Looking B(l)ack: Reflections Of White Racism
Robert Hobbs
Ontology . . . does not permit us to understand the being of the black man.
For not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation
to the white man. . . . The black man has no ontological resistance in the
eyes of the white man. Overnight the Negro has been given two frames of
reference within which he has had to place himself. His metaphysics, or,
less pretentiously, his customs and the sources on which they were based,
were wiped out because they were in conflict with a civilization that he
did not know and that imposed itself on him. . . .
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 1967
The fact is “black” has never been just there either. It has always been an
unstable identity, psychically, culturally and politically. It, too,
is a narrative, a story, a history. Something constructed, told, spoken,
not simply found. People now speak of the society I come from in totally
unrecognizable ways. Of course Jamaica is a black society, they say.
In reality it is a society of black and brown people who lived for three or
four hundred years without ever being able to speak of themselves as “black”.
Black is an identity which had to be learned and could only be learned in a
certain moment.
Stuart Hall, “Minimal selves,” 1984
The ways in which [white mainstream] artists—and the society that bred
them—transferred internal conflicts to a “blank darkness,” to conveniently bound
and violently silenced black bodies, is a major theme in American literature. . . .
Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, 1992
For a while now, scholars of race and whiteness have understood that the construction
of white culture as the invisible norm is one of the most, if not the most pernicious,
constructions of whiteness in the post-civil rights era. . . .
[W]hite identity seemed cultureless because white cultural practices were taken
for granted, naturalized, and, thus, not reflected on and defined. Pamela Perry,
“White Means Never Having to Say You’re Ethnic:
White Youth and the Construction of ‘Cultureless’ Identities,”
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 2001
A portrait in black by Kehinde Wiley.
We are the canvas. Genius. Original.
Breathtaking. A style our own,
never before seen, ground breaking.
You see us, admire us and when you reach out to touch us,
we are gone, leaving art, impressions and influence
in our passing to be admired, studied and imitated in black.
Nissan Ad, 2004
In 2008 Hank Willis Thomas scanned the Nissan ad (referenced above) before digitally
erasing its text to reveal the image’s latent meaning. The completed photo-based work,
which he calls We are the Canvas 2004/2008 (after the ad’s second sentence), is one of
two images representing the year 2004 in his extended series entitled Unbranded Reflections
in Black by Corporate America 1968-2008 (2005-2008). This series, in which all language
has been digitally excised, focuses on advertising images from the late 1960s to 2008,
found in such popular and widely disseminated African-American magazines as
Essence and Ebony. An artist with an M.F.A. in photography and an M.A. in visual criticism,
Thomas is intrigued with corporate ads that target black audiences by first selling them
provocative and timely images of themselves in order to instill a desire for their products.1
Working in concert with ads intended for middle-class black audiences,
Thomas’s Unbranded series begins appropriately with 1968, a very conflicted time
in American politics. Just four years after the Civil Rights Act was passed,
guaranteeing equal employment opportunities for all Americans regardless of their race,
color, religion, sex, or national origin, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated,
the Fair Housing Act was enacted, Robert F. Kennedy was killed, and in the summer of that
same fateful year race riots broke out in hundreds of cities across the United States.
Before initiating this group of works, Thomas had been involved with his B®anded series.
In a few of these 32 works he Photoshopped Nike’s distinctive swoosh logo directly on the
bodies of black figures and implicitly contrasted this company’s emphasis on speed with the
incarcerating marks that in the nineteenth century had sometimes been branded on the bodies
of recalcitrant slaves or left there as telltale marks of brutal whips.
Thomas stopped this series, however, when he decided that its overall premises were too
subjective and idiosyncratic; he decided that he wanted his art to rise above the personal
in order to reveal the ideological filters of corporate advertising that, in the interests
of selling products, projects its images of desire on the bodies and lives of
African-Americans in both blatant and subtle ways.
To appreciate the impact of these ideological filters, it helps to look at both the
manifest and latent meanings incorporated in the 2004 Nissan ad (cited above)
that features the cutting-edge young painter Kehinde Wiley seated in the foreground
mixing paint. Printed in white, the first line of the ad’s text, which reads
“A portrait in black by Kehinde Wiley,” involves a highly sophisticated intertextuality,
connecting it formally with the 1966-67 series known as The First Investigation,
Titled (Art as Idea as Idea), created by white conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth.
Kosuth presented this series—informally known as Definitions—to the public in the form
of Photostats, enlarged exhibition copies of cut-out dictionary definitions affixed to
index cards, which more directly documented the specific concepts with which he was working.
Thus, through its implied connection with Kosuth’s Definitions, this ad has the net effect
of making the reference to Wiley’s portrait conceptual and ephemeral.
Following this first line in white is the rest of Nissan’s text, printed in gray,
which begins with the statement “We are the canvas.” Appearing in a magazine geared to a
black readership, the Nissan ad’s gray-and-white text appears to extol the brilliant
protean spirit of contemporary African-Americans alluded to in the text,
even as it celebrates its own product’s ability to transcend, through the open road,
the material conditions encumbering them. Supposedly working in tandem with this
Japanese automobile is an evanescent spirit so irrepressible and creative that it cannot
even be captured by the important representational conceptual work of Kehinde Wiley,
who is known for contrasting such traditional images of power as aristocratic European
portraits with blacks in contemporary hip-hop dress. According to the text in this Nissan ad,
Wiley will paint portraits in which the exuberant spirit of African-American Nissan owners
can “be admired, studied and imitated in black.”
This ad’s very smart allusions to the extraordinary benefits accruing to its prospective
customers enable us to see how mass-media culture can appropriate and even co-opt aspects
of high art with dry wit and sure intelligence, making its products highly
competitive inversions of Pop Art. In consideration of this Nissan ad’s complex form
of address, we need to ask exactly what Thomas accomplishes when he excises its
entire text in order to create his work. My answer is that he needs to remove this
message because it is directed to the specific goal of generating desire for an innovative
lifestyle of consummate freedom that, according to this ad’s implications,
can only be attained with a new Nissan. When Thomas erases this complex sales pitch,
he moves the canvas referred to in the text away from Nissan in the direction of
African-Americans, and he also encourages viewers of this work to enact their own
reflective judgments for ascertaining the work’s meaning. When he erases Nissan’s message,
Thomas also breaks down the implied conjunction between the product’s use and Wiley’s
painting to reveal another message superintending both of them, and this communiqué
concerns the clean blank slate of black identity, which is synecdochically represented
by the now empty black void at the center of this work. Excising Nissan’s text but not
its carefully constructed latent image, Thomas is able to underscore the paramount role
that corporate America assumes in its attempts to incite and manage blacks’
desire by restaging, redirecting, and naturalizing, through capitalist means,
the racial relations involved in such an effort.
