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“Writing about race is a polemic, in that we must confront the white capitalist infrastructure that has erased us, but also a lyric, in that our inner consciousness is knotted with contradictions.”

Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings[1]

My arrival at Bucknell University coincided with the English department’s desire to evolve the “Race & Literature Concentration,” which seeks to open up frameworks for understanding race and intersectional identity through literature.[2] I see now that this initiative was an attempt to emphasize Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Critical Race Studies within the domain of literary study before the recent hubbub prompted by white supremacist fears, which intend to whitewash and erase histories of marginalization and genocide as they inform structural privilege and dispossession. Because we are a small liberal arts college and an even smaller department, our concentration has evaded the public fear-mongering that other public institutions and academics have not; this may also result from the fact that the concentration is not explicitly labelled as CRT. It is CRT by another name.

Until I arrived, the concentration exclusively addressed racial formations and their literary attendants in an American context. It has more recently grown to incorporate Caribbean authors, and I sought to bring this concentration to the global long eighteenth century—a historical and geographic alignment that made more capacious the concentration’s intent and ambit. This is likewise an endeavour to understand how notions of race exist beyond the contemporary and spotlight differences that are both legible and illegible to our current Western frameworks. I ultimately inaugurated a course entitled “Race & Gender in the Eighteenth Century,” which is taught as an upper-division seminar capped at fifteen students.

Bucknell occupies the unceded and ancestral territories of the Susquehannock peoples in what is now central Pennsylvania, and like most small liberal arts colleges in the United States, it is a Predominately White Institution (PWI). In 2018, for example, 72% of the Bucknell student body identified as white; in 2016, this percentage was 75%. In 2014, white students constituted 80% of the roughly 3500 undergraduates.[3] Nearly identical statistics represent the faculty body; for staff, white predominance is even higher. Union County, where Bucknell is situated, is home to just under 45,000 residents of which, according to recent census data, almost 90% identify as white.[4]

Despite, or perhaps as a result of, these demographics, the University has long required general education courses that fulfill “diversity in the US” and “global connections,” euphemistic phrases that intend to approximate commitments to “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” which, across all institutions, tend to be piecemealed, motivated by word rather than deed, and too often required of faculty of colour as unacknowledged and uncompensated cultural labour (or tax). As Sara Ahmed argues, the emphasis on diversity training and initiatives within the academy bespeaks an ironic realization: the goal of diversifying (an empty buzzword that oftentimes functions as lip service) only holds harmless whiteness and its hegemonic position within the academy.[5] “Race & Gender in the Eighteenth Century” is disqualified from the “diversity in the US” requirement because it does not reflect race and gender in the US, which perhaps prompts the question: are other socio-cultural-historical instantiations of race moot? It does, however, fulfill the “global connections” requirement through some strategic wordsmithing because the texts covered in the course are not exclusively set in England or Europe. “Race and Gender in the Eighteenth Century,” in other words, sets out to apprehend how Anglophone writers of the long eighteenth century [from Henry Neville’s The Isle of Pines (1668) to The History of Mary Prince (1831)] imagine the insinuations of race, gender, and sexuality, too, across a variety of geographic locations that illustrate the iron stronghold of Euro-colonialisms and their concomitant social and material violences.

Reflection as Scholarship | Scholarship as Reflection

The goals of this nontraditional, reflective essay are multi-pronged. I consider how pedagogy, meta-reflection, and analysis can enrich scholarship by highlighting one activity I now enfold in all my courses: the Meme Museum. The Meme Museum comes at the end of a unit and asks students to participate in various literacies. The activity recognizes that memes have become their own form of social media language and have wide, cross-cultural, transnational, and multilingual currency. The language of memes is a visual communication system that harnesses both the pictorial and orthographic. Memes represent a form of literacy that is both highly accessible to our students, highly available because of our enmeshment with (and continued reliance on) social media, and highly functional as a means of expression that endows political possibility (humour, indignation, activism, critique, etc.).

How does it work? Upon finishing a text, students are responsible for generating a reaction meme that captures their reading experience. They can choose any moment and medium to render their meme. Sites such as ImgFlip, Kapwing, and MakeAMeme.org feature user-friendly meme generators, and even platforms like Canva and Adobe have entered the game, which suggests, again, the circulation of memes as a social media darling and, for many, a satirical coping mechanism that intends to alleviate doom-scrolling and soften the blow of any number of current crises (climate change, advanced neoliberalism, the erosion of democracy, the impunity of state-level fascism, the explosion of violent populism, and global conflicts aplenty). The Meme Museum acknowledges first and foremost that rigorous, intimate discussions—a pillar of my pedagogy—can open realms by which students better encounter and grapple with, for example, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe or Johnson’s Rasselas—texts that might appear anathema to meaning-making for 18–21-year-olds. The Meme Museum, like visits to other museums, is meant to be ambulatory. Part of the assignment is to walk around the room and behold each participant’s meme. As we circle the room, we laugh, joke, and forge connections based on these medial reactions prompted by literature. Museums are affective encounters.

