My dissertation centers an established and emerging cohort of black queer contemporary visual artists and writers who articulate how blackness is historically constructed as a signal for erotic danger through a host of aesthetic strategies in order to argue for risk-taking as a mode of erotic liberation. Drawing on archival research, interviews with contemporary artists, and close readings of visual and literary objects, my project is the first to address the persistence of the HIV/AIDS crisis as it traverses time and space in the work of black queer cultural producers. Building upon recent interventions in the fields of Black Queer Studies, Art History, Literary Studies, and Film and Media Studies, I argue that black queer visual artists disrupt and expand upon a version of sexual risk-taking in (white) queer studies that is claimed as the vanguard of radical queer practice. Over four chapters, Immoral Panics considers how black gay, lesbian, nonbinary, and trans filmmakers, painters, and poets represent blackness as a sign of erotic risk in its shifting historical proximity to debates surrounding consent, ungendering, andthe HIV/AIDS crisis. Beginning in 1976 and concluding in 2018 the project, first, reveals the coconstitution of blackness and queerness as sexually excessive contagions by the state through proceeding generations and, second, marks the HIV/AIDS crisis as always already racialized and ongoing in the lives of black queers who now bear the structural brunt of queer radicalism. In Chapter One, I argue that consent within queer pleasure is haunted by the violence of the law and the afterlife of slavery through a reading of the rarely cited archive of the 1976 police raid at the Mark IV Bathhouse during a white male BDSM slave auction and filmmaker Isaac Julien’s The Attendant (1993), produced in response to the AIDS crisis. In Chapter Two, I articulate how the initial moral panic regarding AIDS built upon the anti-black surveillance of skin color through attentive readings of the journals of late black gay writer Gary Fisher and the abstract paintings of Mark Bradford as they both pay sustained formal attention to society’s demeaning interest in AIDS-related cancer Kaposi’s Sarcoma. In Chapter Three, I argue that the disorientation experienced by black queers as they interface with queer public sex institutions, blamed for the spread of the virus, serves as a productive affective model for both inhabiting and critiquing queer risk and pleasure through close readings of the works of late black gay poet Essex Hemphill from 1992, London-based Indian gay photographer Sunil Gupta from 1999, and black lesbian filmmaker Tiona Nekkia McClodden in 2017. In Chapter Four, I demonstrate how a cohort of black nonbinary, queer, and trans contemporary painters and poets, including Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Danez Smith, and jayy dodd, play with and rearrange risky images and signifiers of black masculinity, as a form of pleasurable world-making under the specter of the virus.

This dissertation is a cultural history of Barbados since its 1966 independence. As a pivotal point in the Transatlantic Slave Trade of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, one of Britain's most prized colonies well into the mid twentieth century, and, since 1966, one of the most stable postcolonial nation-states in the Western hemisphere, Barbados offers an extremely important and, yet, understudied site of world history. Barbadian identity stands at a crossroads where ideals of British respectability, African cultural retentions, U.S. commodity markets, and global economic flows meet. Focusing on the rise of Barbadian popular music, performance, and visual culture this dissertation demonstrates how the unique history of Barbados has contributed to complex relations of national, gendered, and sexual identities, and how these identities are represented and interpreted on a global stage. This project examines the relation between the global pop culture market, the Barbadian artists within it, and the goals and desires of Barbadian people over the past fifty years, ultimately positing that the popular culture market is a site for postcolonial identity formation.

With this project I put Barbadian history, visual analysis, performance theory, cultural theory, diaspora theory, and gender theory in conversation. The first two chapters offer a cultural history of Barbadian identity focusing on independence in 1966. Using the theoretical framework of national sincerity, I argue that the nation's history of performance and migration has made national representation a constitutive part of national identity formation. The next three chapters focus on the images of three of the nation's most popular performers who have strong audiences outside of the region as well: Alison Hinds, Rupert "Rupee" Clarke, and Robyn "Rihanna" Fenty. Using these three artists, the project analyzes how femininity, masculinity, and sexuality are put in service of Barbadian nationalism. The final chapter explores the ways in which pop culture images circulate through new technologies that redefine the boundaries of nation and identity. Using Jean Baudrillard's concept of the hyperreal, I argue that the definition of national identity Barbados has struggled with occurs most poignantly in the realm of representation. By examining websites, blogs, and digital products of these artists I conclude the project with a re-examination of the ways in which commodity, sexuality, gender performance, and diasporic consciousness undergird individual careers and national representations.

