United controversies of Benetton : rethinking race in light of French poststructuralist theory and postmodernism

• Main Author: Yamashita, Miyo
• Other Authors: Kaite, Berkeley (advisor)
• Format: Others
• Language: en
• Published: McGill University 1993
• Subjects: Mass media and race relations
• Online Access: http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=69530

Postmodernist texts by non-white authors consistently challenge accepted theoretical discourses with some notion of race or ethnicity. Until recently however, race as a unique category for theoretical investigation has remained largely unexplored. The author here outlines how both a variety of theoretical disscussions about race and ethnicity, about difference, and about experience, have formed the basis of how race is currently talked about in postmodernist discourse and how these various postmodernist discussions about race and difference may both enrich and be enriched by a theoretical examination of French poststructuralist theory. Employing the popular Benetton ads as a vehicle for theorizing a common ground between postmodernist and poststructuralist theory, the author argues that current theoretical discourse must reconceptualize not so much the multiple and varied definitions of "race" by which it has tried to account for the experiences of non-white subjects worldwide, but the very grounds upon which those definitions have been constructed. Race can no longer be thought of as a collective identity predicated on biological similarities but must be re-thought in terms of a transformational metaphor, a multivocal sign for political solidarity and alliance among dispersed groups of people sharing common historical experiences of discrimination and oppression. On this note, the author will herein argue that the naturalized connotations of race must be disarticulated out of racial discourse and rearticulated in such a way as to emphasize race as a contingent, multi-accentual signifier constructed out of varying social and political practices.