Those resistant to or naysayers of this activity might suggest that the Meme Museum is just a trendy plaything that discounts the need for rigorous analysis in the classroom. It’s not. Memes, this assignment has taught me, pave new channels for discussion, interpretation, and synthesis. They exist in reactive, affective, and, I model here, scholarly planes. The Meme Museum thus emphasizes forms of social media ephemera and ostensibly non-academic ekphrasis to spur serious reflection that develops from a readerly and affective reaction.

The playful and the serious rarely meet within the throes of the classroom, but the Meme Museum has accomplished this unlikely feat. The whimsy of the Meme Museum stems from the fact that the assignment is never graded. The completion of the assignment matters little to me. That is, it’s not that I do not care whether my students complete their work. Rather, an assignment like this promotes an exercise that students want to complete. This resides in its own affective plane, especially given the sharing of memes to garner laughter, sociality, and coalitional politics. That students are gleeful about sharing their memes, and the laughter, grins, and smiles that typically bubble forth, suggests to me that the Meme Museum’s nontraditional blending of social media and eighteenth-century narrative provides important outlets for our students: for one, to grapple with a literature that is foreign or difficult to them; two, to showcase their various social media literacies; and three, (because I taught this course in a pandemic) to provide a coping tactic that promotes social interaction in heightened times of loneliness and abject disconnection.

The ungraded nature of the Meme Museum lends itself to another component of my upper-division seminars: what is called ungrading. The practice of ungrading is primarily a pedagogical and epistemological attempt to dispel our students’ vehement commitments to grades as vehicles for self-worth and, they presume, metrics for future success (which, of course, is patently false).[6] As Jesse Stommel, a proponent of ungrading, contends, “Obedience to a system of crude ranking is crafted to feel altruistic, because it’s supposedly fair, saves time, and helps prepare students for the horrors of the ‘real world.’ Conscientious objection is made to seem impossible.”[7] The Meme Museum is a conscientious objection to the “crudeness” and “obedience” to grades; it is a practice of unlearning through relinquishing grades and focusing on effort, summative feedback, and constructive criticism.

Such a praxis can be challenging in the classroom, especially given student expectations of grades as concretized metrics. I’ll be the first to admit that my deployment of ungrading does not completely alleviate grade anxieties. However, by incorporating assignments like the Meme Museum, I am actively able to model to students exercises and activities that are not graded that enrich our discussions and readings. For me, ungrading works best at the upper-division seminar level because these classes typically (though not always) recruit students in their last years of college, who are familiar with the undergraduate classroom experience, and who likely take a class out of choice rather than requirement. I decidedly do not practice ungrading, for example, with my first-semester students because students must first learn how the university system works before we teach them to unlearn it. Ungrading is not easy. Yet it showcases a commitment to readerly, writerly, and student growth that can flourish without the looming spectre of alphanumeric grades.

Through an ungrading provenance, the Meme Museum provides a vital aperture to apprehend our students’ reading and analysis of a text. Because of the intrinsically humorous nature of memes, students often address horrific or scandalous moments that laughter might help displace; case in point, in an example I analyze below, a student has memed the death of Oroonoko in Behn’s novella (1688). It’s not that the mutilation of Oroonoko’s body is somehow funny; nothing could be further from the truth. But a reaction to that grotesque death taps into larger sentiments about anti-black torture and slaughter—what Ramesh Mallipeddi identifies as the spectacle of the Black body in pain (which we read following Behn)—which is already primed by Oroonoko’s narrator and her endowment of overwhelming (white) pathos at novella’s end.[8] Humour is one of those reactions that activate community affects in the face of wanton loss, discomfort, or dismay.

In what follows, I discuss this course (its goals and shortcomings), reflect on the Meme Museum assignment, and analyze a pattern that has emerged in these memes: my students repeatedly use Black celebrities, social media influencers, athletes, and other popular figures to frame their reaction memes. Blackness, in turn, becomes engrained in the language and communication of memes—what some have termed “digital blackface”—and I interrogate how these representations might engender a type of blackened emotionality and affect that traffics widely across cyberspace. To echo Legacy Russell, “Memes are not neutral. The labor enacted through black meme culture raises questions about subjectivity, personhood, and the ever-complicated fault lines of race, class, and gender performed both on- and offline.”[9] The Meme Museum induces what I’ll call reactive blackness as a multimedia language and affective comportment that emerges directly from an eighteenth-century archive and admits the intersections of race and gender into its fold. Reactive blackness exploits blackened emotionality and reifies the Black experience as an icon of expressivity. In so doing, reactive blackness relies on the circulation of Black figureheads as affective scions who encapsulate jocular, political, and recycled reactivity. Sianne Ngai refers to a similar racialized affect as “animatedness,” which engenders a “kind of exaggerated emotional expressiveness [that] seems to function as a marker of racial or ethnic otherness in general.”[10] Reactive blackness, as I see it operationalized through this assignment, exposes Black celebrity as a social media currency that stereotypes and ossifies reaction in service of (non-Black) majoritarian deployment. The Meme Museum performs pedagogical creativity and simultaneously becomes its own site of critical inquiry that examines how the connections among race, gender, and affect are channelled by social media today through, as the assignment suggests, the eighteenth century.