While the Nissan ad employs the extraordinarily subtle verbal and visual incentives of
diversity as a means for encouraging its African-American readers to break away from
monolithic definitions of blackness while also recruiting or interpellating them as its
prospective customers, we need to remember that prior to the full passage of civil rights
legislation in the United States, racial relations rarely involved such gentle and
positive means of persuasion. Despite Nissan’s subtle approach, the subject of race
continues to be a conflicted topic. In this essay I intend to present some of the
dynamics of race in the past and in the present. These involve the relentless efforts
of the white dominant culture to set a racial agenda for blacks;
the resistance of African-Americans in the early and mid-twentieth century who
redirected race in terms of unique and distinctly humanist sensibilities that were
championed during the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Power period; and the current
generation of black artists, well versed in French poststructuralist theory, who understand
the profound effects of social and political constructions that frame their
views and sensibilities. Rather than obviate these constructions and return to an earlier
humanism centered on individual subjects, they use these frames as the basis for work that
reflects back on these conditions, particularly on the largely hidden racial agenda
known in sociological circles as “white blindness.” In addition, they readily acknowledge
the polysemic nature of the postmodern self with its allegiances to numerous sign systems
that in turn convey it. A sub-theme of this essay will be my rereading of the
French theorist Louis Althusser’s idea of recruitment that has been misunderstood as one
of art’s effects. I will demonstrate that this approach is inconsistent with Althusser’s
view that ideology is only reflected in art, thus enabling it (ideology) to be revealed
as a grand invention, and then will show how his idea operates in tandem with the
cutting-edge work of many artists in “30 Americans.”
The overall insidious history of race relations in the United States is predicated
on the disturbing fact that ongoing discriminatory acts against African-Americans have
created distinct and differential hierarchies that have left whites in dominant positions,
while projecting racism on the bodies and desires of blacks, making it appear to be their
fault and destiny. By naturalizing the highly artificial situation of racism,
thereby transforming it into an efficient and effective ideology, whites have largely
camouflaged the preeminent roles they have assumed in producing and directing it.
In order to appreciate more fully the perniciousness of racism and its very material effects
on both blacks and whites, it helps to review a number of substantially different and
often destructive ideological racial constructions that have their origins in slavery.
In his important study of miscegenation in American culture entitled Amalgamation!
Race, Sex, and Rhetoric in the Nineteenth-Century American Novel, James Kinney outlines
five types of racism operative in the United States, beginning in the antebellum period
and continuing through the end of the nineteenth century. His first category, formal racism,
depends on pseudo-scientific beliefs regarding blacks’ presumed sub-humanity and
natural servility as rationales for perpetuating slavery, which was then transformed
into the white race’s so-called benevolent, custodial duty.
Slaves fortunate enough to escape from the South before the war,
sometimes received educations and affiliated themselves with white northerners intent
on ending slavery, but their changed circumstances did not rule out prejudice.
Their fellow abolitionists tended to regard them under the seemingly benevolent
guise of romantic racialism by focusing, according to Kinney, on the
“natural Christianity that made blacks innocent, good natured, and docile.”5
This sentimental view of blacks as God’s children became a paternalistic form of racism
in the 1880s and then morphed into the particularly vicious racism that was initiated
in the 1890s when entire sectors of American society started subscribing not only to
social Darwinism’s characterization of capitalism’s leaders as strong Anglo-Saxons,
but also its concomitant reproach of immigrants and people of color,
occupying society’s lower rungs, as weak and morally degenerate.
A limited differential segregation had been tentatively established soon after the
Civil War by William G. Brownlow, governor of Tennessee, who advocated singling out good
and docile blacks, who would be permitted to live and work among whites,
and then barring from mainstream society those deemed intractable. Trying to decide which
blacks to integrate and which to exclude no longer presented a problem for whites
after the 1896 Supreme Court decision in the Plessy v. Ferguson case that upheld the
“separate but equal doctrine,” which led to segregation as a revived form of
social slavery throughout the South. Although the preeminent author and orator
Booker T. Washington counseled African-Americans to accept the humiliating constraints
of segregation and work slowly for acceptance, his younger archrival W.E.B. Du Bois
railed against such a compromising policy, charging that blacks were in danger of
becoming slaves of ideology because they were “bound by all sorts of customs that
have come down as second-hand soul clothes of white patrons.”6
In his famous 1897 Atlanta Monthly essay entitled “Strivings of the Negro People,”
Du Bois outlined his still prescient concept of “double consciousness.”
This theory is predicated on the basic idea that white stereotypical views
have been projected on the bodies and lives of black people to the point that they
knowingly misrepresent themselves. Du Bois concluded that this concatenation of
competing worldviews distanced blacks from mainstream society, and he was convinced
the internalized split personality resulted from an ongoing awareness of being both
black and American at the same time. Instead of considering this two-fold view
of the world as a strength, Du Bois regarded it as threat. He characterized
“double consciousness” as a never-ending internalized battle and implied,
but did not spell out, the omnipresent danger of self-sabotage:
[t]he Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with
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second-sight in this American world, —a world which yields him no true
self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of
the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness,
this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others,
of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt
and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls,
two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body,
whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
Considered in terms of the symbolist rhetoric typical of the times in which
he was writing, Du Bois’s protracted battle between warring souls can be viewed
as a tragic ontological situation because it does not permit blacks direct and
easy access to their most profound selves.
Despite its stately period prose, Du Bois’s amazingly prescient theory permits us to
leapfrog over the modern essentializing currents of twentieth-century African-American
art and identity following in its wake, and see how his view prefigures a
constructive postmodern understanding of socially and politically constructed selves,
understood in terms of the benefits to be accrued from multiple subject positions.
Before following this line of thought, however, we need to consider briefly the
intellectual lenses that blacks have established for themselves and their culture
in the decades following Du Bois’s analysis. During this period African-American
artists and writers became involved in such defensive and essentialist moves as
empowering the Harlem Renaissance’s New Negro (1917-28) and characterizing,
in the 1960s and ’70s, the Black Arts Movement (BAM) and its emphasis on black pride
and group solidarity, which were outgrowths of Black Power’s social and
cultural activism. Both of these basically modernist positions put positive spins
on black identity by developing fundamental reaction formations against ongoing
racist relations that art historian Darby English has termed “black representational space”
and differentiated as “an effect of a politics of representation raging ever since
‘blackness’ could be proposed as the starting point of a certain mode or
type of artistic depiction.”
Although the literary scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. ostensibly joined forces with
this pan-African current by finding antecedents for black vernacular culture in
West African prototypes, he managed to theorize a distinct language game called
“signifyin(g),” (or, more simply, “signifying” without the vernacular twist)
that updated and redirected Du Bois’s “double consciousness” in a postmodern direction.
