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This article contends performance comedy serves as a mechanism for expressing ethnic and racial stereotypes in public and presents a challenge to studies of contemporary racial discourse which suggest overt racetalk in public is on the decline. In this ethnographic study on the training of stand-up comedians, I probe how comedy students learn to use rhetorical performance strategies to couch ethnic and racial stereotypes in more palatable ways, in order to be 'funny' rather than 'offensive' in public. Using critical discourse analysis (CDA), this study illustrates the role elites play in managing racial discourse. It is found that white versus non-white comedy students are taught to engage in racial discourse in different ways. Whites are taught distance and denial strategies which allow them to engage in overt racial commentary and deny racism or racist intent, while non-whites are often encouraged to engage in racial stereotypes uncritically. This study shows how strategic use of humor allows the 'constraints' on current racial discourse, on whites in particular, to be broken, suggesting a new phase of color-blind racism may be underway.

This article reconsiders the relationship between non-fiction travel literature and the formation of a new racial discourse during the Enlightenment. Some scholars have suggested that information from sea voyages served as raw data from which the new discourse emerged inductively. Examining travel literature about Southeast Asia before and after the Enlightenment, though, shows how authors wrote against the burgeoning discourse. Historicizing travel literature about Southeast Asia demonstrates that the strict racialization found at the end of the nineteenth century was not an unchallenged, inductive scientific enterprise. It also shows how the new discourse shaped the reception of new ideas.

In Absalom, Absalom! , William Faulkner creates a secluded reading space within a Harvard dormitory, where characters Quentin and Shreve engage in reading acts fueled by stories, letters, and memories from the Southern past. Within this protected environment, they explore transgressive desires, particularly those of a homoerotic and interracial nature, without jeopardizing their real-world racial and heterosexual privileges. This work connects this issue of reading at a safe distance to the imbalance between the discourse of race and that of homosexuality in our ways of discussing Faulkner, aiming to suggest more flexible models of ethical reading.

A survey of U.S. history from its beginnings to the present, American History Unbound reveals our past through the lens of Asian American and Pacific Islander history. In so doing, it is a work of both history and anti-history, a narrative that fundamentally transforms and deepens our understanding of the United States. This text is accessible and filled with engaging stories and themes that draw attention to key theoretical and historical interpretations. Gary Y. Okihiro positions Asians and Pacific Islanders within a larger history of people of color in the United States and places the United States in the context of world history and oceanic worlds.

In 1993, in response to the international Human Genome Project pioneered by the United States, the Chinese government began to sponsor national projects in conjunction with the international effort. The result of this scientific endeavor confirmed international geneticists’ conclusions regarding a very recent “African origin” of all modern humans, or Homo sapiens. This scientific development confronted the longstanding nationalist belief that the “Chinese” had lived in “China” as an independent human group since Homo erectus, represented by the 700,000-year-old Peking Man. By examining the still pervasive political uses of a presumed prehistoric ancestor of the people as well as the controversy sparked by the scientific challenge that has provoked public discussions, this article identifies a potent racial discourse in contemporary Chinese nationalism and connects it to a broader international context.

From Al Jolson in blackface to Song of the South, there is a long history of racism in Hollywood film. Yet as early as the 1930s, movie studios carefully vetted their releases, removing racially offensive language like the \"N-word.\" This censorship did not stem from purely humanitarian concerns, but rather from worries about boycotts from civil rights groups and loss of revenue from African American filmgoers. Cinema Civil Rightspresents the untold history of how Black audiences, activists, and lobbyists influenced the representation of race in Hollywood in the decades before the 1960s civil rights era. Employing a nuanced analysis of power, Ellen C. Scott reveals how these representations were shaped by a complex set of negotiations between various individuals and organizations. Rather than simply recounting the perspective of film studios, she calls our attention to a variety of other influential institutions, from protest groups to state censorship boards. Scott demonstrates not only how civil rights debates helped shaped the movies, but also how the movies themselves provided a vital public forum for addressing taboo subjects like interracial sexuality, segregation, and lynching. Emotionally gripping, theoretically sophisticated, and meticulously researched,Cinema Civil Rightspresents us with an in-depth look at the film industry's role in both articulating and censoring the national conversation on race.

