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.
Friday, May 20, 2011
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.
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.
Friday, May 6, 2011
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
Monday, May 2, 2011
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
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.
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.
Sunday, May 1, 2011
Paper Proposal
Texts: Avatar (2010), Nova, Cyborg Manifesto - Haraway, Mophologies: Race as Visual Technology - Gonzalez, The Witch's Flight - Keeling.
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.
Video Art on The Arbitrariness of Race
For my final project, I'm planning on making a piece of video art which explores some of the central questions I've had throughout the class. I've decided to focus on the question of the hypothetical “arbitrariness” of race, which serves as a jumping-off point for many other topics we've been considering. In particular, I'm looking at Cheng's writing on racial melancholia and Fanon's discussion, in Algeria Unveiled, of the superficiality of racial signification (clothing). I've been trying to decide what I think about a post-racist, or indeed post-racial society – what it would look like and mean for social interaction. I talked a little bit about this in my most recent post on Children of Men, and specifically the sociopolitical role that race plays in cinema.
Here's my proposal in more concrete terms: I will film three short vignettes, each of which will present an uncomfortable “racist” interaction:
1) Myself and a Black man. Reenacting the objectification of slave trade. In first segment, I coarsely check the teeth, peer into the eyes, yank on the hair, feel the muscles, etc.. In second segment, roles are reversed, black man engages in the same act, on my body. I want this to be offensive, but only through physical action – no racial slurs, minimal dialogue. I want the viewer to immediately think of depictions of the slave trade they've seen elsewhere – perhaps LeVar Burton in “Roots”. Will be set in a decontextualizing space, e.g. a single chair in a studio in Granoff.
2) Myself and a Hispanic man. In first segment, Hispanic man is abjectly cleaning bathroom floor, I walk in and stop, spit on the floor in a nasty, unfriendly fashion. In second segment, roles are reversed, I am abjectly cleaning bathroom floor, Hispanic man comes in and spits on the floor. Minimal dialogue. Offensive, cold.
3) Myself, and three others. One White man who looks much like me. Two Asians who look similar. In first segment, myself, two Asians – I make an obnoxious scene about not being able to differentiate between the two, both named “Chen”. In second segment, one Asian man makes an obnoxious scene about not being able to differentiate between the two Whites, both named “John”. Also set in decontextualizing space. Feelings of loss of identity.
It's important that these vignettes employ clichés. A strong cliché allows for the presentation of a potent, racially charged image without significant contextualization, and this is important for my project. What I'm looking to do is to make the viewer very uncomfortable about these “racial” interactions, through depictions of objectifying slavery, ignoble service jobs, and de-individualization. But here's the thing – I want them to be, upon further inspection, non-racial interactions, i.e. interactions which reference racism but which do not in themselves necessitate racist explanations. This is accomplished, of course, through the reversal of roles of the 'traditional' subject and 'traditional' object in each of these racist interactions, as well as an absence of any specific racial contextualization.
I think it's going to be challenging to present these images in a successful way. As I was watching clips of Roots while looking for some possible situations to incorporate into the first piece, I found myself really moved when I came upon the classic scene of Kunta Kinte being whipped until he accepts the name “Toby” - mostly by the acting of Louis Gossett Jr. in the role of Fiddler, this noble man who tries to protect Kunta Kinte. I wonder if perhaps my treatment of the subject is too cerebral, in light of the emotional presence there. The thing is, I'm dealing with clichés, which are difficult to manipulate without calling potentially uncritical attention to their manipulation. Perhaps the mechanism of switching roles will be difficult to do tastefully – to make it a real symbolic change, and one which is a zero-sum change at its aesthetic heart, i.e. when the Black man is peering at the body of the White man, it appears equivalent rather than as an obvious, blunt manipulation. I want the video to be very disturbing – to get people emotionally involved – but also clean, in mostly decontextualizing spaces, so that all we see are bodies interacting, rather than Chinese people getting made fun of and Argentinians mopping floors. That's to say, I want the revelation of the viewer to be that race is completely arbitrary – that the ways in which we interact are dependent solely on the enculturation of racism within the individual.
A REQUEST:
I'm in touch with several people who will be able to act in this project already, but I'd be really appreciative if anyone would put me in touch with someone who might be willing to be an actor. It's a big favor to ask, as well as a potentially pretty uncomfortable experience, but also possibly very interesting / fun. The actual time commitment would be pretty manageable, as the vignettes will be short.
Project Proposal
In this paper, I want to explore the politics of visuality and to articulate my project around the issue of technology and its uses in marginalizing Asian American voices in the mainstream. I especially focus on the social implications that might have led to Black Panther Richard Aoki and several other Asian Americans’ complete removal from the mainstream thought. I led an event a few days back involving the screening of the Aoki Documentary (2009). The film elicited several responses from audience members and sparked discussions of Asian American visibility, representation and race/racism. The emerging story of Richard Aoki amalgamated the political, social and cultural problems that have haunted Asian Americans historically. In the case of Aoki, the documentary explored all circumstances and moments in which Aoki was either cut off in the frame or was blurred, mired in the background of muddled colors
For this project, I will draw from theoretical analyses such as Keeling’s The Witches’ Flight, Rhodes’ Becoming Media Subjects, Dyer’s work on whiteness and Cheng’s Melancholia of Race. From these perspectives of cultural studies as well as literary and sociological studies, I want to engage several texts and films and exegetically read them at the level of visual storytelling and narration. Because I want to take issue with the visuality of technology as race in films/movie/among other cultural products, I will not pursue a more conventional critical film studies.