This linguistic strategy constituted an innovative means for positing a sine qua non for
African-American culture at the same time that it reconceived Du Bois’s
“double [or black] consciousness” in terms of a
homonymic pun of the profoundest sort, thereby marking its sense of difference
from the rest of the English community of speakers. Their [African-Americans’]
complex act of language Signifies upon both formal language use and its conventions . . . established by middle-class white people.10
More than just a word game, signifying is intended to enlist its practitioners in a
special empowered subculture that re-encodes the mainstream by both parodying it and
diverging from it at the same time it continues to participate in it. The theory is
important for highlighting ways that language can be rearticulated and stratified to
connote radically different meanings to accord with multiple and different semantic positions.
At this point in our discussion it is tempting to continue with Gates’s signifying by
demonstrating how it provides blacks with a privileged set of positions,
but this situation of creating multiple perspectives through a racially designated
underclass’s doubly encoded signs is also reflective of a number of different types
of subcultures needing to disaffiliate themselves from the mainstream while
remaining dependent on it. Most notably, political subgroups including those based
on ethnicity, as well as teenagers belong to this larger group because they are also
adept at re-interpreting mainstream codes as insider communiqués and jokes that empower,
cohere, and partially insulate them from the mainstream. When considered in relation
to such situations, Gates’s parallels between African-American signifying and the
Yoruba-Fon myths of the trickster Esu-Elegbara are insightful concrete historical
examples of a far vaster, ongoing double-voiced articulation found in many cultures.
Considered in this manner, signifying bears a remarkable resemblance to the
oscillating dialogism of double-voice references, advanced by the early twentieth-century
Russian literary specialist Mikhail Bakhtin. This theorist defines dialogism in terms of
conflicting literary representations predicated on differences between the view
of the speaking character or narrator in a piece of fiction and the author’s intention.
Visual analogies to these essentially linguistic strategies that privilege and
denominate African-Americans by transforming segregation into a more socially acceptable
and authoritative form of self-isolation, of course, are plentiful, and they come
both
before and after Gates’s landmark study.
Because art usually incorporates a number of ongoing tensions, understood in terms
of different subject positions that can be construed as mainstream and outsider at
the same time, signifying has become an established strategy for multiplying and
stratifying different meanings to the same terms, and as an artistic tool it is
capable of generating often brilliant and highly revealing works. Starting with the
stock African-American examples of signifying whereby “cool” means “hot” and “bad”
means “good,” African-American artists can move into the realm whereby they play off
entire artistic genres so that mainstream and black meanings are doubly articulated.
Examples in “30 Americans” abound, beginning with Robert Colescott’s and
Xaviera Simmons’s acts of signifying on the minstrel tradition by presenting blacks
who have assumed the additional mask of impersonating whites who are making fun of blacks.
A similar layering of identities and meanings is at work in Kalup Linzy’s art that
signifies on race, gender, and sex through the various roles he assumes in his
television soap-opera spoof, All My Churen (2003).
A number of artists in the exhibition signify on stereotypes of black males as athletes
by finding ways to attach new and relevant meanings to clichéd ideas. Notable in this area
is the Miami-based outsider artist Purvis Young, who creates images of black
basketball players that are also images of self-transcendence.
Signifying in a far different manner than these two artists, David Hammons provides
substantially different subject positions for looking at his Esquire
(or John Henry) (1990).
His work takes a wary view of African-American culture and its connections to
Egyptian art that is identifiable through his modern-day Ka, or spiritual double,
assuming the form of a smooth head-shaped stone, that he found abandoned in Harlem.
Collecting discarded hair from a barbershop in Harlem, Hammons glued it to his
sculpture and then asked the barber, who provided him with this hair,
to give the sculpture a haircut. The title of this work plays off white and black
identities since esquire is a British term originally employed to designate
Anglo-Saxon social status, and John Henry was a mid-nineteenth-century slave hired out to a
railway company as a steel-driver. Henry became a folk hero after successfully
competing against the recently developed steam-powered hammer just before he died
of exhaustion.11 When considered in relation to Hammons’s sculpture,
the John Henry reference is ironically circular in its implicit reasoning,
since it underscores the ways that African-Americans in the past sometimes participated
in their own undoing. This downfall is evidenced by the irony that the figure of
John Henry—represented in Hammons’s sculpture in terms of a weathered stone—had the
job of drilling into rock in order to create holes where explosives could be placed
in order to blast through this material, thus detonating the type of material
comprising this representation of him.
Related to signifying but differing from it are Jacques Derrida’s theories regarding
the slippery nature of language and his recognition following Martin Heidegger’s lead,
that some terms such as God and being need to be put “under erasure” (“sous rature”)
because they can be referenced but never known. This concept of erasure provides
Gary Simmons with a modus operandi for his chalkboard drawings that employ “whitewashing”
as a medium and consequently are elaborate and ironic plays on the ongoing chimera, “blackness.”
In addition to seeing how signifying and sous rature have become viable strategies for
recent African-American art, it helps to look at some of the new and far more
interactive theories regarding black identity that have been advanced in the past couple
of decades that have also impacted the dialectical interplays enacted by artists in
“30 Americans.” The most notable new concept regarding black identity is the almost
two-decade-long pluralistic approach variously called the New Black, post-black,
and post-soul aesthetic. This line of development focuses on post-civil rights blacks’
easy access to both white and black worlds and their ability to choose their
identity from a number of viable options.
The generational space marking the elitist New Black Aesthetic (NBA) was advanced
in early 1989 in a namesake essay12 written by Trey Ellis for the diasporic-oriented
periodical appropriately named Callaloo after the Caribbean dish, which is remarkable
for its many variations. An essayist, novelist, screenwriter, and, at the time,
Village Voice critic, Ellis’s biography is germane to his theorization of the NBA,
which he describes in a deliberately breezy style intended to gain broad acceptance
for his ideas. The son of upwardly mobile black parents educated at the
University of Michigan and Yale, Ellis attended private middle school and
high school before transferring to Phillips Academy Andover during his junior year.
He then attended Stanford where he chose to live in the campus dorm called Ujamaa,
whose website describes it as “one [of] four Ethnic theme houses” and notes that its
name means “Economic Cooperation in Swahilii,” thus underscoring the fact that
“though it’s the ‘Black’ dorm, Ujamaa provides a forum for diversity and unity among
all ethnicities, peoples and individuals.”13 Tacitly taking this black dorm’s
open-ended mission as an underlying rationale for his new sensibility, Ellis describes
the NBA in a stream-of-consciousness style that can be distilled into the
following qualifiers, involving
1. A post-liberated aesthetic, free of such slave legacies as defensiveness
and unencumbered with BAM’s need to reify blackness in terms of black pride
and group solidarity;
2. Ease of access to both black and white worlds, punctuated by the ability
to freely choose being black;
3. Recognition that “racism is a hard and little-changing constant that
neither surprises nor enrages . . . [and that] racism . . . [is] not an excuse”;
4. Confidence in the ability of NBA adherents to change their world by breaking
away from old definitions of blackness and extending diversity into heretofore
unforeseen realms by demonstrating blacks to be “the intricate,
uncategorizable folks we had always known ourselves to be”;
5. Reliance on the opportunities afforded by upper-middle class origins,
including a refusal to be limited by class barriers.
