UC Riverside

This dissertation examines artistic responses to the prevailing racial discourse of the early

21st century United States, i.e. post-racialism. Each chapter explores the work of artists in

various media—film, portraiture, television, and music—with an emphasis on the ways

that their practices of ironic substitution and recontextualization—e.g. parody, pastiche,

satire—work to simultaneously revise previous aesthetic works and modes and to engage

with a hegemonic US post-racial narrative that has at its core the maintenance of white

supremacy and the suppression of race as an avenue through which to formulate

grievance against oppressive state and institutional structures. This project is in dialogue

not only with contemporary critical race theory but also negative valuations of irony’s

political efficacy inherited from the late-20th century academic discourse of

postmodernism. Reading the work of artists across various media and engaging with

discourses of race, masculinity, fashion, and ontological dualism, I argue for the

progressive potential of irony and humor, and look critically at the de facto privileging of

sincerity in contemporary socio-political discourse.