Body as Evidence

Janell Hobson

Description

In Body as Evidence, Janell Hobson challenges postmodernist dismissals of identity politics and the delusional belief that the Millennial era reflects a "postracial" and "postfeminist" world. Hobson points to diverse examples in cultural narratives, which suggest that new media rely on old ideologies in the shaping of the body politic.

Body as Evidence creates a theoretical mash-up of prose and poetry to illuminate the ways that bodies still matter as sites of political, cultural, and digital resistance. It does so by examining various representations, from popular shows like American Idol to public figures like the Obamas to high-profile cases like the Duke lacrosse rape scandal to current trends in digital culture. Hobson's study also discusses the women who have fueled and retooled twenty-first-century media to make sense of antiracist and feminist resistance. Her discussions include the electronica of Janelle Monáe, M.I.A., and Björk; the feminist film odysseys of Wanuri Kahiu and Neloufer Pazira; and the embodied resistance found simply in raising one's voice in song, creating a blog, wearing a veil, stripping naked, or planting a tree. Spinning knowledge out of this information overload, Hobson offers a global black feminist meditation on how our bodies mobilize, destabilize, and decolonize the meanings of race and gender in an increasingly digitized and globalized world.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Prelude: Haiku

Part I. Text Messages

1. Pop Goes Democracy: Mediating Race, Gender, and Nation on American Idol
2. Understanding “The New Black”: Destabilizing Blackness in the New Millennium
3. Body as Evidence: The Facts of Blackness, the Fictions of Whiteness

Interlude: Hip Hop Hegemony

Part II. Geo Trackings

4. Digital Whiteness, Primitive Blackness: Racializing the “Digital Divide”
5. Digital Divas Strike Back: Digital Cultures and Feminist Futures
6. Exotic Sisterhood: The Limits and Possibilities of Global Feminism

Postlude: Technologies of the Flesh

Epilogue: Widening Our Lens on the World

Notes
References
Index

Sujets

• Película fotográfica
• Visual culture
• Ethnic studies
• Media studies
• Film

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 11 octobre 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438444024
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 5 Mo

Extrait

BODY AS EVIDENCE
Mediating Race, Globalizing Gender
JANELL HOBSON

Cover art is a production still from the film Her by Ayoka Chenzira
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2012 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu
Production by Ryan Morris
Marketing by Fran Keneston
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hobson, Janell, 1973–
Body as evidence: mediating race, globalizing gender / Janell Hobson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-4400-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4384-4401-7 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Human body—Social aspects. 2. Women in popular culture. 3. Popular culture and globalization. 4. Feminism and mass media. 5. Ethnicity on television. I. Title.
HM636.H63 2012
306.4'7—dc23
2011047987
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To bell hooks who showed the way and to my students who will carry the light
Illustrations
Figure I.1
“Nation Cover.” Reprinted with permission from the February 2, 2009, issue of The Nation magazine. For subscription information, call 1-800-333-8536. Portions of each week's Nation magazine can be accessed at http://www.thenation.com .
Figure I.2
Mario Epanya, “Vogue Africa,” 2010. Permission of the Artist.
Figure 4.1
Ayoka Chenzira, “CrazyQuilt Sightings,” 2007. Interactive Haptic Cinema Production on the Digital Tabletop. Permission of the Artist.
Figure 4.2
Film Still from Pumzi (directed by Wanuri Kahiu, 2009). Courtesy of Inspired Minority Pictures/ONE Pictures.
Figure 5.1
Nancy Burson, “The Human Race Machine,” 2000. Billboard advertisement. Permission of the Artist.
Figure 5.2
Kara Walker, “Insurrection! (Our Tools Were Rudimentary, Yet We Pressed On),” [detail], 2000 Cut paper and light projections on wall 12 × 74.5 feet (3.7 × 22.7 meters). Installation view: Moving Pictures , Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2002. Photo: Ellen Labenski. © Kara Walker, Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.
Figure 5.3
Praba Pilar, “Computers are a Girl's Best Friend,” 2004. Permission of the Artist.
Figure 5.4
Praba Pilar, “The Last Supper” from The Church of Nano Bio Info Cogno, 2006. Permission of the Artist.
Figure 6.1
Shirin Neshat, “Rebellious Silence,” 1994. B&W RC print & ink (photo taken by Cynthia Preston). 11 × 14 inches. © Shirin Neshat. Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels.
Figure 6.2
Shirin Neshat, “Speechless,” 1996. RC print and ink. 46¾ × 33⅞ inches. © Shirin Neshat. Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels.
Figure 6.3
Angèle Etoundi Essamba, “Toute en dignité” 2, from the Voiles et Dévoilements (Unveiling the Veils) series, 2002–08. Permission of the Artist.
Figure E.1
Adrian Piper, “Everything will be taken away #13.1 (Dancing Shiva Ardhanarishvara),” 2006; limited edition of 20 photo prints, each 4 × 6 inches. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Berlin. Courtesy: various private collections. Permission of the Artist.
Acknowledgments
This book is the culmination of years of critical thinking, critical research, critical teaching, and critical conversations. I am deeply grateful for those who've remained in my life or who brushed against it to plant and germinate various seeds of wisdom. Such individuals include my mother, Jeanette Hobson, who reminds me of how my knowledge is grounded in the wisdom of my family and community, and various friends who assure me that our raced and gendered existence in the world can only enhance and make vivid that knowledge. I am grateful to Ime Kerlee, whose intellect and support I deeply respect and which helped me to develop key ideas and concepts expressed in this work. I am also grateful to Sylvia Roch, Vivien Ng, Stefanie Samuels, and Meredith LeVande, who have contributed to the critical conversations I needed to have in shaping this book.
I am thankful for Andrew Kenyon, who supported my manuscript through different stages of review, as well as Larin McLaughlin, who quickly saw my manuscript's potential, and Beth Bouloukos and Rafael Chaiken, who helped usher this work into print. I am also grateful for the detailed criticisms and praise provided by the external reviewers and the editorial board at SUNY Press, as well as by the reviewers for Signs and Feminist Media Studies , who commented on specific essays that have formed key chapters in this study.
I would also like to thank my Women's Studies colleagues Virginia Eubanks and Barbara Sutton at the University at Albany, who read and commented on various drafts of the book chapters, as well as Cassandra Carter, Praba Pilar, Juan Luis Lopez Fons, and Ayoka Chenzira, whose enthusiastic review and contributions to my work are deeply appreciated. I am also grateful to Mark Anthony Neal for supporting and promoting my work. I am especially thankful for the different audiences at such academic conferences as the annual National Women's Studies Association meeting and the bi-annual Collegium for African American Research, who commented on my work at different stages. Other audiences, such as the one at SUNY Plattsburgh, eagerly responded to a paper that I presented the day after President Obama's historic election, which became the foundation for one of my chapters.
Finally, I wish to thank my University at Albany students, to whom I dedicate this book along with bell hooks. It was my constant integration of teaching, writing, and research, and the realization that my students needed an update to the black feminist cultural criticism that bell hooks had modeled in the late twentieth century, which led to the writing of this book. May this work contribute to a new century of black feminist theory, praxis, and education.
Prelude: Haiku
This is my body
distorted and recolored
birthing the nation
Introduction
Black bodies surface quite spectacularly in twenty-first-century media. Consider the following:

Scenario #1
On January 20, 2009, Barack Obama was inaugurated as the first black President of the United States of America. To mark the historic moment, several black churches in the area where I lived organized bus trips to Washington, D.C. I chose instead to avoid the freezing cold and watch that moment on TV from the warm comfort of my home. I shared the moment with friends, some of whom reached me on the phone or the Internet. In sharing this televised event together, we remained conscious of our history: not just in the election and inauguration of Obama but also in how we were not that different from the post–World War II generation of black folks who used to call each other long distance to announce the appearance of someone “colored” on TV, since such representations had remained marginal, and therefore that much more precious, in the early years of television. We were still uncertain about how our lives and our representations as black people would change (if at all) with a black man emerging on the world stage and a black family residing in the White House.

Scenario #2
In the days leading up to this historic inauguration, I kept a hair-braiding appointment and witnessed firsthand the “Obamamania” of my hairdresser, a Liberian immigrant, who routinely interrupted her work on my hair to jot down every bit of information on the latest Obama merchandise being advertised on TV. For her and other African immigrants, President Obama epitomized the “American dream” and the global rise of the African continent with this “native son” at the center of the world stage. Sometime later, she played a DVD of the latest movie offering of what is known as “Nollywood,” a film industry based in Lagos, Nigeria, that caters to Africans on the continent and throughout the African Diaspora. It was my first introduction to a movie system that had already dated nearly twenty years and which had become the second-largest film industry in the world, following behind “Bollywood,” India's Hindi cinema, and just ahead of Hollywood. The African body—through Obama, Nollywood, and hair braiders in U.S. urban centers—had dramatically entered into U.S. politics, culture, and society, subtly closing the geographical distance between the global North and global South.

Scenario #3
Six months after the inauguration of President Obama, Michael Jackson died on June 25, 2009. And once again, just as we had all spilled onto the streets in jubilee at the election of a black U.S. president, the world returned to the streets in collective nostalgia to engage in mass moonwalks, flash mobs, tributes, and vigils in honor of another black man. The Hollywood gossip Web site, TMZ, leaked the news first, the social networking site, Twitter, crashed with the breaking news, and I sobbed on the phone while talking to my mother. Days later, I had attended the Michael Jackson