According to Ellis, initiators of the NBA are “cultural mulattoes.” He explains this
new category as fluid rather than fixed. “[A] genetic mulatto is a black person of
mixed parents who often can get along fine with his white grandparents,” Ellis writes
with remarkable prescience, fully fifteen years before Barack Obama, perhaps the most
famous cultural mulatto, delivered the keynote address, “The Audacity of Hope,”
at the 2004 Democratic National Convention and nineteen years before he became the
Democratic presidential nominee and rolled out images of his white grandparents and
introduced his part-Southeast-Asian sister and South Side Chicago black wife.14
In his essay, Ellis continues by noting, “a cultural mulatto, educated by a
multi-racial mix of cultures, can also navigate easily in the white world.”15
After pointing out that the members of his generation of cultural mulattoes are so numerous,
confident, and self-determined that they do not need to join either black or
white worlds but can “create our own,” Ellis then states that, “cultural mulattoism
refers to the ability of blacks to . . . take elements from different cultures to
create a new diverse and pluralistic self.” Moving far beyond the bourgeois politesse
of political correctness that tried not to upset any constituency defined in terms
of ethnicity, gender, age, and sexual persuasion, Ellis’s cultural mulattoism focuses
on the individuals who have the ability to forge their own hybridized identities
while freeing themselves so that they can rethink blackness without being encumbered
with either the shackles of New Negro idealism or BAM black pride. Similarly,
it evades the straightjacket of multiculturism that tended to create equal playing
fields for minorities and ended up stereotyping them according to group norms whose
boundaries were then carefully policed.
Prominent cultural mulattoes in “30 Americans” include Iona Rozeal Brown,
whose work focuses on a Japanese sub-culture of young girls intrigued with
African-American rap. “Back in 1997,” Brown explains, “I read an article in
Transitions written by Joe Wood. It was titled ‘The Yellow Negro,’ and subsequently
introduced me to a group of Japanese youth called ganguro who darkened their skin
and paid top dollar to have their hair permed into afros.”16 In her intriguingly
NBA works, Brown contrasts traditional Japanese and contemporary African-American
cultural references and plays off Ukiyo-e color woodcuts from the Edo period with
telling aspects of hip-hop culture, because, in her words, “we are all mirror images
of each other.”17 Ironically, in a postmodern world many of these resemblances
are also highly commodified.
Inflecting the NBA approach in a new direction, Kehinde Wiley deconstructs rigid
Western views of power as he establishes uneasy conjunctions between the rich panoply
of traditional European portraiture and the hip-hop alpha males he discovers on
urban streets. Significantly, the inspiration for his series of dialectical portraits
came from a mug shot that he found on the streets of Harlem while working as
artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum:
It was . . . an African-American man in his twenties that appeared sympathetic,
18
attractive, and it had all his information on it—his name, his address,
his social-security number and his infractions—and it made me begin to think
about portraiture in a radically different way: I began thinking about this
mug shot itself as portraiture in a very perverse sense, a type of marking,
a recording of one’s place in the world in a time. And I began to start thinking
about a lot of the portraiture that I had enjoyed from the eighteenth century
and noticed the difference between the two: how one is positioned in a way that
is totally outside their control, shut down and related to those in power,
whereas those in the other were positioning themselves in states of stately
grace and self-possession. And the first paintings of “Passing/Posing”
were the merging of those two lines.
Mickalene Thomas’s NBA females elaborate on the elasticity of the art of
self-presentation (fashion) in the many looks assumed by one individual in
Portraits of Quanikah (2006), and parody Black Power Afros and their cinematic
appearances in coy ’70s-style pinups in Hotter than July (2005). This latter work
refers to the open-ended, playful attitude toward new and different types of
identity that can be tried out within the safe confines of the kitsch bedrooms
and dens in which her figures are sequestered. A similar NBA openness is evident
in Lorna Simpson’s many wigs printed on felt backgrounds in Wigs (Portfolio) (1994),
which literalize and move beyond socially conditioned views of African-Americans
as only being involved in soul-work and remaining closely attuned to their feelings
when she pictures blackness as a series of fashions that can be as
easily donned as newer styles of wigs.
Thelma Golden’s highly acclaimed Studio Museum exhibition, “Freestyle,”
named for a particularly radical, open-ended improvisational style of rapping,
proved in 2000 to be an exhilarating visual-arts celebration that has antecedents
in Ellis’s irreverent NBA. To characterize the new options available to
African-Americans, Golden developed the term post-black, which she views as
characterized by artists who were adamant about not being labeled as
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“black” artists, though their work was steeped, in fact deeply interested,
in redefining complex notions of blackness. In the beginning, there were only
a few marked instances of such an outlook, but at the end of the 1990s,
it seemed that post-black had fully entered into the art world’s consciousness.
Post-black was the new black.
Golden views the artists, whose works make up her exhibition, as self-directed;
and this view is in accord with Ellis’s. Her choices include several individuals in
“30 Americans,” including John Bankston, Mark Bradford, and Rashid Johnson,
who has succinctly summed up the overall impetus of Golden’s exhibition:
Now that we all have this knowledge and have a language to deal with it visually,
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it’s the time to start dealing with some of the more playful things.
We’ve accepted privilege, we’re conscious of all these major issues that the generation
before us laid down. Now that we have that formal language, I think we can finally
talk about the smaller things.
In an overview for the Modern Language Association’s special 2007 issue on the
post-soul aesthetic, literary specialist Bertram D. Ashe updates both the NBA and
post-black with new rubrics and more culturally specific traditional black language.
