Page 38 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

BODY

be grasped in terms of ethnic absolutism (that there is a global essential black
identity), rather, they should be understood in terms of the black diaspora of the
Atlantic.
Cultural exchange within the black diaspora produces hybrid identities and 15
cultural forms of similarity and difference within and between its various locales so
that black self-definitions and cultural expressions draw on a plurality of black
histories and politics. Blackness is not a pan-global absolute identity since the
cultural identities of black Britons, black Americans and black Africans are different.
Nevertheless, Gilroy points to cultural forms that have been historically shared
within the Black Atlantic despite the different meanings and history of ‘race’ which
have operated in Britain, America, Africa and the Caribbean. He speculates that a
common experience of powerlessness experienced through racial categories may be
enough to secure an affinity across the Black Atlantic.
Music plays a prominent part in Gilroy’s exposition of the Black Atlantic. For
example, rap music cannot be said to have any single point of origin or authenticity
for it has developed in America, Jamaica, West Africa, South Africa, and Britain
(amongst others). As such, rap is always already a cultural hybridization. For
example, South African rappers take an apparently ‘American’ form and give it an
African twist to create hybridized music that is now being exported back to the USA.
Further, rap can trace its roots/routes back to the influence of West African music
and the impact of slavery. Thus, any idea of clear-cut lines of demarcation between
the ‘internal’ and ‘external’ is swept away since rap has no obvious point of ‘origin’
and its popular American form is indebted to Africa.

Links Anti-essentialism, authenticity, diaspora, ethnicity, hybridity, identity, race

Body The body is commonly understood to be the physical flesh and bones of an
organism. However, within cultural studies it is commonly argued that the body has
been stylized and performed by the workings of culture making the idea of the body
as a pre-social, pre-cultural object impossible to sustain. A concern for the body
within contemporary culture is manifested by organ transplants, regimes of diet,
exercise, cosmetic surgery and health promotion strategies that represent narratives
of self-transformation achieved through self-regulation. Thus we are constantly
called upon to perform ‘body work’, for example involving the transformation of
the body through fashion and self-decoration, as a significant aspect of
contemporary identity projects.
One could understand the performance of ‘body work’ that is dedicated to
maintaining a particular and desirable state of embodiment as being the passive
consequence of disciplinary power. However, it may also be grasped as an active
process of the project of identity construction. The work of Foucault encapsulates
both these theoretical directions. Thus a good deal of Foucault’s writing has been
concerned with the ‘disciplinary’ character of modern institutions, practices and
discourses that have produced what he called ‘docile bodies’ that could be
subjected, used and transformed. In this context, a criticism of Foucault is that he
turns men and women into acquiescent creatures that have no agency. However, in