Racing & Gendering the Eighteenth Century

We begin the first day of “Race and Gender in the Eighteenth Century” by reading two seemingly disparate pieces that provide necessary scaffolds for the primary texts we will undertake: the introduction to Roxann Wheeler’s The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture and Kimberle Crenshaw’s “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women.”[11] Wheeler’s argument, like other scholars working within the newly termed “RaceB4Race” by medievalists and early modernists, reveals that socio-cultural formations and referents of race in the contemporary are unavailable to the first three-quarters of the eighteenth century.[12] While our contemporary conceptions of race assuredly evolve out of the eighteenth-century’s commitment to taxonomies, Enlightenment and Royal Society principles, and hierarchies of difference that accompany imperial expansion, Wheeler argues that roughly before 1775, we must understand the concept of race as an emergent and elastic categorical structure dependent on phenotypic (i.e. melaninated) and material differences (i.e. clothing, geography, religion).

The italicized “and” bridges Wheeler and Crenshaw. Crenshaw’s now foundational articulation of intersectionality, which operates as a nominal boogeyman for recent alt-right circles, demonstrates a juridical and interpretative framework that demands we understand identity politics as mutually though differently attended by the intersections of race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, ability, and class.[13] This is what CRT lays bare, especially with legal contexts in which they are taught and originally conceived. Crenshaw primarily investigates how Black and Latinx women face a repeated double-bind based on logged cases of domestic and sexual violence. The article, which is older than my students, animates conversations about sentencing differences among racialized subjects, institutions that indemnify white supremacy and its entanglement with misogyny, and quotidian encounters of what Sharon P. Holland calls “everyday racism.”[14] While Wheeler and Crenshaw may seem like antinomies, students can benefit from a historicizing framework that provides context-specific textures to intersectional thinking, their prehistories, and current realities. The two, together, facilitate a lexicon by which students can understand what subtends eighteenth-century “racial” frameworks as well as how those frameworks have shifted to account for (or minimize) “race” today.

The course seeks to redress the presumption that attention to “race” is only attention to blackness. This epistemic-ontological overlap continues to rear its head in insidious ways: through practices of demography, academia’s appeal to diversity, and administrative tokenism of equity and inclusion. It likewise continues to recur in eighteenth-century studies conferences where “race” is, too commonly, a synonym for thinking through blackness’ polarity to whiteness. The conflations of blackness and race (and anti-blackness and racism) disregard the specificity of the myriad racial experiences that Wheeler examines in the long eighteenth century (of which blackness is just one example) and Crenshaw explores (alongside other women of colour) at the end of the twentieth. This flattening of blackness as a totalizing racialization likewise presupposes that whiteness exists outside race. Such a reduction facilely suggests that one is either white or racialized. Race, as a categorical catch-all, thus targets marginalized and non-white peoples; whiteness, the illogic goes, is static and serves solely as a contrast in kind. To suggest that race is only about blackness not only effaces other racial identifications but also commits a further anti-blackness by suggesting that blackness must bear the burden of all racial thinking.

This is perhaps best captured for me by Audre Lorde, whose work I also incorporate in the course, especially in conjunction with tropes of the “angry Black woman” that contrast the narrative styles and tones of Olivia Fairfield in The Woman of Colour (1808) and Mary Prince in her autobiography (1831). Anger is, of course, its own affect that is coloured by race, gender, and sexuality.[15] In Sister Outsider, Lorde documents her tokenization within the academy (as a Black lesbian feminist) as the singular individual tasked with teaching and educating blackness, which then circumscribes her scholarship, teaching, and service. Lorde soundly articulates the distinctions among Black women and women of colour who cannot be abstracted as a singular marginalization; she appeals to the affect of anger to accomplish this. “When I speak of women of Color, I do not only mean Black women,” Lorde writes, “The woman of Color who is not Black and who charges me with rendering her invisible by assuming that her struggles with racism are identical with my own has something to tell me that I had better learn from, lest we both waste ourselves fighting the truths between us.”[16] Lorde’s anger as affect is especially apposite to the Meme Museum examples, which I explore below.

