s change of image to a more acceptable and respectable Black beauty stylization. T But ºI was justº amazed by (1.4) the reaction of BLACK people to me ºas blondeº when I had the blonde and the short skirt I got called every name under the sun I was the biggest sell out going ((.hhh)) >and at the time I couldn’t understand what they were talking about< now I can (.6) ºright?º because it must’ve- ((.hhh)) I- I DID after those two three years whatever I was you know PRETENDING I was white? [>but actually<] D

[ WITH THAT ] DREAM [ OF ] BEING THE

T

[Yeah]

D BLONDE, the archetypal [ white ] blonde? (.6) T

[ Yeah ]

T But at the SA ME time I thought I had more right to it than anybody else because you know my MU M >WAS WHITE < and you know? (.) But >like I said< when I left care I dyed my hair back BLACK (1.2) and then my- my clothes image changed it started to be like I used to wear longer skirts? (.8) and then I went into you know BLOUSES and you know TROUSERS >because trousers is-< was a NO NO to me before

For Muñoz (1999) the work of disidentification is central in the emergence of new identifications and shame is an integral part of such disidentification. The previous examples have shown this. What the examples have also shown us repeatedly is that shame is felt because our gift of our vulnerable selves to others is not acceptable or accepted and therefore our exclusion is justified. What has not been perhaps underscored enough in the discussion so far is shame’s transformational potential in terms of politics and the individual and how beauty shame within Black communities is intensely trans-generational. Its ability to trans, to cross from one time and space to another undisturbed, points to the sedimentation of Black beauty shame in the structure of feeling, discourses and practices within racialized societies and the aesthetics which come out of Black antiracist politics. Brenda in the next example has been speaking before this extract of her mothers’

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complaints about her hair being ‘too tough’ as a child and saying that she wished that her child’s hair was softer and straighter. S he then speaks of catching herself visiting the same shame on her daughter which produced her own shame in the present – ‘and then I realised oh my God I shouldn’t be saying this I should be letting her know how beautiful her hair is’. H er realisation that she is reproducing trans-generational beauty shame makes her then tell her daughter how beautiful her hair is because she wants her child to ‘be proud of who she is’, she wants ‘her to be a strong, confident Black woman who can wear her hair natural or any way she likes’. What Brenda’s talk reminds us of is that beauty shame does not just lie with the individual, it is also political, sedimented in culture, seeks to subject us and we must be involved in the struggle against trans-generational beauty shame if we are to move forward in community. T his means that we must leave ourselves open to the possibility for different embodiments and stylizations, to make Blackness other than it once was. T hat is, we must widen the parameters of Black beauty itself. B Y ou know? BUT (.6) I did the same thing to my daughter when I was combing her hair >LOR D< your hair’s too tough and I wish your hair was? (.6) D Mhm?= B =>Fine< and then I realised ºoh my Godº (1.0) I shouldn’t be saying this (1.2) you know? I should be letting her know how beautiful her >HAIR < is? (1.0) which is what I’ve been telling her NO W (.5) D Y eah= B =A nd >for real I’m NOT just telling her that [ for the sake of telling her that<] D though ]

[Y eah but it is beautiful

B but her hair is beautiful ((.hhh)) and >what I do find helps is that a lot of people’s telling her that as well< and not only that I don’t want her to be thinking any other way= D [=Mhm] B [>I ] want her to be proud of WHO she is< (1.0) you know? (.4) I want her to be a strong confident Black woman (.6) I want her to feel she can wear her hair natural or any way she likes.

What we have seen in the examples is that shame attaches to body parts and attempts to speak who we are through performatively producing addressivities of ‘the other’. The intensification of parts of the body such as the skin, lips or hair makes one feel shame because of the ‘raced’ habitus in which we live and Black beauty discourses on/of belonging and acceptability. T hese Black beauty discourses produce different addressivities which expect a predetermined response because

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of their ‘forcible citation of a norm, one whose complex historicity is indissoluble from relations of discipline, regulation, punishment’ (Butler 1993, 232). Bakhtin’s (1981) account of addressivity sees individuals as always existing in a state of being ‘addressed’ and in the process of ‘answering’. For example, in the above extract for T essa and Dana to be ‘Black and beautiful’, to be acceptable and belong, is to be only dark skinned and more A fro-haired and any deviation from this encounters punishing exclusions. The case for Coral, in the first extract, is that only being white and without ‘rubber lips’ and ‘woolly hair’ would have been acceptable. What the women show us in their accounts though is that this addressivity of excluded/ugly/abject is negotiable because of their intervention as addressee. In their interventions the women read the shaming events as abnormal behaviour on the part of the shamers and it is in this moment of critique that the women disidentify from the address of ‘abject’ produced by the shamers. For C oral, the white kids acted as if her hair wasn’t normal, whilst for T essa and Dana their straight(er) hair was an affront to other Black people. In this disidentification they refuse the address of other/abject and transform otherness into a position of ‘rightness’ by calling themselves into being as people outside of the stereotype (C oral) or outside of skin and hair (Dana and T essa), or outside of whiteness (T essa). T hey call themselves into being by perceiving the shaming event as just that, an episode which aims to put them into a pre-destined place of unbelonging. T he shaming event is therefore not perceived as being able to capture the totality of who they are but is based on a politics of exclusion. In revealing the shaming event and the shamers as other to themselves they bring into being the self which they want the hearer of their story to perceive. T hat is a self which once was but is no longer affected by Black beauty shame, which has surpassed its negation and has emerged positively through disidentification from the abject addressivities of shaming events. Black beauty shame thus loses its positioning capabilities of turning us outside in or inside out even whilst we might continue to experience ‘a precarious hyper-reflexivity of the body’. What the women have also made clear is that we have a responsibility as individuals and community to eradicate Black beauty shame as a possibility for future generations of Black women. Conclusion S hame is momentarily forgotten but not gone. S o although the word is seldom used there is still a haunting which re-emerges at the moment of enunciation, a naming of experience which resonates with both the hearer and the listener. T his resonance is the space of affective intensity. S hame becomes clear in the telling as the past experience is trans-lated for the listener. Maybe it is this trans-lation, this crossing between the psyche and the social expressed in the talk which makes us notice the complex performative nature of shame as in its operation it is both repressive and productive. T his symbolizes a movement in which the repressed returns but is halted in its very movement by its naming by the subject. T he naming of the moment of marginality

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and abjection is shaming and shameful but contains within it the prospects for transformation and change. T he trans-ing of translation and transformation is important as it points to the emergence of other discourses and practices. S tarting from the data I have tried to translate some of what we could call a phenomenology of Black beauty shame. I aimed to show the general pattern in the data of (com)plaint-recognition, disidentification, and critical agencytransformation that related to shame and performativity. What was also clear is that Black beauty shame relates to two master signifiers: white iconic beauty and Black beauty norms which are located in Black A tlantic diasporic anti-racist aesthetics. Both of these signifiers are ‘race’d and as norms contain within them forms of address which expect to be answered as specific forms of beauty stylizations and embodiments. H owever, the data has shown that the addressee can make these beauty stylizations unstable by transforming them through the interjection of other meanings as they author their locations within Black beauty. Black women are also involved in racializing as an ongoing process within Black beauty’s raceing stylizations. T his is so because as we share existence there can be nothing which is absolutely new but everything can be translated anew to create other forms and meanings of Black beauty. It is the process of race-ing through stylization which grants shame its transformative potential as it can make Black beauty mobile, never finished once and for all. Shame it appears can lead to ‘racial rearticulations’ in terms of beauty. By this I mean that a hyper-reflexivity in terms of the body’s surface can lead us to value that which has been made other and to seek out instances of beauty practice and philosophy from our ‘home’ and across the Black A tlantic which speak to us and with which we can identify. What this seeking out makes us notice is that there is no single and singular standard of beauty hermetically sealed off from others. T here are only competing standards, some of which have more buy-in than others. C learly also beauty norms are not just those of whiteness and this is not the ideal. T his latter makes us question much work to date which focuses on the spectre of white iconicity and its impact on Black women’s lives. It makes us realize that we also need to get past beauty shame as academics and talk about the differences that exist within our communities, those differences that rupture the shaming hegemonies within which we live. S hame, after all, is not paralyzing or debilitating but is part of a resource for Black beauty transformation both in terms of discourses and stylization practices. T he next chapter takes the idea of beauty ‘racial rearticulations’ forward as we move to look at ‘the browning’ as a Black Jamaican generated beauty category.

 I take this term from C raig (2006).

C hapter 5

‘T he Browning’, S traighteners, and Fake T an

Browning’s always on the agenda. I don’t care what you are. I don’t care what your preference is. Y ou see a browning gal they’re always on the agenda. T hat’s one weird thing. Browning gal always get a blye no matter what.

T hese are R ay’s words of pride related to her self-ascribed category ‘browning’ in 21st-century Britain. For her browning women are always sought after irrespective of who you are or your preferences in terms of looks. Browning in the UK cuts across classes and in diaspora is an aesthetic identity and a sign for embodiment. It is not therefore a political identity as such but is a beauty category which is produced as will become clear throughout the discussion which follows. T his chapter engages with the browning and race-ing stylization technologies like ceramic straighteners and fake tan to continue to look at Black beauty as performative. It draws on Butler’s (1990, 1993) idea of performative reiteration which simply stated would mean that Black beauty is a matter of doing and its effects are not therefore an inherent attribute. A s Black beauty is about doing, the browning as a Black beauty category is read as a matter of doing. T he ‘ing’ in browning is instructive because it is about becoming, specifically becoming brown in the moment of stylization. T he ‘ing’ also implicates a continuous process which is subject to emerging tastes, stylizations, technologies and politics for the browning to come into being. Browning might be ‘this’ at a particular time and in a particular Black A tlantic diasporic space and ‘that’ in a variety of others. T his chapter’s argument is that browning as process means that Black beauty is about race-ing bodies and being raced by embodied subjects. If Black beauty is performative then it can disrupt the normalized racializing Black beauty of Black anti-racist aesthetics by the normalization of straight hair. It can also disrupt the racialized aesthetics where whiteness is the iconic beauty through the use of fake tan. T his means that hegemonic Black beauty is destabilised through women’s embodiment and their daily strivings (not) to approximate to it. N ew versionings of Black beauty emerge at the level of the everyday which, though they are readable because of the norms, refuse these norms. Versionings of Black beauty in turn both trade on and transform beauty knowledge through consumption. S uch consumption depends on the marketability of a global Black beauty culture’s construction of ‘the browning’ as iconic. It must be stated at the  T he Jamaican ‘get a blye’ means to make allowance for.

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outset that this is much different from the global multi-cultural beauty epitomized by S aira Mohan in the Newsweek (2003) article ‘T he Global Makeover’. Global multi-cultural beauty has been critiqued by H unter (2005, 57) in terms of the paradox of ‘purporting a global beauty to a woman who could be mistaken as E uropean, E uropean and E uropean’. H owever, for S uki A li (2005, 62) like H alle Berry, S aira Mohan ‘openly eschew(s) the dominant model of monoraciality’ but reflects a shifting idea of ‘race’ and ethnicity as unstable categories. It is Ali’s point of view which is relevant here as browning also produces shifting understandings of Black beauty. T his chapter charts how the use of straighteners and fake tan by light skinned young Black British women produce beauty embodiments which are then normalized within the category ‘Black beauty’ through readings of diasporic beauty knowledge on ‘the browning’, translation and mimicry. What is underlined here is the point made repeatedly in the book that white beauty is no longer the only model as there have always been Black models. L et us turn now to looking at the cultural, social, political and economic context in which the browning emerged in Jamaica. The emergence of ‘the browning’ and the significance of ‘ing’ T he etymology of the word ‘browning’ is unclear but it is more than likely derived from dancehall lyrics in Jamaica (Jan Mohammed 2000). O ne suggestion is that this term emerged in the1980s at a time in which there was greater political awareness about the growing imbalances in class in Jamaica (Jan Mohammed 2000). T he word browning and its attendant aesthetics have spread from this island through the cultural routes of the Jamaican diaspora. T he use of the word browning in the latter part of the 20th century and into the 21st century is undoubtedly a positive affirmation but one that has a racist past which spans the Black Atlantic and has permeated women’s beauty lives. T his has been dealt with earlier but is worth a fleeting repetition here. Black beauty’s past is one which spans slavery, colonialism and independence whose legacy is that light skin, ‘good features’ and straight hair are still seen as the basic necessity for Black feminine beauty. T his speaks to a pigmentocracy of former slave societies whether colony or metropole. T his pigmentocracy maintained and reproduced itself through constructing social and legal categories based on the ‘amount of white blood’ an individual ‘possessed’. A ppellations such as mulatto, quadroon, octoroon, kept in place abject Blacks at the bottom of the beauty hierarchy and the unattainable white category at its pinnacle. T he ‘“beauty” of the negress and the mulatto was part of the grammar of the exotic, race and beauty were drawn together in a hierarchy of appearance’ (N uttall 2006, 10). T he history of ‘mixed race’ women in the context of slavery, colonialism and independence has been one in which they have been simultaneously desired and despised for their approximation to whiteness. T o bear the mark of whiteness

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on your skin as we have seen in C hapters 3 and 4 is not necessarily a badge of honour. It marks you for exclusion from both Black and white communities as an outsider, an uneasy in-between who unsettles aesthetics, politics and the orderings of society based on strongly held essentialist values. Jamaica became independent from British political and cultural (though not economic) domination in A ugust 1962. From the 1940s to the 1960s the creole multinationalist project was consolidated and is reflected in the country’s national motto ‘O ut of Many, O ne People’ (T homas 2004). O n independence Jamaica’s cultural policy sought to develop a new idea of cultural citizenship based upon a valorization and prominence of the country’s A frican heritage. A frican heritage here was reflected in the ‘folk’ cultural practices of the rural areas – religious and secular rituals, foods, music, dance and speech (T homas 2004). T hese folk practices are still being kept alive and reinvented through Jamaica’s annual Festival which sees groups from all areas of the island and all age ranges competing for prizes in culinary, dance, music and speech areas. My own A unt Joy and U ncle Massah are part of the organizing group in my village S ligoville which prepares young and old for participation in the Festival every year. T hey are very proud of their participation and their successes which they replay on video to all who are prepared to watch and a trip in their car is always to the strains of mento music. A t the time of independence Jamaica’s cultural policy was aimed at respectability and was one which was linked ideologically to a mythical or real A frica. H ere then we begin to see a break from being focused on Britain. In the 1960s the Jamaica L abour Party which was then in government was intent on preserving A frican heritage through its creole multiracial nationalism. In the 1970s the People’s N ational Party under the leadership of Michael Manley saw A frican heritage not in terms of preservation but as a positive influence for individual and national growth. It developed a broad alliance between nationalist and progressive elements within the middle class, rural and urban working classes and the unemployed, especially youth and R astafarians (T homas 2004). Democratic S ocialism was declared in 1976, ties were renewed with C uba and Jamaica became a non-aligned state. After the CIA’s campaign of destabilization in 1977 Jamaica signed its first agreement with the International Monetary Fund and in effect abandoned its social uplift commitments made during the transition to independence. In the 1980s the Jamaica L abour Party under the leadership of E dward S eaga saw an escalation in poverty, social and political violence, migration and a re-establishment of the hegemony of whiteness and a demeaning of Blackness (T homas 2004). In the 1990s the leadership of the People’s N ational Party by P.J. Patterson signaled that it was ‘Black man time now’, as the government was not drawn from old or new elites in terms of wealth or status but from Black professionals who had advanced mainly through education as had the Prime Minister himself (T homas 2007). N atasha Barnes’s (1997) history of the Miss Jamaica pageant considers gender, ethnicity, class and national identity in terms of the politics of representation both during and after independence. S he asserts that widespread unemployment and poor inner cities blighted by state neglect, crime and poverty have meant that

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it is the area of culture – cricket, music and beauty pageants – that poor Black Jamaicans have claimed as their own. S ince the 1930s Jamaicans have done battle over conceptions of beauty with many refusing the preference for whiteness before independence (Barnes 1997). T here is continuing contestation post-independence over ‘the face of the nation’ as represented by Miss Jamaica. It is in this pageant following ‘Black is beautiful’ in the 1970s that national identity politics continue to be played out as the pageant served as a test of the national readiness to erase the centuries old stigma attached to Black skin (Barnes 1997). C hanging sponsorship of ‘Miss Jamaica’ has meant that the focus is no longer on choosing someone ‘typically Jamaican’ but on who has the best chance of winning international competitions, the greatest rewards and thereby also advertising the country on an international stage. ‘Miss Jamaica’ continues to be a field of contestation over questions of national identity and autonomy in which there is also a continuing discussion on colour and A frican diasporic links. A longside this link to A frica reiterated in varying ways during the twentieth century following independence there was also an attachment to ‘brown’. Far from being a phenotypical hangover from slavery only it was also ‘as much a way of life as it was a phenotype […] as it signifies respectability or at least aspirations towards respectability’ (T homas 2004, 24). O ne can become brown then through way of life so brown also was a becoming category in post-independence Jamaica. A s well as this there were much more racialized understandings of belonging that emerged at different points in time – R astafarianism, Back to A frica, Pan-A fricanism, Black Power, for example. It is within this negotiated space between the brown of creole multiracial nationalism and ‘modern Blackness’, those previously marginalized urban expressions of Blackness (T homas 2004) and the historical political, social and cultural context of 1980s Jamaica, that browning emerged. In modern Blackness there has been a fundamental break with the past and invocations of ‘A frica/A frican-Jamaican historical struggles still resonate powerfully with many Jamaicans’ (T homas 2004, 14). C urrent processes of globalization with their attendant racial hierarchies have also reinscribed racial and cultural hierarchies within/between regions, nations and communities (T homas 2004). T herefore as a result there are not unlimited hybridities even though there has been a decline in the previous hegemony of British colonial class and colour hierarchies. Modern Blackness in Jamaica recalls ideologies and aesthetics from earlier generations of working class Jamaicans alongside elements generated from the contemporary political and economic context. U nlike creole nationalism which underlies independence modern Blackness is ‘a notion of blackness in the here and now that accepts and validates the immediacy of contemporary popular cultural practices, such as dancehall, and reflects the transnational experiences of the majority of the population’ (T homas 2004, 13). T his is the space of struggle for public representational power in which browning emerged in Jamaica. It was a specifically Black space of contestation over the power to define identities and the cultural future of a nation state.

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Browning engages with brown not as a phenotype necessarily but as a possibility of becoming acceptably and respectably Black and A frican originated among working class Jamaicans. Browning and its emergence thus represents the ongoing negotiation of systems of power and domination from the 1980s to today in Jamaica in which subaltern aesthetics and politics lay claim to a space within Jamaicanness. Browning has ceased to be a bracketed Blackness outside of the realm of the national and is a part of Black national and Jamaican diasporic identity and class politics. T he countercultural aesthetic of the browning both opens up the space for Black solidarity at the same time as it reinforces and undoes ‘race’, class and political affiliations. ‘The browning’ has spread out from its birthplace through dancehall and the contemporary popular music scene to Jamaicans in the diaspora in Miami, T oronto, N ew Y ork, L ondon, for example, and from there to other Black A tlantic communities. A s a practice rather than a phenotype, the browning gives us an aesthetic parsing of Black beauty as part of a ‘distinctive counter culture of modernity’ (Gilroy 1993, 36). It is as part of this counterculture that ‘the browning’ emerges in 21st-century Britain as specifically a Black derived beauty model. It is therefore removed from the ‘mulatto’ of slavery and the ‘brown’ of independence because of its Jamaican modern Blackness heritage. It makes us question whether we do want to be white as has been claimed. Do we really want to be white? T here have always been struggles for inclusion into the Black category initially because not everyone could or indeed wanted to pass for white. I remember as a young girl in Jamaica watching ‘Imitation of L ife’ on television. T hat certainly brought home to me the perils of passing and that the only home for mixedness was a Black one no matter how much struggle one had to engage in. T he question of passing also has this ‘ing’ which I am interrogating in the browning. S o an interesting idea is also to think about this particular process of becoming brown as passing for brown as in the Jamaican model where brown does not relate only to phenotype. T his would mean that the performativity of ‘racial’ passing is no longer related to the white model. We have emerged from ‘Imitation of L ife’ to something else. H ere we have a parsing of Black beauty in which shades of Blackness are also performed through race-ing stylization and their normalization as Black is constantly being negotiated. I want to use one of my favourite singers at the moment as an example of what I am trying to talk about in terms of browning as a process of becoming. A licia K eys is undoubtedly one of the most talented musicians at present. O n her website she has a genealogy which says she has a Jamaican father, her mother is of Irish and Italian descent and she grew up in N ew Y ork. T hese national but also racialized categories are used to account for her mixedness. T his account is one which also draws us in to constructing her in particular ways. H ow do we know, for example, that her father was not C hinese, Indian, E uropean, L ebanese, Jewish

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Jamaican? A ll these are clear possibilities given the island’s legacy. H ow do we also know that Irish and Italian were not also prefixed by Black? Be that as it may, she is constructed as Black ‘mixed race’ in Britain, ‘biracial’ in the U nited S tates and C anada, in C aribbean terms ‘brown’ and in Brazilian terms ‘mulata’, by her fans. S he says of her heritage: I grew up in N ew Y ork, and thanks God, I never had to go through that in regards to ‘Y ou’re not black enough, you’re not white enough’, the whole kind of white/ black mixture thing. I never had to go through that. I went through the prejudices and all, surely. But I never had to battle with those two parts of me. I was with people who were Indian and S panish, people who were Italian, in N ew Y ork, anything goes. I never had to deal with those kinds of things, I feel blessed (contactmusic.com 2004).

