Aesthetics
and Politics I
Sensibility and Subjectivity
2003 NEMLA Meeting
Boston, MA
07 March
Scott
DeShong
Quinebaug Valley Community College
Articulating
the Seams: Race as Aesthetic, Race as Political
Do
not cite without permission of the author.
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Treating
race as an intersubjective construct, this paper heuristically divides
the semiotics of race into two areas: social meaning, conceived
as the political dimension, and sensibility, the aesthetic. In the
history of race in the West, whiteness has emerged both as universalized
humanity and as an exclusive category; the force of this contradiction
has persisted even as the strategic racism that founded it has been
widely repudiated. Blackness in the United States context (as derived
from W. E. B. DuBois, for example) involves a performative subjectivity
that is improvised on a seam of simultaneous exclusion from and
inclusion within Western naturalized humanity. Such aesthetic performativity
entails negotiation with the politics of racial meaning, as the
putatively sensible features of blackness and whiteness (or the
latter's lack of features) tend to derive from political signification,
rather than vice-versa. As the paper examines the political effects
and aesthetic functions involved in the development of race's junctures
and divisions, it develops a critique of its own conception of the
political/aesthetic seam.
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