Palimpsest-Postscript: Tracing the Past in the Present

Abstract

The biracial taxonomies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in which pan-blackness and pan-whiteness became dominant and were sutured to particular images and ideologies, have left traces that erupt in moments of crisis. Several years ago, for example, a digitally manipulated image of President Obama superimposed with a Hollywood iteration of the Batman villain, The Joker, surfaced in posters and circulated on the internet—the single word “socialism” along the bottom of the frame reinscribed linkages between black and red in the national imaginary (Firas Alkhateeb, a college student, created the superimposed image in 2009. He uploaded it to his Flickr site where it was downloaded and modified by an unknown person who added the word “socialism” and distributed it as a poster. “Creator of Barack Obama ‘Joker’ Image was Bored Student,” The Telegraph, August 18 2009.). The whiteface makeup overlaid on the face of the first President of African descent reads as a disturbing reversal of blackface strategies while the bloodied, smiling, wound of a mouth simultaneously invokes the makeup of a nightmarish clown and the zombie-like figure of the socialist undead, or as one blogger put it, “a zombie cannibal blood-mouth malevolently committed to bringing socialism to America.” (Santi Tafarella, “Rush Limbaugh Wants President Obama Dead, Doesn’t He?,” http://santitafarella.wordpress.com/tag/rush-limbaugh/.) Anxieties about socialism and race revolution are simultaneously exposed and disavowed in the figure of Obama as the socialist undead. With its whiteface racism, the image is undoubtedly vindictive, but at the same time, the figure of the zombie-black-man-as-socialist-President betrays a recurring nightmare of conservative white America that has its roots in Haiti as the site of black revolution and remains deeply concerned about the possibilities of black political power in any context.