Media Studies

Race and Media

How is race mediated? How do racism and white supremacy communicate and disseminate? The urgency of these questions is self-evident. The responses are not so simple. This class is a participation and experience based workshop to explore the persistence and prevalence of race and settler colonialism in the United States. It takes three key figures for examination: the law, poetry and monuments. Each contributes a different angle to our key questions, allowing us to triangulate and experiment. Enslavement was sustained by the law and the legal decisions taken before and after slavery have become part of the collective culture. Poetry allows insights into the experience of racism and settler colonialism, as well as the role of language in mediating and communicating them. The monuments to past figures have become newly visible since Black Lives Matter and the white supremacist rally at Charlottesville. Each member of the workshop will contribute from the perspective of their own experience and ancestry. While this is a safe space, answers to the questions being examined are not given.

The Question of Whiteness

Responding to widespread calls for the undoing and transformation of whiteness, this seminar explores the possibilities of antiracist visual activism through the question of whiteness. For “whiteness” is produced within the racialized encounter, at the intersection the instant of recognition (or misrecognition) and the wider historical moment. It is the foundational “object” of racial hierarchy, often represented by a statue. Faced with (Ivy League endorsed) “cultural distance nationalism” and efforts to provoke a “race war,” visual activism seeks instead to find a way to non-sovereign freedom in collective subjectivity. To that end, it takes intersectional cultural encounter and the will to hospitality as its ways of becoming. Such encounters result, as A. Sivanandan put it to white British people, from the process by which: “we are here because you were there.”