Essay on 'Abjection and Race' (2020)

In reaction to the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing global protests demanding justice and equality for the Black community, I am sharing this essay, which, by using examples from the arts and music, explores the question: What do studies of abjection contribute to our understandings of embodiment and experience? It was submitted to Goldsmiths College in January 2020 as part of my Masters degree in Visual Sociology, in the option module, Embodiment & Experience, led by Dr Louise Chambers.
In solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, the Black community worldwide and my fellow POC, this essay shall serve as further understanding of the embodiment and experience of those pushed to the margins of society because of their social construction as 'Other'. 
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Introduction

This essay identifies what, precisely, studies of abjection can contribute to our understandings of embodiment and experience. It focuses, particularly, on the embodiment and experience of ‘black’ bodies and how studies of abjection help us think about the analysis of racism. Whilst Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytic theory of abjection (1982) provides insights in the origins and underlying mechanisms of racism, as an act of exclusion, this essay cautions against the repetition of the Kristevan abject within theoretical writing. It argues that employing a Kristevan abject paradigm risks reproducing, rather than questioning, violent disgust towards marginalised, ‘black’ bodies. However, this essay will illustrate what can be taken from studies of abjection in order to de-colonise and de-marginalise those bodies in society, which are cast off. By using abjection as a means of shaping subjectivity and, thus, describing embodied experiences of marginalised bodies, previous theoretical assumptions that have been petrified into respectable truths can be transformed into lies. Personal embodied experiences and their theorisations can be used as a resource to understand the ‘lived’ body (Sobchack, 2010) of abject, ‘black’ bodies. In order to argue for a more thoroughly social and political account of abjection, the examples used will show the consequences of being abject within specific social locations and the reactions to being ‘made abject’. This text follows the definition of a body being comprised of the "relations between the objective body (material, physiological and functional) and the phenomenal body (perceptive, expressive, lived)" (Sobchak, 2010: 52).

The essay begins with an introductory derivation from embodiment and bodily integrity to abjection, focusing on the coherent processes, in which these occur. This is followed by a critical account of Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection (1982), interrogating the statement that there is something like a ‘pre-discursive’ (that is, a bodily, affective, pre-symbolic), visceral response to objects, defined, (here, by Kristeva,) as abject. A very brief look at the politics of disgust (Douglas, 1966; Meagher, 2003; Miller, 1997; Kolnai in Korsmeyer and Smith, 2004) will be of help to disparage Kristeva’s generalisation of what ‘we’ respond ‘naturally’ with disgust to, and prove that disgust is always culturally constrained, hence, political. Within the following part, the text will offer further interpretations and critiques of the Kristevan model of abjection, derived from post-colonial, gender and feminist theory, as well as, Black queer studies (Tyler, 2009, 2013; Butler, 1993, 1998; Ahmed, 2002; Broeck, 2018; Scott, 2010). Here, it will be detailed how abjection, dangerously, can become a basis and a means of moral justification for racism. Hook’s (2006) and Fanon’s (1925) accounts contribute to the statement that abjection can help understand the embodiment of marginalised bodies, in particular, ‘black’ bodies, in the way that abjection can reveal the "psychological effects of the racists’ violent ‘psycho-visceral’ reactions to the ‘racial other’" (Hook, 2006: 208). In the final part, this essay deploys examples from art and popular music of lived racial abjection in order to show how, historically, marginalised bodies have weaponised their abjection and are, in reverse, making their ‘abjecter‘s’ abjection visible. The presented examples will be those of African-American artists who are using their state of being (in the margins of society) as a means of subversion. In the conclusion, the limitations of the Kristevan model of abjection will be exposed through reflecting on the theory in regard to racism. Furthermore, using the supporting examples, it will be stated what studies of abjection, precisely, contribute to our understanding of embodiment and experience. 

