{"id":15247,"date":"2011-07-31T04:23:20","date_gmt":"2011-07-31T04:23:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=15247"},"modified":"2011-10-27T19:35:50","modified_gmt":"2011-10-27T19:35:50","slug":"post-race-nation-inheritance-and-the-contradictory-performativity-of-race-in-barack-obama%e2%80%99s-%e2%80%98a-more-perfect-union%e2%80%99-speech","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=15247","title":{"rendered":"Post-race? Nation, Inheritance and the Contradictory Performativity of Race in Barack Obama\u2019s \u2018A More Perfect Union\u2019 Speech"},"content":{"rendered":"

Post-race? Nation, Inheritance and the Contradictory Performativity of Race in Barack Obama\u2019s \u2018A More Perfect Union\u2019 Speech<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

thirdspace: a journal of feminist theory & culture<\/a>
\nVolume 10, Number 1<\/a> (2011)
\n18 pages<\/p>\n

Bridget Byrne<\/a><\/strong>, Senior Lecturer in Social Sciences
\nUniversity of Manchester<\/em><\/p>\n

This article takes the speech that Barack Obama<\/a> made in his campaign for democratic nomination in 2008 as a moment in the performativity<\/a> of race. It argues that Obama was unable to sustain an attempt to be ‘post race’, but is also asks the extent to which Obama was able to re-write the way in which race is positioned within the US, particularly with reference to the place of African-Americans within the national narrative.<\/p>\n

Introduction<\/strong><\/p>\n

[S]ome people have a hard time taking me at face value. When people who don\u2019t know me well, black or white, discover my background (and it usually is a discovery, for I ceased to advertise my mother\u2019s race at the age of 12 or 13, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites), I see the split-second adjustment they have to make, the searching of my eyes for some tell-tale sign. They no longer know who I am.
\n(Obama, Dreams from my Father<\/a> <\/em>xv).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s not likely that there are too many people left who do not know who Barack Obama is, or that he is the product of a \u2018brief union\u2019 as he puts it, between \u2018a black man and a white woman, an African and an American\u2019 (Obama, Dreams from my Father<\/em> xv). Nonetheless, Obama\u2019s racial identity remains a source of fascination. The website democraticunderground.com<\/em> hosted a discussion thread in March 2008 prompted by the question \u2018What ethnicity is Obama\u2019. The original questioner was interested in exploring \u2018his white half\u2019s ethnicity\u2019. One of the respondents to this thread provides links to a website publishing Obama\u2019s family tree and writes \u2018it is amazing to see just how \u2018white\u2019 his mother and grandparents are\u2019. The same respondent also provides a picture from Obama\u2019s mother\u2019s high school yearbook to demonstrate her \u2018amazing\u2019 whiteness as well as one of Obama with his white grandparents. The thread continues with a string of photos of different members of his family (including his half-Indonesian sister\u2019s \u2018Oriental husband who came from Canada\u2019). This is just one example of the fascination that Obama\u2019s racial positioning prompts in supporters and detractors alike and suggests that for many, it takes more than a \u2018split-second\u2019 adjustment to reconcile themselves to complex ideas of family, heritage and racialized identities.<\/p>\n

This paper will explore a particular moment in the racialized positioning of Obama and his own self-positioning as an example of the performativity of race or possibly of \u2018post-race\u2019. The paper will take a key instance when Obama put his own racial positioning on the stage, in response to a particular set of political events. Through an examination of his \u2018A more perfect union\u2019 speech in Philadelphia<\/a> during his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination (18th March 2008), I want to consider the extent to which we can \u2018trouble race\u2019 in the same way that Judith Butler<\/a> has argued for the troubling of gender. The campaign election of Barack Obama has inserted the concept of \u2018post-race\u2019 into popular discourse in a forceful way. This article will question what the theoretical literature, which might regard race to be \u2018under-erasure\u2019 rather than \u2018overcome,\u2019 can offer to an analysis of the positioning of Obama. This is important because, despite longstanding academic and activist insistence that \u2018race\u2019 is a social construction devoid of any inherent or essential meaning, the ontological status of \u2018race\u2019 remains in question. As the reaction to Barack Obama shows, race is something that we still appear to need to \u2018know\u2019 about each other (and perhaps particularly about those who are not \u2018white\u2019). Yet, as I will argue, the racialized performativity offered by Obama is far from clear-cut and suggests that a more complex analysis is required. This paper will first explore the ideas of being \u2018beyond\u2019 or \u2018post\u2019 race and then consider how the notion of gender performativity might be productively extended to race peformativity. Then it will return to the speech given by Barack Obama in the course of his nomination campaign to explore both the impossibility for some figures to step outside of race, but also the potential scope to re-fashion concepts of race and inheritance, and particularly their relation to the nation…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Post-race? Nation, Inheritance and the Contradictory Performativity of Race in Barack Obama\u2019s \u2018A More Perfect Union\u2019 Speech thirdspace: a journal of feminist theory & culture Volume 10, Number 1 (2011) 18 pages Bridget Byrne, Senior Lecturer in Social Sciences University of Manchester This article takes the speech that Barack Obama made in his campaign for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,63,8,26,394,20],"tags":[7060,1384,7059,7058],"class_list":["post-15247","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-barack-obama","category-media-archive","category-politics","category-socialscience","category-usa","tag-bridget-byrne","tag-judith-butler","tag-thirdspace","tag-thirdspace-a-journal-of-feminist-theory-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15247","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15247"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15247\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15247"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15247"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15247"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}