"In Plenty and In Time of Need" shows that the post-independence Barbadian nation-state relies upon regionalism and transnationalism, and that its popular culture artists use diasporic resources to both promote and define a national identity. Using personal interviews, newspapers, internet blogs, and various archival sources, my work reveals how an analysis of Barbadian identity constructions can demonstrate the ways in which transnationalism, popular culture, and diasporic consciousness interact in the postcolonial world.

My dissertation, Berries Bittersweet: Visual Representations of Black Female Sexuality in Contemporary American Pornography interrogates how pornography, from the 1930s to the present, functions as an essential site in the production of black female sexuality. Closely reading a diverse pool of primary pornographic visual materials, across print, moving image and the internet, such as photographs, magazines, trade magazines, videos, DVDs, and internet website viewings, I argue that pornography offers an ambiguous casting of black female sexuality, simultaneously constructing the black female body as craved and contemned yet ultimately not merely other, but in-human (not woman). Pornography's inscription of racial, sexual alterity on the black female body is both somatic and symbolic.

After an overview of the history of pornography, its central yet liminal relationship to nation and oft ignored collisions with race, I unveil print pornography (photograph, cartoon and magazine) as a medium that ultimately speaks to the photograph's task of visualizing a "real" and authentic racialized body. I argue that men's magazines such as Playboy and Players are important texts that delineate pornographic imaginings of desire and national belonging circumscribed by race. I then explore early moving image porn and the stag genre beginning in the 1930s, arguing that the black female body within stag films challenges the rigidity of gender roles that the films subscribe to, ultimately contesting the black female's position within the bounds of American womanhood. The decade of the 1970s, pornography's golden age, an intensely ambivalent era in the history of American pornography, marks a moment of mainstream recognition for the black female body within pornography, yet her inclusion is still underscored by the premise of her racial sexual difference and her performance of primitivized and pathologized sexuality. I examine the golden age as a critical juncture where hard core pornography, blaxploitation, and these two genres' analogous pornographic gaze--a heteronormative and sexualizing sociality--cemented the black female body as intelligible in and through not just her pornographication, but her representation as pornographic body produced and consumed for a mainstream mass market audience.

This ambivalence marks the black female in her transition from the stag era in the 1930s, through the golden age of pornography in the 1970s, into the video age beginning in the mid 1980s and through the present. It is most vivid in my discussion of taboo and the popular and financially prosperous phenomenon of black/white interracial pornography. I frame my discussion of Internet interracial porn against the history of American miscegenation and the coeval yet persistent national ideologies of racialized American womanhood and manhood deeply steeped in sexuality. I unveil interracial pornography, one of the most consumed and financially prosperous types of American pornography, as a domain of porn especially invested in the construction of the black female's racial, sexual alterity, allegorically evoked and projected onto the body. Lastly, I explore the space of the Internet, the fastest growing and most transformative area of contemporary American pornography, and cyberspace's unique positioning of the black female as an embodied figure in the typically unembodied realm of cyberspace.

From examining American pornography from the 1930s to the present, I reveal that neither pornography nor its representation of the black female body is fixed, yet both are anchored in a complex and contradictory negotiation between fantasy and reality that hinge upon the authentication of the black female body via the premised indexicality of the photograph's image. The black female body, as an oscillating site of desire and loathing, humanity and inhumanity, both affirms and challenges the ideological foundations, norms, and "rules" of pornography. My project reveals pornography is not just a fertile ground in considering the production of black female sexuality. It is a critical visual media in the production of national imaginings of race, gender, and sexuality, simultaneously maintaining and resisting social hierarchies, hegemony, power structures, systems of oppression and liberation.

My project echoes the inter-disciplinary nature of the field of African Diaspora Studies itself--combining the insights and methodologies of visual theory, psychoanalysis, history, film studies, sexuality, gender and women's studies. By bringing these fields into conversation, I elucidate the power and significance of visual culture and its central role in the production of race, gender and sexuality. A comprehensive exploration of the representation of black female sexuality in these three pornographic media, print, moving image and Internet, is a paramount, multi-faceted project that has not yet been approached within the academy. Beyond filling an academic void, this project exposes the need for counter-hegemonic and polyvalent images of the black female body while lifting the stifling veil of taboo shrouding discussions of sexuality (specifically in the context of hardcore pornography) within the academy. It develops a much-needed critical gaze and an interdisciplinary framework of visual literacy from which to approach visual representations of black female sexuality. This dissertation undertakes an essential, necessary project and my research is a fundamental contribution to cultural studies within the African Diaspora as well as the fields of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Visual Studies.

