Reading the Racial Encounter engages constructions of race through the analysis of scenes of meeting or encounter in three multimedia texts. Such scenes are rarely, if ever, subject to book-length analysis, yet such a project can arguably allow race to be understood in new and challenging ways. This book’s focus is on three texts that offer particularly nuanced and reflexive engagements with race representation: a video essay exploring Gypsy aesthetics by artists Daniel Baker and Paul Ryan; Boots Riley’s television series I’m a Virgo; and Jean Baudrillard’s controversial travelogue America. Taking an approach to these three texts that is rooted in extended, reflexive and especially fine-grained analysis, and an interest in questions of perspective and framing, the book analyses how their complexities might be further worked through, whilst exploring also some of the difficulties in so doing. This work will be of particular interest to scholars and advanced students of race theory, literary studies, media studies, and cultural analysis who seek fresh methodological approaches to understanding how race is constructed, performed, and contested across different media landscapes.
