MakeUp2&3

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.