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?
Tuesday, April 7, 2015
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?
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It is in Paul Gilroy’s book "The Black Atlantic" where groundwork is laid to accommodate twenty-first century discourse about race and modernity. As Gilroy argues, a great deal of the work that created the dominant narrative of modernity, on which our popular imagination rests, is a result of plantation slavery. Gilroy succinctly labels this as “capitalism with its clothes off.” It was slavery that allowed for the dominant narrative of modernity to emerge. Consequently, the black artistic narratives that emerged as a result of marginalization were distinguished from their
ReplyDeletework. To the plantation slave, work was directly attributed to servitude, misery, and
subordination. As slaves were kept in their place physically, so were their artistic practices placed outside of the popular imagination. Modernity also tells us that this history of marginalization and racism ended with the death of Jim Crow. What we discover in Michelle Alexander’s book "The New Jim Crow," is that “an extraordinary percentage of black men in the United States are barred from voting today as a result of incarceration, just as they have been throughout most of American History.” Despite modernity’s color-blind rhetoric, the money and power of the privileged class continues to control and define what is considered modernity. Although there are many counter-narratives at work in American culture, unfortunately, the spaces they continue to inhabit and change remain hidden from our understanding of modernity.
Jenna Lyons
ReplyDeleteHodges Persley
THR 914
Due: April 7, 2015
Blog 3
Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness argues that the mass incarceration of African-American men in the United States serves as the new mode of African-American oppression, replacing the Jim Crow laws of the South, which replaced slavery. Alexander also points out that this new mode, “the new Jim Crow,” coincides with an era of colorblind discourse in the United States.
One of the main problems with this colorblind discourse is the erasure of difference, and by extension, identities. Simply creating and teaching the American public not to acknowledge racial difference and to accept one another as fellow humans does not rectify the systemic oppressions and discrimination that bodies of difference face at personal and institutional levels. Alexander’s discussion of criminology and the (in)justice system is one such location for systemic oppression and discrimination. The photo I’ve attached to this blog post, came to me via my Facebook newsfeed around the time of Eric Garner’s death at the hand of a New York police officer. These t-shirts oversimplify, and turn a colorblind eye to, the oppression and discrimination inherent within the American criminal (in)justice system, which Alexander explains. The naive notion that police only confront or harass individuals who are criminals or lawbreakers completely ignores how the criminal justice system polices bodies of difference. While not being “explicitly racist,” this t-shirt/motto, through its colorblindness, justifies police brutality and police homicides against African-American bodies that are all too frequent in our current moment.
http://wsjv.images.worldnow.com/images/6238449_G.jpg [Link to photo]
This module has us exploring race from a very contemporary moment: a globalized, transnational perspective (as is deftly called to our attention by Paul Gilroy), and one which would have us falsely believe that we now live in “colorblindness.”
ReplyDeleteColorblindness – to assume we’ve moved beyond the oppression of others based on race, is to live with willful ignorance of our past, and how that past continues to bear on our present. 2015 is still fraught with institutionalized racism. One remarkably clear example of this is Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarcertation in the Age of Colorblindness. Alexander demonstrates how the legality of slavery has been historically replaced by other systems which do the same work of keeping persons of color marginalized and oppressed: Jim Crow, and currently, the American justice system. While this book focuses on the legal strategies of those in power to maintain institutional oppression on the law books, performances such as that of Aamer Rahman can demonstrate extremely broad social effects of racism. In his “reverse racism,” stand-up comedy bit, he breaks down what reverse racism would truly mean if we carried the term to its logical conclusions: meaning, that one would have to go back in time to an era before colonization, and put in place all of the same systems that were created at that time but this time with Africa, Central and South America, Asia and the Middle East colonizing Europe and the U.S. instead. He articulately follows the straight line from colonization and the ensuing oppression to the contemporary domino effects we see now, such as the privileging of whiteness in beauty standards.
At the heart of these past week’s readings and performances is grappling with the idea that the way we view race has been built upon by century after century of institutional, systematic oppression – and that oppression continues in other forms, even when the institutions themselves evolve or are even removed. We have struck down laws to be certain, but we’ve also implemented new ones. To my mind, it’s rather like a physics experiment about energy. Even when energy is forced to take on other forms, it continues to exert force upon objects, even in less visible ways.