Event – CGS Seminar Series – Skin lightening: contempt, hatred, fear
Skin lightening: contempt, hatred, fear
17 March 2016
5 PM, DLT, SOAS
Skin lightening: contempt, hatred, fear
Shirley Anne Tate, (University of Leeds)
Branding skin lightening ‘anti-Black spectacle’ undermines its decolonization of colourism. Through lightening the Black woman’s body becomes the Sable-Saffron Venus alter/native of normative beauty based on white/ light-skin and reveals the colourism of the Black Atlantic. The lightened body refuses the white or light ideal in favour of the in-between space of ‘browning’, a Black Jamaican aesthetic ideal. It also shows the white/light-skinned ideal’s tenacity in the racialized aesthetic space of the UK/US. The discussion looks at the ‘racial grammar’ (Bonilla-Silva, 2012) of skin lightening. Colourism and anti-Black racism in the UK/US and Jamaica moves the discussion to skin lightening and global capital. Saffron-Sable Venus alter/natives emerge through the ‘race’ performativity of skin lightening as a Black mask that defies racialized domination by revealing colourism.
Biography
Shirley Anne Tate is Associate Professor in Race and Culture in the School of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Leeds, UK and Visiting Professor and Research Fellow in the Institute for Reconciliation and Social Justice at the University of the Free State, South Africa. She has written extensively on ‘race performativity’, embodiment, affect, racism in institutions beauty and decoloniality.