Manufacturing Stigma and Allure: Bio-Brand and the Racial Self

• In Event: The Interventional Possibilities of Difference: Thinking Through Communication, Difference, and Identity

Abstract

In his essay, “Subject(ed) to Recognition” (2013), Herman Gray argues that US cultural politics of diversity have shifted from organizing the social, economic, and cultural basis of collective disadvantage to the pursuit of recognition and visibility as ends in themselves, from anti-racist to anti-racial struggles. The self-crafting entrepreneurial subject, incited to visibility as the source of brand value, proliferates market norms of difference as “freedoms” realized by commoditizing diversity. Building on Gray’s insights, this paper considers how such entrepreneurial racial selves shore up, and are themselves secured by, protocols of manufacture and exchange that turn on commodity formations of anti-blackness. I consider, on the one hand, the allure of racial difference, key to profitable commodity racisms that proliferate pleasurable spectacles of “to-be-looked-at” blackness, and, on the other, equally profitable theaters of racial stigma, key to contemporary growth industries of surveillance and punishment as well as triage and neglect.

Author

• Roopali Mukherjee, City U of New York