My use of Lorde here may seem to some an ironic gesture, given that I have already critiqued race as often totalizing and essentializing blackness. My deployment of Lorde, however, doubles down on a Critical Black Studies tradition that has so much informed critical race theory and critical race studies, writ large. This inclusion, as with other Black feminists in my courses, such as Christina Sharpe, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, and Saidiya Hartman, is deliberate. It represents a citational commitment to making visible the work that Black feminists have paved for non-Black, queer scholars of colour like me. Our citationality—what we teach, who we cite, how we engage with scholarship—is always a political overture.[17]

Here and in my course, I attempt to heed Lorde’s call to resist the flattening of racialized experience as blackness to not concede to the pitfalls of an unintentional and yet residual anti-blackness. This requires, first, attention to how constructions of race and gender cohere through critical scholarship in critical race studies, and second, incorporation of theories of intersectional racial identity (for example, Indigenous, Native, Asian, African, Middle Eastern) that surface in the eighteenth century and thus inform our readings of, for instance, William Beckford’s Vathek, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s The Turkish Embassy Letters, or Thomas Southerne’s Oroonoko.[18] These intersections are the types of scholarly and readerly constellations that “Race & Gender in the Eighteenth Century” intends to honour.

Meme-ing the Eighteenth Century

This section features a selection of memes generated by students in the course. I contextualize each reactive moment within the eighteenth-century archive and the meme’s sometimes convoluted history, which operates transhistorically to offer something new about our readings and the reactions they endow in our students. That is, I evaluate how the deployment of a particular meme may work within our analysis of eighteenth-century narratives and thus enrich a type of critical transhistorical meaning-making and argumentation. With a fourteen-week semester and a class of fifteen, “Race & Gender in the Eighteenth Century’s” Meme Museum produces roughly 200 distinct visual items. Readers will notice that the memes included here exclusively feature Black celebrities, athletes, and reality television stars. Not all of the memes do this, but a very large number do.

At the start of the semester, I require students to sign a code of conduct that operates as a content warning (elsewhere referred to as a “trigger warning”). The code of conduct, while not legally binding, prefaces the graphic, uncomfortable, and emotionally rigorous encounters that our readings will induce as we take up moments of violence, racism, anti-blackness, sexism and misogyny, homophobia and transphobia, sexual violence, sexuality, depictions of nudity, vulgar language, radical political dissent, and the like. This list does not equalize these aspects. I also do not hierarchize them because they are felt and realized differently by each of my students.

That said, the entwinement of violence and eroticism continues to characterize the experiences most trying for students; the fact that others are less triggering suggests a particular type of inurement. We may find ourselves desensitized to experiences of violence in the present—I write this in the unceasing throes of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the no-longer-exceptional trend of school shootings, an insurgence in hate crimes across North America, and the continued exposure of anti-black violence perpetrated by state actors—and yet students are woefully unprepared for the graphic, anti-black tortures that Oroonoko is subject to by Banister at the conclusion of Behn’s novella. In a move in which I would like to emulate Saidiya Hartman, readers will not find the violent dissection of Oroonoko repeated here.[19] The replication of this moment in a scholarly venue seems exploitative in a way that seeks to further spectacularize the Black body in pain. Figure 1 perhaps best captures the shock, awe, and disgust that surfaces from reading about Oroonoko’s mangled body—both a material enactment of enslaved torture that spurs abolitionism and a metonymic representation of the assaults perpetrated under the aegis of colonialism.

The image of National Basketball Association star, Anthony Davis, cropped to accommodate the subtitle “Oroonoko’s Death …” recycles a reaction from Davis during a 2014 game in which his incredulity responds to a referee’s foul call. Sportscasters and sports news media comically played up this reaction—emphasizing Davis’ characteristic unibrow—to satirize the fear of the New Orleans’ Pelicans unsettling mascot, Pierre.[20] Davis’ reaction, ergo, becomes enfolded into at least two affective registers: incredulity and fear. Perhaps only one of these is telegraphed by the student-created meme. Still, this amplification of emotion—televised, memed, and made into a Graphics Interchange Format (GIF), which is an excerpted, moving image—demonstrates the multidimensionality of reaction that signals various affective states that operate in myriad contexts. The reaction meme thus avails opportunities to read both shock at the graphic mutilation of Oroonoko’s body and fears of enslavement, torture, and bodily dissection and castration. It channels these explicit violences through other forms of reactive blackness. Davis is employed and able to translate the calamity Oroonoko is subject to as a potential interlocutor by which to understand how Black and non-Black contemporary audiences might stomach Behn’s conclusion.

Figure 1

Anthony Davis reaction meme to the ending of Behn’s Oroonoko.

-> See the list of figures

Figure 2

Blended meme, featuring Quenlin Blackwell (left) and Shirlene Pearson (right), that reacts to Crusoe’s attempt to proselytize Friday.