Of course, my project will not only extend to just Richard Aoki. For my project, I will read the visual frames and narrative of the Aoki Documentary as well as Rea Tajiri’s documentary on Yuri Kochiyama. The questions I will ask will involve the differences in cinematography, angles, lightings, and framing and the juxtaposition of Asian American images to those of Black and Latino figures. How have figures like Richard Aoki and Yuri Kochiyama disappeared from historical recollection? Why have their names been forgotten? Why have their efforts paled in comparison to those of Caesar Chavez, Angela Davis, Che Guevara, among others? How has the camera’s gaze constructed an image of privlegedness to non-Asian Americans and cast radical Asian Americans out of this spotlight? Has the media also come to shape our own perceptions of Asian Americans? Has this gaze of privilegedness come to determine Asian Americans’ contemporary position of marginalization in the mainstream? Or is it because Asian Americans as model minorities have locked ourselves up in silence?
Proposal: Illusion and existence of race.
I aim to address the following two questions with my final paper:
1) Does race physically exist?
1) Does race physically exist?
2) If race is purely a historical, social construction, how do we re-evaluate its significance and all the discourses around it?
I have long been wondering about the first question. Before I came to US, I never (or rarely) thought of myself as Asian. For me, born and raised in South Korea, Chinese and Japanese people were just as foreign as Americans. I spoke almost fluent English but I knew nothing about Japanese or Chinese language. I grew up listening to N'Sync and Britney Spears, but I did not know a single Chinese popular song (and I still don't know any). Then I came to America, at age 19, and I was all of sudden categorized as Asian and was expected to feel close to certain types of "foreigners" (from my viewpoint) just for looking similar. And strangely, I did find myself transforming from Korean to Asian -- maybe race is a self-fulfilling prophecy from this perspective.
I think I can take three steps/approaches to tackle these questions.
1) Gilroy, apparently, would be an ideal starting point for this project. His claim on non-existence of race on DNA-level could nicely introduce my argument. If the essence of race is just an illusion, and if people could realize this, the crisis of race and raciology would be a natural and necessary consequence.
2) Despite the illusionary nature of race (or at least as I argue), raciology exists so tangibly. And the human society, or at least American society, has been built around it and it is still building around the rigid yet illusionary racial divisions. I can analyze further on this paradox of race from one or more of following perspectives:
- construction of desire around racial division (Asian plastic surgery articles)
- economic power and "rights to consume"(Hale)
- race as political tool/technology (Coleman)
3) How do we deal with this paradoxical situation? I find Kara Keeling can speak very nicely of such paradox as social common sense. The unnatural race that doesn't exist in our body has become something so natural to our bodily reaction. Keeling-Fanon way of explosion, in this sense, could be a key strategy for Gilroy's dream of much-needed new humanism.
Madison Utendahl and Olivia Fagon Race and/as Technology Final Proposal --
Madison Utendahl and Olivia Fagon
Race and/as Technology Final Proposal:
Title: T.B.A - [ A photo project/passing + dragging]
Basic Intro:
Texts:
- Jennifer Gonzalez, “The Face and the Public: Race, Secrecy and Digital Art
Practice," in Camera Obscura 70, Vol. 24, No. 1 (2009): 37-65.
- “Morphologies: Race as Visual Technology,” Only Skin Deep, 379-393.
Process:
The project will be executed in three stages. The first will be an interview process in which we will ask and develop an understanding and profile of our participant’s (preferably two men and two women) ‘other’ through a framework of questions that will incorporate their opinions on race, gender, and socio-cultural differences. Second, using their ‘profiled other’ (the subject will not be forced to dress in a particular way) we will develop a costume/makeup design and execute a photoshoot with the participant depicted as their other. We will complete a before-photo of the participant in their everyday appearance. Enhanced through photo-editing and retouching, we will complete the project by questioning and developing the results of the photoshoot and interviews using Gonzalez’s notions of morphology and ‘the face’, as well as theories on passing, drag, and identity tourism. This third stage will also include a guided discussion with the participants on the experience of ‘passing’ during the photoshoot, and their reactions and insights to the completed photographs.
Passing/Dragging:
- As the apparatuses of what it means to be hetero-normative continues to be questioned, dragging has become an agency by which those who fall outside of hetero-normative/hegemonic gender, race, sexuality (etc) constructs can attempt to “pass,” and/or "drag"--- blend in with the “real” normative apparatus.
- Dragging/Passing can become a naturalized normative appearance -- allows for the individual who chooses to drag to be seamless and “pass,” the untrained eye.
Questions of Analysis:
- What is the salience of gender and racial difference in these particular subject’s conception of ‘the other’? What, if any, are the political implications of an artificial experience ?
