Bumpah politics: thick black female body in US and Caribbean academic discourses

The relationship between Black women’s bodies and their personhood and oppression has been the subject of much academic discourse. In this chapter, I survey scholarship from the United States and the Caribbean that explores the construction of Black women’s buttocks in colonial and postcolonial contexts, and the impact of these narratives on Black women’s lives. I highlight three major themes in the scholarship: the influence of the Hottentot Venus in how Black women’s bodies are positioned in white body supremacist spaces, the legend of Nanny of the Maroons’ voluptuous body and its impact on the interpretation of Black women’s embodied realities, and Black women’s struggle to negotiate competing narratives about their bodies in their everyday lives