The Making of Antiracist Curriculum Through the Aesthetics of Cinema

• In Event: Roundtable Session 45
  In Roundtable Session: Antiracist Reading Practice in Curriculum

Abstract

Essay focuses on Hollywood cinema as a site for anti-racist curriculum. Drawing from phenomenologies of difference (Ahmed, 2006) and the regime of cinema (Ranciere, 2010), it explores how the sensorial aspects of “looking” and “being with” cinematic images direct bodies in ways that reify the visual field as white property (Harris, 1993). Authors argue that, when viewed through the lens of white property the image technologies of Hollywood cinema “teach” youth how to understand and assign racial differences in a manner that defends and valorizes whiteness as the archetype of personhood. The paper concludes with suggestions for pedagogies grounded in race-conscious critique of cinematic representations that employs reverse appropriation (Mirzoeff, 2006) of racial fantasies embedded in the dominant white visuality.

Authors

• David Herman, University of North Texas

• Amelia M. Kraehe, University of North Texas