Race-Swapping in Art

There are some great examples of race-swapping in art. The Wiz (1978) replaces all the characters in the Wizard of Oz with people of color. Photographer Cara Romero<a href="https://www.cararomerophotography.com/editions/the-last-indian-market" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank"> stages Leonardo’s Last Supper</a> (2015) with Indigenous artists (with Marcus Amerman’s Buffalo Boy in the center). Photographer Carell Augustus<a href="https://www.npr.org/2022/10/13/1128624013/photography-book-reimagines-black-actors-in-some-of-cinemas-most-memorable-momen" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank"> just published</a> a book called Black Hollywood where he replaces white actors from iconic films with black actors. Likewise, Jay-Z’s video Moonlight (2017) recreates Friends with a cast of black actors, and Lin-Manuel Miranda in Hamilton (2015) replaces famous white people with actors of color. I’ll admit, the music in Hamilton gave me goosebumps. The quality of the singing, dancing, and lyrics was beyond my expectations. It was one of the best, if not the best musical I’ve ever seen! And yet, the story was merely a remake of the classic, naïve, kind of sexist (it didn’t pass the Bechtel test), Eurocentric American musical. Nothing ‘groundbreaking.’ No counter-narrative to the heteronormative patriarchal text that has been distributed to millions of students throughout this country. It’s the settler colonial narrative par excellence. Native Americans aren’t even mentioned once! Of course, it doesn’t include any nonwhite characters either, an omission that must have been intentional. <a href="https://davidtitterington.medium.com/race-swapping-in-art-56a62b595af">Read More</a>