> On 26 May 2015, at 11:07 PM, robert wood <wood0257 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Drawing off Les's comments, the phrase seems to link far more into the
> phenomenological tradition, rather than Foucault. This is certainly also
> true for the recent, popular 'Afro-Pessimism' take on the question, as
> formulated by Frank Wilderson. The closest you get to Foucault is probably
> the work of Saidiya Hartman and Hortense Spillers, which also inform
> 'Afro-Pessimism.' Robert Wood
I responded to Joe’s question via another list a couple of days ago:
I stand to be corrected, but I think the current usage traces most directly to Sander Gilman’s 1985 "Black bodies, white bodies: toward an iconography of female sexuality in late 19th-century art, medicine, and literature” (http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343468). Gilman hardly uses the phrase beyond the title, but the paper (and the phrase) became much more widely known through bell hooks’ reference to it in one chapter of her 1992 book, “Black Looks: Race and Representation” (http://www.amazon.com/Black-Looks-Representation-Bell-Hooks/dp/0896084337):
“Representations of black female bodies in contemporary popular culture rarely subvert or critique images of black female sexuality which were part of the cultural apparatus of 19th-century racism and which still shape perceptions today. Sander Gilman's essay, "Black Bodies, .' White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature," calls attention to the way black presence in early North American society allowed whites to sexualize their world by projecting onto black bodies a narrative of sexualization disassociated from whiteness. Gilman documents the development of this image, commenting that "by the eighteenth cen- tury, the sexuality of the black, male and female, becomes an icon for deviant sexuality." He emphasizes that it is the black female body that is forced to serve as "an icon for black sexuality in general.”
The phrase had been used much earlier, but with a very different (although horrifically related) meaning, e.g.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnlTHvJBeP0 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnlTHvJBeP0>