When she first burst onto the music scene she was very light skinned and had her hair in canerows with beads. A s discussed in C hapter 2 her hair spoke her body and politics as Black. S ubsequently, she became darker – browner – and with straight/loosely-curled hair. We can see this transformation I am speaking about if we look at the ‘N o-one’ video of 2008 and compare this to her look in 2001 when she released ‘Fallin’ from her Songs in A Minor album. A licia K eys has gone through the process of browning over the years. T his visible transformation and the data from which this chapter draws its inspiration makes me look at S heila Jeffreys (2005) with a question mark in my head. Felski (2006) has developed a well-rounded critique of this work and I do not want to add to this here. I find Jeffreys’ work disturbing though, because in this book on beauty, Black women and women of colour are presented in pathological terms by her white centred normative reading of aesthetics. T his is contained in Jeffrey’s (2005, 113) claim that: By the 1960s it was clear that the beauty practices that black women were taught were aimed at emulating a white ideal. A frican-A merican women have written eloquently on the racism of beauty standards in the US that not only have white women bleaching their faces and straightening their hair, but create impossible goals of emulating whiteness for black women. T his has led to an industry of hair straighteners, and face whiteners, and other products designed to enable black women to approximate to a white ideal. S ince it is unlikely that black women are somehow naturally excluded from the province of natural beauty, it is clear that what is beautiful is constructed politically and incorporates race, class and sex prejudices. When black women are chosen for their ‘beauty’ to be models, such as Iman from S omalia, or Waris Dirie, their faces and bodies are likely to conform to white ideals and not to resemble the commonest features of A frican-A merican women’s faces.

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T hrough her reading of Black beauty Jeffreys becomes part of ‘the hermeneutic machine of the West [which] has long relied on Africa’s otherness to stage its grandest and most exclusive theatres of the self’ (Nuttall 2006, 8). I find Jeffreys’s words disturbing because in the 21st century we still have writing like this which insists on the iconicity of whiteness even though there is research, writing, centuries of activism and beauty stylizations which insist otherwise. I will say once again because it seems necessary that it is not a white ideal that is being emulated but there are different Black beauty models which have their own aesthetics and raceing stylization technologies. T o give her her due at least she does say that beauty is politically constructed along the lines of ‘race’, sex and class prejudices. A s a constructed category she should have also recognized that beauty is subject to subversion and transformation through political activism and stylization and that different communities would have different aesthetics. H er words have left me with a number of questions. What about A lek Wek? What are the commonest features of A frican-A merican women’s faces? What about a longer and more contemporary discussion of Black women’s ideas and beauty practices which run counter to white iconicity? Why put ‘beauty’ in quotes when one is speaking of Iman and Waris Dirie? Perhaps her point of view needs to be complicated somewhat by pointing out that it could the case that Iman and Waris Dirie are chosen precisely because they are marked as not the white ideal through ‘race’. T hey are chosen precisely because their bodies have the mimetic qualities of ‘a copying or imitation and a palpable, sensuous connection between the very body of the perceiver and the perceived’ (T aussig 1993, 21). Further, contained in their ‘ability to mime’ well is also their ‘capacity to other’ themselves because of the mark of skin (T aussig 1993, 19). I want to say something about the women she has othered and diminished through her words. T hese are women of international standing not just because of their beauty but also because of their humanitarian work, business and literary acumen. Waris Dirie, model, UN ambassador and author was born in 1965 in S omalia. S he is the UN S pecial A mbassador for the E limination of Female Genital Mutilation and in 2007 she received the C hevalier of the L égion d’honneur for her humanitarian work. S he set up the Waris Dirie Foundation to work on female genital mutilation in E urope. S he left modelling in 1997 to focus on her writing and her humanitarian work. S he has written three autobiographies which have also been translated into other languages besides English. Her first novel Desert Flower was a best seller across E urope. Iman is also S omalian and cousin to Waris Dirie. S he does work for a charity on children living with HI V and AI DS in A frica, is the CEO of ‘Iman C osmetics, S kincare and Fragrances’ which she established in 1994 and has had roles in various movies. H er brand of cosmetics was at the time the only one with S PF and one that tries to truly reflect the many different shades that is Black beauty. In her 20 July interview (Inner Views with E rnie Manouse, 2006) on H ouston’s PBS channel she speaks at length about her experiences in the modelling business in terms of ‘race’ and beauty. S he speaks about not being seen to be black enough

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even though she is very S omali. T he reason for this is that people see A frica as one continent as if one look fits all. She admits to maybe not looking West African but looking very S omali and in her country she was a dime a dozen. S he says ‘I hated being told I look like a white girl only browner. I look very S omali, very Bantu. I didn’t have to define myself as Black where I come from we are all Black’. In the end she had to value herself and find her value to survive the industry. For her it was a matter of doing advertising and cosmetics because that was where the money was. S he never doubted herself but her only doubts were about whether her looks would sell if they used her for a major product. T hese two women have shown us that as Iman says ‘a vacuous beauty is an empty shell’ (Inner Views with E rnie Manouse, 2006). I want to return to my ‘what about A lek Wek’ question. T his question is an important one because it makes us look at Jeffreys’s assumption about Black beauty with different eyes. In her autobiography A lek Wek talks about how she transformed the face of beauty and modelling in A merica (Wek 2007). S he speaks about her early struggles in just getting recognized as worthy of a shoot and being cast, for example, for the video of T ina T urner’s theme song for the James Bond film GoldenEye ‘because of, not in spite of, my A frican features – they wanted someone exotic who lived in a jungle’ (Wek 2007, 138). S he had the white racist imaginary played out very early in her modelling career as did Iman, though Iman’s was more about denying her Blackness and making her a brown white woman. Wek’s response like Iman’s is to assert her A fricanness very proudly. S he was shot by H erb R itts for the Pirelli catalogue and went on to be shot by S teven Meisel for Italian Vogue wearing Versace. S teven Meisel told reporters ‘ I haven’t seen anyone that interesting, that Black and that beautiful in a long time’ (Wek 2007, 155). For Wek her skin defines her and has both helped and hindered her career. S he speaks about the L avazza ad shot by A lbert Watson where her skin was the espresso as being in the latter category for her politically and emotionally. S he goes on to compare this ad to other contemptible collectibles (T urner 1994) of racist culture’s advertising. S he says ‘I can’t help but compare them to all images of black people that have been used in marketing over the decades. T here was the big-lipped jungle dweller on the Blackamoor ceramic mugs sold in the 1940s; the golliwog badges given away with jam; L ittle Black S ambo, who decorated the walls of an A merican restaurant chain in the 1960s; and U ncle Ben, whose apparently benign image still sells rice’ (Wek 2007, 162). Wek eventually stopped going for work which sought ‘Black girls’. S he confesses to being amused when people say that she has an ‘A frican’ look as A frica is a continent and there is no one standard of beauty in A frica (Wek 2007). H er cover for A merican Elle with Gilles Bensimon in 1997 for her was pivotal in changing the view of Black beauty. T his was followed by work with K arl L agerfeld at C hanel who told her that her features and her look represented the future of fashion. S he also reports L agerfeld as telling a reporter ‘T he standards of beauty changed, and she is the expression of modernity in beauty. It’s important to have her, because the world is not just basic

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blonde’ (Wek 2007, 170). A lek Wek went on to work with John Galliano at Dior, be named ‘Model of the Decade’ by i-D magazine; one of People Magazine’s ‘Fifty Most Beautiful People’; and one of the ‘Fifty Most Influential Faces in Fashion’ by both i-D and Frank magazines (Wek 2007). Sheila Jeffreys most definitely needs to rethink her statement, I believe. However, what Jeffreys affirms and both Alek Wek and Iman reinforce is that in the racist beauty habitus which we occupy in our everyday life, ‘beauty is to be found at the limits of the ugly, since it is the ugly which has so often been the sign under which the A frican has been read’ (N uttall 2006, 8). T his explains the use of Iman and Waris Dirie as ‘exceptions’ by Jeffreys and their alignment with whiteness because of their exception status. Given this racist beauty habitus it is no surprise that even in our post-colonial, post modern times Black women are still assumed to want to be white, which of course harks back to our supposed desires during slavery and colonialism as outlined by Fanon (1967). What this chapter will do now is to look at how this position of white beauty as iconic and its reverse of a closed Black beauty based on tightly ascribed ideas of naturalness is being destabilized by young Black ‘mixed race women’ in Britain as they reconstruct the category browning for their 21st century context. What I want to do is to look at the fact that in Britain now notions of beauty related to E urocentrism and unexamined A frocentric essentialism are being contested and transformed. T hat is, how a new structure of feeling and its bodily practices re-inscribe the racialized hierarchy of skin and hair differently without dispensing with the essentialist ideas of ‘race’ needed for Black antiracist communal politics to continue. T he young women whose words I use here provide us with a glimpse of the future of Black beauties as process, as ‘ing’, a new grammar of Black aesthetics if you will, which is marked by Gilroy’s (1993) ‘connective circuitry’ of the Black A tlantic diaspora. L et us now move to looking at the browning in 21st-century Britain and browning as a becoming beauty through performativity. The browning in 21st-century Britain and performativity Let us listen first of all to Ray’s words R I brought browning into our clique, I won’t lie. S h Did you? R Y eah. S h H ow interesting. Y ou think it exists outside of your clique then? It must. R Y eah it does of course it does because when I say it to other people that aren’t in my little group, if I say browning they know what I mean straight away.

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A s we know from Jan Mohammed’s (2000) work, the browning emerged in Jamaica in the 1980s and has dispersed through the Jamaican diaspora to the extent that R ay in Britain in 2005 is sure that even people who are outside of her clique know what she means straight away when she uses the term. T here is a translatability of browning which has taken it from the Jamaican context in which it was born to the wider Black community in the UK and the US . Doubtless this translatability has to do with the structure of feeling which emanates from the history of the desirability of ‘mixed race’ beauty in these former slave contexts, its paradoxical exclusion from both the white iconic ideal and the anti-racist aesthetics of Black ‘racial purity’, alongside the possibility to become brown as a way of life outlined earlier. T ranslatability is also linked to the modern Blackness exported through Jamaican popular culture. T he necessity for ‘race’ (Y oung 2000) seems to allow for this translatability because it keeps the boundaries of the category clearly Black. It is not a ‘becoming white’ at all. T ranslatability also has to with what women make of the category ‘browning’ in terms of beauty, identification and mimicry. That is, it is also about the practices of race-ing stylization in which women engage in order to make the browning visible and also how it is that in doing this that discourses on/of the category are maintained, managed, destabilized and enlarged. Practices of stylization are about performativity, translation and mimicry. A ccording to Judith Butler (2004, 198) ‘performativity is not just about speech acts. It is also about bodily acts’. T hrough bodily acts such as stylization, through its performativity, dominant and non-dominant racialized beauty norms are equalized to the extent that Black and white beauty have no origin to refer to because ‘the original’ is as performative as ‘the copy’. Browning, as all beauty, is performative, so the reality of browning is ‘produced as an effect of the performance’ (Butler 2004a, 218) as we can see for example in A licia K eys’s ‘becoming browning’. Further, although there are norms that govern what will and will not be real, and what will and will not be intelligible, they are called into question and reiterated at the moment in which performativity begins its citational practice. O ne surely cites norms that already exist, but these norms can be significantly deterritorialized through the citation. T hey can also be exposed as nonnatural and nonnecessary when they take place in a context and through a form of embodying that defies normative expectation (Butler 2004a, 218).

T he process of stylization to be discussed below of fake tan and the use of ceramic straighteners as natural and Black destabilizes the notion of ‘Black’ and ‘white’ iconic beauty. T hese destabilizations occur through inscriptions on bodies of translations of a browning which is itself deterritorialized within diasporic culture. T ranslation here takes as a point of departure Derrida’s (2002a, 20) idea of translation as transformation where

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translation practices the difference between the signified and the signifier. But as this difference is never pure, no more so is translation, and for the notion of translation we would have to substitute a notion of transformation: a regulated transformation of one language by another, of one text by another.

T he browning will never be the same as it was in Jamaica as indeed it never was in that context either, nor will the categories white or Black, as browning makes its way in the world. T his quality of ‘will-never-be-the-same-ness’ arises because of the play of difference which is a part of translation. T his difference for Derrida (2202a, 26) means that an element can never refer only to itself but there is a constant referral to other elements which are never simply present or absent (Derrida 2002a). Différance enables the translations of browning through stylization’s becoming discourses in ‘the systematic play of differences, of the traces of differences, of the spacing by means of which elements are related to each other’ (Derrida 2002a, 27). S tylization produces a becoming-space of the browning as embodied, as visible text which has to be read for difference and sameness to the discursively constructed category of browning. T his category itself is shifting and contingent, even while there is an ongoing construction of the beauty paradigm of browning through the play of difference within an economy of racialized traces such as shade. T his is shown in the next example which is a continuation of the conversation between R ay and myself R O h yeah it’s the ideal colour isn’t it? Y ou don’t want to be too pale because you look a bit, ‘what are you?’ S h Mhm R Well not even ‘what are you?’ you can tell that they are ‘mixed race’ but it’s just not ideal to be pale just like it’s not ideal to be too far on the dark side, is it? Y ou’ve just gotta meet somewhere in the middle. T hat nice browning shade. S h Mhm like who? R T his is very tricky very tricky. S h Do you think that H alle Berry is the right? R N o a bit too dark. Y eah if you see her and Beyoncé sitting on this bed now natural, they would be too dark, with all that lighting and all that fake shit on them sometimes they lick the right colour but only sometimes. A aliyah in Queen of the Damned would be a browning but not Beyoncé too much fake hair and make-up she is just too much. S h U h uh Mariah C arey? R T oo light, A licia K eys, too light. A lthough she might be the right colour in real life the lighting will make you lighter anyway. Mariah C arey’s a no no. S he’s very light. S he’s very pale. S he needs some fake tan. S h Y eah she does doesn’t she?

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R R ihanna in the video is a browning with a slight tan. But browning, she’s in the category. But K eisha C ole K eisha C ole’s the one.

T his extract continues the long standing pre-occupation with colour – ‘it’s not ideal to be too pale like it’s not ideal to be too far on the dark side’ – but extends it to what would be seen to constitute a browning in terms of the intricacies of shades of Black. S hade is important in terms of how it marks you. T hat is, not as a ‘what are you?’ which makes you indeterminate but rather as someone who can be placed as ‘mixed race’. T herefore being too light is not what is desirable here neither is it desirable to be too dark. R ather, the ideal is a mid point which is exemplified by the singer Keisha Cole. Those who we are told by the media and our own inclinations are beautiful women are put outside of this category because they are too dark (H alle Berry and Beyoncé K nowles) or they are too light (A licia K eyes) and in need of fake tan (Mariah C arey). In an interview, R ihanna herself has been quoted as saying ‘I feel most beautiful when I am in Barbados and I am well-fed, well-rested and well-tanned’ (BMI Voyager 2008, 8). Where in all of this is the quest and overwhelming desire for whiteness of which writers from Fanon (1967) to H unter (2005) and Jeffreys (2005) speak? If it solely lies in the continuing exhortation not to be too dark then we need to revisit the supposed hegemony and insidious character of light skin as it is being nuanced differently here. T he focus is not so much on as light as possible but rather it is on ‘licking the right colour’, ‘somewhere in the middle’, ‘that nice browning shade’. This is a �������������������������������������������������������������������������� judgement����������������������������������������������������������������� based on the intricacies of the reading of shade for fit within the browning category. T his is not being taken to be part of whiteness but is being negotiated as part of the continuum of Blackness in terms of shade. T his reading also extends to hair, eyes and ‘naturalness’ as is made clear by R ay next R Do you know what it is? Browning in essence is plucking things, different aspects, yeah? T hat are good out of different ‘races’ and putting them all in one but it’s all got to be natural it can’t be tiefed. Y our hair’s gotta be natural. S h R ight. R

Y ou need to be able to straighten it natural without any need for relaxer.

S h R ight. R When me and S haza see people in contact lenses we just rip them up. Do you know what I mean? S h But if somebody had natural green eyes or blue eyes or grey eyes. R T hat’s wicked. T hat’s highly attractive. I really like that yeah right through to the dark hazels. I mean brown eyes are nice too but I think it’s because I’ve got them I find them quite normal and ordinary.

What is natural, not ‘tiefed’ and still within the Black category even though ‘hybrid’ is what is of interest here. Browning in essence is about pulling good aspects   ‘T iefed’ is Jamaican for stolen.

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from different ‘races’ and putting them together in a new combination. T his new combination is then still based on a socially constructed binary in which one’s Black ‘racial’ antecedents must not be opaque and everything about browning must be natural it cannot be ‘bought’ or ‘stolen’. T he mark of a browning is having hair that can be straightened without the use of a relaxer. Further, while contact lenses are seen as un-natural and inauthentic, eyes of different natural hues from blue to hazel are seen as ‘wicked’. T here is, of course, nothing wrong with brown eyes but they are commonplace in terms of attractiveness. T he focus on naturalness imbues browning with a sense of authenticity. ‘A uthenticity is not that view which says that we have to be ourselves in order to be authentic. R ather, authenticity is more about the kinds of self that are allowed to emerge through the regulatory ideal of the racialized bodily schema’ of beauty (T ate 2005, 93). A s the Black ‘mixed race’ body naturalizes whiteness within itself Blackness as a category is called into question. Further, whiteness itself as a bounded impermeable category and the supposed quest for white beauty are also called into question. T he focus on naturalness produces its own Black aesthetics which are specifically marked as Black and not as a wanting to be white. A part from skin colour there are other signs of browning which R ay also mentions in relation to hair. H air has to be natural and capable of being straightened without any need for a relaxer. A lso according to her in the next extract a sign of a real browning is that she can’t put any ‘grease’ in her hair before straightening it because it will not straighten. T he hair has got to be ‘raw’. C alling hair raw brings it closer to nature, not in terms of it being untamed but in terms of it ‘being as it was born’, so to speak. I also add credibility to R ay’s assertion by introducing the fact that her hair dresser C armen says that about her hair. R ay continues to reinforce her assertion on browning hair by speaking about her friend who can only use oil sheen at the ends which is only a fine dry mist anyway. The point is that the hair cannot be wet/slippery from products and nothing in terms of the balance of the raw hair must be disturbed (‘you are not faasin wid nutn’) R Well I don’t put anything on it when I straighten it. I just wash it, condition it and straighten it. S h Mhm. R Because that’s the sign of a browning. A real browning can’t put grease on their hair to straighten it because it will not straighten. S h T hat’s right too slippy. R It’s gotta be raw. S h Mhm. R It’s gotta be, the hair has got to be really raw to straighten properly. T hat’s the sign of a browning. S h Because C armen says that doesn’t she about your hair in fact yeah that’s right.

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R Mhm and S haza’s just the same. Y eah she can’t put anything on it. Just a bit of oil sheen on the ends and that’s like a really fine dry mist anyway so it’s not wet and you are not fassin wid nutn.

Browning hair also means that one can have different textures. It can be left curly or straightened. T his means that one has to think carefully about what to use on the hair as well as one’s skin as R ay attests below. For her no matter how light you are as a browning you can’t seriously think about using (‘romp with’) white people’s ‘products’ on your skin and hair because they just dry you out. T he use of ‘products’ again places brownings very much into the category Black here in terms of having skin and hair which is removed from whiteness even if they might bear its mark. Black products produce the browning. Practices of skin and hair still continue to signify browning not as an absence of Blackness but rather as part of the category Black itself. S h What do you use on your hair? R

It depends whether I’m straightening it or leaving it curly.

S h Do you use Black products on it? R

God yeah. Y ou can’t romp with white people’s shit. N ot on the hair.

S h Y eah. R T hat’s one thing yeah skin and hair. I don’t care how light you are as a browning you cannot romp with white people’s products for your hair or body. S h Why? R

T hey just dry you out don’t they?

Browning provides us with a contradiction in terms of performativity. O n the level of stylization browning is clearly performative as it can be called into being through ‘worked on’ hair – curly or straight – and fake tan as S haza will show us later. H owever, ‘race’ as a mark borne by the body prevents the endless citation of performativity. Browning has clearly defined parameters based on ‘race’, on being Black which refuses performativity because of the culturally instituted melancholia of Black beauty. A s Jayne Ifekwunigwe (1999) reminds us ‘race’ in terms of the not now quoted but not forgotten ‘one drop rule’ still means that ‘mixed race’ is read as Black. R eading ‘mixed race’ as Black is a problem for some but not for others as R ay and S haza make clear. For them their beauty practices and embodiments are given meaning and value within a Black aesthetic space and no other space is aimed for or desired. L est we begin to think of browning as a category which is set in stone and thus immutable, let us move to look at some of its contradictions.

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Browning’s contradictions R A ll I know is my Black skin stays out of the sun mhm mhm S ha L aughter Y ou wear- you wear factor 35 and I put baby oil on.

Joint laughter.

R 35? 90! S ha L aughter. R Oh if I could ever find like 150 or something that didn’t have any pigment in it. S ha L aughter R to make my skin change colour, dread, I’d be there�������������� , I won’t lie.

