Forms of Blackness

Cecile Bishop is Associate Professor of Francophone Post-Colonial Literatures and Cultures at University of Oxford and Kelleher Fellow in French at Oriel College. She is the author of Postcolonial Criticism and Representations of African Dictatorship: The Aesthetics of Tyranny.

List of Illustrations ix

Preface xiii

Introduction 1

1. Blackness Unseen: The Liberation of Paris, in Black and White 33

2. Portrait of Madeleine Versus Portrait of a Negress? Portraiture, Race, and Subjectivity in Marie-Guillemine Benoists Painting 69

3. The Becoming-Insect of Frantz Fanon: Blackness, Form, and Lived Experience 100

4. Photographic Possessions: Summoning the Diaspora in Samuel Fossos African Spirits 135

Conclusion 177

Acknowledgments 189

Notes 193

Sources 223

Index 242

"Cecile Bishops Forms of Blackness is an exceptional book with a compelling premise: to consider blackness as a form of production rather than as an empirical fact, moving deftly beyond the bounds of Anglophone critical race theory. Original and elegant, Bishop posits provocative and well thought-through possibilities for meaningfully deconstructing racial categories."-Kaiama L. Glover, author of, A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being



"This is a rich, original, and inventive project that will have a resounding impact. Bishops brilliant readings denaturalize racialized perception, surface vivid contradictions, invite readers to feel discomfort in familiar aesthetic experiences (and find pleasure and power in others), and suggest new ways of conceptualizing, and seeing, Blackness that transgress representation. This is urgent and extremely timely work."-Jennifer Bajorek, author of, Unfixed: Photography and Decolonial Imagination in West Africa