Trayvon, Postblackness, and the Postrace Dilemma

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, Barack Obama, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Social Justice, United States on 2013-11-06 03:01Z by Steven

Trayvon, Postblackness, and the Postrace Dilemma

boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture
Volume 40, Number 3 (Fall 2013)
pages 139-161
DOI: 10.1215/01903659-2367072

Richard Purcell, Assistant Professor of English
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

If President Barack Obama crystallizes the intersection of postrace and postblack idealism, nothing has exposed the fraught relationship between the two than the shooting death of seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin on February 26, 2012. What Trayvon Martin’s death has brought to the fore is what contemporary intellectuals are attempting to think when they think postblackness and, for that matter, postrace. What way of understanding race knowledge in our present does postblackness offer us, especially in a postrace era? The answer: both blindness and insight. Through a meditation on the relationship between Trayvon Martin, postrace, and postblackness, this essay aims to demonstrate this blindness and insight. On the one hand, postblackness has the potential to provide a bulwark against the persistent biologisms in contemporary race thinking. Yet, it is also used in our postrace era as a term to indulge in a weaker mode of criticism: debunking—a critical posture that has allowed critics to ignore and even circulate more insidious forms of race thinking.

Read or purchase the article here.

Tags: , , ,

Destiny’s Child: Obama and Election ’08

Posted in Articles, Barack Obama, New Media, Philosophy, Politics/Public Policy on 2012-07-15 19:26Z by Steven

Destiny’s Child: Obama and Election ’08

boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture
Volume 39, Number 2 (Summer 2012)
pages 3-32
DOI: 10.1215/01903659-1597871

Hortense Spillers, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English
Vanderbilt University

“Destiny’s Child: Obama and Election ’08” interrogates the election of Barack Obama to the presidency of the United States as a historically ordained event. This essay not only addresses the question of whether we might plausibly read it as the fulfillment of telos but also examines the implications of our having already done so.

Read or purchase the article here.

Tags: , ,