Overview

In Skin Acts, Michelle Ann Stephens explores the work of four iconic twentieth-century black male performers-Bert Williams, Paul Robeson, Harry Belafonte, and Bob Marley-to reveal how racial and sexual difference is both marked by and experienced in the skin. She situates each figure within his cultural moment, examining his performance in the context of contemporary race relations and visual regimes. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis and performance theory, Stephens contends that while black skin is subject to what Frantz Fanon called the epidermalizing and hardening effects of the gaze, it is in the flesh that other-intersubjective, pre-discursive, and sensuous-forms of knowing take place between artist and audience. Analyzing a wide range of visual, musical, and textual sources, Stephens shows that black subjectivity and performativity are structured by the tension between skin and flesh, sight and touch, difference and sameness.

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9780822356684

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Reviews

Michele Ann Stephens adds an important layer to our understanding of black masculinity in the U.S. and the Caribbean during the twentieth century. This is a compelling, thorough, and cohesive treatment of the complex intersections of black masculinity, performance, and psychoanalysis. Well-written and clearly argued, Skin Acts will make an indispensable contribution. Alexander G. Weheliye, author of Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human Michelle Ann Stephens has written a book that anyone interested in race and psychoanalysis will want to pay attention to, and one that even those who do not consider themselves interested in the topic will have to pay attention to. She has taken the most immediate and seemingly obvious site of racialization, the skin, and given it a revelatory new genealogy. She sets the standard for all future engagements with what Frantz Fanon termed 'epidermalization'. Through arresting readings of modern and contemporary art and performance, Stephens unfolds the racializing and engendering of skin within modernity, and makes a powerful argument for reading it through the lens of feminist, antiracist, and haptic visuality. Tavia Nyong'o, author of The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory

Michelle Ann Stephens has written a book that anyone interested in race and psychoanalysis will want to pay attention to, and one that even those who do not consider themselves interested in the topic will have to pay attention to. She has taken the most immediate and seemingly obvious site of racialization, the skin, and given it a revelatory new genealogy. She sets the standard for all future engagements with what Frantz Fanon termed 'epidermalization.' Through arresting readings of modern and contemporary art and performance, Stephens unfolds the racializing and engendering of skin within modernity, and makes a powerful argument for reading it through the lens of feminist, antiracist, and haptic visuality. --Tavia Nyong'o, author of The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory

Michele Ann Stephens adds an important layer to our understanding of black masculinity in the U.S. and the Caribbean during the twentieth century. This is a compelling, thorough, and cohesive treatment of the complex intersections of black masculinity, performance, and psychoanalysis. Well-written and clearly argued, Skin Acts will make an indispensable contribution. Alexander G. Weheliye, author of Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human Michelle Ann Stephens has written a book that anyone interested in race and psychoanalysis will want to pay attention to, and one that even those who do not consider themselves interested in the topic will have to pay attention to. She has taken the most immediate and seemingly obvious site of racialization, the skin, and given it a revelatory new genealogy. She sets the standard for all future engagements with what Frantz Fanon termed 'epidermalization.' Through arresting readings of modern and contemporary art and performance, Stephens unfolds the racializing and engendering of skin within modernity, and makes a powerful argument for reading it through the lens of feminist, antiracist, and haptic visuality. Tavia Nyong'o, author of The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory

""Michele Ann Stephens adds an important layer to our understanding of black masculinity in the U.S. and the Caribbean during the twentieth century. This is a compelling, thorough, and cohesive treatment of the complex intersections of black masculinity, performance, and psychoanalysis. Well-written and clearly argued, Skin Acts will make an indispensable contribution."" Alexander G. Weheliye, author of Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human ""Michelle Ann Stephens has written a book that anyone interested in race and psychoanalysis will want to pay attention to, and one that even those who do not consider themselves interested in the topic will have to pay attention to. She has taken the most immediate and seemingly obvious site of racialization, the skin, and given it a revelatory new genealogy. She sets the standard for all future engagements with what Frantz Fanon termed 'epidermalization.' Through arresting readings of modern and contemporary art and performance, Stephens unfolds the racializing and engendering of skin within modernity, and makes a powerful argument for reading it through the lens of feminist, antiracist, and haptic visuality."" Tavia Nyong'o, author of The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory

Author Information

Michelle Ann Stephens is Associate Professor of English and Latino and Hispanic Caribbean Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She is the author of Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914–1962, also published by Duke University Press.

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