-> See the list of figures

Figure 2 reacts to Crusoe’s didactic (and mostly failed) attempts to convert Friday to a particular brand of Christianity. Crusoe’s proselytizing behaviour frames Friday’s disclosure of an already-existent monotheism characterized by the belief in “Benamuckee.”[21] To force into both submission and ingratiation, Crusoe

Began to instruct him in the Knowledge of the true God: I told him that the great Maker of all things liv’d up there, point up towards Heaven: That he governs the World by the same Power and Providence by which he had made it: That he was omnipotent, could do every Thing for us, give every Thing to us, take every Thing from us … He listned [sic] with great Attention, and receiv’d with Pleasure the notion of Jesus Christ.[22]

The student meme accommodates Crusoe’s self-edifying narrative while accounting for a subtle subversion. By Crusoe’s account, Friday receives his indoctrination “with Pleasure.” The meme does not account for this pleasure, which doubts the authenticity of Crusoe’s projections and demonstrates an awareness of the colonial grip that accompanies the forced conversion.

The popular meme shown in Figure 2 results from an internet pastiche; it enfolds two distinct Black women and their screen-captured reactions to model a cause and effect. The left panel features Quenlin “Quen” Blackwell, a social media personality whose internet popularity results from a rather convoluted blunder. The image of Blackwell captured by this meme, however, is a result of internet bullying resultant from that blunder. The bullying ultimately induced mental health struggles that culminated in an eating disorder and suicidal ideation for Blackwell. The meme locates Blackwell’s breaking point in which, following her mother’s advice, she attempts to unsuccessfully “scream … out” her sadness. In the original Vine (a video-sharing predecessor to TikTok), from which the meme originates, Blackwell confesses, following the tear-filled screams, “No, I’m still sad. It didn’t work.” Reflecting on the circulation of this video, Blackwell shares, “People do what Twitter people do, after I posted the video and they quote tweeted it, and related it to themselves.”[23] Blackwell’s meta-reflection here powerfully illustrates how and why memes like Blackwell’s circulate so widely: they offer a glimmer of sympathetic attachment in which emotionality is registered by, translated through, and appropriated by others, especially, as this essay demonstrates, popular Black figures.

Opposite Blackwell, the meme incorporates a still from a live chat hosted by Ms. Juicy Baby (Shirlene Pearson), a reality television star best known for her role on Little Women: Atlanta. In the meme, Ms. Juicy is photographed enraptured by what appears to be Blackwell but is, in fact, a football game. As the “I Accidentally Became a Meme” YouTube video series reveals, Ms. Juicy and Blackwell were stitched together by a Twitter user in Mexico and quickly flooded social media channels, demonstrating the versatility of this meme.

Within the context of Defoe’s novel, however, we witness how the language of memes becomes colourblind: Blackwell stands in for Crusoe, and Ms. Juicy operates as a surrogate for Friday. Colourblindness, as implicitly invoked by this tweet, shifts the contours of Blackwell’s experiences with cyberbullying, anorexia, and ideas of self-harm to telegraph the anxiety-filled pleas of Christian conversion that students feel emoted by the text, which are not fully captured by the passage highlighted above in which the conversion is narrativized. Even more, however, Ms. Juicy’s placement as an analogue for Friday serves to potentially flatten non-white embodiment in the Black body and to feminize Friday’s role as somehow akin to the experiences of Black (little) women.

To this point, the meme is commonly described as “me explaining to my mom,” which reflects yet another potential way of reading the Crusoe-Friday byplay. On a surface level, it might appear that Crusoe assumes a maternal role because of this meme, and yet, as the student employs it, Friday is, in fact, transformed into the maternal figure. In Ms. Juicy’s representation as Friday, we experience an ironic subversion wherein Crusoe assumes the role of a child attempting to convert an unconvinced parent. The meme thus juggles these tense semiotics and provides new ways of reading and understanding the power dynamic between the two. Memes, of course, are not meant to be read literally. Yet, contextualizing this meme in conversation with Robinson Crusoe opens different analytical interfaces in which substitutive logics ultimately reveal ulterior knowledges about race and gender making in examining the eighteenth century today.

Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas offers a philosophical apologue that frames the sojourn of Prince Rasselas and his sister Nekayah away from “Happy Valley,” which imagines Abyssinia as a site of Edenic plenty devoid of want. Early in the narrative, Rasselas grows tired of Happy Valley because he longs for unbounded experiences. Rasselas and his tutor query the extent of the unhappiness:

“I fly from pleasure, said the prince, because pleasure has ceased to please; I am lonely because I am miserable, and am unwilling to cloud with my presence the happiness of others.” “You, Sir, said the sage, are the first who has complained of misery in the happy valley. I hope to convince you that your complaints have no real cause. You are here in full possession of all that the emperour of Abissinia can bestow; here is neither labour to be endured nor danger to be dreaded, yet here is all that labour or danger can procure or purchase. Look round and tell me which of your wants is without supply: if you want nothing, how are you unhappy?”[24]

The question of happiness, so fundamental to Rasselas’s experiences in and outside Happy Valley (at apologue’s end, unlike Nekayah, he refuses to return), is its own affective conundrum ventriloquized by an African prince. As Riley DeBaecke and I discuss elsewhere, the affective turn within eighteenth-century studies must better account for how the social and political emotions of racialized and blackened subjects are differentially constructed and realized.[25] To assume that happiness, its aspirations and failures, are universally shared or a common denominator regardless of identity is to ignore how affects are socio-culturally determined by situated knowledge and lived experiences.

