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CAROLE BOYCE DAVIES 19 Black/Female/Bodies Carnivalized in Spectacle and Space Bodily memory should [therefore] be understood as narratives expressing beliefs about the content (as well as the form) of white violence. . . . Bodily memory has very powerful emotional resonances in that it is the medium through [which] are constructed the affirmations of black people. —Alrick Cambridge, “Black Body Politics” The need to think through the black female body obtains significance given the location, in the semiotic field, of black bodies and female bodies historically. Even so, the black female body carries its own set of resonances, also historically locatable, which demand independent articulation. The epigrammatic quote which leads this paper is taken from “Black Body Politics” by Afro-Caribbean scholar/activist Alrick Cambridge, who makes some arguments that I find helpful. Speaking in the context of police violence on the black body in England, the context in which he works, he asserts: The black body is a surface of traces. Outwardly it bears the mark of exclusion upon the skin. But the black skin which bounds the body is an enclosure of a special kind for it is not only what differentiates. It is also what identifies. The black body is thus a mark of exclusive difference and also the basis upon which identification—and the claims to identity—can be formed. . . . In fact, what black skin denotes is already more than that, because it is already an outcome of traumatic histories of racialist transgressions. The black body is not only a natural, physical body, but a political and cultural body upon the surface of which are already imprinted multiple historic subjections.1 In speaking of the black female body, then, the particular contexts of representation have to be historical as much as they have to be culturally located. So it is with the resonances of the historical and the cultural simultaneously that this essay is concerned. And the meaning of body memory in both of these processes is also centrally important. One of the most obvious representations and commodifications of the black female body takes place within the context of carnivals and as a result allows a series of questions about representation and the carnivalesque. The discussion which follows is organized, therefore, around four central formulations : (1) the carnivalized female body; (2) the commodified female body; (3) the taking of space, freedom, movement, and resistance; and (4) triangular representations. The particular originating moments for the raising of some of these questions have been, in a larger sense, the re-interpretation of African Diaspora and, more directly, Black/Female/Bodies Carnivalized in Spectacle and Space 187 Caribbean culture in a variety of locations. The re-creation of Caribbean carnivals in a variety of U.S. and European cities, in frameworks and locations very different from Caribbean island space, gives rise to a larger consideration of the very meaning of Diaspora, culture, and migration. The genesis of these carnivals carries the intent of resisting on some level the otherwise alienating conditions of life in North American/Puritan–based culture or European culture, and therefore to carnivalize in “post-colonial” intent imbues these landscapes with some of the joy and space commensurate with Caribbean Carnival. Being from Trinidad, and having done (and still doing) my own share of carnivalizing , I found myself in a very strange position when witnessing some of the Caribbean festivals as a spectator. But I was often also a participant, enjoying the joy of free movement , the body for itself outside of circumscribing controls, and often experiencing the two (witnessing and participating) simultaneously. For me, the issue moves contradictorily around the location of the Caribbean woman ’s body, at once existing as the object of voyeuristic gaze; at once taking control in carnivalized space: the do-what-you-want-to-do, this-is-my-body-not-yours. So I want to locate this paper in the midst of this contradictory context without necessarily offering any neat resolution, but rather highlighting questions about these contradictory implications in the context of a series of hierarchies and asymmetrical relationships located in dominant patriarchal and imperialistic contexts. Additionally, the highly misogynistic representations of women in the lyrical articulations of female bodies in some versions of calypso, reggae, rap, dancehall, and toasting are also implicated. In this latter context (patriarchal/imperialistic), female genitalia are pornographically exposed, identified in ways so detailed and objectified that no amount of women’s reversing the terms of pornography by exposing male sexuality could be equivalent. To...

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