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Facing Barack Hussein Obama

Race, Globalization, and Transnational America

Indiana University, Bloomington

Arguing that race does not receive enough attention in studies of globalization, this article examines the implications of Barack Hussein Obama's successful presidential candidacy for both expanding and reducing the meanings of Blackness in relation to transnational America. In contrast to the "Third World" racioscape of Black America that became visible to the world during Hurricane Katrina, Obama's biography produced new tropes of Black identity that registered both the viability of the "American dream" and a cosmopolitan global sensibility. The article notes that Obama's victory has the potential to stretch Black racial identity beyond its hegemonic anchoring to America, but at the same time it is equally important to question nationalist discourses of American exceptionalism that surrounded Obama's campaign for minimizing the institutional contexts of race and class inequality.

Key Words: race • Black • globalization • Barack Obama • America • Hurricane Katrina

This version was published on July 1, 2009

Journal of Communication Inquiry, Vol. 33, No. 3, 195-205 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/0196859909333896


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