Cynthia Estremera

Cynthia presented at the spring conference on Critical Theory, “Principles of Uncertainty,” at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her panel was labeled "Shifty Subjectivities: Race, Gender, and Contingent Imagery in Popular Culture" and consisted of three interlocking papers that explore the uncertainty created/perpetuated within 21st century popular culture, discussing the ways in which intersectional identities are constructed and informed by/through ideology, culture, and power. Her paper entitled “Cultural Miscegenation in Mansbach’s Angry Black White Boy” focused on Adam Mansbach’s protagonist, Macon Detornay, as a white boy who authentically reflects and refracts his abiding identification with Hip Hop Culture. One result of his embrace of Hip Hop culture is Macon’s ultra-identification with blackness, uncertainly construed in a world where even in his most earnest desires to deconstruct whiteness, it is black identity that is repeatedly over-determined. Hip Hop culture presents the most fertile ground for the project of cultural miscegenation in the 21st century, and the narrative of Macon Detornay generates the attendant uncertainties that such a project both invites and warrants.