Not to continue harping on this idea of public whiteness/private blackness, but it resonates with Gonzalez’s discussion of public/private as being actually a binary of public/secret.(“The other of the public is not the private but the hidden, the unknown, even the unknowable”) Race then, as Dean outlines, has an almost paradoxical relation to the unknown, or the secret, by being both something whose meaning/implications/relevancy is understood as something unknown that must be determined and defined in order to enter the public sphere, and yet also being something visually evident, it’s ‘epidermal indexicality’. We’ve already discussed the problems of visual empiricism through notions of racial passing, and the limitations of visual technology, but is private blackness in fact secret blackness, and is this secret then occupying or only salient in public space?
What is the difference then, besides semantics, between keeping something private and keeping something a secret, specifically in regards to notions of virtual invisibility, and something like identity tourism?
Private as the act of choosing boundaries, a indication of a certain spatial or social ownership…
Privacy as the ownership of secrets, and secret as the information/data of the private….
Does secrecy inherently function as, and if not, is it a product of a handicap? Is virtual invisibility, in regards to race, an enabling limitation?
No comments:
Post a Comment