Embodiment, Bodily Integrity and Abjection

Every single embodied experience is different to the other – informed and shaped through an assemblage of factors, including current and historic sociocultural influences. The way we, as bodies, are allowed to move in certain parts of the world, informs the embodied experience of our bodily integrity – alliance between the body and the mind. Regardless of time and space, there can be things that might disturb or disrupt our sense of bodily integrity. This might be due to the distinctions made between the dualisms of the inside and the outside, self and other, nature and culture, etc. The separation of mind from body, nature from culture, reason from emotion has been a consistent theme in Western thought and is famously manifested in Descartes’s dictum ‘Cogito ergo sum’ (J. Williams, 1998: 1). It suggests that we ‘are’ only through thinking; through our cognitive skills, which completely neglects the body and its work. This view creates a hierarchy, in which the rational mind is above the fleshy, sticky and emotional being of the body. This dualism is what informs abjection, too. In making a distinction and, in it, a judgment, between the intellect of the mind and the stickiness of the body, we neglect an essential part of our beings and, consequently, inflict shame on that part. The act of neglect of the natural side of our beings – consciously or unconsciously – is abjection. If we move away from Descartes’s dictum and see the body, in the first instance, not as a Cogito but as a 'knowing body', a lived body (Sobchack, 2010: 53), the disruption of our bodily integrity and, hence, abjection can be avoided. When this neglect and disgust is conveyed towards other bodies in dissolution to one-self, it becomes clear that abjection is linked to acts of exclusion. Consequently, it can be said that abjection is a concept that precisely "hovers on the threshold of body and body politic" (McClintock, 1995: 72).

A Critical Account of Julia Kristeva’s Theory of Abjection (1982) and its (Non-)Relationality to Racism

One of the most known accounts of abjection is the one pursued by Julia Kristeva in her work Powers of Horror: An Essay On Abjection (1982), in which she writes: “An object becomes abject when it is opposed to I” (Kristeva, 1982: 1). I, here, represents identity, system and order of a person. She describes that which does “not respect borders, positions, rules: the in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (Kristeva, 1982: 2) as abject. More concretely, those aspects that unsettle bodily integrity: death, decay, fluids, orifices, sex, defecation, vomiting, illness, menstruation, pregnancy and childbirth, are abject (Tyler, 2013: 27). Here, it is not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but the disturbing character of the above listed to identity, system and order. This shows that Kristeva’s account is from a strictly Western perspective and ignores that, as Mary Douglas states in Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concept of Pollution and Taboo (1966) ‘each culture has its own special risks and problems’ (Douglas, 1966: 122) and, hence, its own reactions and attributed emotions to the same matter. For example, ‘in some [cultures], death pollution is a daily preoccupation; in others not at all’ (Douglas, 1966: 122). It should be stressed, however, that Kristeva’s account of abjection aims to explore only the psychic origins, functions and mechanisms of revulsion, aversion and disgust (Tyler, 2013: 27). She does not deny variations in identity, system and order, which surely depend on the rules and beliefs of the society the subject lives in, nor does she, however, mention that her account is generalised and isolated from varying sociocultural and historic conditions. For this essay, it is important to mention that Kristeva sees the continual process of abjection as a central role within the process of subjectivity (Tyler, 2009: 4).
Through the continual enactment of self/other and self/object, the subject forms, both, its psychological and material boundaries. As Kristeva notes, abjection is "the border of my condition as a living being" (Kristeva, 1982: 3). Additionally, she says:

“On the edge of non-existence and hallucination of a reality that, if I acknowledge it, annihilates me. There, abject and abjection are my safe-guards. The primers of my culture” (Kristeva 1982: 2).

