ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that Black and white beauty ideals have produced and continue to produce their own Black beauty melancholia within Black Atlantic diaspora. Black beauty discourses, knowledge, politics and race-ing stylization technologies and practices have been taken back and forth across the lines of communication of Black Atlantic discursive space. The chapter begins by thinking the link between the psyche and the social through using Didier Anzieus skin ego. It then moves to drawing from Ranjana Khanna, Judith Butler and Anne Anlin Cheng in terms of Black beauty melancholia before moving to look at the cultural/political/ social terms under which Black beauty was positioned as melancholic. The chapter continues to depathologize Black beauty melancholia by engaging with the possibility for disidentificatory agency and the emergence of new beauty ideals within Black politics. Thinking melancholically helps us to destabilize the simplistic division between agency/powerlessness and to look with new eyes at the internalization of pathology argument of Black anti-racist aesthetics.