Leigh Raiford, "The Here and Now of Eslanda Robeson's African Journey," in Migrating the Black Body: The African Diaspora and Visual Culture, edited by Leigh Raiford and Heike Raphael-Hernandez (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017), 134-52.

"Colorblindness, A Life: Race, Film, and the Articulation of an Ideology," offers a political and cultural biography of the racial ideology of colorblindness from its emergence as a coherent racial ideology in the years after the civil rights movement to its dominant influence in social policy in the 1990s. Most importantly, the project reveals the manner in which colorblindness became the racial project of neoliberalism. This elaboration of colorblindness as an ideology and cultural form is best understood through an examination of film during the period of my study. Beginning in the second-half of the 1970s, Hollywood developed its own set of filmic aesthetics, narratives, and tropes that advocated colorblindness. Moreover, Hollywood was not only central to the articulation of the ideology, it also depended upon colorblindness in the New Hollywood era. In the post-civil rights era, then, colorblindness, neoliberalism, and film are constitutive of and inextricable from one another.

The project illustrates three key themes. First, colorblindness is the racial project of neoliberalism. The 1970s were characterized by an anti-government ethos that extended across racial and political lines that neoconservatives used in the 1970s to attack issues like affirmative action and busing as part of a movement intent on dismantling of the welfare state. Out of these struggles emerged a neoliberal notion of "individual" colorblind freedom that neoconservatives, beginning in the mid-seventies, successfully sold as the antidote to the "reverse discrimination" of government mandated "group" rights. The growing popularity of neoliberal economics in the seventies was not merely the result of the seeming failures of Keynesianism to cure stagflation. Instead, the mounting opposition to the "overreach" of the federal government in busing and affirmative action was fundamental in building the appeal of a return to uncompromising laissez faire economics.

Secondly, colorblindness, although post-racial in theory, has served as a tool for whites to realign and reconstitute white supremacy within a post-civil rights political correctness. Beginning in the late seventies, white Republicans and moderate Democrats alike used colorblindness to eliminate race-conscious programs intended to promote racial equality. These efforts have only exacerbated racial inequality.

Lastly, my dissertation asserts that film served as a key battleground for the culture wars out of which the ideology of colorblindness formed. Yet just as colorblindness needed film to form its cultural cohesion, film needed colorblindness to reinvent itself in the desperate economic times of the post-Classical era. Beginning in the 1970s, movies capitalized upon the volatile racial, social, and economic struggles in the decades after the civil rights movement that shaped colorblindness and have continued to appeal to colorblind sentiments for profit. By the end of the 1980s, Hollywood was increasingly turning to historical dramas that imagined colorblind white heroes at the center of black freedom struggles--emancipation and the civil rights movement, specifically. And by the 1990s, entirely new colorblind film genres, most notably in what I term the "Teacher Film," had emerged.

For Bisi Silva (1962–2019)

Abstract

This essay surveys a number of contemporary artworks that address the recent migrations and perilous water crossings of African people to Europe, made by artists of the African diaspora. Paying specific attention to the deployment of photography, time-based media, and installation, we argue that artists like Isaac Julien, Alexis Peskine, Romuald Hazoumè, and others disrupt the photojournalistic portrayals of African migrant–refugees crossing the Mediterranean in overloaded small rafts and makeshift boats circulated by the international media. While the UN and its High Commissioner for Refugees have tried for years to call international attention to the situation of these migrant–refugees in Libya’s camps and those camps’ catastrophic violations of human rights, it has been only recently that public attention and discourse have begun to recognize these crossings as a “crisis,” primarily because a growing number of African migrant–refugees have succeeded in reaching Fortress Europe via Spain or Italy. The artists of the African diaspora considered in this essay have attempted to intervene in these public debates by offering counternarratives to often sensational and dehumanizing depictions of specifically Black migrant–refugee lives. In focusing on these counternarratives, we demonstrate how artists connect this contemporary mass migration from African countries to a longer history of forced migrations over water in the African diaspora. Artists have returned continually to the “chronotrope of the ship,” following Paul Gilroy, and have drawn on this long memory as a means to convey the contemporary crisis, thus addressing the sorts of “colonial amnesia” that conveniently ignore any prior entanglements.