T his conversation is between two friends, R ay and S haza, a 25-year-old C are Worker. They both claim the browning category as an identification and body ascription category. T hey see themselves as occupying different sides of browning. R ay is on the darker side of the category while S haza is on the lighter side. T his therefore means that they have to enter into different practices in order to remain within the category browning which for them importantly speaks both beauty and identification. For Ray it is a matter of keeping her Black skin out of the sun. This seems to be an ongoing joke between the friends as they both laugh when S haza compares their practices – she puts baby oil on and goes into the sun while R ay wears factor 35 and stays in the shade. T he joke continues as R ay talks about her necessity for sun protection with the ultimate dream being to get factor 150 as long as it didn’t make her change colour. T he whole idea of changing colour is an interesting one here. For the lighter skinned S haza a change of colour must be made so as to be darker and fit within the browning category whereas Ray is just right and does not seek a change of colour in any direction – darker or lighter. T his again makes us question the ideas of Black anti-racist aesthetics that Black women have internalized racism by wanting to be white and Jeffreys’s (2005) idea that Black women want to be white. What we have here are young women working with a category within the Jamaican diaspora to make sense of their fit within a Black beauty category which is commonly agreed is attractive and ‘just right’. T he ‘just rightness’ of browning has within it the necessity to still be Black in terms of heritage as a pre-requisite as is clear in the following extract of a conversation between R ay and myself: R C hristina Milian isn’t really Black though she’s browning. S h C hristina Milian? R

Y eah but she’s not Black.

S h Well what is she?

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H ispanic.

S h S he’s H ispanic. O h imagine I thought she was Black. R She’s browning in that new video definitely. What’s it called? I’ve forgotten. It’s got S now Man in it. S he’s browning especially when she’s got the canerow in very much so.

The US definition of ethnicity and ‘race’ has become global to the extent that for us C hristina Milian’s location in the H ispanic category means that the space of Blackness cannot be occupied even if bodily one is a browning. E ven if the adoption of a ‘Black’ hairstyle – the canerow – makes her look even more browning she cannot pass because her heritage as non-A frican diasporic precludes her entry. T his angle interrupts the totalization of browning so that it cannot have an inexhaustible series of meanings and applications. ‘R ace’ pulls it back into Blackness thus marking the boundaries of its non-performativity. ‘R ace’ means that browning can masquerade as a ‘certainty’ while stylization ensures that browning is undecidable as a ‘mark marks both the marked and the mark, the remarked site of the mark’ (Derrida 2002b, 59). R ay has made clear above that a pre-requisite for browning is that no relaxer or weave should be used on the hair. H owever, for her friend Jada she makes an exception even though she has to relax her hair because it is so thick. Jada’s hair grows very fast although it is ‘picky’, she relaxes it every two weeks so you never see the re-growth at the roots and when she tongs it, it then looks like she has straightened it with ceramic straighteners. What also helps Jada to ‘slide under the wire’ and to enter the browning category which is under such careful surveillance by R ay is the fact that she is also Black ‘mixed race’. H er light skin which is called ‘white’ is contrasted with S haza who still has ‘a bit in her’. T hat is a bit of Black colour. A s we know from previous examples such lightness places you outside the category, browning. H ere though Jada’s more afro hair ‘just tilts her over’ into browning as it belies the paleness of her skin and makes her A frican heritage clear in terms of her mark of ‘racial’ alterity. T hat is, her straightened hair just looks like she has used ceramic straighteners on it just like any other browning. H ere in this extract then Jada is spoken about as mimicking browning: S h H asn’t she got straighter hair then Jada? H as she got really afro hair that she’s straightened out? R Boy that’s what happens that’s another thing because if you really think about it S haza’s light but she’s not very light, she’s still got a bit in her. S h Mhm. R Jada is white very, very light with afro hair. S he has got the nappiest hair you have ever seen I won’t lie. T hat tends to happen. S h Y eah, yeah. R L ike L uke’s sister S arah you’ve seen how light she is.

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S h Y eah, yeah. R Dread the hair is so thick. It’s unbelievable. T hey’ve both got relaxed hair. Jada relaxes her hair every two weeks. S T wo weeks? R Mhm but with Jada’s hair because she is ‘mixed race’ it grows so quick. S h O h that’s the point. R Do you see what I am saying? But it’s so picky but it still grows fast like how our hair would grow. But yeah she has to relax her hair. Sh But Jada still qualifies as a browning then even though she relaxes her hair? Because before you said no you can’t. R Y eah I said no right like, Jada is very pretty and she is ‘mixed race’. But do you know what it is about Jada? I think she slides under the wire a bit. S he is on the outskirts of a browning. It’s very difficult because it’s just that one thing. S h Mhm just her hair? R Y eah that just tilts her over but because you never see Jada’s hair picky and because she’s ‘mixed race’ when it’s relaxed and she tongs it which she does every day it looks just like she’s straightened it with ceramic straighteners.

T he contradictions of browning once again show the operation of both its performativity/nonperformativity and its translatability/nontranslatability across bodies and practices. A s well as this it makes us think about the two-layered character of mimesis. First copying and, second, ‘the unstoppable merging of the object of perception with the body of the perceiver and not just with the mind’s eye’ (T aussig 1993, 25). C opying and becoming the other is brought to mind by Jada’s inscription of the browning onto her hair on an everyday basis. T hrough this bodily practice she engages in ‘not so much staying the same [as browning] but maintaining sameness through alterity [using relaxers]’ (Taussig 1993, 129). The ‘mimetic labor’ of ceramic straighteners produces ‘an everyday art of appearance that ... cultivates the insoluble paradox of the distinction between essence and appearance’ (T aussig 1993, 176). S traighteners are a part of the performativity of ‘browning’. The performativity of straighteners H air straightening technology has come a long way from the times of Madame C .J. Walker and the straightening combs of the 1950s. N ext, R ay talks about her youth when there weren’t any GHDs (ceramic straighteners) today’s no fuss straightening technology and what one had to endure from hot iron barrel tongs if you wanted your hair to be straightened. For her it was about being burned out  T his term was taken from T aussig, M. (1993, 177).

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and tortured at the hairdressers. T he tongs were so hot that they had to be left on a towel to cool after being taken from the oven and then blown on in order to cool them down further before putting them on her hair R Way back then there weren’t any of these GH Ds at all. Y ou had to go to the hair dressers. S h Y eah to get your hair tonged straight. R A ll the time burn out and tortured with the barrel tongs. S h Mhm. R But it’s hot iron barrel tongs because they put them into an oven don’t they? S h Mhm. R A nd they pull them out and then they go through your hair. I remember they used to come out so hot that C armen used to have to blow them. S h Before she put them on your hair? R L eave them on a towel before they went near my hair because that’s what she’d do she’d always have a rotation of them.

When asked what made browning hair, the answer was again about being natural. T here should be no weave and no hair extensions because this meant that there would be something fake about the browning. A lthough there may be an array of styles it basically boiled down to two. T hese are naturally curly and naturally straight or straightened with ceramic straighteners. H air that is naturally straight expands the boundaries of Blackness as this has been presumed in the past to not be something that could be un-problematically claimed as Black. In R ay’s view, the hair itself can be any colour, different shades of blonde, highlighted, as long as it is not ginger. T he browning category also means that there is an unproblematized widening of what counts as Black hair in terms of colour not just texture. This is a reflection of Black style, for example, the ‘Black blonde’ which is quite ubiquitous: R Well I don’t want to see no weave. I don’t want to see no plaited up hair extensions. Well maybe there is an array of styles but two. S h Y eah what are the two? R C urly, naturally straight or straighten with ceramics. O r straighten with ceramics, curled with tongs but when you wash it it goes naturally nice and curly. T hat’s it full stop. S h A ny colour? R A ny colour hair like blonde, red, highlight, not ginger, highlighted different shades of blonde, for example, as well.

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A s browning, your hair can be naturally straight or it can be straightened with a straightener, not relaxed. For R ay relaxer only comes ‘in brackets in the browning dictionary’. H owever to have more afro curls also will do as it is the length that counts. R ay here shows though that her inclusion of this hair texture could be a bone of contention because some people would say that that is not ‘nice hair’ because ‘nice hair’ blows in the wind. For some browning hair has to mimic ‘white hair’s’ ability to move but not be it. For R ay though all hair moves as long as it is not very short. T his movement means that in its very difference from whiteness Blackness speaks and is claimed through hair R S o it can be naturally straight or you straighten it with straightener. I don’t want to see any relaxation up in there either. S h Mhm. R N o need for relaxer. S h L augh. R T hey only come in brackets in browning dictionary. Browning no relaxer. A nyway and then natural curls any kind of curls. S h Mhm. R E ven more afro curls as long as the hair is a good length. I know that some people would say that that is not nice hair because it should actually blow in the wind and move but all hair moves as long as it is a good length.

The significance of length of hair for browning is made clear by Ray next who causes joint laughter by saying you do need something on your head and a millimetre long afro will not make it even if your skin makes you a browning. S o hair length is also a clear necessity for the browning whether A fro, loose-curly or straight. H air and skin are intertextual as they are read for signs of belonging and difference within the Black aesthetics of which browning is firmly a part. S h S o do you think it needs the hair to also be browning then? What kind of hair do you think browning needs? R Y ou need something on your head dread I won’t lie.

Joint laughter

R A millimetre long afro ain’t gonna make it browning or not blood. S h L aughter

What has emerged from this discussion is that faking it is also about looking naturally browning anyway. T he line between ‘the fake’ and ‘the authentic’ is only finely drawn in terms of browning beauty because the browning is only brought into being through considerable labour and this is also the case in terms of skin.

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Faking it and looking naturally browning From the examples above we could say that using ceramic hair straighteners is faking it. H owever, if we put this into perspective as a race-ing stylization practice on/of the body we can see that it is one of a variety of practices which is shared across different ‘racial’ groups. C eramic straighteners are also marketed to and used by white and A sian women to my knowledge. U sing ceramic straighteners is a societally normalized beauty practice so these Black ‘mixed race’ women are not inscribing whiteness on their bodies. R ather, in stressing the need for naturalness within this straightening they are saying just the opposite. T hey are engaging in a beauty practice that many women use, Black or not. T hey fake straight hair just like many other women but naturalize it as one of a variety of hair stylizations to which they have access. A pproaching skin as a light skinned Black ‘mixed race’ woman who wants to be in the browning category means that one also has to fake it but look natural at the same time. A gain we have an approach which comes from the mainstream, that is, the use of fake tan, without denying that it is being used. In fact I comment on the natural look of S haza’s fake tan in the next extract. Fake tan, ostensibly a white product, is used by S haza to provide a veneer of browning. It is used to erase the traces of her light skin so that she can mimic the browning successfully S ha L ook how dark my feet are. R

Y eah I know.

S h Is that from your fake tan then? S ha Y eah. R Y eah look at her face. S h Very ni- I know but S haza just looks natural I mean. S ha It’s fake tan.

For H omi Bhabha (1994b, 86) mimicry within the colonial context is about a ‘desire for a reformed, recognizable O ther, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite’. T his would relate to the way in which ‘mixed race’ was viewed during slavery and colonialism’s hierarchy of beauty in which the ‘mulatto’ was the desired precisely for being almost the same but not quite white. S he was desired for her mimetic quality. A s said above this desire is still with us. H owever, mimicry in the 21st-century post-colonial context of the UK also speaks to other desires such as the disruption of the cultural, racial and historical sameness of post-colonial discourses on beauty which valorize the purity of either Black or white in their essentialist guises. T he gaze of the browning returns to displace the discipline of these discourses. T he mimicry of browning means that

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T he representation of identity and meaning is rearticulated along the axis of metonymy. As Lacan reminds us, mimicry is like camouflage, not a harmonization of repression of difference, but a form of resemblance, that differs from or defends presence by displaying it in part, metonymically … U nder cover of camouflage, mimicry ... is a part-object that radically revalues the normative knowledges of the priority of race (Bhabha 1994b, 91–2).

Postcolonial mimicry is not like mimesis, it is not a going towards the desired other. S o the browning would not go towards the desired other of white beauty. R ather, based on its Black working class Jamaican heritage it is a resemblance that challenges normative whiteness and opens up a becoming-space of Blackness. A s such browning’s mimicry rearticulates the presence of ‘race’ in terms of whiteness as its own disavowed otherness even while it seeks the camouflage of the Black same as a becoming-space. Browning doesn’t harmonize with the background of whiteness rather it comes into being as the translations of the Black beauty category are made manifest through the bodily practices of ‘brownings’, like using fake tan in order to become the right shade of Black. U sing fake tan is mimicking the behaviour of white people who want to be brown without wanting to be white. The desire is to be darker than one is, to wear a beauty camouflage in order to become a browning. In engaging in the practice of fake tanning these young women radically revalue dark skin positively. T he colonial priority of ‘race’ in which white was right, has now been subverted. Fake tanning is another aspect of the mimetic labour of browning in which one is taken into ‘the magical power of the signifier [browning] to act as if it were indeed the real, to live in a different way with the understanding that artifice is natural’ (Taussig 1993, 255). In this way mimetic labour imparts the beauty power of browning onto the bodies of the young women who use fake tan to camouflage their light skin and re-produce the browning shades of Blackness. S haza takes an all over and serious approach to the process of fake tanning, to the process of becoming browning. S he has an every other night beauty ritual– bathe, exfoliate, apply fake tan, wait for it to dry and then go to bed in loose pyjamas. S he puts fake tan everywhere including her batty (bottom). Putting it everywhere including where people who are not your intimates would not see also reinforces the idea that there is an erasure of light skin at work here. What we have in this ritual erasure is also a re-birth every other night of the browning. What is fake and what is real is brought into question because of the performativity of the very act of colouring in the body with fake tan and the erasure of lightness. A s one colours in and erases lightness one speaks in a dialogical way to a desire for a browning beauty that is called into being in the very act of fake tanning. In this dialogism one is making clear that one’s political affiliations and identity lie with Blackness and one’s aesthetic models are Black not white. T hese women challenge quite clearly any assumption that Black women want to be white. L et’s listen to S haza:

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S ha O n an evening what I do is I have my bath, exfoliate and put my fake tan on. R L aughter. S ha A nd I walk around like that. S h O h with your arms out. S ha Y eah so it dries properly. R L ike scarecrow. S ha L aughter A nd then I go to bed in loose pyjamas like you know loose silk pyjamas. R Do you put it on your batty? S ha O h yeah. R Do you? S ha I put it everywhere. I don’t put it on every night. I put it on like every other night though.

T he beauty of browning is related in the next extract to a ‘glow to the skin’ as opposed to paleness. T o achieve this glow S haza has resorted to sun-beds in the past but the fear of skin cancer has meant that for her fake tan is a much better alternative. S o ‘a glow to the skin’ is about being darker, it is not about being lighter. S he claims that other ‘mixed race’ people that she knows also use fake tan. S o this is not the practice of one woman but is widespread. Further, she would have a spray tan if she had the money. S he contextualizes her use of fake tan in the practices of others – white women use it because they want to be brown and ‘mixed race’ women use it because they want to be a bit darker. N otice here she does not equate ‘mixed race’ women’s practices with white women’s because the desire is different. T he desire is not to be brown too but to be darker. Irrespective of the prohibitive cost of the brands she uses she would not be without her fake tan. Browning beauty as represented in a glow to the skin does also come from a bottle when it is carefully applied S ha T he reason I wear fake tan in summer is because I am very pale S h Mhm S ha A nd I’d like a glow to my skin and unfortunately this British weather R Y eah S ha Isn’t very good and it isn’t very hot R Believe S ha S o therefore I have to go out and buy fake tan. N ow it’s better than using a sun-bed which I used to do because you know skin cancer R O h

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S ha A nd I have a mole on my back I don’t want it to get cancerous. I know quite a few people that are mixed race that wear fake tan. I don’t wear it so much on my face because I don’t want to get a streaky complexion but I do put it all over my body and if I did have enough money I would go for the spray tan R

Would you spray it? Dread you’re not romping

S ha I’d go for a spray tan. A lot of white girls wear it because they like to be brown and ‘mixed race’ people wear it because they like to be just a bit darker. I use Johnson’s H oliday S kin which is quite expensive. It’s almost £10 a bottle, £8 something and I also use N uA gé which is a facial and body moisturiser as well as fake tan. H owever, Johnson’s does leave quite a funny smell

It might be worth reiterating if it has not been made plain by the examples that Black women don’t want to be white, Blackness in all its shade variety is what is desired. Conclusion Browning is a text of social practice within the Black A tlantic diaspora. It is both a Black identification (Tate 2005) and the construction of a body as browning, a text to be read produced through the ‘mimetic labor’ of race-ing stylization. R aceing stylization carries within it the performativity, translation and mimicry which are a part of Black beauty. What we have in such stylization is a realization that the browning self is not clearly separable from Blackness as was slavery’s and colonialism’s ‘mulatto’ or the ‘brown’ of Jamaica’s independence. If one attends to the ‘ing’ in the word we see that it is about mimicry, it is about a becoming space in which the constant struggle is to create the stability of Black beauty as known and practiced within the instability, slippage and paradoxes of Black beauty itself. I gave a conference paper in 2007 using some of the data presented here. I recall a comment made by one of the participants which I think is worth repeating. T his was that browning seemed to be a category of fear and anxiety because of lack of affirmation. At the time I wasn’t quite sure what to make of this comment but thought about it for a while. I personally do not see any fear and anxiety in the words of the women. If anything they are very open about themselves as browning and the stylizations that they engage in to achieve beauty. T hey also do not repeat the ‘beauty comes from within’ mantra which is played out a lot in everyday beauty discourse. If the conference participant was right and there is fear and anxiety, I have to say that it is not about being excluded from whiteness as a beauty home, an identity or a political affiliation. Rather, if such fear and anxiety does exist it is about being allowed into browning, into a Blackness which has spread out in the Black A tlantic diaspora from its Jamaican Black urban working class roots. Browning, as a becoming-space, heralds a Black beauty category with many beauty models within it, creates room for previously questioned Black political allegiances and holds out the possibility of hybrid transformations of Black beauty which we will look at in the next chapter.

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C hapter 6

H ybrid Black Beauty? Introduction T his chapter tries to make sense of some of the uncertainties, unease and slippage which have been opened up. What is significant for the discussion is the ‘?’ of the title. It is significant because it questions ‘hybrid’, ‘Black’ and ‘beauty’ as well as setting up the (im)possibility of a definitive answer about the question of hybrid Black beauty itself. It leaves them undecidable because of the intervention of class, mixture, location, politics and myriad Black A tlantic diasporic understandings of what is Black and what is beautiful. What is interesting in all of this is how traces of Black anti-racist aesthetics’s and white beauty iconicity’s Black/white binary continue to haunt Black beauty definitions and recognition even within what I see as a widespread search for browning from both sides of the beauty binary. In the British context for L orraine below we are now at a point in our history when some people have changed and see Black beauty positively because they have embraced the idea of naturalness from Black anti-racist aesthetics. H owever S ome people – they’re trying to buy into like the Black that’s white – not like the real Black. I suppose like the Black – Beyoncé like how she’s got lighter. T he idea of a Black girl now is probably light skin, straight hair, contacts if you can wear them, I reckon.

T his is an interesting observation because it points to a search for browning and the use of ‘hybrid beauty practices’. I call them hybrid because for L orraine light skin, straight hair and contact lenses seem to be grafted onto the Black body as additions from ‘somewhere else’. Further, her observation highlights postcolonial beauty mimicry in terms of the impact of race-ing stylization and consumption on ‘the real Black’. It also shows that through practices on and of the body what was once considered artifice has become naturalized as part of Black beauty in some quarters. S o in the 21st century for this Black British 21-year-old student the ‘idea of a Black girl now is probably light skin, straight hair, contacts if you can wear them’. A naturalization of ‘the foreign’ and ‘the unfamiliar’ is also a part of the politics and practice of Black beauty. T his naturalization is one which we also need to take account of as we ponder the continuing place of Black anti-racist aesthetics in both Black beauty politics and stylization. L orraine’s talk also shows us that there is now a wider versioning of Black beauty than ever before seen in her terms as including light skin, contacts and straight hair.

