"Have You Ever Seen the Crowd Goin' Apeshit?": Disrupting Representations of Animalistic Black Femininity in the French Imaginary (original) (raw)
Related papers
Introduction: APES**T (APESHIT) Beyonce and Jay-Z at the Louvre
Journal for Popular Music Studies, 2018
This colloquy may be the first multi-perspective, in-depth look at a music video. We can imagine why there’s been such a paucity of music-video scholarship. It’s not only due to, as Ann Kaplan has observed, that music videos straddle a border between advertising and art, but that the analyst must also feel comfortable with addressing the music, the image (including the moving bodies, cinematography and editing), the lyrics, and the relation among them. (This might include looking at a dance gesture against a harmonic shift and an edit, and asking how these might relate to one another.) A collective approach is probably the best way to understand a clip and the genre, and also adds some benefits. Music videos are open forms, and as each analyst charts his or her path through the video, we can get a sense of a personal perspective (and readers can then more carefully track their own trajectories as well). Each of us takes on a different facet: Dani Oore writes on the song’s rhythm arrangement, Eric Lyon attends to rhythm and the song’s production features, Gabriel Ellis attends to the song’s multiply-stylized vocal performances, Maeve Sterbenz considers harmony and gesture; Gabrielle Lochard looks closely at race and the background figures; Dale Chapman attends to “APESH**T” in relation to other African American, opulent, art-inspired videos as well as their bonds to neoliberalism; Jason King considers larger contemporary phenomena, including other films, that turn to the museum as a historical repository that might help us solve what feels like humanity under threat; Kyra Gaunt describes how The Carters confront exclusionary regimes of power and other “ape-shit” through a mosaic of art, music, and media; and I offer an overview of music-video aesthetics, and some possible ways of finding a path through the video. We hope our tack will inspire a confederated approach, where art historians, dance scholars, media experts, and those who work on poetry and rap lyrics, costuming and architecture would write alongside us.
Postcolonial Studies, 2021
This article offers a reading of the APESHIT music video by the duo The Carters (Beyoncé and Jay-Z) as an Afrosurrealist intervention in the White space of the Louvre. Against the backdrop of calls for decolonizing archives and public institutions such as the university and the museum, and arguing for the political potential of APESHIT, this article makes a case for the music video as an act of resistance against the enduring ‘coloniality of power' in the European museum and elsewhere in the public sphere. We argue that The Carters embrace the role of the public intellectual-activist - assumed to be within the remit of the Western, White, liberal intellectual for centuries. Our argument is threefold: (1) the aesthetics of the APESHIT music video builds on and contributes to the Afrosurrealist artistic tradition, engaging with contemporary Blackness via the strange and absurd; (2) the music video itself creates performance art that intervenes in and extends beyond the Louvre and audiovisually re-curates its exhibitions; (3) The Carters can be seen as celebrity ‘critical organic catalysts’ whose Afrosurrealist intervention targeted at the colonial legacies of museums activates a critical relationship with these museal spaces traditionally constructed as White spaces.
The display, an important component of the modern museum, is a vital tool in communicating national identity to the public. Curators and exhibition designers are tasked with the role of storyteller, as they have a significant role on how to utilize objects and organize the display to form and circulate the visual language of a culture. The organization of the display significantly shapes how the viewer perceives and understands the messages and by extension of the museum, the display has historically acted as a repository of nationalism. As a culture, in which I'm speaking exclusively about the dominant whiteness in the United States due to the length of this paper, visual language is critical to formulating collective memory, understanding self, and upholding hegemony. The scope of this paper explores four Black American female artists' participation in the institution of art during 1990 to 2000. In doing so, I further elaborate on current scholarship on the display's participation in nationalism and the authority space yields on valuing objects. Because of compulsive nationalism in the display, viewer participation is critical to the subjugation of the Black female body. Analyzing both artist statements and reviews and conducting formal analyses of their work, I suggest that multiculturist practices shape and form the art produced. By theorizing the implications of female Blackness in the visual field this work challenges the display and uncovers what her participation means not only for her work, her body, but other Black women.
The ?Batty? Politic: Toward an Aesthetic of the Black Female Body
Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, 2003
1 assess representations of black women's derrieres, which are often depicted as grotesque, despite attempts by some black women artists to create a black feminist aesthetic that recognizes the black female body as beautiful and desirable. Utilizing a black feminist disability theory, 1 revisit the history of the Hottentot Venus, which contributed to the shaping of this representational trope, and I identify a recurring struggle among these artists to recover the "unmirrored" black female body.
Beyond the black venus: Colonial sexual politics and contemporary visual practices
Italian Colonialism. Legacies and Memories. Oxford: …, 2005
It is a striking fact that colonial authority and racial distinctions were implicitly structured in gendered terms. These taken for granted constructions seemed obvious, and were eventually reinforced in the heyday of empire by eugenics, the gathering and collection of scientific and ethnological evidence which made scientific racism, one aspect of which involved the reduction of women to their biological essence, an undoubted axiom.
