La Douleur Exquise: Neoliberalism, Race, and the Un/Making of Blackness in the 21st Century

Open Access

Abstract

La Douleur Exquise: Neoliberalism, Race, and the Un/Making of Blackness in the 21st Century, examines how neoliberalism operates as a cultural discourse and the distinctive ways that race is deployed through the constitution of bodies and spaces. My data for the project draws on the cultural politics of aesthetics and political economies of redevelopment. Using a mixed methodology of visual, textual, and ethnographic analysis, I examine two different sites of the discursive production of blackness and contemporary politics: high fashion and urban development. I develop an argument about the interrelatedness of neoliberalism, race, and aesthetics and maintain that neoliberalism embeds a particular logic about blackness that ought to be understood as an aesthetic politics or racial aesthetics. While scholarship on race and neoliberalism observe that neoliberalism dissociates race and racism from social actors and social formations, my project highlights aesthetics as a social formation, which is in turn an articulation of blackness specifically, and race, generally. By considering aesthetics, this project expands claims about neoliberalism and race that tend to highlight the political economic logics of how neoliberalism ideologically deploys race in service of capitalism. The study has two components: first, I explore how blackness is deployed on bodies by explicitly focusing on editorial images in the high fashion industry, and by developing an archive of industry publications, fashion blogs, interviews with designers, stylists, magazine editors, photographers, models, and fashion writers that feature descriptions, responses, and conversations in the fashion world about the role of race in high fashion. Secondly, I use ethnography to explore the discursive meanings and expressions of blackness produced within physical spaces of everyday life as they develop alongside urban renewal efforts along the H Street, NE corridor in Washington, D.C. I draw on African American Studies, Urban Sociology, Cultural Studies, Media Studies, and Visual Studies to guide my interdisciplinary exploration of fashion and urban renewal and their engagement with identity, visuality, and oppositional politics within the context of neoliberalism. Within each site, I empirically describe how blackness operates and identify the mechanics of how neoliberalism works as a system. To capture the importance of the everyday, I look to these innocuous spaces to concretely illustrate how neoliberalism appears visually and through discourses of racial authenticity, identity, and excess.