Figure 3

Oprah Winfrey reaction meme to Johnson’s Rasselas.

-> See the list of figures

The meme employed to visualize this reaction to Rasselas, Figure 3, features Oprah Winfrey, specifically her exclusive interview with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle upon their disharmonious departure from Buckingham Palace. Oprah with Meghan and Harry exposed the treatment that Markle, a mixed-race American woman, faced following her marriage into the English monarchy. While several notable soundbites circulated following the interview—perhaps most famously was Oprah’s pointed question to Markle, “Were you silent or were you silenced?”[26]—the reaction expressed by Oprah in this meme is an amalgam of indignation, exhaustion, and incredulity. The exasperated body language articulated by Winfrey accompanied Markle’s disclosure that the British monarchy noted concern over the melanin of Harry and Markle’s child(ren). “There were conversations,” Oprah questions, “about how dark your baby was going to be?”[27] Markle responds that these conversations circumvented her but were brought to Harry’s attention. Oprah does not disguise her shock at the palpable effects of systemic racism and anti-blackness—perhaps its own shock.

The use of Oprah in this student-generated meme may ostensibly downplay the context in which it originates: indignation at the monarchy’s explicit racism, especially as it pertains to an heir to the crown. However, the question of blackness remains at the forefront of Rasselas, especially given that the entire cast of characters primarily consists of African peoples. And while the meme responds to the lack of happiness that Rasselas encounters in Happy Valley, we might read the original and eighteenth-century contexts in conjunction. In the original, Oprah expresses umbrage at the racial hangups of the royal family; in the Rasselas-reactive meme, Oprah registers discontent with the shortcomings of happiness in Abyssinia. The meme thus harnesses an important touchstone for visualizing and interpreting, again, the racial dynamics of happiness, especially as they encircle experiences of blackness. This aspect of reactive blackness transcends historical context and genre to account for how the experience of blackness is deployed as emotionality par excellence.

Figure 4

Ted Dorfeuille reaction meme to Volume Two of The Woman of Colour.

-> See the list of figures

The anonymously written, The Woman of Colour has exploded in scholarly and teacherly attention over the past decade.[28] The epistolary narrative follows Olivia Fairfield, a mixed-race woman born of an enslaved mother and an enslaving father, as she traverses the Atlantic in search of her cousin Augustus’ patronage and hand in marriage. Whereas the first volume concludes with Olivia’s determination that the wedded pair will be successful (despite the harassment she faces in England), the second volume discloses Augustus’ deceit in that he has already been clandestinely affianced to another woman, Angelina. In an extreme moment of martyrdom, Olivia forgives Augustus for his deception by reuniting him with Angelina and their child. Olivia writes, “I started up, I placed the little Augustus in his father’s arms, then taking his tiny hand, and joining it with both his parents, I said, ‘May heaven protect, and bless you all! May my fervent prayers be heard for your happiness!’ and before any thing reached my ear, save the sigh of Augustus, I had quitted the house and was once more in the park!”[29] Olivia, here, forgoes her own happiness because she realizes that she does not adequately conform to the schemata of happiness and the marriage plot meant for Augustus and Angelina: “I felt relieved at having seen Angelina, and having beheld in her a woman who was likely to form the happiness of the husband who I must for ever relinquish!”[30]

Figure 4 shows a now-famous meme reframed to account for Olivia and Augustus’ failed marriage. The individual is known on the internet as “Disappointed Black Guy,” and his circulation as a meme typically features a two- or four-panel image in which an expression of excitement or laughter is quickly followed by shock and tears. Ted Dorfeuille, the person behind the sobriquet, is not a celebrity or athlete in the way that Oprah or Anthony Davis might be, but as Dorfeuille’s interview with Know Your Meme reveals, this Tumblr reaction meme began circulating on the internet in 2011. Ten years of internet circulation and celebrity are seen as a watershed, given the ephemerality of internet stardom. Dorfeuille describes the origins of his reactions:

I got an anonymous message about a tier list post I made for a game I was playing at the time. When I got the message, I thought it would be from a friend but it wasn’t, and it was actually very racist. The next day I made a parody of the ordeal to joke with my friends. I sent myself a message with just a slur and I took pictures of it, and then I kinda [sic] composed it into what was the first version of the Disappointed Black Guy meme.[31]

Dorfeuille’s original meme shows excitement at receiving an inbox message. The subsequent shock accompanies opening the message, which includes a capitalized anti-black epithet.

