(Re)Encoding Race: Black World-Sense in Wayne Dunkley’s the degradation and removal of the/a black male by Dr. Sheila Petty

The goal of this paper is to widen the debate around disembodiment and the body by exploring the degradation and removal of the/a black male, a moving artwork created in 2000 by black Canadian digital artist, Wayne Dunkley, in which he raises these very issues in a complex new media environment.

Incorporating black diasporic theorists such as Oyèrónké Oyĕwùmí, Stuart Hall, George Elliott Clarke and Kodwo Eshun, I will interrogate the proposition that “the body has an exaggerated presence in the Western conceptualization of society” and that this presence amounts to a “privileging of the visual” in new media theory (Oyĕwùmí 2-3).

Through a close analysis of Dunkley’s work, I will argue that the “world-sense” foregrounded in his use of aesthetics and narrative structure offers a view of race that extends beyond the constraints of visuality to encompass a layered, transnational black identity.

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(Re)Encoding Race: Black World-Sense in Wayne Dunkley’s the degradation and removal of the/a black male, AfroGEEKS: Global Blackness and the Digital Public Sphere, University of California at Santa Barbara, May 19-22, 2005.