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