- The discrepancy between elements of difference that are perceptible and ones that are corporeal
- Does the use of visual technology (Photography and Photographic Editing ) to blur/distort visual representations of difference (gender, sexuality, race, occupation etc) function as a solution to indulge the active desire to both embody and abject the other?
- By anchoring theoretical discussions on the other, passing, and identity tourism with the ‘real’ lived experiences and interpretation of these concepts of individuals, do we find a more pragmatic approach to these theories?
- juxtaposing our own interpretations with the participants...compounding of perceptions.. both ours and the participants
Proposed Interview Questions:
Q: When you think of women or when you think of feminine side of yourself, what comes to mind? - Images of femininity that you can relate to ---
- What images do you have of women?
- Mothers/Sisters/Strangers etc
Q: When you think of men when you think of masculine side of yourself, what comes to mind? - Images of masculinity that you can relate to
- What images do you have of of men?
- Fathers/Brothers/Strangers etc.
Q: What do you think of as your “other,” completely opposite of your self?
- Have you ever desired to be this person/thing?
Q: Why do you think some people choose to embody their “other,” or make the choice to “pass,” on daily basis/“drag” their “other” from time to time?
Q: How would you define “passing,” and “dragging” ? Do you consider them to be the same things? What are their differences?
Q: What do you know about cyber-worlds -- facebook/second life etc? Have you ever thought of passing/dragging your "other" in the form of a cyber-site?
to be continued....
Race and/as Technology Final Proposal:
Title: T.B.A - [ A photo project/passing + dragging]
Basic Intro:
Texts:
- Jennifer Gonzalez, “The Face and the Public: Race, Secrecy and Digital Art
Practice," in Camera Obscura 70, Vol. 24, No. 1 (2009): 37-65.
- “Morphologies: Race as Visual Technology,” Only Skin Deep, 379-393.
Process:
The project will be executed in three stages. The first will be an interview process in which we will ask and develop an understanding and profile of our participant’s (preferably two men and two women) ‘other’ through a framework of questions that will incorporate their opinions on race, gender, and socio-cultural differences. Second, using their ‘profiled other’ (the subject will not be forced to dress in a particular way) we will develop a costume/makeup design and execute a photoshoot with the participant depicted as their other. We will complete a before-photo of the participant in their everyday appearance. Enhanced through photo-editing and retouching, we will complete the project by questioning and developing the results of the photoshoot and interviews using Gonzalez’s notions of morphology and ‘the face’, as well as theories on passing, drag, and identity tourism. This third stage will also include a guided discussion with the participants on the experience of ‘passing’ during the photoshoot, and their reactions and insights to the completed photographs.
Passing/Dragging:
- As the apparatuses of what it means to be hetero-normative continues to be questioned, dragging has become an agency by which those who fall outside of hetero-normative/hegemonic gender, race, sexuality (etc) constructs can attempt to “pass,” and/or "drag"--- blend in with the “real” normative apparatus.
- Dragging/Passing can become a naturalized normative appearance -- allows for the individual who chooses to drag to be seamless and “pass,” the untrained eye.
Questions of Analysis:
- What is the salience of gender and racial difference in these particular subject’s conception of ‘the other’? What, if any, are the political implications of an artificial experience ?
- The discrepancy between elements of difference that are perceptible and ones that are corporeal
- Does the use of visual technology (Photography and Photographic Editing ) to blur/distort visual representations of difference (gender, sexuality, race, occupation etc) function as a solution to indulge the active desire to both embody and abject the other?
- By anchoring theoretical discussions on the other, passing, and identity tourism with the ‘real’ lived experiences and interpretation of these concepts of individuals, do we find a more pragmatic approach to these theories?
- juxtaposing our own interpretations with the participants...compounding of perceptions.. both ours and the participants
Proposed Interview Questions:
Q: When you think of women or when you think of feminine side of yourself, what comes to mind? - Images of femininity that you can relate to ---
- What images do you have of women?
- Mothers/Sisters/Strangers etc
Q: When you think of men when you think of masculine side of yourself, what comes to mind? - Images of masculinity that you can relate to
- What images do you have of of men?
- Fathers/Brothers/Strangers etc.
Q: What do you think of as your “other,” completely opposite of your self?
- Have you ever desired to be this person/thing?
Q: Why do you think some people choose to embody their “other,” or make the choice to “pass,” on daily basis/“drag” their “other” from time to time?
Q: How would you define “passing,” and “dragging” ? Do you consider them to be the same things? What are their differences?
Q: What do you know about cyber-worlds -- facebook/second life etc? Have you ever thought of passing/dragging your "other" in the form of a cyber-site?
to be continued....
Experimental Movement Analysis
I recently performed and co-choreographed a dance that utilized technology (projections, computer programming, sound) and the body. Stepping outside of the piece and watching it on film, I’d like to interrogate the way race, the body, and the visual interact with technology. During the performance, the director of the work (a white male) stood behind a table playing music and projecting images that directly responded to the dancers' (all women of color) bodies. Like shadows, the projections mimicked the dancer’s movements and followed them through space. In one section, these projections formed body-like masses on the screen behind the dancers. These amorphous clusters of lines would move in tandem with (or a few seconds later than) the dancers, but sometimes they would move after the dancers had stopped moving—flicking and jittering in place or reaching out to connect with the other dancers' shadows/shapes on the screen.
