Scarlet-Letter Politics: The Rhetoric of Shame in the Campaign to Unseat President Barack Hussein Obama

This essay considers the politics of racial shaming as deployed against Barack Obama, arguing that it targeted black and foreign bodies as threats to the American body politic

The Politics of Race and Class in the Age of Obama

This essay explores the revival and misappropriation of identity politics in the age of Obama. I argue that Obama’s presidency has exposed the fault lines of American society, evoking deep-seated apprehensions about race, immigration, and America’s role in a post-9/11 world. As a result, it has generated a range of discursive strategies intended to both disguise and deploy racialist ideology. In particular, my analysis focuses attention on three developments in the wake of Obama’s election: the emergence of “whiteness” as an endangered identity; the prevalence of “class” as a code word for “race”; and the reconfiguration of “passing” and miscegenation tropes in political discourse. I consider the ways that these rhetorical sleights-of-hand exploit post-racial discourse in order to dismantle decades of progressive civil rights legislation in the United States

Introduction: Race, Politics, and the Humanities in an Age of “Posts”—Rethinking the Human/Race

This Special Issue of Humanities comes at a time when the viability of the humanities are challenged on numerous fronts. [...

Forum : Vol. 31, No. 03 (Fall : 2007)

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