through the eyes of the white man

8/3/2019 Through the Eyes of the White Man

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Liz Barnett

Through the Eyes of the White Man:

Representations of the Black Female Body and Construction of Racial Difference.

A Review Essay:

Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery .

Deborah Willis and Carla Williams, The Black Female Body: A Photographic History .

The female body in the West is not a unitary sign. Rather, like a coin, it has an

obverse and a reverse: on the one side, it is white; on the other, not-white or, prototypically, black. The two bodies cannot be separated, nor can one body beunderstood in isolation from the other in the Wests metaphoric constructions of woman. White is what woman is; not-white (and the stereotypes not-white gather in) is what she had better not be. 1

On August 18, 2007, the Association of Black Women Historians published a scathing

review of the Kathryn Stocketts best-selling novel and movie The Help. 2 They denounced the

novel and movie disturbed by The Helps representation of black women as a disappointing

resurrection of Mammya mythical stereotype of black women who were compelled, either by

slavery or segregation, to serve white families. The review continued to lament how the

caricature of Mammy allowed mainstream America to ignore the systemic racism that bound black

women to back-breaking, low paying jobs where employers routinely exploited them. However,

reviews like those from Entertainment Weeklys Karen Valby suggest that many Americans were

either not conscious of the overt racism that disseminated through the stereotypical depictions of

black women, or such representations did not bother them. She writes that, Kathryn Stockett's

1 Lorraine OGrady, Olympias Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity, in New Feminist Criticism, ed. JoannaFreuh et al. (New York: Harper Collins, 1994) 152.2 "An Open Statement to the Fans of the Help:" Association of Black Women Historians Website . 16 Aug. 2011. Web.06 Nov. 2011. .

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debut novel, The Help , could have turned out goofily earnest or shamefully offensive. Instead, it's

graceful and real, a compulsively readable story. 3 For reviewers like Valby, the novel and movie

represented a happy veneration for the beloved mammy character. The relative popularity of The

Help raises important questions about the origins and reliability of popular representations of black

femininity.

Common representations of the black female are deeply embedded into both United States

and European society. Discourse of race and femininity continue to be unconsciously reproduced

without much criticism. Although these representations appear to exist and reproduce themselves

naturally, they are human creations that are neither static nor unchangeable. Foucaults idea that the

body and sexuality are cultural constructs, rather than natural phenomena, proves important to the

analysis of the representations of black female bodies and sexuality. In The History of Sexuality ,

Foucault states how, deployments of power are directly connected to the body. 4 Foucaults

definition of the body as a constant site of struggle is crucial in understanding the formation of the

dominant representations of black womens womanhood. Foucault sees bodies as instruments of

institutions of power that only want to propagate their ideological viewpoints - an observation that

is very important in understanding the representations of black female bodies. Black female bodies

are, in essence, a canvas in which figurative scripts of racial representations are inscribed by the

dominant group. In tracing the origins and evolutions of the dominant groups representation of the

black female body, it is apparent that over time, the representations of the black female body

remained an ideological tool for those in power .5

Understanding the motives and history around

hegemonic representations of the black female body is the first step in deconstructing such images

3 Karen Valby, The Help Review | Book Reviews and News | EW.com." 11 Feb. 2009. Web. 02 Nov. 2011..4 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality (New York: Pantheon, 1978) 151-2.5 For an in-depth discussion of how Foucaults History of Sexuality should intersect with racial thinking see: Ann LauraStoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham:Duke UP) 1995.

2
http://easybib.com/cite/viewhttp://easybib.com/cite/view


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and liberating the black female body from these oppressive representations.

The scripting of black female bodies has been a common practice since the early European

expeditions to Africa in the second half of the 16 th century. The early European representations of

the black female body were created by European travelers who looked for ways to differentiate

newly encountered African women from white European women. These representations consisted

of drawings and written descriptions that emphasized specific parts and aspects of the black female

body. Such representations were the direct constructs and imaginations of their European creators.

