Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 1 of 1
Full-Text Articles in Philosophy
The Violence Of Post-Racial Memory And The Political Sense Of Mourning, Alfred Frankowski
The Violence Of Post-Racial Memory And The Political Sense Of Mourning, Alfred Frankowski
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
In this paper I argue that “post-raciality” entails a way of remembering that depoliticizes the social meaning of memory and thus of history. Through aesthetic critique, I attempt to show how the hyper-production of memory obscures the very real forms of violence directed toward non-whites. By developing the aesthetic critiques of W.E.B. Du Bois and Walter Benjamin, I argue that representing former violence as social memory fails to adequately address subtle forms of cultural and residual violence. Furthermore, I argue that post-racial memory produces sites and representations of the past only to enact a type of social forgetting in the …