Racism Postrace - Softcover

Mukherjee, Roopali; Banet-Weiser, Sarah; Gray, Herman

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1478001801 ISBN 13: 9781478001805

Verlag: Combined Academic Publ., 2019

Inhaltsangabe

With the election of Barack Obama, the idea that American society had become postracial—that is, race was no longer a main factor in influencing and structuring people's lives—took hold in public consciousness, increasingly accepted by many. The contributors to Racism Postrace examine the concept of postrace and its powerful history and allure, showing how proclamations of a postracial society further normalize racism and obscure structural antiblackness. They trace expressions of postrace over and through a wide variety of cultural texts, events, and people, from sports (LeBron James's move to Miami), music (Pharrell Williams's “Happy”), and television (The Voice and HGTV) to public policy debates, academic disputes, and technology industries. Outlining how postrace ideologies confound struggles for racial justice and equality, the contributors open up new critical avenues for understanding the powerful cultural, discursive, and material conditions that render postrace the racial project of our time.

Contributors. Inna Arzumanova, Sarah Banet-Weiser, Aymer Jean Christian, Kevin Fellezs, Roderick A. Ferguson, Herman Gray, Eva C. Hageman, Daniel Martinez HoSang, Victoria E. Johnson, Joseph Lowndes, Roopali Mukherjee, Safiya Umoja Noble, Radhika Parameswaran, Sarah T. Roberts, Catherine R. Squires, Brandi Thompson Summers, Karen Tongson, Cynthia A. Young

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Roopali Mukherjee is Associate Professor of Media Studies at City University of New York, Queens College.

Sarah Banet-Weiser is Professor of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics.

Herman Gray is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

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Racism Postrace

By Roopali Mukherjee, Sarah Banet-Weiser, Herman Gray

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2019 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-4780-0180-5

Contents

INTRODUCTION | Postrace Racial Projects SARAH BANET-WEISER, ROOPALI MUKHERJEE, AND HERMAN GRAY, 
PART ONE Assumptions, 
1 Race after Race HERMAN GRAY, 
2 Theorizing Race in the Age of Inequality DANIEL MARTINEZ HOSANG AND JOSEPH LOWNDES, 
3 "Jamming" the Color Line | Comedy, Carnival, and Contestations of Commodity Colorism RADHIKA PARAMESWARAN, 
4 On the Postracial Question RODERICK A. FERGUSON, 
5 Becked Up | Glenn Beck, White Supremacy, and the Hijacking of the Civil Rights Legacy CYNTHIA A. YOUNG, 
6 Technological Elites, the Meritocracy, and Postracial Myths in Silicon Valley SAFIYA UMOJA NOBLE AND SARAH T. ROBERTS, 
PART TWO Performances, 
7 Vocal Recognition | Racial and Sexual Difference after (Tele)Visuality KAREN TONGSON, 
8 More Than a Game | LeBron James and the Affective Economy of Place VICTORIA E. JOHNSON, 
9 Clap Along If You Feel Like Happiness Is the Truth | Pharrell Williams and the False Promises of the Postracial KEVIN FELLEZS, 
10 Indie Soaps | Race and the Possibilities of TV Drama AYMAR JEAN CHRISTIAN, 
11 Debt by Design | Race and Home Valorization on Reality TV EVA C. HAGEMAN, 
12 "Haute [Ghetto] Mess" | Postracial Aesthetics and the Seduction of Blackness in High Fashion BRANDI THOMPSON SUMMERS, 
13 Veiled Visibility | Racial Performances and Hegemonic Leaks in Pakistani Fashion Week INNA ARZUMANOVA, 
EPILOGUE | Incantation CATHERINE R. SQUIRES, 
REFERENCES, 
CONTRIBUTORS, 
INDEX, 

