[lbo-talk] Query: "black bodies"

Les Schaffer schaffer at optonline.net
Tue May 26 12:32:04 PDT 2015


i guess as a physicist the question caught my attention (I’ve always wondered how "black-body" originated).

philosophically, one thread seems to trace back to Frantz Fanon (what came to be referred to as "black-as-body") and Du Bois ("dark body"):

Black skin. white masks http://abahlali.org/files/__Black_Skin__White_Masks__Pluto_Classics_.pdf see: Black Bodies, White Gazes

https://books.google.com/books?id=iyoonjqA0Z0C&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

http://blogs.umass.edu/afroam391g-shabazz/files/2010/02/George-Yancy-on-the-Return-of-the-Black-Body.pdf

http://www.westga.edu/~mmcfar/George%20Yancy.htm Black Body: Women, Colonialism, and Space https://books.google.com/books?id=r4NwAVpYsdkC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false A Phenomenology of the Black Body

http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/mqrarchive/act2080.0032.004/110:12?rgn=main;view=image

dark body / Du Bois / The Souls of Black Folk: """After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.""" http://www.bartleby.com/114/

literature: Scarring the Black Body: Race and representation in African American Literature

https://books.google.com/books?id=h8QwGyoyiB4C&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/black-body-re-reading-james-baldwins-stranger-village

black is beautiful from a"medical anthropology" perspective:

Black America, Body Beautiful

https://books.google.com/books?id=PyNE-VHTBuYC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

to Doug's point:

"""Remember the trip lasted thirty-fave to ninety days, contingent upon weather. Moreover, the decks where Blacks were held were infested with lice, fleas, and rats. Diseased, dead, and dying black bodies were chained together. My point here is that the sheer non-discursive confinement of Black bodies/selves within these tight spaces, filled with the putrid smell of death, sickness, blood, urine, and feces was an exercise in discipline. The "Black body" in relation to the European imaginary was being created and produced, a docile and self-hating body. Whiteness as a site of concentrated power was productive. Foucault maintained that the effects of power are not simply manifested in terms of that which excludes, represses, and censors. Rather, "power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production. " """ from Black Bodies, White Gazes....

Les

in physics, the seminal papers of Planck -- who is most associated with black body in physics -- are here

http://www.ffn.ub.es/luisnavarro/nuevo_maletin/Planck%20%281900%29,%20Improvement%20of%20Wien%27s.pdf

http://www.ffn.ub.es/luisnavarro/nuevo_maletin/Planck%20%281900%29,%20Distribution%20Law.pdf German versions here:

http://www.archive.org/stream/verhandlungende01goog#page/n212/mode/2up

http://www.archive.org/stream/verhandlungende01goog#page/n246/mode/2up

the phrase "black body" does not appear in (the translation of) Planck's paper, as Planck was working with an idealized statistical mechanics construct, an ensemble of oscillators. Plancks breakthrough hypothesis was to quantize the energy of those oscillators, though the word quantum was apparently in use already: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum

earliest uses of black body (Wikipedia): - Balfour Stewart 1858: "Lamp-black, which absorbs all the rays that fall upon it, and therefore possesses the greatest possible absorbing power, will possess also the greatest possible radiating power." - Kirchhoff 1860: schwarzer Korper

seeBalfour Stewart and Gustav Robert Kirchhoff: Two Independent Approaches to "Kirchhoff Radiation Law"by Daniel M. Siegel http://www.jstor.org/stable/230562?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

On 05/25/2015 02:05 PM, Doug Henwood wrote:
>> On May 24, 2015, at 10:20 PM, Joseph Catron <jncatron at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>> Does anyone know the backstory of this odd wording: when and where it
>> started, what the point was supposed to be, etc.?
> I don't know where and when it started but it seems to be an attempt at (a Foucault-inspired?) pseudo-materialism that strikes me as quite dehumanizing, though of course habitual users intend otherwise.
>
>



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