Category: Uncategorized

PART 1: SEQUENCING

Sequence 1 – Protagonist Explorer One logs onto a computer to access an abstract digital space that is “inthe.net”. We see Explorer One enter the digital space, along with three other Explorers that are key characters in the film.

Sequence 2 – A group of gray-skinned Explorers in the digital space, including Explorer One herself,  touch each other as a way to transfer information (or more specifically, memes, gifs, and videos).

Sequence 3 – Explorer One attempts to connect with Explorer Z, who is the antagonist. Explorer Z responds by sending Explorer One a series of photos and memes that depict racism and black hate. Explorer Z then removes the bag from Explorer One, thus exposing her as a black woman.

Sequence 4 – Explorer One is on the ground, trying to put her bag back on her head but two Explorers appear to stop her. They drag her away, and surround her. After a moment, Explorer One disappears. Nothing happens to Explorer Z who also no longer has a bag on his head.

Sequence 5 – A new Explorer enters the digital space, unaware of the events that have passed.

Word Count: 187

Online, it is difficult to control the narratives and representations that proliferate among diverse creators. Indeed, the content produced online can often range from the empowering to the grossly harmful. In our positioning of technology and digital content in the contemporary world, we felt that digital spaces give the illusion of post-racial harmony while actively reinscribing the many forms of harm that visit Black bodies.

This shot is a medium close shot of Ava, playing Explorer One, and 2 sets of hands. The light is across her face while the shadow is falling on the disembodied hands intruding in her space. This frame is disorienting and blurry, as well as cast in black and white, which adds to the confusion. The placement of light on Explorer One’s face highlights her humanity, but it also centers her inability to appear as a disembodied ‘post-racial’ participant in the digital space. Moreover, the hands show the willfulness of elements in the digital space to disrupt the ambiguity supposedly posited by engaging with the digital. Additionally, viewing this frame within the larger context of the film, Explorer One’s face is illuminated in a way that other participants in the digital space were not; this adds to the alienness of her presence and identifies her further as an outsider– if the absence of the bag weren’t enough. We appreciated how disorienting this shot was because of the ways that racialization online is both insidious and unsettling. Racialized attacks come from all directions, at all levels, and can be unending. Like Ava eventually decides, it is sometimes the difference between succumbing or getting out.

Digital spaces offer limitless possibilities in creating space for Black representation. However, given the freedom of the medium, it offers many opportunities for existing racialized representations to be replicated. As Christine Elizabeth Sharpe indicates, “the Web [can] often reproduce the very exclusions and inclusions of our in-person social encounters and alienations” but it can also “constitute an intervention in these power relations” (Sharpe 1093, 1999). The digital runs lateral to reality and thus offers the same spectrum of race relations of person-to-person interactions in real life. For Explorer One, and for many Black users of digital spaces, sharing can be as liberatory as it is limiting.

 

Word Count: 374

Hello!

This is weary world, a blog dedicated to understanding the meaning of Blackness in the 21st century.

The entire blog is a shade of green that I selected because of its blend of blues and greens. I felt that green was an appropriate choice for the background because of its representative ties to the earth and the soil. This resonated with the ways that Blackness is intrinsically tied to finding one’s roots, sometimes terms as ‘returning home.’ The blues reminded me of the Atlantic which of course is deeply tied to our study of Blackness, its history, and its representations.

etymology of the site

weary world /ˈwirē wərld/

derived from Solange Knowles “Weary” on A Seat at the Table (2016), specifically

I’m weary of the ways of the world/ Be weary of the ways of the world

I find that, more often than not, I can’t help but be weary of the world. Rather than allow this to be negative, I have understood this to be an advantageous, if not sometimes tiring position. So what this site points to is that Blackness means being a little weary, a little cautious, a little ‘been-tired, stay-tired.’

The subtitle, “lessons in living color,” is a reference to the ways that experience teaches. And, also to In Living Color, which is just a great show.

about the author

My name is Ivana and I’m a sophomore here at Williams. I started my college career on the pre-med track and that totally tanked. Now I’m trying to do something that I actually really love, but never thought I was good enough to actualize.

I’m 19 years old, a New Jersey native, lover of rom-coms and good books. You can find me in Baxter talking with friends or sitting on a ledge somewhere banging out a paper.

 

I entered the GTA world for the very first time in the past week and I have to admit that I was very apprehensive in playing a daunting 3 hours on the PS4 console. I’ve only ever played on a Wii and I basically only played Super Smash Bros and Just Dance.

I actually started by playing some version of GTA on the PS3 console and literally could not get past the first intro sequences. After a few failed missions, the game would let me choose to move past a single introductory sequence. When I finally started playing the right version, I had a similar time following my in-game friends and escaping the police. It was fun though, I have to admit.

In playing this game, I would project the target audience to be folks who’d like to assume the character of a mafioso/gangbanger, but can’t perform this type of characterization in real life. Despite being able to play characters of different races, it is evident that these characters are performing Blackness or at least how Blackness exists in the white imagination. Based on who I’ve generally seen play this game, the target audience could be any male-identifying person from ages 9 to 25. This  doesn’t mean that this online performance is limited to this demographic, I’m just speaking from experience.

By the way of conversation surrounding performance, I thought the ability to switch between characters of different races (and play as a dog, woof!) was an interesting gaming option, especially given that the game is single player and first-person. Through this mode of play, strict delineations of race and racialization are ambiguated. In a sense, when you play as Michael, you’re the supreme wigga with an *actual* Black man inside of you. Further, external characters help to draw race/class differences between neighborhoods. For instance, Franklin’s neighborhood is indicated not only by the housing, but by the racialization of people in the street, who tend to be more aggressive, more likely to indulge in vices, and often Black/Brown. As we’ve come to understand in this course, racialization escapes physical characteristics; the joining of Blackness and poverty/criminality/aggression is made clear in the casual depictions of the GTA universe.

Despite the ambiguation of race in GTA–which effectively permits players to embody a white-imagined Blackness– and the muddied audience, there is a clear crafting of this game around and for whiteness. As Leonard writes, this game functions in accordance with “longstanding practices of whites generating pleasure through the exploitation and consumption of the racialized other” (2003, 4). Even when white folks in the game participate in crime, it is because they have been touched and therefore tainted by Black and Brown intrusions into their life. The types of problems (i.e. missions) that Franklin is faced with are racially coded in a way that Michael’s are not. As such, we witness the flatness of the GTA representation; while critics have run the gamut on the violence and poor representation of women in GTA, the purely racialized aspect of the game cannot be overlooked.

 

weary world is a site where’ll I’ll try to understand everything we digest together in Blackness 2.0. Stay tuned for more blog posts and new layers to this base format of the site.