Religion and the Medieval and Early Modern Global Marketplace, 2021
This chapter focuses on a scene of amputation as a visceral instantiation of antiblack depredatio... more This chapter focuses on a scene of amputation as a visceral instantiation of antiblack depredation. In it, saints expropriate an anonymous black gure's limb during miraculous healing. According to the Miracle of the Black Leg (MoBL), a Roman dreamt that Cosmas and Damian amputated an Ethiopian's healthy limb so that it could be transplanted onto his own ailing body. The MoBL merits this sustained attention because it evidences how Renaissance worldviews shape visual representations of humanity's di erentiation from divinity and each other. Blackness operates cosmologically within the miracle as a sign of heathen physiognomic di erence and disease. It illuminates how church authority, commerce, and medical knowledge converge as a backdrop for European conquest into Africa and the New World. The original version of the miracle did not hinge upon the racial di erences between the amputee and the recipient. I argue that the racial metamorphosis of MoBL literary accounts and visual iconography were sparked by the onset of the transAtlantic slave trade. In other words, the oncewhite donor leg was blackened as part of a rhetorical move to justify territorializing parts of the globe as legitimately enslavable. This chapter uses the divine possession chronicled in the Miracle of the Black Leg's cross-racial transplant imagery to theorize human bodies as sexualized and racialized territories that index larger geographic territories. Moreover, it a ords an opportunity to show how the racialized trade in chattel slaves throughout early modern marketplaces is among the dynamic contexts where libidinal economies and political economies converge. Quests to possess land, persons, or goods were as in uenced by emergent psychic investments in white sovereign personhood as the ordering of territory in accordance with monotheist religious doctrine. My study examines fteenth-through seventeenth-century Italian and Spanish woodcut, sculpture, and paintings alongside hagiographies, surgical texts, and anatomy atlases. The artistic renderings are not treated as mimetic
In the first part of this interview, Frank B. Wilderson IIII discusses how his documentary Repara... more In the first part of this interview, Frank B. Wilderson IIII discusses how his documentary Reparations . . . Now (work in progress from 2008) theorizes black perspectives on loss and redress in context with his larger body of work. He further reflects upon the degree of alignment between the experimental video’s formal strategies, means of production, political aims of its participants, and audience reception. What does using a video camera as a tool for witnessing, confession, surveillance, and documentation reveal about the limits of relationality? How does the technological medium shape its libidinal thrust and aesthetics? In the second part of this interview, Cecilio M. Cooper discusses their movement away from performance and filmmaking (including Uncle Samima Wants U [2008, 2012] and SHADOWPLAY [2013]) toward critical writing. This is a move made necessary by the way that most audiencing for these media is hostile to a performer—a queer nonbinary black transmasculine person—us...
Religion and the Medieval and Early Modern Global Marketplace, 2021
This chapter focuses on a scene of amputation as a visceral instantiation of antiblack depredatio... more This chapter focuses on a scene of amputation as a visceral instantiation of antiblack depredation. In it, saints expropriate an anonymous black gure's limb during miraculous healing. According to the Miracle of the Black Leg (MoBL), a Roman dreamt that Cosmas and Damian amputated an Ethiopian's healthy limb so that it could be transplanted onto his own ailing body. The MoBL merits this sustained attention because it evidences how Renaissance worldviews shape visual representations of humanity's di erentiation from divinity and each other. Blackness operates cosmologically within the miracle as a sign of heathen physiognomic di erence and disease. It illuminates how church authority, commerce, and medical knowledge converge as a backdrop for European conquest into Africa and the New World. The original version of the miracle did not hinge upon the racial di erences between the amputee and the recipient. I argue that the racial metamorphosis of MoBL literary accounts and visual iconography were sparked by the onset of the transAtlantic slave trade. In other words, the oncewhite donor leg was blackened as part of a rhetorical move to justify territorializing parts of the globe as legitimately enslavable. This chapter uses the divine possession chronicled in the Miracle of the Black Leg's cross-racial transplant imagery to theorize human bodies as sexualized and racialized territories that index larger geographic territories. Moreover, it a ords an opportunity to show how the racialized trade in chattel slaves throughout early modern marketplaces is among the dynamic contexts where libidinal economies and political economies converge. Quests to possess land, persons, or goods were as in uenced by emergent psychic investments in white sovereign personhood as the ordering of territory in accordance with monotheist religious doctrine. My study examines fteenth-through seventeenth-century Italian and Spanish woodcut, sculpture, and paintings alongside hagiographies, surgical texts, and anatomy atlases. The artistic renderings are not treated as mimetic
In the first part of this interview, Frank B. Wilderson IIII discusses how his documentary Repara... more In the first part of this interview, Frank B. Wilderson IIII discusses how his documentary Reparations . . . Now (work in progress from 2008) theorizes black perspectives on loss and redress in context with his larger body of work. He further reflects upon the degree of alignment between the experimental video’s formal strategies, means of production, political aims of its participants, and audience reception. What does using a video camera as a tool for witnessing, confession, surveillance, and documentation reveal about the limits of relationality? How does the technological medium shape its libidinal thrust and aesthetics? In the second part of this interview, Cecilio M. Cooper discusses their movement away from performance and filmmaking (including Uncle Samima Wants U [2008, 2012] and SHADOWPLAY [2013]) toward critical writing. This is a move made necessary by the way that most audiencing for these media is hostile to a performer—a queer nonbinary black transmasculine person—us...
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