CHAPTER 1

Race after Race

HERMAN GRAY

Let's face it, the idea of postrace in the midst of one of the most racially charged and turbulent moments of the new century so far is oxymoronic — in the United States we are experiencing an epidemic loss of black life at the hands of police violence; since the 2016 presidential election cycle we have state-sanctioned voter suppression of black voters; race is at the center of intense racial suspicion, division, and resentment; no longer a fringe element in the national discourse, white racial nationalism aimed at demonizing black and LGBTQ people and at restricting Muslim, Latino, and Arab immigration with the expressed aim of mobilizing and stoking white solidarity, resentment, and identity emanates from the White House. The postracial alibi for race, that postrace signals the diminution of the impact of race in modern American civic and public life, does not hold. Against the force of race in shaping the history, imagination, social relations, and psychic life of the United States, the concept of postracial is empirically mute and analytically incapable of telling us much about the continuing and powerful role of race in the contemporary life of the republic. The "post" so readily available to journalists, politicians, and scholars from various political perspectives that sought to tame the unruliness of race instead has been overtaken, indeed overwhelmed, by "race." Race has made trouble for the post with its stubborn refusal to be transformed into a more acceptable, polite, and equitable claim on social difference, which in the postracial lingua franca the words "multicultural," "diversity," and "color blindness" came to describe. With race's unwieldy and unruly eruptions in the form of virulent white supremacy, the racial basis of mass black and brown incarceration, the concentration of wealth at the top, the magnitude of loss incurred by the financial and housing crisis, we are reminded once again of the centrality of race to the foundation of the American project. Despite the postracial claims to the contrary, we are reminded of the powerful role of race in the nature of our social relations, the assignment of value, and the distribution of rewards and vulnerability.

In this chapter, I dwell on the discursive production and capacity of the post, the conditions of possibility that produced it, and the conditions that it in turn makes possible — including the trouble race makes for the postracial. Taking into account the long historical legacy that produced the concept of race in the first place, I treat the claim to the postracial "in this time," especially the disavowal of race in the form of the commitment to color blindness and the aggressive avowal of white nationalism, as a signal about the importance of race. Built as it is around a narrative of teleological movement toward a notion of progress, the postracial narrates a future in which race is benign, if not inert. In other words, the claim to postrace is not innocent. Rather, it is an operation of power knowledge, whose arrangement produces the very racial order of things, which it claims to diminish if not eliminate. Moreover, I shall suggest that in this time of race, postrace operates through knowledge, practices, and technologies — codes and algorithms — that take hold of genomes, zip codes, and credit scores in addition to bodies, morals, manners, and norms.

Rather than attempt to settle the dispute over the postracial, I am more interested in identifying the elements that a postracial conception of the present make possible in the first place. That is, whether or not we are in a moment of history and social life in the United States that we would describe as postracial, the fact is that the term is discursively productive and as such begs to be taken seriously in terms of what makes it possible as well as what it makes possible. Do we gain analytic confidence and empirical accuracy when the term "postracial" is used to refer to something in the world? To what are we referring — a political condition, a structure of feeling, a historical period, an arrangement of time that we recognize as distinct from some other, or merely a shift from previous arrangements of resources and their social distribution based on race? Perhaps postrace is a triumph of the widely held view in scholarly communities and progressive political circles that race is a fiction, a social construction, which in effect signals the end of disputes about race.

I am not convinced that this business of race, or more likely postrace, settles the matter or that the analytic and empirical salience of race in the condition of the postracial is itself a settled matter. That said, I am interested in the role of time, temporality, and progress in relation to the condition of "the post" that marks and qualifies race in the formulation "postracial." I want to trouble the post's implicit periodization of race by replacing a singularly temporal notion of time with the concept of space-time and emphasizing the incommensurable, conflicted, incomplete ways that race continues to organize social life and to matter in many aspects of our quotidian world. That is to say, the claim to the postracial implies a temporal sense of movement from one (unfair and unequal) condition to another (fair and equal). This temporality takes on board a cultural judgment and political stake in interpreting this movement as progress, as signs that things are better racially. The idea of the postracial establishes a breach in the fabric of social history and cultural memory into which have stepped some of the most virulent forms and expressions of racism and white supremacy. That is, the postracial provides cover for cultural styles of racism where quotidian ideas of racial tolerance and inclusion thrive, where racism does not need racists...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Combined Academic Publ.
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2019
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1478001801
• ISBN 13: 9781478001805
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 341
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland