{"id":6096,"date":"2010-03-18T04:14:16","date_gmt":"2010-03-18T04:14:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=6096"},"modified":"2017-06-04T20:56:04","modified_gmt":"2017-06-04T20:56:04","slug":"commentary-on-ngozi-onwurahs-the-body-beautiful","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=6096","title":{"rendered":"Review of Ngozi Onwurah&#8217;s &#8220;The Body Beautiful&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>&#8230;Onwurah&#8217;s ending is not, however, Utopian; neither her own objectification and labeling by discourse nor her mother&#8217;s stigmatization is miraculously resolved. Onwurah&#8217;s comment on &#8220;a world that sees only in black and white&#8221; is both fitting and predictive, since viewers and critics continue to lean towards that very essentialism (if existing scholarship on the film is any indication). <strong>But on a fundamental level, Onwurah&#8217;s <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=6103\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">The Body Beautiful<\/a><\/em> remains an unusual example of a film directed by a woman of white-black racial heritage, which centralizes the consciousness of the mixed-race identity.<\/strong> The film delivers a rare message by encouraging viewers to challenge ethnic absolutism and essentialist codes of gender. To borrow an appropriate quotation from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.humnet.ucla.edu\/humnet\/french\/faculty\/flionnet\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Fran\u00e7oise Lionnet<\/a>, <em>The Body Beautiful<\/em> effectively &#8220;subverts] all binary modes of thought by privileging (more or less explicitly) the intermediary spaces where boundaries become effaced and <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Manichaeism\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Manichean<\/a> categories collapse into each other.&#8221; And it is precisely where binaries and essentialist codes of identity are subverted that the process of identification becomes constructive, rather than a site for problematic exclusion, inclusion, and marginalization.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><strong>Diana Adesola Mafe<\/strong>. \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=6074\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Misplaced Bodies: Probing Racial and Gender Signifiers in Ngozi Onwurah\u2019s <em>The Body Beautiful<\/em><\/a>.\u201d\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/muse.jhu.edu\/journals\/frontiers\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><em>Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies<\/em><\/a>.\u00a02008, Volume 29, Number\u00a01, pages 37-50.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8230;Onwurah&#8217;s ending is not, however, Utopian; neither her own objectification and labeling by discourse nor her mother&#8217;s stigmatization is miraculously resolved. Onwurah&#8217;s comment on &#8220;a world that sees only in black and white&#8221; is both fitting and predictive, since viewers and critics continue to lean towards that very essentialism (if existing scholarship on the film [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[14238,2521,1010,2519,2520],"class_list":["post-6096","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-excerpts","tag-diana-a-mafe","tag-diana-adesola-mafe","tag-diana-mafe","tag-ngozi-onwurah","tag-the-body-beautiful"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6096","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6096"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6096\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54087,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6096\/revisions\/54087"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6096"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6096"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6096"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}