Bought and Sold
Bought and Sold
This chapter shows that, long after slavery, it is common to see the black body not merely as evidence of humanity but also as an object, and as a metaphor for other objects, so that the desirable and raced body is densely related to the symbolic surround of American consumer culture. To visualize blackness, then, is to strangely conflate blackness and a product, a bauble, or an object that we desperately desire. Indeed, inasmuch as the postemancipation desire for the black body connoted—and continues to connote—a desire for the presumably stable relations of slavery, the love of blackness as a medium for advertisement also breathes life, as we understand it, into the otherwise static and disembodied world of things. To see the black body as a commodity, then, is to see race in a very particular way, to make use of a very unusual, very long lived sightline.
Keywords: slavery, black body, evidence of humanity, metaphor, raced body, consumer culture
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