The human body is a central entity and analytic within African life and Africanist scholarship. The source of perception and the seat of animation, of life, it grounds experience of the world while also providing a rich set of symbols from which humans draw in political, social, and religious life to create and communicate meaning. Livingston reviews approaches to the body as a key concept in Africanist scholarship, tracing regimes of bodily representation ranging from the deployment of bodily symbolism in ancient smelting furnaces to the hypervisibility of the black female body in the European colonial imagination. She discusses a welter of bodily experience, from the pain of childbirth and the vulnerabilities of illness and accident to the sensorium or the kinesthetic power of movement and dance. In the process, Livingston considers developments within the field of African Studies via the body.

人体是非洲生活和非洲主义学术研究的核心实体，并对其进行分析。感知的来源和生命的动画所在地，是世界经验的基础，同时还提供了丰富的符号集，人类可以从这些符号中汲取政治，社会和宗教生活的色彩，以创造并传达意义。利文斯顿（Livingston）审查了将身体作为非洲学者奖学金中的一个关键概念的方法，以追溯身体的表现形式，范围从古代熔炉中的身体象征主义展开到欧洲殖民时期想象中的黑人女性身体的超视感。她讨论了身体的疾驰，从分娩的痛苦，疾病和事故的易感性到感官或动作和舞蹈的运动感觉力量。进行中，