Hale weighs in heavily on visibility and space as the main tools/sites of racial segregation and constructions of whiteness in the Reconstruction era. Can these areas be considered independently of one another today? In the digital age, we’ve been told, images proliferate even as they “mean” less, which I take to mean (in part) that photographs do not carry the weight of verisimilitude and the power of evidence they once did; that seeing is no longer believing. But if, as the fact of image proliferation makes clear, seeing still matters, what does seeing now ‘do’? Space, like seeing, means and does something different today than it did in the Reconstruction period. Space and seeing have been conflated, overlapped, and adopted each other’s qualities—what can we make of the fact that a substantial amount of the way we move and/or treat/surpass space is directed by or through images?
As Coco Fusco points out, images of race that aren’t even actual people are still ‘doing’ whatever it is that images of race do. This idea of categories/paradigms that hinge on the body and can ‘do’ things to/for/as bodies even in the absence of bodies themselves echoes the disturbing extra-bodily “massifying” aspect of Foucault’s “multiple body…a body with so many heads that…they cannot be necessarily counted,” (245). The “crushingly obvious, almost banal human sameness” which Reardon points out is “undervalued,” is, for Foucault, precisely the place where power operates on bodies (29). Power operates on the body insofar as it can be made to exceed the body in the fluidity of biological process.
While I thoroughly enjoyed Hale’s book, I found that her argumentative style became increasingly repetitive, relying on a rhetorical mechanism of inversion to seal nearly every section of her argument (formula: the _____ white Southerners used in fact undermined the very ____ they worked to _____!) Did anyone else notice the repetitiveness of the way she figured almost everything as a paradoxical inversion?
I’m not sure, but perhaps if her argument had opened with an assumption of the paradoxical nature of techniques of segregation, her argument could have evolved into a different kind of statement. In transcending racial inequality (the ultimate project of all our readings so far) it might be essential to cease to figure sameness/unity/whole and difference/fragment as oppositional—the way we talked in class about how figuring truth as opposed to ideology misses what ideology does in the first place, maybe figuring an opposition between similarity/unity and difference/fragment misses what segregation does.
I could certainly see a different sort of argument as benefiting what Hale is attempting to achieve, but I cannot say I was disturbed by the repetitiveness of the inversion. For me, it seemed to be making a profound statement about the slipperiness of race and its techniques. The hegemonic culture, in preserving itself, necessarily creates countercultures and alternative subcultures. That this inversion was repeated so often appears to be more a function of the doggedness of the "_____ white Southerners" in their attempts to suppress threats of racial equality. Hale's chronicling of repeated instances of the slippage of oppressive cultural projects toward counterculture seems to me to be fairly natural and intuitive, while at the same time being a profound statement about the difficulty of maintaining oppression through cultural production. Images, controls, and prejudices take on lives of their own. Seeing, an act so greatly affected by context and personal point-of-view, can proliferate divergent meanings within different groups of people.
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