Performing Whiteness, Troubling Blackness: Afropolitanism and the Visual Politics of Black Bodies in Youtube Videos (American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, 20-24 Nov. 2019, Vancouver, BC) (original) (raw)

2019, Individual abstract for the thematic panel "Images of Otherness, Othering Images", AAA Nov. 2019, Vancouver, BC

This presentation will analyze the visual politics of the ‘‘Afropolitan’’ style (Mbembé 2002) and its critical and emancipatory aims within the postcolonial symbolic economy, through the analysis of bodily performances of so-called ‘‘Afrodescendant’’ militants of Cameroonian origin, who live in Paris. These people were met during a two years fieldwork in a pan-African association of young executives and business leaders. Relying on the semiotic analysis of Youtube videos of the Gala Exception, the association's major event, I will show how, through the entextualization (Bauman and Briggs 1990) of a set of bodily, spatial and musical signs, these black people ‘‘speak like the Whites’’ (or "whitisent" in French): indeed, they visually perform a collective ethos of cosmopolitan Africans, well integrated into the globalized and neoliberal ‘‘new world society’’ (Ferguson 2002) and in conformity with the norms of hegemonic whiteness. Thus, they enregister (Agha 2007) the positive image of an empowered Africa, which contrasts with racializing images about Afrodescendant people, and they tend to erase the social stigma (Goffman 1963) of black skin. By demonstrating the centrality of images in the process of social semiosis and their performativity as a counter-discourse and a political practice for negotiating agency and power relations, I will show how the notions of entextualization, enregisterment and ideology can be used in order to analyze the visual dimensions of style (Eckert 2000) and language, conceived as a ‘‘total semiotic fact’’ (Nakassis 2016).