21st century Black beauty resistance: Collectivism, individuality, and in/visibility in Black women’s writing

Smith, Amanda Nicole

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/124273 Copy

Description

Title

21st century Black beauty resistance: Collectivism, individuality, and in/visibility in Black women’s writing

Author(s)

Smith, Amanda Nicole

Issue Date

2024-04-15

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Reynolds, Felisa

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Reynolds, Felisa

Committee Member(s)

• Gaillard, Julie
• Harrison, Faye
• Proulx, Francois

Department of Study

French and Italian

Discipline

French

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

• Black women
• Black French
• Afropean
• Blackness
• Collectivism
• Individuality
• Invisibility
• Visibility
• Corporeality
• Black bodies
• Black hair

Abstract

What does it mean to think beyond white supremacy, to consider its limits, to transcend them? How do Black women-centered gazes illuminate its borders and unseat it? I respond to these questions by examining the experiences and perspectives of Black women via representations of their bodies and hair in Francophone autobiographical, sociocultural, and literary texts written by 21st century Black women. Building upon the legacies of post-colonial, critical race, and afropessimist theory, I look beyond how they survive everyday traumas of the white male gaze and historical traumas of slavery and colonialism to consider how they exercise power, self-determination, and self-definition. My work looks specifically at representations of Black bodies and hair with sustained attention to the relationship(s) between collectivism, individuality, and in/visibility therein to elucidate the conceptual attributes of Black women-centered gazes and its power. It is the objective of my dissertation to bring light to the possibility of Black presents and futures that are not constructed under the white gaze, and that surpass the bounds of white supremacy by showcasing the power of a Black women-centered gaze to reify those bounds as they realize new worlds. While my focus is on Black women in the hexagonal French context, this work has implications for a global Diasporic community in the aftermaths of colonialism, the transatlantic slave trade, and chattel slavery. I argue that within the autobiographical, sociocultural, and literary texts I examine, Black women-centered gazes are making the world beyond the hegemonic forces of the white male gaze and white supremacy and creating space there for the fullness of Black beauty, Black creativity, Black joy, Black freedom, and ultimately, Black life. The first two chapters, “Individuating the Collective Body,” and “Styling, Shame, Disalienation, and Apolitics of Hair,” analyze three autobiographical/sociocultural texts: Afrofem, authored in 2018 by the Mwasi Collectif Afroféministe, and Noire n’est pas mon métier, published in 2018 by a group of Black French actresses, and Trop noire pour être française, an autobiographical text by Ivorian-born Black French screenwriter and director, Isabelle Boni-Claverie. In these texts, I consider the themes of collective resistance to violence and the ungendering of Black French women’s bodies, corporeal performance of belonging and individuality, the bodily inscription of celebration of Diasporic connectedness, as well as Christina Sharpe’s notion of Black redaction as resistance against corporeal and aesthetic devaluation. I employ the scholarship of Shirley Tate and Juliette Smeralda to tease out the relationship between hair choice and social in/visibility, alongside the external and internal political inscription of hair choice as it relates to the white male gaze and Black women-centered gazes. I claim that the positive recognition of variability in Black beauty aesthetics related to hair decenters whiteness as the norm from which to be different. I also note these authors’ creation of space for the apolitics of hair where the “depoliticizing” of hair choice disregards whiteness as an icon to which Blackness must respond. In the third and final chapter, “Aesthetics and Corporeality in Black French Women’s Fiction,” I analyze both the representations of Black women’s hair and body in two literary texts: Laura Nsafou’s 2018 novel, À mains nues, and Léonora Miano’s 2010 novel, Blues pour Élise. These texts foregrounds dynamics of power at the intersections of race, gender, and class, and semiotic relationships between aesthetics, corporeality, horizontal connectedness, and self-determination. In this chapter, I argue that the aforementioned conceptual attributes and functional strategies of Black women-centered gazes demonstrated by my analyses in the first two chapters are no less present in the narrative worlds created by these authors, and that these spaces of creative expression both connect and distinguish Black women while depicting ontological possibilities beyond the limits of white supremacy.

Graduation Semester

2024-05

Type of Resource

Thesis

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2024 Amanda Smith

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