Additive race: colorblind discourses of realism in performance capture technologies

Abstract

This contribution interrogates the sites in which performance capture simultaneously fetishizes and hides the performer's flesh-and-blood body, asking how technologies preoccupied with ‘realism’ inscribe race in a moment obsessed with the myth of post-raciality. The link between the tradition of minstrelsy and the multicultural celebration of difference as additive, rather than embodied, exposes how whiteness must animate itself against a fictitious ‘Other’ imagined as embodying culture. At the same time, discourses of colorblindness assume that race no longer constitutes a significant category of analysis—a move that negates the daily lived realities and material manifestations of power operating on bodies in order to foreclose conversations about ongoing racial injustice. Our term ‘additive race’ draws out how performance practices, particularly in a digital context, participate in post-racial ideologies of a world in which the goals of the civil rights movement have supposedly been realized by reducing race to a matter of style.

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