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What is also interesting is that L orraine talks about ‘the real Black’ as opposed to ‘the idea of a Black girl now’. H er contrast between the real Black and the idea of a Black girl now is instructive. T he real relates to materiality and authenticity, a Black original that has no possibility of white within in, whilst the idea points to constructedness, desire, consumption and race-ing stylization. We know that the real Black was never fixed once and for all and has no origin. It was always shifting and varied in terms of looks and stylization practices. T here are ‘real’ and ‘imagined’ Black beauties with the imagined sitting uncomfortably it seems on top of the real which acts as template. H owever, her assertion raises several questions with which we have been pre-occupied throughout the book. For example, what could the ‘real Black’ be in the 21st century? What can Black beauty mean if we are ‘buying into the Black that’s white’? What does this ‘buying into’ imply politically, especially when it is juxtaposed with the non-buy-in to ‘the real Black’? H ow does this ‘idea of a Black girl now’ make us have to revisit ideas on/of Black beauty from the Black anti-racist tradition with which it coexists? C an we still say that beauty continues to be racialized with whiteness being iconic into the 21st century? A s A nne McC lintock (1995) shows, one of the consequences of centuries of colonial domination is that whiteness functions as both spectacle and desire in capitalist production as well as being the central organising core of E uropean imperial conquest of non-white peoples and cultures. White beauty – delineated in the example by L orraine as being straight hair, contact lenses and light skin – as capitalist commodity, can be possessed and approximated. T he word approximated is instructive as it limits the extent to which white beauty can be possessed by other bodies. T his is so as ‘race’ ensures no easy slippage between dominant and subjugated bodies. In pointing to the ‘racial’ nature of the beauty industry, Margaret H unter (2005) states that definitions of beauty and the discourse of the new multicultural global beauty serve a very powerful and exclusive ‘racial’ agenda. In her view, instead of seeing hair colouring and the use of contact lenses as ‘innocent’ they should be seen as a variety of methods to emulate the aesthetics of white women. H er point of view is based on Black anti-racist aesthetics and it is quite a commonly held one as L orraine shows. Whilst I do not want to deny what they both say, I think that we perhaps need to have a much broader, more nuanced view. We also need to wonder where this leaves women for whom these are practices of stylization and therefore normalized as Black as in the ‘looks’ of C hapter 1. A lso, where does this position Black ‘mixed race’ women for whom the focus is on being accepted as they are naturally within the boundaries of Black beauty? Further, what about the browning explored in the last chapter, the aesthetics of which are based on a Black working class originated model? T his chapter continues to tackle the question of what counts as Black beauty begun earlier in the book when I spoke about hair and what practices on and of the body mean for what can be included in the ‘Black beauty’ category. It does

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this by looking at the transformative potential of ‘en-racing’ which occurs in the moment of mimicry. In this moment of mimicry race-ing stylization practices both deny the racialized discourse of white beauty as iconic and destabilize the Black anti-racist racializing discourse on beauty. What happens in this denial and questioning is what I call ‘en-racing’. In this en-racing discourses on/of Black beauty are never replaced once and for all with a new paradigm. R ather, Black beauty is made mobile and subject to those hybrid practices that L orraine speaks about above whose looks can also be a natural part of Black bodies independent of stylization. Black beauty becomes undecidable because of the political necessity for the categories ‘race’ or ‘Black’ themselves. I want to begin to look at this undecidability first by looking at the search for browning as a supposedly Black pre-occupation. Searching for browning? I am writing this immediately after just being interviewed for ‘Woman’s H our’ on BBC R adio 4 on the topic of skin bleaching in A sian and Black communities in the UK . T his discussion made me wonder if in general there is a search for browning which is still going on and which L orraine highlights above. I wonder this not just because some Black women lighten their skins with products from, for example, the German company N ivea which brings in millions of dollars annually for E uropean and US -A merican multinationals. I also do not wonder this because Black celebrities have their photographs re-touched so that they appear to be lighter. I thought about searching for browning because looking tanned whether from the sun or from a bottle is still something that a lot of white women and Black light(er)-skinned women want to do in order to ‘look better’ and have a glow on their skin. S o much so that ‘tanorexia’ has been the topic of newspaper articles and a search for tanorexia on Google produces several results. For example, on the BBC N ews site there is the 12 May 2005 headline ‘T anorexic teenager risks cancer’. T he story was about H ayley Barlow, a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl from West Derby in L iverpool who has been using sunbeds since she was twelve and was quoted as saying ‘Being brown is very important to me. It suits me better. I just can’t imagine being white’. We could read this following Bhabha (1994a) as the stereotype requiring H ayley to identify herself in terms of what she is not, so in tanning excessively she is making her whiteness clear. H er ‘I just can’t imagine being white’ speaks to other desires though. For her it’s not about denying whiteness or leaving it behind, it is more about masking the paleness of white skin through brownness because ‘it suits me better’.

  By en-racing I mean, as I tried to show in my previous work (T ate 2005), that ‘race’ is performative. A s such it can be evoked differently and its ‘certainties’ can be disrupted through stylization and embodiment.

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C arolyn C ooper (2004) sees a disturbing trend in the C aribbean today of Black women bleaching their skin – usually their face and neck – in an attempt to approximate the ‘mulatto’ ideal and in so doing to attempt to erase racial identity. S he avers that the ‘mask of “lightness”, however dangerous in medical terms, becomes a therapeutic signifier of status in a racist society that still privileges melanin deficiency as a sign of beauty’ (Cooper 2004, 135). Cooper goes on to show though that skin bleaching is far more complicated than this in terms of how it is understood by its practitioners in her example of the skin-bleaching DJ. T his man had what she came to realize is a ‘practical sense of seasonal browning’ in which the DJ knew that being brown was not really an essential part of his identity but rather a fashion accessory that would give him more visibility in the competitive C hristmas season (C ooper 2004, 137). Bleaching although contentious is not about imitating a white ideal here but rather about presenting the original ‘browning’ as a construction in a way which is meaningful to the bleacher and which in turn makes his Blackness clear. R elating this to dancehall women in Jamaica, Bibi Bakere-Y usuf echoes my point of view in seeing skin bleaching ‘as a superficial form of styling, nothing more than an appropriative aestheticisation of a bodily form, a simple borrowing from another representational regime. In this sense, bleaching certainly has little to do with a desire for dancehall women to become that which they are miming. As a superficial form of styling, bleaching can be thought of as another form of adornment, along the same lines as wearing green or pink wigs or wearing latex batty riders’ (C ooper 2004, 139). R acialized skin though as the most visible part of who we are seen to be in a range of cultural, political and historical discourses on beauty still continues to play a very public role in the everyday lives of both Black and white women in postcolonial societies. I am not equating tanning here to the physical dangers of skin bleaching. H owever, if we are thinking about the politics of skin then we have to wonder as I have said elsewhere in the book, why some beauty practices are seen to speak more to racial identity and pathology than others. Just so that we do not problematize and pathologize Black women in terms of skin bleaching, A mina Mire (2000) also makes clear that white and A sian (Japanese, K orean, C hinese) women also bleach their skins with products from manufacturers like L ’O réal. T hese products speak of, for example, ‘a more luminous complexion’, with the promise of the effect of bleaching on beauty enhancement being contained in ‘luminous’. It makes me wonder why – apart from the health risks which I am clear must be publicized to all communities – there is such a continuing emphasis on Black women bleaching their skin as the continuation of   A mina Mire (2000) demonstrates how the chemical agents used in skin bleaching creams arrest the synthesis of melanin. T his can lead to the complete destruction of the melanocytes. T he creams themselves contain chemicals such as mercury, topical corticosteroids and are often carcinogenic. S he also speaks about the sexism and racism of the Western medical profession who tend to see skin bleaching as a minor problem of some Black women hoping to pass as white.

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‘a racist practice’? Would we also say I wonder that white women bleaching or tanning their skin was also ‘a racist practice’? Why as a matter of interest to see where this might take us, don’t we look instead to see if there is a ‘searching for browning’ that extends from the Black communities outwards to the extent that whiteness has itself been assaulted by these desires which are impossible to speak but which are made known on the skin? I have gone into detail about the origins of the category browning in the last chapter and so I won’t repeat that here. What I would merely like to remind us of instead is that like any other type of beauty it also has a long history which is embedded in our US -E uropean-C aribbean-L atin A merican habitus and made known/reinforced/negotiated/changed through our bodily practices. One thing that is significant about browning for my purposes is that it is Black beauty. First of all because the ‘one drop rule’ of slavery and the colonialist injunction that only white was white meant that one could try to pass for white at one’s peril because ‘race’ spoke and still continues to speak, volumes. Second because it comes out of a specifically Black context (Jamaica) and its struggles over the politics of ‘race’, class and culture. ‘R ace’ speaks. S o that is why, like L orraine, we continue to feel that unlike other women, Black women should not have the choice to work with different beauty paradigms to get a result which they think looks attractive. A s I wrote that sentence my thought was ‘ooh this won’t be popular, not politically, everyone will think that I am saying that Black anti-racist aesthetics have gone past their sell-by date’. I am not saying this at all. What I am saying instead is that we need to lower the border guards around Black beauty as something that we want to treasure and something that is so dear to us that we do not want to change it. T he point is that this ‘it’ has never been something solid, fixed once and for all, as said before. Further, change has been upon us for centuries as Black women through their beauty practices show us that beauty is syncretic, performative and as such open to new stylizations. T his means that new renderings of Black beauty have always been and continue to be possible. We can see some of these renderings if we look at re-touching sites on the web, for instance. T hese sites are there to sell their services so they show us ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures of their celebrity clients. O n that of GlennFeron.com we can see pictures of Mary J. Blige, E rykah Badu, T yra Banks and H alle Berry. Mary J. Blige’s picture has been lightened as has H alle Berry’s, whereas E rykah Badu’s two covers have different brown skin tones as do T yra Banks’ two magazine covers, with only the green eyes being a constant. T his then is not about white beauty as being iconic. R ather, these sites provide a good example for me of what I am trying to talk about in terms of a search for browning. T hat is a search for a beauty category which resides within Blackness and is not the poor country cousin of a white ideal. I am not, of course, saying that we are now in a situation of post-white beauty iconicity. T o do that would be to deny the effectiveness of colonial and neo-colonial power in shaping what counts as beautiful and its attendant beauty categories and regimes. What I want to do instead is to shift the focus to discourses

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on and practices of Black beauty which are not centred on becoming white but rather on being ‘browning’. L orraine mentions Beyoncé as an example of someone who has got lighter, presumably lighter than she was in her days in Destiny’s C hild. If we look at one of her recent music DVDs in which she performs ‘Beautiful L iar’ with S hakira we see something else that I find fascinating. The music begins and the mist rolls in and then, interspersed with head shots of the two (bleached) blonde women, we hear them introduce each other with ‘S hakira, S hakira’ and ‘Beyoncé, Beyoncé. At this point it is difficult to distinguish the two clearly apart from their voices. As Beyoncé begins to sing S hakira appears to the left of the screen, dressed similarly in Black with the only distinction being that her dress has no sleeves and with the same blonde, curly wind-machine blown hair and brown skin tone. T his merging of Beyoncé’s Black with S hakira’s L atina white body, occurs for some time in the DVD and is quite striking in the head to head shot. H ere both women are lying down with their curly blonde hair streaming behind and around them with a similar skin tone. T he similarity of the hair colour and texture and the skin tone enable the effect of merging and flow from one body to the other. In the dance scene which follows both wear the same outfits whilst curly blonde hair again suggests a merging whilst their words ‘S hakira, S hakira and Beyoncé, Beyoncé’ signal separation. T he camera’s movement from one face to the other and from one body to the other at different points in the DVD also encourages this flow of merging as does their synchronized dancing throughout. What is fascinating about this is that bodies can morph and extend the boundaries of Blackness in doing this. O f course, you could also read S hakira as doing the very same, that is, morphing into a Black body and widening the boundaries of L atina white beauty. T he search for browning then happens in both directions. H owever, whereas S hakira’s search for browning might be seen as being about exuding exoticism and sexiness, Beyoncé was often criticized by research participants like L orraine for ‘buying into the Black that’s white’. Would we ever say, I wonder, that S hakira was ‘buying into the white that’s Black’? Would we ever say that she was a ‘wigger’? N o we wouldn’t I suppose because it seems like too much of a contradiction for a white celebrity to do that. Further, it would provide too much of a jolt to the discourse of white beauty as hegemonic which emanates from both Blackness and whiteness. We can still say though that Beyoncé is a wannabe, that she desires whiteness. It’s interesting isn’t it when the same rules do not apply equally? S uch is the nature of the racialized beauty domination within which we still live that stylization must mean that we as Black women are whitening ourselves. We should perhaps try to get beyond just this reading to see other possibilities. L et’s take another tack on this and move to looking at what this might tell us in terms of ‘hybrid Black beauty?’. By ‘hybrid Black beauty?’, I am not just   S ee A noop N ayak’s (2003) study of young white people’s identities in the N orth of E ngland for a fuller discussion of the ‘wigger’ category.

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referring to the fusion and mixing of global multi-cultural beauty still focused on a white ideal which H unter’s (2005) critique implies. What I want to look at instead is what I began by looking at the examples above. T hat is, stylization and its possibilities. In the colonial context H omi Bhabha (1994b) sees mimicry as one of the strategies of colonial power and knowledge. T he colonizer requires that the colonized other adopts his values and norms. Mimicry is about the civilizing mission and the production of mimic men. H owever, Bhabha also speaks about another aspect of mimicry when he looks at hybridity as being a displacement of the eye of surveillance through mimicry. H e shows that there have always been reciprocities and negotiations across the colonial divide which make the relationship between colonizer and colonized complex and ruptured. T he hybrid mimicry of which Bhabha writes is a speaking back that produces something other than was entailed through colonial discourse’s construction of the other. H ere I want to read speaking back not as literally speaking but as a translation and inscription onto bodies through race-ing stylization which re-produces Black beauty as an undecidable. L ike mimicry, Derrida’s (2002b) undecidable is unsettling. It unsettles the givens of beauty oppositions because it keeps double meanings in play. It resists oppositions, here for us Black/white, Black anti-racist aesthetics/white beauty as iconic, Black as ugly/white as beautiful, without ever constituting a third term once and for all. A s beauty is made undecidable by stylization practices different meanings of Black beauty are grafted on to other meanings. T o take Derrida’s undecidable to its conclusion would be to speak of Black beauty outside of binaries as neither/ nor and simultaneously either/or. T he endless shifting between poles is halted by the body as racialized sign of otherness. T his means that racialized bodies also over-determine the possibility of translation. S o even when something other is produced through translation, as I said in the chapter on hair, the body speaks it as Black and it speaks the body as Black. Beyoncé is always open to critique because even in translation, even in flow, her body speaks. It both fixes ‘racially’ and points to difference simultaneously in beauty translations. S tuart H all (1995) sees translation as a process of cultural change in which cultural practice becomes translated, becomes different from what it once was because of the impact of new spaces and times. We can therefore see Black beauty as something that has evolved and become different from what it once was so ‘the real Black’ that L orraine speaks about above has always been in a process of change without any ‘original’. For example, ‘the Black blonde’ of which Beyoncé is currently one of the most famous exemplars has been the object of critique by respondents in my research since its ascendancy in Black style in the 1990s   A nne McC lintock (1995) critiques Bhabha’s work for its ungendered mimicry which also ignores class in its focus on ‘race’. H is mimicry is a male elite strategy which does not distinguish between colonial and anticolonial mimicry. I think that Bhabha’s linkage of mimicry to hybridity makes its anticolonial potential clear in terms of identifications, politics and ideology. It is this linkage which is the threat to colonial power.

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in Britain. T heir critique, like L orraine’s, has been focused on questioning the politics of Black blondes as they are seen to be incorporating white norms. Whilst not denying that this might be the case I also want us to look at this through Bhabha’s (1990, 210) view that … translation is also a way of imitating, but in a mischievous, displacing sense- imitating an original in such a way that the priority of the original is not reinforced but by the very fact that it can be simulated, copied, transferred, transformed, made into a simulacrum and so on: the ‘original’ is never finished or complete in itself.

‘Black blondes’ would not be reinforcing a white iconic ‘original’ but putting it into question and making it mobile through its location on the Black body. T hrough the displacement of translation we can see beauty as being a much larger language than that of white iconicity and Black anti-racist aesthetics. T ranslation always involves critique, deconstruction and reconstruction which emerge as beauty is inscribed on the body’s surface through stylization. S uch stylization runs counter to that which is expected as an answer to discursive positions of hegemonic Black beauty produced through ‘colonial discourse’. We could say that colonial discourse in this case is two-fold and encompasses the discourse on white beauty as iconic and, its binary, that of Black anti-racist aesthetics. Both of these discourses produce their own versions of hegemonic Black beauty which simultaneously speak of the impossibility of both difference from the norm and translation across beauty categories. H owever, stylization as we have seen above shows us other possibilities, as that which is seen as ‘the other’ is also appropriated and inscribed onto the surface of the body. T herefore, the mimicry of stylization is ‘at once resemblance and menace ... [the] [menace] of mimicry is its double vision which in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority’ (Bhabha 1994b, 88). S o as women like Beyoncé translate what are taken to be ‘white looks’ onto their bodies there might be some resemblance through mimesis. H owever, mimesis is not the only outcome of this translation. T here is also a questioning of white beauty as iconic alongside a critique of Black anti-racist aesthetics’s idea of ‘the real Black’. T his questioning and critique is enabled because women’s bodies point to these stylizations as Black and as normalized artifice which is recognized and valued/negated as such. T hese disruptions of discourses on Black beauty through the translation of ‘looks’ like ‘the Black blonde’ produce ‘hybrid Black beauty?’ in the moment of stylization. A s I have already said, the mimicry which I am reading here denies both the iconicity of white beauty and the ideals of Black anti-racist aesthetics as we see an en-racing in action. T his en-racing is about a search for browning perhaps as part of the global multicultural approach to beauty in some quarters. H owever,   T aussig, M. (1993) Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses.

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before we assume this focus on ‘global multicultural beauty’ to be the case we should remember, as said in the last chapter, that browning has a long history in former slave societies of the C aribbean as it does in Britain and the U nited S tates. Fanon (1967) himself reminds us of this when he says that what the Black woman wants in colonial Martinique is to have children who are light(er) skinned and straight(er) haired as a way of enabling their social mobility. Margaret H unter (2005) also reminds us of the continuation of the impact of light skin colour on social mobility in the U nited S tates today and I have no reason to believe that the UK will be any different from this, bearing in mind the similarity of the past histories of these two nations and the fact that they are both societies structured through racial dominance. Why then is there only outrage for Beyoncé if we bear in mind H unter’s (2005) observations mentioned earlier? I assume that this has to do with the point of view which goes that she has ‘whitened’ herself in line with dominant norms from her blonde weaves to her mid-brown contact lenses and her re-touched lightened skin in photo-shoots and DVDs. Maybe some might add that this has been for profit, for the crossover value that this would have rather than being ‘her true Black self’. T hat she has had crossover value is clear if we only look at her ads for L’Oréal hair products, Tommy Hilfiger’s perfume ‘True Star’, her role in 2007 as the spokesperson/spokesbody for the A rmani perfume ‘Diamonds’, her continuing fame as a singer and her place as ‘one of the world’s most beautiful women’. Being called one of the world’s most beautiful women is significant though we might question which/whose world this relates to. What this means now is that beauty has a much wider definition. One in which Black women can fit when they engage in practices of stylization which are recognized and valued in those parts of the world where the globalized beauty market originating in E uro-A merica operates. H owever, there are clearly critiques of this at the level of the everyday as T essa and Dana two Black ‘mixed race’ women make us aware as they deploy the anti-racist aesthetics approach to Black beauty in late 1990s UK . H ere they critique those women who do not use the positive Black beauty models which exist but instead are prepared to ‘slam in the green contacts’ rather than ‘look at how you are portraying yourself’. D Do you remember that movie we went to see and we spent half the movie trying to work out if the woman was meant to be a Black counsellor or what? T Y eah. D S he had blue contact lenses and a blonde weave and very light make-up on. T But it bothers me how they can go into these roles and not question you know what these people are making them out to be. Y ou’ve got to really look at you know how you’re portraying yourself. But I look around and there are a lot of positive Black images out there but they don’t get half as much coverage as the one who will be prepared to slam in the green contacts. It used to be blue but now it’s green at the moment. A nd it really annoys me. It annoys me when I go

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A s Dana and T essa make clear whatever we ourselves might feel about it politically there have always been a multitude of Black beauty models and there always will be as C raig (2006) reminds us. We do not need to keep giving one position or the other such dominance in our discussions of beauty. What we need to see instead is beauty stylization as something that women engage in with different motivations. We also need to acknowledge that the beauty of Blackness is varied and it always has been, rather than take an approach which says that there is only one authentic way to be, only ‘the real Black’. T he dangers of this position for the possibility of an inclusive Black politics will be made clearer in the next section which looks at Black ‘mixed race’ British women’s recollections of being denied a space within the Black beauty category because of the boundaries around what constitutes Black beauty in terms of skin shade and hair texture. Black ‘mixed race’ shade and hair We should remember that just because there is a search for browning this does not mean that Black ‘mixed race’ women with light(er) skin and straight(er) hair have an easy life. A s R ay says in the last chapter the browning category is also hard to fit into and those like Alicia Keys, Mariah Carey and Halle Berry fall outside of it. Being seen to be beautiful is clearly tough! It’s tougher still as I have shown in earlier work (T ate, 2005; 2007a) when the anti-racist aesthetics’ racializing norm of dark(er) skin and more afro hair is not replicated on your body for all to see. T his racializing norm counters the search for browning and therefore can be seen to be a discipline of ‘race’ which draws the boundaries of recognizable Black beauty very tightly. Black ‘mixed race’ women like T essa and Dana still feel this very clearly in their everyday lives in late 1990s Britain as they struggle to be accepted and become acceptable within these boundaries as the extracts below show. In the extract below Dana speaks about the paradox which existed in late 1990s Britain between ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ Black beauty. T essa speaks about women who use face lightening creams and straighten their hair or wear weaves so that their hair looks ‘like mine sort of thing’ in order to look artificially like her but who can’t accept that that is how she looks naturally. Dana agrees with her assessment and asserts that ‘it’d all make me more acceptable if I had a wig or if I had a weave they’d accept me much more then’. T his is an assessment with which T essa agrees T A nd yet I look at some people using face lightening creams and the hair straighteners and weaving on hair kind of like mine sort of thing and I think to myself but you’re actually making yourself artificially to look like me. So why can’t you just accept me? D S o why can’t you just accept that is how I look?

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T N aturally? D A nd it’d all make me more acceptable if I had a wig on or if I had a weave they’d accept me much more then. T Oh yeah definitely.