All of these artists play with stereotypical views of blacks that they then provoke to
tease out additional and often latent meanings. Even though many of the stereotypes are
well known paranoid white-racist determinations inflicted on the bodies and lives of blacks,
their effects have continued to be felt. The artists, listed by Ashe, have consequently
exaggerated stereotypical effects to make points about their racist intent. Kara Walker,
for example, points out:
When stereotypes attempt to take control of their own bodies, they can only do
what they are made of, and they are made of the pathological attitudes of
the Old South. Therefore, the racist stereotypes occurring in my art can
only partake of psychotic activities.23
Rather than subscribing to BAM’s crusade to create a morally uplifting and regenerative
art capable of revivifying stereotypes, as a number of mid- and late twentieth-century
artists like Murry DePillars, Jeff Donaldson and Betye Saar attempted to do with the
Quaker Oats Company’s trademark Aunt Jemima, Walker and a number of her fellow artists
wish to undermine rather than embolden racist stereotypes. Walker’s above statement
indicates that such well-intentioned efforts as those undertaken by BAM artists are
doomed to failure because even the most seemingly benign stereotype, by its very nature,
has created, in her words, an “unredeemable” form of alienation. Disapproving of
efforts to reclaim and redirect such imagery, Robert Colescott—the critically attuned
painter of an older generation—has noted, “the philosophy did not grow out of the paintings;
the paintings grew out of the philosophy. And so they’re illustrations.”24
The almost two decade-long discourse on post-civil rights diversity enunciated by Ellis,
Golden, and Ashe that this essay has just reviewed has constituted a healthy and
commendable critique of earlier essentialized views such as those espoused by
BAM artists. The writings of Ellis, Golden, and Ashe underscore the fact that
African-Americans are no longer content to serve as the undifferentiated screens
on which mainstream culture can project its biases, and are unwilling to condone
reaction formations that reify blackness into an undifferentiated and monolithic
whole so that it constitutes one of racism’s more insidious and least
understood effects. Although their combined approach provides a knowledgeable and
sophisticated understanding of a great deal of art that has been made in the past
few decades, including black-white interactions, it does not account for the fact
that increasing numbers of artists, including those already discussed in this essay,
have made concerted efforts to move beyond their personal understanding of experience
in order to demonstrate a Michel Foucaultian-type consideration of the social,
economic, cultural, and political discourses that frame, support, and even produce
these experiences while establishing subjectivity and desire as ways of linking
knowledge and representation. As Leonardo Drew explains,
Imagine that you are a tool for creating this thing and try to remove yourself
just enough, SOSO that you don’t get too bogged down by ego or see yourself as
an all-important Image.25
It helps to get a perspective on this type of Foucaultian critique by looking at the
situation (cited above as an epigraph) that the Martiniquean expatriate psychiatrist
and philosopher Frantz Fanon described in Black Skin, White Masks as an exile
from ontology, a view that updates Du Bois’s “double consciousness.” Using Foucault
as a means to critique both Du Bois and Fanon as well as to assess the validity of
their own experiences, a number of cutting-edge black artists in recent years
have relied on this French theorist’s concept of the historical a priori.
In doing so, they have de-centered traditional views of humanism as an immutable
foundational epistemology and recognized the limits of even their own subjectivity
as socially, politically, and economically produced. According to Foucault,
subjectivity is framed by the broad-base assumptions comprising the archive or
discursive formation of what can be said in a given historical setting.26
It therefore reflects on the coercive role normalization assumes in establishing truth.27
Working with Foucault’s ideas, artists are keenly aware that they are functions of
distinct énonciations that consist of both the culturally ratified position in which
their articulations can be viewed as knowledge, and the resulting concomitant
network that provides them with a place and a stylistic voice or métier where
their works can assume authority.
A brief look at the work of five artists in “30 Americans” indicates the relevancy of
their individual énonciations and historical a priori as working premises. A decisive
example of both an ongoing historical a priori as well as a majestic énonciation is
evidenced in terms of the perspective provided by the appropriated image of a tribal
woman with an elaborate hairstyle, seen in profile on both the right and left sides of
Carrie Mae Weems’s From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995), which serves as
both the artist’s and viewer’s surrogate in the work. Looking as if her image has
been taken from an early National Geographic or anthropological study, this mediated
and stately profile looks at the collection of appropriated ethnographic photographs
of black slaves in the center of the work who have been reduced to the tragic state
of representative types. Weems reinforces this demeaning condition by branding each
image with a quasi-scientific label, such as “You Became a Scientific Profile,”
“An Anthropological Debate,” “A Negroid Type,” and “A Photographic Subject.”
Playing on differences between African tribal culture and contemporary African-American
realities, fashion designer, performance artist, and sculptor Nick Cave has created
a series of full-body outfits, called “Soundsuits,” in which he morphs found objects
with regal African-appearing costumes to redefine race in terms of the twin legacies
and dual conflicting énonciations of being American society’s cast-off fringe,
while invoking the more distant and romantic heritage of tribal ancestry.
For Shinique Smith there are several possible énonciations that are articulated
through her work: they include—but are not limited to—African-American charms,
long-held views about blacks as America’s cast-offs, current concerns about recycling
and the plights of displaced people throughout the world, as well as the
twentieth-century artistic discourse on assemblage. “There is a transient,
nomadic sensibility to my work,” Smith states, a “place for things that were once
displaced.” She continues by noting, “I see the urban terrain as nature.
My work deals with my interactions with the city and popular culture and broadly
with transitory phenomena and human nature.”
Fully cognizant of the importance of moving from the subjective to the social,
Kerry James Marshall in Souvenir’s Composition in Three Parts (1998-2000), part of his
tribute to the civil rights movement, and Mark Bradford in Whore in the Church House
(2006), rely on the metonymic force of found objects and signs to locate their work
in objective, on-going social and historical situations. They also attempt to diminish
in these works the role played by their own combinations and articulations of these
materials by foregrounding stories about the subjects and lifestyles they are
re-presenting. As Bradford has pointed out, “I generally collect merchant posters
because they talk about a service, and the service talks about a body and that body
talks about a community, and that community talks about many different conversations.”
Thus far, my discussion of Althusser and the ways ideology recruits its subjects
correlates with orthodox views of his theory. But I wish to diverge from this standard
interpretation of Althusser and interpellation by looking at art, which a number of
critics and art historians have assumed to be a preeminently active producer of ongoing
ideologies rather than being concerned with its effects, so that it recruits viewers as
ideological subjects in similar ways to its functioning in everyday life.
Particularly notable examples of misconceiving Althusser’s approach to art and ideology
are found in the writings of the eminent postmodern critic Craig Owens, who contended
that “to represent is to subjugate” and who observed that the photo-based art of
feminist Barbara Kruger “stages for the viewer the techniques whereby the stereotype
produces subjection, interpellates him/her as subject.” Owens then goes on to remark
on Kruger’s “mobilization of the spectator.”33 Such misconceptions as Owens’s have been
appealing and persuasive to many critics, historians, and theorists because they make
art appear to be a preeminent way to inculcate and realize specific ideologies.
The consequent instrumental views of art as an ideological mode, however, impoverishes
art because it obviates the crucial role assumed by artistic form that distances art
from the machinations of particular ideologies, thereby enabling viewers to look at them
as fictive and as only reflected in art rather than actively produced by it.
