Bodies Unveiled

During the 2008 Presidential elections, Barack Obama’s campaign was on multiple platforms which spoke to specific positions of American polity, social life, and economic disparities. In particular, Obama’s campaign operated on race, transforming it into a “levered mechanism” that would refrain from framing race essentially, but use it in other productive ways. So, this levered mechanism was deployed to resist essentialization, and to refigure race into new identities that could be formed by Obama and conceptions of him in the media, whether it be images or his performative speeches and appearances. And it would be race that was at the heart of this campaign: “When the public sees him, they see a Black man.” Perhaps this was a moment of explosion, or, better put, a rupture in the human sensory motor apparatus? An explosion that would dissolve colonial conceived images of the colonized, i.e., the Black imago, Black slaves and Negroes? Perhaps intentionally remaining silent, i.e., The Bluest Eye, or using the body as the site of resistance, i.e., Algeria Unveiled and the Algerian women who hid their weapons against the Colonizers, could be considered strategies of agentive resistance may have manifested, but, as the readings of Obama’s campaign made clear, we may also come to recognize that the most effective agency is an unconscious one.