"Cool Runnings" :Toward the Origins of Post-Raciality

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The great mistake of recent critical commentary on the emergence of post-racial discourse, rhetoric, and electoral politics, has been its lack of historical, social, and cultural contextualization. Post-raciality does not finds its origins in the rise of President Obama or the "diverse" cast of CNN anchors, but rather within particular historical, political, and social convergences whose ideological legitimacy serves to isolate such a complex network of relations from their conditions of emergence. I thinking through various objects in the history of post-raciality, the film "Cool Runnings" stands as an object of preliminary demarcation, a moment where the deterritorialized and reterritorialized  lines of post-raciality's central productions collapse and converge. Since this is a preliminary investigation, I will only outline what I hope to be a kind of small genealogy of one specific circuit in which post-racial visual and popular culture operates: 

          1. the aesthetic-politics/ political aesthetics of sports and competition: within this structural relation eugenic claims on the nature of the body, the racialized body, proper "fitness", civilized/savage binaries

         2. Legacies of Colonization and post-colonality: within the film, Jamacia's colonial history is never outwardly addressed. That Jamaica remains to this day a British commonwealth is a fact that film never addresses. However each character fits into the social structure of colonial society, representing a fragment of colonized sociality, most visibly along class lines and representations. 

3. The figure of the nation and nationalism as liberation: one ongoing narrative in the film is centered upon the main characters feeling of suffocation, isolation, and lack of social, political, and personal mobility on "the Island". Jamaica as a nation, is continually positioned within a dialectic of aversion (shame, backwardness, stupidity, immobility, and provincialism) and belonging. The central climax of the film involves Derice's fascination with Swiss mannerisms, phrases, and ways of conduct, and his eventual return to his "roots" as a proud Jamaican.  Here the figure of the nation is both affirmed and disavowed through "cultural practices", rituals, and desires. 

4. Within this positioning of the figure of the nation, the modernity/premodernity binary is in full force. Jamaica is overdetermined as premodern through a complex procedure of discursive productions ranging from the "privatism" of the "island" bar where we (the viewer) are to assume the majority of the population (no specific cities or localities are even mentioned when scenes take place in Jamaica, whereas the scenes during the olympics in Canada are always identified by location, city name, etc) gathers to watch the olympics are their lone single television, to the technological, financial, and completely material lacks of the main characters both societally and in terms of their competition at the olympics. 

5. The Whiteness of the Olympics: It is perfectly fitting that the winter olympics takes places in Calgary, Alberta Canada, both in terms of the "incredible" contrast between Jamaican life and Canadian life and the particular "frontier" connotations that Calgary inspires. The olympics themselves, especially the bobsled events feature the whitest "world" athletes possible. Not a single scene set outside of Jamaica features a single person of color beyond the Jamaican athletes themselves. This has a wider meaning in terms of the fact that the olympics signify a "global" event.

6. Stereotypical roles: Rich boy, Poor boy, the stoner "rasta", model-minority athlete, John Candy's love of the "rasta hat". 

7. Difference deferred: a constant theme in the film involves the main characters negotiation of their "differences" (which are strategically abstract and decontextualized) and these differences are constantly negotiated through a framework of the desire for social ascendency, class mobility, whiteness (temporarily in Derice's fascination with the Swiss team), and the notion that through capitalism liberation is possible and that a production of meaning/belonging will result from such a desire. 

8. Race and reconciliation: the complete and total racism (institutional in terms of the olympic committee's treatment of the Jamaican team as "jokes, fools, and idiots" and their constant enforcement that the team must prove/demonstrates its "qualifications".) that the teams faces both from fellow athletes (the Swiss, the embodiment of white purity, athletic finesse, respect and seriousness) the population of Alberta (the infamous bar fight scene is perhaps the most grotesque demonstration of this) as well as the broadcast commentators during the "runs" is coupled with the almost instant "jamaica fever" that follows the teams successful runs. The scene where both the broadcast commentators reveal Jamaica shirts beneath their jackets as well as the rampant display of both Jamaican and American flags in the crowd during races, points to this "minute" example of the power of deracialized "racial harmony". 

New Media and the Complexities of Witness: Political Violence and Accountability

Inaugurating the Post-Racial State: Official Discursivity and Scene of Narration

" For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus- and non-believers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of the Earth; and because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself.." - President Barack Obama's Inauguration speech

" The all-governing expanse of this open relational context is the world of this historical people. Only from and in this expanse does the nation first return to itself for the fulfillment of its vocation." - Heidegger The Origin of the Work of Art 

