The Political Aesthetic of Irony in the Post-Racial United States

Abstract

This dissertation examines artistic responses to the prevailing racial discourse of the early21st century United States, i.e. post-racialism. Each chapter explores the work of artists invarious media—film, portraiture, television, and music—with an emphasis on the waysthat their practices of ironic substitution and recontextualization—e.g. parody, pastiche,satire—work to simultaneously revise previous aesthetic works and modes and to engagewith a hegemonic US post-racial narrative that has at its core the maintenance of whitesupremacy and the suppression of race as an avenue through which to formulategrievance against oppressive state and institutional structures. This project is in dialoguenot only with contemporary critical race theory but also negative valuations of irony'spolitical efficacy inherited from the late-20th century academic discourse ofpostmodernism. Reading the work of artists across various media and engaging withdiscourses of race, masculinity, fashion, and ontological dualism, I argue for theprogressive potential of irony and humor, and look critically at the de facto privileging ofsincerity in contemporary socio-political discourse.