Description:

WHITE NOISE: THE SEMIOTICS OF INTENTIONAL WHITENESS & EPISTEMIC RESISTANCE IN DIGITAL SPACE

A growing number of scholars and activists insist that our need to better understand both the current state and future of race and racism has reached a new zenith in this tense historical moment. In many ways, this recent era has simply updated those historical schemes of hierarchized and racialized US citizenship that routinely mark non-white-identified bodies for political and social exclusion, economic exploitation, and systemic criminalization. Digital discourse is a more recent process of constructing the ideal political subject-citizen and marking non-ideal subjects. These multimodal discourses help authorize the policing, containment, and eradication of people who inhabit marked bodies and they often do so by propping up ideological frameworks that normalize whiteness. And, as we see across different social domains, numerous strategies of resistance and “refusal” (Simpson, 2014) of these ideological frameworks entail discursive practice as well. This talk concerns a wide range of digital discourses and will first examine the ways some racializing discourses of national belonging interdiscursively feed a revival of the unapologetic white identity politics of yesteryear. We will then turn to discourses that either speak directly to intentional and unintentional whiteness or that semiotically upturn their epistemic foundations. In response to Rosa and Flores's urging towards a "raciolinguistic perspective" (2017), we will conclude with a brief consideration of the possibilities of a revival and revamping of whiteness studies.