This suggests that, for Kristeva, the abject is a force which not only disrupts social order, but (in doing so) operates as a necessary psychological ‘safe-guard’, abjection…settles the subject within a socially justified illusion – (it) is a security blanket" (Kristeva, 1982: 136).
Consequently, the subject forms its subjectivity through association and disassociation processes with other subjects. The disassociation process, in which the subject is ‘abjecting’, hence, rejecting other subjects, determines their own boundaries as a body, materially and psychologically. Following this, it’s safe to say that abjection, as a means of developing subjectivity, informs the subject’s embodiment. Comparably, Judith Butler (1993) links abjection with the project of self-definition; the task of ego-construction and, in other words, the substantiation of identity (Butler in Hook, 2006: 220). She insists, that the productive processes by which subjects are formed, require the "simultaneous production of a domain of abject beings, who form the constitutive outside to the domain of the subject" (Butler, 1993: 3). It can be argued that there is a pertinence of her description (‘abject beings’ referring to ‘racial’ others) to the dynamics of racism (Hook, 2006: 220). Another critical aspect of Kristeva’s generalisation of what ‘we’, naturally, react with revulsion to, is that she equals some objects with disposable waste. This, especially, becomes problematic, when we take the definition of abjection into account, which says that abjection not only describes the action of casting out or down, but the condition of one cast down – that is, the condition of being abject (Tyler, 2013: 21). Whilst Kristeva speaks of a pre-discursive, generalised physical reaction of disgust towards objects, or, inevitably, bodies deemed as abject, accounts from the politics of disgust disparage that statement: "disgust reactions are always anchored to wider social beliefs and structures of taboo" (Douglas, 1966). Taken from Douglas’ Purity and Danger (1966), this statement reminds us that, to separate the reaction of disgust from the social body, oversimplifies this aversive emotion. Aversive emotions such as hatred, fear, contempt, and disgust, are experienced, however, as tangled emotional and affective responses. What is important about Douglas’ argument is that there is no ‘natural dirt’ (Meagher, 2003: 32). Rather, as Douglas puts it, dirt is in the eye of the beholder and, that which is experienced/ or imagined to be filthy corresponds with prevailing belief systems and involves community-wide complicity (Tyler, 2013: 23). These accounts on disgust show that disgust reactions are always relational and revealing less about the disgusted individual, or the thing deemed disgusting, than about the culture in which disgust is experienced and performed. Meagher summarises:

“disgust is not a condition of an object, but an effect of a beholder’s intentional relationship with an object. […] objects are rendered disgusting or dirty through implicit social agreements. That is to say, rules of dirt and the regulation of bodily contact with dirt are not behaviours that can be reduced to ‘personal preoccupations of individuals with their own bodies". (Meagher, 2003: 32)

