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Far From A La La Land: Obama, Selfies, and Deconstructing a Post-Racial America

Aziz + Cucher Dystopia

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Chapter 3: Digitally Rearticulating Racial Identity and Race as Commodity in A Post-Racial Context
   In the nine years since Barack Obama’s election, it has become apparent that the “post-racial” project -- espoused by media outlets of both sides of the political spectrum -- is actually an extension of white supremacy masked in the ideology of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism, a political ideology with roots in the post-civil rights movement of the 1960's, has according to David Harvey meant the “financialization of everything” from the state apparatus to daily life (Harvey 33). In the three decades that have followed since Reagan and Thatcher manifested neoliberal ideology in policy, the capitalist free-market, and the corporate agents of the market, have become the primary catalysts for constructing modern society. Obama's election offered corporate neoliberal agents, notably establishment media and advertising, the ability to obscure the racial hierarchies of American life. “Post-racialism” in effect became an ideological tool used by media pundits, corporations, and politicians to disguise commodification and capitalist expansion in “liberal” identity politics. Mainstream American visual culture became inundated with, “a corporate multiculturalism in which some degree of visible difference from an implicit white norm may be highly prized as a sign of timeliness, vitality, inclusivity, and global reach” (Gilroy 21). “Post-racialism”/colorblindness became a narrative that white liberals used to remove the historical construction of race from its attached culture in order to commodify that culture. To resist this dual- commodification and subjugation by white capitalist hegemony, artists-of-color have begun utilizing the digital space to rearticulate themselves outside this hegemony through self imaging. Social media and digital photography offers artists of color a ubiquitous platform to challenge mainstream media's fabrication of a “post-racial” society. To illustrate this one has to interrogate the dialog between art pieces such as Aziz and Cucher's Dystopia Series, Sanaa Hamid's Cultural Appropriation: A Conversation piece, as well as various self-portraits taken by people of color on Instagram (notably Olivia Engobor).
   The digital medium, although quite new in the broader context of art history, has a close relationship with the critique of white supremacy and racial formations. Digital imaging offers artists the ability to construct an image without a reference to reality, or re-construct reality through a computational lens. Latin-American artist duo Aziz and Cucher, pioneers in the digital medium, rose to prominence in the art world with a series of digitally altered photographs named the Dystopia Series. This series of portraits uses early digital editing software to remove the identifiable characteristics of the subjects face (eyes, lips, noses) by covering them with more skin. A stand out photo from that series is that of a black body with its eyes, nose, and lips digitally removed (). Aziz and Cucher’s pieces rely not only on the visual information presented to the viewer — the eye, nose, and mouthless figures set against a colorful backdrop — but the contextual information the viewer brings to the piece, especially concerning notions of difference. In a piece for the New York Times, “It’s An Absurd World, So Send In The Clowns”, writer Hilarie M. Sheets quotes Aziz and Cucher stating, “‘[w]e were making fun of this idealized notion of a white society that had no room for difference’” (Sheets). What Aziz and Cucher offer with their Dystopia Series is a visual illustration of the historical ideological construction of race that many – especially white liberals – fail to recognize. Unpacking that further, Aziz and Cucher touch upon the skin-deep gaze that white liberals use to justify statement such as 'I don't see race'. Within the context of American visual culture in a “post-racial” moment, this series offers an introduction to, as Anna Everett writes, “how race and ethnicity get re-presented, remixed, recoded, redeployed, known and understood generally in digital media interactions and transactions” (Everett 165). Aziz and Cucher reduced the body to its base figure leaving the audience to attach signifiers (racial, gendered, etc.) that they pull from their socially conditioned imagination. In many ways Aziz and Cucher had begun a critique of “post-racialism”/colorblindness before those ideologies had begun to truly take hold of the American political consciousness.
   From a historical lens Aziz and Cucher's Dystopia Series provided a theoretical foundation for the works of artists, such as Sanaa Hamid, who critique the real world through the digital. London-based Sanaa Hamid uses her blog and social media platforms to interact with and examine the shifting relationship Western society has with race. Her Cultural Appropriation: A Conversation piece specifically functions as a reflexive lens on the way that multiculturalism and colorblindness have removed racial formations from their respective culture. The piece is comprised of a series of portraits with half the subjects adorning clothing that is cultural significant to a culture not theirs, and the other half of subjects wearing that same clothing while also embodying that culture. Hamid here is visually examining what Gilroy writes as, “the emphasis on culture as a form of property to be owned rather than lived” (24). A white man adorning a Sikh turban views it as a fashionable “expression”, whereas the Sikh man views it as an honorable tradition directly linked to his identity (Fig. 2 and 3). This juxtaposition highlights the ideological process within post-racialism, that turns ethnic culture into a fetishized commodity with social value. According to Marx, “[i]t is value, rather, that converts every product into a social hieroglyphic […] we try to decipher the hieroglyphic, to get behind the secret of our own social products; for to stamp an object of utility as a value, is just as much a social product as language” (Capital Volume 1 Section 4). For the Sikh man, the turban is an object of utility while to the white appropriator it is a valuable product that directly ties to socially created fashion trends. Marx’s fetishism of commodities offers a perspective on the value/utility dynamic that is at the core of Hamid’s piece. To further illustrate this relationship between commodity, culture, and post-racialism one can turn to the use of self-imaging by people of color on Instagram in juxtaposition to the selfies of Kylie Jenner.
   Social media networks such as Instagram offer people of color, artists and non-artists alike, a platform to share self-portraits that refutes the commodifying gaze of “post-racial” thought. Instagram specifically offers an interesting perspective on the prevalence of “post-racial” ideology in images taken by white celebrities as they tout clothing/hairstyles of people of color to much acclaim. Kylie Jenner’s infamous selfie with corn-rows for example highlights the cognitive dissonance at play in the appropriation of cultural signifiers by white people, largely perpetuated by “post-racial” ideology (Fig. 4). To combat this POC users utilize self-imaging to re-articulate these signifiers back into the racial-cultural context they come from. Instagram user spookykookyaunt (real name Olivia Engobor) for example, uses Instagram as a tool in illustrating black femininity through “selfies” (self-portraits taken commonly using the front-facing camera on a smartphone) and staged portraits of other black femmes (Fig. 5). Enogobor’s work touches upon what Derek C Murray summarizes as “selfie-style” or, “self-portrait as a radical form of self-definition: one that enables for the undoing and interrogation of painful ethnic stereotypes” (Murray 504). The use of selfies by people of color on Instagram, here a black women in particular, is the most salient method of defying the colorblindness at the core post-racial ideology. It is a defiant illustration of existence by oppressed groups that refuses to co-optation by mass media.
   Deconstructing the colorblind commodification of racial/cultural signifiers by white liberal masses requires a nuanced analysis at the methods that people of color use to resist this ideology. Capitalism, under the neoliberal state, has the ability to infiltrate and commodify the elements that make up the identity formation by racialized groups. The commodification of these elements, coupled with the white liberal media parading of the “colorblind” narrative, removes the cultural products of people of color from their communities and into the larger market place. The act of self-imaging and re-articulating those commodities back into the community is an example of what Achille Mbembe calls a “pedagogy of presence”, or “a set of creative practices that ultimately make it impossible for official structures to [...] pretend that [POC] are not there’ to pretend that they do not see them; or to pretend that their voice does not count” (Mbembe). Aziz + Cucher, Sanaa Hamid, and Olivia Engobor all effectively use the contemporary digital space to embrace the racial and cultural signifiers that define their body, in a political moment that aims to ignore and exploit those signifiers..