Recently American scholars have examined the politics of mourning in relation to anti-black racism in the United States. Drawing on the work of queer theorist Maggie Nelson, I will illustrate that a political sense of mourning is also relevant to queer theory and life as a way to bear witness to the violence of the sex-gender system even as we find ways of navigating through it. Lastly, I will defend the claim that a sense of mourning-without-end is political for any marginalized population that suffers from social death and from the disavowal of its suffering through the normalization of violence against them. Récemment, des chercheurs américains ont examiné la politique du deuil dans le contexte du racisme contre les noirs aux États-Unis. En utilisant le travail de la théoricienne d’études «queer» Maggie Nelson, j’illustrerai qu’un sentiment politique de deuil est aussi pertinent pour la manière de vivre et la théorie «queer», comme moyen de témoigner de la violence du système basé sur le sexe et le genre. Enfin, je défendrai l’affirmation selon laquelle un sentiment de deuil sans fin est politique pour n’importe quelle population marginalisée qui souffre de la mort sociale et du désaveu de sa souffrance par la normalisation de la violence à son égard.

In 1999, Bill T. Jones, in collaboration with digital artists Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar, presented an installation at the intersection of dance, drawing, and digital imaging. Ghostcatching featured Jones's previously improvised movements recorded using motion capture technology. In 2010, Kaiser, Eshkar, and Marc Downie of the OpenEndedGroup revised Ghostcatching into a new piece titled After Ghostcatching, composed of unused sequences of Jones's movement and sound captured for Ghostcatching. This essay focuses on the extended relation between Ghostcatching and After Ghostcatching to track a shift from so-called identity politics to a discourse of post-racialism over a ten-year period in U.S. history. A consideration of various media—motion capture technology, digital art and imaging, and improvised, virtual dance—as well as formal analysis of each piece, highlight the political effects and visual implications of each work in a racially mediated world. In this article, I question the status of Jones's raced, sexed, and gendered body within neoliberal fantasies of post-racialism. In spite of the persistence of visible markers such as skin color that are mobilized to construct racial subjects, with the development of digital imaging and new visual technologies, to what degree is race actually visual? That is, how are race and the racialized body in motion subject to and determined by specific media, i.e., photography and digital art, improvised dance and choreographic form? This analysis of Ghostcatching and After Ghostcatching reveals how each piece tests the boundaries of choreographic form and digital imaging technologies as well as the category of race as inherently visual—a test that posits race as technology itself in visual, haptic, and spatial terms.

Scholars have begun to explore how conversations occurring in entertainment publics often extend into discussions on broader social issues. Media sociologists have described entertainment publics that engage in such discussions as aesthetic public spheres. This article is among the first to adopt this framework to study video game commentary. To do so, I examine the debate over Resident Evil 5 ’s ( RE5 ) racially problematic imagery on the popular Internet discussion forum NeoGAF. Forum posters participating in this debate present multiple understandings of racism and video games’ social significance. Posters also construct two competing narratives about what they describe as America’s problematic racial hypersensitivity and racism’s enduring presence. My analysis indicates that video game publics are clearly capable of functioning as an aesthetic public sphere, but such discussions predominantly rely on prevailing racial discourses in civil society. Posters primarily incorporate principles from color-blind racism to reject the idea that RE5 ’s imagery is troubling and to characterize the game’s critics as racists themselves. In doing so, these posters ignore contemporary forms of inequality and marginalize those looking to discuss these issues. Consequently, my findings highlight how the particular discourses adopted by aesthetic public spheres promote society’s existing power dynamics.

  This performance narrative, and the analysis and implications that follow, was constructed from data collected during a year-long critical ethnography of foregrounding race and racism in a preservice literacy methods course. It was written as a medium to create anti-racist interventions within thirdspaces (Soja, 2010) in higher education classrooms, spaces where possibilities for understanding and changing the way race and racism shape and distort educational contexts can emerge.