The dancers wore all white—the only color that worked with the technology (so that the dancers could be seen in the dark room and so that colored light could be reflected on their bodies).
How does technology function here? As a way in which the dancers can move beyond race by obscuring themselves in the darkness, a way of attaining Gilroy’s post-racial humanism? If so, the piece would seem to problematize the reliance on the visual to provide objective truths about race. Furthermore, it would seem to challenge the reliance on representation as well: the dancer’s shadows are at once representatives (standing in the place) of something lost/past and representations (reflecting reality)— yet neither form of representation accurately depicts the dancers. Or, if racial invisibility is not the desired goal, does this racial obfuscation erase the importance of the visual in understanding racial identity, effectively making women of color invisible?
The dancers’ past and future selves are in constant motion, moving beyond the stasis of the ongoing present. One could argue, that this piece represents moving beyond the problem of historical racial memory and trauma, and reaches toward a space of mobility and self-creation. Maybe this is Keeling’s explosion, in that in moving toward affect, race persists in the sensory motor system, and that the past, or the shadow, is crucial here in its interaction with the future. Perhaps this is the explosion—the bringing together of the past (the shadow), the present (the dancer), and the future (the after-image, lingering shadow, technology).
Perhaps these dancers are performing the future of race—a dream sequence in which differences are whited-out and light dances on their bodies like a reflection of the human nervous system. It is almost as if the dancers were translucent. There is fluidity, movement, and a Dobson-esque symbiosis between humans and machines in this dream of the future.
RPG + Snake = time-image?
I'd like to address race and visuality (and their employment as technology) using the spatial metaphor and interactive mechanics of video games. My aim is twofold:
1) Explore the possibilities of modeling/elucidating critical theory using interactive systems.
2) Push the aesthetic, expressive, and representational potential of video game tropes (ludotropes?)
The game will resemble a classic Nintendo era role playing game like Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest:
It will take place within one RPG style town. The player will control a character on a tile map similar to those games, however the character's motion will be limited to a specific section of the town, as delineated by color (perhaps related to the skin color of the character). So, the character will be in a town, but won't be able to move outside of the section of the town that has tiles of a certain color.
As the character walks within this space, a trail of the character's motion will accumulate. The trail will grow over time. This marries the RPG character trope to something like the game Snake. I'm intending this as a gesture toward Keeling's time image.
Inevitably, the character will collide with a part of his/her time-image tail, and s/he will be caught in a hellish loop, now further limited to walk only along the body trail of previous motions (past-as-cliche, limiting the future). Eventually, either through pressing buttons frantically, or walking this trail repeatedly, the character's time-image loop will explode, and for a moment, motion to a new part of the board will be possible.
There will be other (computer controlled) characters to encounter. I'm thinking that I'll play with the RPG trope of having text boxes for character interactions. I'll use windows that look like classic RPG text boxes, but they won't have text. Rather, they'll have the colors of the board that limit character motion. Through interaction with characters, one will be able to travel to other parts of the board and alter the limited boxes of motion. This is a (clumsy) gesture toward using race to open up new possibilities of motion.
This bulk of the piece is grounded in the work of Kara Keeling, but also Beth Coleman and Dona Haraway.
I don't know that I can actually create a full and completed game by the end of the semester, as this is a large project. At the very least, I'll have the following in addition to my FAQ: a demo of the fundamental mechanics, basic game resources, and if needbe, some mock screenshots or a paper prototype. It is quite possible that I'll complete the game itself by the end of the semester - there is just a lot of programming and resource creation in a project like this.
I'm also thinking about reaching out to Kara Keeling when I have a little more to show - I'll inquire if she has any feedback or suggestions. The game will be a free, creative commons, public release when completed.
1) Explore the possibilities of modeling/elucidating critical theory using interactive systems.
2) Push the aesthetic, expressive, and representational potential of video game tropes (ludotropes?)
The game will resemble a classic Nintendo era role playing game like Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest:
It will take place within one RPG style town. The player will control a character on a tile map similar to those games, however the character's motion will be limited to a specific section of the town, as delineated by color (perhaps related to the skin color of the character). So, the character will be in a town, but won't be able to move outside of the section of the town that has tiles of a certain color.
As the character walks within this space, a trail of the character's motion will accumulate. The trail will grow over time. This marries the RPG character trope to something like the game Snake. I'm intending this as a gesture toward Keeling's time image.
Inevitably, the character will collide with a part of his/her time-image tail, and s/he will be caught in a hellish loop, now further limited to walk only along the body trail of previous motions (past-as-cliche, limiting the future). Eventually, either through pressing buttons frantically, or walking this trail repeatedly, the character's time-image loop will explode, and for a moment, motion to a new part of the board will be possible.
There will be other (computer controlled) characters to encounter. I'm thinking that I'll play with the RPG trope of having text boxes for character interactions. I'll use windows that look like classic RPG text boxes, but they won't have text. Rather, they'll have the colors of the board that limit character motion. Through interaction with characters, one will be able to travel to other parts of the board and alter the limited boxes of motion. This is a (clumsy) gesture toward using race to open up new possibilities of motion.
