Sent from my iPhone
> On May 26, 2015, at 3:32 PM, Les Schaffer <schaffer at optonline.net> wrote:
>
> 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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