Although Althusser wrote little on art, he did summarize a number of his basic ideas
about it in the brief yet revealing epistle known as “A Letter on Art in Reply to
André Dasperé” (1966), which is only rarely mentioned as a cautionary note to those who
would like to view art as a means for enlisting subjects on behalf of specific ideologies.
Responding to Dasperé’s question about whether or not art should be considered an ideology,
Althusser unequivocably states that he does “not rank real art among the ideologies.”
I believe that the peculiarity of art is to “make us see” (nous donner á voir),
“make us perceive,” “make us feel” something which alludes to reality. . . .
What art makes us see, and therefore gives to us in the form of “seeing,” “perceiving,”
and “feeling,” (which is not the form of knowing), is the ideology from which
it is born, in which it bathes, from which it detaches itself as art, and to which
it alludes. . . . Balzac and Solzhenitsyn give us a “view” of the ideology to which
their work alludes and with which it is constantly fed, a view which presupposes
a retreat, an internal distantiation from the very ideology from which their
novels emerged. They make us “perceive” (but not know) in some sense from the inside,
by an internal distance, the very ideology in which they are held.35
Since Althusser considers knowledge (as opposed to art) to be inherently structural and
involved in the articulation of systems and the implicit rules “of arrangement and
combination that gives them their meaning,” he attributes this type of analysis to science,
whereas art “is ‘detached’ from . . . ideology and in some way makes us ‘see’ it from
the outside, makes us ‘perceive’ it by a distantiation inside that ideology.”36 Following
up on this observation, I contend that in art the wonderfully absurd opacity of its media
and form preclude it from actually interpellating ideological subjects because these formal
means obstruct the more direct persuasiveness necessary for this type of enlistment.
The theorist Jacques Rancière comes close to ratifying Althusser’s ideas about art and
ideology when he views art as divided into the irreconcilable yet continually oscillating
roles of its punctum (arresting form) and studium (connections with external semiotic
chains of meaning that harness art to something external to itself).
During the past few decades, the subject of race in daily life has appeared to be
downgraded by the evenhandedness of multiculturalism, the widely touted diversity
of the NBA, and the openness of the post-black and post-soul aesthetics whose
adherents can choose to be black since race is no longer assumed to be an imperative
decreed by outside forces. This de-emphasis on race is the case not only for the arts
but also for such fields as anthropology, sociology, medicine, and the humanities
in general. What is particularly disconcerting about this “winnowing away of racial
classifications”39 is that efforts to defuse them have a very long history.
As AFRICOBOBRA artist and eminent historian of black art Michael D. Harris explains,
the word “colored” “began to be used in the late eighteenth century as an attempt to
undermine the monolithic concept of blackness, so those of mixed heritage with fairer
skin would not be lumped in with their darker neighbors.”40 And yet, as anyyone who
is aware of the history of twentieth-century segregation in the United States knows,
“colored” assumed an almost insurmountably absolute designation that was used to
differentiate black and white public facilities. Certainly, references to the genre
of coloring books found in some of the works of both John Bankston41 and Glenn Ligon
play on this distinction, and ironically both artists, clearly aware of the NBA’s
approach, have made the decision to leave their works relying on this genre partially
unfinished, to indicate that the process of providing ideological hues for ethnic
groups is far from over. For his Untitled (Malcolm X) (2008), Ligon referenced
Black Power-inspired coloring books of the 1970s. During the summer of 2000 he in
fact chose images from them for his children’s workshops in the Minneapolis-St.
Paul area, and their involvement with this material serves as a basis for his art
that focuses on this means of political indoctrination.
In the twentieth century, sociologists and others attempted to use the term “ethnic”
as a sotte voce means for discussing race, but efforts to achieve widespread
endorsement of this term have been at best tentative and only briefly successful.
In Racism and Cultural Studies, E. San Juan Jr. points to early twentieth-century
efforts to replace race with ethnicity:
Among U.S. social scientists of the 1920s and 1930s, ethnicity replaced the
42
biologically based racial paradigm of eugenics and social Darwinist theories
of cultural evolution prevalent in the late nineteenth century. “Ethnic group”
instead of “race” became the category that defined group-formation process based
on descent and culture (religion, language, customs, nationality,
and political identification). Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma (1944)
valorized ethnicity in its analysis of the African-American problem of
nonassimilation and economic-political subordination.
However, despite these efforts to defuse racism’s effects, the opening of the
Nazi death camps at the end of World War II made the Western world painfully aware
of the tragic problems that can ensue from unbridled racism. This realization was
an important incentive after the war for UNESESCO to commission biologists and
social scientists to develop a precise and workable definition of the term “race.”
Biologists working on this project concluded that the species Homo sapiens has a
common source and that groups previously regarded as races were far too interconnected
to be segregated on this basis. Reaching a similar conclusion, sociologists decided
to use the awkward yet meaningful phrase “race relations situation” when it was
absolutely necessary to discuss racial problems.
The openness and democracy promised by the term “ethnicity” as opposed to the
strictures enforced by racial terminology seemed in the 1990s to portend a new
worldview in which race truly could be an elective, as Ellis had suggested.
But, just as in the past, the problem of race continued to reemerge, and it again
became particularly timely and topical in the ’90s for altogether unforeseen and
very legitimate reasons as increasing numbers of impressive thinkers began to
recognize that an entirely new civil rights campaign needed to be enacted.
Not only were inequities between races not being addressed at the end of the
twentieth century, but they were also not even being documented because specialized
studies of ethnic minorities were considered undemocratic. The publication entitled
Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society by a group of seven respected
sociologists summarizes the strange reversal of circumstances in which post-civil
rights language and freedom were co-opted by conservatives intent on doing away with
any type of affirmative action:
When private or public organizations set out to correct historical racial
46
disparities, they typically institute some race-conscious remedial plan.
But because such plans classify people based on race, the courts routinely
strike them down. Even though these race-conscious plans aim to help
subordinated groups, the courts believe they constitute reverse discrimination.
Under the resulting color-blind norm, lawyers rarely succeed in justifying
affirmative action plans that seek to remedy actual racial disparities and
societal discrimination.
In the interests of preserving color-blind equity, statistics employing racial
categories were no longer permitted to be tabulated or used to buttress arguments
about injustice to minorities. Thus, the following remarkable catch-22 or double
bind ensued: government agencies were no longer permitted to record racial
inequities because that activity would be undemocratic in a world where everyone
is supposed to be equal, and since no documentation exists, no substantive arguments
can be made to correct them.
Colour blindness is a formidable racial ideology because at worst, it seems like
racism “lite”. Yet, its frames, style, and racial stories are the main ideological
elements whites use to explain and justify contemporary racial inequality.