This bulk of the piece is grounded in the work of Kara Keeling, but also Beth Coleman and Dona Haraway.
I don't know that I can actually create a full and completed game by the end of the semester, as this is a large project. At the very least, I'll have the following in addition to my FAQ: a demo of the fundamental mechanics, basic game resources, and if needbe, some mock screenshots or a paper prototype. It is quite possible that I'll complete the game itself by the end of the semester - there is just a lot of programming and resource creation in a project like this.
I'm also thinking about reaching out to Kara Keeling when I have a little more to show - I'll inquire if she has any feedback or suggestions. The game will be a free, creative commons, public release when completed.
Taking the cyborg a step further through (non?) fiction
Gilroy calls for a new humanism, while Haraway uses the cyborg to get beyond the human. As I’ve mentioned, I think that rethinking the human is the most efficient way to get beyond hierarchical ideas about human difference, ideas that are embedded in the word “human.” However, I also think we can use this strategy to work toward Gilroy’s goal of eliminating the concept of race.
But to do this, we need new language structures not built on binaries. After reading several science fiction stories in preparation for this project, including Nova and He/She/It, I’m dissatisfied with descriptions of cyborgs that reimagine but also subscribe gender, race and nationality.
The idea of science fiction as tarot-like — as well as a fascinating parallel I read in the novella “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang, which uses Fermat’s Principle in physics to collapse the temporal order of cause and effect — is helping me to understand how it can be about the future and present at the same time. I’ve noticed several works commenting on the present by using inter-planet tensions as an allegory for international tensions. Instead of exploring what subjectivity will be like in the future, I want to imagine a future without anything like the subject, a concept built on problematic ideas of difference. Instead of using the future to talk about the social structures of the present, I will use it to talk about their equally current disintegration.
I want to write my own short story that explores how a cyborgean view of the human can eliminate concepts we need to get by today — clichés whose disappearance would demobilize our current society — including racial metaphors and, by necessity, the very notion of the subject, which is coded in terms of difference. To do this, I will devise alterations in English grammar, like Delaney and other science fiction authors, and see how far I can go in creating a new way of thinking without completely losing the reader. I want to lose the reader to an extent, though, because of the productivity of frustration (Gonzalez). I hope that readers become frustrated by my lack of revealing what the characters are (in terms of race, gender, etc.). I’m contemplating trying to write without first- or second-person pronouns to avoid the notion of the subject and the object, the mind/matter distinction, and the isolated wholeness of the self.
I’m not sure what the plot is, but it will be post-apocalyptic, post-identity and utopian (or at least anti-anti-utopian) and will incorporate philosophy of mind (a lot of my knowledge of cyborgs comes from thought experiments by such philosophers, and you can't rethink the human without rethinking the mind/body duality).
Project Proposal - “In the Light of the Frame: Enframing the Invisibility of Whiteness” - Liana Ogden & Monica Garcia
This project hopes to explore the relationship between race as embodied discourse (using Hall’s phrasing) and the deployment of whiteness by visual apparatuses such as the standardization of filmic conventions. This project hopes to ask, what would it mean to think and represent whiteness not as a neutral or invisible category, but rather as one produced within a register of visuality that holds whiteness as fixed and central? Working with Dyer’s analysis of the filmic apparatus as an organization of light that privileged whiteness, we are interested in the historical reproduction of whiteness as neutral as well as its current role in the realm of niche marketing and film production. We want to interrogate the status of whiteness within contemporary film and to what extent whiteness is reproduced and constructed.
One idea that we find particularly useful is Dyer’s notion of the glow; that “idealized white women are bathed in and permeated by light. It streams through them and falls on them from above. In short, they glow” (122). If the screen functions as a visual skin to project and cover over its represented subjects, then can whiteness be portrayed beyond light? How does this ‘glow’ relate and bind skin to screen? Through the structure of the vanishing point, we hope to depict this glow as an external effect rather than an internalized embodiment. Drawing from the framing of the vanishing point found in filmic composition of slaughterhouses or its use within the horror genre, the vanishing point or ‘white spot’ can be seen as a locus of disappearing through which the body may be circulated and made public. We want to examine several horror films and films depicting slaughterhouses with the goal of using their editing techniques as a way to frame the otherwise invisible construction of whiteness. By reframing whiteness as represented in contemporary cinema, we hope to enframe the technology of whiteness as an organization of light and bodies.
Final - Race and/as Technology in Control Society
Expanding on my post “Affixing Race in a Control Society,” for my final paper I would like to look at the way Jennifer González’s way of conceptualizing race in “The Face and the Public: Race, Secrecy, and Digital Art Practice” is both symptomatic of and produces new answers for the way race can be used as a technology within an apparent move from disciplinary to control society, as illustrated by Giles Deleuze in “Postscript of the Societies of Control.” Through looking at the way González frames the terms of her current/future interventions in racial stereotyping and discrimination through a re-imagining of race and technology, I would like to look at the way an emerging set of ideas, readings, and conceptual formations stemming from the idea of a control society transform and enable visions of what kind of technology race has the potential to be, as well as what kind of technology we imagine race to have been all along. Looking at González’ article through the lens of an apparent shift from discipline to control society, I ask: what kind of technology can race now be? And, in light of González’s move to neo-democracy, what kind of technology can technology be? And, how does González’s concept of what race is (as well as the conditions of this imagining) change what race historically was?
