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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
In But Not Of, Of But Not In: On Taste, Hipness, And White Embodiment, Robin James
In But Not Of, Of But Not In: On Taste, Hipness, And White Embodiment, Robin James
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
The status of the body figures paradoxically in the interrelated discourses of whiteness, aesthetic taste, and hipness. While Richard Dyer’s analysis of whiteness argues that white identity is “in but not of the body,” Carolyn Korsmeyer’s and Julia Kristeva’s feminist analyses of aesthetic “taste” demonstrate that this faculty is traditionally conceived as something “of” but not “in” the body. While taste directly distances whiteness from embodiment, hipness negatively affirms this same distance: the hipster proves his elite status within white culture by positioning himself as, in the words of James Chance’s song title, “Almost Black.” The notion of hip contributes …
The Last King Of Scotland Or The Last N----R On Earth? The Ethics Of Race On Film, Paul C. Taylor
The Last King Of Scotland Or The Last N----R On Earth? The Ethics Of Race On Film, Paul C. Taylor
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
This paper undertakes four tasks. It examines a tradition of cinematic and narrative representation that we might call “the narrative of moral gentrification.” It insists on the importance of excavating the racialist and often racist images, motifs, and myths that constitute this tradition. It recommends a form of philosophical aesthetics, located at the intersection of aesthetics, ethical perfectionism, and critical race theory, as a resource for doing this work. And it insists on the importance of subjecting problematic or qualitatively inferior expressive objects to critical scrutiny for the sake of developing proper iconographies and archives of white supremacist expressive culture.