The cover of Jennifer Nash's The Black Body in Ecstasy displays a black-and-white photographic triptych of black adult film actress Jennifer Leigh, who plays the title role in the golden-age porn classic Lialeh (dir. Barron Bericovichy, 1973). The film, recognized by many to be the first feature-length black hardcore film, is the subject of the book's chapter 2. It is the same image that graces the cover of the film's original music soundtrack (Bryan Records, 1974), composed, produced, and performed by the legendary drummer Bernard “Pretty” Purdie. Purdie and his band open the film playing live the title track, “Lialeh.” In his smooth soulful voice Purdie sings “sweet sexy Lialeh” against a backdrop of funky antiphonic horns, jazzy piano, loyal bass, and the rhythmic syncopated pulse of Purdie's own famous funky drums. To borrow from Nash, Purdie, “speak[s] sex and race simultaneously” and summons black spectatorial pleasures in pornography – what is in fact one of Nash's primary interventions in reading pornography in and against dominant black feminist discourse (62). From top to bottom, the portraits reflect a gradient value. In varying shades of grey – a cool greenish-blue gun metal, a warmer richer charcoal, and a sooty almost-black slate – the images capture Leigh's face, cast in various degrees of illumination and shadow, at the point of rapture. Her eyes are closed, her head is arched back at a slight angle, her mouth is slightly parted, and her dark glossy lips contrast with her white teeth. Her nostrils flare in what appears to be a moment of inhalation.

It is this trifecta of rapture – this snapshot of black female ecstasy – that blueprints Nash's important analysis of the black female body in contemporary American hardcore pornography film from the 1970s and 1980s. The image instantiates her inventive method of what she terms “racial iconography”: an innovative critical practice of reading performances of black female sexuality in moving-image pornography to foreground black women's pleasure over their exploitation, oppression, and trauma. Nash proposed this groundbreaking, nonnormative reading practice some years earlier in her essay “Strange Bedfellows: Black Feminism and Antipornography Feminism,” as a mode not just of seeing but also of performing the multiplicity of blackness.Footnote ¹ In reading pornography, racial iconography encourages historical and technological specificity to contest dominant theories of spectatorship and pleasure, or antipleasure. Black feminist scholars in the arena of black female sexuality will be grateful for the space racial iconography carves in our critical engagements, creating a site where we can be, perhaps, more comfortable with the contradictions of black desire, unruliness of black pleasure, and fraughtness of black fantasy.

While Leigh's image renders the book's motif of black female ecstasy, it is the figure of Sartjie Baartman that represents the “archive of pain” integral to the book. Nash excavates this black feminist theoretical archive to interrogate a dominant historical black feminist mode of critiquing visual culture's representation of the black female body through the lens of injury. As a quintessential figure of racial sexual alterity, violence, sexual excess, and access, Baartman has, Nash argues, become the poster child not just of black feminist theories (and practices) of visuality, but, more specifically, also of black feminist critiques of racialized pornography. Revisiting the historically contentious relationship between black feminism and pornography, she explores the peculiar alliance between antipornography and black feminism, arguing that the relationship hinges around Baartman: a problematic analytic tool of both scholarly political projects. Antipornography feminism is one of four feminist traditions Nash critically engages in the book's introduction. Nash's overview of these threads in the ongoing feminist pornography debate is sharp and nuanced – one of the many places where the book shines as a pedagogical tool. Her trenchant analysis of historical feminist pornography scholarship makes The Black Body in Ecstasy an invaluable tool for teaching black feminist theory, black visuality, pornography studies, women's studies, and feminist theory more broadly.

If Baartman's image epitomizes the black feminist archive of pain, it signifies another critical mode of black feminist scholarship – that of recuperation. Baartman is a symbol not only of injury, but also of what Nash terms “recovery work”: a project of reclaiming the black female body in the visual sphere. She anchors this black feminist recovery genre in the work of contemporary black female photographers such as Carla Williams and Renee Cox, whose well-known self-portrait Hot-En-Tot (1994) evokes Baartman as a figure of reinvention. In conclusion, I suggest that Nash's project might not be so divergent from the black feminist canon she writes within and against. As a theoretical enterprise of locating and visualizing black female ecstasy – a critical archaeology of pleasure – Nash is perhaps engaged in the type of recovery work she identifies as erecting the black feminist archive's collateral theoretical lines of harm and recuperation.