So much to say about watching these two speeches, one delivered by Wanda Sykes (comedienne) and one delivered by John Hodgman (The PC Guy from the Mac ads). Watching them back to back as I did helped me clarify a few thoughts I had before on how different discourse communities view Obama as representin’ authenticity as a signifier in specific cultural spaces. In watching these two videos together, I am intrigued by how there is a celebration of him as black (the Sykes address) and as geek (Hodgman’s) and then a quick (and important) distancing of him from the essentialist definitions of each at the same time. The delicate ways in which this kind of thing happens continues to intrigue me.
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