These representations served a distinct ideological purpose - to construct African inferiority - and

were created with that goal in mind. Jennifer L. Morgans work, Laboring Women: Reproduction

and Gender in New World Slavery, shows how these European artistic and literary representations

of African women focused on their savagery and their resilience to pain, as a means to underscore

their fundamental difference from European women. In Morgans analysis, it was the female body

that allowed European men to justify and create the racial differences that the institution of slavery

was structured upon. European mens obsession with the myths and perceptions of African

womens sexual and reproductive identities allowed them to justify the use of African womens

labor in the most difficult arenas of plantations society.

The differences that European travelers saw between the African woman and the European

woman helped forge the initial ideologies about racial dissimilarity. Unlike the male body which

proved harder to subscribe symbols and meanings of racial difference, the female body was

conducive to inscribing such difference. Morgans use of travel accounts of European men in Africa

and then of popular representations of black females in the British colonies in the Americas,

demonstrates that these ideas were not specific to time and place but traveled across the Atlantic

with the trade of African slaves. In travel accounts, the socially constructed idea of beauty as white

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was transcribed onto the black female body as a means to perpetuate the idea of African inferiority.

According to Morgan, the conflict between perceptions of beauty and assertions of monstrosity

exemplified a much larger process through which the familiar became unfamiliar as beauty became

beastliness and mothers became monstrous, all of which ultimately buttressed racial distinctions. 6

European men emphasized this monstrous characteristic of African women as a means to elevate

the superiority of European women and the European race.

The depiction of the African women with long sagging breasts became the representation of

monstrosity and savagery used to justify forced labor. During his 1555 voyage to Guinea, William

Towrson depicted African women using this sort of animalistic and savage imagery. In her text,

Morgan cites Towrson when he writes that Africans goe so alike, that one cannot know a man

from a woman but by their breastes, which in the most part be very foule and long, hanging downe

low like the udder of a goatdiverse of the women have such exceeding long breasts that some of

them will lay upon the group and lie down by them. 7 European travelers, such as Towrson, were

able to separate themselves from the African women they encountered by creating such outlandish

descriptions of African women. This clear demarcation between African and European is seen in

many drawings of the time. An example of one of these drawings is titled A Description of the

Habits of Most Countries in the World, found in Ansham and John Churchills Collection of

Voyages ( which is reprinted in Morgans book). The drawing juxtaposes African, Indian and

European females. While well dressed, proper, European women held their children in their arms,

Africans were depicted as savages through their lack of clothing, long sagging breasts, and babies

tied to their backs. The theme of African womens beastliness and savagery repeatedly appeared

over and over again in travel accounts and works of art, allowing Europeans to subscribe meaning

6 Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2004) 15.7 Morgan 27.

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of racial savagery to black female bodies.

Difference is also emphasized is in the descriptions of the process and experience of African

childbirth. Europeans used myths and false perceptions to describe the African womens

childbearing process as that of something profoundly different from European women. As Morgan

argues, these descriptions of childbirth work to establish further distance between Africans and

Europeans. Morgan quotes a passage from Pieter de Marees narrative, A Description and

historicall declaration of the golden Kingdome of Guinea. In this passage, Marees writes that,

when the child is born [the mother] goes to the water to wash and make lene her self, not once

dreaming of a moneths lying-inas women here with us use to doe; they use no Nurses to help

them when they lie in child-bed, neither seeke to lie dainty and softThe next day after they goe

abroad in the street, to do their businessit shows that the women here are of a cruder nature and

stronger posture than the Females in our Lands in Europe. 8 De Marees emphasizes the strength

and savagery of African mothers by describing the ability of African mothers to work right after

child birth by carrying their children in a sash on their backs. He writes that African babies, whilst

the mother is walking or at workif they cry out for the teat, they throw their breasts over their

shoulder and let them suck. 9 These artistic and literature depictions of African womens difference

gave European men the reasoning and ideology to exploit African womens labor.

