Module 5- Race Remixed

This module worked to complicate whiteness by interrogating its assumed homogeneity. By interrogating relationships of ethnicity to whiteness and power, we were able to identify the ways in which social, cultural and racial relationships to whiteness unsettle and disrupt particular social, cultural and economic interests that are directly tied to the state. How do trajectories of whiteness get remixed over time and space? How are have particular sites of assumed whiteness been challenged by particular racial and ethnic groups shifting the assumed meanings and connotations of whiteness by "coloring" it through assertions and/ subversion of its constructs?

Module 4- Black+ White+ Atlantic Mash Up

Satirist and comedian Trevor Noah is an embodied representation of the exchanges that map the historic contours of violence, intellectual property and creativity that marks the "routes and roots" of the black Atlantic. A south African born Black male of Xhosian, German, Jewish decent, Noah was recently named the successor to Jon Stewart as host of The Daily Show , a popular television show that offers national and international political critique of social inequality from a US perspective. Noah's personal mapping of modernity and his capacity to be read as simultaneously black and "other," American and South African, in multiple national contexts, is at the crux of this module's notion of the "mash-up." My definition of a mash-up here "extends the music metaphor to imply a blending and connecting of multiple cultural and national experiences into one transformative text that illuminates the histories of its multiple sources"(Hodges Persley 2015). Over the past few weeks we have explored the central importance of the black Atlantic in shaping and defining modernity. Paul Gilroy's landmark text The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness explores the simultaneity of a black Atlantic culture whose complexity circulates through bodies and their cultural contributions to shape circuits of shared cultural exchange that have left an indelible mark on humanity. Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow: Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness continues the work of Gilroy to challenge the persistence of a Hegelian master-slave dialectic by asking how the radicalized caste system of the US disproportionately targets a particular Black American population to discipline and punish their bodies and consciousness. For Alexander, such acts shoulder viewed as human rights violations and must be addressed and read within a global context of the black Atlantic and the transatlantic slave trade. As you write about this module consider how Gilroy's syncretic theory of the Black Atlantic speaks directly to the specificity of Alexander's argument about mass incarceration. In what ways do notions of colorblindness attempt to mask and flatten the histories of social inequities embedded in the circuits of exchange that both shape and delimit black subjectivity? How might the US model of mass incarceration become an international model of supression the resignifies humanity?