As I argued, by supporting equality, fairness, and meritocracy as abstract
principles and denying at the same time the existence of systematic discrimination
and disregarding the enormous implications of existing racial inequality,
whites can appear “not racist” (“I am all for equal opportunity”),
safely criticize any institutional approach to ameliorate racial inequality
(“Reverse discrimination?!”) and blame minorities for their situation
(“If minorities work hard and complain less, they would be doing much better”).
Thus the political beauty of colour blindness as an ideology is that it allows
whites to state their racial views in a principled, even moral manner.48
Because of the work by Bonilla-Silva and others, the American Sociological Association
in August 2002 decided that efforts to dispense with the term “race” were specious
and no longer tenable. It urged its members to continue using race in their research,
even as they recognized that it was a dangerous and damaging ideology that continued
to create differential hierarchies and exclude groups on the basis of superficial
features. This respected professional group also issued in 2002 the following statement:
Those who favor ignoring race as an explicit administrative matter, in the hope
that it will cease to exist as a social concept, ignore the weight of a vast body
of sociological research that shows that racial hierarchies are embedded in the
routine practices of social groups and institutions.49
The American Sociological Association’s decision to adopt the term “race” as one of
its recommended professional practices might seem surprising in consideration of
the decades of concerted work to replace it with the word “ethnicity,” which seems
self-selective rather than imposed from without, as is race. But its reversal
should not be surprising, if one considers the great number of racial inequities
that still persist. Although white racism works to minimize statistics regarding
racial discrimination, some have still continued to be formulated. Sally Lehrman,
an associate with the Institute for Justice and Journalism, posted on the Internet
on September 18, 2003, a number of very sobering ones pertaining to racial bias.
1. Considered demographically, twice the percentage number of blacks as whites
hold low-paying jobs and are likely to be unemployed.
2. Blacks and other minorities are denied mortgages far more frequently than whites.
3. The National Cancer Institute has reported that cancer death rates are more accelerated
for blacks than whites, sometimes by as much as ninety to one hundred times more.
4. Black women are more likely than white women to die of breast cancer even though
the incidence of the disease is lower among blacks. According to the National Cancer
Institute, “Black men have a cancer-death rate about 44 percent higher than that for
white men.” In fact, African-American men between the ages of fifty and seventy are
nearly three times as likely to die from prostate cancer as white men, and their
prostate cancer rate is more than double that of whites.
5. Exposure to environmental toxins and carcinogens, which are disproportionately
located in poor and minority communities, is one important reason for the racial
disparities in cancer mortality rates. Differential access to screening, prevention,
and treatment is another reason for the disparities.
6. Racial differences in mortality rates for stroke and coronary heart disease
are also significant. The black mortality rate for strokes is 80 percent higher
than the white rate, and the black mortality rate for coronary heart disease
is 40 percent higher.
7. The amputation of a lower limb is the one advanced procedure that blacks
receive far more often than whites because of inadequate treatment of
hypertension and diabetes.
Given this grim situation, it is not surprising that race continues to be an important
topic for cutting-edge African-American artists, particularly since these problems
are not being addressed by society at large. Because a number of artists also continue
to celebrate the free and easy access of NBA and the new ethnicities, they find
themselves facing battles on two very different fronts. At the same time they are
continuing to critique monolithic racial definitions, these artists need to inject
race in their work so that it will be part of the national discussion and not glossed
over by the dominant yet still far too little recognized ideology of white blindness.51
Caught between the conflicting discursive formations of self-imposed segregation and
victimization by a homogenous post-civil-rights white-dominated culture,
these artists must invoke race while remaining ethnic and look b(l)ack while
reflecting white racism. They manage these two conflicting goals by double indexing:
they demonstrate in their work ways that racism frames and makes possible their
individual experiences even as they also proclaim in it their right to choose
blackness among a number of equally viable options. They also balance these different
initiatives by underscoring the fact that racism is a white overlay, and one of their
key strategies is parody, which in their work ranges from being dry and understated
to becoming ribald and hyperbolic. Because it is hierarchical, parody controls its
target through the ironic detachment it effects.52 As Robert Colescott, who paved the way
for many of the other artists in the exhibition, concluded about racism:
We’ve already come to understand that it’s about white perceptions of Black people.
And they may not be pretty. And they may be stupid. We didn’t make up these images.
So why should we take the heat? But it’s . . . the satire that kills the serpent, you know.
October 2008
Robert Hobbs
The author gratefully acknowledges the perceptive reading of this essay by
Dr. Lowery Sims, formerly executive director and president of the Studio Museum
in Harlem and now curator, the Museum of Arts and Design, New York City.
In addition he appreciates the able and thoughtful assistance of Jessica Welton,
Thalhimer Research Assistant, Virginia Commonwealth University
Robert Hobbs holds the Rhoda Thalhimer Endowed Chair of American Art at Virginia
Commonwealth University and is a regular visiting professor at Yale University.
Recognized as both an academic and a curator, Hobbs specializes in both later modern
and post-modern art. His recent publications include (co-author with Rachel Kent),
Yinka Shonibare, MBE (New York: Prestel, 2008); “Hernan Bas’ ‘Fag Limbo’ and the
Tactics of Reframing Societal Texts” in Mark Coetzee, Hernan Bas: Works from the
Rubell Family Collection (Miami: RFC, 2007); and “Kelley Walker’s Continuum:
Consuming and Recycling as Aesthetic Tactics” in Suzanne Cotter, ed.,
Seth Price / Kelley Walker: Continuous Project (Oxford: Modern Art Oxford, 2007).
He is the author of many books, including monographs on Edward Hopper, Mark Lombardi,
Lee Krasner, and Robert Smithson. Hobbs divides his time between Richmond and Manhattan.
1. H Hank Willis Thomas, interview with author, New York, 2008.
2. James Kinney, Amalgamation! Race, Sex, and Rhetoric in the
Nineteenth-Century American Novel,
Contributions in Afro-American and African Studies,
90 (Westport and London: Greenwood Press, 1985), 151.
3. Joel Williamson, New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the
United States (New York: Free Press, 1980), 63.
4. Kinney, 7-8.
5. Ibid., 152.
6. W.E.B. Du Bois, “Criteria of Negro Art,” The Crisis 32 (October 1926),
http://www.webdubois.org/dbCriteriaNArt.html, consulted 8/18/08.
7. W.E.B. Du Bois, “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” Chapter 1 in The Souls of Black Folk
(Chicago: AC McClury and Co., 1903, rpt. New York: Barteby.com, 1999,
http://www.barteby.com/114/1.html, consulted 8/30/08.
8. Darby English, How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness
(Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2007), 9 and 29.
9. Richard J. Powell, Black Art: A Cultural History
(London: Thames & Hudson, 1997, rpt. 2002), 154.
10. H Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey:
A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 47.
