Browsing by Subject "White identity"
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Item Saving white face : lynching and counter-hegemonic lynching performances(2007-12) Akbar, Maisha Shabazz; Jones, Omi Osun Joni L., 1955-"Saving White Face: Lynching and Counter Hegemonic Lynching Performances," examines American lynching as hegemonic performances constitutive of discursive and material practices that reinforce a cultural fiction, white supremacy. "Lynching studies" is identified as an interdisciplinary academic project that includes lynching history, analysis and (activist) cultural production. Among other approaches, "Saving White Face" uses psychoanalysis and ethnography to unmask lynching as a site where race- and gender-based identities originate. Lynching's "materialities," such as lynching photographs and souvenirs are examined as the bases of American consumer culture, especially as they relate to football and (the) O.J. Simpson (ordeal). This work also documents the production of my Chamber Theater adaptation of Bebe Moore Campbell's 1992 novel, Your Blues Ain't Like Mine (also entitled "Saving White Face"). I also contextualize this counter hegemonic performance as a lynching drama, as well as among radical black feminist activism and blues performance. As such, lynching is identified as an emergent performance practice which not only reinforces white identity, but lynched subjectivities, as well.Item "What 291 means to me" : spaces of radical artistic expression and immigrant identity(2007-05) Kohn, Tara Gabrielle, 1983-; Smith, Cherise, 1969-This study investigates a series of questions regarding the instability of white identity around the turn of the century as record numbers of European migrants flooded into American cities. My research, focusing on "What 291 Means to Me," a collection of essays and poems contributed by the artists and critics of the Stieglitz circle and published in a 1915 issue of Camera Work, suggests that this group of intellectuals subtly obscured questions about their own complex social position as elite, radical artists with immigrant roots. Their gallery, consequently, became a space that reflected a tension between avant-garde ideals and the social and political marginalization of immigrant communities. Tracing their voyage across the Atlantic Ocean, through the unwelcoming New York streets, and up the elevator to the architecturally humble, but metaphorically significant, exhibition space, this project explores their transformation from racialized immigrants into the artistic leaders of a white-supremacist nation.