If You Look Like You're Black, You're Black: High Tech Blackface, Identity Tourism and (Black) Power Fantasies in Gaming

Abstract:

It is said about gamers that they are mostly white men who often even hold bigoted beliefs against anyone not belonging to their ingroup.
The gaming industry seemingly agrees, considering the typesof protagonists they overwhelmingly offer and their adamant repudiation of any attempt to read their games as political statement.
This talk will investigate what happens – on a narrative, ludic and ludonarrative level – when a videogame features a Black protagonist while still assuming the player to be white. In doing so, it will look at the political, cultural, and identity-related processes that take place in this ‘playful’ translation of a Black experience.
Furthermore, since these games have both the player and protagonist use violent means to oppose White Supremacist structures, it will also analyze the resulting points of contact between intersectionality, activism, and interactivity.

Biography:
Marko Jevtic is a PhD student at the University of Konstanz, the topic of his dissertation is shared with this lecture. Before primarily analyzing videogames, he studied American and British literature and wrote his M.A. thesis on the cultural fantasy of masculinity on display in the hard-boiled detective fiction of the 1920s and 30s.
He is a member of the GameLab at the University of Konstanz and has taught multiple seminars on literature, rap music and videogames over the years, including at the Zeppelin University.

The series of lectures will be hybrid, i.e. streamed in presence and additionally via ZU | Gaming's twitch.tv channel. You can access it here.