Over the past few weeks we have read several texts that have given us some insight into the installation of the black-white binary as the guidepost for racial formation in the United States. After reading George Aiken's play
Uncle Tom's Cabin, Cheryl Harris's "Whiteness as Property" and Omi and Winant's Racial Formation in the United States from the 1960s to the 1990's as texts that give you some insight into the racial trajectory mediated by the state and social relationships mediated by the law, what is your take and how do you understand these texts in relationship to some of the visual texts we have explored such as Kara Walker's Antebellum series or Douglas Kirk's
Imitation of Life?
This week, we finish our module on performing raced and gendered bodies. After reading Elam, Foucault and Butler think about the new tools you have to read the performance of artists such as Cindy Sherman, Nikki S. Lee and Yinka Shonibare. Consider how these performances interrogate, reinscribe and/or subvert the the intersecting and mutually constitutive boundaries of racial, gender and sexual identification in performance. What do the performances enable or foreclose to concepts of race and gender identification?
