The Racial Life of Things by Christina Bush a Dissertation Submitted In
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The Racial Life of Things By Christina Bush A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in African American Studies and the Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender and Sexuality in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Brandi Catanese, Chair Professor Ula Taylor Professor Juana Rodríguez Fall 2017 Abstract The Racial Life of Things by Christina Bush Doctor of Philosophy in African American Studies and the Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender and Sexuality University of California, Berkeley Professor Brandi Catanese, Chair The Racial Life of Things is a cultural biography of the racialization of the sneaker. This project identifies the emergence of Michael Jordan, his 1984 partnership with Nike, and the eventual ban of his first signature shoe by the National Basketball Association as inaugurating a critical shift in the polysemous nature and cultural position of sneakers within the United States (and globally). Drawing upon the work of performance studies and thing theory, this work offers the concept of “the racial life of things” to examine how and why sneakers, arguably, more than any other consumer object, have become deeply and inextricably linked to blackness and masculinity. Moreover, this project contends that sneakers work both, in tandem with, and in the absence of, corporeal bodies, to do the work of making gender and race “real.” Using discourse analysis, semiotics, fashion and performance theory, The Racial Life of Things traverses a diverse set of cultural artifacts––corporate endorsements and advertisements, popular news media images and discourse, and consumer narratives–– and proffers that everyday cultural objects like sneakers can work to reveal the opacities and slippages between subjecthood and objecthood and offer productive modes for understanding race and gender, specifically black masculinities, more broadly. 1 Introduction “It's A Black Thing: Towards a Theory of Racial Objects” Things are en vogue. Indeed, as historian Frank Trentmann asserts, “after the turn towards discourse and signs in the later twentieth century, there is a new fascination with the material stuff of life.”1 This turn towards materiality, however, has been met with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Black Studies, for example, has had a persistent ambivalence towards things. And for good reason. For those of us racialized as black, objects haven’t necessarily served us well. In her essay, “On the Limits and Promise of New Materialist Philosophy,” Kyla Wazana Tompkins questions the “putative newness” of New Materialism and states, rather directly, that “New Materialism, particularly in Object Oriented Ontology, cannot deal with race.”2 I would offer that this lack of engagement is rooted more in refusal than ability. And yet I, like Tompkins, do agree that despite this, “New Materialist thought is and can be profitably put to work alongside those projects that have so far been absent,” including race.3 For example, imbricating blackness to objects and objecthood can aid in our understanding of the limits of the body—still the preeminent site through which we come to apprehend what we know about race, even as it has and continues to confound us. The Racial Life of Things keeps this in mind while also understanding theoretical potentialities of this line of inquiry. Furthermore, this project also acknowledges the existence and importance of an already critical body of work that has offered postulations on blackness which are not moored in the body. One of the most significant intellectual contributions to this has been Critical Race Theory (CRT)—a body of work that has examined the law and legal system, albeit in relationship to bodies, to understand the particularities and peculiarities of blackness, particularly in the United States.4 Other nodes of Black Studies such as studies of space, or fields like performance studies have offered important challenges to the supremacy of the body.5 More recently scholars have engaged explicitly with the theory and new materialism to more explicitly imbricate these ontological questions to one another.6 Given its emphasis on “the potentially actant qualities of the material and non-human world” new materialism seems like an especially generative site through which to engage other non- corporeal sites of race, specifically blackness and objects.7 1 Frank Trentmann, “Materiality in the Future of History: Things, Practices, and Politics,” Journal of British Studies 48, no. 2 (2009): 283. 2 Kyla Wazana Tompkins, “On the Limits and Promise of New Materialist Philosophy,” Lateral, 2016, http://csalateral.org/issue/5-1/forum-alt-humanities-new-materialist-philosophy-tompkins/. 