One of the many ironies of the student-generated meme, of course, is that Augustus takes the place of Dorfeuille. As a result, we have a whitewashing of a meme that explicitly responds to anti-black harassment. The meme downplays this, yet most employ memes like Dorfeuille’s outside their original context. By superimposing Augustus’ name over Dorfeuille’s face, the “Disappointed Black Guy” meme is dislocated from its racial and raced provenance and instead stands in for archetypal disappointment. Memes thus espouse potential colourblindness in their global trafficking that can erase, efface, or minimize the experiences of blackness. Such a realization highlights how other memes further heighten or spectacularize blackness. The fact that the memes are capable of doing both is not an indictment of the assignment but rather promotes an awareness in which the memes communicate forms of racialized being that re-orient our understandings of the primary sources to which they react.

Digital Blackface | Reactive Blackness

As the examples above evidence, what these memes subversively and sometimes perversely do is reflect forms of affectivity, emotionality, and registered expression that are blackened—that is, they are constructed by forms of race and blackness in particular. Some media scholars have referred to this as “digital blackface,” which is how white supermajorities employ Black media and memes to reflect reactions and emotions. Francesca Sobande identifies “digital blackface” as an evolution of minstrelsy as visual performance that doubles down on anti-blackness. The types of Black mimicry that the popularization of memes and GIFs represent ultimately result in, for Sobande, “a Black person’s mannerisms, facial expressions, image, and overall humanity being treated as though it is nothing more than a mere digital commodity and means to communicate online.”[32] Indeed, the insinuations of digital blackface have become so quotidian that public and popular media venues as far-reaching as The New York Times, Teen Vogue, Refinery 29, and Wired have tapped into this broader discourse. Lauren Michele Jackson’s op-ed for Teen Vogue attends to the minstrel afterlives of digital blackface. Jackson confirms that the widespread trafficking of Black memes, and GIFs more specifically, visualize “extreme joy, annoyance, anger and occasions for drama and gossip [as] a magnet for images of black people, especially black femmes.”[33]

Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings provides another perspective to reckon with the surfeit of emotionality and reactivity distilled by these student-generated memes. “Minor feelings” engender “the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one’s perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed.”[34] Hong contributes to larger conversations of racialized affect, especially in their dysphoric circulation. As the above memes suggest, a genre of reactive blackness likewise participates in acknowledging how too often people of colour must sideline minor feelings to hold harmless (or defer to) white affect, professionalism, and decorum. Hong’s articulation of minor feelings corresponds with Sianne Ngai’s discussion of “animatedness” as racial affect. Through analyzing Black and Asian subjects, Ngai reveals a “disturbing racial epistemology” that hypervisualizes forms of allegedly authentic or naturalized racial being.[35] Memes perhaps best capture Ngai’s animatedness (they notably were not as circulatory in the early 2000s) because they are freighted with the possibility in which the animation of the racialized body becomes “an instrument, porous and pliable, for the vocalization of others.”[36] Trends in meme and GIF usage exemplify this instrumentality of racialized subjects for non-verbal reaction.

The digital blackface and reactive blackness made apparent by the overuse of Black celebrities, actors, and social media personalities allow us to more poignantly consider how formations of race, and blackness in specific, come to congeal in the present. It appears that my students participate in these behaviours, and the Meme Museum ultimately creates a space in which digital blackface is further spectacularized. Given the discussion so far, it may seem appropriate to chastise our students for perpetuating these behaviours, especially at a PWI. I’m not interested in this sort of punitive measure, not because I seek to indemnify students from their digital habits and the prejudices they may repurpose, but because in a seminar about race and gender, it’s more valuable to engage students in these patterns as a means of dialogue and translation. I don’t presuppose that my students are ignorant of the wide circulation of Black memes and GIFs; yet, because these digital currencies have become so normalized, the use (and use-value) of these media may escape our students’ exacting attention. I want to query this as a means of conclusion.

Anti-Racist Pedagogy for a PWI

The goals of the seminar, my pedagogy, and the analyses I’ve offered here are intimately connected to anti-racist endeavours that are vital to fostering systemic and atmospheric change in eighteenth-century studies and acknowledging the violences that the eighteenth century and its traditional scholarship produced. Many of us know what this is like as scholars in the field, especially through conferencing, professionalizing, and peer-review arms. However, our students (undergraduate or graduate) are less familiar with the enduring livelihood of discrimination and hegemonic whiteness in the academy.

