Description
Race/identity in the United States is a problematic structure that remains unresolved although "things seem better." This paper examines Jean Baudrillard's opening chapter of Simulacra and Simulation to explicate and then apply his theory of simulacrum to race and identity in the United States. Baudrillard's theory proposes four phases of the perversion and then destruction of the basic reality of an image that then leads to the perpetuation of a hyperreality that is accepted and consumed as real. This hyperreality cannot be subverted nor destroyed because there is nothing real behind it and it envelops the society which it infects. Moving from early American writing to the birth of film and television, this paper explores the interactions of the history of representation, race and identity toward a change in the way Ethnic American, LGBT, and "Other" Literature is discussed and included. Zora Neale Hurston's "What White Publisher's Wont Print" and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man guide the path to a solution ultimately found in a return to narrative principles of orality as defined by Walter Ong.
