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".
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