As Morgan argues, African womens Africaness became contingent on the linkage between

sexuality and savagery that fitted them for both productive and reproductive labor. 10 This allowed

Europeans to remove any connections that could be made between African mothers and European

mothers so that they could morally justify the enslavement and forced labor of African women. The

publications and artwork tactfully depicted African womens savagery as a means to legitimate the

8 Morgan 31.9 Morgan 35.10 Morgan 36.

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exploitation of these black women. According to Morgan, Sixteenth-century ambivalence about

Englands role in overseas expansion required a forceful antidote. In responsethrough and often-

conflicted depiction of African peoples, ultimately differentiated between Africa and England and

erected a boundary that made English expansion in the face of confused and uncivilized people

reasonable, profitable, and moral. 11 Across the Atlantic, these discourses allowed colonists to see

African women as biologically fit to perform the harsh tasks of plantation life. The discourse

surrounding the representation of their bodies scripted black women as feeling no pain, as savage,

and as significantly stronger then the European women. As Morgan demonstrates, those who

would capture African women to exploit their labors in the Americas would have to grapple with,

and harness those womens dual identity as workers and parents; once having done so they would

inaugurate a language of race and racial hierarchy in which that dualism was reduced to denigration

and mobilized as evidence of European distinction. 12 Europeans turned to African women in their

search for evidence of cultural inferiority that would ultimately become encoded as racial

difference. 13 Representations of the black female body were paramount to the development of the

ideology of black savagery and white superiority that Europeans needed to justify the exploitation

and enslavement of African women.

Many of the early representations and descriptions of African women with long, sagging

breasts, as indistinguishable from their male counterparts, as shameless, as carnivorous, and as

impermeable to the pain of labor, continue to form the basis of more contemporary European and

American representations of black womens bodies. In their book, The Black Female Body: A

Photographic History, Deborah Willis and Carla Williams trace the photographic portrayals of the

black female body from the invent of photography in the mid-19 th century to present day. Willis

11 Morgan 26.12 Morgan 54.13 For another example of the intimate relationship between race and gender see: Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather:

Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge) 1995.6


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and Williams highlight significant continuities between the colonial period and modern period by

tracing the varying Eurocentric narratives that have shaped the representations of the black female

body. As the authors demonstrate, the representations of the black female body continue to be

scripted in accordance to the ideological and political needs of those in power.

Even though the invention of photography redefined the visual world and everyones access

to it, photography did not alter the visual conventions that were used to depict racial differences.

According to the authors, when the means of visual communication became an impartial

machine, visual conventions gained force, as viewers assumed that they were seeing black people as

they really were.14

There exists a strong correlation between the 16th

and 17th

century European

artistic and literary imaginations of the black female body and the photographic representations

found in Willis and Williams book. The earliest photographic representations of the black female

body in the late 19 th century engage similar themes as the earlier representations. Like the European

travelers who purposely shaped their drawings and writings to represent the black female body in a

specific light, the photographers also shaped their shots to represent their black subjects in a distinct

light. Using specific props, lighting, and positioning, 19 th and early 20 th century photographers

successfully mimicked many aspects of earlier 16 th and 17 th representations.

In similar spirit to the European travelers that Morgan uses in her analysis, Willis and

Williams examine the late 19 th century scientific communitys obsession with classifying the black

female body as beastly and savage. The two authors define this photographic style as the National

Geographic Aesthetic- the photographic emphasis on the skin color, facial structure, and most

specifically black female genitalia. Such photographic representations defined the black female

body as a foreign specimen to be studied. These scientific studies allowed for the classification of

14 Deborah Willis and Carla Williams, The Black Female Body: a Photographic History (Philadelphia: Temple UP,2002) 3.

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black bodies as less developed than whitesas associated with moral deficiency, sexual deviance,

and intellectual inferiority. Phrenology and physiognomy compared the shape and size of African

and European skulls; these comparisons exaggerated differences and linked blacks to animals

(particularly monkeys), and were touted as proving African inferiority. 15 This scientifically

certified knowledge about blacks inferiority was symbolized through the photographic

representations of black female bodies that appeared in many scientific institutions during the late

19 th century.

