BLU in You

Abstract

BLU IN YOU is a poetic-essayist rumination mediated through the lens of a female observer, who watches the staged conversations between a writer (Nalo Hopkinson) and a visual arts curator (Andrea Fatona). The aesthetics and conversations in Blu In You employs a visual/aural poetics to politically challenge early ethnographic tropes of the colonist gaze and spectacularization; to engage a cultural history of the black female body, subjectivity and sexuality marked by violence, but also celebrated in art and culture. The conversations bridge historical and contemporary art and cultural figures such as the “Hottentoth Venus,” Jeanne Duval, and cultural icons Josephine Baker and Dorothy Dandridge