In what he calls a “proposal” to think post-racially in a new and more realistic way, Sekyi-Otu entreats us to
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Rightly denying that the world is post-race, according to the Ghanaian philosopher Ato Sekyi-Otu in his recent book Left Universalism, Africacentric Essays, can shade too readily into a taboo on trying to liberate moral thought from racialized histories. But such knowing critique now risks becoming rote in its own right: an easy social signifier that relieves those who wield it of more demanding intellectual or imaginative tasks. This backlash against smug, mostly white celebration is justified. As Americans have reckoned with the meltdown of our own hasty optimism, South Africans have looked back on the Mandela years with anger, disappointment, and grief. In southern Africa, and particularly in South Africa and Zimbabwe, the analogous term is “nonracial” (not to be confused with its close cousin “multiracial”). In most progressive circles in the US, the notion is dismissed as fantasy or delusion. Though the message is often timely, the play lacks a single, definable creative impulse such as was supplied by Chris Hardman in his social satire ''Vacuum'' or by JoAnne Akalaitis in the Mabou Mines nuclear commentary ''Dead End Kids.'' In the case of ''Social Amnesia,'' earnestness exceeds ingenuity.Responses to the idea of a “post-racial” society usually follow a certain script. Along with the theme of American Indians, there are several other, less evocative motifs - a bag lady camped in Washington young people, so-called ''auto-lemmings,'' who protest injustice by throwing themselves in front of moving cars.
Social amnesia book movie#
Moments misfire, as in a movie marquee featuring a fictitious film, ''The Iron Heel,'' starring William Hurt and Sally Field - an opportunity to make an irrelevant joke about the actress's early role as a flying nun. That Orwellian transformation could itself be the material for an evening's dramatic investigation, but it is only one of many topics glancingly studied in the kaleidoscopic ''Social Amnesia,'' which sometimes seems to be suffering from an overload of information. That woman at the computer is subjected to a battery of questions and assigned a personal identity number, which, naturally, leads directly to her depersonalization. Through cutouts on a graph-papered screen, we see fashion shows in shop windows, a woman entranced by a computer and other reminders of an acquisitive, technological society. Using what is described as a ''nine-projector computerized dissolve slide system,'' the production has a high-tech gloss, and there are many clever visual touches.
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The conceptual approach is photographic rather than cinematic, crosscutting live performance with still views of the Washington Monument, city streets and early American landscapes. ''Social Amnesia'' is subtitled ''A Live Movie,'' but ''A Live Slide Show'' would be more accurate. In one of the show's several humorous refrains, Columbus is first glimpsed ''off the coast of Amerigo Vespucci land.'' Later, we hear about American Indians ''ghost-dancing.'' The strongest narrative element is the story of American Indians, as verbalized by Black Elk and others who regard the discovery of America as an invasion. The point of view is that of downtrodden victims who are treated as losers. Zinn's work, it emphasizes the personal rather than the governmental or the global.
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The play, presented in the academy's Lepercq Space, draws its inspiration from two books - Russell Jacoby's ''Social Amnesia'' and Howard Zinn's ''People's History of the United States.'' As in Mr. If anything, ''Social Amnesia'' tries to be too inclusive, or rather, its aggregate approach vitiates individual political points. The production says things that bear repeating - about passivity, compromise and complicity, and about the obligation of citizens to stand up for moral principles.
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As such, it is a reminder that the avant-garde is not necessarily hermetic when it comes to public issues. ''SOCIAL AMNESIA,'' the first theatrical event in this year's Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, is experimental theater with a social conscience.