Craig, B.B., Davis, P.G., & Rahko, S.E. (Eds.). (2024). Rupturing Rhetoric: The Politics of Race and Popular Culture Since Ferguson. University Press of Mississippi, 277 pages.

Shahbaz Khayambashi
Independent Scholar

When an othered group within a society gains a path leading out of subjugation, a popular narrative inevitably occurs that declares that the said subjugation is over. When Barack Obama became the first Black American president in 2008, a new liberal narrative that suggested that American society had entered a postracial era was born. Postracialism, like the colour-blindness that came before it, suggests that race is no longer relevant in the understanding of society because it is no longer seen as disadvantageous; after all, there is a Black president! Of course, this myth was dispelled quickly into Obama’s presidency when, in Ferguson, Missouri, Black teenager Michael Brown was shot dead by an agent of the state, the white police officer Darren Wilson, who faced no repercussions for his act. This case was not unique, but it occurred within such a specific zeitgeist of postracialism that it captured people’s attention. Ferguson ruptured America’s postracial fantasy, showing that this narrative is merely a subtler hegemony which celebrates the demise of the old racist system while fostering complacency towards a new racism. It is here that Rupturing Rhetoric begins by incorporating critical analysis to respond to the racial rhetoric of post-Ferguson  popular American culture. The book is divided into five areas of postracialism: symbolic violence and cultural appropriation, issues regarding whiteness, a post-Ferguson revisitations of older texts, the creation and control of memory, and the spatial dynamics of social class and economic inequality.

The first section begins its critique of postracialism with studies of the sitcom Fresh Off the Boat and the Broadway musical Hamilton. In the initial chapter, Davis describes the sitcom as a postracial fantasy, which replaces the absent Blackness of an urban narrative in a suburban environment with a less-threatening model minority family’s troubled son, Eddie Hwang. She points to Eddie’s appropriation of hip-hop as an act of racial poaching, wherein a secondary non-dominant group closer to whiteness appropriates another culture that is positioned further from whiteness. This allows the closer, or more acceptable, minority to escape their own stereotypes, while forming a more palatable image of Blackness for postracial society, one which shows that minorities can succeed and need not complain about their standing in that society. This postracial Blackness, along with Eddie’s parents’ disapproval constituting whiteness, is defined by the author as a new form of anti-Blackness, which sees Blackness as transactional rather than substantive. While this is an important concept, it should likely be coined as its own term to avoid the risk of bogging down the concept of anti-Black racism. The latter chapter takes a much more experimental approach, with Oscar Giner beginning with the assertion that Puerto Ricans do not like Hamilton before using a variety of contextualizing sub-sections to discover the issue with the musical: there is no rage, no full immigrant experience narrative, no horror of revolutionary excess. This is the one chapter in the collection that feels theoretically incomplete, the scope being far too vast for its length.

The next section focuses on whiteness as a concept within postracial rhetoric—an area with the richest scholarship—using the postracial buddy film, NPR’s American Anthem series and the television show, Lovecraft Country. The first chapter discusses the unique concept of postracial allyhood in an era of whiteness divided between Trumpism and “wokeness.” Rahko and Craig discuss the new subgenre of postracial buddy film through the lens of white audiences who wish to move past race and racism without giving up their centred privileged position in society. This essay introduces the Nuse character—Negro muse—who, upon meeting a racist white character, leads him through hubris, guilt and eventually postracial—rather than antiracist—wokeness. This Nuse character rescues the white character from his racism by cultivating the latter’s sympathy for Black suffering and imparting lessons, eventually absolving him through friendship. This is followed by Jaclyn Olson’s similar discussion of NPR’s attempt to absolve American nationalist music by conflation with racialized music through their series on the “anthems” of the United States. This leads to a postracial mystique, suggesting that a multicultural nation has already been achieved, using the obfuscation of inequality and accentuation of differences as evidence. This section concludes with Craig, Rahko and Scott Jordan’s study of trauma and grieving in Lovecraft Country. Using MAGA conservatism and the reactionary All Lives Matter slogan, this chapter references white victimhood to understand the refusal of race-based victimhood by white hegemony. Conservative white identity has become defined by a self-imposed trauma which results from multiculturalism and the decentring of white, western values, leading to grieving becoming reserved for those deemed worthy of it. This leads to postracialism explicitly centring on whiteness and moving the central trauma of protests from Black Lives Matter issues of police violence to All Lives Matter issues that include everything from the opioid crisis to Black-on-white violence. This shift is represented in the program by way of a time travel angle, wherein two generations of one family witness the Tulsa massacre and the horror of white supremacy firsthand.

