MakeUp2&3

This is for the week of Battle of the Algiers and colonialism and also the week on Kara Keeling. Looking back I see overlap that make a combined post for the two appropriate. Also, I'm going back to the list format, so this will simply will be a two part list.

1. Obama's talk (and whole candidacy/presidency) is a great illustration of the ways that race can be used. Politics in general, whether using race (or language that alludes to race indirectly) to campaign or to destroy another candidate, the racial construction (... technology?) that we have been convinced is an inherent part of ourselves, can at any point be removed and manipulated to influence political results. Which gets to an interesting comment that Obama makes in his speech...
2. "Seared into my genetic make up is the idea that this nation is more than the sum of it's parts."
3. Race is never presented through media in it's positivity. In the great things that it does. Always an issue that needs to be resolved, or the descriptive words used on a criminal. Which... is still a tool of some sort. Still being used to a specific ends. As Kara Keeling explains, "Colonial and neocolonial discourses rely upon the rhetoric of 'the black problem' as one way of ascribing 'race' to black bodies while ostensibly rendering 'white' bodies nonraced, universal, and nonproblematic."
4. In Of Mimicry and Man, Bhaba outlines the inherent flaw in mimicry that allows for change. This is the same issue that Keeling addresses. They both see possibility in hegemony. The quote in Bhaba is... "The menace of mimicry is its double vision which in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority." This is reminiscent of a quote in keeling's argument which is "Common sense contains elements that consent to dominant hegemonies, as well as to aspects that are antagonistic to them." I'm not sure if the two authors are saying the same thing. They surely agree that hegemony has holes. To what extent is mimicry similar to common sense? I did try to answer this question for myself, but it wasn't too fruitful. Here's a quote from Bhaba that describes mimicry... "colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite." I found this overlap interesting. In my Black feminism class, professor Rose articulated that one benefit of hegemony, was that it was a fragile, unstable construction. It leaves room constantly for change, and that resonated to me in both of these quotes.

MakeUp1

So I'm taking time now to make up some reading responses that I've missed, which is harsh since I'm away from Brown and trying to suppress all memories of the event. As I was looking back through posts and readings to figure out what I'm missing, I started reading the responses to the Cyborg Manifesto week. I found this week the least compelling, the hardest for me to grasp. Haraway's reading was literally hard to read, but also the ideas she was presenting to me were the furthest from any manner I had previously thought about race. Looking back at both her reading and responses (it feels different having gone through the entire class), I actually might say that her reading is the richest with possibility. Thinking of humans literally as machine animal mixes again has helped me understand the constructions she was discussing and her case for us all being walking cyborgs. I'm not convinced by the argument in terms of technology, but in this post Suzy really articulates her points in terms of our class well. This quote by Haraway also...

This quote to me summarizes the weight in the argument that she is making: "Gender, race, or class consciousness is an achievement forced on us by the terrible historical experience of the contradictory social realities of patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism."

This argument is beautiful to me, but the issue I had with it during class, was that this often turned into a future with no categories. A raceless, genderless, classless reality. This is why during class I said that maybe, as someone living in this time, I'm not equipped to imagine a utopia.

Anyway, this post by Suzy was also helpful in my understanding.

Technologies have shown us how mutable identity is, and hence made us realize that categories like race and gender are not natural, so people should be free to identify or not identify themselves as they choose. Saying man is part machine is a good way of describing this because it means we can’t separate our “selves” from the technologies that enhance and define us. We can use labels to our advantage just as we can use contact lenses or hair dye or psychiatric drugs (I choose these technologies because they are really hard to identify as “me” or “not me” once someone uses them). Like technologies, identities are not inherently internal to us but rather are internalized. Seeing human difference as a technology can open the opportunity to internalize or externalize labels at our liberty and not think that somebody “just is” a member of a category.

Hennesy Youngman

A great series of videos that bring up a lot of great issues that are relevant to this class. I'd love to know what everyone thinks about them. He has a series of videos that provide "art commentary."

Thanks to Liana for linking me up to the video!

 

And this is just great. Post-structuralism

Enjoy.

Monica

Final project

Open Casket

I want to do a project exploring the ways that black women can, do, and desire to use their public bodies as a means to a specific ends. I will engage Eden Osucha’s analysis of privacy, as I have found it the most compelling space to search new possibilities of identities. Black bodies are attached to a history of slavery in America that posited them as,available to the public and unworthy of privacy. Black bodies were and still synonymous with publicity. From being bred, oiled, and placed on auctioning blocks to commercialized hip hop, where black male and female bodies are still exploited and displayed. I will engage the documentary on Emmett Till as a text. The history of lynching is another example of the public’s access to the black body. This division between private and public is crucial to the maintenance of racial hierarchy, and lynching exemplifies how the public black body can be used to maintain hegemony. Emmett Till’s story also offers the possibility that I want to explore further. When his mother chose to put his mutilated body on display, she used the black public body to a different ends. By doing so, she showcased (literally) the effects of this construction of public and private. I want to “open the casket”, so to speak.

