What’s Due Next?
This Week
- Tuesday (today): Keywords Race and Intersectionality
- Wednesday: Attend Çudamani performance (you should have received tickets by email)
- Thursday: Response post to either “Race” or “Intersectionality” (or you can respond to both in a single post, if you’d rather)
Near Future
- Sunday, September 26: Submit Short Response Paper #1: Identity (I Am Not Your Negro)
- Review assignment
- Review rubric
- Format
- About 4 pages, typed and double-spaced
- Classic 12-point serif font (e.g., Times New Roman, Georgia)
- Include APA-style cover page and References (list the film and the Keyword entries you’ve used)
- Submit as Word or PDF (you can save Pages, Google Docs and other file types as PDF)
- Submit via Blackboard > Submit Response Papers > Response Paper #1
- Sunday, October 3: Submit Field Experience Report on the Çudamani performance as a blog post – see assignment for details
- Readings for next week:
- Keyword Technology
- Ancillary reading It’s Hard to be a Moral Person. Technology is Making It Harder. (Vox)
What’s Coming Up?
- Access the full text of Keywords for Media Studies to select an original Keyword to read and report on during class on Thursday, October 14
- Read All You Need is Kill and watch Edge of Tomorrow by Sunday, October 24
Tuesday, September 21
I Am Not Your Negro
- What’s the over-arching narrative approach?
- What role do you see Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X playing in this film? Is this what you expected?
- What did you notice?
- What made your think?
- What aspects of identity helped you make sense of this film
- Is this a documentary? Is this an art film? Why do you think so?
- How is identity revealed as constructed? How as performed? Why?
- What do you think of weaving modern Black narratives, like BLM and Black murders by police, into an historical approach? What’s the impact of those design decisions?
- Where does “mediation” begin and end in this film?
Race and Intersectionality
- Race is constructed
- From laws, culture, and society
- With contributions from media, academic knowledge, and racial science
- Toward the exercise of power
- To produce, organize, and distribute racial and ethnic groupings of populations hierarchically, according to socially valued attributes
Race is a discursive project that’s distributed across social relations and organized into hierarchies.
A post-racial project is to “search for alternate imaginations with which to build different accounts of human variation and their role in social worlds” (p. 164).
As a discursive construction, race changes because it’s a product of subjection (inscribing media subjects as racial, for example), of cultural and social values, and of changing approaches in scholarship, laws, and politics.
Intersectionality critiques a race-focused approach (or any other single-lens approach) with the reality that humans are never only racial beings, but also always classed, gendered, regionalized, and nationalized.
Race as Constructed in I Am Not Your Negro: James Baldwin in his own voice
Intersectionality in “Ain’t I Woman,” an 1851 speech by Sojourner Truth