Coda — Decolonization and Seeing through Black Women’s Bodies

Abstract

This book has looked at the journey of the Sable-Saffron Venus as an alter/native-body from the slave plantations of Jamaica to contemporary times to show her constitutive absence in Europe/the USA/the Caribbean. The insistence throughout the book has been that Black British and Caribbean women’s bodies should be taken account of in any discussion of the Black Atlantic as a site of culture so that African American women’s bodies are no longer the sole location of Black women’s representation. In the process, what has been shown is the flow of Black woman body politics across time and space. The book has illustrated that Sable-Saffron Venus alter/natives are produced through disalienation (Césaire, 2000) with its twin processes of disidentification (Muñoz, 1999) and inscribing new autographies (Hall, 1996) in a re-epidermalization of the Black woman’s body. A Sable-Saffron Venus alter/natives perspective on bodies enabled us to see that there is a corporeality of class, ‘race’, gender, age, (hetero)sexuality, ability and the power of celebrity within representations of iconic Black women in the US, Europe and the Caribbean. Such an intersectional, disruptive corporeality underlies a decolonial approach to making Saffron-Sable Venus alter/natives visible within the nation as a Black Atlantic (trans)national versioning of female iconicity no longer dependent on whiteness to come into being.