What is black art?

Perhaps the most useful thing this body of work shares is not so much its attachment to Fanon, but rather the many ways in which close readings of his work tease out the complexity of contemporary concerns. In this light, Fanon's work becomes a central resource for the material contained in this volume. Methodologically, these works rely on Fanon's understanding of psychoanalysis as well as his relationship to the philosophical work of G. W. Hegel and Jean-Paul Sartre. They attempt to engage with Fanon's aggressive dialogue with European philosophical, Marxist, and psychoanalytic discourses as a means to subvert ingrained strategies of Othering embedded in multiple regimes of European thought. In undertaking such a strategy, the contributors to Read's volume understand race as a socially constructed category, and with this foundation, these transgressive images and texts not only resist but also attempt to destroy ingrained stereotypes of "blackness" through separating it from biological fixity. For example, Harris's Venus Hottentot 2000 takes the paradigmatic image of the Venus Hottentot - a nineteenth-century icon of black Otherness - and creates an image which at once reiterates the tropes of desire and the projection of sexual licentiousness embedded in the breasts, buttocks, and genitaha of the Hottentot. But through her direct stare at the viewer, her anthropomorphic armor that covers her breasts, and her hand on her hip, Venus Hottentot 2000 insists on her own subjectivity. Harris has transformed her from being an object of scientific and psychological projection to a subject who destabilizes the legitimacy of the stereotype of the black woman and upsets the viewer's ingrained myths about blackness.

In examining Fanon and his legacy, the writers in this volume do not celebrate him; rather they take his work to task, critically analyzing his blindspots with respect to essentialism, gender, and sexuality. bell hooks, whose essay, "Feminism as a Persistent Critique of History: What's Love Got to Do with It?," explains the place Fanon occupies in her own thought. Seeing the ways in which black women are virtually absent in Fanon, hooks eloquently takes the reader through her family romance with the author, showing how this process - a flight from Fanon to feminism and back - allows her to imagine a transgressive space in which the relations between black men and women become a site of resistance as well as healing. This presumes (as does much of the work in this volume) that we are always "becoming." Moreover, hooks's intellectual journey becomes the means through which she realizes how Fanon's work exposes the pain of lived experience as well as her strategy for carving out a space for women within his oeuvre. This move to theorize, or to place women into Fanon, is also the central force of Young's and Verges's essays.

This issue of seeing Fanon's slippages or blindspots also drives Mercer's work. In his essay "Decolonisation and Disappointment: Reading Fanon's Sexual Politics," the author, along with Young, iterates the ways in which Fanon's sexual politics were highly problematic. From this point, Mercer attempts to show how Fanon's relations to homosexuality and women underlie significant moments of anxiety in his writings. As such, Mercer's project, simply stated, is to demonstrate how sexuality complicates and disavows notions of a fixed identity or a position from which to speak. Moving beyond a narrow reading of Fanon, Mercer insists that raising the issue of homophobia in black intellectual discourse offers an alternative to what he calls "the culture of retribution" that was a part of the nationalist sentiments of the Civil Rights movement. Discussion of homophobia is for Mercer a way to avoid the "ideological traps in which an identity politics of gender can get stuck" (128).