The Particulars of Postidentity (original) (raw)
Related papers
AFRICAN-AMERICAN ARTISTS' SEARCH FOR AN IDENTITY IN CONTEMPORARY VISUAL ARTS
This paper seeks to define African-American art as a willing attempt to discern what it means to be a mixed-raced entities and to claim an identity for themselves by dint of their African American experience in the United States. In this regard, this study sheds light on Afro-American experiences in reference to historical facts, such as racial discrimination and racial hierarchy, one drop rule, the mulatto identity paradox, and a present case called 'people of colour', which structure the central theme of Afro-American art. It takes two notable Afro-American artists, Romare Bearden and Lezley Saar, as the point of reference. It is equally significant to understand that Afro-American artists' identity concerns reflected in their art works are essentially consolidated by past and present struggles for racial segregation against mixed-raced individuals in America.
Ugliness. Why does it seem to cleave so painfully to the flesh and blood, hair and bone of black folk? We are possessed, it seems, by the symbols of social stigma. Or have we embodied the stories and images that have discredited us within a modernist reductive discourse? If the latter, what has been our agency for undoing the (ab)normative texts that have ferociously named us? This study explores a transgressive postmodern research methodology that interrogates modernity. I will make the argument that the de/re/construction of collective African-American identity from categorical ugliness toward a constitutive role in Western social discourse was also one of the early movements into a contemporary postmodern condition. The evidence for this repositioning is a part of Western visual culture. Thus a new methodology, a visual archaeology, has been derived for the deployment of this study. The data for this project are autoethnographic, both collected and created; the text is itself an argument for a hybridized arts-based, arts-informed process. Texts, embodied in personal memory, blend with those ensconced within America’s visual culture. Both memory and culture are the target sites of an epistemological paradigm shift and a poststructuralist repositioning. In spite of the dominating archaeology of Western scientific modernity, this study shows that rogue narratives of social acceptability—a matrix of anomalous and ultimately transgressive (re)configurations of identity and methodology—have been employed to mediate the stubborn texts (re)presenting African-American stigma, freeing us to explore the borders of a postmodern “normality.”
Messing Around With Identity Constructs: Pursuing a Poststructural and Poetic Aesthetic
Qualitative Inquiry, 2004
Winner of the 2006 Roy C. Buck Award, honoring a tenure-track faculty member in the College of Arts and Architecture of The Pennsylvania State University for the best refereed article in a scholarly journal. Kenneth Gergen (1991) sees identity crises as endemic to the current human condition and has termed the malady “multiphrenia.” It is described as being symptomatic of nations with these particular traits of the postmodern era: a populace of multilocal people—people with attachments to more than one place or community, and with increasingly disconnected relationships; cosmopolitan communities with a plurality of cultures, including transplanted colonies from other lands; an explosion of information systems and a multi-media visual culture. Utilizing an autoethnographic framework, this essay examines my own identity crisis after the death of my father and, as reconstituted in this essay, my namesake. I will explore modernist, postmodernist, and poststructural methodologies available for the construction and reconstitution of our identity constructs in the current era.
Shifting Blackness: How the Arts Revolutionize Black Identity in the Postmodern West
The contemporary experiences of racially marginalized people in the West are affected deeply by the hegemonic capitalist Orthodox cultural codes, or episteme, in which blackness operates as the symbol of Chaos. As it relates to people of African descent, these affects are marked by a denial of the black person’s full status as an unproblematic subject, by ontological voids arising from the practice of enslavement over the past centuries, and by problems of representation within the West, where examples and points of reference for black identity are always tied up with conflicting interests. Utilizing Sylvia Wynter's model of the "ceremony" as one means of describing the ways in which blacks in the West maneuver the extant psychological and philosophical perils of race in the Western world, I argue that the history of black responses to the West's ontological violence is alive and well, particularly in art forms like spoken word, where the power to define/name oneself is of paramount importance. Focusing on how art shaped black responses to ontologically debilitating circumstances, I argue that there has always existed a model for liberation within African American culture and tradition. This work takes an approach that is philosophical and theoretical in nature in order to address the wide breadth of the black experience that lies beyond the realm of statistics. The goal of this approach is to continue the work of unraveling hidden or under-discussed aspects of the black experience in order to more clearly find possibilities for addressing problems in the construction of race and marginalized people within the Western episteme. This work attempts to redefine the struggle for a healthier ontology within the framework of a process of liberation that transcends Orthodox limitations on the marginalized subject.
Portrait of the Postmodern Artist as Hysteric
2011
"Portrait of the Postmodern Artist as Hysteric" explores the art of crossover celebrity artists Cindy Sherman, Matthew Barney, and Kara Walker. I posit that their creation of diegetic alter egos demonstrates how the subjective splitting once attributed to hysteria has become a postmodern norm. This mainstreaming of hysteria arose in the wake of the demystification of the modernist notion of the sovereign subject as well as the supplantation of reality with simulacral images. These two developments have resulted in a cultural shift characterized by the notion that subjectivity is a performance of the self as a series of simulacral images devoid of any original referent. Though hysteria is widely perceived to be an antiquated relic of the nineteenth-century fin-de-siècle, I argue that the mimetic condition epitomizes postmodern subjective shifts. Identity, like the ostensibly obsolete malady, is a performance of subjective lack projected upon the surface of the body. This void manifests as dissociative split selves produced by way of hysterical identifications in which the self is (con)fused with an other. As with hysterics, Walker, Barney, and Sherman pose themselves to viewers as a question. By implication, they ask audiences to diagnose or fix their protean symptoms and identities. Thus, viewers, like clinicians, are hystericized in the process of attempting to convert performative displays of discordant and ahistorical symptoms into coherent narratives and stable identities. These artists’ alter egos compel us to recognize ourselves as similarly fragmented and mimetic subjects. In the postmodern era, binaristic conceptions of race, gender, and sexuality have become more fluid. This subjective mutability is the result of widespread recognition that identities are performative. Presenting oneself as raced and gendered in accordance with established codes reifies the ideologies that motivated the performances in the first place. While postmodernism has seen the efflorescence of posts – post-racial, post-feminist, post-human – we are hardly free of the instinct to categorize others. Thus, we live in an intriguing moment in which identities are seen as fluid and evolving yet we cannot seem to relinquish the notions of racial and sexual difference. However, these artists suggest that we are moving toward the possibility of abolishing such divisive identity categorical criteria and are beginning to formulate alternative means of defining ourselves in relation to others.