It is to be emphasised that there is no disgust without social agreements of what is disgusting, which is supported by Miller, who says that "an avowal of disgust expects concurrence" (Miller, 1997: 194). Consequently, it is through repetition then, that a ‘disgust consensus’ (Tyler, 2013) develops, which in turn shapes perceptual fields. It is a disgust consensus that allows disgust to be operationalised in a given social and political context as a form of governance to sustain ‘the low ranking of things, people, and actions deemed disgusting and contemptible’ (Miller, 1997: 13). The Hungarian philosopher and political theorist, Aurél Kolnai (1905-73), whose phenomenology of disgust from the 1920s was only translated into the English language in 2004, makes an important observation regarding the conflation of disgust with a ‘natural’ response: because disgust is an emotion associated with involuntary bodily reactions, ‘moral disgust’ is often experienced, or retroactively understood, as a natural response (Tyler, 2013: 22 – 23). He says: "So strong is the revulsion of disgust that the emotion itself can appear to justify moral condemnation of its object – inasmuch as the tendency of an object to arouse disgust may seem adequate grounds to revile it" (Kolnai in Korsmeyer and Smith, 2004: 1). This misconception that disgust is a solely physical response and not culturally informed, is part of the base of racism and justifies racist actions. As Tyler states in Against Abjection (2013), disgust is political and when we approach disgust as symptomatic of wider social relations of power, we can begin to ascertain why disgust might be attributed to particular bodies (Tyler, 2013: 24). This notion that disgust responses are political is touched on, too, in the Kristevan model of the ambiguous opposition of I/Other, Inside/Outside (Kristeva, 1982: 7). The statement: “I experience abjection only if an Other has settled in place and stead of what will be ‘me’” (Kristeva, 1982: 8) makes visible that abjection produces borders and boundaries of bodies: individual, social, sexual, racial and national. Additionally, it shows that abjection can explain the structural and political acts of inclusion/ exclusion, which establish the foundations of social existence. Abjection, thus, generates the borders of the individual and the social body (Tyler, 2009: 79). In Butler’s (1990) terms, the abject, at its literal, designates "that which has been expelled from the body, discharged as excrement, literally rendered ‘Other’" (Butler, 1990: 169). Expanding on Imogen Tyler’s work, Sabine Broeck also diverts from the universalism of Kristeva’s theoretical account of abjection. She writes that she is only interested in Kristeva’s model of abjection, "[..]in the way in which the white modern subject (male or female) might be considered an abjector, that is, a motorizing force which needed Black thingification to “know,” socially, culturally, politically, and epistemically, its subjectivity and its social being” (Broeck, 2018: 17).
What Broeck means is that white subjectivities are "not just produced through the construction of people of colour as Other, but through an Other, whose subjectivity is always already abject, and thus ‘outside’ the borders and boundaries of being-ness: not only abject, then but maybe less-than-human" (Broeck, 2018). Giorgio Agamben, who is writing on the ‘bare life’ of subjectivities that are constituted through these discourses of ‘inside/outside’, argues that this construction of subjectivities is nearly as old as Western philosophy itself. In a reading of Aristotle’s Nichomedean Ethics, Agamben writes: “All the more striking [is] the definition of the slave as the human being whose work consists only in the use of the body. That the slave is and remains a human being is, for Aristotle, beyond question (anthropos on, “while being a human being”; Nicomachean Ethics). This means, however, that there are some human beings whose ergon is not properly human or is different from that of other human beings” (Agamben, 2015: 5). Derek Hook, in ‘Pre-Discursive Racism’ (2006), explores how abjection underpins the forms of racism directed towards Black women and men. His relation of the Kristevan abject to racism is ‘a base, visceral racism of the body, firstly, invested with anxieties about physical proximity with ‘racial others’, fantasies of contamination, obsessions with bodily difference. This is a racism of the flesh, in short, replete with symptomatic expressions and affects, a reviling of the other on a ‘pre-discursive’ basis' (Hook, 2006: 225). He acknowledges the habituated symptoms of avoidance, aversion, disgust or discomfort - those bodily reactions - as bodily symptoms of racism (Hook, 2006: 208) and says that racism ‘never loses its localisation in the body’, which is supported by Frantz Fanon’s visceral writing in Black Skin, White Masks (1952). Sentences like ‘In the white world the man of colour encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema … My body was given back to me sprawled out, distorted, recoloured, clad in mourning in that white winter day. The Negro is ugly, the Negro is animal, the Negro is bad, the Negro is mean, the Negro is ugly … […] All this whiteness that burns me … (Fanon, 1952: 112-113)’, mimic the ‘bodilyness’ of racism, and make the brutal psychological effects of racism tangible (Hook, 2006). Whilst Fanon explores the bodily effects/ affects of the victim of racism, Hook’s focus is on an ‘embodied form of racism that is played through, and substantiated by, the body’s economy of separations and distinctions’ (Hook, 2006: 208). Both accounts explore the embodiment of being ‘made abject’. In Fanon’s work, the notion of ‘corporeal malediction’, the ‘disjunction’ of inhabiting a ‘black’ body in a racist white world, is contrasted against markers of disembodied whiteness. Hook comments that there is something ‘difficult to fathom in this disconcerting mismatch of physical and psychological properties (‘The ‘meta-physics’ of racism are read into the natural features of a hostile, white world; the hatred of this racist world, correspondingly, is read back into the experience of the mutilated, radically objectified body.’): a disjunction that obeys no strict demarcation between ideology and bodily experience, between the stereotypes of racist discourse and its effects on an embodied psychology’ (Hook, 2006: 208). This passage manifests a disjunction in the embodiment and experience of someone who has been mutilated and excluded due to their skin colour.
Fanon’s discussions of Black subjectivity or, the subject under conditions of colonialism, after Darieck Scott in Extravagant Abjection (2010), certainly open the way for theorising race (Scott, 2010: 38). However, they also, and more importantly to Scott, theorise what Fanon calls the ‘sociogenic creation’ – blackness as a figure that renders itself psychopathological in Western culture by the invention and incorporation of blackness' (Scott, 2010: 38). To explain, after Fanon, to “be” black is to have been blackened (in Scott, 2010: 38). That figure, to Fanon, is an "invention serving the particular cultural and psychological functions set for it by its inventors, enslavers and conquerors of various African peoples: […] a psychoanalytic and phenomenological rendering of the cultural construction of blackness" (in Scott, 2010: 38). Fanon, further, elucidates that "the qualities of the black figure, and the identities that refer to that figure, are rendered ‘abnormal’ and ‘pathological, so that a 'true' black identity, a black integrated consciousness, even a black ontology, become all but impossible to attain" (Fanon in Scott, 2010: 38). Scott goes on by saying: “Fanon’s purpose is to free his readers from the tyranny of a blackness that by its nature is subjugating: one becomes black in order to be subjugated by a conqueror who in creating you as black becomes white; blackness is both the mark and the means of subjugation" (Scott, 2010: 38). This touches on Leder’s concept of dys-appearance (1990) – a ‘dysfunctional’ re-appearance of the body into consciousness. The dysfunctional aspect, as a blackened person poses, living the abjected body of the differentiated ‘Other’. It becomes clear that the opponent to the ‘Other’ poses a white person, which has the privilege of the absent body (Leder, 1990); of receding into the background, and developing a subjectivity away from their skin colour – and in opposition to that which is ‘Other’ to the ‘I’. Equally, the ‘Other’ becomes minoritarian (Goulimari, 1999) to the dominating ‘I’. Here, Sara Ahmed’s theory in Racialised Bodies (2002), explains this further:

