°Redface, blackface, whiteface …

October 8, 2009

‘All in good fun, no offense intended to Harry or Americans’ Or, ‘who cares what foreigners think’

Filed under: Biowar + Screen
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5 Comments »

  1. The blindness in mainstream debate is such that there’s been _no_ recognition (as far as I can tell) that Australia has its own history of blackface or that, even if it didn’t, white Australia is still implicated in the global racial order of which slavery in the US is a part. Settler psychosis much?

    ana australiana [October 16, 2009 @ 11:39 am]

  2. Yes! And Australia sure does have its own history - ‘fuzzy wuzzies’ being one. But there’s also a lot of reluctance to stop treating it as anachronistic, and think seriously about why this stuff is happening now. Here and now.

    Anyway, I’ve been busy in terms of writing about this stuff, and will more soon, but just to note that there was a minstrel performance at the Red Rattler (the same night as this was on elsewhere), and someone doing racist jokes at the Sly last Wed (the person who complained was escorted out by security). I’m hopeful that the Rattler crew will deal with it much better (though why they already didn’t have a policy about it seems bizarre) - but these exercises in racist community-building are definitely resurgent.

    There’s a lot of work to be done to stop thinking of queer and race, sex and nationalism, as separate.

    On that note, here’s draft, first para, of what I’ve been working on:

    In late September 2009, the Serbian Government stated it would not guarantee the safety of those attending Belgrade Pride. It had been scheduled to assemble near the the Philosophy faculty, under the banner of “It’s Time for Equality”. Pressured to cancel – to shift location and, finally, on the eve of the event informed of their impending abandonment, once again, to an extralegal violence – organisers announced that Belgrade Pride 2009 had effectively been prohibited by the state. The violence of 2001 remains palpable – images abound of the quick slip between democracy and terror: of someone pleading with police, as they decline appeals for help while nationalist thugs hunt all around; of a woman being led through the streets by a police officer, her face covered with blood, in a manner I cannot imagine anyone being treated, unless they are considered guilty of something; of police standing around watching while a man is pushed to the ground and repeatedly kicked. Played out along figurative boundaries of East and West, through the mutually constitutive language of anti-imperialism and human rights (most immediately, as the violent re-distributions of shame and pride), and at the line that separates the privacy of the household from the gaze of the street, much of this turns around those tense knots that bind the familial to the national, and, therefore, sex and desire to race and (re-)production. Indeed, there would be no way in which to think of race, or a people, or a nation without the inscriptions of genealogy, just as it is not possible to think of the persistence of any of these over time without invoking a normative economy of sex, gender and sexuality. Something of this was noted in the statement from the Open Assembly of Solidarity, as they called for protests against the prohibition outside the Serbian Embassy in Athens: “The ideology of ethnicity, of racial purity and supremacy, arms the violence against anyone who does not conform to nationalist dogma. Those who do not align themselves with the vision of nationalism are attacked because their life-practices refuse to reproduce the values responsible for the structuring of an ethnic identity.” Alys Eve Weinbaum calls this the race/reproduction bind, arguing that the “interconnected ideologies of racism, nationalism, and imperialism rest on the notion that race an be reproduced” (2004:4).

    s0metim3s [October 16, 2009 @ 3:41 pm]

  3. Well, looking forward to reading and distro-ing it. There’s clearly some urgency in this local knot. I’m going to give it some more thought too (and on at least one front, namely the Humanist Society, said thinking couldn’t be easier…!)

    ana australiana [October 17, 2009 @ 11:08 am]

  4. Mm, Humanist Society - some seemingly obscure philosophical joke assuming crude theatrical proportions.

    s0metim3s [October 17, 2009 @ 2:09 pm]

  5. As slackbastard puts it here: “Presumably the question will be subjected to a thorough committee process.”

    ana australiana [October 20, 2009 @ 8:44 am]

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