In “What Anti-Racist Teachers Do Differently,” Pirette McKamey writes, “To fight against systemic racism means to buck norms.”[37] McKamey reminds us of the need to listen and learn from Black community stakeholders to hold our pedagogies and curriculum accountable to our Black students. McKamey is attentive to the elementary and secondary school classroom, but I wonder how such an approach is just as necessary at the post-secondary level. And what does it mean at a PWI, such as Bucknell, where only 5% of our students identify as Black? What does it mean for teachers of the long eighteenth century? In recent years, the Early Caribbean Society has spearheaded “Anti-Racist Teach-Ins” that attend specifically to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.[38] Presenters and organizers such as Kerry Sinanan, Kirsten Saxton, Nicole Aljoe, Joycelyn Moody, Shelby Johnson, and Mariam Wassif have established an underground initiative that makes explicit a commitment to anti-racism at the university and communes networks of scholars that desire to effect change starting from our classrooms, moving to our scholarship, and ultimately impacting structural changes at our institutions and within our learned societies.

While the Meme Museum may seem an unlikely fellow of anti-racist pedagogy, I see the teaching of race and gender in the eighteenth century as a necessary stepping stone for moving towards more accountable pedagogies and curricula that highlight global majority representations despite the canonicity of coloniality/the coloniality of canonicity. Such a course offering poses an opportunity to disturb both canonicity and coloniality by providing an outlet wherein students can grapple with the sinews of their digital behaviours and the racial, gendered, and sexual displays of these digital media, as reactions to eighteenth-century texts become springboards for thinking about visual rhetorics of identity. In revising this course and re-teaching it in future semesters, what I can do better is acknowledge how our investigations, theoretical underpinnings, and ungrading activities are explicitly an anti-racist endeavour.

Students may be familiar with anti-racism (at least nominally), but they may not be familiar with what it’ll look like in the classroom, especially in the (more likely than not at my institution) absence of any students of colour. To be clear, I do not believe that the teaching of the intersections of race and gender is in itself an anti-racist tactic; in truth, I can think of many approaches that reify considerations of race, gender, and sexuality that may, in fact, be racist, misogynist, homophobic, and transphobic. Put another way, those who study, research, and teach race and gender in the eighteenth century are not de facto anti-racist. A commitment to anti-racist pedagogy, however, resituates how we approach the coherences and ruptures of race and gender insomuch that we are committed to recognizing how hegemonic whiteness participates in siloing, taxonomizing, and spectacularizing the non-white, non-male body as something that has required intersectional recuperation.

Anti-racist pedagogy at a PWI is not an excoriation of my white students. It doesn’t require them to sulk in shame for fifteen weeks. Anti-racist pedagogy in my classroom instead requires students to hold themselves accountable (as I hold myself) for historical and contemporary ramifications of race and gender that requires, yes, introspection, but more importantly, awareness of the constructed nature of these identities that invariably shape the terrains of privilege, hegemony, and institution. Anti-racist pedagogy acknowledges difference and humility to foster, at a PWI especially, authentic allyship in the enduring fight against erasure.

The primary challenge for a revised course that returns to the Meme Museum activity is how to approach students with these digital behaviours. Based on my analyses above, it may seem appropriate, especially in a class on race and gender, to pinpoint digital blackface as endemic and problematic. Though I suspect there will be a necessary juggling act alongside this realization not to foreclose creativity and discussion or instill shame. What I think I can do better at some point in the semester is to acknowledge the recurrence of digital blackface in the Meme Museum with a series of open-ended, provocative questions on which students can reflect, which may very well inspire genres of introspection and metacognition that anti-racism avails. Consider the following:

  • What might it mean that in discussing representations of race and gender in the eighteenth century, we rely on other racialized bodies to telegraph the humour or shock in our reactions?

  • What might the broad exchange of Black memes suggest about our fixations with blackness, celebrity, and humour?

  • Might there be ways to recuperate blackness as a particular form of social reaction that works against anti-blackness?

  • Can meme use be done ethically?

  • Do Black memes commit social violence?

  • How might Black memes react to social violences that traffic on social media?

  • Might we read liberation?

  • Do we need to rely on the affects of racial minorities for liberatory praxis?

I see these questions becoming challenges in and of themselves, especially since fewer of my students know the experience of living in a body marked by systemic structures of racialization. At the same time, however, I see opportunities for these questions to circulate in our classrooms, office hours, conferences, and organizations. Like the discussions I seek to foster in the classroom, I’m not interested in unanimity. Questions like these do not function as solutions or remediations to digital trends and the study of eighteenth-century literature. Rather, the Meme Museum, in correspondence with “Race and Gender in the Eighteenth Century,” provides a valuable, interrogative opportunity to better understand how emotion, affect, and behaviour are socially constructed and remain tethered to cultural constructions of race, blackness, gender, and sexuality not bound to any singular historical period. And in pursuing such efforts, we might better realize what an anti-racist pedagogy can accomplish.