“[…] The white body becomes the body-at-home, through the very gestures that enable a withdrawal from the black body’s co-presence in a given social space” (Ahmed, 2002: 59).

The notion of abjection understands that the ‘logics’ of hate or racism address multiple elements of ‘blackness’ (Fanon, 1925), each of which is ‘abjectionable’ for the white racist (Hook, 2006: 219). In the notion of abjection, we have a theory of embodiment able to understand a form of racism that is played through, and substantiated by, the body’s economy of separations and distinctions (Hook, 2006: 227). The following examples show accounts of ‘racial’ Others from art and popular music, who have used the tool of being aware of their historic abjection as a means to reverse powerlessness into power.

Examples from Art and Popular Music: Abjection as a Tool for Subversion

What is absent from Kristeva’s account and many subsequent developments of the concept is an account of what it means to be (made) abject, to be one who repeatedly finds herself the object of the other’s violent objectifying disgust (see Tyler, 2009) (Tyler, 2013). Therefore, in response, this part of the essay will present examples from art and popular music to offer mediated examples of abjection as a lived social process.

fig. 1

The Artist FRED WILSON and his Installation Mining the Museum, 1992-1993

Artists who work with the ‘abject’, challenge social norms and ideologies. The African, Native American, European and Amerindian artist Fred Wilson did exactly that, when he, in 1992, temporarily reconfigured the Maryland Historical Society’s displays, interspersing treasured objects from the collection with repressed traces of Baltimore’s slave past. The result was Mining the Museum, 1992-1993, an installation that has been hailed as a masterpiece, with its most celebrated work of juxtaposition Metalwork, 1793-1880. (fig. 1). Exquisite vessels in Baltimore Repoussé style are juxtaposed with slave shackles. Its meaning can be understood as a racialized subjection that materialises the historical interdependency of white wealth and Black subjugation in the history of the New World (Copeland, 2013). While the silver vessels are a known, local object of pride, the shackles have no known provenance. This could be compared to the development of subjectivity, in the white as opposed to the Black subject. From a psychoanalytical point of view, the white subject, here represented by the silver vessels, developed a healthy subjectivity, only in dissolution to the ‘abject’ represented by the shackles, which were shamefully hidden away for years, in the back room of the Historical Society. One of the narratives had been accepted as ‘history’, while the other ultimately remains ‘Other’ even if it is seen. The continual abjection (neglect, suppression, exploitation) of the one, only allowed the other to exist, and to flourish. Mining the Museum uses the collections of a white art historical institution to catapult publics into realities, too often marginalised, side lined, or outright repressed. By placing the ‘abject’ objects of slavery among the polished treasures, the distinctions between ‘me’ and ‘not me’, life and death, along the lines of the dichotomy white/ Black, become blurry, hence, abjection is put into practice. On the one hand, abjection, here, is used as a resource to enable the viewer to embody the dehumanised, Black person, made abject, which, thus, helps the understandings of the embodiment of the ‘racial’ other. On the other hand, the ‘abject’ can détourne the act of abjection and, in doing so, detect the monstrosity of ‘Othering’. Through Wilson’s subtle undertakings in his installation, we encompass our own individual complicities as members of society, especially in our ways of seeing and thinking. He manages to show white society’s racial blindness, creating a space in which the subject of blackness might be heard. Mining the Museum, additionally, reintroduces the messiness that invariably gets edited out, and allows the viewer to engage those forms of racism that evade the rules of discourse, grapple with a racism of powerful affective responses, embodied experience, of pre-symbolic reactivity. While Kristeva’s notion of abjection can assist in theorising the role of the body in racism, Wilson’s art brings the body back into discourse.

