Paper short abstract:

Taking ownership by becoming the artists themselves and harnessing the black female body image to their will signifies the black woman “asserting dominion over their own bodies” and reclaiming agency in their identity (Wallace Sanders, 2006:114).

Paper long abstract:

Taking ownership by becoming the artists themselves and harnessing the black female body image to their will signifies the black woman “asserting dominion over their own bodies” and reclaiming agency in their identity (Wallace Sanders, 2006:114). This chapter explores ways in which such traditionally diminishing labels are being reclaimed through modern expression to re-establish images of the black female body as a source of empowerment. In looking at the iconography of Sara Baartman, the article aimed not to revisit her history, but also to recognize the endurance of her body (and countless African women's enslaved bodies) to serve as vessels of ancestral memory despite a violent past. Drawing on disability theory, the chapter explores how the black female body during the time of Baartman’s was deemed disabled in its treatment which morally justified her being othered and put into the carnivalesque setting. Writers like Bakhtin help to contextualize the development of the grotesque and the carnivalesque as a backdrop for such mistreatments and amplification of the European imagination aloud. Focusing on the different ways Tracey Rose, Lady Skollie, and Wangechi Mutu interact with the body and the colonial paradigm demonstrates the sophisticated and layered nature of working with the black female body archetype.By endeavoring to unmirror from the colonial violence and stereotypes of the past, this ideological struggle to evolve past the carnivalesque black female body must continue amongst African woman artists.