The Dia ectica Image of White Masochism and the Fugitive Spectator: On C audia Rankine’s The White ard

Based o a close readi g of Claudia Ra ki e’s play The White ard (2018), i this article I argue that Ra ki e offers a political view of the theatre as capable of produci g a dialectical image of white masochism i service of a critique of the eoliberal prese t. Drawi g from Walter Be jami’s theory of dialectical images, I further co te d that Ra ki e’s dialectical image i terve es i helpful ways i the famous debate betwee Saidiya Hartma a d Fred Mote regardi g how to represe t the sce e of racial/sexual subjectio . I that debate, Hartma decides ot to focus o the “i tolerable image” that spectacularizes Black sufferi g to defamiliarize the terror of slavery, co ce trati g i stead o the terror of the mu da e. Mote questio s that move a d tur s back to that image to u pack a differe t ki d of age cy, which he ide tifies as the resista ce of the object. Ra ki e’s theatre succeeds, I claim, i re deri g both mu da e a d schocki g viole ce visible without replicati g it, while also foregrou di g the otherwise compromised a d ofte erased age cy of the e slaved. I doi g this, I co clude, Ra ki e’s theatre offers us a fugitive rather tha ema cipated spectator. Here I questio the limits of Jacques Ra - cière’s theory of the ema cipated spectator to address the politics of the theatre, whe o e u dersta ds polici g ot as a abstract logic of power but as a historically cha gi g tech ology of racial/sexual subjectio .