BEYONCÉ and JAY-Z (The Carters) with their Music Video 'Apeshit' shot at the Louvre, Paris

Beyoncé Knowles-Carter and Shawn ‘Jay-Z’ Carter’s latest collaborative visual, 'Apeshit', directed by Ricky Saiz, was released in June 2018 and shot in the Louvre museum in Paris.

fig. 2

In one scene, two Black women sit in front of the painting 'Portrait of Madame Récamier' (fig. 2, painted in the 1800s, which shows a rich wife in neo-classical garb reclining on a chaise longue.) on the wooden floor. Connecting the two black women, white floor-length durags are tied to their heads. Beyoncé adds what is not in the painting above but would have been: two Black dancers as servants, still and docile, at the woman’s feet; the silent, unremembered and invisible labour behind the painted woman’s wealth and finery. The durag, often worn around the heads of Black men and women to preserve their hairstyles, has become an indelible emblem of Black cultural practice. During chattel slavery, headscarves were used to further the subjugation of Black women. Yet, like much of the Black cultural production that has been birthed out of their oppression, Black people have found ways to make what might seem mundane, sublime. Today, Black artists across industries have incorporated the durag into their creative practice, uplifting it as a sign of Black pride and unity (Byrd, 2018).

Similar to Fred Wilson, Beyoncé juxtaposes the dancer’s and their Black bodies with the white art of the Western canon within the white institution of the Louvre and, in doing so, renders visible the consequences of abjection: the erasure of the differentiated ‘Other’, the Black body in history of the white man. More so, does the insertion of the Black bodies as the literal carriers (fig. 2) of the white woman demonstrate that it takes the labour of the ‘Other’ for such wealth and comfort, as displayed in the paintings, to be sustained.

fig. 3

In another scene, Beyoncé stands in front of 'The Coronation of Napoleon' in line with a group of Black women dancers (fig. 3) as they gyrate their bodies. The Black woman’s body has often been rendered as out of control, lascivious, dangerous, and deviant but, here, they are completely in control. There is no misinterpreting what they might represent because they represent themselves, summoning movements rooted in African Diaspora-n dances (Byrd, 2018). In this example, control gives power (and money) for representation within Western visual culture. It’s a subversive act of Black bodies performing in front of art depicting predominately white bodies. It can give Black people and people of colour the reassurance that they belong where they have previously felt misplaced. Beyoncé is reversing the historical abjection of ‘racial’ Others; minoritarian to the leading white race, by reverberating the abjection exercised by the white Western visual culture, when erasing Black bodies from visual documents of a shared history. This reversion works especially well, because of the the music video's aesthetically-pleasing properties; she is using the weapons of beauty to detect injustice. Beyoncé’s huge public popularity predestines, that the realisation of the historical exclusion of Black bodies from traditionally white spaces, will be experienced as unjust by her following. While abjection is said to operate on aversive emotions rather than those directed to beauty, the Black female body has, thus, been made abject, by having been objectified immensely. As mentioned above, the bodies of the dancers in the video, however, are in total control. Through abjection, Black bodies become hyper-visible. However, that platform can be used to show their pride and beauty – like Beyoncé and the dancers do in the music video 'Apeshit'.

Conclusion

This essay has concluded that abjection can be used as a tool to help understanding embodiment and experience, here, of the ‘racially’ excluded body, through its subversive application. In both accounts, the artists have used their awareness of the ‘black’ body’s historic exclusion and re-inserted themselves within the white canon of art in the Western world. In doing so, they have rendered their abjection by the white Western society visible and subverted what made them underprivileged as a means of liberation and resistance. As Spivak suggests: "Why not develop a certain degree of rage against the history that has written such an abject script for you?" (Spivak, 1992: 62). The theory of embodiment, that is situated in the notion of abjection, helps us to understand a form of embodied racism. Consequently, abjection poses as a tool to understand the embodiment and experience of the excluded. Here, we turn to Scott:

"Blackness in relation to abjection endows its inheritors with a form of counter-intuitive power – indeed, what can be thought of as a revised notion of Black power. This power is found at the point at which ego, identity, body, race, and nation seem to reveal themselves as utterly penetrated and compromised, without defensible boundary, unveiling a new understanding of the construction of Black identity" (Scott, 2010).

In widening, both, the conversation on the construction of race and reimagining and repurposing dated theory, we can further undermine racist ideologies that are still pertinent and persistent in society today. 

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