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Jennifer C. Nash, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2014, 240pp.,
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5620-2
, $23.95 (Pbk)
For understandable reasons, black feminists traditionally treat pornography as a damaging form of visual representation for black women. In agreement with Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon's powerful criticisms of pornography, many black feminists, including Patricia Hill Collins and Hortense Spillers, imagine pornography as a painful site that violently denigrates, objectifies and exploits black female bodies for the sake of male pleasure. Pornography, according to this perspective, can only generate wounds; this cinematic genre is a persistent reminder of legacies that have reduced black women to passive objects of pleasure, fantasy and violence. In her provocative and beautifully written book, The Black Body in Ecstasy , Jennifer Nash challenges this tendency within black feminist discourses to privilege pain and trauma and ignore the ways in which visual culture enables women to name, articulate and experience desires, pleasures and fantasies.
In order to provide a kind of corrective to black feminist approaches to pornography and the representation of black women more broadly, Nash introduces a new way of interpreting and viewing racialised pornography that she calls racial iconography. As a counter-reading practice, racial iconography 'shifts from a preoccupation with the injuries that racialized pornography engenders to an investigation of the ecstasy that racialized pornography can unleash' (p. 2). By broaching the language of ecstasy, Nash 'refers both to the possibilities of female pleasures within...