Final Paper Proposal
Writing on Asian women who seek cosmetic surgery to look "pretty" and "smart," Kaw critiques them for conforming to the normalized standards of beauty based on Caucasian women's features. Such critique, as it attempts to deal with Asian women's status as the racial other in the American society, nonetheless denies these women's agency in accepting cosmetic surgery. I want to trouble Kaw's critique by exploring possibilities of a more empowering understanding of these women's choice.
In light of Cheng’s theory of the melancholia, the cosmetic surgery can be seen to mark the internalized ideal swallowed by the racial other; it is injury to the body in a literal sense. But Cheng calls for an understanding of injuries beyond the merely affective responses of sadness, but rather “a deep sense of how that sadness - as a kind of ambulatory despair or manic euphoria - conditions life for the disenfranchised and indeed, constitutes their identity and shapes their subjectivity” (Chen 23-24). Also, in light of Haraway’s deployment of the metaphor of a cyborg to challenge feminists to engage in a politics beyond naturalism and essentialism, there are ways in which critique of Asian cosmetic surgery as a call to authenticity is oppressive rather than liberating. Engaging with these two critical texts, I want to explore the extent to which identity and agency emerge from a state of being damaged rather than a state of pure originality.
If something like cosmetic surgery can be associated with agency, we must then ask, what can this agency bring to politics? How is politics possible for those who choose to knife their bodies? Can politics accommodate a concept of identity based on constitutive loss? And what kind of new politics does renouncing the notion of a complete, essential subject call for?
Saturday, April 30, 2011
An interesting clip
An interesting incident of race & technology @ Google, relating to their "yellow badge" workers:
" Most of them are people of color and are supposedly involved in the labor of digitizing information. I’m interested in issues of class, race, and labor, and so out of general curiosity I wanted to ask these workers about their jobs. "
http://www.andrewnormanwilson.com/portfolios/70411-workers-leaving-the-googleplex
" Most of them are people of color and are supposedly involved in the labor of digitizing information. I’m interested in issues of class, race, and labor, and so out of general curiosity I wanted to ask these workers about their jobs. "
http://www.andrewnormanwilson.com/portfolios/70411-workers-leaving-the-googleplex
Thursday, April 28, 2011
My Proposal: From Cyborg Culture to a Culture of Cyborgs
The Cyborg Manifesto provides rich possibilities for intervention in a technological realm built upon the logical and mythological foundations of Western Enlightenment epistemology. Our readings from the past week, notably Digitizing the Racialized Body, complicate the position of existing technologies of internet visuality in terms of their complicity in digital race. It is easy to fall into the belief that technologies of anonymous communication and digital self-identification will make race disappear; but as Hansen points out, though perhaps we are all “passing” in cyberspace, technological access and agency are not uniformly distributed.
Because cyberspace changes the conditions under which seeing and writing---the preeminent cyborg technology---take place, and indeed makes possible new models of communication previously impractical or unthinkable, race in cyberspace is not entirely congruent to race in biospace. However, it is precisely the ways in which cyberspace estranges race while allowing it to remain a force that make it so interesting. What avenues are open for constructive action in digital worlds? The endurance (or, ironically, the enduring effacement) of race in digital culture makes clear that we are developing new worlds with potentially new race-functions.
Understanding and critiquing these often-ambivalent developments of digital race will only become more important as we become, as a species, more and more cyborgian. How can we direct digital race to be productive, rather than destructive or complicit or compromised? And how can our individual cyberspace existences take part in this project? I envision considering Hansen’s arguments about online passing, the nature of online identity, mimicry, and performance from the position of ironic, cultural-mythological creation that Haraway takes as a productive model for feminist theory and action in the digital age.
Because cyberspace changes the conditions under which seeing and writing---the preeminent cyborg technology---take place, and indeed makes possible new models of communication previously impractical or unthinkable, race in cyberspace is not entirely congruent to race in biospace. However, it is precisely the ways in which cyberspace estranges race while allowing it to remain a force that make it so interesting. What avenues are open for constructive action in digital worlds? The endurance (or, ironically, the enduring effacement) of race in digital culture makes clear that we are developing new worlds with potentially new race-functions.
Understanding and critiquing these often-ambivalent developments of digital race will only become more important as we become, as a species, more and more cyborgian. How can we direct digital race to be productive, rather than destructive or complicit or compromised? And how can our individual cyberspace existences take part in this project? I envision considering Hansen’s arguments about online passing, the nature of online identity, mimicry, and performance from the position of ironic, cultural-mythological creation that Haraway takes as a productive model for feminist theory and action in the digital age.