In the 1850s Louis Agassiz, a Swiss born natural scientist and zoologist from Harvard

University, spent a month on a United States plantation to observe the enslaved Africans.16

He

believed that photographic evidence could validate his theories on the plural origins of man and the

racial inferiority of blacks. The female participants were forced to pose for the photographs half

naked from the wait up in frontal and profile views that exaggerated their breasts and buttocks (in

the same fashion that Morgans sources did). In orchestrating such representations of the black

female body, the photographers were specifically controlling the knowledge, ideas and discourses

surrounding the body.

Photographs that were not taken for scientific purposes often juxtaposed a black woman and

a white woman within the same photograph. In the early 20 th century, photographer Jacques Moulin

actively engaged his black and white subjects in gender and racial roles to heighten the sexualized

content of his photographs. In these photos, the sexualized subject is constantly the white woman

and never the black women. Moulin makes the distinction in his photos between the nude white

women and her naked black maid. According to Willis and Williams, the nude body is

aesthetically pleasing, idealized rendering, while the naked is a more realistic, less flattering

15 Willis and Williams 2.16 Willis and Williams 22.

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depictionthis image explicitly denies the black female body a rendering as an aesthetically

pleasing equal of the white. 17 Moulin also manipulates the composition of his photos to subtly

reinforce African womens animal-like nature. Willis and Williams demonstrate how photographers

like Moulin used props, such a leopard skin blankets and different manners of posing the bodies, as

a means juxtapose the two women.

For centuries, representations of the black female body in Western fine arts and popular

culture has centered on manmade racial and sexual mythologies including the promiscuity,

deviance, and exoticism of their bodies. The hegemonic notions that controlled the representations

of the black female body were intrinsically connected to the need to justify and exploit the labor of

black women (both literally and sexually). Historians and scholars like Morgan, Willis and

Williams can gauge these hegemonic notions by the degree to which the representations account for

the subjects voice and include their participation in the process of representation. In this sense,

agency is defined as the act of confronting hegemonic identities and taking control of the image

being produced.

Willis and Williams see the emergence of black female agency and resistance in the mid-

20th century. Since the Harlem Renaissance and the Great Migration, black artists, especially

photographers, took control of their own self-representations. They did so by creating images that

reflected their own aspirations, desires, beauty and pride in their identity. According to Willis and

Williams, the term black was itself transgressive, and it became a positive self-definition for

many African Americans. Black photographers framed their photographs, especially the image of

the black female nude, with a sense of pride in their ancestry informed by sexual desire and racial

identity. 18 For the first time in centuries black women exerted power and control over their self-

17 Willis and Williams 39-40.18 Willis and Williams 5.

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representations.

Many black female artists working today choose to directly confront many of the historical

images of their body. Thus they are, in essence, subverting and rewriting their history through their

photographic work. According to Willis and Williams, the interplay between the historical and the

contemporary, between self-presentation and imposed presentation is fundamental to black female

photographers .19 Today black female artists demonstrate the agency and power to directly challenge

and rewrite the popular historical representations of the black female. They incorporate

photographic legacies with contemporary realities in order to present images of real black women

who are no longer acted upon but who possess, in one body, both active voice and visual self-

presentation. 20 Although responding to these historic narratives of the black female is an important

first step in deconstructing these representations, Willis and Williams must be careful in their

definition of agency and resistance. By responding to and engaging with historical representations,

black female artists are not, in effect, liberating themselves from these historical discourses. They

are instead working from within them; never fully deconstructing them. A complete reformation is

needed in which black females create their own narrative and their own representations free from

the confines of historical representations.

For centuries, the image of the black female body has always served an ideological purpose.

The strength of these hegemonic representations came from the alienation of the black female from

the representation of her own body. The extent and power of such hegemonic descriptions of the

black female body is seen in the salience of such imagery in todays society. The representations of

black women are so deeply rooted in American and European society that it will take more than just

black womens voices to deconstruct the many stereotypes surrounding the black female body. It

19 Willis and Williams 5.20 Ibid.

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will take a new level of consciousness throughout all of society to critically scrutinize the origins of

societys representations of the black female body. For true liberation to exist, the representation

of the black female body needs to be created and defined through the eyes of the black woman. This

process will only be complete when movies like The Help no longer rely on stereotypical, racist,

and unreal representations of African American women.

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through the eyes of the white man

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