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KARIN COPE
NSCAD University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
Abstract
While the election of Barack Obama to the office of US President is a
significant historic event, recent claims that America is finally “post-racial
or post-ethnic” engage a set of ideas that are decidedly not new, but partake of
a long-standing, hegemonic and idealized figuration of “America” as a
conversation or “dialogue,” a concordia discors, in which certain chosen actors
may secure and maintain domestic peace by agreeing to disagree. Indeed, Obama’s
own rhetoric is drawn from this “conversational” reserve, although not without
some trouble. By reading select pieces of African American literature against
the grain of this conversational strain in American letters, and examining how
these evocations of America’s racial past work “treasonously” in relation
various versions of America-as-dialogue, this article aims to find other, more
particular, even difficult, grounds for relationship, subjectivity, ethical
action and imagination than appeals to an abstract and impossible American
dream.
Keywords:
Barack Obama, Toni Morrison, race, American dream, American nightmare, W.E.B. Du
Bois, post-racial, concordia discors, American Studies
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