Skin acts : race, psychoanalysis, and the black male performer / Michelle Ann Stephens.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Stephens, Michelle Ann, 1969-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

African American entertainers.

African American men.

United States--Race relations.

United States.

Race relations.

Human skin color.

Physical Description:

xvi, 282 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Durham : Duke University Press, 2014.

Summary:

In Skin Acts, Michelle Ann Stephens explores the work of four iconic twentieth-century black male performers-Bert Williams, Paul Robeson, Harry Belafonte, and Bob Marley-to reveal how racial and sexual difference is both marked by and experienced in the skin. She situates each figure within his cultural moment, examining his performance in the context of contemporary race relations and visual regimes. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis and performance theory, Stephens contends that while black skin is subject to what Frantz Fanon called the epidermalizing and hardening effects of the gaze, it is in the flesh that other-intersubjective, pre-discursive, and sensuous-forms of knowing take place between artist and audience. Analyzing a wide range of visual, musical, and textual sources, Stephens shows that black subjectivity and performativity are structured by the tension between skin and flesh, sight and touch, difference and sameness. Book jacket.

Contents:

Introduction fleshing out the act

Seeing faces, hearing signs

Bodylines, borderlines, color lines

The problem of color

In the flesh, living sound

Conclusion defacing race, rethinking the skin.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [259]-271)and index.

ISBN:

9780822356684

0822356686

9780822356776

0822356775

OCLC:

871186953