This is followed by a section dealing with postracial revisitations, specifically of the home video rerelease of Spike Lee’s Bamboozled and the remakes of Disney animated films. The former chapter does not make a particularly compelling point. Christopher Gilbert’s study of the film through minstrel shows suggests that Bamboozled fails as satire because of its internal position as a minstrel show satirizing minstrel shows and because of its external position as a Criterion Blu-Ray release for assumedly white audiences. However, the author’s own understanding of the film’s forecasting of postracialism and MAGA-era America, on top of Spike Lee’s position as an important member of the Black American intelligentsia, goes a long way in disproving the thesis. The latter essay in this section is a more compelling study by Arthur Soto-Vasquez of postracialism as it focuses on the live-action Disney remakes of the 21^st century and the role they play in sanitizing the company’s history. This is done by replacing outdated elements of the animated films with updated ones, recasting them with more multicultural voices and sanitizing history to engineer more anti-racist narratives, despite their contradictions of reality. This ensures that Disney will appear progressive and not suffer financial harm.

The penultimate section deals with memory, bringing the reader into contact with Blackkklansman, Crazy Rich Asians and The Hateful Eight. The first chapter concerns itself with the use of a real lynching photo in the film. Susan Owen and Peter Ehrenhaus use this reappropriation of an object of white supremacy into Black agency to discuss the concept of critical Black memory and the act of witnessing. The way this scene was shot and edited places the audience into the role of witnessing Black trauma through a critical Black gaze, leading to the image becoming a site of mourning in the same way writers like Ida Wells used such imagery. Following the act of remembering, Euni Kim uses the concept of necropolitics to dissect how the film Crazy Rich Asians equates Asian—and Asian-American—with East Asian individuals and the erasure of dark-skinned Southeast Asian individuals. In fact, a primary criticism of the film is that it erases this latter group by advertising its own importance as the first major motion picture starring Asian actors and lamenting the lack of the othered Asian communities by suggesting that the film cannot represent all peoples, and hence celebrates the future ability of other immigrants to tell their stories, effectively erasing Southeast Asians even from their own apology. According to Kim, this is an important part of postracialism, wherein doublespeak is used to remove racialized people from discussion so that they can be forgotten. This is another case where a newly-coined term would have been useful, as necropolitics already has a place in Asian history, such as in discussions of Cambodia, Indonesia or even Japan during World War II. This risks diminishing this important concept because of its placement among necropolitical discourse. This section ends with a discussion of The Hateful Eight as a study of anti-Blackness. Erika Thomas and Maksim Bugrov look at racial progressive cinema through an Afropessimist lens to examine this film as an exposure of modern society, one which is built on Black suffering, but refuses to acknowledge race in a postracial era. The authors see Hateful Eight as a film that represents slavery and social death as ontological structures of society.

The final section may well be the most novel of the book, as it deals with spatial dynamics in postracial narratives. The two chapters at the end discuss the film The Public and two works that deal with a Black district of Pittsburgh. In the earlier chapter, Whitney Gent and Melanie Loehwing look at The Public’s story of unhoused people seeking refuge in a library, leading to a protest. This story does not incorporate race in a strategy of postracial enthymeme, wherein race is not mentioned outright, because it is assumed. Yet, the authors feel that this strategy does not work here because it does not manage to create a fourth persona, a winking knowing from a subsection of the audience; this is not a situation that is aided by hiding the truth, but rather by convincing the ignorant outsider. In this film, what is suppressed inherently changes the basic premise of the narrative in favour of what is visualized. The authors refer to a series of elements in the narrative that are also completely changed by the removal of race, because race is what provides them with nuance. The final chapter deals with visual representations of the Hill District in Pittsburgh, a Black area of the city which exists within two conflicting narratives: one of racial unrest and Black radicalism, and  the other of postracial neoliberalism and a vibrant multicultural neighbourhood prepared for redevelopment. Nick Sciullo points out that racism can only be resisted through visualization, which is something that postracialism disallows and undermines. The author discusses Fences, the play and later film adaptation, and a multimedia news series, “A Life on the Hill.” All of these narratives resist postracial narratives, separating the neighbourhood from the world around it.

This collection is occasionally uneven, and some chapters are unquestionably better than others, but the focus on postracialism in the post-Obama, post-Ferguson age is a strong one and the book manages to create a worthwhile study of it. Furthermore, some chapters will incorporate texts whose relevance and importance some readers may initially question, but those chapters surprisingly end up being the most insightful, because the authors begin with that irrelevance in mind and put forth the strongest ideas. Overall, this book, with all its pros and cons, deals with an understudied topic and will be of great importance for postracial scholarship as it is developed and built upon. This book is a great addition to any collection on race.

Author Bio

Shahbaz Khayambashi is an academic, artist and author who holds a PhD from York University. His research deals with death in the media and the use of imagery in protest. He has been published academically in journals including Omega: Journal of Death and Dying and Pop Culture Review, and non-academically in Pulp and Black Sheep. He has also built a career in the experimental film and video scene, as both a curator and an artist.