Incorporations

Book excerpt: Incorporations offers a new way of thinking about issues of race, bodies, and commodity culture. Moving beyond the study of identity and difference in media, Eva Cherniavsky asserts that race can be understood as a sign of the body’s relation to capital. In Incorporations, Cherniavsky interrogates the interplay of nationalism, colonialism, and capitalism in the production of racial embodiment. Testing the links between race and capital, Incorporations examines how media culture transmutes white bodies into commodity-images in such films as Blonde Venus, A Touch of Evil, and Fargo, and in the television series The Simpsons and the fiction of Octavia Butler and Leslie Marmon Silko. Cherniavsky posits an innovative approach to whiteness studies that does not focus on the emancipatory possibilities of cross-racial identification. Working with the tools of critical race theory as well as postcolonial and cultural studies, Cherniavsky demonstrates how representations of racial embodiment have evolved, and suggests that “race” is the condition of exchangeable bodies under capital. Eva Cherniavsky is professor of American literature and culture at the University of Washington. She is the author of That Pale Mother Rising: Sentimental Discourses and the Imitation of Motherhood in Nineteenthth-Century America.