Abstract
This article explores the idea of “postracialism” as it circulated during the candidacy and election of President Barack Obama. Treating postracialism as a visual discourse, I recount a history of post-race moments through depictions of African Americans and describe the visual metaphors used to relay the idea through popular and political commentaries. Using Foss's (1994) rhetorical schema for the evaluation of visual imagery, I critique the New York Post “Stimulus Cartoon” and the New York Magazine “Politics of Fear” caricature as representatives of the contemporary postracial climate. These images represent the complicated visual culture of postracialism and the types of cultural tropes that circulate to support its logic. Examining the visual rhetoric of postracialism, I argue that the discourse is unable to communicate race in new ways because its contrived attempt at colorblindness (specific to Blackness) continually relies on a periphery view of the racial past. Whether using a comparative frame for racial progress, historically racial (and racist) imagery, or traditional approaches to race in caricatured illustrations, postracialism asks for a way of seeing that it cannot achieve even within its initial utterance.
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