The Color of Joy: Reconsidering Critical Race Visual Culture

Abstract

In the summer of 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic ravaged Black and Latinx communities that suffered disproportionate hospitalizations and deaths, the world watched—on repeat—as Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd. Meanwhile, Asian Americans, conflated with the novel coronavirus outbreak in China then beyond, experienced an exponential rise in hate crimes. Smart phones combined with social media displays enabled instantaneous dissemination of BIPOC pain and violence. These images are constitutive of a long-standing visual culture of suffering that is necessarily gratuitous. Repeatedly, images—still and moving—of racialized bodies in ruin were shown on global news cycles as pundits framed BIPOC communities as endemic to wretchedness. These representations continue a well-established narrative that is essential to the formation of racializing assemblages that produce difference. As a form of ontological violence, this mode of looking interferes with the racialized Other’s agency. However, moments of crisis also give rise to formations of possibility for the oppressed that point to freedom, joy, and pleasure. This forum emerges from a recognition of the disparity between the day-to-day lived experiences of people of color and the unchanging narrative that centers the pain and death of the racialized Other and making her a spectacle.