The visibility of race: Epidermality and Black vernacular in the popular and visual culture of Civil Rights America

This project focuses on the historical construction of racial difference as primarily visual in order to disclose how race's signifying practices and material structures mutually support and enable each other. Drawing on Frantz Fanon's concept of epidermality, along with theoretical grids such as vernacular theory, Marxist theory, and post-colonial thought the dissertation examines the visibility of race from a semiotic, rhetorical, materialist, and phenomenological perspective. It pursues this goal through close textual analysis of literary, visual, and performative texts emerging from the Depression Era culture industry, the post-war democratic utopias, and the Civil Rights era.; Chapter One analyzes the first widely seen photographic archive of the American people---the Farm Security Administration photo collection---through the lens of Richard Wright's exploration of the scopic regime of race in 12 Million black Voices. Wright's conception of race as the ghost in the capitalist machine and the inassimilable element within modernity's scopic regime offers a critique of the coincidence of racial and photographic indexicality established by XIX century social sciences and continuing in the majority of FSA photographs. The second chapter unpacks Jackie Robinson's burden of proving and embodying two post-war utopias founded on the presumption of color blindness: the even playing field of sports and the postwar promise of citizenship through consumption called the Consumers' Republic. Despite initially reconciling the demands of the assimilationist imagination, images of Robinson progressively reveal the cracking facade, of American democratic ideals dependent on racial inequalities. Chapter Three considers Dick Gregory's 1960s comedy and civil rights work as expressions of a vernacular Marxism that critiques the political economy of the racial power structure and the racial sign. Race for Gregory is at once a materially deforming force and a spectral effect of value. Finally, Chapter Four locates George Romero's evocation of Civil Rights and lynching photography in Night of the Living Dead within the increased social visibility of racial unrest. By reinforcing the authenticating power of photographic indexicality pursued by the coverage of the Movement Romero offers an intractable testimony to a historical continuum embracing racial violence, its media images, and the film audience.