The specific expanse that Heidegger was referencing was the Greek temple, for us the national mall in the capital can be our stand-in. Either way the tone of Heidegger and the scene of President Obama's national imaginings demonstrate a strange alignment both of terms of figure and image. For the figure of post-raciality, a certain unstoppable sense of mobilized historical telos, progress, and unity, and the image- the record crowds under the "shadow of Lincoln" (to paraphrase from Obama's brief statement on Martin Luther King day) accomplish the "fulfillment of our national vocation". Much has been said in the realm of oppositional media (blogs, ethnic media organizations, and even occasionally in the op-ed columns of major newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times) against the official rhetoric of Post-Racial America, and yet such claims of refutation (while urgently necessary) have in some sensed glossed over the importance of Post-raciality's universalizing claims. The questions that cast their ghostly specters over such critical interruptions, can lead us to the skeletal operations now establishing themselves as the new rhetorical agents of a newly inaugurated discursive state apparatus, truth-regime, and social contract. These questions are not: why and for whom is this post-raciality addressed but rather (questions whose answers cannot be other than the maintenance, regulation, and growth of white supremacy and privilege), what such discursive regimes mean as official utterances, as state-sanctioned sovereign speech acts, and morally-juridically-politically coded truths. That is, what do these statements actually say? And where can we find the scenes, spaces/places, and localities from where these speech acts and multiple rhetorics emerge in their sheltered ambivalences? In cultural studies and political philosophy, these scenes have been conceptualized as the "scene of the address" or the "concept of the address" contextualized within specific "histories of determination" that establish and ground the possibility of normalizing political rhetoric. However, the discursive truths of the post-racial state while firmly related to a very specific kind of address: the Right of Reconciliation, the universal telos of racial transcendence at the of racial history, and the national destiny of hope and continuance, are equally and intersectionally a scene of narration (political, aesthetic, ahistorical etc). President Obama's own speeches, personal statements/comments, jokes, and hyper-aestheticized national performances constitute a densely complex of network of address and narration. In speaking to the nation (whose nation? what nation? do his speech acts themselves constitute the narration of a new state (the post-racial state) or do they establish a kind of liminal indeterminateness between a racialized nation and deraced state?), President Obama also performs a kind of radically busy textuality of personhood, nationhood, Empire, and state, one that narrates as it addresses, ruptures as it recuperates, and signifies as it signs an (un)locatable authorship. To clarify, the concepts of address and narration cannot be distinguished by their dialectical opposition and separateness, nor do the two synthesize as a unified totality. We are not working within a binary, but rather, within intensely active circuits of a deeply ambivalent texuality. Further, the notion of a scene should be understood in some sense in its literalness. In the case of President Obama's inauguration speech, both the scene of the address and the narration/address itself signified an ideologically coded production, a violent discursive silence. That President Obama spoke in the national mall built entirely by slave labor, in front of buildings that officially sanctioned legal white supremacy (the Supreme Court, Congress,), where slaves were bought and sold, is just one example of the ways in which specific "histories of determination" and discursive economies of exclusion, were erased or displaced in the moment of national address and narration. Such a displacement is in itself a political narrative that establishes itself along the logical lines of post-raciality's central themes: forgetting or disremembering, gestural politics or performative politics devoid of both agency and power relations, and the centrality of speech acts and rhetoric. The moment of Obama's inaugural address then signified a kind of of politics of displacement and projection- the violent  projection and displacement of so-called "racial tensions" out of the temporality of the present and into the promise of Democracy at the ends of history.

The Works of Whiteness: Crisis, Culturelessness, and Redemption

The Inauguration of President Obama inaugurated a regime of forgetting, of concealing and coding the “histories of determination” (Ahmed) that place official American political rhetoric at the “beyond” of a democracy to come. The pure idealism of American Liberalism establishes its self-contained dialectic of newness, its continual circles of origins and beginnings, in the ceaselessness of its blind ahistoricism. At an absolutely singular moment when the shame of American (neo)liberalism is everywhere displaced and disrupted by the material realities of economic collapse, extra-judicial political violence (the execution-style killing Oscar Grant constitutes the most recent and visible case), racial profiling and detainment, American exceptionalism and triumphantalism returns to the absolutely singular promise of a nation on the long path toward the twilight of history. Obama’s comments just days before his inauguration concerning the prosecution of the Bush regime for war crimes, speaks to the radical passivity of the politics of forgetting that have been represented as “hope” and “change”. The narratives of progress, newness, and hope, demand (narratives and tropes central to Obama’s campaign) deploy a particular concept of history that links universal regimes of truth without contextualization or social location. The lack of these narratives is positioned as the always potential accomplishment of "democracy", the task to come.




The “post-racial” is not just a strictly political ideology but extends into the realm of political economy as a commodified life-style and cultural indicator. As a discourse of advertising and mass culture, the “post-racial” has signaled a shift in the racialization of commercials, films, and television shows. The coding and recoding of consumption in the context of the “post-racial”, points to the framework of color-blind ideology as one way to deconstruct and interrogate the fluidity and rapid circulation of the “post-racial” image and “post-racial” visual culture at large. In his ethnographic study of white-youth culture and the appropriation of hip-hop, Rodriquez examines the relationship between color-blind ideologies and cultural practices. Central to his examination of that relationship, Rodriquez’s discussion of blackness as cultural indicator of subcultural style (coolness) and in-group claims to authenticity is a helpful framework for reading the “post-racial” in terms of subcultural practices, reading-formations, and popular culture. Color-blindness is related to the schemata of the “post-racial” in that it affirms the “invisibility” of whiteness as the lens through which all other races and ethnicities are imagined, and yet color-blindness and the “post-racial” are themselves, particular kinds of imaginaries. As pedagogic whiteness, both imaginaries instruct, through cultural tools, the coding and decoding of cultural practices embedded in particular racial and ethnic histories and struggles and then decontextualize, destabilize, and reinscribe those practices as cultural available to “all” (which means to whites). That is, both “post-racial” and color-blind ideologies enable whites to position their racial identities as “culture-less” and devoid of historically and socially embedded meaning. In "post-racial" visual culture such "culture-lessness" accomplishes one of the primary works of white privilege and supremacy, a work of erasure of the histories of determination that imagine whiteness as a kind of post-modern crisis of shattered self and subjectivity, a theme of the recent film "Revolutionary Road". Similarly, this cultureless-ness (a result of self-marginalization and effacement) produces a liminality of whiteness that establishes whiteness as “in-between” or beyond racial binaries and constructions. The construction of the crisis of whiteness signals racial redemption only through the agency of whitness itself.