oops. I should say, "Please pardon the utter absence of scholarly decor in the posing of that question..." although I actually don't really give a damn if you pardon it or not.
Just write something. Please.
Consider this a kind of CFP (call for postings) on this blog with the prompt being, 'the hell is this shit:
The Red House Furniture Store in High Point, North Carolina
In particular, how are black bodies being used? How are nonblack bodies being used? In what sense is the fact that this store is selling accoutrements of domesticity significant?
What are the bodies being used for? Whose fantasies are being served by this... umm, "???commercial???" Indeed, can it be properly called a commercial at all? Or is it, oh say... a couple of Masters having fun with the Masters-subaltern and the Slaves (even though this is apparently a real store http://redhousefurniture.com/)?
What would Kant/Hegel/Adorno/Foucault/Fanon/etc. say is going on here?
Please add to the list of questions with which we ought to be interrogating shit like this.
Or pose a set of answers to questions already posed.
Looking more closely at the detail of the t-shirt, i turned to rhettandlink.com in order to garner a "context" for the shirt. And of course as Derrida would have predicted, what I found was in no way an explanation for the t-shirt.
ReplyDeleteIt appears that (the powers that be at) Red House furniture enjoy mocking/ satirizing race relations. In the service of this joke, employees and customers are asked to list their racial identification and endorse the furniture store.
In the "commercial," the faces on the t-shirt have bodies and interact with each other. I don't feel competent to answer the list of important and difficult questions in the post, BUT i recommend that people take a look at the 1:30 spot.