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Symbolic Economies between a Black Mirror and Black Aesthetic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 January 2020

JOSEPH R. SHAFER
JOSEPH R. SHAFER*
Affiliation:
University College Cork. Email: jrs0166@auburn.edu.
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Extract

This essay seeks to review the edges of Eric Lott's Black Mirror. But to approach the inner and outer edges of “a black mirror” is to sense the threat that they could become two sides of the same coin. In chapter 1, “Black Mirror: State Fantasy and Symbolic Surplus Value,” Lott writes, “we should explore the dimensions and especially the consequences of the fantasy race is – consequences that suffuse the consciousness of class, sexuality, gender, and other lines of force. Live there a while, in thought as in life. That is what this book tries to do.” To take up this invitation is therefore to first locate that space which readers are asked to live in for a while. However, to near that territory is not to enter the fantasy of race, if only to critique it, for we are already there. Nor is it accessed by abandoning the value of race, Lott contends, especially while the economy of whiteness continues profiting from “black symbolic capital.” Here we encounter the daunting scope of a “black mirror,” where horizon lines become Fata Morganas: an area that covers “the mechanics, dispositions, and effects of the dominant culture's looking at itself always through a fantasized black Other” (xvii). The dimensions of that mirror prove wider still, as any race, gender or class is shown capable of reflecting itself in it. More specifically, Black Mirror questions how signs of racial difference might possibly divest from the dominant symbolic economies in which they are exchanged, except Black Mirror largely does so by demonstrating their reinvestment. When analyzing the fantasies, angles and contradictions of a “black mirror,” readers are compelled to seek its outer edges, a market with real use-value, spaces where gifts are exchanged, or a beyond alluded to as “occupying the tain of the mirror – the mirror's tin backing that allows it to reflect at all” (20).

Type
Review Essay
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 54 , Issue 1 , February 2020 , pp. 241 - 250
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2020

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