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
My Final Paper Topic
For my final paper I want to expand on the conversations from last week and further explore the ideas of the human persona that is created within technological worlds. Using Kelly Dobson’s talk in conjunction with Jennifer Gonzalez’ “The Face and the Public” and “Morphologies” along with Mark Hansen’s “Digitizing the Racialized Body” and Gilles Deleuze’s “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” I want to write about the socio-political ways in which someone can (re)create their virtual selves. How do these “bodies” take on technology as a race? How can the created avatars of real people fully embody the human it is supposed to represent? Is it even made to represent the human who created it? On the other hand, how can technologic bodies (computer/robot) take on the façade of the human? When does this boundary become so blurred that the human has to prove his humanity? On the more socio-political side of this discussion, I want to go into such topics as new frontiers that the Internet can provide; however, are these frontiers legal/why are they not? To answer these questions I will use Obidake’s Blackness project and things like “rape” in Second Life and stalking both online, maybe moving into reality. I’m also fascinated by questions such as: when is it appropriate to “friend” or “poke” someone on Facebook, admit to “stalking” them and how many photos back can we say that we saw? What can we do online that we can do in life appropriately, and what do we that crosses these boundaries? I want to answer how the Internet and Internet relations have changed/challenged conventional ideas of friendship and how humans communicate as it forces us to ask new of ourselves, who we are in life and especially who we are/want to be online.
Haunting and the Black Subject's Spectral and Repetive Presence
I find Morrison’s notion of the shadow particularly interesting. That the black subject marks its presence on the imagination of American white writers, and finds expression in their fiction, through a vocabulary "designed to disguise the subject’. But this seems to indicate two conflicting notions of embodiment: the black subject marked by the physicality of their difference, physically haunted, but their ontological, cultural, and social significance resonates only in the imaginary planes of the white subject’s mind. The spectral haunting of the black or othered on American fiction and white consciousness and its intrinsic accompaniment to the white subject engages notions of memory, repetition, and the act of forgetting.
While it seems unclear how exactly you could exactly identify and codify a way of identifying this spectral presence, I wonder in which way this presence, either spectral or ‘ornamental’ could be subversive: what kind of agency does, the black subject in shadow, or the ghost in the machine, have, with no material weight to disrupt the system it inhabits?
Also what would it mean to explode this ghostly presence, existing between the lines? Morrison is exploring the condition of hauntedness in this essas, but seems to anchor her argument to the textual and metaphysical, when I think the solution is specifically temporal. Haunting seems to indicate an oscillation or a tension between memory tied to the act of forgetting. In comparing this to American fiction writers, and the ‘Africanist’ hauntedness, we could characterize their writing, the textual inclusion and erasure of the black subject, perhaps as a technology of memory.
In considering memory and ghost, two statements come to mind: First, Deleuze’s “forgetting is the impossibility of return and memory is the necessity of renewal” and second, Derrida’s “Repetition and first time: this is perhaps the question of the event as question of the ghost”
Haven’t exactly worked at the implication of those two statements.
In addition, I’m considering Kristeva’s discussion of the abject and memory: the abject stands in opposition to I (helping to constitute the subject) but remains in proximity, haunting the subject. The white writer, the subject, is in a state of perpetually remembering the abject, the black subject, but it is a memory inarticulated, and can never be recalled. It is interesting to consider the difference between an articulate memory, something like the cliché, and an indiscernible one, the abject, and how both notions of reminiscence can inform conceptions of racial otherness.
Moreover memory, whether discernible or inarticulate, indicates some type of repetition; in the act of remembering we attempt to bring back what has past, inducing a form of repetition (Fanon’s closed circuit of colonial memory?) In Race and Technology, Coleman posited black repetition as a sign of pure embodiment and rendering of difference—it differs from itself with no other meaning than this differing. Repetition, can be understood as a process of differing, moving further away from the original….
I’m not sure where I am going with this, but this notion of haunting, memory, the difference between recollection and repetition, and their implication on race all work together in some way. Going to figure it out.
tarot
Avatar and Children of Men each perfectly fit the mold of "science fiction" as discussed during our Haraway week: these films are not about accurately projecting a hypothetical future, but rather, they are mediums to show the frustrations of our present. Both offer commentaries on contemporary society, and are lenses through which we can observe the symptoms of our current relationships with race. Sci-Fi cinema is a tarot - our imagined futures allow us to understand our present.
Ethan's post deliberates on colorblindness, and raises important questions through Children of Men's tarot lens. Ethan draws out a question we've reached numerous times throughout the semester: what is at stake in putting a person of difference (race, gender, sexual orientation, etc) on screen? If we try to pursue Gilroy's ideal of going "against race," don't we disavow the common senses that still linger, and wind up quietly re-presenting racialized others as colonized cliche? On the other hand, if we directly affirm that race still marginalizes, then what? Simply showing positive multicultural images does not break Fanon's hellish loop - that only makes the racialized other "feel better" temporarily. My vote goes to the motion in Keeling's explosion, Harraway's ironic cyborg, and Dobson's playful therapy.
Somewhat unrelated... here is a tenuous read:
In Children of Men, can we consider Britain as a melancholic ego structured through a lost object? But what is the object? Is it race? Human history? All other civilizations have collapsed, history is losing significance, and the broader world population is veering toward a multicultural melting pot. Are these not the tensions against which we define Children of Men's Britain? How does the moment of the baby crying play into this? Does that explode a common sense maintaining Britain as ego?