Questions :

• How can black bodies be used to specific ends ?
• To what extent can our own bodies be used to reveals the flaws in the world around us ? The beauty ?
• Can publicity be claimed personally, the image and medium as the individual, the advertisement, whatever they choose ?

Plan : I will sit down with multiple black women and talk to them about these questions. A more concise version would probably be « what story do you tell with your body ? What is it you want to publicize ? » After we talk about that, I will work with them to represent the story they want to tell with their bodies with something tangible (photograph, drawing, letter, video, etc)

Product : I imagine a lot of the final versions will be photographs. I might paint their message on them and photograph their bodies. Depending on what they say, it might make more sense to photograph them and photoshop a specific background, or draw the whole thing. Or maybe they’ll work with me to write something, make a video.

final: israel/palestine, race, domination

Guiding questions:
How do we understand the way race, nation, and religion interact in the construction of Israel, in the context of European settler-colonialism and the German Fascist genocide of the Holocaust?
To what extent has there been a shift in the character of domination between these 3 instances of the sort described by Donna Harroway or Gilles Deleuze?

Also: how do we understand the division/relationship between race etc. as symbolic/ideological/psychic systems and as material systems? What role has academia played in this division/relationship? Did it create it? Has it elucidated it? Obfuscated it? Shifted focus to one or the other or from one to the other?
What effect does this have on our ability to critique and act on these systems?
How can we understand the role academia plays here in terms of the motivating processes of academia, in terms of academia’s position within the systems it critiques/creates?

Additional Sources:
Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict - Norman Finkelstein
The Question of Palestine - Edward Said

From Insult to Injury: Adventures in Whiteness-Final Project

I was on the fence about doing a project or paper. I decided to go the project route after realizing I was spending so much time wondering if I should volunteer to help Ethan out with his video project. My problem was that I didn't know if I was visibly hispanic enough to serve the project. This gave me some justification to delve into the question of my whiteness. For my project I hope to explore my journey to "find out" if I'm white through video and new media/digital expression. I want to frame the project as a personal journey to "find out" the nature of my whiteness.I will explore the limits and implications of the narratives of 'whiteness' which comprise my identity, such as the"official" narrative of my family in which our ancestry is comprised of only racially Spanish members, as opposed to indigenous lineage, as well as the narratives of theories of race we've been exposed to in the course. I hope to draw upon González and Fusco to guide the presentational/curatorial aspects of my project and Fanon and Bhaba for the project's content. My goal to present what Fanon terms the psychological aspects of being raced as post colonial subjects and its role in identity formation; in this vain I think it would also be useful to use his critique of Colonial powers' discourse helping women play a "capital role" in overcoming their oppression.



This project stems out of the realization of the conflicting opinions (mine and others) over my racial/ethnic categorization, and specifically its tie with whiteness. I am addressing my own personal identity as well digital media's relationship to identity formation to explore theories of the internet as a democratic public space. Furthermore, I plan to explore how hispanic-ness intersects with other forms of racialized because of its peculiar relationship with whiteness (The categories of: White non-Hispanic vs White: Hispanic and their aversion of the indigenous/Mestizo characteristic of Hispanic-ness which is central to traditional conceptions of Hispanic/Latino identity and Hispanic/Latino nationalism. I plan to do this mostly with video recordings of my own performance which will address ambiguities in racial classification, their strategic invoking in politics. I will also use social media sites of identity construction to explore role in the visual coding of (racial) identity. I will use QR codes placed in specific areas to link to videos of performance or other footage relevant to my "adventure" in whiteness and the social media links thank deal with racialized classification and identity formation.

Paper Proposal

Texts: Avatar (2010), Nova, Cyborg Manifesto - Haraway, Mophologies: Race as Visual Technology - Gonzalez, The Witch's Flight - Keeling.

"A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction."

Society has boxed itself into 'coded texts', which we use to define the human individual. Our attempt to simplify humanity has only created a more complex referential categorical system for the human identity. It has entered into a realm of complexity that results in contradictions, but unfortunately we did not allow for contradictory-flexibility. A being of hybridity is able to achieve mobility and flexibility within this categorical system.

While the film, Avatar, grants hybridity through technological mobility it also suggests an abandoning of the old referential system - Jake's human body. The novel, Nova, however suggests accepting the pain and rage, which is necessary for growth. In order to do this, this advancement should happen organically and not enhanced through technological means. I'll be analyzing Nova and Avatar through the scope of texts read during the course.