T hey remind us that even though there is a search for browning its accomplishment is dependent on the visibility of artifice in Black beauty stylizations. For them artifice has to be disidentified from as the necessity for naturalness continues to be at the heart of their commitment to a Black beauty and politics which is inclusive of their own embodiments. T hey present normalized ‘racializing’ Black beauty as expressed here in terms of artifice and their own natural ‘mixed race’ beauty as binaries. In doing this they do not erase the contradictory components of Black identity/anti-racist aesthetics in their reformulation of Black beauty. R ather, they keep them in view. T his reformulation serves to make Black beauty an undecidable which refuses binaries and is never settled once and for all. In such undecidability there is an ongoing everyday interaction between desire, identification and ideology (Muñoz 1999). Tessa and Dana show such a negotiation when they speak about themselves as being un-acceptable to other Black women with whom they identify in terms of political community. It is through this that their desire for inclusion within the Black beauty category becomes known. T he moment in which inclusion is claimed is the moment of mimicry which destabilizes Black beauty’s power and knowledge through its contradictions, through its speaking against the said, ‘the real Black beauty’. Below, T essa and Dana deal with the beauty contradictions that arise for them as Black ‘mixed race’ women in terms of both Black and white women’s reactions to their hair as a ‘problem’ because of its natural length and straightness. T he problem of their hair needed to be solved it seems by cutting it short or setting it alight or questioning the naturalness of its straightness. Why is it that their hair posed such a problem to both Black and white beauty that it had to be made to disappear from view? C ould it be that their hair symbolized such a contradiction to the carefully drawn boundaries of the Black and white social skin of beauty that it had to be made to vanish? T here is only so much disturbance of norms that can be endured it seems before naturalization and re-normalization must occur. What these women are arguing for is a normalization of their own natural beauty within the boundaries of Black beauty. T hey are seeking a time in which they do not have to ask the question ‘why’re they turning against me?’ T his question shows the negotiation between desire, identification and ideology of which Muñoz speaks. It also points to a need for a Black beauty community which has no boundaries or, at the very least, much more permeable ones, a community with a different poetics. A s I have said in previous work by poetics what I mean is how community means, not just what it means to its members (T ate 2007b). When I speak about a Black beauty community I am then not talking about physical boundaries. I am talking about boundaries which are circumscribed by a politics of ‘race’ naturalness/artifice which underlie inclusion in the Black beauty collective. These

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politics have attendant affects as I have described in earlier chapters on shame and melancholia which haunt the experiences of Black women in their continual re-negotiations of beauty’s (im)possibilities. T hese (im)possibilities have to be worked with and in some cases like Dana’s, survived, by cutting your hair short in the 1970s when it was posing a fire hazard! Tessa also shows that we can no longer take essentialist notions of ‘race’ for granted in terms of inclusion into the Black beauty community when she wonders why it is the case that if they can have the same length of hair as hers with extensions that they still insist that she should cut her ‘hair off’? T his question is quite pertinent for questions of Black beauty and its inclusions/ exclusions. S ince long hair can be bought from the store and is acceptable as part of Black beauty stylizations then why not that which grows out of the scalp naturally? A fter all, Black beauty as any other has to be about variety. Perhaps this is what is paradoxical about the search for browning. For some women variety is only acceptable if it is clearly about artifice. T A nd I get a lot of it from Black people as well but it’s mainly white people who tell me to cut it off because you know you look better with it short. I am like you know, I always turn round and say what is your problem with it? A nd I have a lot of Black people saying to me I must be relaxing it because it couldn’t be that straight naturally and I say well it is. A nd then you have, it’s usually the girls who’re out there with the attitude, that girl would try and set your hair on fire, you know play tricks like that. D O h I’ve had that. I had that in the seventies that’s why I cut my hair off really short because it was posing a fire hazard laughter. T Because it’s like you’re thinking what’s going on here you know? Why’re they turning against me? It’s such a problem. T hey have exactly the same length hair as me with extensions so why’re they trying to get me to cut my hair off?

Dana continues below to talk about the necessity to be recognizably someone who uses artifice in their stylizations of Black beauty in order to be accepted. S he emphasizes the fact that she went to a ‘Black women’s theatre thing’ in order to show that she includes herself within this communal identification category anyway. H owever, her colleagues’ reactions to her blow-dried hair, ‘oh look at that she’s got hair like a white woman’ left her feeling ‘bad’, like the odd one out. I remember when I did go on this Black women’s theatre thing. I blow-dried my hair and it was really long. I had this new hair cut. Jay had cut it into layers. A nd that’s how I blow-dried it out and it looked really nice. A nd when I was in this minibus there were these two women who work in my section and they were whispering to each other and saying oh look at that she’s got hair like a white woman and all that.

What Dana’s talk makes us realize is that there is affect involved in these rejections. S he wouldn’t feel several years later the impact of this rejection if it didn’t mean

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something when other Black women said that her hair looked like a white woman’s. What it means to her is exclusion from the category of Black beauty because of the shame attached to her skin and hair by Black anti-racist aesthetics. A gain we see the impact of desire, identification and ideology in making Black beauty undecidable. For her what looked really nice has been put outside the possibility of Black beauty by her colleagues. I began to talk above about the need for a different poetics of Black beauty community. I also said that it is important to not just look at what community means but also how it means to those who experience, imagine and practice it as marked by difference, as not being as certain as it once was, if it ever was indeed certain. It is this uncertainty which is productive of ‘hybrid Black beauty?’, of beauty emerging between the cracks of the racialized discourses of white beauty as iconic and ‘the real Black’ of Black anti-racist aesthetics. T his interstitial beauty of necessity has to incorporate a variety as women’s stylizations make Black beauty very mobile and undecidable as I have shown above and will again attend to below. Black beauty’s undecidability, mimicry and hybridity I am sitting in a plaza in A ndalucia in S pain in A ugust 2007 eating lunch and looking as I have looked for five years at a particular scene. In the shade of a store canopy West A frican women do canerows and synthetic hair extensions in white S panish women’s hair. T he hairdressers have placards with all of the different styles that they can do in which white women are the models. What I observe is a moment of great intimacy as S panish women and girls come into close contact with women who they might not otherwise have encountered. T his is at the core of the search for hybrid beauty, this coming closer to something other because beauty also has to do with the different and the rare. T he S panish girl who I had been watching for an hour was overjoyed with the result and rushed to her family sitting at an adjoining table to thank them for the money which she had used to achieve her new ‘look’. S he sat there looking very much at ease and herself with her new hairstyle. A lso there was no question about this hairstyle not being appropriate for a white S panish girl. Indeed, canerows and extensions seem to be very much a part of being on a beach holiday across Europe as can be confirmed if you look at the hair of women coming back from such holidays. I suppose that for some this would be a point at which to criticize the S panish girl as someone who as hegemonic, had ‘consumed the other’ by appropriating a Black hair style as hooks (1992) and N arayan (1997) might have it. My point of view is that her beauty models were the white women on the placards who showed her the possibility for a translation to something different through the stylization possibilities offered by West A frican women who make their living by plaiting in this small seaside town. S uch translations can change from week to week or remain constant for some time without any question that this woman sees herself as white and S panish. It is not clear to me without asking these women if they know that

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the styles that they are wearing are Black as such notwithstanding the spread of hiphop and rap style through MT V and other music channels, S alma H ayak’s fullhead canerow in the Spanish language film La Gran Vida and the kudos attached to Black urban culture. Is the S panish girl’s canerow still Black or is it a white style? A s I said in C hapter 2 hair points to the body as the body points to hair and in her stylization she extends the boundaries of white beauty by using something which is other. T his other to some extent becomes the same through normalization so that it is one of the numerous possibilities of white stylization. T he continuing process of expanding-the-norms-and-normalization-of-the-strange is what leads to Black beauty’s undecidability and the continuing necessity to examine ‘hybrid Black beauty?’ I would like to go back to what I said about hair as object in C hapter 2. T here I said that as an object it can be used to extend the self. T his extension I should now say involves mimicry. It is not mimesis as it is not about a striving to become the other (T aussig, 1993). R ather, the young S panish woman’s canerow signals a change in S panish beauty ideals, a disruption of what is possible and its replacement by something new. This disruption is enabled by the traffic in styles globally and also by the transfer of knowledge and technology through the work of her stylist. It is this disruption which extends the boundaries of white S panish beauty and so it is here that ‘hybrid Black beauty?’ arises. It is here that we then see a white search for browning through canerows. Following R obert Y oung’s (1995) take on ‘culture’, when we think about Black beauty we need to see it as a cultural and stylization category which can never be essentialist even when we presume the contrary because Black beauty is always a dialectical process. A s such Black beauty both inscribes and expels its own alterity as it continually reforms itself around conflictual divisions. Black beauty has its own hybridized economy which is never at ease with itself. It is always in search of the different. T he different in turn becomes the naturalized strange, which in turn becomes normalized as part of the same. A s such, canerows as part of white S panish beauty maps the trace of Black beauty’s search for browning on these women’s bodies. T he examples looked at above also speak to disruptions and unease because of difference. T here is unease on the part of the viewer and also on the part of those being subject to the disapproving gaze, as their very embodiment is disturbing. H ybridity is about unexpectedness, a break from the norm, a normalization of the strange enabled by stylization’s possibilities. I am not here then seeing hybridity as a negotiation of identity positionings as I have in my previous work (T ate 2005). N or am I talking here about hybrid Black beauty as creolization which is another versioning of hybridity within C ultural S tudies. T hat is, I am not speaking about a fusion, the creation of new forms, which can then be compared with the old forms of which they are partly made up (Y oung 1995). R ather, what I mean here is that ‘hybrid Black beauty?’ does not produce new forms once and for all but is something much closer to H omi Bhabha’s (1990) restless, interstitial hybridity which is a ‘permanent revolution of forms’ (Y oung, 1995, 25). ‘H ybrid Black beauty?’ works to transform difference into sameness and sameness into

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difference without any possibility for us to say with any degree of certainty that that was really once what Black beauty was. T his is the challenge posed by raceing stylization to white beauty as iconic and Black anti-racist aesthetics’s centuries old idea that to change our natural beauty means that we have internalized racism and we despise ourselves. It is a challenge that is produced at every moment that we do something as everyday as having our hair styled and through this practice make Black beauty mobile. T hrough this mobility ‘Black beauty’ becomes something else. It becomes a ‘cipher space’ (K lor de A lva 2000, 175). T hat is, a space which hides the secrets of identity while also providing the clues to its discovery. It is an empty place holder which can encompass almost any stylization. Almost needs to be emphasized here because of the impact of racialization on what can fill the empty space, as markers of sameness and difference, fixity and fluidity combine to produce the effect of Black beauty. Black beauty can only be articulated as a set of representations through the use of simulacra producing technologies like weaves, extensions, contact lenses, straightening, canerowing. It is these simulacra which fill the cipher space, the empty place holder, ‘Black beauty’. In saying that Black beauty is a cipher space I do not wish to empty it of all politics or identificatory potential. What I want to do instead is merely to indicate that whilst the governmentality of discourses keeps Black beauty’s divisions in play we are distracted from seeing it for what it really is: a fetish. Black beauty as fetish In some of my previous work on Black community I speak of it as a fetish (T ate 2007b), following Bhabha (1994a). I want to revisit some of my ideas there as it is instructive for thinking through why we continue to be so obsessed with keeping the boundaries of Black beauty firm. We continue to do this even when faced with the fact of Black beauty’s undecidability and translatability. T he cultural critic, H omi Bhabha (1994a, 74), speaks of fetishism as being ‘always a “play” or vacillation between the archaic affirmation of wholeness/similarity […] and the anxiety associated with lack and difference’. We could read these very clearly in the extracts from the women above. For Lorraine, it is her affirmation of a real Black beauty as opposed to a fake Black beauty that is white. T his is also shared by Tessa and Dana in their first extract when they wonder if these women don’t realize what they are portraying. Further, for T essa and Dana themselves, there is a need to establish their place within Black beauty. T his is a political need which relates to being part of a Black community, part of Black beauty, even within the difference spoken by their embodiment as the other from the racialized Black beauty norm which constantly disavows their wholeness/similarity. We struggle to keep the boundaries of Black beauty firm because as fetish it ‘gives access to an “identity” which is predicated as much on mastery and pleasure as it is on anxiety and defence … the scene of fetishism is also the scene of the

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reactivation and repetition of a primal fantasy – the subject’s desire for a pure origin that is always threatened by division for the subject must be [‘raced’ to be en-‘raced’], to be spoken’ (Bhabha 1994a, 75). A ccess to Black beauty is also about access to Black identification and a Black Atlantic diasporic community. T herefore, what we do to be beautiful continues to be seen as extremely political to the extent that we are under constant surveillance from others and ourselves. Black beauty continues to exude its own governmentality even though it is a site of both fixity and fantasy: a fetish. The continuing pervasive power of Black beauty as a fetish lies in it being a tantalising form of knowledge and possibilities. T his is the case as it is a form of knowledge which allows the possibility of having two contradictory beliefs: ‘one that allows the myths of origins, the other that articulates difference and division’ (Bhabha 1994a, 80). A s such Black beauty stylizations do not mean that one disavows one’s anti-racist politics or one’s Black identity but that these allow difference and division within the continuing necessity for belonging to Black community which results from racialization. It is this necessity for community in difference present in the talk from T essa and Dana, which is called into being by the words ‘Beyoncé Beyoncé’ in the song ‘Beautiful L iar’ and which is highlighted by L orraine. Bhabha’s insistence on fantasy as part of the fetish reminds us of what he also said about simulacra as part of translation. So while we can perhaps have the fixity of ‘race’ called up by the words ‘Black’ or ‘white’ we also have the fantasy produced by stylization’s simulacra as beauty continues to be translated across racial lines. S uch translation is also now increasingly being made possible through aesthetic surgery. Aesthetic surgery as Black problem and problematization A comment from R ay makes us see the contemporary relevance of aesthetic surgery for Black beauty: Y eah look at L il’ K im. I don’t know. S he used to be really beautiful but now she’s spoiled herself with having all that shit she’s done to herself. S he has had her breasts done, a nose job and now cheek implants or something. I didn’t even know you could get cheek implants.

H er words show us the fetish that is Black beauty because L il’ K im as really beautiful before aesthetic surgery is about natural Black beauty which allows for the myth of origin, whereas her surgery speaks the difference and division within Black beauty itself. R ay also speaks the face and breasts as discursive sites which have been constituted in culturally specific ways. My intention is not to condemn or condone L il’ K im or the aesthetics surgery industry. I want instead to look at the assumptions inherent in attempts to understand the truth of L il’ K im’s beauty and  

Bhabha’s original reads ‘must be gendered to be engendered’.

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its imbrication with the white other. T his may help us to see how Blackness still operates with exclusionary categories even when we are aware of our variety. Black anti-racist aesthetics is a polemics which is not interested in recognizing Black women as subjects with a right to speak and act but seeks to silence women with the charge of ‘E urocentrism’, ‘psychic damage’ and ‘white wannabe’. In waging such a war against alterity, Black anti-racist aesthetics and white beauty iconicity, reaffirm their position as moral guardians of the Black social skin. They do this through inscribing ‘abject’ on the body of the silenced other which at once also becomes absolutely knowable and a threat which is demonized. I do not see L il’ K im’s face and breasts as a confession of a damaged psyche but I am trying to problematize how they have been constructed as problems for the Black social skin. For Foucault problematization should not be considered as A doctrine, nor even as a permanent body of knowledge that is accumulating; it has to be conceived as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits imposed on us and an experiment with going beyond them (Foucault 1997, 319).

U nlike the ethics of Black anti-racist aesthetics and white beauty iconicity which would see Lil’ Kim as a problem through their definitive codes and conventions on Black beauty, problematization means that we should be open to alterity. A s agent, L il’ K im could also be seen to be involved in an analysis of the limits imposed on her and going beyond these in a society in which ‘race’, skin colour, facial features and hair texture matter for social status and mobility which H unter (2005) states is the case for the US . H er body changes are at once a questioning of Black and white politics as ontology, judgement, knowledge, the regulation of difference, the promotion of some values and identities over others and the institutional practices that uphold these. Perhaps this is what makes L il’ K im so unsettling. L il’ K im’s changes though much maligned in community and online have been openly spoken about by her. S he is quoted by Bruce Banter as saying, ‘I felt [surgery] would make me have more fun with my photoshoots and enhance my look a bit. H is comment in turn is ‘it’s sad that she believes changing her nose, lip jobs, boob jobs, skin lightening and other changes will make her “more fun and enhance her” because that feeling should come from within. K im doesn’t look the same’. I have already dealt with beauty comes from within as a normalizing strategy in C hapter 1 so won’t look at it here. What is interesting about what L il’ K im says is that women who have aesthetic surgery do talk about ‘enhancing’ themselves as does the aesthetics surgery industry (H unter 2005). L il’ K im shows   Quoted in N . S ullivan, ‘It’s as plain as the nose on his face: Michael Jackson, modificatory practices and the question of ethics’.  S ee, http://www.playahata.com.

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that it is about ‘looks’ in her Queen Bitch DVD where the series of pictures show her changes as she has her breasts, nose, lips and cheeks done, with accompanying changes of hair. S he herself feels no shame about these procedures but rather is dismayed by people’s reactions. S he is quoted as saying, ‘I don’t understand it. Is it because I’m a black girl from the hood that I get more criticism for it? I say you only live once, so whatever you want to do just do it without offending anybody’. S he hits on two things which are relevant for the discussion. A s a former working class ‘hood’ girl who has made good, she gets criticism. T his could be because she had been supposed to be authentic, original and ‘truly Black’ given these credentials. She also speaks about the fine line that she, as a consumer of aesthetic surgery, has to tread between doing what you want and offending others. It is interesting that offence is caused by what you do with your body as a Black woman and you can be called to account as ‘race’ and class traitor in a way which it seems no-one else is. T he offence is caused because of Black antiracist aesthetics’s/white beauty iconicity’s idea that any change is pathological and means that your Black identity and politics are questionable. S o whatever changes Black women make to their bodies in terms of aesthetic enhancement is an affront to the Black/white social and political skin in the Black A tlantic diaspora. It is not about individual enhancement as in the case of Jordan, but Black communal shame and denunciation. L il’ K im has been seen to be becoming a ‘more doll-like E uropean standard after succumbing to a white supremacy dynamic’.10 S he was even spoken about in a 28 May 2008 item following her cheek implants, breast enhancement, nose jobs, browlift as looking like ‘a cat’.11 Y ou might say, of course, that I am making too much of the negative comments which she has received and I am not saying that she should have aesthetic surgery without comments from us as someone in the public eye. What I am saying is that when white women have these procedures they are not seen as ‘race’ traitors but rather as people trying different looks, to enhance their white beauty. White beauty can develop in any direction that race-ing technology can take it, whereas Black women are simply criticized. Is this where Black beauty melancholia and shame have taken us? T o the point of barring any change from a putative original? If we already know that Black beauty is multiple, is Black beauties, then why are we so insistent that L il’ K im is approximating a E uropean standard? I cannot say what motivates her or what she is trying to achieve apart from what I read in the media which everyone else also knows. What I can say though is that in her 28 May 2008 picture at the premiere of Sex and the City in N ew Y ork she still looked Black though not the same L il’ K im that she looked in 2000.12 S he has shown us the potential of aesthetic surgery to change  S ee . 10 S ee . 11 S ee . 12 S ee .

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your looks so that you are not the same as you once were whilst keeping ‘race’ alive on her body itself through the acknowledged fakeness of its enhancement. H aving this view of aesthetic surgery removes me from that of K athy Davis (2003) who says that women try to achieve normal bodies through aesthetic surgery. A chieving normality removes the psychic pain which they feel (Davis 1995) because their defective bodies are ‘fixed’. Perhaps Lil’ Kim’s transformations are motivated by psychic pain. H owever, there is not anything ‘normal’ about L il’ K im as she is at pains to make sure we know. S he is an active beauty maker and seeker who, in this process of change brought about by aesthetic surgery, is also creating distinction. S he is constructing her body’s cultural capital through her spending power. T his removes her from where she started as a Black girl from the ‘hood’ but the value she is adding to her body through her increased economic power is only valued by some. L il’ K im’s aesthetic surgery could have equally been a means to enhance status, economic rewards or cross over value in the H ip H op business. S he might not be at all engaged in producing the E uropean doll image that she has been accused of because this is to assert that she is creating a normalized body through aesthetic surgery which is a position adopted by feminists (H olliday and S anchez T aylor 2006). Indeed, K athy Davis (2003a, b) is of the opinion that there is one ideal which is a white Western model which becomes the norm for everyone. Margaret H unter (2005) also believes that if you choose aesthetic surgery you want to be the same as everyone and as the ideal is white then that is what you are aiming to become. R uth H olliday and Jacqueline S anchez T aylor (2006, 188–9) argue, however, that ‘aesthetic surgery to reduce psychological pain is likely to produce a normalized body whilst surgery as consumption might instead produce a proliferation of difference’. T his proliferation of difference is shown in the Queen Bitch DVD which shows L il’ K im as an agent who is consuming aesthetic surgery. Indeed, L il’ K im talks about what she has been doing as ‘enhancement’ and ‘enhancement does not suggest the transformation of the body, rather, it suggests a working “with” the body’ (H olliday and S anchez T aylor 2006, 189). L il’ K im is involved in reflexive body work and knows full well that her ‘race’ cannot be left behind, nor her community abandoned through her body shape, face and colour shifting. It seems to me that what she is doing, if anything, is buying into the racial ‘mixing’, the search for browning which is a part of our Black A tlantic diasporic world rather than into whiteness, which is simply unattainable. Perhaps what we see her engaged in is a struggle with beauty post-Black anti-racist aesthetics in which the ‘post’ is about attitude (H olliday and S anchez T aylor 2006) rather than only issues of politics. S he has said what that attitude is. It is about doing what you like without offending anyone. I also think that attitude is important because her ‘bad gyal’ rapper attitude foregrounds agency in the face of ‘hood’ politics, violence and misogyny. H er post-Black anti-racist aesthetics attitude in her turn to aesthetic surgery and away from the fetishized ‘natural Black beauty’ signifies beauty agency and autonomy.

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N owhere is this more clearly stated that in L il’ K im’s selling of herself as a sex symbol, most markedly through her breast augmentation which hints at a hypersexuality. T his body which is both classed (working class originally) and ‘raced’ (Black) has been unfavourably viewed from the position of middle class ideals of respectability from both Black and white communities (H olliday and S anchez T aylor 2006). We should perhaps see L il’ K im as being upfront in the creation of a hypersexualized Black woman’s body. S he is spewing the discourse straight back at us to show that she is not ‘passive but active and desiring (not just desirable)’ (H olliday and S anchez T aylor 2006, 191), yet another reason why she has shaken respectability to its core. Part of being a natural beautiful Black woman is being demure and passive. L il’ K im asserts her location as an active maker of the body and positioner of the beauty gaze at every turn. A s a career woman her sexually marked body is a part of her ‘bad gyal’ glamour in an industry which valorizes ‘bling’ culture. A fter all when you have all the bling why not make the body blinging as well? If what is desired in the Black A tlantic diaspora is browning then L il’ K im’s aesthetic surgery should not be so surprising. Indeed, H unter (2005) states that more A frican A mericans than ever before are having aesthetic surgery and one of the most common procedures is the nose job. Drawing on K athyrn Pauly Morgan’s (1998) analysis, H unter makes the case that cosmetic surgery is not about free choice but a colonization of the body by the coercive force to become more beautiful. T his force in the US is about having procedures which move away from enhancing ‘A frican, Indian or A sian ethnic features and instead toward minimizing them’ (H unter 2005, 59). I cannot deny the minimizing element here, especially if we look at L aT oya and Janet Jackson, because that is the nature of the aesthetics and technology of aesthetic surgery in which idealized white features are regarded as superior. H owever, I merely want to ask ‘what are A frican ethnic features?’ I ask this question because across the Black A tlantic diaspora we have many features so which do we see as more A frican than others? We all know what she means, of course, we all share the same stock of beauty knowledge. H owever, again we are faced with some putative original A frican ethnic features of the Black anti-racist and white beauty iconicity polemic which denies the existence of variation in the Black A tlantic diaspora. In this denial these other bodies are marked as problems to be silenced and removed from Black beauty’s parameters. S ome of this silencing is achieved through H unter’s (2005, 63) 21st-century Black feminist anti-racist aesthetics approach as she states: It would be condescending and insulting to suggest that all people of colour who choose to purchase cosmetic surgery are doing so because they want to be white, but it is not egregious to suggest that the choices people make about cosmetic surgery are strongly influenced by our cultural norms of beauty, all of which are white because we live in a context of white racism.

T his statement is also something that I can only partially agree with. T he reason for this is that I cannot agree that all of our cultural norms of beauty are white.

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T hat would be to reproduce Black women as cultural dupes and go counter to what I have been arguing throughout this book. We do live in a context of white racism so it is clear as I said earlier that aesthetic surgery technologies and aesthetics will reproduce what is seen to be idealized whiteness on Black bodies. T he point is that this does not just naturally belong to white bodies in the Black A tlantic diaspora but to Black bodies as well, so this binary is itself already troubled. My aim in this chapter has not been to deracinate the ideology of beauty by juxtaposing Black and white women’s skin practices, or talking about L il’ K im as problematizing Black beauty ideology through her attitude of body enhancement which seeks to go beyond the limits imposed on her, or by looking at S hakira and Beyoncé morphing into each other, or the S panish girl’s canerows. I am not participating in a colour blind discourse on beauty, ‘race’ and domination and in that process evading discussions of white privilege. O n the contrary, what I have shown throughout the book is that whatever we do on the body can be done without loosing our racial status as Black. L il’ K im is still a Black woman, though one with enough money to enhance her looks. If this ‘enhancement’ is truly in the direction of ‘A nglo physical features’ as H unter (2005, 67) claims then I must agree with her assertion that: Individually, cosmetic surgery does allow for some escape of racial penalties associated with discrimination, but in the long run, cosmetic surgery just enables a system crippled from racism and dysfunction to remain alive a little longer. If worth and humanity continue to be based on A nglo conformity, then the larger social structures of racism that denigrate black and brown culture and aesthetics will never be dismantled.

T he task of dismantling the larger structures of racism which denigrate Black and brown culture and aesthetics makes us notice that ‘hybrid Black beauty?’ is about a struggle with Black/white beauty polemics as it attempts to make other aesthetics visible through problematizing old certainties. Conclusion I started with several questions in the beginning of this chapter which were stimulated by L orraine’s words and I would like to return to them now. It is clear that beauty still continues to be racialized into the 21st century because of the hold of the two master narratives ‘Black’ and ‘white’ on the fantasy of beauty possibilities. What I would argue is much less certain is that white beauty still continues to be iconic for Black women. A s I argued above, the multiplicity of race-ing stylization possibilities which exist for Black women and which have been built up over centuries and embedded in our habitus means that what is iconic is Black beauty. It is there in Black beauty where our beauty models are located both representationally and ideologically and it is there where our beauty identifications

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reside. The traffic of discourses and signs of Black beauty which are naturalized, even if only momentarily, on the white body also leads us to wonder about what it is that is iconic about white beauty anymore? S o, perhaps the question I started with of what could be the ‘real Black’ now, should be rephrased to say what do we mean when we talk about ‘Black’ and ‘white’ beauty? T he question needs to be rephrased because of the permeability of boundaries which I have shown to exist between the two categories and the fact that Black beauty has always been mobile as indeed, has white beauty. Black beauty’s mobility means that we also need to question the common critique that we make that women are ‘buying into the Black that’s white’. We need to do this because if Black beauty is so clearly about multiplicity and the hybridity produced by stylization’s many possibilities then how is it possible anymore to decide the Black/white of Black beauty? We can no longer say with any certainty that someone is buying into the ‘real Black’ based solely on their stylization. T he surface of the skin is not a reliable indicator of one’s politics. The ‘idea of a Black girl now’ has never been a site of fixity either and this has been the case for centuries. Black anti-racist aesthetics needs to rethink some of its precepts in order to make sense in the 21st century and to be a location of the possibility for the continuation of Black politics. Black beauty should stop being fractured by its ‘browning’ exclusions because of its insistence on a putative ‘the real Black’. O n the other hand we should also remember that browning as a Black aesthetic is not the necessary ground for Black anti-racist politics. Only ‘Black’ can provide that as a site of affirmation and radical politics. A traffic in Black ‘looks’ means that we have to look again at what we once might have held dear as ‘hybrid Black beauty?’ makes its way in the world. H erein lays the challenge of developing an inclusive Black feminist anti-racist politics which is the focus of the conclusion.

C hapter 7

C onclusion: Is it all S tylization and Is T here a N eed for Black Beauty C itizenship?

Introduction I have been arguing throughout for beauty equity within an identity politics which recognizes that ‘race’, class, gender, age and sexuality are indispensable in transforming the meaning of Black beauty. I have developed a Black beauty where new forms of subjectivity are produced which contest normative systems that deny agency. I have insisted on inclusion rather than exclusion from Black collectivity. A n inclusive Black beauty across the Black A tlantic diaspora entails sustaining an identificatory process that resists the hegemonic discourses on beauty and leaves space open for multiple experiences and stylizations of beautiful Black bodies. This means that we have to engage in a disidentification from these discourses in order to decentre Black beauty so that other Black beauties can be recognized. N otice that ‘Black’ is still central as 21st century ‘race’ consciousness forms the basis of this disidentification across the Black Atlantic diaspora structure of feeling. A 21st century ‘race’ consciousness does not imply we are now postthe necessity for ‘race’. L ike S uki A li (2003) I believe we should free ourselves from the bonds of raciology and compulsory raciality. H owever, we still need narratives of origination and authentication (Y oung 2000) whilst also needing to focus on the Black beauties that are performatively produced in the inscription of difference from Black/white unitary discourses on Black beauty. T hese Black beauties reconceptualize Blackness and decentre racial essentialisms. What has been underscored so far is that stylization is the arena in which contemporary ideas of ‘race’ intersect with consumption and popular culture to produce Black beauties. A s we have seen throughout the book Black beauty stylizations both challenge and reproduce dominant beauty ideals. T hey are also created and recreated within dynamic Black A tlantic networks of philosophy and practice. T his is why it is important to talk about ‘what is Black’ at the end of this book. I also need to do this because it has been the undifferentiated preface for all of the discussion in the book so far. It has been used as an identification space holder for everyone, irrespective of their personal politics and the intersectional differences produced by gender, sexuality, class and age, for example. It has been used to implicate everyone in the Black A tlantic diaspora irrespective of difference, in other words. T his can make

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for a feeling of unease for us especially if we remember my particular location and the impact of Jamaican and A frican A merican popular culture within the diaspora on ideas of Black unity. Just to be clear, I am not assuming that there is a sameness of Black beauty identities as practices are rooted in different contexts. I also need to turn again to look at Black because I want to say something about the necessity for commonality in difference and draw out some thoughts on the particular Black feminist anti-racist lens on beauty from which this book emerges. In other words I want to draw out a model for a Black feminist anti-racist approach to Black beauty citizenship in the 21st century. First, just what has been the ‘Black’ under discussion? Coming to terms I do not want to repeat S tuart H all (1996b) or to start with Paul Gilroy’s (2004) thoughts. R ather, I want to get to grips with just what is the Black body that has been under discussion. When I say Black here like the research participants who also use this term, I mean ‘A frican diasporic’. Why then didn’t I merely use this from the beginning and save any possibility of a terminological muddle? I use ‘Black’ because it relates to a particular history of political struggles both inside and outside of Black communities around naming and who can qualify as ‘Black’ or ‘A frican diasporic’. What is interesting is how such a broad term as ‘A frican diasporic’ can be so narrow and how a narrow term like ‘Black’ can be so wide in terms of their constituencies. I showed this earlier in the book through sharing my experience of being told ‘I don’t have Black hair, I have A frican hair’, by someone who had listened to my talk. A s we know because of slavery’s ‘one drop rule’ and the binaries Black/ white on which UK -N orth A merican, L atin A merican and C aribbean societies are structured, Black has had to be varied, expansive and capable of being a site of identification even given ‘mixing’. Black developed in a specific context over perhaps 600 years in the imaginary of former colonized/colonizer societies and their metropoles since S panish exploration of the West A frican coast and slavery. If we take the A nglophone C aribbean-UK connection as an example ‘Black’ was also taken up in anti-colonial movements, Black liberation struggles postindependence and continued into the 1970s to the 1990s Black anti-racist struggles in the UK . When I say Black, I am not denying A frican diasporic roots/routes and the continuing importance of having A frica in our imaginings and narrativizations of ourselves and communities. R ather what I am doing is pointing to the necessity to think how local politics can inflect words, can texture their meanings in very specific ways. So when I talk about Black beauty, I mean a beauty which shares in this ‘heritage’ of Black itself. A beauty developed within the power/knowledge factories of E urope, its ex-colonies in N orth A merica, L atin A merica and the Caribbean, in very specific ways, with each location being differently nuanced in

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terms of meaning but within which the compelling binary was Black/white and dominance was based on colour. If we look from Brazil to the UK , to France, to the US , to Jamaica we can see that Black beauty is very much linked to their national contexts even though the technologies of stylization, of hair and makeup for example, are shared. S o, Iman, A lek Wek, Jourdan Dunn, N aomi C ampbell and Z ahra R edwood would have appeal in these contexts as beautiful women, as would Vanessa Williams, C indy L ou Breakespeare, A licia K eys, H alle Berry and Mariah C arey. T heir appeal exists because of the malleability of ‘Black’ itself and the (im)possibility of producing an ideal which is iconic across all contexts. T he only shared beauty value across all these contexts is that the person must look black. T hat Blackness must be performed or inscribed on the body in some way. A n example of this is the Ilê A yê approach to Black stylization and its accompanying beauty politics in the carnival in Brazil. A s said before this was part of a move to an A fro-aesthetics and antiracist political activism which became visible in the 1970s. A ccording to Patricia Pinho (2006) the phrase ‘tornar-se-negro’ (to become Black) in Brazil is about the need to gain awareness of one’s Black identity by being proud of A frican heritage. S he sees the creation of an A fro-aesthetics in Brazil and in other Black A tlantic diaspora communities as being a major component of the movement in which Blacks took control of the production of Blackness (Pinho 2006). T here are different beauty models which have emerged within the Black A tlantic diaspora, some of which have been in response to white iconic beauty. T hese Black originated counter discourses became political locations of new narrativizations of beauty’s identifications and belongings. A part of this narrativization is the reiteration that Blackness is produced and inscribed on the body through stylization. T his making of Blackness leads to the instability of more essentialist ideas of authentic Black beauty. T here are Black looks as wide as the women mentioned earlier which struggle politically to be contained in the term ‘African diasporic’ but which find a home in ‘Black’. A s all other beauties, Black beauty in all its varieties is not something which exists independently from a cultural context. Its value and what is valued as beautiful are relational, exist within a socio-cultural classification system and are dependent on who is doing the gazing. T he perfect beauty of whatever shades and hair textures is always defined within our cultural understandings. Black beauty is embedded within power knowledge matrices that have been centuries in their formation. A s we have seen this is played out in Black politics and white aesthetics by elevating some and excluding others. What Black anti-racist aesthetics has done is successfully create Black beauty and erase its dominant negative images through   S he is a seventeen-year-old model who was discovered coming out of a West London Primark store in 2007. She was the first Black model on the Prada catwalk after N aomi C ampbell 15 years ago (S ource: The Voice 3–9 March 2008).   She is the first Miss Jamaica beauty queen to be dreadlocked.

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the analysis of the link between beauty/ugliness and Black disempowerment. It has done this so successfully that Black anti-racist tenets on naturalness and valorization of dark skin, ‘more A frican’ facial features and hair texture are still with us in the 21st century. T he task is to keep this alive alongside a widening of Black anti-racist aesthetics parameters to include those embodied as other. T o do this would continue the social transformation which was so powerful in the twentieth century and further liberate Black women’s bodies from the expectations imposed on them by such parameters. What would again be produced in this aesthetics is a continuation of what was done earlier. T hat is, the production of new representations of Blackness, a maintenance of pride in Black beauty and a denial of the iconicity of white beauty. L ike the Black blonde, these representations are Black A tlantic diaspora derived with specific historical trajectories and affect attached to them. This means that room must be allowed within Black community for embodied dissent/difference from these representations or valorization of embodied sameness to them without this meaning that your politics are questionable. We need to stop limiting ourselves to binary oppositions of white wannabes/radical Black based solely on stylizations. We need to see where stylization leads in the production of Black beauty. A s tradition, stylization is about work and invention. H airstyles from afros to dreadlocks to canerows to ceramic straightener worked on hair enable us to produce Blackness. This means that stylization possibilities speak affirmation of autonomy and subjectivity within Black politics which should continue to be the case into the 21st century. We should never again feel that we should be as we are supposed to be, that we have pre-destined essential identities with their accompanying bodily and cultural practices to which we have been consigned. What we lose by using Black is what we have always known anyway. It could be said that as we use Black we still reflect the dichotomization of ‘race’ which exists in the E urope-N orth A merica-L atin A merica-C aribbean nexus rather than bringing it into question. If we follow Paul Gilroy’s (1993, 1997) idea of diaspora as dynamic circuitries of communication and interaction, ‘real’, virtual and ‘imagined’, we can see that the certainties of ‘race’ are already under erasure. T raditional and newly emerging Black beauty discourses and their accompanying beauty stylizations have done and will continue to do their rhizomatic work in the Black A tlantic diaspora to put ‘race’ certainties into question. S aying ‘Black beauty’ opens a space for discussion of beauty as racialized. It makes us notice that beauty’s performativity is related to all bodies and that beauty is not just about a preference for whiteness. Beauty is also about preference for Black looks. S o, for example, as I have argued earlier in the book, if women straighten their hair their stylization is not ruled by whiteness, but rather by an ideal of what it means to look Black (C raig 2006; Figueiredo 2003; Pinho 2006; R ooks 2000). What does this mean for dominant ideals?

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Dominant ideals? What I have been saying throughout the book is that aesthetic criteria are located in community. Further, the development of shared discourses of Black beauty value happens within community. We need to ask: ‘whose community; how would it be constituted; would it be fixed or mobile; how would its dominant ideals on Black beauty position us as subjects; how can we invigorate discourses of beauty value based on stylization?’ E veryday life practices are replete with complex cultural meanings which can either reinforce dominant ideologies of Black beauty or resist them. S uch practices help us to see that there is a dialogical relationship between imagined community identifications and daily stylization practices and that the production of Black beauty value is not free-floating but based in power structures. T his is the case because this relationship involves an addressivity in which we are spoken to by discourses on community, identification and belonging and answer back to them or contest them producing other Black beauty values. ‘Women negotiate a sense of self through beauty work and in relation to beauty standards, but they do so as socially located women positioning themselves in relation to socially located beauty standards’ (C raig 2006,166). T here have always been crossings between Black and white beauty ideals as well as deep divergences and this underlies an understanding of Black beauty as hybrid. T his mixedness of Black beauty presents a clear challenge to the mythic structure of the dominant ideals. I have maintained throughout this book and hold in common with C raig (2006), Mercer (1994), C ooper (2004) and Pinho (2006), that the beauty which is (re)created through stylization is a Black beauty based on Black A tlantic diasporic beauty models. What is not being created anywhere are ‘mimic white women’ in Black skins. I am restating this because I think that to keep that fiction going into the 21st century is to continue to centre white beauty as iconic. O f course, one can always continue to do this but that would be to deny that white beauty is also itself ruptured by ‘race’, class, sexuality, age, for example, and contestation over ‘white’ itself. S o like Black beauty it is hard to say that white beauty is iconic. Maxine L eeds C raig (2006) sees beauty as a gendered, racialized and contested symbolic resource. I would also like to add sexuality, age and disability into this list. A s beauty is contested there are multiple beauty models available. T heir use allows us to look at local power relations and their penalties or pleasures (C raig 2006). Beauty, we must remember, as well as being oppressive can also equally be a vehicle for gendered agency through stylization practices. A t the level of the mundane and the everyday, for Michel de C erteau (1988) tactics are the points and moments of resistance used by the powerless to combat   S ee Bakhtin, M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination, Pearce, L . (1994) Reading Dialogics and T ate, S . (2005) Black Skins, Black Masks on addressivity.   S ee for example, C andelario (2000) ‘H air raceing: Dominican beauty culture and identity production’, for a discussion of blanqueamiento, H ispanization and mixed looks. S ee also C aldwell (2007) for a similar discussion focused on Brazil.

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their subjection. I am not saying that women are powerless but that socially located beauty standards as myriad points and moments are (re)productive of Black beauty cultures and subjectivities within spaces, from the city to the domestic. Within these spaces even that of the domestic and the psychic, Black women struggle with socially located beauty standards structured by amongst other things, ‘race’, class, sexuality, politics, as they do the work of beautification. What the book has shown is that instead of one beauty standard there are several which have different meanings and implications for women. For C raig (2006, 167) ‘standards of beauty circulating within non-white communities have been neither monolithic nor identical with dominant standards. T hey have taken shape in dialogue with dominant standards, challenging some aspects of dominant ideals and incorporating others’. When I say dominant here I of course am not just speaking of the white ideal but also the ideal which emerges from Black anti-racist aesthetics as well. T he complex interaction over centuries between these ideals and their multiple incorporations has been well documented in the work of N oliwe R ooks (1996) and C raig (2006), for example and this book has shown that this interaction still continues to be the case. Black beauty ideals hold within them both performativity and hybridity as they are produced through discourse, brought into being by subjects and are subject to contestation and restless movement. A ddressivity and performativity in combination enable us to see that an essentialist Black beauty ideal is about a governmentality which desperately seeks to keep us in our desired space. T his is that of the iconic Black beauty which comes out of racialized beauty discourses whether one focused on Black anti-racist aesthetics or whiteness. T here are other spaces which are occupied, whether now tentatively or with increased certainty. T hese are the daily building blocks of Black beauty stylizations and belongings which I have begun to get to grips with in this book. T his movement across beauty ideals enables us to see Black beauty citizenship as no longer being only about struggles over beauty equality but also being about battles over beauty products, stylization practices, technologies, identities, differences, positive Black beauty attitudes and politics. A s a community we now need to think about Black beauty citizenship as an important part of politics. Thinking Black beauty citizenship? H aving said all that, what can citizenship mean in the context of Black beauty? How can stylization be a significant part of a notion of ‘Black beauty citizenship’ when stylization means that looks are in a process of continual change? By using the phrase ‘Black beauty citizenship’ I am not talking about a cultural approach to citizenship in terms of a deconstruction of ‘the normal citizen’ and an emphasis   S ee Butler, J. (1993) Bodies that Matter – On the Discursive Limits of Sex.   T his latter is the meaning of hybridity explored in T ate (2005).

