ohhh B

this picture of Beyonce recently appeared in a French fashion magazine. i found it particularly striking in light of the recent campus lecture on the AIDS campaigns that feature American and European celebrities/models in various forms of African "drag"-- examples include Kate Moss in blackface on a UK magazine cover as part of (RED) and Gwyneth, Gisele etc. wearing generically "tribal" face paint and jewelry for the "I AM AFRICAN" campaign. its interesting that unlike the kate moss cover, Beyonce's photo contains a juxtaposition of painted and natural (sub-saharan African and African American?) skin tones; the make-up leaves her hands and about half of her chest undarkened. but her facial expression, somewhere between contemplative/concerned and just plain confused, clearly resonates with many of the faces from the "I AM AFRICAN" campaign. of course the African-chic aesthetic of the actual clothing/accessories featured-- snakeskin, leopard prints, and are those tusks (??)-- raises a whole other set of issues. what is with the contemporary resurgence of blackface in "high" fashion world? what different implications arise when it is black bodies that don the paint? (the history of American blackface/minstrelsy, seems one obvious, though certainly not the only, avenue through which to consider that question.) finally, it seems that what's really at stake here is the void between this sexy, stylish, provocative, (still definitively primitive) visual rendering of "Africanism" and the actual and multiple realities of the people, bodies, cultures, identities, etc.--by no means homogeneous-- that an image like this implicitly claims to represent.