Bordering on: The black penis

Textual Practice

Volumn 10, Issue 1, 1996, Pages 9-28

  Marriott, David ^a  

^a QUEEN MARY UNIVERSITY OF LONDON   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Black cultural studies; Fanon; Lynching; Mapplethorpe; Photography; Psychoanalysis; Scopophilia

Indexed keywords

EID: 61949290617     PISSN: 0950236X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09502369608582237     Document Type: Article

References (22)

1. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Selected Works of Ida B. Wells-Barnett (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 182
2. Sutton E. Griggs, The Hindered Hand: Or, The Reign of the Repressionist (Nashville: The Orion Publishing Co., 1905), pp. 133-4
3. Nedra Tyre, Red Wine First (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1947), pp. 112-13
4. See Robert Mapplethorpe, Black Males (Amsterdam: Galleria Jurka, 1982)
5. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967), p. 159
6. Cited in Calvin Hernton's classic study, Sex and Racism in America (New York: Grove Press, 1965), p. 100
7. Hortense Spillers, 'Mama's baby, Papa's maybe: An American grammar book,' Diacritics, 17 (1987), p. 80
8. See also Frederick Douglas, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York: Dover Publications, 1969)
9. Otto Fenichel, 'The scopophilic instinct and identification', in The Collected Papers of Otto Fenichel (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954), p.377
10. James Baldwin, Going to Meet the Man (New York: Dell, 1965), pp. 250-1
11. See also Rhoda L. Goldstein (ed.), Black Life and Culture in the United States (New York: Apollo, 1971), p. 242b
12. and Henry M. Miller, The Mob's Verdict: Silence at the End of the Rope (Chatsworth, California: Barclay House, 1974), pp. 49-56 and 121-8
13. The picnic atmosphere at mass lynchings also served to preserve the ritual integrity of the act as a form of collective ceremony or festival. See James H. Street, Look Away! A Dixie Notebook (New York: Viking, 1936), pp. 35-7
14. See Robert L. Zangrando, The NAACP Crusade Against Lynching, 1909-1950 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980), pp. 33-4
15. and Thomas Cripps, Slow Fade to Black. The Negro in American Film, 1900-42 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 41-69
16. This captivating image of Southern white womanhood often served as the root cause of lynchings founded upon accusations of rape. The illicit looking of a black man at a white woman often being enough proof of the man's sexual desire and therefore guilt. See Ida B. Wells-Barnett, On Lynchings: Southern Horrors; A Red Record; Mob Rule in New Orleans (New York: Arno Press and The New York Times, 1969)
17. According to Victor Burgin 'the photographic look is ineluctably implicated in the structure of fetishism', 'Photography, fantasy, fiction', Screen, 21 (1980), p. 54. The 'freezing' of a look in photography bears witness to a 'pervasive structure which links fetishism to the image and to phantasy' (ibid., p. 55)
18. For Christian Metz, the fetish in photography is bound up in two chains of meaning: 'metonymically, it alludes to the contiguous place of the lack ... and metaphorically, according to Freud's conception, it is an equivalent of the penis, as the primordial displacement of the look aimed at replacing an absence by a presence - an object, a small object, a part object.' 'Photography and fetish', October, 34 (1985), p. 86
19. Kobena Mercer, 'Reading racial fetishism: the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe', in Emily Apter and William Pietz (eds) Fetishism and Cultural Discourse (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 316
20. See Patricia Morrisroe, Mapplethorpe: A Biography (London: Macmillan, 1995), p. 248
21. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death. A Comparative Study (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 46
22. Cited in Kobena Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle; New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), p. 197