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on those whose cultural practices are marginalized. R ather, I want to remove citizenship from its usual context in order to look at what everyday stylization can tell us about Black beauty inclusions/ exclusions as we go about our daily lives using objects, rituals, technologies etc. to naturalize our ideological views and value systems about beauty. T hat is, I want to unpick the political economy of Black beauty citizenship by foregrounding readings of Black beauty as cultural practices situated within Black A tlantic diasporic structures of feeling. By cultural practices I mean meaningful activity performed habitually by a social subject or group of social subjects, at the level of everyday power networks (Martin 2003b, 155). T his means that our collective idea of Black beauty comes into being in everyday life even whilst it shows the nature of its (im)possibilities because of the very dynamics of power implicated within stylization itself. A s we do styles, as we become active beautifying women, we present identifications to the world which are read within the framework of the discourses of ‘race’, class, gender, sexuality, age, disability and Black beauty. H erein lay the complexities and tensions of Black beauty citizenship because we cannot just relate practices of beauty to structures of oppression or to women’s agency in terms of pleasure or post-feminist attitude. R ather we should see Black beauty citizenship as being a constant negotiation between the beautifier and the gazer (read here Black/white community) in which both allow or do not allow entrance to a Black beauty category which is also constantly evolving. Black beauty and Black beauty citizenships are constantly in motion as they have always been. T o the extent that we can say that Black beauty is hybrid as I said earlier then Black beauty citizenship as a political economy must also be a hybrid construction. It is a hybrid construction of ‘changeable configurations of discourse and practice’ (Craig 2006, 166). These configurations have sedimented over centuries in our Black Atlantic diasporic structure of feeling. Stylization involves specific ‘race-ing’ technology – straighteners, weaves, afro picks, extensions, braids, makeup, (etc.) – which add value to the body. Value is added to the body because of the labour which has been involved in beautification. This value leads to distinction, to the creation of a specifically Black social and cultural capital which sometimes can only be appraised by other Black interactants. For example, I would say that intricate canerows and 21st century afro puffs fall into this category. What I hope to have done throughout the book is to make a particular sort of movement. T hat is a movement beyond K obena Mercer’s (1994a) work on stylization whilst acknowledging its place in any theorization of Black beauty. I hope to have done this by looking at ‘race’ performativity in Black beauty and expanding the discourse on Black beauty through looking at the wider version of Black anti-racist aesthetics which is necessary for Black beauty citizenship. By this at the moment I mean a Black anti-racist aesthetics which in the 21st century isn’t named specifically ‘anti-racist’ by participants and isn’t based on a narrowly drawn Black political identity. R ather, I think that it is about an antiracism which incorporates ‘mixing’, ‘diversity’ and ‘cosmopolitanism’, however we might define these contested concepts, in terms of practices on/of the body.

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T his, of course, means that Black community ideas of ‘racial authenticity’ in terms of aesthetics have to be revised. T he implication is not that questions of shade, hair and features, the visible aspects of ‘race’, cease to matter. Indeed not, as they are very much there and haunt some current approaches to stylization like Black blondes that seek to take us beyond racialization’s binary grip on beautification. What the book has done is to think through ‘Black beauty’ itself to begin to see what ‘Black’ and this beauty which calls itself Black mean at the beginning of the 21st century. T he cultural politics of Black beauty in the latter part of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century is still as fraught as it ever was. We are still caught between discourses of Black anti-racist aesthetics on ‘naturalness’, ‘the real Black’, ‘the Black that’s white’ and bodily practices of stylization which speak different demands, different horizons of Black beauty. H air continues today to have emotional, political and social significance in a context in which stylization choices often mean acceptance or rejection and affect how we feel about ourselves. T he centuries’ old debate on women’s hair and what stylization means psychically, socially and politically continues unabated because hair continues to be read by, for and against Black women (Grayson 1995). T his is the case because ‘race’ and the bodily aspects that have been socially constructed and held in place to make ‘race’ – hair texture, shade, facial features – continue to function within the C aribbean, the UK , L atin A merica and N orth A merica to assign worth and value in the beauty hierarchy. In these spaces, as has been said earlier, racialized beauty aesthetics mean that Black is read as the antithesis of beauty which is white and feminine. It is also the case though that alongside this racialized hierarchy there is also a racializing one of Black anti-racist aesthetics in these spaces which leads to the emergence of other beauty norms. Women then have to negotiate the intersections of ‘race’ gender, beauty culture and politics in their stylizations. What is clear is that we must be aware that hair and shade are not neutral but are enmeshed in a multiplicity of meanings which have political, cultural, psychic and social consequences for women. Black beauty is not just about aesthetics but also about deeply held political investments. Investments in which, for example, we feel we can make assumptions about a woman’s consciousness, her political worth, because she straightens her hair. Ideals of feminine Black beauty from the 1990s to today have always been in a state of flux. What have tried to keep the borders of Black beauty firm are those discourses which, even given their governmentality, also leave the traces of contradictory inscriptions on the body. For example, discourses on ‘natural’ versus ‘straightened’ hair produce norms which relate to governing and transforming hair in order to measure up to prevailing beauty standards. O n the other hand governmentality’s grip is broken in the moment that hair stylization reveals that beauty ideals are arbitrary and that even ‘natural’ hair is worked on. Women do reproduce norms but they also refute them through making artifice – for example straightened and bleached blonde hair – another aspect of Black beauty. In doing this they deny ‘a yearning for whiteness’ alongside disrupting continuing

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displays of the natural agenda of canerows, braids, locks, plaits, chiney-bumps, for example, aimed at keeping them in the space of the ‘unnatural’, the ‘not Black enough’. We know that as Black women in one life-time our hair can go through myriad transformations which recreate and redefine the norms for ‘acceptable’ and ‘respectable’ Black hair. T his means that we have to move away from seeing Black women’s hair as good/bad, manageable/unmanageable, straight/kinky. L ike Mercer (1994a) we have to move to see all Black hair styles as political and to a position of seeing what is done with our hair as reflective of a global Black Atlantic diasporic beauty culture rather than an attempt to mimic whiteness and negate our Black identities/ political locations. We have to move to a position where simplistic ideas about hair styling practices as showing ‘desire for whiteness’ or ‘Black self-hatred’ can finally be laid to rest. What the women have shown is that they are not beauty dopes or dupes. Through their agency they redefine and recreate Black beauty culture discourses, norms and body politics. Questions of ‘race’ and beauty are related to the culturally instituted melancholia which still continues to haunt Black beauty today. Whatever we do to ourselves in terms of stylization is supposed to speak of our psyches, of our identifications, of our desires. T he idea that through stylization we continue to show the wish to be white is a widely held one and there is no doubt even today that the lighter your skin and the straighter your hair the better your life chances and marriage prospects as a Black woman in the UK , N orth A merica, L atin A merica and the C aribbean. C hromatism does exist even in the 21st century. H owever, the long-held ideas about wishing to be white are actually based on racist culture’s assumption and imposition of white superiority in all things. S o there are a multitude of Black beauty models with which women work and it is here that different iconic ideals are located. For example, the meanings of hair styles were not just shaped by aesthetics but also by Black anti-racist politics. Further, ‘the browning’ and the movement of ‘hybrid Black beauty?’ begin from a base in Black aesthetics, relationality and politics. T hese meanings and beauty models are truly not to be found in whiteness at all but within Black beauty ideologies and practices. A n example of this is Black women’s beauty magazines. I know, of course, that these have been subjected to many critiques because of their focus on straight hair, light-skinned or retouched models and conforming to ‘the white beauty ideal’ in general. I won’t argue with that. H owever, if we read contrapuntally (S aid 1995), if we use our diasporic double consciousness (Gilroy 1993) we begin to notice that they speak specifically of and from Black beauty multiplicity. If we do not read for whiteness and ‘mimic white women’ what we see is that alongside the straight hair we also have braids, plaits, canerows, locks, afros, short, shaved, long as hair possibilities, as well as different shades of Black women. Beauty magazines are an example of the visibility of the hybridity of Black beauty – ‘hybrid Black beauty?’ – and its bodily practices which exist in everyday life and which we cannot wish away or erase by other means. Black beauty diversity is here to stay and will continue to grow into the 21st century as beauty technologies develop.

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I suppose that a critique which could be made at this point is that as a hegemonic ideal whiteness is invisible but forever present and therefore will still continue to underlie much of Black beauty practice and desire. A gain I will not, of course, argue with this apart from to say that we also need to think at this point of Blackness as being what underlies Black beauty ideology, practice and desire. T his continuing tension of desiring Blackness within the frame of being located by others as being part of white iconic beauty does indeed haunt some women’s stylization possibilities. T he women of whom I speak are those who are Black ‘mixed race’ whose everyday struggle is to be accepted within the Black beauty category as they are judged and found wanting by the Black gaze because of the mark of whiteness on their bodies. I think that these exclusions and their resultant affects are much more important for an inclusive Black politics than those which are focused on deciphering whether or not someone sees herself as Black because she has straightened her hair. I do not think that this latter any longer has political currency and the veracity of its claim to tell us about women’s psyches is very questionable. We need to address the damage that we do to each other in community through our rigid ideas about who is Black and who is not based solely on stylization, shade, hair and features. We need to disrupt the idea that the most important things about being a Black woman are beauty and femininity so that we can continue to define and re-define ourselves. We need to finally accept the fact that ‘Black beauty’ means many different stylization possibilities. We need to stop the negative force of shame from affecting our relationships with each other as Black women. What I have looked at in C hapter 2 is another aspect of shame. T hat is the positive part it plays in beauty transformation in terms of one’s recognition as beautiful/ugly and how this leads to new beauty paradigms. S hame does not always have to be about negativity and rejection. It can be a force for change. It can be a restorative, creative force, mobilizing self and community ‘into acts of defiant presence, in cycles of disattachment and reconnection’ (Munt 2007, 216). As women redefine Black beauty they fashion their Black beauty identities based on an analysis of their own struggles with the norms of ‘race’ and gender and those of the larger Black community. T he women have shown that shame has the potential for transformation and reinvention. T he issue though is about how shame is deployed in community. A s women have shown us they feel shame much more if they have an attachment to the community that the shame emerges from. We have also seen that trans-generational beauty shame exists because of ‘buyin’ to discourses on white beauty as iconic. A s families and community we have a responsibility to stop these continuing processes of shaming. We can do this by recognizing what makes them work so effectively to silence different beauty stylizations because these practices putatively raise the question of ‘Black selfhatred’ and ‘desire for whiteness’. A fter all we are just as creative as everyone else beauty-wise so we should be able to show this without any possibility of retribution. We also have to get beyond the idea that Black equates to one skin tone, one eye colour and one hair texture. We know this not to be the case in the

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Black Atlantic diaspora so why we keep this particular fiction going is beyond my comprehension. It is almost as if in order to recognize ourselves we have to have the great binaries of Black/white in play which have remained unchanged for centuries. T heir very un-changeability is what allows shame to continue unabated and be a possibility from both sides of the binary at any moment of every day for Black women. We clearly still have a body of work to do on a re-reading of Black aesthetics. H ere we would see shame as a catalyst for change rather than something to be feared because of its intense, separating individuation. What we should orient ourselves to as community is not just a reflexive engagement with the self but also feeling responsible for our impact on others. We should feel the shame that we force others to endure in order to finally put Black beauty shame to rest. T his is the only way forward if our expectation is that Black politics can continue. We must develop an ethical politics in which our position is always that of the other so that we no longer ask each other the shaming ‘who are you?’ as in the research participants’ narratives, but instead assert ‘we are’. We have to go past shame’s erasure to the recognition of en-racing. We have to give loving acceptance to each other as we produce Black beauty heterotopias through stylization in the Black A tlantic diaspora. ‘H eterotopias are the conceptual space in which we live, they allow a slippage of meaning, they produce a kind of imaginative spatial play, out of which can emanate a new kind of semiotic, new practices, and by extension, new kinds of identities and subjectivities’ (Munt 2007, 187). Within the political challenges offered by Black beauty heterotopias en-racing is a necessary part of our re-reading of Black asethetics. Performativity: Re-reading aesthetics and en-racing stylizations I have spoken above about reading contrapuntally, using our diasporic double consciousness when looking at Black beauty magazines. T his work also needs to be done at the level of re-reading Black aesthetics. T his of course prompts the questions: What would a Black feminist anti-racist aesthetics for the 21st century look like? H ow can Black beauty within this framework be en-raced differently? A t the very beginning of the book I argued that beauty does not come from within. R ather, it is something that is inscribed on the surface of the skin through stylizations. What we might think comes from within are feelings about beauty itself. H owever, as the chapters on melancholia and shame have shown Black beauty affect is also culturally instituted. T his means that how beauty links the psyche and the social makes it urgent that we produce a re-reading of Black aesthetics. T his re-reading needs to construct an aesthetics which makes sense within the 21st century. H aving said this about the time frame, it does not mean that all that once was will be left behind. R ather, we must acknowledge that all that was before continues to creatively haunt any new definitions that we care to offer up as ways to move forward in community. What we have to do in this

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re-reading is to make room for difference and to live without the certainties of beauty normalizations. What we also have to give up is the centuries’ old notion that stylization must of necessity mean political orientation. A s such we must reorient ourselves to the possibility that Black beauty stylizations as any other need not speak anything more than momentary inscriptions which cannot be read once and for all as this or that. We also have to acknowledge that Black beauty stylizations are as extendable as technology allows. T his clearly has implications for our thinking about ‘race’ performativity. I think that it has been made clear in the book that ‘race’ performativity works through socially and culturally recognized forms of sameness and difference. What I said in the chapter on hair is that bodies speak hair as Black and hair speaks bodies as Black, so that stylization and ideas about ‘race’ interact in the making of Blackness. T here is a mutually constitutive relationship between them in signalling Black beauty so that indeterminate categories are not produced as differences are included. A s technologies produce an ever widening array of beauty possibilities does this mean that we will see an end to the search for and necessity of ‘race’? Will we ever be at a time in which Black beauty will be at ease with its multiplicity? A s we currently are at the beginning of the 21st century, I see no lessening in the necessity of ‘race’ and ever widening pride in the appellation ‘Black’. A s many have commented before me, multiculture and diversity have not led to raceless utopias and the most that can be wished for is an uneasy cosmopolitan conviviality (Gilroy 2004). If what is emerging is cosmopolitan conviviality as a societal model in the UK , for example, then Black beauty has to be at ease with its multiplicities and be confident that this in no way dilutes the Black identifications which have been hard won through Black feminist anti-racist politics. We have seen a movement in this book which cannot go uncommented on. T hat is, a movement from Black contestation around brown/light skinned straight(er) haired beauty in the 1990s to a position of the 21st-century browning. T he browning is both undeniably a Black political affiliation as it is an aesthetic statement of Black beauty transformation. We need then to add this to our list of considerations. T hat is whether or not there has been the birth at the level of the everyday of a critical racial rearticulation approach to beauty in the twenty first century which makes the need for a wider discussion of Black beauty citizenship urgent. What the turn to citizenship entails is the longing for the reading of differences as Black and therefore worthy of inclusion within beauty which underlies so much of women’s experiences. This is significant for Black politics. It is significant not only because of the coming future expansion of the Black ‘mixed race’ population in the UK and beyond. It is important also because we would finally be saying that Black beauty and Black beauty identities have been wide since the E uropean conquest and settlement of ‘the N ew World’ and the mixedness produced in this process. T o continually refuse to do this means that we remain in denial of ourselves as a community and continually produce ‘other others’, forever subject to the threat of shame and melancholia. What I noticed though in the narratives of 21st-century brownings is absolute confidence, a self assurance in their embodied beauty value,

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an unshakeable claim to a Black identity and a place in Black politics. T hey take the ‘one drop rule’ seriously so why don’t we all? Further we must continually remember that stylization does not mean that women are inscribing a white aesthetic onto their bodies without giving any thought to the political implications of their actions in terms of anti-racist aesthetics. R ather, what they are doing is expanding the boundaries of what counts as Black beauty and at the same time investing this with a social capital which is recognized as Black and given value. What this highlights is that there continues to be versionings of Black beauty of which we must take account in Black feminist anti-racist politics. Versionings of Black beauty and Black feminist anti-racist politics Beauty and becoming beautiful through stylization practices are about hegemony, political investment, ascription of value and stylizations which create spaces for the emergence of difference. T here is no singular beauty standard enforced by a male/white/heterosexual gaze, for example. T his is the challenge to Black feminist anti-racist politics posed by a call for Black beauty citizenship which insists that beauty can be empowering. It means that we can no longer live within our carefully drawn and hermetically sealed worlds within which this stylization means straightforwardly that. For example, an A fro means that the wearer is intensely proud of being Black and is very politically conscious. What a Black beauty citizenship speaks to is a radical progression and re-evaluation of beauty models which puts them into question whilst its attendant practices are aimed at resisting domination. H ere Black women delexicalize the strange and become active in the transformation of beauty as they make new claims to beauty visible. This transformation breaks from, is disjunctive with and disaffirmational of beauty hegemonies whilst speaking partially of them through its stylizations in different spaces. If we look at the Black Beauty archive across the Black A tlantic diaspora from the 1800s to today we would see this represented in different registers such as, objects, music, soma, psyche and politics. For example, the Pan-A fricanism of the U niversal N egro Improvement A ssociation (UNIA ) under the leadership of the Jamaicans Marcus Garvey and A my Jacques Garvey; the advertisements of Madame C .J. Walker (R ooks 2000; Dossett 2008); the straightening comb of our youth; the relaxer; the ceramic straightener; Black makeup from Flori R oberts, N aomi C ampbell and Iman; Black Beauty and Hair magazine; Ebony; photographs from our different life stages with different looks; C arol Joanne C rawford;

  K ate Dossett (2008) has done an extended critique of the sexism of the movement so I will not go into that here.   C arol Joanne C rawford was a Miss Jamaica in the 1960s who became Miss World.

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Beverley Johnson; A gbani Darego; Vanessa Williams; A lek Wek. T he Black A tlantic diaspora is an active mode of Black beauty relationality which produces its own iconic tropes through the traffic in images, ideas and objects that signify different social relationships, ready to be translated into our varying local contexts. N ew modes of cultural translation which emerge through stylization mean that we are not at all fixed or frozen in various essentialized subject positions. Rather, the language of Black beauty breaks up so that Black beauties can be continuously known and (re)known. In this known-(re)knowing a politics of a ‘we’ emerges through beauty. T here are different Black beauty poetics at play which enable diasporic public spheres as zones of Black beauty contestation which transform beauty knowledges. S o for example when I was recently asked at a conference in E ngland when I spoke on the browning whether I didn’t think that what these women’s talk showed was fear and anxiety, I could subsequently answer in the negative. A s I said above if there was fear and anxiety it would be that attendant on being outside of the Black A tlantic diasporic beauty category which was in constant motion, not a white beauty model and that to me is what is significant about what this category illustrates. It illustrates a decided break with white iconicity and a reassertion of Black centeredness which has always been there, sometimes out of sight but never forgotten. O ne part of this ‘sometimes out of sight but never forgotten’ is the early work of the UNIA in the dismantling of white iconicity. T he UNIA was founded in K ingston, Jamaica, in 1914 by Marcus Garvey. T he UNIA was a Pan-A frican organization which sought the liberation and unity of all peoples of A frican descent. Garvey moved the organization to the U nited S tates in 1916 (Dossett 2008). H e encouraged A frican diasporic people to return to A frica, a call which was also heard in his native Jamaica and remains a part of R astafarianism. H e set up many A frican-A merican owned and run businesses one of which was a company making dolls for A frican-A merican girls as he thought they should have Black dolls to play with (R ooks 2000). T he UNIA ’s newspaper, the Negro World refused advertisements from companies which promoted the straightening of A frican-A merican hair and the lightening of A frican-A merican skin because for Garvey ‘such products attempted “to make a new race and make a monkey out of the N egro”’ (R ooks 2000, 77) For K ate Dossett (2008) A my Jacques Garvey and other women in the UNIA developed ‘community feminism’. T his could be a part of the ‘protofeminism’10 which underlies the later emergence of Black feminism itself. bell hooks (1982) reflects their ideas on community uplift when she states that Black feminism must be about going forward in community. T he work of women such as R ose Brewer (1993), A ngela Davis (1990), the C ombahee R iver C ollective (1982) and Pat H ill C ollins (2000) remind us that we must recognize the simultaneity of Black women’s oppression. A part of this recognition must also   Janell H obson (2005) develops an interesting critique of this Miss World in terms of racialized bodies. 10  A ngela Davis (1999) uses this term.

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be the colorism which exists within our communities. We must envision and enact a Black politics which is non-essentialist, includes all skin tones and hair textures and simultaneously disrupts white supremacy’s light skin privilege which seeks to place darker-skinned, kinkier-haired women outside of beauty itself. T his is what would underlie the politics of a specifically Black feminist anti-racist aesthetics in which as a community we would all recognize that we are striving for recognition as ourselves, that we are striving for recognition so that we can have a home to feel at home in, to belong. Without this recognition we simply cannot continue to become a Black A tlantic diasporic community as T o ask for recognition, or to offer it, is precisely not to ask for recognition for what one already is. It is to solicit a becoming, to instigate a transformation, to petition the future always in relation to the other (Butler 2004b, 44).

It is only with such recognition that we can guarantee a Black communal diasporic future. T o speak of Black beauty citizenship is a way of reading both stylization and politics into the future. A s Black women we have more stylization possibilities than ever before but we are still beset by the beauty/politics insecurities brought about by Black anti-racist politics and exclusions from feminist theorizing on beauty. In terms of feminism we ������������������������������������������������������������� have to go back to the old to reflect on the ‘new’. Hazel C arby (1997) in one of the seminal texts of Black British feminism reminded us of the difference that ‘race’ makes to feminist thought. Pat H ill C ollins (2000) also reminded us of the necessity to start from the standpoint of Black women in order to develop our knowledge claims. A t the time that these words were published they gave feminism a jolt. It seems strange to now be at the beginning of the 21st century at the time of ‘new feminism’ still thinking that it is important to remind us all that ‘race’ and anti-racism as a condition for the inclusion of all women within feminist theorizing still matter (T ate 2008). It seems in the end that nothing really changes, it strangely remains the same. It is not surprising that we have feelings about beauty and ugliness, belonging and exclusion which are shared across the Black A tlantic diaspora. We have to do some careful soul searching in order to diminish the negative impact of beauty discourses on the psyches of all women. We need to think about how we should to use critical agency to deal with an ever returning past that textures the present and produce new ways of organising politically around Black beauty. We do not know our possible future but it must be one in which we leave the spectres of both colonialism and essentialist anti-racist aesthetics behind by going against the grain of their stubborn historicities as we let our stylizations speak.

