"The satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, known globally and tragically for being the target of an Islamist attack in 2015 published a caricature of me. And it was appallingly racist. A huge, toothy grin, an enormous mouth, the cartoon depicts me dancing on a stage before an audience of laughing white men, adorned with a banana belt on a largely exposed body. The headline: The Rokhaya Diallo Show: Mocking secularism around the world."
"Stunned by the violence of this grotesque cartoon, I shared it on social media with a brief analysis: In keeping with slave-era and colonial imagery, Charlie Hebdo once again shows itself incapable of engaging with the ideas of a Black woman without reducing her to a dancing body exoticised, supposedly savage adorned with the very bananas that are hurled at Black people who dare to step into the public sphere."
"One of the most iconic performances of the American-born dancer, actor and activist in the 1920s involved Baker in a (rubber) banana skirt, at a time when France took pride in displaying what it claimed was its superiority over the territories of its colonial empire. But Baker was far more than the act whose erotic charge she deliberately chose to subvert through exaggerated, clownish gestures."
Charlie Hebdo published a caricature depicting Rokhaya Diallo with a huge toothy grin and an enormous mouth, dancing on a stage before an audience of laughing white men while wearing a banana belt and a largely exposed body. The headline labelled it The Rokhaya Diallo Show: Mocking secularism around the world. The image invoked slave-era and colonial imagery by exoticising and reducing a Black woman to a dancing, supposedly savage body adorned with bananas. The cartoon referenced Josephine Baker's banana skirt without acknowledging Baker's resistance work, military honours, civil-rights leadership and unique interment in Le Pantheon. The post sparked massive social-media circulation and widespread controversy.
Read at www.theguardian.com
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]