3 Ibid. 4 For more on CRT and race and the law see the following: Patricia J. Williams, The alchemy of race and rights. Harvard University Press, 1991; Charles W. Mills, The racial contract. Cornell University Press, 2014; Cheryl I. Harris, "Whiteness as property." Harvard law review (1993): 1707-1791; Derrick A. Bell "Who's afraid of critical race theory." U. Ill. L. Rev. (1995): 893; Kimberlé. Crenshaw Critical race theory: The key writings that formed the movement. The New Press, 1995. 5 see George Lipsitz’s "The racialization of space and the spatialization of race theorizing the hidden architecture of landscape." Landscape Journal 26, no. 1 (2007): 10-23; Gaye Theresa Johnson, "Spaces of Conflict." Sounds of Solidarity: Music, Race, and Spatial (2013). 6 For example, Uri McMillan, Embodied avatars: Genealogies of black feminist art and performance. NYU Press, 2015. 7 Tompkins, “On the Limits and Promise of New Materialist Philosophy.” 1 To be certain, an imbrication of blackness to objects arouses a number of important questions, including: how then do we, at once, make use of objects to theorize the ways that tell and indeed recognize the ways in which they have made use of us? Furthermore, if objects are indispensable to telling the story of black subjectivity then what might this mean for the limitations of the body? How do and might objects assist us, serve as interlocutors in our queries about Blackness? This dissertation sets out to address these queries by offering a theory of racial objects, and applying that theory across a specific object—the sneaker. However, it is first necessary to acknowledge an existing genealogy of theorizing blackness and things. Blackness and/as Objects Thinking about blackness and/as thing(s) is not new. Indeed one of the most fecund sites around which questions of materiality and blackness have cohered is the black body. While, for some, identifying the body as a thing might seem peculiar, as Bill Brown, quoting Maurice Merleau-Ponty, asserts “the body is a thing amongst things” or perhaps the thing amongst things.8 When it comes to materiality and identity the corpus trumps all. Indeed, the physical body is often naturalized as the receptacle for identity. Furthermore, given the peculiarities of blackness, the black body is, arguably, the most obdurate object of them all. 9 This foregrounding of the body as another object amongst objects, should not minimize the significance of the corpus, but rather highlight that while the implications for racialized bodies, as opposed to (non-corporeal) racial objects are assuredly different, troubling the naturalization of race around and onto the corpus can actually serve to better acquaint us with the curious workings of race across all types of materialities. Ultimately, this emphasis on the body as the material object, nonpareil, is invoked in service of more complex and comprehensive understandings of black subjectivity.10 It seems that part of the hesitancy in foregrounding the materiality of the black body is also due to a discomfiting nearness of these claims to the pernicious objectification and commodification of blackness. Indeed, American cultural objects as iconic and revered as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s landmark text, Uncle Tom’s Cabin—whose original subtitle, “The Man Who Was a Thing”—reveal the deep and unsettling associations that have been made between blackness and objecthood. However, objectification, while often imposed as part of a racist project, has also been employed by black subjects themselves to name the unique terms of their own condition.11 Some of the most luminary and cited meditations on black subjectivity are articulated in relationship to objectification. While the relationship between racialization and objectification, particularly as it relates to black bodies has been a consistent thematic within Black Studies, taking up the terms of things and objects towards investigating blackness, hasn’t been as readily adopted. At the outset of his now canonized essay “The Fact of Blackness,” Frantz Fanon begins with what is, presumably an anecdote, “‘Dirty Nigger! Or simply, Look, a 8 Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (2001): 4. 9 Bill Brown, Other Things (Chicago, IL.: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 8. 10 The body is seldom understood as material in relationship to other material forms. Indeed, the body is often only evoked as material when the corpus is being distinguished from, say, claims around the body as discursive. In certain instances, however, the body's materiality is foregrounded, for example when, the body is injured or post-mortem. 11 Bill Brown, “Reification, Reanimation, and the American Uncanny,” Critical Inquiry 32, no. 2 (2006): 179. 2 Negro.’”12 These remarks,