Hashim Ali-- The Black Body in Ecstasy

Jennifer Nash’s monograph The Black Body in Ecstasy manifests itself as a radical intervention by contesting the assumptions of anti-pornography black feminists camp that deem the desires and pleasures of black bodies as impossible within the framework of visual representation. Nash utilizes the methodology of what she terms as the hermeneutic iconography to contest the anti-pornographic black feminist camp. In her own words: “Racial iconography is a critical hermeneutic, a reading practice that shifts from a preoccupation with the injuries that racialized pornography engenders to an investigation of the ecstasy that racialized pornography can unleash” (Nash, 2). Basically, Nash performs the labor of closely reading black pornographic films produced in the 1970s and 1980s in the United States that she categories as golden and silver age cinemas; her major reason for choosing this unusual source relates to the potentiality as sites where one would not expect to locate political possibility. The good example of this possibility is the “performance of racial fiction” performed by the “black pornographic protagonists—particularly females that deploy race humor strategies to amplify racial fictions” (Nash, 110).

Nash clearly states that she employs “media-studies approach” as opposed to psychoanalytical approach adopted by many scholars and the reason for adopting this approach is the open possibility of transnational analysis. While I really appreciated Nash’s incorporation of “the nineteenth century display of Saarjie Baartman” in the French museum, the transnational contextual analysis and reception of the golden and silver cinemas was missing. How would the analysis of reception of these films in the transnational context enhance her analysis?

Also, Nash alluded to the hetero-normative porn as essentially homophobic without delving deeper into the dynamic of that relationship. By offering such a frame, isn’t she assuming the foreclosure the possibility of a gay male seeking pleasure from focusing his gaze on just the male protagonist in a hetero-normative porn?