11. A number of studies have attempted to establish the identity of John Henry.
One of the most recent and convincing is Scott Reynolds Nelson’s Steel Drivin’ Man: John Henry,
the Untold Story of an American Legend (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). Cf. William Grimes,
“Taking Swings at a Myth, with John Henry the Man,” New York Times (October 18, 2006),
http://www/nytimes.com/2006/10/18/books/18grim.html, consulted 9/1/08.
12. T Trey Ellis, “The New Black Aesthetic,” Callaloo 38 (Winter, 1989): 233-243.
13. Http://www.stanford.edu/group/resed/lagunita/ujamaa/main.htm, consulted 8/17/08.
14. Ibid., 236. In a February 19, 2007, blog for The Huffington Post entitled
“Obama: Cultural Mulatto,” Ellis writes:
I bit my tongue for as long as I could, reading essay after essay about Obama and his
“blackness” that were about as insightful as if they’d been written in the era of Flip Wilson . . .
our antebellum notions of race like the “one-drop rule” (one drop of black and you’re black)
no longer make any sense in this new millennium. . . .
I coined the term “cultural mulatto,” to describe people like myself who,
because of how we were raised, can easily navigate both the white world
and the black. . . .
15. E Ellis, “The New Black Aesthetic,” 235.
16. Iona Rozeal Brown, “Iona Rozeal Brown,” Spelman College Virtual Museum,
http://www.spelman.edu/bush-hewlett/a3/artiststate.html, consulted 9/1/08.
17. Ibid.
18. Kehinde Wiley, interview by Roy Hurst, “Young, Gifted and Black: Painter Kehinde Wiley,”
National Public Radio, June 1, 2005.
19. T Thelma Golden, Freestyle (New York: Studio Museum in Harlem, 2001), 14.
20. Rashid Johnson, interview by Barbara DeGenevieve, Features (April 2004),
http://www.fnewsmagaine.com/2004-apr/current/2004-apr/pages/p18.html, consulted 9/1/08.
21. B Bertram D. Ashe, “Theorizing the Post-Soul Aesthetic: An Introduction,”
African American Review 41, No. 4 (Winter, 2007): 609-623. Although dated Winter, 2007,
this special issue devoted to the post-soul aesthetic was not published until fall, 2008.
22. E Ellis, “The New Black Aesthetic,” 239.
23. Kara Walker, lecture, School of the Arts, Virginia Commonwealth University, October 24, 2000.
24. Robert Colescott, oral history interview, conducted by Paul Karlstrom for the
Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1999,
http://www.aaa.si.edu/collecions/oralhistories/transcripts/colesc99.htm, consulted 9/1/08.
25. Lorraine Edwards, “Navigating a Sea of Chaos,” Sculpture Magazine 16, No. 2 (February, 1997):20.
26. Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 127 and 129.
27. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans.
Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), 184.
28. E Ellen Donahue and Ronald Sosinski, “The Proposition: Shinique Smith,” http://www.thepropostion.com/last/shiniquesmith_press.html, consulted 9/3/08.
29. “Mark Bradford: “Market > Place,” Art:21 - Art in the Twenty-First Century: The Artists,
http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/bradford/clip1.html, consulted 9/1/08.
30. E Ernest Hardy, “The Eye of L.A. / Mark Bradford,” Los Angeles Times (June 13, 2001),
http://www.sikkemajenkinsco.com/markbradford_press.html, consulted 9/1/08.
31. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” in Lenin and Philosophy and
Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1971).
32. An excellent example of Pêcheux’s approach is in Martin Montgomery and Stuart Allan,
“Ideology, Discourse, and Cultural Studies: The Contribution of Michel Pêcheux,”
Canadian Journal of Communication 17, No. 2 (1992),
http://www.cjconlin.ca/index.php/journal/rt/printerFriendly/661/567, consulted 9/22/08.
33. Craig Owens, “‘The Indignity of Speaking for Others’: An Imaginary Interview,”
Art & Social Change (Oberlin: Allen Memorial Art Museum, 1983), 84; Craig Owens,
“The Medusa Effect, or, The Specular Ruse,” Art in America 72, No. 1 (January 1984): 104.
34. Louis Althusser, “A Letter on Art in Reply to André Dasperé” (1966),
http://courses.essex.ac.uk/LT/LT204/althusser.htm, consulted 9/15/08.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid.
37. Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliott
(London and New York: Verso, 2007).
38. Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital, trans.
Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1970).
39. Antonia Darder and Rodolfo D. Torres, After Race: Racism after Multiculturalism
(New York and London: New York University Press, 2004), 9.
40. Michael D. Harris, Colored Pictures: Race & Visual Representation
(Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 7.
41. In addition to coloring books, Bankston’s work incorporates such sources as children’s books,
homoerotic sadomasochistic fantasies, nineteenth-century slave narratives, and fairy tales.
42. E E. San Juan Jr., Racism and Cultural Studies: Critiques of Multiculturalist Ideology
and the Politics of Difference (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002), 138.
43. John Rex, Race and Ethnicity (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1986), 18-19.
44. Phil Cohen, “Through a Glass Darkly: Intellectuals on Race” in New Ethnicities,
Old Racisms? (London and New York: Zed Books, 1999), 2.
45. Cf., Stuart Hall, “Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities” in Culture,
Globalization, and the World-System, ed. Anthony D. King (London: Macmillan Education, 1991), 19-39.
46. Michael K. Brown, Martin Carnoy, Elliott Currie, Troy Duster, David B. Oppenheimer,
Marjorie M. Shultz, and David Wellman, Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a
Color-Blind Society (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University Press, 2003),
http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9866/9866.ch01.php, consulted 8/30/08.
47. Ibid.
48. E Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, “Racial Attitudes or Racial Ideology? An Alternative Paradigm
for Examining Actors’ Racial Views,” Journal of Political Ideologies 8, No. 1 (2003): 79.
Other important essays by this author include “Rethinking Racism:
Toward a Structural Interpretation,” American Sociological Review 62, No. 3 (June 1997): 465-480;
“The Essential Social Fact of Race,” American Sociological Review 64, No. 6 (December 1999):
899-906; and “’I Did Not Get That Job Because of a Black Man . . .’: The Story Lines and
Testimonies of Color-Blind Racism,” Sociological Forum 19, No. 4 (December 2004): 555-581.
49. S Sally Lehrman, “Colorblind Racism,” http://www.alternet.org/story/16792, consulted 8/30/08.
50. Ibid.
51. T This concept that art’s role in bringing racism to light is inherently political is
indebted to Jacques Rancière’s excellent discussion of this topic in The Politics of Aesthetics:
The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London and New York: Continuum, 2004).
52. Lindy Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century
Art Forms (New York: Methuen, 1985), 34.
53. Robert Colescott, oral history interview.