In the wake of museul whiteness
Anywhere and Elsewhere conference proceedings, 2019
In the videoclip for ApeSh*t, The Carters traverse the Louvre after dark. A troupe of dancers loop through hallowed halls asserting the continuing presence of people of color in the spaces of high culture. The Louvre’s collection rests on colonial entanglements and a history of enslavement. Many have dissected this videoclips art historical references, and Kimberly Rose Drew (best known by her twitter handle MuseumMammy) identifies the influence of Black photographers Deana Lawson and John Edmunds to remind viewers of the voices of Black culture that resonate here. This paper looks at the ways in which the videoclip references a theme that literary scholar Christina Sharpe articulates in In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, the four chapters of which deploy concepts from the history of transatlantic slavery—'The Wake,’ ‘The Ship,’ ‘The Hold,’ and ‘The Weather.’ Beyoncé and Jay-Z perform in front of classical antiquities and French paintings, two of which reference disasters at sea: The Winged Victory of Samothrace—originally a ship’s figurehead—evokes a passage across the sea and, inevitably, the slave ship’s hold. Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa depicts a scene from an 1816 shipwreck off the coast of Mauritania. The line ‘I can’t believe we made it’ in front of these pieces speaks of the cultural survival of a people whom Audre Lorde wrote were ‘never meant to survive.’ Indeed, the video signals their arrival as royalty in the spaces of French colonial subjugation.
Beyoncé: Disrupting the Erotic Space within the “Queen-Ho” binary
This paper was submitted as part of a Ideas & Exposition Module - Risk and Popular Culture, at Tembusu College, NUS. The paper deploys concepts of risk through an exploration of African-American pop superstar, Beyoncé’s, visual album released in 2013 - " Beyoncé". Specifically, I examine the deployment of risqué content in the music videos for “Yoncé/Partition”, “Blow”, “Mine” and “Grown Woman” ,Beyoncé. These songs explore different facets of sexual experiences in its corporeality as well as psychosexuality. The paper argues that the performer utilises bodily notions of excess and control through her physical body ie. booty ,and acts of performance ie. posturing. Drawing from popular discourses on Beyoncé and women in hip-hop, the paper aims to offer an alternate perspective on notions of performativity and emancipatory possibilities of the performer’s hypervisuality through visual representations and strategies.Unlike commercialized ideals of (white, Eurocentric) beauty and femininity which objectify the female figure (and sexuality) as either Madonna or whore , the visual album utilisies provocative sexual politics to denote contesting and lived female experiences that refuse easy categorization. While some praised Beyonce's risqué lyrics and images as a ‘feminist manifesto’ , others critique the implicit reinscription of historical sexual violence against (and objectification of) black women through a hypervisualised medium.
More than meets the eye … representations of black women in mid-19th-century french photography
Women's Studies International Forum, 1998
Synopsis-This article looks at issues raised by some French photographs of black women taken in the mid-19th century. While standard readings of Orientalist painting describe representations of North Africa as constructing an imaginary Orient for the male white viewer, I argue that this oversimplifies a complex historical, cultural, and ideological configuration of factors relating to the transition between colonialism and imperialism in the mid-19th century and the embodiment of this configuration consciously and unconsciously in the representations of black women. Using photographs taken in France and in North Africa, I look at issues of gender, ''race,'' and class in relation to these images, locating some serious problems in attempts to read them as discourses of racialised femininity, which construct signs more real than the material circumstances and lived experiences through which they were produced and viewed. I offer a Marxist reading of these images as profoundly contradictory and unstable-embedded in modern historical and cultural processes rather than successfully fixing a clear and unchanging stereotypical view of North Africa and the racialised sexuality of black women's bodies. This should in no way be seen as an attempt to rehabilitate these images.
The Ambivalent Grotesque: Reading Black Women's Erotic Corporeality in Wangechi Mutu's Work
Internationally renowned contemporary artist Wangechi Mutu is known for her collages that craft sexual and grotesque women's bodies by combining images of models from high fashion magazines, racialized pornography, and ethnographic photographs of African villagers. The discussion of gender in relation to Mutu's practice has been overwhelmingly framed through issues of sexual violence, exploitation, and trauma suffered by black women. Mutu's description of black pornography as obscene and aesthetically debased in contrast to more professionally styled mainstream porn featuring white women is the particular point of departure for this article. The artist appears to reference her own work in terms of the politics of class disgust and engages tropes of racialized pornography in order to demonstrate both the harm they pose to black women and her distance from them. However, another reading is possible, one in which Mutu unintentionally reclaims these tropes and exposes their potential erotic and political power for women of color. I explore how the grotesque aesthetics Mutu employs may conjure ambivalent responses to the erotic presentation of black women's bodies, and employ a multiperspectival approach that reckons with my own conflicting responses to her practice and the various stances on sexual representations of blackness articulated by the artist herself and by concerned scholars in gender, race, sexuality, art historical, and visual studies. Beyond expanding the standard interpretations of racialized gender in Mutu's work, tarrying with ambivalence may offer more complex pathways for theorizing sexual freedom, difference, and feminism with the nuance demanded of women of color’s varying erotic subjectivities and embodiments.