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.