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A ppendix

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lengthening of the sound in-breath latched turns overlapped talk micro-pause pause in tenths of a second quietly produced talk medium rise in pitch high rise in pitch cut-off on the word capital letters indicate loudness laughter smiley-voiced talk speedily produced talk talk with laughter bubbling through this sounds like chuups

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R ooks, N .M. (2000), Hair Raising: Beauty, Culture and African American Women (Piscataway, N J: R utgers U niversity Press). R ose, N . (1999), Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self, 2nd E dition (L ondon: Free A ssociation Books). R oseneil, S . (2006), ‘T he ambivalences of A ngel’s “arrangement”: A psychosocial lens on the contemporary condition of personal life’, The Sociological Review 54(4), 847–69. R ussell, K . et al. (1992), The Color Complex: The Politics of Skin Color Among African Americans (N ew Y ork: Doubleday). S aid, E . (1995), Orientalism (H armondsworth: Penguin). S edgwick, E .K . (2003), Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke U niversity Press). S ullivan, N . (2008), ‘It’s as plain as the nose on his face: Michael Jackson, modificatory practices and the question of ethics’, in Scan: Journal of Media, Arts, Culture. . accessed 8 June. T ate, S . (2005), Black Skins, Black Masks: Hybridity, Dialogism, Performativity (A ldershot: A shgate). T ate, S . (2007a), ‘What’s shade got to do with it? A nti-racist aesthetics and Black Beauty’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 30(2), March, 300–319. T ate, S . (2007b), ‘T ranslating melancholia: A Poetics of Black Interstitial C ommunity’, Community, Work and Family 10(1), February, 1–16. Tate, S. (2008), ‘Feminisms meet Black beauty’, in M. Gržinić and R. Reitsamer (eds), New Feminism: Worlds of Feminism, Queer and Networking Conditions (Vienna: L öcker). T aussig, M. (1993), Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (N ew Y ork: R outledge). T aylor, P.C . (2000), ‘Malcolm’s C onk and Danto’s C olors: O r four logical petitions concerning race, beauty, aesthetics’, in Brand (ed.). T homas, D.A . (2004), Modern Blackness: Nationalism, Globalization and the Politics of Culture in Jamaica (L ondon: Duke U niversity Press). T seëlon, E . (1995), The Mask of Femininity: The Presentation of Woman in Everyday Life (L ondon: S age Publications). T urner, P. (1994), Ceramic Uncles and Celluloid Mammies: Black Images and their Influence on Culture (L ondon: A nchor Books). Van S ertima, I. (ed.) (1989), Black Women in Antiquity (L ondon: T ransaction Books). Venn, C . (1992), ‘S ubjectivity, ideology and difference: R ecovering otherness’, New Formations, 16, S pring, 40–61. Weekes, D. (1997), ‘S hades of Blackness: Y oung Black female constructions of beauty’, in Mirza, H .S . (ed.), Black British Feminism: A Reader (L ondon: R outledge). Wek, A . (2007), Alek: Sudanese Refugee to International Supermodel (L ondon: Virago Press).

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Index addressivity 97, 149 aesthetic surgery 138–43 A frican-A merican women 56, 142 Black/white differences 140 L il’ K im 138–41, 142 Margaret H unter on 142, 143 psychic painremoval 141 aesthetics, Black beauty 25 see also A fro-aesthetics; anti-racist aesthetics A fro hairstyle 9, 42, 65 Brazil 37 afro puffs 151 A fro-aesthetics, Brazil 60, 66, 80, 147 A hmed, S ara 25, 47, 50–1, 90 Queer Phenomenology 48 A li, S uki 100, 145 animal sexuality, Black women 61 anti-racist aesthetics Black 88, 123, 139, 140, 151 and Black beauty 147–8 Black A tlantic diaspora 36–40, 41, 47, 65, 66 Black feminist 142, 144, 157, 159 and hair stylization 52 meaning 39 and skincolour 68 A nzieu, Didieu, ‘skinego’ 55, 57 Baartman, S arah (H ottentot Venus) 8, 61 Badu, E rykah 3, 127 Baker, Josephine 61 Bakere-Y usuf, Bibi 126 Bakhtin, Mikhail, on addressivity 97 Banks, Ingrid 48 Banks, T yra 127 Barnes, N atasha 101 Baudrillard, Jean 26, 27 on beauty 28–9 beauty as aesthetic judgement 3, 17

aesthetics, Dominicans 64 anatomical economy 24 assimilations 61 Baudrillard on 28–9 of browning 120–1 classic accounts 2–3 conceptions of, Jamaica 102 and critical agency 55 E uropean ideals 5 external features 19 and fakeness 23 and fantasy 20, 27 feminist ideas on 1 gaze 22, 23, 24 global multicultural, rise of 66 and grief 59, 71 and hair 38, 40 and the Ideal 7–8 inner 30, 94, 121, 139 outward manifestations 13, 24, 29, 30 K antian 3–4, 5, 6–7, 8, 9, 17, 20 labour involved 23, 26, 30, 31 models 35 Black A tlantic diaspora 147, 149 multi-cultural 100 natural vs artificial 9, 35 non-idealized 76 norms arbitrariness of 152 and race 4 performativity 6, 7, 9, 21, 25–6, 148 practices, hybrid 123 racialization 4, 17, 18, 32, 33, 143 as seduction 28, 29 sign-value 26 subjective universality 4 ugliness, opposition 9, 28, 107 value 26 measurement 83 wisdom 18, 19, 21

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and women’s oppression 11 see also Black beauty Beckham, Victoria see Posh Berry, H alle 3, 6, 8, 10, 71, 100, 109, 110, 127, 132, 147 Beyoncé (K nowles) 3, 6, 8, 46, 49, 109, 123, 128, 129, 143 beauty product endorsements 10, 22, 131 blonde hair 48 whitening 131 Bhabha, H omi 31, 57, 125, 136 on fetishism 137–8 on mimicry 118, 129 on translation 130 Black as A frican diasporic 146 being/becoming 53–4 meanings, multiple 146, 154–5 mixed race as 112, 132 Black A tlantic diaspora 1, 8, 10, 35, 158 anti-racist aesthetics 36–40, 41, 47, 65, 66 beauty models 147, 149, 158 browning 121 hair stylization 51 Black beauties 12, 145, 158 Black beauty aesthetics 25 ‘Black’, meaning of 66 and Black anti-racist aesthetics 147–8 Britain, 1970s 64 as ‘cipher space’ 137 community 133, 135, 138, 149 as continuum 129 cultural politics of 152 definition problems 2, 22–3, 144 as dialectical process 136 discourses 68, 148 disidentification 55, 73, 74 evolution of concept 129–30 and feminism 10–12 as fetish 137–8 and hairstyling 40 heterotopias 155 hybridity 128–9, 136–7, 143, 144, 149, 153 ideals 3

ideology, and Blackness 154 judgements of 7 legacy 100 meanings, multiple 146–7 melancholia see melancholia mainentry models 131–2, 143–4, 153 multiplicities 75, 99, 153, 154, 156, 157 and N ation of Islam 94 national contexts 147 natural/unnatural paradox [more] 132, 152 norms 12 performativity 1, 7, 11, 99 as process 127 research data 15–16 restlessness of 136 role models 64 salons 8–9 S heila Jeffreys on 104 as simulation 26–7 social construction of 26 vs white beauty iconicity 10–11 Black beauty citizenship 14, 15, 150–5, 156, 157, 159 fluidity 151 Black beauty shame 13, 16, 82–91 construction, by stories 80–2 disidentification from 92, 95, 97 exclusions 88–91 performativity 82, 90 personal testimony 92–6 transformative potential 79, 93–4, 98, 154, 155 transvaluing 94 vocabulary of 82 Black beauty stylization 1, 8, 133, 145 fluidity of 156 see also hair stylization Black blondes 45–6, 50, 51, 116, 129–30, 148 Black Brazilians 37 Black hair descriptions 41–2 shame of 86 use of term 43–4 white people, adoption by 42, 43 Black identity, 1970s 65

Index ‘Black is Beautiful’ movement 9, 37, 38, 65, 66, 80, 102 Black Power Movement 37, 65, 66 Black products, and browning 112 Black ugliness 76 Black Venuses 8, 61 Black women, animal sexuality 61 Blackness and Black beauty ideology 154 boundaries of 128 Jamaica 102 performativity 147 Blige, Mary J. 127 body discourses 18 social construction of 26 Brazil A fro hairstyle 37 A fro-aesthetics 60, 66, 80, 147 dreadlocks 38 E bony Goddess contest 38 hair straightening 37 Ilê A iyê 38, 65, 147 slavery era 37 white beauty, as norm 38 Breakspeare, C indy L ou 147 Brennan, T eresa, on feelings 7 Brewer, R ose 158 brown, passing for 103 browning in21st-century Britain107–12, 156–7 A licia K eys 104, 108 beauty of 120–1 Black A tlantic diaspora 121 and Black products 112 combinations 111 contradictions 113–15 and destabilization 108 diaspora spread 103, 108 and en-racing 130–1 and fake tan 118, 119, 120 faking it 117, 118–21 as fashion accessory 126 and hair 47, 111 straightening 111–12, 116 Jamaica, dancehall origin100, 108 L il’ K im 141, 142 mimicry of 118–19

175

performativity 108, 112, 127 process 99 A licia K eys 104, 108 ritual, personal 119–20 search for 125–32, 133 shades of 110, 113 websites 127 white search for 136 Bush, Barbara 61 Butler, Judith 55, 68, 108 on gender identity 59, 70 performative reiteration 99 works Gender Trouble 7 The Psychic Life of Power 59, 69 C ampbell, N aomi 61, 147, 157 C andelario, Ginetta 56, 63, 64 canerow hairstyle 5, 42, 135, 151 Bo Derek 51 C hristina Milian 47, 48 S alma H ayak 136 and white beauty 136 C arby, H azel 159 cardigan, straight hair mimicry 87 C arey, Mariah 109, 147 C arroll, N oël 6 C arvalho, T aís 38 ceramic straighteners 115–16 C erteau, Michel de 149 C heng, A nne A nlin55 on melancholia 58–9, 73 C iara 40 C ivil R ights Movement 65 C ole, K eisha 110 C ollins, Pat H ill 158, 159 colonial melancholy 30, 55 colonized mimicry 57 C ombahee R iver C ollective 158 contact, and shame 81 C ooper, C arolyn 48, 126 cosmetic surgery see aesthetic surgery C raig, Maxine L eeds 40, 149, 150 C rawford, C arol Joanne 157 critical agency and beauty 55 and beauty labour 31 Freud 30, 59, 72

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and grief 59, 74 melancholic 69, 73 operation of 30, 72 and the plaint 59, 72–3 use 159 C uba, mulatto women 62 Darego, A gbani 158 Davis, A ngela 158 Davis, K athy 141 Derek, Bo, canerow hairstyle 51 Derrida, Jacques 129 on translation/transformation 108–9 destabilization, and browning 108 diaspora, Paul Gilroy on 148 différance 109 Dirie, Waris achievements 105 Desert Flower 105 disidentification 90–1 Black beauty 55, 73, 74 from Black beauty shame 92, 95, 97 and plaint 73 Dominicans beauty aesthetics 64 hair, importance of 64 identity formation 63–4 Dossett, K ate 158 dreadlocks 9, 42, 63, 65 Brazil 38 opposition to 44–5 Du Bois, W.E .B. 37 Dunn, Jourdan 147 E bony Goddess contest, Brazil 38 en-racing and browning 130–1 and mimicry 125 performativity 125 recognition of 155 E ng, David 53, 67, 77 ethnography, mobile beauty 15 fakeness, and beauty 23 Fanon, Frantz 24, 54, 57, 62, 131 feeling, structure of 54 fn1 feelings, Brennan on 7 Felski, R . 104

femininity, and white beauty 41 fn4 feminism, and Black beauty 10–12 Ferme, Mariane 49 fetish Bhabha on 137–8 Black beauty as 137–8 fetishization, hair stylization 49–50 Figueiredo, A ngela 40 Ebony Goddess 38 Foucault, Michel, on problematization 139 Freud, S igmund 56 critical agency concept 30, 59, 72 melancholia 72 Garvey, A my Jacques 157, 158 Garvey, Marcus 157 influence 37, 63 UNIA foundation 158 gaze, and shame 83 gender identity, Judith Butler on 59, 70 GH Ds (ceramic straighteners) 115–16 Gilroy, Paul 27, 146 on diaspora 148 Goffman, E . 30 grief and beauty 59, 71 and critical agency 59, 74 guilt, shame, distinction 79 fn1 hair

and beauty 38, 40 blonde 45 blow-dried 134 braided 38 and browning 47, 111 Dominicans, importance for 64 ‘good’ and ‘bad’ 41, 44 natural 36, 43, 47, 48 meaning 50 vs straight, debate 9, 36 naturalized 48 ‘picky-picky’ 41, 44, 48 racialization 19, 63–4 as self-signifier 44, 136 and sex appeal 44–5 see also Black hair hair extensions 5, 36 Posh 26

Index hair mimicry, cardigan used for 87 hair straightening 20-1, 22, 36, 39–40, 51 Brazil 37 and browning 111–12, 116 cardigan mimicry 87 as common beauty practice 118 Jamaican origins 93 performativity of 115–17 and self-hatred 37, 47 technology 115–16 hair stylization 11, 12, 14, 29, 44–7 added-value of 151 and anti-racist aesthetics 52 Black A tlantic diaspora 51 fetishization 49–50 performativity 46–7 possibilities 148 white 5, 136 hairstyles Black 35, 42, 51 development 48–9 mainstreaming 66 performativity 49 inSex and the City 66 dancehall, Jamaica 48 hairstyling 25, 29 and Black beauty 40 K obena Mercer on 35, 151 S ierra L eone 49 H all, S tuart 66, 129, 146 H an, S hinhee 53, 67, 77 H arvey, Irene 75 H ayak, S alma, canerow hairstyle 136 heterotopias Black beauty 155 definition 155 H olliday, R uth 141 hooks, bell 158 H ottentot Venus (S arah Baartman) 8, 61 H unter, Margaret 10, 11, 124, 131, 141 on aesthetic surgery 142, 143 hybridity, Black beauty 128–9, 136–7, 143, 144, 149, 153 hypersexuality, L il’ K im 142 iconicity, white beauty 10–11, 19, 25, 41, 70, 105, 140, 143–4 Ideal

and beauty 7–8 and O bject 6–7 identity formation, Dominicans 63–4 identity production, shame 88 Ifekwunigwe, Jayne 112 Ilê A iyê, Brazil 38, 65, 147 Iman 147, 157 achievements 105 on race 105–6 ‘signifying monkey’ 8 Jackson, Janet 142 Jackson, L aT oya 142 Jackson, Michael, nose job 139 fn7 Jamaica A frican heritage, recognition 101 annual Festival 101 beauty, conceptions of 102 Blackness 102 browning, origin100 cultural policy 101 dancehall hairstyles 48 Democratic S ocialism 101 hair straightening, origins 93 independence 101 L abour Party 101 Miss Jamaica pageant 101–2 national colours 38 People’s N ational Party 101 R astafarianism 63 Jeffreys, S heila 11–12, 113 on Black beauty 104 critique of 105, 107 Johnson, Beverley 158 Jones, Grace 61 Jordan (K atie Price) 140 nose job 56 K ant, Immanuel on beauty 3–4, 5, 6–7, 8, 9, 17, 20 Critique of Judgement 2, 3, 5 K eys, A licia browning 104, 108 heritage 104 mixedness 103–4 K hanna, R anjana colonial melancholy 30, 55 on melancholia 58, 69

177

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kiss teet, 84 fn4 L il’ K im 143 aesthetic surgery 138–41, 142 browning 141, 142 hypersexuality 142 nose job 138 Queen Bitch 140, 141 look(s), meanings 23, 32, 33 McC lintock, A nne 124 Manley, Michael 101 Marley, Bob 38 melancholia A nne A nlinC heng on 58–9, 73 Black beauty 13, 16, 30–1, 53 between beauty/ugliness 54–5 cultural basis 54, 60–7, 71, 75, 76, 77, 79, 153 definition 59–60 depathologizing 67–71 and government 75–6 ubiquity of 77 writers on 55 cause 72 Freud’s 72 racial 55 R anjana K hanna on 58, 69 see also colonial melancholy melancholics 58 Mercer, K obena 25, 29, 40, 44 on hairstyling 35, 151 mestizos, Mexico 62 Mexico colonial, Black population 62 mestizos 62 Milian, C hristina 46, 113–14 canerow hairstyle 47, 48 mimicry of browning 118–19 and en-racing 125 H omi Bhabha on 118, 129 hybrid 129 and hybridity 129 postcolonial 119, 123 Mire, A mina 126 Missy E lliott 40 ‘mixed race’

as Black 112, 132 UK population 156 Mohammed, Patricia Jan 108 Mohan, S aira 100 Morgan, K athryn Pauly 142 Mugler, T hierry 8 mulatto women 61, 100 C uba 62 Muñoz, Jose Esteban 91–2, 95, 133 N ation of Islam, and Black beauty 94 Negrismo movement 60 Négritude movement 60 Negro World 158 nose jobs Jordan 56 L il’ K im 138 Michael Jackson 139 fn7 O bject, and Ideal 6–7 other, consuming of 5, 42, 51 Patterson, P.J. 101 performative reiteration, Judith Butler 99 performativity beauty 6, 7, 9, 21, 25–6, 148 Black beauty 1, 7, 11, 99 Black beauty shame 82, 90 of Black hairstyles 49 browning 108, 112, 127 en-racing 125 hair stylization 46–7 race 8, 156 shame 84, 97–8 ugliness 9 ‘picky-picky’ hair 41, 44, 48 pigmentocracy 61, 100 Pinho, Patricia 37, 40, 147 plaint and critical agency 59, 72–3 and disidentification 73 on inner beauty 31 as melancholic complaint 30, 58, 71, 72–3, 74, 75, 81 of non-beauty 76 plaint-recognition 83, 85, 98 Plato, Symposium 2

Index Posh (Victoria Beckham), hair extensions 26, 51 Price, K atie see Jordan problematization, Foucault on 139 psychic painremoval, aesthetic surgery 141 race and beauty norms 4 colonial priority of [more] 119 essentialist notions 134 Iman on 105–6 performativity 8, 156 uncertainties of 148 and white beauty 55–6 see also en-racing; racialization racialization of beauty 4, 17 beauty 4, 17, 18, 32, 33 hair 19, 63–4 racist beauty habitus 107 R astafarianism 2, 65, 66, 158 colours 38 Jamaica 63 roots 37 R edwood, Z ahra 147 R etzinger, S uzanne 82–3 R ihanna 110 R oberts, Flori 157 R ogers, J.A . 37 R ooks, N oliwe 40, 150 R ose, N ikolas 75 R ussell, K . 55–6 S antos, S imone 38, 41, 43, 50 S eaga, E dward 101 S edgwick, E .K . 84 seduction, beauty as 28, 29 self-hatred, and hair straightening 37, 47 self-signifier, hair as 44, 136 sex appeal, and hair 44–5 Sex and the City 140 Black hairstyles in66 S hakira 128, 143 shame of Black hair 86 and contact 81 dormancy 87 and gaze 83

179

guilt, distinction 79 fn1 identity production 88 individuation-relationality movement 85 performativity 84, 97–8 positive effects 79–80, 88 inspeech disturbances 86–7 see also Black beauty shame S ierra L eone, hairstyling 49 simulation, Black beauty as 26–7 skin, social 56, 85, 87 skinbleaching 36, 57, 125 health risks 126 fn2 as racist practice 127 skincolour and anti-racist aesthetics 68 racialized hierarchy 65, 100 ‘skinego’ 55, 57–8 slavery, origins, white beauty norm 61 stylization see Black beauty stylization; hair stylization subjective universality, beauty 4 tan, fake, and browning 118, 119, 120 tannorexia 125 T aylor, Jacqueline S anchez 141 T aylor, Paul C . 39 transcription conventions, interviews 161 translation 135 Bhabha on 130 as cultural change 129 as transformation 108–9 ugliness beauty, opposition 9, 28, 107 performativity 9 U niversal N egro Improvement A ssociation (UNIA ) 37, 157 foundation 158 Van S ertima, Ivan, Black Women inAntiquity 2 vanity 18, 20, 31, 32 Walker, Madame C .J. 37, 115, 157 websites, browning 127 Wek, A lek 8, 105, 147, 158

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modelling career 106–7 white beauty approximation 124 and canerow hairstyle 136 contestation 149 and femininity 41 fn4 hair stylization 136 iconicity 10–11, 19, 25, 41, 70, 105, 140, 143–4 as norm 10–11, 19, 25, 41, 56, 61, 152

inBrazil 38 slavery origins 61 and race 55–6 ‘wigger’ 128 Williams, Vanessa 147, 158 Wingfield, Adia Harvey, Doing Business with Beauty 8 words, power to wound 84 Y oung, R obert 136