“I am Trayvon Martin”: Visual Culture, Trauma, and the Incarceration Crisis

Political scientist Cathy Cohen has characterized the post-Reagan era African American community as caught in “a period of contradictions and advanced marginalization.” Cohen notes that while African American participation in electoral politics has grown exponentially since the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, African Americans are increasingly marginalized economically as well as socially. One of the major factors in social marginalization is what African American Studies scholar Richard Iton has characterized as “hyperincarceration.” This presentation will explore the apparently contradictory conditions in the U.S. that created the possibility of both Trayvon Martin’s murder and the triumph of Black electoral politics through the ascendency of the first Black president. It will examine the visual iconography surrounding the case to explore the role of visual culture in negotiating both dissent and consent with the mass incarceration of African Americans and also the structuring role of incarceration in contemporary African American culture

“I am Trayvon Martin”: Visual Culture, Trauma, and the Incarceration Crisis

Political scientist Cathy Cohen has characterized the post-Reagan era African American community as caught in “a period of contradictions and advanced marginalization.” Cohen notes that while African American participation in electoral politics has grown exponentially since the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, African Americans are increasingly marginalized economically as well as socially. One of the major factors in social marginalization is what African American Studies scholar Richard Iton has characterized as “hyperincarceration.” This presentation will explore the apparently contradictory conditions in the U.S. that created the possibility of both Trayvon Martin’s murder and the triumph of Black electoral politics through the ascendency of the first Black president. It will examine the visual iconography surrounding the case to explore the role of visual culture in negotiating both dissent and consent with the mass incarceration of African Americans and also the structuring role of incarceration in contemporary African American culture

Postcoloniality without race? Racial exceptionalism and south-east European cultural studies

The black Dutch feminist Gloria Wekker, assembling past and present everyday expressions of racialized imagination which collectively undermine hegemonic beliefs that white Dutch society has no historic responsibility for racism, writes in her book White Innocence that ‘one can do postcolonial studies very well without ever critically addressing race’ (p. 175). Two and a half decades after the adaptation of postcolonial thought to explain aspects of cultural politics during the break-up of Yugoslavia created important tools for understanding the construction of national, regional and socio-economic identities around hierarchical notions of ‘Europe’ and ‘the Balkans’ in the Yugoslav region and beyond, Wekker’s observation is still largely true for south-east European studies, where no intervention establishing race and whiteness as categories of analysis has reframed the field like work by Maria Todorova on ‘balkanism’ or Milica Bakić-Hayden on ‘symbolic geographies’ and ‘nesting orientalism’ did in the early 1990s. Critical race theorists such as Charles Mills nevertheless argue that ‘race’ as a structure of thought and feeling that legitimised colonialism and slavery (and still informs structural white supremacy) involved precisely the kind of essentialised link between people and territory that south-east European cultural theory also critiques: the construction of spatialised hierarchies specifying which peoples and territories could have more or less access to civilisation and modernity. South-east European studies’ latent racial exceptionalism has some roots in the race-blind anti-colonial solidarities of state socialist internationalism (further intensified for Yugoslavia through the politics of Non-Alignment) but also, this paper suggests, in deeper associations between Europeanness, whiteness and modernity that remain part of the history of ‘Europe’ as an idea even if, by the end of the 20th century, they were silenced more often than voiced