I'd also be game to talk about Avatar, passing, and racial tourism. It seems like there is a lot to explore, and I think it could be worth parsing out the popular reads that declare the film as latently racist
Ethan's post deliberates on colorblindness, and raises important questions through Children of Men's tarot lens. Ethan draws out a question we've reached numerous times throughout the semester: what is at stake in putting a person of difference (race, gender, sexual orientation, etc) on screen? If we try to pursue Gilroy's ideal of going "against race," don't we disavow the common senses that still linger, and wind up quietly re-presenting racialized others as colonized cliche? On the other hand, if we directly affirm that race still marginalizes, then what? Simply showing positive multicultural images does not break Fanon's hellish loop - that only makes the racialized other "feel better" temporarily. My vote goes to the motion in Keeling's explosion, Harraway's ironic cyborg, and Dobson's playful therapy.
Somewhat unrelated... here is a tenuous read:
In Children of Men, can we consider Britain as a melancholic ego structured through a lost object? But what is the object? Is it race? Human history? All other civilizations have collapsed, history is losing significance, and the broader world population is veering toward a multicultural melting pot. Are these not the tensions against which we define Children of Men's Britain? How does the moment of the baby crying play into this? Does that explode a common sense maintaining Britain as ego?
I'd also be game to talk about Avatar, passing, and racial tourism. It seems like there is a lot to explore, and I think it could be worth parsing out the popular reads that declare the film as latently racist
Oh, Avatar - and your Racial Markers
When I first saw Avatar in theaters, I distinctly remember my family expressing extreme annoyance towards the movie's portrayal of the Na'vi. Although it is pretty clear the Na'vi are alien, their culture and racial markers don't stray too far from ones used in other media. The blue skin and cat-like features were enough to signify "other", but we can still see some recognizable cultures similar to those of Native American or African tribes. examples: the beads, feathers, clothes and the bows&arrows of the Na'vi.
Morrison describes black characters in American literature as ornamental, used "for a bout of jungle fever, or a bout of local color ... to supply a needed moral gesture, humor or a bit of pathos" (15). Although the Na'vi are not black characters, they are the "other", and represent a lot of racial markers that resonate with the black identity. While the film does move toward an idea of a "new world", through its liberation of the Na'vi - the people will still be marked as other.
I can recall my family wishing that James Cameron was creative enough to create a culture that was unrecognizable and not so easily linked to cultures of Africa or Native Americans. Even the Na'vi language borrows elements from the Ethiopian language, Amharic. The actors who portray the Na'vi, interestingly enough, are Dominican, Native American or African.
Side note - there is a scene which I thought was really interesting. When the primary antagonist, Colonel Miles Quaritch, is pumping up mercenaries for killing some Na'vi they were predominantly made up of people of color. I always think that's an interesting scene and kind of want to talk about that image.
Morrison describes black characters in American literature as ornamental, used "for a bout of jungle fever, or a bout of local color ... to supply a needed moral gesture, humor or a bit of pathos" (15). Although the Na'vi are not black characters, they are the "other", and represent a lot of racial markers that resonate with the black identity. While the film does move toward an idea of a "new world", through its liberation of the Na'vi - the people will still be marked as other.
I can recall my family wishing that James Cameron was creative enough to create a culture that was unrecognizable and not so easily linked to cultures of Africa or Native Americans. Even the Na'vi language borrows elements from the Ethiopian language, Amharic. The actors who portray the Na'vi, interestingly enough, are Dominican, Native American or African.
Side note - there is a scene which I thought was really interesting. When the primary antagonist, Colonel Miles Quaritch, is pumping up mercenaries for killing some Na'vi they were predominantly made up of people of color. I always think that's an interesting scene and kind of want to talk about that image.
children of men
I was surprised at first by the idea of refugee camps in Children of Men. I wouldn’t have made the connection between the end of mankind and a surging politics of nationalism. I think it would be more expected (more mainstream Hollywood, perhaps) to think of the end of humanity in terms of coming together. Perhaps, however, this dystopia is more realistic. If we can think of science fiction as presenting the anxieties of the present, then we might say that our present is fixated on a fear of not going far enough with science—of encountering a disease of our own creation (of the body) that is nonetheless beyond our control (and invisible). Pregnancy is correlated with the visible and the body, like in the scene where Kee shows Theo her pregnant belly—this can only be communicated visually, and there is a tendency in the film to privilege visual over verbal communication. Meanwhile infertility is aligned with the invisible—this kind of invisible, unknowable disease that exists because something (a baby, a future) is absent. Kee’s race, then, is a visual symbol of fertility—man’s origin in Africa, the origin of the future. Is this the rupture for a new future? Starting with a new, African Eden? Of course, Theo is very much presented as the Joseph to Kee’s Mary. A hybrid, bastardized future.
There also were many reminders of the Holocaust—the prevalence of German-speaking refugees, the gates of the camps, the song “Arbeit Macht Frei.” I can’t help but think of the strange juxtaposition of concentration camps with infertility, and the idea of genomics. It’s interesting that Kee’s travels end with her deliverance into the hands of science—science here being an a-political entity, literally floating apart from the nation-state.
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