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• 1 media/mermaid_statue_racist.png 2022-04-29T08:49:20-07:00 Racial Fetishism and Hybrid Forms 7 image_header 2022-05-13T14:13:45-07:00
  

  DIANA

  In July 2020, the words “racist fish” were spray painted across the base of Copenhagen’s famed Little Mermaid statue. Appearing against a backdrop of global anti-racist protests, this accusation seemed to implicate Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale, and by extension the country of Denmark, in the same anti-black systems responsible for the murder of George Floyd. While Denmark was the first European country to abolish the slave trade in 1803, slavery continued in the Danish West Indies until 1848, or eleven years after the initial publication of Andersen’s fairy tale. Andersen scholars have established the many ways this historical context influenced his body of work, but they generally agree that race was not of central concern. The question that remains, then, is why the mermaid would evoke an association with race and an association with anti-blackness in particular. Before becoming the model of white, whimsical femininity that was popularized by Disney in 1989, the mermaid was already a near-universal figure of folklore. Depending on their cultural and historical origins, mermaids were variously portrayed as vengeful or benevolent, monstrous or sacred, deviant or idealized. Mermaid lore also received a significant boost during the Columbian Exchange and Transatlantic Slavery, during which periods anxieties over racial difference were mapped through and onto the mermaid’s hybrid form [See Jessica’s “Mermaid Stories as Code”]. Indeed, it is not coincidental that Columbus’s first mention of mermaids comes from a journal entry recorded during a voyage to Haiti in 1493. The mermaid in this sense is a symbol of racial hybridity and fetishism, standing-in for the unresolved contradictions between the universal force of racial blackness and its manifestations in individual black bodies.
  
   
• 1 2022-05-11T08:06:54-07:00 Stereotyping and Silhouettes 3 plain 2022-05-13T15:07:00-07:00

  Diana

  Like its innovative use of mermaids, FISHNETSTOCKINGS' multiple silhouettes clarify how symbols of racial hybridity and fetishism function within economies of representation. From Josiah Wedgewood’s abolitionist medallion to the infamous broadsides of the Brookes slave ship, the silhouette has occupied a singular place within slavery’s iconography. While we cannot reduce the silhouette to this racial history, as a style of illustration it is inescapably bound to the stereotype. This is in no small part due to the role the silhouette played in the racial pseudoscience of physiognomy. Because physiognomy presumes a correspondence between physical features and moral and intellectual characteristics, its practitioners sought to produce images of the body that minimized individual variations. Their goal was to render visible only those characteristics that were indicative of a more general type or trend. Resolving the tensions between the universal and particular characteristics of race therefore required the evacuation of more obvious racial markers. The silhouette provided physiognomists with an abstract form onto which they could project an imagined relationship between the body’s external features and an individual subject’s internal essence. We can observe this more clearly in the work of contemporary artist Kara Walker.