Black Looks (Back)

Colin Wright

The English phrase “black look” – meaning, to glower angrily or disdainfully – dates from the 18th century. We cannot pinpoint a causal origin of course, but it is surely not an accident that this usage coincided with the rapid growth of the British Empire. Could it have emerged from increasing encounters, in the colonies but also “at home,” between English speakers and black bodies? From our Lacanian perspective, the phrase “black look” implies the presence of a jouissance in the perceptual field, hinting at the role hatred of the other can play in the ego’s constitution.

However, it is one thing to cast a black look, another entirely to be seen by one. In Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon famously described the dissolution of his imaginary consistency on being subjected – or, better, objected – to a look that, as it were, blackened his very existence. Upon seeing the novelty Fanon still was as a black man on the streets of Lyon in the 1940s, a little French child exclaimed in fear to his mother “Look, a Negro!” Fanon’s “corporal schema crumbled, replaced by a racial epidermal schema,” leaving him “battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency.”[1]

We all receive our body from the Other in the end, but we do not all do so in the same way.

The current exhibition at Tate Modern in London, entitled, “A World in Common,” provides a different perspective on the “black look.” Arguably, it enacts a parallax shift on Eurocentric “ways of seeing”[2] the African continent by focussing on the medium – relevant to our Congress theme – of photography. This technology played a key part in the “scientific” project of knowing the African other through a very particular mode of ethnographic and anthropological looking centred on documenting, classifying, hierarchizing, and ultimately museumizing. The European scramble for Africa was partly a scramble to see it through the camera lens. Yet behind the veneer of scientific neutrality, this project was also a vehicle for exoticizing and eroticizing black bodies. Echoing previous tropes of the “Hottentot Venus,”[3] late 19th and early 20th century photographs of naked African women both recorded tribal scarification practices, for example, and pandered to the sexual pleasures of white men of science (knowledge being also an apparatus of jouissance).

By contrast, “A World in Common” gathers contemporary works by African artists who are decidedly on the other side of the lens. They joyously curate their own self-presentation in ways that are embedded in, rather than abstracted from, everyday life on the extremely diverse African continent. No museums here, only life! Instead of “black looks” imposing an objectifying disdain then, we find black photographers, some of them women, playing with the to-be-looked-atness that Laura Mulvey once made pivotal to the (white) “male gaze.”[4] Quite simply, these artists construct images that, like Lacan’s famous sardine can glinting in the sea, look back at us. An important book in the field of post-colonial studies was published in the late 1980s entitled, The Empire Writes Back:[5] perhaps we could say of this exhibition that the Empire looks back? Not that Africa can only be seen through the lens of its colonial past. On the contrary, by producing photographs that resist being mere pictures tailored to the eye – with that gaze-taming function that Lacan referred to in SXI[6] – some of these works make the average white, Western viewer feel seen in their act of looking.

Just as the shift to the psychoanalytic couch can enact a cut in the imaginary, moving analysands away from the “ineluctable modality of the visible,”[7] so some art works can make our picture of the world, and our place always at its centre, vacillate and even fall.

References

[1] Fanon, F., Black Skin, White Masks, trans. C. L. Markmann, London: Pluto, 1986, p. 112.

[2] Cf. Berger, J., Ways of Seeing, London: Penguin Classics, 2008.

[3] The notion of the Hottentot Venus originated in Sara Baartman, a Khoikhoi woman from South Africa who was exhibited before “learned” scientific communities from 1810 in first England and then France. She died at 26, and not only was her body dissected (not autopsied) and the results published by George Cuvier, but her remains were displayed in several “Natural History” museums in France before being repatriated to her homeland as recently as 2002, following the intervention of Nelson Mandela.

[4] Mulvey, L., “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen, Vol. 16, 3, 1975, pp. 6-18.

[5] Cf. Ashcroft, B., Giffiths, G., and Tiffin, H., The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures, London: Routledge, 1989.

[6] Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. A. Sheridan, New York/London: Norton, 1977.

[7] Miller, J.-A., “The Sovereign Image,” The Lacanian Review 5, 2018, p. 42. Miller takes this phrase, of course, from James Joyce’s Ulysses.