Photograph by Beckett Logan. Ray's photograph clearly illustrates the idea of contemplating the primitive. In Amos' painting, the African mask in Noire et Blanche is replaced with the head of a young, beautiful African American woman. Black passivity and anonymity are transformed by a meaningful glance and a real black person. Not only the Tahitians of Gauguin, the Africans of Picasso, Braque and Matisse, but the African Americans of Mapplethorpe and countless other artists demonstrate how the black body continues to stand for sensuality and sex, possession and power.
Primitivism lingers in mapping out the terrain of the black body.
In the United States, the African American is the late modern primitive. The legacy of Josephine Baker and Le Revue Negre continues to Hip-Hop. Black culture is the essential signifier for cultural modernism and post-modernism. At issue is agency. Who controls or possesses the black body as an object of desire and economic exploitation affects how we comprehend black culture.