Module 6- Sounding the Border and the Post-Racial

Over the past few weeks we have explored the relationship of race and performance to notions of the post-racial body/politic. Scholars such as Alexander Weheliye stress the importance of the sonic and aural within black performance to suggest a theory of black culture as historically performative and radical. Tavia Nyong'o moves to trace notions of a "post-racial" present to a contested history of a "mongrel" past that reflects the persistence of racial governmentality often ignored in our present day obsessions with notions of hybridity. Challenging seemingly utopic answers to race/racisms that are connected to liberal notions of "hybridity,"how might Weheliye and Nyongo's insights in this this module help us make connections between the amalgamation of the sonic and the silence allow us to reevaluate black and white relationships with Zizek's notion of the national Thing? What performative acts constitute the borders of racial crossings past and present?

Module 5- Race Remixed

This module worked to complicate whiteness by interrogating its assumed homogeneity. By interrogating relationships of ethnicity to whiteness and power, we were able to identify the ways in which social, cultural and racial relationships to whiteness secure particular social, cultural and economic interests that are directly tied to the state. How do we read the journey "into whiteness” of particular immigrant communities in the United States such as Jewish, Irish and Polish Americans against immigrant communities of South Asian and Arab decent that,over many years, have shifted from being categorized as non-whites to sometimes "white"?

What is David Roediger asking us to contemplate with his term "colored white"?