“Look, a [picture]!”: Visuality, race, and what we do not see

Posted in Articles, Communications/Media Studies, Media Archive, United States on 2016-03-03 16:21Z by Steven

“Look, a [picture]!”: Visuality, race, and what we do not see

Quarterly Journal of Speech
Volume 102, Issue 1, 2016
pages 62-78
DOI: 10.1080/00335630.2015.1136074

Elizabeth Kaszynski
Department of Communication and Culture
Indiana University

This article argues that understanding vision and visuality as associated but distinct terms has significant implications for the ways in which we engage with racial constructions of identity. Expanding the ways in which we visualize race beyond simply the visual offers us a more comprehensive approach to understanding the construction of and response to race in the twenty-first-century United States. This article moves from theoretical implications of non-visual visualizations like tactile visuality and audial visuality through photographs taken by blind photographers to ask how race and racial identity are implicated in conversations about both vision and visuality.

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Selective Amnesia and Racial Transcendence in News Coverage of President Obama’s Inauguration

Posted in Articles, Barack Obama, Communications/Media Studies, Media Archive, United States on 2013-04-27 03:58Z by Steven

Selective Amnesia and Racial Transcendence in News Coverage of President Obama’s Inauguration

Quarterly Journal of Speech
Volume 98, Issue 2, 2012
pages 178-202
DOI: 10.1080/00335630.2012.663499

Kristen Hoerl, Associate Professor of Communication Studies
Butler University,  Indianapolis, Indiana

The mainstream press frequently characterized the election of President Barack Obama the first African American US President as the realization of Martin Luther King’s dream, thus crafting a postracial narrative of national transcendence. I argue that this routine characterization of Obama’s election functions as a site for the production of selective amnesia, a form of remembrance that routinely negates and silences those who would contest hegemonic narratives of national progress and unity.

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