ABSTRACT
Black Nationalism, with its emphasis on black separatism, is resurging as a response to the assumption that white cultural imperialism and white yearning to possess the other are invading black life, appropriating and violating black culture. Resurgence of Black Nationalism as an expression of black people's desire to guard against white cultural appropriation indicates the extent to which the commodification of blackness has been reinscribed and marketed with an atavistic narrative, a fantasy of Otherness that reduces protest to spectacle and stimulates even greater longing for the "primitive". Given this cultural context, Black Nationalism is more a gesture of powerlessness than a sign of critical resistance. The commercial nexus exploits the culture's desire to inscribe blackness as "primitive" sign, as wildness, and with it the suggestion that black people have secret access to intense pleasure, particularly pleasures of the body.
