More than Two Places to Stand: Tracing the Evolution and Effects of Standpoint Epistemology in Contemporary Social Justice Responses to Racially Salient Cultural Artifacts

Abstract

This dissertation tracks contemporary appeals to and uses of standpoint theory in an archive of popular late-20th-and-21st-century literary works, memoirs, museum exhibits, and public artworks that have been taken up as touchstone objects in contemporary conversations about interracial communication. Focusing on social media, blog, newspaper, and comments-section reactions to these works, I analyze the ways in which knowledge generated from creators’ standpoints is offered to audiences and the subsequent ways in which particular audiences respond to these invitations with attempts at identification. I argue that responses to these cultural artifacts, specifically, and contemporary racial justice conversations, more generally, tend to rely on standpoint theory and on the evidence of lived experiences as a way to unearth marginalized experiences and make ethical appeals to their audiences. While speaking from one’s standpoint may provide an important way to explore and validate experiences long ignored by our American institutions, I contend that doing so can also inhibit the cross-racial dialogue that I view as central to any serious attempt at building antiracist consciousness and communities. In particular, I analyze Dana Schutz’s painting, Open Casket (2016); Kara Walker’s art installation, A Subtlety (2014); Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (2014); James Baldwin’s “Letter to My Nephew” (1962); Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me (2015); and an interactive video game exhibit at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. I highlight questions of identification and perspective taking, uses of a second-person “you” address, and objects that encourage imaginative role play—all of which invite audiences to imagine themselves in vastly different subject positions and, frequently, to center their own experiences in these explorations. Engaging with theories of identification and the resurgence of standpoint epistemology, I argue that textual and artistic strategies that encourage imaginative engagement with others unlike the self puts audiences in a valuable position to learn about others’ experiences. At the same time, however, these strategies constrain opportunities for dialogic engagement with others’ experiences when the experiences themselves are treated as unassailable truth rather than as entry points into a historico-cultural moment or conversation, and preventing engagement, as difference becomes sedimented as naturalized and unbridgeable. These standpoint testimonies also constrain opportunities for cross-racial dialogue when they encourage monolithic conceptions of identity that flatten differences among individuals within racial or intersectional identity-based groups. Ultimately, I hope to accomplish three goals: 1) to assess, with an eye toward affordances and limitations, extant, socially prominent ways of engaging with Black art, with particular attention to intercultural interactions; 2) to illustrate how these methods shape and are shaped by currently available political responses to injustice; and 3) to encourage more dialogic modes of interaction across difference. Taking seriously the cultural objects that call their audiences in and have thus become major touchstones in current racial debates, I seek to contribute to the fields of Rhetoric and Pedagogy, in addition to African American literary and cultural studies, by illuminating possibilities for imagining varied futures and models for anti-racist work and social change and by elucidating how art makes possible new lives, affinities, and communities.

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