{"id":40387,"date":"2015-03-10T15:20:33","date_gmt":"2015-03-10T15:20:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=40387"},"modified":"2016-11-14T02:10:39","modified_gmt":"2016-11-14T02:10:39","slug":"signifying-without-specifying-racial-discourse-in-the-age-of-obama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=40387","title":{"rendered":"Signifying without Specifying: Racial Discourse in the Age of Obama"},"content":{"rendered":"

Signifying without Specifying: Racial Discourse in the Age of Obama<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Rutgers University Press<\/a>
\n2011-11-01
\n218 Pages
\nCloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-5143-2
\nPaper ISBN: 978-0-8135-5144-9
\neBook ISBN: 978-0-8135-5210-1<\/p>\n

Stephanie Li<\/strong><\/a>, Professor of English
\nIndiana University, Bloomington<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

On the campaign trail, Barack Obama<\/a> faced a difficult task\u2014rallying African American voters while resisting his opponents\u2019 attempts to frame him as \u201ctoo black\u201d to govern the nation as a whole. Obama\u2019s solution was to employ what Toni Morrison<\/a> calls \u201crace-specific, race-free language,\u201d avoiding open discussions of racial issues while using terms and references that carried a specific cultural resonance for African American voters.<\/p>\n

Stephanie Li argues that American politicians and writers are using a new kind of language to speak about race. Challenging the notion that we have moved into a \u201cpost-racial\u201d era, she suggests that we are in an uneasy moment where American public discourse demands that race be seen, but not heard. Analyzing contemporary political speech with nuanced readings of works by such authors as Toni Morrison, Jhumpa Lahiri<\/a>, and Colson Whitehead<\/a>, Li investigates how Americans of color have negotiated these tensions, inventing new ways to signal racial affiliations without violating taboos against open discussions of race.<\/p>\n

Table Of Contents<\/strong><\/p>\n