‘Nice shoes’: Will Smith, mid-2000s (post) racial discourse and the symbolic significance of shoes in I, Robot and The Pursuit of Happyness

This chapter contextualises the symbolic significance of shoes as they pertain to the mid-2000s stardom of Will Smith. Beginning with a discussion of the meanings underpinning Smith’s character’s fetishization of his Converse trainers in I, Robot, it goes on to interrogate the semiotic power of shoes in his subsequent film The Pursuit of Happyness (Gabriele Muccino, 2006). In both films, shoes serve an ideologically loaded communicative function with respect to the negotiation of post-racial discourse at the intersection of blackness, masculinity and social class—a function that enables Smith’s start text to successfully negotiate the cultural logic of post-racial America at the dawn of the Obama era.